These stats are why I claim that Israel deliberately attacking civilians isn't supported by the numbers. I get that this is really grim and really brutal, but it's also expected with Hamas' style of fighting.

So if 15 ambulance/medical personal die, Israel is doing a good job if 3 of them were Hamas and a great job if 5 of them were.

The most important stat is civilian:military ratios.

My link is to a listing of estimates. The various ratios bounce around over time but between 80% and 66% civilian seem a good median. So between 4:1 and 2:1 civilian:military. At the moment the list leans towards the former but I suspect an edit war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civilian_to_combatant_ratio

IMHO the stat "women and children" is so vague to be worthless. We need to know how many of those "children" are male and how many are female.

The unfortunate reality is a 4:1 ratio is doing better than expected in this kind of war even before factoring in Hamas deliberately putting it's own civilians in danger.

Israel seems to be doing a good but not great job by the standards of urban war.

It’s being widely reported that Facebook is taking down recent posts by historian Heather Cox Richardson. The post detail significant alleged wrong doing by the current regime and were removed with no warning or apparent recourse available to the author.

While corporations are, indeed free to do as they please with their content, suppressing speech like this puts Zuckerberg on par with Musk as slayers of truth.

Yahoo News, wow, that sounds official. Except that's just Telegraph repost, but I guess they sound official, too. Except the story is based on reporting by this site: https://honestreporting.com/

Hmm. That...actually doesn't appear to be any sort of neutral researcher group.

You might notice the distinct lack of any, like, confirmed information in that story. It's just quoting these guys. Hell, half of them are not quotes of _them_, it's the quotes of Andrew Fox _talking about_ what those other people's research, which he has not seen at all, must have uncovered.

What the utter hell? How can anyone take this seriously?

I really like how the article talks about how hard it is to compare the lists cause they're in PDFs and they have to do it by hand. Wow, that sounds like something that _should be made available on the website_, doesn't it? They could easily reformat and show the last three lists as a table, show the changes, show the ages, show the supposedly corrected birthdates and ages, show any evidence that a person was in Hamas .

Except that's actually just Andrew Fox _guessing_ what this other group must have done, so we don't even know they did that.

Really feels like the Telegraph should have gotten that, as the story, instead of just quoting these guys about this, or quoting a guy talking about those guys talking about this.

I think JB is wrong about McCain/Romney and I don't think he's GHWB... so let me see if I can break it down by the good 'ole stool analogy.

Leg 1: Economics/Libertarians
* He's explicitly taking down the Free Market fundamentalists... Markets are good, but markets are basically all about games/rules/incentives. There is no invisible hand.

Leg 2: Foreign Policy/Neo-cons
* He's explicitly acknowledging a multi-polar world order, and the goal isn't maximal containment, but strategic alignment; which means honey/carrots/sticks and the willingness to use whichever is needed. Pax Americana comes with duties from those who participate. But the era of hegemony is over and over-extension will lead to losing our allies in the medium term.

Leg 3: Social/So-Cons
* He's not a bootstrap conservative; he thinks the 47% has been ill-served by the economic policies of Leg #1 and that arbitraging labor *isn't* a comparative advantage in trade; the market should have rules that benefit families and the state has a role in making policies that protect and advance civil society.

None of those things are 'conservative' in the old Republican synthesis kind of way.

But, what Steward missed (this is pretty common) is that challenging the old consensus doesn't mean that the Left's solutions are vindicated -- he's got different ideas from Romney/McCain/Clinton/Obama/Pelosi/Trump/McConnel that he's peddling.

Basically everyone thinks he's wrong about everything, but from different angles. And that's ok.

Maybe I need to read him more to get that. I read the substack post on the 3 demands that seemed to me to be premised on the idea that there is an audience for this within the Trump administration. I have not been able to watch the interview with Jon Stewart and (mistakenly it sounds like) assumed it covered the same ground.

I think the premise that someone like Cass is working with is that Trump and Musk *aren't* on-board. This isn't a Trump/Musk explainer.

Folks like Rubio have flirted with these non-orthodox ideas (they go broader than simple tariffs) but as Cass says, Politicians are lagging indicators -- they rarely lead the way. Cass mentions a few other folks on the economic side with whom I believe he has a direct line.

So yeah, that's what makes some of the Stewart interview 'funny' to watch, Cass doesn't have a mission to trash Trump... so he just let's Stewart's jokes roll over him... and he's pretty clear that he thinks Trump/Musk are not competently executing whatever plan it is they think they are executing (that's the point of the article). But his audience isn't Trump/Musk/McConnel or any of the Old Republicans or MAGA cultists... he explicitly says the targets are 40-under.

Post-Trump is pretty explicit in his by-line...

Eh maybe...?

I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass' 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world.

If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you'd say congratulations, you've re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that's also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn't seem to be what motivates Musk.

That's a law enforcement agency arresting, for months or years, people who not only have not committed a crime, but no crime actually existed at all.

They just _mysteriously_ looked at the person and decided they were here illegally.

You don't think that's meaningful?

Come for the Jon Stewart fun, stay for the autistic nerd talking about the new-center-right economic policies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgEQeLR-M0g

To me, Cass is interesting for his Pre-Post-Trump positioning...

I think he fumbled a couple answers ... I don't think he quite gets across his message that NATO doesn't have to be destroyed to become renewed/reordered effectively (it kinda gets tacked on at the end after he meanders a bit); and I think he's too circumspect 'implying' what he pretty much says, which is that the Trump Admin is poorly run and even if you enact some policies that *could* be good, if you do them haphazardly and without a clear outline of what other countries can do to amend behaviors to bring trade into alignment... then you aren't doing good policies at all. Or, per usual, the Trump Admin undermines everything it touches. It's pretty clear that his long-term Post-Trump objective is tied to younger parts of the party... but he doesn't define his future goals as either supporting Trump nor directly taking Trump to task for botching things up.

He addresses this second point directly in this essay (probably written after the interview, I assume) where he critiques the administration for not articulating the point, direction or correction behind tariffs. So, if you were looking for a steelman on the Point/Purpose of Tariffs if handled by a competent administration, this is your article.

https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/americas-three-demands

As a supervillain origin story, he tells how he was the guy tasked by Mitt Romney(!) to look at the China trade policies... and turns out, there was a bit of a gap between theory and reality. This is before (I think) Autor's China Shock came out. So out of the Romney Bain Capital labs ...

Really? That's it? I'm far from his number one fan, but if you can't off the top of your head name several legitimately good policies he's put into place---among many very bad ones!---then you might have drunk too deeply of the neurotoxic waters of Portland.

These reports, as well as others that include accounts of ICE arresting and detaining US citizens, also make me think that ICE is challenging ATF’s reputation as one of the most lawless and unaccountable federal law enforcement agencies.

LOL. Tell me you're a conservative without telling me you're a conservative.

ICE has always been completely lawless, in every possible way, since it was created. It just generally restricted itself to being lawless against brown people.

Now, it feels free to move on to other people too.

It also used to have to turn people over to the courts, and it doesn't have to do that anymore.

But all this has been ICE, for the two decades it has existed. This is how it always has been, it didn't suddenly get worse.

Wait, they're arguing that the prisoners in El Salvador are no longer under US control? That they are not merely holding our prisoners, but we transfer authority to them ? I assumed their defense was the exact opposite, that El Salvador was basically operating as a private prison.

I feel that has very serious legal implications that they have not thought through at all. Specifically, the United Nations Convention Against Torture:

Article 3

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

*ahem*
https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/el-salvador/

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and femicide; substantial barriers to sexual and reproductive health services access; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; and crimes involving violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.

You see that word torture right there? The 'competent authorities', aka, the US State Department, appear to have made a very clear statement in 2023 about whether people detained by the El Salvador government are in danger of being tortured. It is the Current Official US Foreign Policy Conclusion that there are credible reports that prisoners in El Salvador are tortured. On their own website. (Guys, you might want to take down the 'things that will be used as evidence of crimes against humanity' from your website before 'Black guy that got a medal'. Just saying.)

The US government, in court, just claimed they have violated Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture. As a _defense_.(1)

Oopsie-doodle. Bet that's going to play well.

The UN Convention Against Torture, incidentally, was signed by the president and ratified by Congress. It is US law.

Article 3 is a restriction on the government, like a lot of the constitution, and like the constitution, there's no actual stated penalty for the government breaking it, but the courts ABSOLUTELY can force the government to follow it.

1) This is, incidentally, why when the Bush administration ferried prisoners overseas to be tortured, it pretended either it still had authority over them and just allowed them to be 'interrogated' by others, or that it never had authority over them at all. Or, sometimes, that the place did not torture. But the Bush administration actually understood laws existed.

Trump admin admits an “administrative error” made it send an immigrant with protected status back to El Salvador but then added, “welp the card says moops” and we can’t do anything

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/

You can if you want... although this kind of stuff is the big reason I didn't vote for him.

At some point this will come to a head, but I expect he'll have to lose some popularity before that. Probably also need to lose Congress.

What the next administration will also be very interesting. A lot of lines are going to be crossed, we're going to have a lot of criminal activity done during this administration.

I haven't even seen a "you know, it wasn't *THAT* bad" review yet. The two buckets I've seen so far are "it's as bad as you feared" and "it's worse than you feared".