Autism may be related to the human specific evolution of higher intelligence:
Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection. These shifts may have slowed brain development in children while boosting language and cognition. The findings suggest autism is part of the trade-off that made humans so cognitively advanced.
A post at Quora has a thoughtful take on why the MAGA movement is opposed to so many fundamental American ideals.
Tomaž Vargazon ·Practicing atheist
Sep 10 [2025]Why are MAGA so opposed to the very principles on which the United States are based -- liberty and freedom? Why does MAGA want to surrender their freedom to an authoritarian loser like Donald Trump, who only wants to use and destroy them?My personal opinion, after spending an unhealthy amount of time looking at various extremists over the past 20+ years, is a significant minority of people who are simply not capable of modern human civilization.
ISISTake the Islamic world for example. Various studies have been made as to how many Muslims support the crazies and it’s usually in the 10–20% range, depending on the country, region and time in history. They are a minority, but a very sizeable and vocal minority that has the ability to control the narrative, due to their vicious nature.But this is not limited to Islam at all. In Europe we have various kooky-looney parties that look different, behave differently, but share the same core disdain for modern human civilization. In Germany they’re the ones who support AfD, across Europe they’re the main provider of various neo-Nazi gangs and so forth.These same people, born in a Muslim family, would become the radical crazies of ISIS. In Europe they fawn over Michaelle Le Pen. In Britain they bend over for Nigel Farage. Born in an America, they become MAGA. It’s the same kind of mindset, right from the stone age: my way or the highway, my leader is perfect, your side has no redeeming qualities, anyone who opposes us is evil or crazy, we will solve everything and nothing you do is worth talking about.The reason why I think this is intrinsic to humanity is because whereever you look, the numbers are always hover at approximately 20% of the population. Sometimes it’s a bit more due to temporary surges when people don’t really know what they’re voting for (Hitler in 1933 had about 33% support), sometimes it’s a bit less because there are several competing groups for the stone age vote and they steal the stone age vote. Sometimes the excesses of one such groups also drop their support, because they get percieved as bad - this certainly happened to ISIS.But in the long run the crazies, once they’re known to everyone, end up with ~20% support. It’s not that odd if you think about it, approximately 99% of our history we’ve spent in tribal groups and endemic warfare in prehistory. It was your way or the club or spear of the other tribe. Of the recorded history we’ve spent a clear majority, certainly over 5500 of the past 6000 years and likely more, in one dictatorship or another. Keeping your mouth shut and head down in front of the powerful leader was the way you kept it on your shoulders, questioning authority being something positive is a new development.In light of this the fact 1 person in 5 is not okay with the modern state of affairs and wants to have a strong ruler that will tell them when to shit, when to eat, when to clap and when to kill, should not be surprising. They don’t function well when disconnected from the hive and feel lost. Making choices and taking responsibility is hard and tiring, just following orders unquestioningly is easy. No, the most surprising fact should be is 4 out of 5 people do want modern society, with all that entails.Unfortunately that means we have to contend with 20% support for crazies, like MAGA or what have you. What Trump did in other words was not to convince anyone of anything. He just rallied the deplorable vote under one banner and make them vote consistently for the return of the stone age.
So, today was my first day at a new job as a senior assistant city attorney with the City and County of Denver.
As usual, as a lawyer, I can't talk about the substance of what I actually do at work, due to attorney-client privilege and confidentiality rules and so on.
But, as in any big organization (the City and County of Denver has at least 11,000 employees), day one at a new job is not mostly about the substance of the work that day. I probably only did about two hours of actual legal work on my first day.
Day one at a new job in a big organization is about getting your employee ID, completing employment related paperwork, getting accounts with various workplace software systems set up, learning where the bathrooms and break rooms are located, figuring out the layout of your part of the building so you don't get lost, introducing yourself to your co-workers while trying to match their names to faces in your memory, watching orientation videos, and reading orientation materials.
This wasn't my first rodeo. I'm a middle aged man and I've been through this drill before in my life. But I haven't done it recently, since I've been self-employed and worked in small offices for a couple of decades.
A couple of things struck me as very different from my prior experiences.
Preparing For Mass Shootings
The last time I went through the "onboarding" drill, in 2004, was five years after Columbine, and three years after 9-11. At the time, we were more concerned about international terrorism in high profile locations, than we were about the era with a never ending wave of school and workplace shootings, even though, in hindsight, that era really began with the Columbine High School shootings in 1991.
On the day of the Columbine shooting, in 1999, I had just recently moved to Denver and lived close to downtown before moving to the Washington Park neighborhood after which this blog is named the next year. I saw the Denver bomb squad's truck rush right by me, sirens blaring. I recall thinking at the time that something really bad must be going down, although I hadn't listened to the news yet that day and didn't know what was going down at the time. The Denver bomb squad truck was headed for Columbine High School. Not much later that day, the news confirmed my suspicions. It was a massacre. Thirteen students and one teacher were killed before the two shooters committed suicide (one died a quarter century later from these injuries, while the others died almost immediately); twenty-three more people were injured (twenty by gunfire) in a spree that lasted 49 minutes, even though a police office had responded within five minutes.
But back in 2004, during my last onboarding to a larger employer, five years after Columbine, our society's response to "active shooter situations" still hadn't really jelled yet.
Before Columbine, police and institutional administrators had doctrines about responding to armed threats that favored the cautious approach appropriate for situations where an armed person had taken multiple people hostage, but wasn't actively shooting anybody.
After the fact recognition that the institutional and law enforcement response to Columbine had been inadequate, crystalized the recognition that a different response was appropriate in an "active shooter" situation. In an "active shooter" situation, the right approach is to minimize harm by denying the shooter targets, and by boldly doing everything possible to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible. But it took years for a consensus to emerge around the best law enforcement and institutional response to an active shooter situation.
"Lockdown" and "active shooter" drills only started when my children were in early elementary school, in the late aughts. None of my onboarding experiences in 2004 or earlier had imagined the possibility.
The mostly small law firms that I worked at over the years devised skeletal security plans on an ad hoc basis when there were specific security threats (usually from a client's ex-spouse, or soon to be ex-spouse), like keeping shades drawn to deny someone with a rifle a target in our office, or thinking about escape routes out back doors and how to stall threatening people while everyone was trying to flee.
Fast forward to 2025. Onboarding and HR materials still have the old mainstays. A brief history of the institution you're beginning to work for. A review of various nuts and bolts considerations related to sick days, employee benefits, and other employee policies and procedures. Strong cautioning against sexual harassment.
What is new to me is the new, major focus on how to head off violence in the workplace, and how to react in the event of an active shooter, even though it has been a part of my children's lives for as long as they can remember. There was even once a shootout unrelated to their school, that took place just outside their high school, during which their high school was locked down.
For me, this hit hard. Unlike my children, this was not something that I had ever been systemically prepared for before. Even in years in the Boy Scouts, with its "be prepared" motto, all of the way to becoming an Eagle Scout, we'd never considered these scenarios. But, this issue was raised in two or three different sessions in my orientation activities today, consuming almost an hour on my first day of work.
This isn't by any means a criticism, even though it was unsettling. This instruction is necessary in our day and age when these kinds of shootings are weekly, if not daily occurrences. There were two school shootings on the same day on September 10, 2025 last week. And, the instruction works.
At the Evergreen High School shooting in Colorado last week, which involved an active shooter who emptied and reloaded his revolver many times, all over the school, firing dozens if not hundreds of times, and trying to attack students in many different classrooms, only two victims other than the shooter were shot.
One victim was in the school at the time. This victim was a casualty of one of the first shots fired, and was probably one of the intended primary targets of the shooter. He was shot with little or no warning, and until then, no one at the school knew that the shooter had a gun with him that day.
No amount of training about what to do when an active shooting incident starts could have saved this first victim, although someone might have taken action to prevent it from happening in response to the shooter's disturbing social media activity (which his parents appear to have been aware of, at least to some extent, but didn't act upon). The FBI had started investigating the shooter's social media postings in July, but wasn't able to identify who was making them prior to the September 10 shooting.
The other student was shot by the shooter while fleeing, outside the school. This student was probably a target of opportunity after the shooter was thwarted in his attempt to find his other intended targets in the school, and instead shot someone else at random out of frustration, not long before the shooter shot himself. The active shooting episode (as is often the case) was all over before law enforcement could confront the shooter. This second victim was, realistically, the only conceivably preventable casualty that all those drills were not enough to completely save.
Both of the victims who were shot were initially in critical condition, but have survived for more than five days so far (as of early this evening one victim was in critical but stable condition, and the other victim was in serious, but not critical, condition), as a result of extremely rapid and decisive medical responses once the shooting stopped (or maybe even earlier, the details aren't perfectly clear). The two victims were brought to a specialized trauma center, while receiving emergency care en route, well within the "hour of power" when a serious trauma victim can often be saved. While this is speculation on my part, I suspect that the less seriously wounded victim was probably the second one who was shot while fleeing, and that the distance that this victim put between him or herself and the shooter was probably decisive in preventing that shot from killing this victim.
The only life that wasn't saved was the shooter, who died from his self-inflicted, point-blank, gunshot wound which he intended to be suicidal and which ultimately did cost him his life. But even he survived in critical condition for hours due to the rapid medical response, and the quality of care that a Level One trauma center can provide.
There were eight hundred or more people in Evergreen High School school at the time the shooting started. But, the active shooter training and lock down drills paid off. The shooter would almost certainly have killed many more people, as the shooters at Columbine did in 1999 in another affluent part of the same suburban Colorado county, if everyone in the school hadn't done what they had learned in their annual drills.
Evergreen High School's students, teachers, and administrators, almost instantly after the first shots were fired, turned the school into a fortress of locked or barricaded doors. The shooter repeatedly tried to break into classrooms to kill more people, some of whom were probably his intended targets, but he failed. People who couldn't lock themselves into a safe place hid out of sight if they couldn't flee and weren't shot. The rest of the students, including those in a cafeteria near where the shooting started, and some hallways full of high school students, successfully fled to safety purposefully and without hesitation, mostly getting out within a minute or two after the shooting started. They ran far away, beyond the range of the shooter, to safety.
Everyone who wasn't shot was promptly accounted for, to make sure that there were no victims who were shot, but not found, who needed medical attention.
The world has changed. Twenty-five years ago, an active school or workplace shooting of multiple people was shocking and almost unthinkable. Now, while it is still much less common than other kinds of murders and attempted murders, school and workplace shootings are a routine fact of life that we have accepted as a society (even though many of us urgently want policy reforms to address them), and we prepare for them in much the same way that we prepared for tornados when I was a kid in school, and in much the same way as we prepare for plane crashes in advance of every commercial airline takeoff.
Preparing For High Rise Fires
Another change today was more thorough and vivid instruction from HR on what to do if there is a fire in a high rise building than at any place I've worked before now.
This is a direct offshoot of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, as well as the fact that I'm working on the 11th floor of a downtown office building.
I don't recall ever even thinking about fire safety when I worked near the top of a high rise office building in Glendale, Colorado from 1999 until the summer of 2001, a few months before 9-11. No one ever even mentioned the possibility.
My office at the time of 9-11 was a single story steel framed building with a brick facade, multiple exits, and a window that could be opened and escaped from in every room, so escaping a fire wasn't a concern there either. And, nobody was worried that our tiny suburban office building, which was also home to a miniature golf course and a drive though coffee kiosk, was a terrorist target.
This threat wasn't a big deal at the workplace I joined in 2004, the last time I had a thorough onboarding at a new job in a large organization, since our offices were on the second floor of a modern, up to code, sprinkler equipped, three story concrete, steel and glass building in a suburban office park. It also wasn't much of a concern in 2005 when I worked on the first floor of a two story converted Victorian era mansion with a fire escape from the second floor, and many windows in every room from which people inside could safely escape if need be.
I did get a little fire emergency training from 2010 until 2019, when I worked on the 20th floor of a high rise office building in downtown Denver (on the same block as downtown Denver's signature "cash register building"). Within a year of starting to work there, I was appointed to the unpaid position of fire marshal for our little office suite with a peak occupancy of about six people that took up about half a floor of the building. We went through annual drills where we walked down twenty flights of stairs and assembled at our office's appointed regrouping site in front of the Warwick hotel a couple of blocks away. But my duties were communicated to me in a low key manner, face to face, from our previous office fire marshal to me. I served in this role until the office suite's lease ended, and so I never had to pass that hat to anyone else. My subsequent offices were also small and low rise.
But, now I work on the 11th floor of a downtown office building for a large, bureaucratic organization that employs everyone in the building. And, the horrors of people trying to escape the World Trade Center still seem almost as fresh as they did twenty-four years ago, even though the threat of foreign terrorism has slipped to the back of our consciousness. So, this was, rightfully, a significant focus in our orientation, even though it was also unsettling.
The case for a next generation A-10.
One recent article tries to justify the retirement of the A-10 Warthog attack aircraft. Retiring the fifty year old aircraft is understandable. But the Air Force has for decades scandalously ignored its obligation to support ground troops and continues to do so. Some of the recent article's reasons are more sound than others:
The F-35 Can Do Its JobOne of the reasons for decommissioning the Warthog is redundancy. While the A-10 is great at its job, which consists of ground strike and close air support, these missions can be carried out by the F-35. Since the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy all fly F-35s, each service can call in Lightning IIs for danger-close missions. The F-35 does not have the Warthog’s GAU-8/A Avenger 30-mm rotary cannon, but it can drop numerous munitions when it is equipped in beast mode. F-35s can launch the StormBreaker smart weapon and the Paveway laser-guided bomb. The F-35 can also share targeting data in real time with other airplanes.
The argument that the F-35 is a suitable A-10 replacement doesn't hold water. The A-10 is more robust, is better suited to the slow and low flights needed for close air support, and has better protection for pilots against small arms fire than the F-35, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, or the AC-130 adapted C-130 transport plane which only flies missions at night because of its vulnerability. The A-10 (when new) needs less maintenance per flight hour as well. The A-10 is better for most close air support missions than the AH-64 Apache, the AH-1Z Viper of the Marine Corps, the MV-22, or the AC-130, and rivals drones in situations where there aren't sophisticated anti-air defenses but there are anti-drone defenses like electronic jamming or directed energy weapons.
The A-10 Would Not Survive In Modern WarAnother reason to retire the Warthog is its low survivability. Air defenses are constantly improving, with better radar and surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems such as the Russian S-400 and S-500 that are layered in depth.The A-10 would have little protection from being detected, tracked, and destroyed by newer SAMs. The A-10 is not known for speed and maneuverability, although its performance in air shows has left me impressed. A-10s are also not stealthy like the F-35, and they are much slower and less maneuverable.
The basic problem with this point is that it is all or nothing thinking. Against an opponent with strong, modern air defenses, the A-10 (and close air support in general) doesn't make sense. But, in many conflicts, such as President Trump's contemplated involvement in wars with the armed militias of Latin American drug cartels, or in the global war on terrorism, or against pirates, the adversaries don't have modern air defenses and close air support is desirable. As a country with the largest air force in the world, not every fighter aircraft needs to be a generalist suited for every conflict.
Even in the same conflict, there may be an initial stage, when the goal is to destroy enemy air defenses when air superiority has not been secured, when an expensive stealth fighter may be the right tool, and a later stage of the same conflict, when enemy air defenses have been secured and air superiority is substantially achieved, when an attack aircraft may make more sense.
A manned close air support aircraft may be desirable when the opponent has advanced anti-drone or electronic warfare resources (that can also thwart guided missiles and smart bombs) but not sophisticated air defense resources that are still functioning. And, a modern version of the A-10 would have more active air defenses.
The A-10 Is Costly to Keep in the AirFurther, the A-10 is an older airframe. It was introduced in the 1970s and requires significant maintenance. The airplane’s need for spare parts and tender loving care makes it expensive to keep in the air.The money saved by no longer maintaining Warthogs can be spent on other airplanes, such as the new F-15EX, as well as the F-35. The cost per flight hour of the Warthog ranges between $19,000 and $22,000. This adds up quickly, and in a future war, the costs would multiply. The Air Force has requested $57 million to retire all A-10s.
This is a legitimate concern. Airplanes are machines that don't last forever and even training missions put a lot of wear and tear on them. But, it is a straw man argument.
The real debate is not over keeping the original airframes from the 1970s, but over whether the niche of a simple, robust, fixed wing close air support aircraft should continue to exist. The Army designed helicopter gunships and an armed version of the MV-22 Osprey because it didn't trust the Air Force to be committed to providing closely coordinated close air support for it, and the Army wasn't wrong. But a helicopter gunship or MV-22 Osprey is slower and more fragile than an A-10. The real question is whether a successor to the A-10 that is designed in a similar way with a similar mission should be built. If it was, its hourly maintenance costs (and per unit production costs) would be much lower than a supersonic stealth aircraft, or an aircraft like the F-15EX optimized for air to air combat.
Supersonic speeds, advanced air to air combat capabilities, and stealth make an aircraft much more expensive.
Also, an A-10 successor would be better suited to intercepting drones than a more expensive, supersonic, high altitude F-35 or F-15EX. The A-10 or a successor in the same niche, would be better suited to engaging adversaries in the typical drone airspace.
Would It Even Have Any Tanks to Destroy?Finally, warfare is changing. Combat in Ukraine has focused on first-person view drones that loiter and drop down to eliminate tanks and people. The A-10 is not the best tool to take out small drones.Plus, the tank, which has historically been the main target of A-10s, is becoming an obsolete platform. The A-10 could still offer close air support for soldiers and Marines in tight spots on the ground, but there may not be as many tanks and armored personnel carriers on the battlefield compared to the days when the United States first fought in Iraq.
Tanks probably will play a smaller role in future conflicts. But, the same folks who are pressing for the retirement of the A-10 also think we still need tracked manned tanks with a 105mm to 125mm main gun whose primary purpose is to destroy other tanks. But even without tanks, close air support is needed, and there are artillery batteries, trenches, fortified positions, and other armored vehicles to strike. Drones can take over many of these roles. But, a manned A-10 isn't vulnerable to electronic jammers, doesn't require fiber optic control wires, can evaluate the situation with richer visual and electronic input than a small laptop computer screen displaying digital camera images can (which is critical when friendly and hostile forces are close to each other), is much faster than any ground vehicle (and especially faster than a tracked vehicle), and can ignore obstacles on the ground like rivers, trees, mountains, and barricades.
In general, fixed wing aircraft are faster, have longer range, can carry heavier payloads, are more fuel efficient, are more survivable when hit with enemy fire, and are easier to maintain from austere forward operating bases. And, unlike transport aircraft, their ability to land and takeoff vertically (as opposed to from short field airstrips) isn't as important (unless they are non-aircraft carrier ship based).
Not Needed for Combat Search and RescueThe A-10 had a secondary use for combat search and rescue, but the F-35 can carry out this mission as well. Special operations forces have personnel called “combat controllers” who act as air traffic controllers on the ground. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data collected by the F-35 can be shared with the combat controller, who then relays the findings to other special operators and helicopters that can rescue downed pilots or stranded personnel.
A critical mission like combat search and rescue isn't necessary a task for a single aircraft. It is generally a team effort.
Neither an A-10 nor an F-35 is suit for a "rescue" mission. These are single plane fighters that can't pick someone up and evacuate them. They can play a role in a "search" mission, and a supersonic F-35 at 30,000 feet simply isn't as suited for this role as an A-10 at lower altitude with a much lower stall speed that can operate from more primitive air strips.
Drones do provide an alternative, but a manned aircraft close to the ground provides richer visuals than a digital camera and is vulnerable to being jammed. The attack aircraft could control other drones with line of sight, hard to jam lasers or microwave beams, rather than general radio signals that are used by a more conventional drone.
Also, while a fighter aircraft may not be actually "rescuing" someone, it could be dropping supplies for the troops in need of rescue or could be serving as an armed escort for a helicopter or tilt-rotor aircraft that is actually doing the retrieval. Both rolls may be better suited to a low and slow aircraft.
The case for the Marine Corps force redesign.
Another article complains about the Marine Corps divesting itself of main battle tanks and much of its heavy artillery. The Marine Corps was right and the skeptics are wrong.
I've written repeatedly and at length about why main battle tanks are obsolete. They are highly vulnerable. They are very difficult and slow to deploy. They are very slow moving. They have long and highly vulnerable logistics trails. Their main guns are ill-suited for destroying tanks.
I have also written somewhat less voluminously about the problems with traditional howitzers, which are vastly less accurate than missiles and drones (which both means multiple shells per target destroyed and undesirable collateral damage, which also undermines their cost advantage particularly with cheap drones that are often comparable to or lower in cost than a cheap suicide drone), often have more limited range, and are much heavier than missiles or drones per target hit.
As a rapid reaction, expeditionary force, these heavy, slow to deploy systems with long logistics trails are ill suited to the Marine Corps.
* I was supposed to be in a trial out of town today for one of my clients. She's been hospitalized since Sunday (it is not life threatening at this time, although it sucks to be in the hospital, of course). So, the trial had to be continued to a future date to be determined. As a result, I have some found time today.
* I was in court 24 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon took place, and Flight 93 crashed after passengers rose up and disrupted the efforts of the men who hijacked the plane. 2,996 people were directly killed in the attacks including 19 terrorists were killed in the attacks, predominantly passengers on the four hijacked flights, people in the World Trade Center, and World Trade Center first responders.
I still lived in the same house and was married to the same wife. Back then, I was a junior associate attorney with a two year old and an infant. Now, my children have finished college, have apartments of their own, have good jobs, and have significant others with good jobs. My daughter is engaged to be married in less than a year. I'm a few days away from starting a new job as a senior city attorney for the City and County of Denver, after almost twenty years of self-employment as an attorney in the interim.
* In the U.S., the 9-11 attacks, after briefly completely shutting down commercial air travel in the U.S., resulted in the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the reorganization of the federal government bureaucracy to create a Department of Homeland Security, the establishment of much more strict security checks and protocols for commercial air travel, the creation of memorials and compensation schemes for the victims of the attacks (several thousand people were killed), the rebuilding of the Pentagon, and the erection of a new skyscraper where the World Trade Center once stood. Islamic terrorism in the U.S. after 9-11 proved to be extremely rare and small in scale. Some of the measures imposed in the wake of that attack, like a requirement to remove one's shoes in a security line that was triggered by a single failed shoe bombing attack on December 22, 2001, are finally being rolled back now. The 9-11 attacks also spurred the passage of the controversial PATRIOT Act which strengthened the authority of U.S. intelligence agencies, the substance of which largely remains on the books with several modifications adopted since then.
* A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, dismissing a lawsuit alleging the arbitrary detention without probable cause and mistreatment of American Muslims in the wake of the 9-11 by the federal government adopted a new standard for bringing federal lawsuits, that replaced "notice pleading" that allowed lawsuits to be brought upon information and belief to be substantiated in the discovery process with "plausibility pleading" that requires allegations of facts that were actually known to state a plausible claim for relief to bring a federal lawsuit, and many but not all U.S. states subsequently also adopted this standard. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have actual knowledge of the insider discussions of top U.S. officials in adopting the policy. The case and a related one called Twombly, which involved an anti-trust lawsuit in which the plaintiffs did not have the "smoking gun" of actual knowledge of the deal reached by allegedly conspiring insiders who had allegedly reached an anti-competitive agreement with each other, made it much harder to bring lawsuits that involve misconduct that only actual insiders have actual knowledge of without court ordered discovery.
* The 9-11 attack was planned and orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization operating in Afghanistan, an organization that the Taliban, which controlled almost all of Afghanistan at the time. al-Qaeda was backed financially and intellectually mostly by factions of the Saudi Arabian royal family and allied wealthy elites were were not part of the ruling faction. The terrorist was Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Lebanese nationals.
In response to the attacks, Congress promptly and almost unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against this non-state actor. Starting on October 7, 2001, a small U.S. force using a combination of CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and U.S. air power promptly crushed the Taliban (by December 7 of 2001), which had been on the verged of conquering the entire control over the opposition of a coalition of warlords, called the Northern Alliance, that was resisting them.
A multinational coalition led by the U.S. then occupied Afghanistan in the resulting power vacuum, shepherded a constitutional assembly based upon local traditions which adopted a Western style government (but with Islamic law as the supreme law of the land) under which a democratically elected civilian government of Afghanistan was formed, with the multinational force supporting the newly formed Afghan government (whose take on Islamic law was far less extreme than that of the Taliban) in counterinsurgency actions against the Taliban.
The Afghan government fell in 2021, just days after U.S. forces withdrew on August 30, 2021, under an executive agreement that previous U.S. President Trump had negotiated with the Taliban without Afghan government involvement. The Taliban government swiftly seized control of the entire country and has imposes a very strict Islamic law regime in the four years that have followed.
The AUMF, however, continues to be in force to fight a larger "War on Terrorism" against Islamist terrorist groups and insurgencies related to al-Qaeda, especially the "Islamic State" group that briefly operated an ultra-extreme Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. military action under the AUMF, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, has continued into 2025.
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The modern Democratic party operates to a great extent like politics is supposed to work in Civics 101, and follow on political theory says that it is supposed to. It has found policies, that its leaders believe are good ones for the nation, that can unite a diverse big tent coalition. Democrats believe that government can be a force for good and want to use it the implement policies that make the world a better place. They go to great lengths to demonstrate with evidence that their policies do indeed do so. They aren't saints, but they also view stupidity, bad character, and malice in their leaders negatively and are generally happy to cast out leaders who demonstrate those traits.
The Republican party, in living history, was a pretty similar organization and movement that assembled a different bundle of policies to unite a different, smaller tent coalition.
But, that Republican party is almost gone and rapidly dissolving, even though most of its top leaders got their political start in that party.
The MAGA Republican party and movement, in contrast, is something else entirely. It absolutely still has its roots in the pre-FDR solid south Democratic party, in the Dixiecrats, and in the post-Southern strategy anti-civil rights Republican party. But unlike the Republican party that preceded it, it doesn't fit the Civics 101 model.
MAGA Republicans don't accept a lot of the bipartisan consensus about many aspects of policy making and governing that preceded it. It is isolationist. It is anti-trade, anti-immigration, anti-NATO, and unconcerned about alliances with foreign dictators. It has no respect for expertise. It doesn't think that government does anything good (and is oblivious to the benefits that its members receive from government), so it isn't troubled by having the government run by incompetent fools. It has strong authoritarian leanings, no commitment to democratic ideals, and little concern for the rule of law. It sees power as a tool to utilize to fight culture wars and its political opponents, rather than as a means to advance the greater good
Republican political leaders know perfectly well that most of President Trump's executive branch appointees, like RFK, Jr., are incompetent idiots whose only redeeming quality is their momentary personal loyalty to Trump. Most of them are also well aware that many of the policies that Trump is pushing for are objectively bad ones.
Then why do these Republican leaders back Trump anyway?
They can read the room. They know that they face mafia style backlash from Trump if they cross him. They also know that their not terribly bright constituents in the MAGA base firmly support Trump (or at least have until very recently within Trump's second term when they've discovered personally, the hard way, how bad his policies really are) seeing any deviation from Trump's agenda as a betray of Trump's MAGA base including them. The MAGA base also sincerely believe in a lot of the misguided elements of Trump's agenda because unlike most Republican leaders, they don't know any better.
Billionaires and the political representatives of many big businesses also know personally well that Trump is a horrible person who supports mostly bad policies who is basically trying to destroy the federal government from the inside. But, for them, the immense tax cuts that Trump has delivered to them, and the dismantling of federal laws and regulations that cost them money have seemed worth it to them so far.
The conservative leaning members of the college educated upper middle class, who used to work in think tanks formulating conservative policies that they thought furthered the national interest on a basis similar to that of their liberal peers, who served as senior civil servants, and served as professionals in roles that either supported conservative economic and religious interests, or were at least apolitical, meanwhile, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves, some to be unaffiliated politically, some to be libertarians, and some to become "moderate" and "neo-liberal" Democrats. Fools loyal to MAGA and Trump's cult of personality, and powerful hypocrites, have rushed in to fill the vacuum that they upper middle class conservatives left behind.
The agenda of Trump and his MAGA cult of personality isn't sustainable. But it wasn't really meant to be. The objective of MAGA is to burn it all down, and to entrench far right cultural dominance and political power now, knowing that in the long run, the democratic process and respect for the rule of law and settled political norms, run fairly, will undermine those objectives.
Destruction can be accomplished more quickly than building something that works. So, it doesn't have to last long. And, if the MAGA base comes to realize that the face eating leopard they supported ate their faces once the damage done is irrevocable, that's their tough luck in the eyes of the billionaires and far-right cranks who actually benefit from its agenda. By then, if the MAGA agenda is successful, they will have dug the United States (and even the larger world) into a hole that will be very hard to get out of again.
The system struggles to stop them. Trump has installed enough people loyal to him that share his far from the mainstream agenda in key institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court, the military, and senior government offices that he wasn't supposed to be able to oust and oust, and key policies that he wasn't supposed to have the legal right to control, that the systems and people designed to stop him aren't doing their jobs. The system wasn't designed to to stop a President who had no respect for his oath of office, no commitment to the good of the nation, no respect for the rule of law, and immense political power arising from a base brainwashed by decades of lies from clergy, Republican political leaders, and cynically manipulative conservative mass media outlets that jettisoned their journalist ethics long ago.
Of course, the willingness of the MAGA base to be manipulated and accept these lies didn't come from nowhere. It isn't that information that reveals that these are lies isn't available. It isn't that members of the MAGA base unanimously agree that Trump has good character.
They are motivated to accept a false worldview because the last half century of American progress has left them behind and greatly diminished their socio-economic status in relative terms. They are willing to take the gamble of destroying the system because of they feel that it has done nothing for them, and that they have no prospects of improving their lot within it.
Most of them made a bad bet. Trump's agenda will leave them worse off and reveal to them that they actually did have something to lose in the system that they are trying to destroy. The policies that they thought were the problem aren't the source of their dismay. Their future prospects within the system that they support destroying were better than they believed them to be. But, now that they've made that bet, a psychological unwillingness to admit that they've been duped and made a mistake, and the fact that much of the damage to both the system and the political process has already been done, makes remedying their mistake difficult.
The situation could still be turned around: If enough of the MAGA base is disillusioned fast enough. If enough old guard Republicans and conservative judges who are hypocrites wake up to the fact that the end game isn't a good one before it is too late. If Trump dies or implodes (which is a bet the left is trying to make by pushing the Epstein files issue) and no successor to Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement arises.
But if it is turned around, the most likely failure mode for MAGA will be a dramatic collapse of the entire political movement. It will look like an economic bubble popping. It will look like the sudden death of the Whig party in favor of the new Republican party shortly before the Civil War. It will look like the collapse of Naziism at the end of World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will look like the post-Herbert Hoover Republican Party of the 1930s. It might even look like the French Revolution with guillotines and all.
There isn't much room for a middle ground business as usual alternation of power at the margins at this point.
What features of the English language are deeply ingrained but add little value?
* Gendered honorifics and titles. There are Mr., Mrs., Miss, Mistress, Ms. which convey both gender and, for women, marital status.
There is also "Master" which paradoxically can refer to either someone who has compulsory authority over someone who is greatly subordinate to them (e.g. a slave or servant), a boy with high social standing, or an expert. It is strongly gendered when referring to a boy with high social standing, is neuter when referring to an expert, and is only very weakly and residually gendered, with the feminine counterpart being "Mistress" when referring to someone in a master and servant type relationship. But Mistress can also refer to either the female companion of a respectable man, or to a concubine or partner in adultery of a man (especially a married man). Meanwhile "Lady" can refer to any female older than a toddler, can be a non-honorific description of a female adult, or can refer to an aristocratic woman or gentry as a feminine version of "Lord".
Yet, honorifics don't have to be gendered.
The suffix honorifics of Japanese are not gendered.
The professional honorifics "Doctor" and "Professor" are not gendered and this creates no problem at all.
Historically the honorific suffix "Esquire" was so masculine that it is the name of a "men's magazine" and generally refers to men as the lowest tier of the British aristocracy that can also refer to esteemed non-aristocrats. But, as an American honorific suffix, referring to people who are admitted to the practice of law, is is gender neutral.
The title "Chair" works almost as well as the gendered "Chairman" and "Chairwoman". "Policeman" has been replaced with "Police Officer".
One path to get there could be to convert historically male honorifics into gender neutral ones, just as many professional titles that were once gendered are now gender neutral. There used to be a Testator and a Testatrix, but the term Testator is now used in a gender neutral way. The same is true of Executor and Executrix. Actor used to be a strictly male gendered word with the counterpart Actress, but now a female who acts can be called an Actor as well. Even the word "guy" is only weakly male gendered, in part, due to the plural second person expression "you guys" that is a counterpart to the Southern "y'all" in the Northeastern United States.
On the other hand, the use of the gendered word "man" to refer to a person or all people, regardless of gender to include women as well, has become archaic and ambiguous.
* Gendered third person pronouns. We manage without them in the first person and second person. If the third-person pronoun could be narrowed down to gender neutral person v. gender neutral thing, that would be a win.
* Frequently confused words. Two combinations of words are particularly prone to errors: their, there, and they're, and it's and its. Interestingly, four of these mischievous five words involve third-person pronouns, but this time, the gender neutral ones. There are also to, too, and two. Really common words like these shouldn't have equally common homonyms, and instead, should be distinct, unambiguous words. Also, there should probably be different grammatical symbols for a possessive and a contraction, rather than trying to make the apostrophe do all of the work for both of these purposes. I'd favor keeping the apostrophe for possession, and finding a new one to indicate contractions.
* Agreement as to number. It doesn't add much clarity and is a pain when you are editing something and the number of the thing you are talking about changes.
* Spelling words with "qu" instead of just "q", most absurdly in the British English "queue" meaning to get in line or referring to a group of people waiting in line, in which all of the letters but the first are silent.
* The letter "c" which is almost always pronounced as either a "k" or an "s".
What are language features that we're glad are mostly absent in English?
* The formal v. informal second person pronoun that is present in most Romance languages, with the formal second person pronoun doubling as a plural pronoun, is not found in English (although there is residual royal "we" to indicate a formal first person pronoun rather than a plural first person pronoun). Closely related is the distinction, primarily in first person pronouns in Japanese, between speaking as an individual, speaking of multiple people, and speaking official on behalf of a group, which sounds in Japanese like "Wadi wadi" although that isn't the proper romanization (I tracked down the correct one once, but I have forgotten it).
* Abjabs. A writing system that omits vowels in its written version, such as written Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew (sometimes with notations such as accents or dots to indicate the missing vowels in ambiguous cases) is called an abjab, and I'm glad that English is not one of them as there is too much pronunciation ambiguity that you just have to know without being able to discern it from the text itself.
* Alphabets where letters used together combine into combination characters. This is something of an intermediate stage between an alphabet and a syllabary. For example, in Korean hangul, multiple letters in a syllable or word are combined in a fashion that looks superificially a bit like a Chinese character. Arabic cursive script and many South Asian alphabets also have this feature.
* Syllabaries. A writing system where a single symbol represents a single syllable, rather than a single sound, are called syllabaries. Japanese has two of them, and many languages use syllabaries rather than alphabets like the roman and Cyrillic and Greek alphabets where individual symbols represent particular sounds and are combined into syllables. As a result, syllabaries have more characters than alphabets do. When you are writing with a pen and paper, syllabaries can be more efficient, but in the digital age where you are mostly typing, alphabets are superior.
* Heavy use of logograms. Chinese has a writing system in which a symbol represents a whole word and there are many thousands of them. Japanese, Korean, and some other Asian languages use them to a lesser extent through direct borrowing from Chinese (although sometimes with semantic drift as these borrowings often took place during the Tang Dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE). Essentially every language has some logograms (symbols and characters such as emojis which are associated with a whole idea) and they have their place (e.g. the universal symbol for biohazards), but even these can get out of hand (such as the logograms used for fabric care on clothing and bed linen labels).
* Heavy use of honorific hierarchy. Japanese makes very heavy mandatory use of hierarchical honorifics in many forms of conversation, which ingrains hierarchal thinking into people who speak in it, which can cause undue deference to authority.
* Fuzzy gendered pronouns. In Japanese, which is overall a very sex divided culture, it isn't just honorifics that are mostly gender neutral. Some honorifics and pronouns have weak male or female or age or hierarchy connotations, but don't fit in a black and white way into one gender and/or age and/or hierarchy combination or another. They are used more often to refer to someone with certain particular combinations of those, but not exclusively.
* Gendered definite articles (the equivalent of the English word "the"), especially for nouns that don't have a natural gender, that is found in many romance languages.
* Heavy use of inflection. Latin is the worse offender, but many, many other languages also use it heavily. English, however, uses short additional words, such as articles, in lieu of inflection in most cases.
* Fusional languages. I am thankful that English doesn't combined multiple word fragments into very long words that are almost sentences the way that German does.
* Grammatical tone. Many languages of almost all language families, primarily in tropical areas, use grammatical tones as substitutes for additional vowels and consonants.
* Non-gender grammatical genders or cases. Many languages have multiple categories of nouns used in a manner similar to grammatical gender for words that don't inherently have a gender, only they refer to things like whether something is animate or inanimate. Sometimes there are as many as five or ten such arbitrary noun categories. This kind of system is found in the aboriginal Australian that is discussed in the linked video.
* Dual number. English distinguishes between singular and plural nouns and requires agreement of number in many cases (with some notable exceptions), and requiring agreement in grammatical number is mostly useless feature of our language. But some languages are even worse and singular, dual, and plural in excess of dual grammatical number that works the same way.
* A surname shortage. Many cultures and languages have a serious surname shortage.
In Asia, this is mostly because when one aristocratic house absorbed or conquered another aristocratic house, everyone subject to the subjected house took the surname of the dominant house, so as the number of aristocratic houses controlling most of the territory dwindled, everybody ended up with the same few surnames. Vietnam is the worst case, but China and Korea are both pretty bad.
In the Americas, this is partially a founder effect phenomena, with the surnames of the initial wave of Spanish colonists who had many descendants in the early generation becoming dominant.
In other places (Scandinavia and many Slavic countries, for example), patronymics (like Johnson) and sometimes matronymics (like Marydaughter) were used in a transition period to fixed surnames and the existence of very common given names caused patronymics (or matronymics) associated with those given names to become very common among unrelated people.
Thankfully, in the U.S., there are a great variety of surnames, with none too dominant, so this has made distinguishing people by the names easier.
Romanization of foreign languages
It would be nice to have a consistent, global system of romanization of foreign language words and sounds that is consistent with how English words with the same letters are pronounced that is not redundant. So often, I subconsciously ask myself what the heck someone was thinking when they came up with these romanizations.
* Pronunciation of the letter "x" in Romanized words is not consistent. It is usually pronounced "ch" in words of Greek origin, and "sh" in words of Chinese and Mesoamerican languages. At end of French words, the "x" is usually silent.
* Pronunciation of "ph" usually in words of Greek origin, as "f".
* The letter combination "ng" in Vietnamese usually comes out as something like a "wh" sound. That isn't quite right, but few English speakers can get closer.
* The letter combination "wh" in Romanized Maori is usually pronounced like an "f".
* I'm not entirely sure what the letter combination "ts" which appears in Japanese and in many Slavic languages is supposed to sound like, and I usually end up just treating the "t" in "ts" as silent.
* It is annoying that "ll" in Spanish is pronounced basically as "y" (the consonant).
* It is also critical to know the source language when a word has a "j" or an "h" in it. The "j" in Spanish tends to be pronounced as an "h", and the "h" in Spanish tends to be pronounced like the "w" in "win".
* On the other hand, the nasal "n" with a tilde over it, in Spanish (or less often other languages) is completely unambiguous.
* There is a sound in Korean, for example, the initial letter in "kim chi", the ubiquitous fermented cabbage with hot pepper and garlic side dish, and "gim bop" (basically a sliver of what is also called a "California roll") that is more often Romanized with a "k" than a "g", but has a pronunciation that is closer to a "g".
* Another source of consternation in Romanization are the long consonant strings, that seem to be missing necessary vowels, in Welsh and Polish.
* Romanizations of Irish proper names, and British place names, are also incredibly fraught. For example, as a stand alone geographic division, the word "shire" is pronounced "shy-er", but as a suffix in a British place name it is pronounced "shir" which is almost the same as "sure". Many Irish proper names and British place names aren't even pronounced remotely like you would think that they should be given their spellings.
* The biggest problem with French spelling, famously, is that so many of its letters are silent, such as the "h" in the borrowed phrase "h'orderves", which also has the common French feature of being a contraction of more than one word that sounds like a single word.
* You could try to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. But, this requires learning a completely new script that is only vaguely related to the Roman alphabet, and it contains quite a few sounds that are early entirely absent from most English dialects, which makes them hard to both heard and pronounce, or are very hard to speakers of many English dialects to distinguish from each other.
* In contrast, Japanese has three different scripts in addition to roman letters that you have to learn, but is pretty easy to learn to pronounce well, because Japanese has fewer sounds than English, doesn't have tones, has virtually no sounds that are absent from English, and has more strict rules on how syllables can be constructed than English. If the sounds of a Japanese word are spelled out in roman letters, the main pronunciation difficulty is getting the flow and accent of long words or phrases that are spoken quickly correct.
* Some languages in Romanized forms have excessive numbers of accents, diacritical marks (like tildes and umlauts), often because there isn't a good equivalent to a sound in a language in the roman alphabet. When this is the case, combinations of roman letters or just whole new letters for sounds not found in English, are probably a better solution. Then again, using combinations of letters for novel sounds leaves you with hard to parse consonant clusters like those found in Polish.
Is There A Method To The Madness?
There are annoying turns of phrase that strike me as ungrammatical but are becoming so common that they are now just slightly informal constructions. There may be some patterns and general rules lurking in them, but I haven't fathomed them yet.
* Using the word "gifted" to mean, having been given a gift (i.e. "gave") rather than to mean possessing great talent. I suppose that this is really a use of a regular form rather than an irregular infix.
* Say that someone "graduate high school" rather than "graduated from high school." I'm not sure what linguistic force is driving that and it seems to have its origins in a rural dialect.
* Saying that you "garnisheed" someone's wages or bank accounts, rather than "garnished". A "garnishee" is a third-party to whom a writ of garnishment is directed who controls and holds property for its true owner or who is indebted to the garnishee.
A lot of the other annoying phrased come from business slang or jargon.
This article is primarily a review article.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act to protect recently freed slaves from the tyranny of white supremacist violence. The act was later codified as 42 U.S.C. § 1983, lying dormant as a vehicle for relief until it was resurrected in 1961 by the Supreme Court in Monroe v. Pape.
Today, state officials across the nation act with impunity, harming groups of people less powerful, and less popular, than themselves under the cloak of state power. In the last few years, state legislatures have passed laws that target women and transgender people, to limit their bodily autonomy. Many of these laws violate the Constitution and allow plaintiffs to seek damages under § 1983. While the legislators who pass and introduce such laws enjoy absolute immunity, the state officials who enforce these laws do not.
From Emily Kaufman, Acting with Impunity No More: Holding Rogue State Officials Liable for Money Damages Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 on SSRNThis article will discuss the current state of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 litigation and examine the ways that state actors violating the Constitution may be held liable for money damages. Part I will discuss the background of the Ku Klux Klan Act and how subsequent Supreme Court cases limited the aims of reconstruction. Part II will discuss how the Supreme Court’s decision in Monroe v. Pape paved the way for modern § 1983 litigation. Part III will examine the doctrine of qualified immunity and the doctrine’s limiting impact on § 1983 liability. Part IV will discuss damages and when damage awards are available. Part V will discuss the bundle of rights that fall under the umbrella of §1983 protection. Part VI will examine whom one can sue under § 1983, from Governors and State Attorneys General to lower-level officials. Part VII will be a case study of a Florida law and the corresponding § 1983 liability for the law’s enforcers. Part VIII will conclude by discussing the Florida law and the importance of using § 1983 as a vehicle for redressing constitutional injuries.
States Go Their Own (and Contradictory) Ways on Vaccine PolicyCalifornia, Oregon and Washington said they would work together to review scientific data, saying the C.D.C. could no longer be trusted. But Florida said it would abolish all vaccine mandates.
Colorado issues order allowing pharmacies to provide COVID vaccines without prescription: CVS, Walgreens have said they would need to require prescriptions due to lack of federal vaccine recommendation
The Army is rushing a contract to create a self-driving Infantry Squad Vehicle.
The U.S. Army is turning to commercial startups to fast-track autonomous ground vehicles into combat formations, awarding $15.5 million in new contracts to three companies to test self-driving systems on Infantry Squad Vehicles.Overland AI, Forterra and Scout AI will “rapidly integrate and deliver commercial autonomous mobility into Army formations,” an Army statement published last week states. The companies are required to build prototypes as part of the “Unmanned Systems (UxS) Autonomy” program and get them to soldiers for demonstration and evaluation in May 2026.
Current efforts to develop this technology are not ready for prime time.
The Army has struggled to clear the hurdle to achieve fully-autonomous vehicles because of the inherent challenges on a modern battlefield not found on predictable roadways.Following an off-road autonomy software assessment last year, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, who was in charge of PEO GCS at the time, told Defense News, “The good news is we are moving forward in that area. The bad news is industry is nowhere near where people think in terms of off-road autonomy. There’s a lot of development to do.”
The Infantry Squad Vehicle is a bad idea. It doesn't have any protection whatsoever for the nine troops that it carries, not even against heat, cold, rains, snow, or high winds, let alone anyone trying to fire on the troops, even with rocks or arrows. It doesn't even offer cover to dismounted infantry. It isn't designed to minimize damage from land mines. It puts nine undefended troops where they can all be disposed of at once.
It has no armament of its own and very little cargo capacity for the troops it is carrying, so that they can carry anti-tank missiles, heavy machine guns, mortars, or other supplies, so the infantry carried are limited to lighter small arms.
Did we learn nothing from Iraq and Afghanistan?
U.S. paratroopers would be better off with dirt bikes.
This also makes absolutely no sense to convert to a self-driving version. It is filled to the gills with soldiers who know how to drive, but has no armaments of its own. Why would it need to be self-driving?
Also, a self-driving vehicle adds one more layer of complexity to something designed to be used someplace that paratroopers had to drop in. It is one more thing that could fail.