Drones v. Missiles

From here.

Cleaner Diesel As An Interim Solution

This is potentially a quick interim fix to diesel pollution that could be quickly adopted at the refining industry level by a handful of major oil companies rather than through vehicle purchases that could take decades to phase in. 

Scientists are exploring a surprisingly simple way to clean up diesel engines: adding tiny droplets of water to the fuel. During combustion, the water rapidly vaporizes, triggering micro-explosions that improve fuel mixing and lower combustion temperatures. 

Studies show this technique can slash nitrogen oxide and soot emissions by more than 60% while sometimes even improving engine efficiency. Because it works in existing engines without redesign, it could provide a quick path to cleaner diesel use.

From Science Daily citing: 

Chukwuemeka Fortunatus Nnadozie, et al. "Advancements in diesel emission reduction strategies: a focus on water-in-diesel emulsion technology" 4(1) Carbon Research (2025) DOI: 10.1007/s44246-025-00210-y

Space Junk Removal

One of the industries of the future will be space junk removal. 

There is already a movie about it (Space Sweepers 2021 S. Korean).

Orbital debris in Earth orbit is not adequately described as a static inventory problem. It is a coupled operations-stability problem governed by shell occupancy, collision kernel, breakup severity, and orbital residence time. The near-term orbital sustainability is controlled by three variables: disposal reliability for newly launched spacecraft, encounter-state uncertainty in the high-risk conjunction tail, and the residual hazard stock of inactive high-mass legacy objects.

Using public ESA, NASA, FCC, NOAA, JAXA, and OECD sources through 2026, we develop a reduced-order control framework for intervention ranking and market formation. Current ESA statistics indicate ~44,870 tracked objects in Earth orbit, more than 15,800 tonnes of orbiting mass, and model-based populations of ~5.4e4 objects larger than 10cm, 1.2e6 in the 1 - 10cm regime, and 1.4e8 in the 0.1 - 1cm regime.

Operationally, the environment is already visible in constellation-scale workload: public reporting by SpaceX indicates that Starlink collision-avoidance maneuvers rose from 6,873 in 12/2021-05/2022 to 144,404 in 12/2024-05/2025. Physically, the present LEO environment shows a separation between the traffic peak near 500-600 km, which drives conjunction workload, and the persistence-driven risk peak near ~850km, where long lifetime/inactive intact mass dominate long-horizon hazard; under current assumptions, 96% of the LEO index is inactive objects.

NASA studies indicate benefit-cost ratios of 20-750 for shortening disposal timelines from 25 to 15 years and greater than 100 for targeted uncertainty reduction in high-risk conjunctions. The analysis implies that orbital-debris services will not emerge as a single homogeneous market, but as a result of linked markets: compliance-led mitigation for new missions, prepared end-of-life servicing and premium SSA overlays, and publicly anchored remediation of the legacy stock.

Slava G. Turyshev, "Orbital Debris in Earth Orbit: Operations, Stability, Control, and Market Formation" arXiv:2603.23552 (March 22, 2026).

Religion In America

 

Reflections On Six Months As A City Attorney

Six months and a week ago, I started a new job as a senior assistant city attorney at the City ad County of Denver in the civil litigation section. We handle lawsuits brought against the City and County of Denver, and against City employees where the lawsuit arises from the employee's official duties.

The job

Most people who work in my section have backgrounds either in criminal case litigation, or in private sector insurance defense of personal injury cases. I was one of the fairly uncommon applicants who had significant prior experience in civil litigation with government entities. One of my main responsibilities at my first job in Colorado, in Grand Junction, was defending county governments all over Western Colorado from lawsuits, which is more or less exactly what I do now defending the City and County of Denver. In my subsequent private private of law, I had a low volume, but steady trickle of cases where I represented private parties in lawsuits against the government, in addition to having broad civil litigation experience making up about half of my practice in a variety of other areas in both state courts and federal courts. This has allowed me to hit the ground running, compared to many of my peers.

Fortunately, our office operates with a very high level of professionalism, and my co-workers are good to work for.

My current case load (which varies from lawyer to lawyer in my section based upon the lawyer's experience and aptitudes) is about 60% civil rights litigation (mostly, but not entirely, involving actions of the police and jail guards), about 20% plain vanilla personal injury litigation like motor vehicle accidents that is similar to what private insurance defense lawyers do but with a governmental liability twist, and about 20% litigating subpoenas and public record requests where there are disputes that go beyond what can be resolved by records custodians out of court.

Different sections of the City attorney's office handle employee discipline and employment related litigation, enforcement of ordinance violations, child protective proceedings in cases where there are allegations of abuse and neglect, and transactional/corporate counsel type work for matters like negotiating and monitoring compliance with contracts between the City and its vendors, drafting ordinances, lobbying the state and federal governments, and managing conflicts that arise between different city agencies and officials.

There are also some governmental agencies which many people think are part of the City and County of Denver, but which are not: the Denver Public Schools, the Denver District Attorney, Denver Health (the county's public hospital), the Denver Housing Authority, the Regional Transportation District (RTD), the Downtown Development Authority, the Denver District Court, the Denver Probate Court, the Denver Juvenile Court, and probably a few others that I've failed to mention. 

The Denver County Court is a unique hybrid court that combined the roles of the limited jurisdiction state government's county court found in other Colorado counties, and the role of a municipal court for the City and County of Denver where municipal ordinance violations are prosecuted.

The biggest change for me has been transitioning from being self-employed for two decades to being a salaried W-2 employee. 

Mostly, this is for the better and was an important reason to take this job. Instead of having to invoice clients and pester them to pay their bills, or to wait until contingent fee cases are converted into money at the end of a case, money just magically appears in by bank account without me even asking for every two weeks. I get paid vacations and sick days! I get my health insurance through an employer plan, a switch I made shortly before big cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies for self-employed people seeking health insurance took effect. If I continue to work for the City for five years, I get a defined benefit pension. I have a public sector defined contribution plan to which I can contribute about 20% of my income. I can pay for my parking expenses with pre-tax dollars. I don't have to pay anything out of pocket to get IT support. My tax returns will get a lot less complicated starting in 2027 (I had some residual self-employment work and income wrapping up my private practice in early 2026). I don't have to deal with fixing broken copying machines, building maintenance, hiring employees, tax withholding for employees, office security, arranging telephone and internet service, balancing an attorney's trust account, and so on. I don't have to spend large chunks of time marketing and deciding which clients to sign up. My work is mostly (not 100%) confined to 9-5 on business days.

I also get to work in a place with good systems in place, with adequate administrative support, with competent fellow attorneys who can cover for you while you are sick or on vacation, and top quality legal research and office related software packages.

We still have to pay close attention to potential conflicts of interest in new cases (and conflicts of interest that can emerge during cases), so we can send conflicted cases to outside counsel. But, unlike my fairly brief stint in a multi-state law firm with about a thousand lawyers, I don't have to spend half an hour to forty-five minutes every day (like every single other lawyer in that entire law firm) screening new cases brought into the firm for conflicts of interest.

Best of all, except for particular phases of the small share of cases where there is a prospect of receiving an attorneys' fee award, I don't have to track every tenth of an hour of every single working day, since all of the work we do is for the same client and is very unlikely to be the subject of attorneys' fee litigation.

Insights into law and policy and legal practice

Most people, most of the time, are outsiders to government, sometimes spinning conspiratorial narratives about what they think happens behind the scenes in the criminal justice system, and in government more generally. In my subpoena and records request practice, and in civil rights cases, I'm on the opposite side of the fence, with more or less complete access to the full "behind the scenes" story.

I almost always know more about what actually happened, sometimes legally relevant and sometimes not, than the other lawyers in the case and that the judge. It is a rare case where I don't know more or less exactly what happened in all legally relevant ways within a month or two of receiving it, and often within a couple of weeks.

I have nearly full access to all relevant records and a full ability to interview the government employees involved in a context where they are more quickly forthcoming about what I want to know, than in the formal discovery process.

The truth isn't nearly as nefarious as conspiracy theorists and a plurality of civil rights lawyers would have you believe.

This isn't to say that law enforcement officers or jail guards never make mistakes that hurt someone, sometimes in ways that give rise to legal liability, and sometimes in ways that don't.

A significant portion of my job is facilitating the payment of reasonable settlements to people who have been legitimately wronged by the government or government officials. Sometimes a city employee is clearly at fault in a motor vehicle accident. Sometimes a law enforcement officer does cross the line and is in the wrong. The City pays out millions of dollars a year in settlements and judgments as a result.

Most settlement payments err on the side of being generous, in order to avoid the risk that a jury won't correctly evaluate liability and damages in a case and will award an excessive amount. 

A significant minority of jury awards reach the wrong result on liability or damages (sometimes for the government and sometimes against it), often (as post-verdict juror interviews reveal) for reasons that shouldn't be legally relevant or reflect misunderstandings that neither side's lawyers even contemplated were possible. Most of the time, juries reach verdicts that are close to being right, but not all of the time by any means (even when the lawyers and judges are doing their jobs correctly).

My rule of thumb (based upon the available academic literature on the topic, and confirmed by my personal experience) is that in a best case scenario where the lawyers and judges in a case are doing their jobs right and the law dictates a clear answer, is that the likelihood that a jury will reach the wrong conclusion is about 10%. 

The odds that the jury will reach the wrong conclusion rockets up, of course, when one or the other side's lawyers engaged in misconduct, or the judge makes a significant mistake (not always appealable), or there is litigation misconduct by a party in the case such as destroying or fabricating evidence or lying under oath (often not known to the lawyers). The most common problems, however, are lawyer incompetence or a bad ruling from a trial judge or sincere but incorrect witness memories about what happened, and not outright litigation misconduct.

Some kinds of suspicions about what is happening behind the scenes are more often correct than others. For example, I know (from having access to what is in them in cases where I move to quash subpoenas) that the vast majority of internal affairs files sought by defense attorneys in criminal cases that are withheld from them, truly aren't material to the outcome of those cases, even at the margins on credibility issues. The kind of conduct that law enforcement agencies, and governments more generally, care about for purposes of internal employee discipline, are only vaguely similar to the kinds of conduct that give rise to legal liability, or would be relevant in a criminal case in which an officer was involved in some way and is a potential witness.

Timelines

Different kinds of cases have different timelines. Records request cases and subpoenas are typically litigated over a period a week to a few months. Ordinary personal injury cases in which a defendant just happens to be a governmental entity, tend to be fairly simple cases that are resolved in a year or two once a case if filed, and are often settled sooner than that. 

Civil rights cases, and personal injury cases which are really civil rights cases in disguise, take one of two typical courses. Many of them are resolved very early on in initial dispositive motion practice and are often dismissed within a few months to a year with complete dismissals on the merits (or for failure to prosecute by a pro se party, i.e. a Plaintiff bringing suit without a lawyer). The civil rights cases that aren't resolved that way can take much longer, in part because they are often prosecuted in federal court which is much slower than state court, in part because interlocutory appeals (i.e. appeals brought prior to a final trial and verdict) are common in civil rights cases, and in part because these cases are sometimes more complex and require lengthy pre-trial discovery and motion practice. I have one case that will probably go to trial soon about eight years after the underlying incident (that involved a handful of people over the course of less than two hours in one place)  took place.

If everyone knew what I know as a governmental defense attorney know within two or three months of a case being filed, these cases could be resolved in six months and would be resolved more accurately than they are in jury trials. But, of course, part of the reason that I can secure this information so quickly is because the people from whom I receive the information know that what they share with me won't be used against them in court. Still, this observation does suggest that there is plenty of room for improvement in the process.

Also, a lot of the delay in civil litigation is a function of simply not having enough judges to keep their case loads small enough to allow them to make prompt rulings, and an overall litigation system that has adapted to that reality.

The quality of plaintiff's litigation

Another thing that my job gives me is a broad overview of the quality of the legal work done by the people who sue the City.

About half the lawsuits brought against the City are brought by pro se parties, or by lawyers whose legal work falls below the standard of care that should be expected from a reasonable competent lawyer. 

Indeed, the best pro se parties (maybe the top 5-10% of them) are doing a better job of litigating their cases than the worst lawyers that we see (although no pro se parties do an excellent job). There are a few lawyers in the Plaintiff's bar who are so incompetent that I am amazed that they passed the bar exam, although even they have basic literacy and some understanding of the process. But there are plenty of pro se parties whose literacy and understanding of the process is below that of an average high school student, who would benefit from representation by even an only marginally competent lawyer.

One of the better arguments for a "civil Gideon" system in which indigent people would routinely be provided access to lawyers by the state, the way that indigent criminal defends are, is that it would make the delays and confusions caused by incompetent pro se litigants largely go away making the whole legal system work much more efficiently.

Cases brought by incompetent litigants overwhelming get dismissed early on, or settled for amounts far less than a competent lawyer could secure.

Incompetent litigants tend to be particularly weak at investigating a case and gathering facts to support it, and in understanding at a more than superficial level the relevant substantive and procedural legal requirements for proving a case of governmental liability. Now and then, they do the right thing despite themselves, however.

Of course, part of the failure rate among these litigants is an inability to accurately judge if they have a legally meritorious case. I have definitely seen cases that were winnable or could have secured a larger settlement, that don't because they are brought by incompetent litigants. But probably 80%-90% of the cases brought by incompetent litigants wouldn't have been brought at all by competent lawyers, who could have identified the weakness in those cases at the outset and not filed suit. 

When I was in private practice, I probably turned away two or three potential clients a week, often potential clients who had heart wrenching stories of misfortune. But those potential clients either didn't have cases for which the legal system had a remedy, or had cases where the likely outcome of  their cases with competent legal representation would provide them with less economic benefit than the cost of competent legal representation, and would have greatly disrupted their personal lives and eaten up huge amounts of their personal time.

And, by the way, incompetence by lawyers isn't restricted to sole practitioners with little experience. I've seen multiple cases of grossly incompetent litigation from medium to large plaintiff's law firms (some of which are household names due to their advertising or due to prominent cases that they have litigated) by lawyers with significant experience.

This isn't to say that all litigants against the City are incompetent. About half of lawsuits against the City are brought by lawyers whose work is at least up to the standard of a reasonable competent lawyer, and a minority but good share of litigants against the city are represented by lawyers whose work represents the best practices in this work, are highly competent, and have screened potential clients in such a manner that they have chosen to represent plaintiffs with meritorious cases.

At least one case that I have handled so far involved a plaintiff who was represented by two successive incompetent lawyers, only to have the case pass to a third, highly competent lawyer that salvaged the case with some smart litigation decisions and was able to secure a settlement much higher than what the previous incompetent lawyers came close to reaching.

Sadly, there is very little that a person thinking about bringing a lawsuit can do to determine if their lawyer is litigating competently or not. That's why we have a bar exam in an attempt to impose at least some minimum standards, but this gatekeeping isn't perfect.

Admission to the bar allows you as a lawyer to handle almost any kind of case (patent law is an exception, and some states set a higher standard to determine if a lawyer is allowed to represent defendants in death penalty cases), subject only to their own self-determination about their competence.

But while being admitted to the bar usually means that a lawyer meets basic standards of literacy and can find their way to the courthouse, with a vague understanding of how the process works, the vast majority of lawyers (I'm an extreme outlier in this regard), have a far more specialized legal practice and predominantly handle a fairly narrow kind of legal work.

Probably a majority of lawyers don't litigate any civil or criminal cases on a regular basis, and instead do transactional work, legal compliance work, or provide counsel to senior corporate officials in their day to day activities.

It is rare for a lawyer to represent both plaintiffs and defendants in personal injury work. It is rare for divorce lawyers or real estate lawyers to handle personal injury or civil rights cases. It is rare for commercial litigators to litigate personal injury cases. It is rare for probate lawyers to do personal injury or civil rights litigation. It happens. I'm an example of that. But it is rare.

Unlike physicians, whose regulators have imposed both a general threshold professional qualification to become an M.D., and an additional professional qualification to practice in a particular medical specialty, the legal profession has almost no secondary level of professional qualification to practice in a particular legal specialty, like personal injury litigation, or civil rights litigation.

Most specialist legal practitioners do develop special expertise in the area where they practice, from working as a junior lawyer in a firm that has that kind of practice, from taking continuing legal education classes in that field, from researching the law and procedure in their own cases, and from the school of hard knocks. But it isn't systemic or uniform among specialist legal practitioners who often have significant gaps in their knowledge of the best practices for handling cases in their specialty.

This can be a particular problem in civil rights litigation where the law is more complicated than in many other areas of law, and where firm sizes tend to be small, so that many practitioners have never worked as junior lawyers under seasoned senior civil rights lawyers to learn the ropes. A fair number of lawyers with this kind of practice went to law school because of, and are driven by, a strong commitment to social justice, but couldn't find an employer in a field relevant to their objectives out of law school. So, they never received the kind of mentorship that they needed to become competent in their field as a result and are prone to making big picture conceptual mistakes and to bad legal judgment that hasn't been honed by more seasoned practitioners.

Some Quick, Ill Developed, Political Ideas

In defense of the deep state

The "deep state" is valuable and good, not a conspiratorial anti-democratic force. It is the bureaucratic manifestation of the rule of law.

We say we live in a "democracy" but that's an oversimplification. Obeying the law is not a matter up for popular vote. When we say we are a democracy what we really mean is that changes in the law must be made democratically. Not even the President is allowed to deviate from the law, which the President is sworn to faithfully execute. The President, wearing a different hat, can participate in the legislative process. But the bureaucratic organization that is the state can and normatively should push back against a President who tries to deviate from the way that the law mandates that the organization should behave.

Fiscal federalism

Trump 2.0 has illustrated the perils of relying too heavily on the federal budgetary process to spend funds for public purposes. So have many past government shutdowns.

Of course, dysfunction in the federal budgetary process leaves undisturbed public functions funded and operated at the state and local level with state and local funding. Most law enforcement comes from state and local law enforcement, most court cases (criminal and civil) are handled in the state courts, most K-12 and higher education funding is state and local, most roads and bridges are maintained at the state and local level, state and local law and funding keeps the water running, the sewers flowing, clears away trash from homes and businesses, and regulates the construction industry and real estate development for the most part.

We've seen what happens when this falls apart now. Because Medicaid and VA Health Care are federally funded and don't even had dedicated federal tax funding, they can be undermined quickly when the federal budgetary process goes astray and also equalize services between poor states and rich states. A simple federal tax law change can undermine ACA individual health insurance marketplace subsidies. K-12 education relies heavily on federal funding for special education (i.e. educating the disabled) and for schools in low income areas (which also equalizes situations between poor states and rich states). Higher education relies upon federal funding for grants for low income students, higher educational institutions for military officers and the deaf, student loan financing, and research grants. Disaster relief is heavily federally funded and leaves havoc unchecked when that is suspended. Disease control and weather prediction and monitoring are also heavily federally funded and are screwed up when this changes.

While we couldn't fund the military or the national debt at the state and local level, we could have a system where more health care and education spending is state and local. This would reduce federal influence on how those industries run and remove those industries from the whims of the federal budget process to a great extent, but would also lead to weaker subsidies of poor states and disproportionately worse services in poor states and would subject those services to greater state and local political influence.

After 9-11 we federalized airport security creating the TSA. Today, we see the political price of that as a federal budgetary process fight unrelated to the TSA itself disrupts airport service. Early in Trump 2.0 we saw what happened to FAA air traffic control as a result of exposure to the Trump 2.0 administration and the federal budgetary process.

So far, Social Security is only suffering deficiencies in administrative processing of disability claims for the most part, because it has its own dedicated funding source that insulates it from the federal budgetary process as an entitlement.

But national parks and major transportation ad energy infrastructure programs have seen a twirl.

Could we build a more robust system without facing too many costs?

A Glimmer Of Hope

 The status quo is a one vote Republican majority, but Trump screwed it up for the GOP.

A Song For Our Times (Mad World)

 

Indirect And Non-Obvious Effects Of The Iran War

The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (the NYT recaps the first week here) will have some indirect and non-obvious impacts, some of which mirror those from the Ukraine War.

* Iran is the sole significant outside military supplier for Russia in the Ukraine War (supplying drones) apart from North Korea which has supplied artillery rounds and some old school military equipment (and even about 10,000 troops) all of which have been subpar in quality and not very useful. The attacks on Iran are likely to divert existing supplies of drones to domestic military use from exports to Russia for use in counterstrikes, and are likely to somewhat degrade Iran's military production capabilities.

* Iran's counterattacks and continued war-like footing have driven up global oil prices dramatically, have had direct supply effects on most of Asia, and have damaged the oil production infrastructure in many Middle Eastern oil producing nations (including Saudi Arabia) which will reduce the capacity of these countries to produce oil in the short to medium term.

* This oil price shock, like many more before it, makes electric vehicles and public transportation more attractive to policy-makers and consumers alike, all over the world, potentially resulting in long-term systemic reduction in demand for oil.

* This mirrors the indirect effect of the Ukraine War in causing Europe to rush to find long term alternatives to oil and natural gas, resulting in wider adoption of EV vehicles, renewable energy sources for their power grids, and energy conservation measures. Again, this results in long-term systemic reductions in demand for oil and natural gas in one of the largest economically developed regions in the world.

* The Ukraine War also strengthened NATO, strengthened European cooperation, and caused re-militarization of European countries, especially those most at risk of attacks from Russia.

* Trump's inexplicable decision to temporarily ease sanctions on Russian oil sales to India, helps Russia in the Ukraine War despite the fact that Russia has used its intelligence resources to help target the U.S. and its allies for Iranian counterstrikes.

* Generally, an international war strengthens the regime attacks vis-a-vis external dissent (something that partially explains Russia's persistence in the Ukraine because the ongoing war there makes Putin more able to crush dissent against him at home). The protests of the Iranian people against its regime may suffer because of this effect. While the U.S. assassinated the Ayatollah, Iran's supreme leader, and many of the likely successors, the successor chosen for this reason is probably more likely to be a hardliner than the person who might have been chosen if the Ayatollah (who was 86 years old and close to 87 when he was killed by a U.S. strike) had died of natural causes as was likely in the near future.

* It seems unlikely that Iran will experience regime change, either in favor of a more democratic regime (Iran's democracy was actually more robust than a lot of regimes in the Middle East), or a monarchist restoration of the Shah. Pre-attack, this had been conceivable because of huge protests against the too conservative Shiite religious regime's social policies, despite the fact that Iran is actually quite religiously and ethnically diverse. Air strikes and missiles are rarely sufficient to secure regime change.

* The war probably delays steps that could be positive for the residents of Gaza.

* The war probably depletes military equipment supplies of Iran, and to a lesser extent, the U.S. and Israel, weakening the affected countries' capacity to fight further wars.

* In much the same way, the Ukraine War has dramatically depleted Russia's military resources (despite half the national budget in Russia being spent on the military and interest on loans to support it).

* The strikes in Iran are very likely to weaken the Republican Party's MAGA coalition, since MAGA campaigned on ending foreign wars of choice and then has repeatedly sought out those wars in Trump's second term, striking Venezuela, embargoing Cuba, striking Iran, and renewing a "drug war" in Mexico, Ecuador, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, which doesn't seem very calculated to actually do anything about drug abuse and drug related crime in the U.S. (as well as threatening Canada and Greenland). This coalition has already been beaten up in special elections and survey results and has a very thin majority (especially in the U.S. House).

* The inflation caused by rising oil prices, weakens support for Trump and the Republicans and strengthens Democrats chances in the 2026 midterm elections, which are just seven months away.

* The Iran War hasn't been particularly effective at diverting attention from the Epstein files which graphically reveal a coalition of child trafficking, corrupt, and Russian influenced officials in senior levels of politics, business, and academia, with Trump at the center of all of it as a highly culpable serial child rapist.

* The Venezuela invasion, by the way, seems inconclusive and certainly doesn't seem to be having much of an oil supply impact.

Trump's Many Wars

Trump has declared wars on small boats in international waters in the Caribbean and the Pacific, claiming that they are drug boats, without proof, claiming a right to kill the people on them, contrary to international law.

Trump invaded Venezuela and seized its leader.

Trump has involved U.S. military forces in striking a Mexican cartel chief, leading to a bloodbath there.

Trump has unilaterally made strikes on Iran.

Trump has now deployed the U.S. military in Ecuador.

Trump is trying to impose an oil embargo on Cuba.

Trump deployed the National Guard to peaceful American cities.

Trump has deployed ICE as his private secret police to lawlessly terrorize American cities with scant regard to what they are actually legally authorized to do.

Trump has deployed U.S. forces to interdict Russia's shadow fleet of oil tankers trying to evade sanctions arising out of the Ukraine War. The Ukraine war itself is ongoing and Trump and blown hot and cold on it, prolonging the war by giving Putin hope.

Trump has threatened, but not yet struck, Greenland, Canada, and Panama.

And, while only metaphorical, Trump has declared trade wars on the entire world.

In most of these cases, Trump hasn't had even a whisper of Congressional authorization or legal authorization to act. The uses of force (and the tariffs) have violated domestic and international law. 

Four Years Of War

Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, that started on February 24, 2022, after an eight year respite following the Russian seizure of Crimea and Russian allied sympathizers trying to join Russia in parts of a couple of the far western provinces of Ukraine that were most ethnically and linguistically Russian.

Russia thought it would have a quick and easy triumph, just as it had had in Crimea in 2014. It didn't. 

* It has had 1.2 million casualties (including wounds not mortal, captured soldiers, and desertions), which is more than the size of the entire Russian Army it started with, and the losses have extended to officers and even the highest ranking generals. About 325,000 of them were killed.

* It is losing soldiers as fast as it can draft them, at a rate of about a thousand soldiers a day. It is replacing a large share of its seasoned soldiers with green conscripts that are ill-trained, ill-equipped, and ill-treated.

* The vast majority of it tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery, and the like gone. It's soldiers are resorting to using museum pieces and horses. Ukraine's estimates (below) may be slightly high, but they've largely been born out by third-party assessments. Here is there assessment as of yesterday:

Russia's losses in this war have been greater than all but a handful of entire military forces in the world, and greater than the entire amount of its ground forces and ground force equipment that was in active service four years ago.

* It's military tactics sometimes seem similar to the inability of World War I generals to recognize the futility of their approaches, trying the same things over and over to abject failures.

* Its Black Sea fleet suffered heavy casualties and neutered.

* Its air forces have suffered not insignificant losses.

* Its supplies of advanced drones and guided missiles has thinned.

* After the early part of the first year of the invasion, its territorial gains have been minuscule, and have come at immense cost in troops lives and equipment. The most recent assessment I could easily find was as of February 11, 2026:

Since Feb. 24, 2022: Russia: +29,210 square miles. 13% of Ukraine. (Area roughly equivalent to half the U.S. state of Illinois).

Total area of all Ukrainian territory Russia presently controls, including Crimea and parts of Donbas, Russia had seized prior to the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022: Russia: +45,835 square miles. About 20% of Ukraine. (Area roughly equivalent to the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.) . . .

In 2025, the average monthly rate of Russian gains was 171 square miles. . . . 

According to RM’s measurements, using ISW data, Russia captured 2,171 square miles—about 0.93% of Ukraine including Crimea—in 2025.

Russia still controls less Ukrainian territory than it did in August of 2022, six months into the war.

Russia has gained 5,200 square miles of territorial control since November 2022, its low point in this four year long war. This is an average gain of 133 square miles a month in a war where it is currently experiencing 30,000 casualties or so per month.

* The territory taken, which was home to the strongest political opposition to Ukraine's government, has strengthened the political backing of Ukraine's government in the territory it still controls. And, Russia has alienated former pro-Russian Ukrainians in territory it does not control.

* Crimea was mostly as a summer resort for Russians and had been a key Black Sea fleet military base for Russia. It is neither of those things now.

* Its oil and gas infrastructure has been seriously ravaged. Its ability to sell its oil and gas abroad is also increasingly restricted.

* Its transportation infrastructure, especially en route to the front and to Crimea, has been seriously damaged.

* It has been isolated internationally and the restrictions have tightened, while the world, and especially Europe has embraced it. It has failed to win military support from any countries except North Korea and Iran. China and India have remained lukewarm towards it.

* It's oligarchs have been pinched and looted as sanctions.

* It's domestic economy has again been squeezed out for military demand.

* An estimated 7,254 Russian civilians have been killed.

* It's best and brightest young men have fled abroad to avoid conscription and likely death or disability in the process. 1,000,000 (0.7% of Russia’s 2022 population) left Russia for economic or political reasons in the first year of the full-scale war. Between 15% and 45% of those who had left have returned since then, so, between 550,000 and 850,000 people have not returned to Russia.

* It has withdrawn from other international military commitments, for example, in Syria (whose regime fell), and in a strip of land in Moldova.

* NATO has expanded and grown stronger.

* It's European neighbors have built up their own military might and military solidarity, at the same time that Russia's military might is a shadow of what it was four years ago.

* It has relied heavily on more or less random attacks with long range drones, glide bombs, and missiles on civilian targets of little tactical value that violate intentional laws of war. Ukraine's air defenses have been about 89% effective, which means that strikes do get through regularly and cause damage, but the air defenses make it about 9 times more expensive for Russia to do so than it would be without them.

In January 2026: 

Russia fired: 

* 4,838 drones

* 14 ballistic missiles

* 61 cruise missiles 

Ukraine intercepted: 

* 4,120 drones (718 not intercepted)

* 1 ballistic missile (13 not intercepted)

* 38 cruise missiles (23 not intercepted)

* Ukraine has proven to have more military industrial capacity, more allies, more competent troops, and more of a capacity to learn and change their tactics and technologies.

* Ukraine has managed to strike both military and economic targets deep in Russia, but has done so without indiscriminately harming civilians.

* Russia has found that its immense nuclear arsenal has been challenging to turn into practical military gains.

This isn't to say that Ukraine has won. It has had about 600,000 military casualties (including wounds not mortal, captured soldiers, and desertions), of whom about 120,000 have been killed, and lost lots of military equipment too (although Ukraine has faired better at replenishing its equipment losses). An estimated 15,954 Ukrainian civilians have been killed (from the same source).

The vast majority of harm to civilians and the civilian property has been on its territory. 

It has lost significant amounts of territory. Millions of Ukrainians have been internally displaced or have become refugees. As the New York Times explains:

At the start of the full-scale invasion, excluding regions that were already occupied by Russia, it had a population of perhaps 36 million people, according to Tymofii Brik, a sociologist and the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics. (Other estimates tend to be higher.) Since then, Brik says, six million have been displaced inside the country and some four million — mostly women and children — have left Ukraine. More than 100,000 Ukrainians, troops and civilians, are estimated to have been killed. Millions of people live under occupation in areas Russia controls.

Ukraine's whole existence has become an existential fight for survival every day, with intense uncertainty.

But, at best, the Russo-Ukrainian war has been a stalemate for the last three and a half years, and Russia's military capacity to challenge anyone is profoundly depleted.

Russia's leaders have seized on the war to exert greater control on its people in an authoritarian style, but the cracks are showing.

The feckless "leadership", or lack thereof, by Trump and the Republicans in Congress has helped encourage Putin and extended the war, given Putin hope that his unilateral adventure unknown outside his inner circle until it happened, can prevail, at least into a treaty that leaves Russia better off. They have also cratered NATO.

In The Resistance We Drive Minivans

The left is resilient. We have strong communities. We care for our neighbors. We are the grown ups in the room and we prove it with our actions. Trump and the Republicans are doing immense damage to our nation, but at the grass roots, we are doing what we can to mitigate the harm.

In the resistance we drive minivans, we take ’em low and slow down Nicollet Avenue, our trunks stuffed with hockey skates and scuffed Frisbees and cardboard Costco flats. We drive Odysseys and Siennas, we drive Voyagers and Pacificas, we like it when the back end goes ka-thunk over speed bumps, shaking loose the Goldfish dust. One of our kids wrote “wash me” on the van’s exterior, etched it into the gray scurf of frozen Minneapolis slush. Our floor mats smell like mildew from the snowmelt.

In the resistance we play Idles loud, we prefer British punk, turn the volume up, “Danny Nedelko,” please and thank you — we cast that song like a protective spell across our minivans: Let us be bulletproof, let us be invisible. . . .

Everyone is doing his part here, each to his ability. This is easier to accomplish, it seems, when joy and love are the engines. Outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where detainees, some of them American citizens and legal residents, are being held without beds or real blankets, the grannies of the Twin Cities are serving hot chocolate to college kids in active confrontation with ICE. I know of an off-grid network of doctors offering care to immigrants, a sub rosa collective of restaurateurs organizing miniature food banks in their basements. A friend of mine is a pastor who went with around 100 local clergy members to the airport in protest. Another friend is an immigration lawyer who spends his days endlessly filing habeas petitions, has gotten 30 people released from detention over the last few weeks. He recently offered a training session on how to file habeas petitions and 300 lawyers showed up, eager to do the work pro bono. . . .

Here’s what you need to remember: There is no reward that comes later. No righteous justice will be dispensed, not soon and not ever. Renee Good and Alex Pretti don’t come back to life. The lives of their loved ones are not made whole again. Thousands of people will remain disappeared, relatives scattered, families broken. This story does not have a happy ending, and I can assure you the villains do not get punished in the end. If that is your motivation, try again, start over.

But you also need to understand — and this is equally important — that we’ve already won. The reward is right now, this minute, this moment. The reward is watching your city — whether it’s Chicago or Los Angeles or Charlotte or the cities still to come — organize in hyperlocal networks of compassion, in acephalous fashion, not because someone told you to, but because tens of thousands of people across a metro region simultaneously and instinctively felt the urge to help their neighbors get by." . . .

you slow down to the speed limit, you turn Idles a little louder, you play “Danny Nedelko” again. That song comes from an album called “Joy as an Act of Resistance.”

Today I’m driving a girl who never speaks other than to say thank you. She’s out of the car now and trying to clamber ungracefully over a dirty ice bank that walls off the roadway from her house. There is no entry point — she’d have to walk down to the corner to gain access — and I’m cursing myself for where I’ve dropped her off. The skies are an unsympathetic oatmeal. It is very cold, the dark dead of winter.

Out on the stoop of her building, the girl’s mom and little sister are waiting. The mother looks on nervously, wishing to minimize this vulnerable transition point between car and home. The little sister is probably 3 years old. She is in pigtails and wearing footie pajamas and she is radiant, leaping up and down, clapping, ecstatic to see her big sister come home. The quiet girl is stone-faced and stumbling, and eventually she makes it across the wall of gray ice to her stoop, where her little sister grabs her by the leg. 

I’ll admit: This was the only time I cried, throughout this whole disgusting affair, as I sat in my car watching the girl in the footie pajamas clapping for big sister’s safe return[.]

An excerpt from this New York Times Op-Ed essay.

Against Municipal Courts In Colorado

The Denver Post has an article highlighting the problems of having municipal courts not of record incarcerate people who aren't represented by lawyers with no record of the proceedings, and notes that a bill this session seeks to change that. The bill is HB26-1134:

Fairness & Transparency in Municipal Court: Concerning measures to ensure that municipal court defendants are subject to conditions similar to state court defendants.

The bill clarifies that municipal court defendants have a right to counsel and that municipal defense counsel have the same notice, case information, and opportunity to meet with their clients as do state-level defense counsel. Current law prohibits paying indigent municipal defense counsel on a fixed or flat-fee payment structure if the municipality prosecutes domestic violence cases. The bill applies the prohibition to all municipalities.

All municipal court proceedings are required to be open to public observation. Virtual observation is required for all in-custody proceedings, and prompt resolution of municipal cases is required.

Last year, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that municipalities with ordinances that parallel state crimes can't have higher penalties than the state crimes, in the wake of the state legislature reducing penalties for misdemeanors, and in the wake of Governor Polis vetoing a bill that would have mandated the same result.

A different bill last legislative session addressed the problem with municipal court judges abusing failure to appear warrants in a way that led to disproportionately harsh punishments.

None of these bills address yet another problem with the municipal court system, which is that municipal court judges are not nearly as independent of the municipal legislative bodies as state court judges are because they are appointed by the Governor in a merit based system that makes state court's independent of local governments (except for Denver County Court which is quasi-municipal).

Municipal courts also leave people arrested languishing in jail for longer than the U.S. Constitution allows because they hold court less frequently than state courts.

The simple and best solution would be to abolish municipal courts entirely and to give county court's jurisdiction over ordinance violations (which could still be prosecuted by City attorneys). 

Perhaps parking violations could be made administrative proceedings of municipalities limited to fines, boot, and tow orders instead of municipal violations.

Typos In Blog Posts

A rare essay about typos in blog posts, expressing views that largely mirror my own views on the topic, can be found here.

The MAGA-GOP Coalition Is Falling Apart

 

Trump's decade plus old hold on the GOP is slipping, because Republican political leaders they know that their prospects in the midterms look apocalyptically bad as a result of his actions over the last year.

Military Updates

Initially without links:

* 70%-80% of the casualties in the Ukraine War have been from drones. Heavy armored units en masse have almost vanished as a tactic and a very large share of all artillery batteries have been destroyed. Russia has had 1.2 million military casualties, Ukraine has had 0.6 million military casualties. The fourth anniversary of the start of the latest phase of the war is coming up later this month. Russia's rate of territorial advance has been the slowest in the last century. Europe is stepping up support for Ukraine and considering deploying troops as U.S. support under Trump continues to be fickle. Ukraine's campaign against oil and gas infrastructure in Russia seems to have subsided somewhat although it has hit some relatively low value targets near Moscow. Russia has stepped up strikes against civilian targets in Ukraine (more or less indiscriminately). Russia is nearing a breaking point economically, although it has finally started to ramp up its military-industrial capacity someewhat. U.S. and European forces are being more pro-active in interrupting "ghost fleet" trade in sanctioned Russian oil.

* Germany has invented anti-torpedo torpedos.

* Japan has invented a 40mm railgun for one of its ship classes. It overcame the hurdles faced by the U.S. program with a 40mm round instead of a 155mm round, different materials in the barrel that have different electrical properties, and gallium capacitors that reduce the power supply footprint. It can fire 120 rounds in shot succession and doesn't suffer the barrel burn out problem of the U.S. attempt. It can fit in a shipping contain plus a small turret. This would be mostly useful in anti-small craft, anti-drone, anti-helicopter, and missile interception roles. It is quite accurate although range and accuracy details are not publicly available. The same ship would have lasers, something that China is also investing it. But lasers are only effective for 3-5 km, and can be disrupted by heavy sea spray, fog, low lying clouds, storms, and fog, so the lasers would be mostly for close in missile and drone defense together with something like a Phalanx Close In Weapons System. Railgun rounds are basically immune to lasers.

* The U.S. has developed a large area anti-drone system that uses microwaves to generate an electromagnetic pulse that can take down hundreds of drones at once, deployed on military truck.

* The U.S. is stepping up B-21 Raider production, a stealth bomber similar to the B-2 but a bit smaller and more modern.

* A prototype of a next generation Abrams tank was shown off at the Detroit auto show.

* China claims to have ready for prime time sensors that can see U.S. stealth aircraft.

* Progress is being made in ground drones, generally, either on a small unmanned ATV scale or a robot dog with a rifle sized weapon approach.

* Progress is being made on surface and submarine drones.

* Progress is being made on optical gun sight attachments that make it much easier to identify sniper sights that would otherwise be almost invisible at ranges up to a mile.

* China continues to be active in deploying its navy, coast guard, are paramilitary maritime forces around the Philippines and the South China sea.

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).

Brainstorming Possible Public Law Reforms

There are important gaps in our public law system:

* If we are to reject taxpayer standing, voter standing, and citizen standing, we need to empower someone to enforce violations of the law that harm the general public, but not any specific person differently from any other, like many forms of public corruption.

* Judges should have the power to remove government officials who defy court orders and commit serious breaches of the public trust from office, certainly, officials who are not elected officials.

* There needs to be a parallel to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for federal officials and agents (i.e. people who act under color of federal law) that is more robust than the federal common law Bivens remedy, which doesn't cover all federal officials or all federal rights.

* The unitary executive theory adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court is just a pure political trick, with no historical basis. INS v. Chadha (1983), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that legislative vetos in duly enacted laws were unconstitutional was also a bad decision.

* The gutting of the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment by SCOTUS was a horrible legal decision not supported by any fair reading of the document.

* The grant of immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts of the President was a very bad idea. Granting both civil immunity and criminal immunity should be a matter of common law or statutory law that can be changed by Congress, not a matter of constitutional law.

* Granting unfettered pardon power to the President now looks like it was a bad idea on the part of the Founders. Notably, a great many U.S. states do not afford the same power to their Governors.

* Requiring a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Congress to override a Presidential veto greatly upsets the proper balance of power between Congress and the President. Let the President veto legislation that unwittingly contains a bad provision which the President noticed but Congress did not. But let them reaffirm and override it by a simple majority of both houses. Part of the big picture problem in the United States is that it is far too hard to legislate, so the courts and regulations adopted by the executive have to fill the gap.

* Making the respective houses of Congress the judges of their own elections was a bad idea.

* The impeachment power is too weak and too political. And, it should be easier and less political to remove a President (or any other public official) for disability.

* A proposal is pending in Colorado to remove absolute immunity for prosecutors from civil liability, which as drafted I don't support, even though I can somewhat sympathize with the motivations for it. Judges also have absolute immunity. I think that the solution is to make a finding of professional or judicial misconduct or criminal conduct have the collateral consequence of forfeiting absolute immunity, with the statute of limitations for a private civil action to impose liability in those cases running from the time that there is a final criminal conviction or of professional or judicial misconduct. If a judge convicts you of a crime and sentences you to a private prison due to a bribe from a private prison investor, and the judge is convicted of that, the judge should have civil liability to you.

* An alternative to the fault based approach of § 1983 and Bivens for civil rights violations, would be to instead adopt the takings jurisprudence that applies when the government takes property without fair compensation. Rather than being perpetrator focused, if someone is deprived of their civil rights, they would be entitled to just, compensatory only, compensation, by the government under whose color the deprivation occurred, without regard to the intent of the person violating the right, and without individual liability on the part of the agents who participated in the deprivation of civil rights. Indemnification and defense mandates of public employees basically gets you to a similar place in most cases, but denies any relief when someone is deprived of life or liberty wrongfully, if no one individual intentional or almost intentionally violates their rights (e.g. if the injuries or destroyed property or other harm arose from mere negligence or mistakes, or due to broken systems rather than malicious individuals). Thus, if you were incarcerated and later found to be innocent, or incurred attorneys' fees defending a criminal case only to be acquitted, you would be entitled to compensation from the government that brought the charges and incarcerated you, without regard to how you were wrongfully convicted or were charged with a crime for which you were not convicted. Qualified immunity and intent requirements would be much less problematic if § 1983 lawsuits and Bivens actions were secondary remedies to punish individual bad apples (and included, for example disqualification from serving in law enforcement for serious willful wrongdoing), while municipal liability for compensatory relief only was available much more easily.

* Many countries vest prosecutorial power in the judiciary rather than in the executive branch, and many states have an attorney general or DA who is independently elected to create a built in special prosecutor. There is wisdom in depriving an elected executive branch politician like a President or Governor or Mayor from having absolute control over enforcement of the criminal laws.

* Colorado has the Colorado Open Records Act and the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act to allow pre-litigation discovery of incidents that might give rise to civil liability on the part of public officials, which makes Warne v. Hall, which prevents people from suing first and getting discovery to determine if they really have a claim, by adopting the federal standards of Twombly and Iqbal for pleading civil actions more tolerable than in other contexts. It isn't clear to me that FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) at the federal level, provides an equally effective tool to bring claims against federal public officials.

* While allowing all U.S. District Court judges to impose national injunctions can be problematic, mostly because it allows for forum shopping, it is also deeply problematic to allow the federal government to re-litigate issues that it has lost in other jurisdictions over and over again, which is just reverse forum shopping. Maybe national injunction power needs to be reserved for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

* Felons should be able to vote. But maybe they shouldn't be able to run for public office without some process establishing that they were reformed or just the passage of time of a certain number of years after they fully served their sentence.

* A statutory obligation for all law enforcement officers to be unmasked and clearly display their badges subject to narrow exceptions that would have to be authorized much like a search warrant on a case by case basis, wouldn't be a bad law.

* We need a better structure to limit the use of military force and covert operations by intelligence agencies to legally authorized act, that doesn't simply give the President absolute power.

* No President should have the power to unilaterally impose any taxes, including tariffs.

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

U.S. Homicide Rate At Record Low

There are lots of theories about why this is the case.

It isn't just better medical care that turns homicides into aggravated assaults, because almost all form of serious crimes have declined.

This number also conceals greater regional variation between high crime states and low crime states, but the trend apart from a little year to year noise in individual states, has been widespread.