A bunch of CongressCritters (including the one from New Hampshire who isn't Chris Pappas) took it upon themselves...
Which (of course) caused our President to go nuclear, as reported many places, but here's NHJournal: 'Punishable by DEATH!' Trump Blasts Goodlander for Urging Military to Ignore Orders.
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Thursday to blast six congressional Democrats, including New Hampshire Rep. Maggie Goodlander, who appeared in a social media video urging military and intelligence officers to ignore ‘illegal’ orders. He called their behavior ‘seditious’ and argued they should be locked up or possibly face the death penalty.
“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” the president first posted on Truth, followed by a second post reading “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR punishable by DEATH!”
Thursday’s escalation followed numerous calls from New Hampshire Republicans for Goodlander to resign or face punishment for what some say could be construed as encouraging treason.
At the Federalist, Chris Bray is contemptuous: Theater Kids In Congress Vaguely Urge Military To Disobey POTUS. As a commentary to the above video:
Note what they don’t say. They say that the American military is being “pitted against” their own countrymen, and they say to service members that “you can refuse illegal orders…”
…but they don’t say, even once, even in a pretty clear hint, precisely what illegal orders Trump has issued. He’s being vaguely bad, so you don’t have to obey him. The serious version would look like this: On [date here], the president of the United States ordered [unit name] to enter [place name] for the purpose of [specific action], and that order violated [explicit citation of U.S. Code]. They mushmouth around a set of feelings-signals about Mean Orange Something, but they never quite manage to spit it out. What’s the illegal order anyone is supposed to disobey, and what makes it illegal? News reports suggest they mean to refer to the boat strikes, but click on that link if you want to see more vagueness and weak hinting.
Chris's point is well-taken. They shy away from taking responsibility. Should any service members refuse to carry out what they consider to be "illegal orders", I doubt any of these guys would show up at the subsequent court martial to testify.
In other words, it's awful behavior from both sides, but J.D. Tuccille finds a libertarian pony among all the horseshit: 'Refuse illegal orders' cuts both ways for Democrats.
I favor government employees defying orders and sabotaging the instruments of the state as much as the next libertarian (well, maybe a little more). But I suspect the Democratic lawmakers urging members of the military and the intelligence community to "refuse illegal orders" haven't entirely thought through their positions. While their advice is commendable so far as it goes, as officials of a political party known for its expansive view of the role of government their words are likely to come back and bite them on their collective asses. It's hard to imagine them being so enthusiastic about a reboot of this message directed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and IRS agents under a Democratic administration.
It's nice to fantasize about hundreds of government bureaucrats turning to their bosses with their Cato Institute Pocket Constitutions and demanding: "Show me where it says this is a proper function of the Federal government!"
Also of note:
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A worthless waste of time and taxpayer money, in other words. You may have missed it, but Jack Nicastro summarizes and analyzes: Meta's victory over the Federal Trade Commission shows the market moves faster than antitrust enforcement.
The federal government's yearslong case to label Meta a monopoly ended on Tuesday when a federal court ruled in favor of the tech giant. The ruling sets the important precedent that the current market in which a dominant firm competes is the relevant one to consider when determining whether or not it is a monopolist.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) first brought the lawsuit against Meta in December 2020, during the first Trump administration, alleging that the tech giant had run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing the personal social networking market through its acquisition of then-nascent Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively. The case was dismissed in 2021, but refiled later that year. In April, Lina Khan, who served as the FTC chair when the case was refiled, said that "there's no expiration date when it comes to the illegality of a transaction."
On Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia contradicted Khan in his decision, saying the FTC must prove Meta continues to wield monopoly power "whether or not Meta enjoyed [such] power in the past." Citing Heraclitus' philosophy of universal flux, Boasberg says, "while it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down."
That's right: Heraclitus' philosophy of universal flux. He went there.
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I was always good at giving the answers the test-makers wanted me to give. Alex Tabarrok looks at a recent paper that explains why so many are Confidently Wrong.
If you’re going to challenge a scientific consensus, you better know the material. Most of us, most of the time, don’t—so deferring to expert consensus is usually the rational strategy. Pushing against the consensus is fine; it’s often how progress happens. But doing it responsibly requires expertise. Yet in my experience the loudest anti-consensus voices—on vaccines, climate, macroeconomics, whatever—tend to be the least informed.
This isn’t just my anecdotal impression. A paper by Light, Fernbach, Geana, and Sloman shows that opposition to the consensus is positively correlated with knowledge overconfidence. Now you may wonder. Isn’t this circular? If someone claims the consensus view is wrong we can’t just say that proves they don’t know what they are talking about. Indeed. Thus Light, Fernbach, Geana and Sloman do something clever. They ask respondents a series of questions on uncontroversial scientific topics. Questions such as:
- True or false? The center of the earth is very hot: True
- True or false? The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. True
- True or false? The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True
- True or false? Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False
- True or false? All insects have eight legs: False
- True or false? All radioactivity is man made: False
- True or false? Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True
- True or false? Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False
- True or false? Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True
- True or false? Electrons are smaller than atoms: True
This got a lot of comments, including a couple from me. Number Ten is the most problematic. An electron is a quantum-behaving object, which makes its "size" tricky to define, and perhaps meaningless. You can go slightly bonkers while thinking about the famous Double-slit experiment which generates an "interference" pattern even when you send one electron at a time through the slits.
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How could it be worse? The Dispatch hosts differing viewpoints on Congressional term limits from Doug Bandow (Fixing a Failed Political System) and Anthony Fowler (The Case Against Congressional Term Limits)
No excerpts, although I think Bandow has the better argument.
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Explains a lot, actually. Why does Trump stonewall? Jeff Maurer offers a plausible explanation: Sometimes Trump Stonewalls Because He's Just a Moron. I enjoyed this look back into the past, see if you remember:
Remember how much attention was paid to Trump’s tax returns? Those tax returns were to The Rachel Maddow Show what O.J. was to late night comics in the ‘90s. In 2022, House Democrats forced the release of Trump’s returns from 2015-2020, and we learned…not much. It seems that the main thing Trump was hiding was that he’s not nearly as rich as he claims. Maddow also acquired part of Trump’s 2005 return — which I like to think she pilfered in a Mission Impossible-style heist in which she dropped into Trump Tower suspended by cables — but there wasn’t much there. Maybe the Trump returns we haven’t seen contain damning information, but Trump fought like crazy to prevent the release of stuff that didn’t even fill a full hour on MSNBC.
That's just one example. Stonewalling just comes naturally to him. Because… well, read Jeff's headline again.
![[The Blogger]](/ps/images/barred.jpg)
