Nov
30
2025

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Chose

Today's Eye Candy is the first panel of today's Calvin and Hobbes comic, as preserved and resurrected by the Andrews McMeel syndicate. Click over, and you'll see the remainder of young Calvin's complaint about the poisonous zeitgeist generated by "talk show hosts, political candidates, news programs, special interest groups", who vie for attention by reducing discourse to "shouted rage".

Reader, credible sources date Bill Watterson's original to October 2, 1995. In other words, it's thirty years old.

So my (admittedly, fingers-crossed) attitude is expressed in the headline above. I wouldn't blame you for drawing a more pessimistic conclusion, though.

Also of note:

  • The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley. As do poorly laid anti-capitalist schemes like the one pushed by Democrat State Rep Ellen Read from Newmarket, NH. As expressed in her tweet from a few weeks back:

    She is referring to the bold Blackout The System action, demanding that "We The People" "withdraw our labor & spending" from the economy between November 25 and December 2 of this year.

    So how's that going? Well, according to news reports…

    Yeah, people are doing what they want. Eat it, Marxists.

    Obligatory Disclaimer: this is just one isolated factoid. There are a whole bunch of ways to spin/rebut/disbelieve this. But imagine how Ellen and her "progressive" buddies would gloat if the headlines went the other way.

  • Andrew C. McCarthy draws one. He points out that Military Lawfare Is a Red Line. (I'm out of NR gifted links for November, so here is a archive.today link.)

    Mark Kelly and the Seditionist Six sounds like a bad lounge act. That, at any rate, is how I decided to treat it — which is to say, ignore it. After all, it’s Thanksgiving. As we enter the holiday season, it’s time for not just good cheer but introspection: how blessed we are to be alive at a time of such abundance. It shouldn’t be the occasion for the week’s third or tenth or whatever episode of Trump-era sound and fury.

    But it is.

    This one, you’ve no doubt heard, involves a half dozen Democratic lawmakers who starred in a craven but legally unimpeachable video reminding our troops that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. I have to say “remind” because it has already been drilled into our troops — the best trained fighting force in the world, more thoroughly tutored in their legal and ethical duties than any fighting force in history — that the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) obliges them to disregard orders that are manifestly unlawful.

    But:

    Now, let’s not get deep into every constitutional patch here. To my mind, members of Congress should not be subject to executive control. The specter of punitively applying the UCMJ to Kelly effectively does that. But that’s an issue for another day. For the moment, the point is that Kelly knows he should stay a million miles away from a stunt like this video.

    That’s not because it was criminal; it wasn’t, the theatrical rage of the president and his apparatchiks notwithstanding. It’s because the video was a politicization of our armed forces at a time when we desperately need them to be kept out of the political fray.

    And as Kelly knows, when Democrats poke another hole in another norm, the president’s MO is to drive a truck through it.

    And, as Andrew shows, that's exactly what Trump has done.

  • Free legal advice from Andrew. Specifically, Andrew McCarthy (yes, his second link today): ‘We Intended the Strike to Be Lethal’ Is Not a Defense (and, yes, an archive.today link)

    An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them.

    If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict. (See my Saturday column, with links to prior posts on this subject.)

    Nevertheless, even if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors (i.e., suspected members of drug cartels that the administration has dubiously designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)), the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting) — including by shipwreck.

    Reader, I hope you had "Committed War Crimes" on your Trump Impeachment Bingo Card.

  • But if you want to read the other side… John Hinderaker calls it The Democrats’ Latest Faux Scandal. Maybe! His four-point rebuttal:

    1. The story is based on anonymous “sources,” i.e., deep state leakers. Unless and until someone steps forward, identifies himself, tells us what he knows and how he knows it, and takes responsibility for his statements, I assume everything in the story is probably a lie.
    2. Given the lack of regard for the “law of armed conflict” that is consistently shown by our enemies, my reaction is: boo hoo.
    3. Is there really a “law of armed conflict” that says you can only shoot at a target once? And if someone escapes an initial bombing, or burst of fire, or whatever, he is home free and can’t again be targeted? I’d like to see that law. I haven’t seen any news source cite to it.
    4. If such a rule exists and applies in the present context, it is stupid. If it applies, and one were determined to follow it, it would incentivize a massive first strike that would eliminate any chance of survivors. And would also increase the risk of collateral, unintended damage.

    To me, it appears John has caught a bad case of confirmation bias, but I could (as always, of course) be wrong, and Trump, Hesgeth, et. al. have truth and law on their side. But…

  • And where, exactly, is this mentioned in the Constitution? This is way more offensive than Drunk Aunt spouting off about toxic masculinity at the dinner table: America's Politicized Holiday Dinner.

    In recent weeks, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised that the forthcoming revised U.S. Dietary Guidelines—spearheaded by his agency alongside the Department of Agriculture—will be released in December. As the deadline approaches, holiday hosts could be feeling understandably queasy about how thoroughly food policy now intrudes on what we serve and how we eat.

    The dietary guidelines are revised every five years, and they've seen their share of controversy. In the past few decades, the federal government scrapped the infamous food pyramid (which allegedly could be making a return) and has notoriously issued poor dietary advice on more than one occasion. In the 1980s, the federal government urged Americans to shift away from saturated fats and meat and toward carbs. Under the food pyramid—unveiled in 1992—Americans were further encouraged to eat less animal fats and consume copious amounts of bread and cereal. Americans did not get healthier, and obesity rates skyrocketed.

    "It's not as if we're suddenly eating a lot of lentils and kale," Yale School of Medicine's David Katz told the Huffington Post back in 2017. "We replaced the fat with low-fat junk food."

    Enter RFK Jr., who argues that America's food system is corrupt and "poisoning" Americans with hyper-processed additives. He advocates for increased saturated fat consumption—even recommending turkey deep-fried in beef tallow.

    Mmmmm... tallow!