The drone attack: “Russia’s Pearl Harbor”

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s mostly Russians who are calling the recent drone attack by Ukraine “Russia’s Pearl Harbor,” because that would make Russia seem the innocent victim of a sneak attack that was unprovoked. Russia, of course, started this war, which makes the analogy absurd. However, Russia apparently did sustain quite a blow.

What it does to the peace talks is anybody’s guess.

More:

On Sunday, the Russian Ministry of Defense issued an official statement that a coordinated Ukrainian drone swarm attack targeted and damaged military aircraft across several airbases located deep within Russian territory. …

Multiple U.S. media outlets—including Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News—have independently confirmed the Ukrainian drone swarm operation targeted and destroyed approximately 40 Russian military aircraft across four airbases.

According to Ukrainian intelligence officials cited by CBS News, the aircraft destroyed include Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 bombers, which play a central role in Russia’s strategic and nuclear-capable long-range aviation forces.

These are aircraft that have been used to launch attacks on Ukraine. Ukraine says it informed Washington; the Trump administration denies this.

More details here.

The larger picture is that drone attacks seem to be the new face of warfare and probably will necessitate a huge adjustment in strategy and tactics. We’ve known about this need for quite some time; let’s hope we’re preparing quickly. Here’s an article with some details:

[Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army] noted that technology is changing too rapidly on the modern battlefield to be wedded to these large procurement programs that historically have taken years to develop and once fielded, can be largely obsolete.

He wants to shrink the timeline it takes to develop systems and get them in the hands of soldiers, especially given much of these capabilities, such as drones, communications gear and electronic warfare tools, are increasingly available on the commercial market.
…
The Army has been experimenting with this approach through what it calls transforming-in-contact, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments. …

He also noted that Ukraine’s drone attack over the weekend flips the cost curve. Kyiv used relatively cheap systems to destroy millions to billions of dollars worth of Russian combat power.

“Look at how cheap those systems were compared to what they took out. We have to be thinking about that [with] everything we’re doing,” George said.

The attack, furthermore, exemplified how transparent battlefields are becoming, meaning there is nowhere to hide.

“We talk a lot about you can’t really hide anymore on the modern battlefield. You’re going to have to be dispersed, lower signature, all of those things, which we talk a lot about with our troops and with our commanders,” George said.

Our military needs to scramble to figure out a way to defend against this sort of thing, and I hope they’ve been working on it for quite some time because the threat has been obvious for a while.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Musk left government at the end of the statutory period, and of course there was spin.

Musk and Trump had a presser for the occasion.

(2) Chatbots don’t have First Amendment rights, says the court. What a tragic case – I don’t mean the ruling; I mean the fact situation:

One case involved a Florida mother, Megan Garcia, who had filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character Technologies, the company behind the AI chatbot platform Character AI. …

The lawsuit claimed that [14-year=old] Sewell, who began using Character.AI in April of the previous year, became emotionally and sexually involved with a chatbot modeled after the “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen. Over several months, Sewell grew increasingly isolated, engaging in explicit and emotionally charged conversations with the bot, during which he discussed his suicidal thoughts and wishes for a pain-free death.

According to the legal filing, the chatbot not only failed to intervene but also encouraged Sewell’s suicidal ideation. In his final exchange, the bot told him, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” to which Sewell replied he could “come home right now.” The bot responded, “Please do, my sweet king.” Shortly after this conversation, Sewell died by suicide.

The firms involved in the case asserted protections under First Amendment rights to free speech. The judge in the case ruled against them.

(3) The Biden administration tried to foist a consent decree on the Minneapolis police department in the waning days of Biden’s term. The Trump administration didn’t defend it, and a judge ruled against the consent degree’s implementation.

However (a quote from the linked article – not the judge):

Minneapolis will surely implement, through its socialist/communist City Council, the restraints the consent decree would have imposed on the MPD, giving law-abiding Minneapolis residents perhaps a final reason to engage the services of U-Haul.

The judge in this case, by the way, is 88 years old and a Reagan appointee.

(4) Actress Loretta Swit, who played the MASH role of Hot Lips Houlihan, has died at 87. RIP.

(5) This is how North Korea controls the cellphone use of its population.:

Nineteen Eighty-Four, eat your heart out.

So much of modern technology facilitates propaganda and surveillance.

No true Scotsman: is MAGA no true conservative?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Bauxite” writes:

What I also see, however, is that MAGA is willing to throw overboard everything that we all professed to believe until about 10 minutes ago now that it is inconvenient to Trump.

I don’t know what MAGA is, but conservative it ain’t.

Bauxite make a point that I think is central to the confusion and disagreement about the value of Trump and the MAGA movement. It hinges on the definition of “conservative.”

The word has a meaning in the vernacular, and by that definition Trump is not conservative. For example, we’ve got these definitions:

… marked by moderation or caution …

marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners : tending to avoid qualities or elements that are novel, showy, etc.

Trump is the antithesis of those things.

“Conservative” – in the US anyway; the definition in Europe is somewhat different – also has a political meaning. Back when I was in school, I was taught this meaning or something approximating it:

… tending or inclined to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions …

a person who adheres to traditional methods or views

Here’s where it gets really complex. What existing views? Existing when? And, in particular, what is “conservative” after many years in which the left has been in ascendance and has transformed what for a long time had been “existing views” so that today’s “existing views” are very different – at least among the bureaucrats who run our government these days, plus great deal of the judiciary? Today’s conservatives wouldn’t be upholding what’s been put into place by Obama and the Biden crew, for example. How far back should today’s conservatives go, and how far forward into newer views? Because the term “conservative” has also come to be a synonym for a smaller federal government, the preservation of individual liberties, and long-held social values involving the family and who is male and female. MAGA stands for those principles, which used to be called – just to make matters more complex – classical liberalism.

Once the left has been in charge for a while, it’s not conservative to preserve what they’ve put in place. Perhaps we now have the need for terms like “reactionary” – which you seldom hear these days, and which has a pejorative ring. Or, as Victor Davis Hanson says, counter-revolutionary – that is, undoing the Obama-Biden revolution, or perhaps even the FDR revolution if you want to go back further into smaller federal government. But one never goes back, not exactly. It will always look different

Counter-revolution is not conservative in the sense of conserving what is, or of being restrained in nature. It’s bold. How bold is too bold? At what point do we lose the point and become something else, something dangerous in its negation of traditional avenues such as courts? Trump dances around the edges of such things, and that’s why some conservatives disapprove. But he must approach those edges in order to be effective. Therein lies the dilemma.

UN official admits lying about starving Gazan babies in a modern-day version of the blood libel

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, he doesn’t say “I lied.” He’s such a good and virtuous person, you see. He meant well, and he just needs to be more precise:

UN aid chief Tom Fletcher expressed regret for his recent claim that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours in Gaza without aid – a claim the UN retracted – in an interview with the BBC on Friday.

Fletcher acknowledged a need to be “precise” with language, admitting that when he made the comments, “we were desperately trying to get that aid in.”

“We were being told we couldn’t get it in, and we knew that we’d probably have a couple of days, a window to get as much aid in as possible, and that was being denied, and we were desperate to get that in. And so yes, we’ve got to be utterly precise with our language, and we’ve clarified that,” he said.

Isn’t that great. Meanwhile, his “desperate” lie was spread around the world, repeated over and over by an MSM devoted to villainizing as baby-killers the only Jewish state in the world. One of the many results of his lie was that it almost certainly contributed to the motivation of Elias Rodriguez, the alleged murderer of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgram.

The UN and people such as Fletcher, as well as the international “human rights” community and international courts, consider it perfectly fine to distort the truth – that is, lie – in line with their anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic convictions. That those convictions are based on an edifice of falsehoods is of no concern to them, and they have no problem adding some more bricks to that edifice.

More from Fletcher:

Despite his retraction, Fletcher still maintained that Israel has caused forced starvation in Gaza, amounting to a war crime.

Hamas plays people like Fletcher like a violin. Israel is the only country I can think of that is supposed to feed an enemy that has attacked it viciously. And if Gazans are starving, it is mostly because Hamas takes its food away, keeps some for itself, and then sells the rest back to the people at a profit.

More:

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) [US and Israel-backed], which the UN refuses to cooperate with, opened its third distribution center in Gaza on Thursday.

The UN doesn’t want Israel distributing the food; it apparently wants Hamas to do it in its own special way.

The ethics of the ethics researcher

The New Neo Posted on by

Another Harvard professor has been determined to be falsifying data or an incompetent researcher, take your pick (or both?). The twist here is that her specialty is honesty and ethics:

Harvard University has stripped a world-renowned scholar of her tenure status. The university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School.

Gino, who was celebrated for her research on honesty and ethical behavior, had faced scathing allegations of academic misconduct and fraud. …

In 2023, Harvard launched an internal investigation into Gino’s work after concerns were raised on a blog called Data Colada, run by a group of behavioral scientists who scrutinize academic research. The Harvard investigation concluded that Gino had manipulated certain data to support her hypotheses in at least four of her studies.

At that point, the university placed her on unpaid administrative leave.

Gino denied the allegations and filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard …

Irony noted.

Tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs on …

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump’s tariffs are back in place – temporarily:

A federal appeals court has overruled an activist decision from earlier this week to allow President Donald Trump’s tariffs to stay in place — at least for now.

Once again, this is not yet a ruling on the merits. Rather, it is a procedural ruling that places the lower court decision on hold pending disposition of the case on appeal, currently before the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

How can a president conduct foreign trade negotiations under such circumstances? I believe this case, like so many others, will end up being decided by SCOTUS.

As usual, Jonathan Turley has some words that elucidate the matter. This is a fairly short clip, and I think you’ll probably find it at least somewhat reassuring:

Speaking of court decisions affecting Trump, SCOTUS has ruled in Trump’s favor on his suspension of Biden’s parole program for illegal aliens, lifting a stay on his suspension of the program for now:

The Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump’s administration a stay on an order forcing it not to revoke protections given to illegal aliens through former President Joe Biden’s parole program.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

The majority did not elaborate on its decision, but once again, Jackson wrote a long dissent.

In April, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the United States District Court – District of Massachusetts blocked Trump from ending the parole program, giving over 500,000 illegal aliens parole and the right to work.

The program applied to those from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The people approve, at least

The New Neo Posted on by

Good news for the right from a recent poll:

… [T]he latest Rasmussen Reports “right track/wrong track” average shared with Secrets has hit 50% on Tuesday and shows no sign of pulling back.

Rasmussen pollster Mark Mitchell says that it’s the first time in the history of the poll asking that question that the approval rating has been that high. In addition, Trump’s approval rating hit 53%, with disapproval at 46%. And by the way, Rasmussen pollsters have been asking that “right track” question for twenty years.

Rasmussen has a very good track record in polling lately, having been spot-on in predictions for the 2024 election, as opposed to most other pollsters.

Trump’s tariffs: legal or illegal?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Bauxite” writes, concerning a court’s recent blocking of Trump’s tariffs:

A court “kneecapped” Trump’s power to impose tariffs because Trump never had that power to begin with.

It wasn’t that long ago, just a few years, that conservatives would still be rightly outraged when presidents acted beyond their powers and claimed to justify themselves with never-before-conceived interpretations of decades-old statutes. Good times.

Goodness knows there have been some screwy and abusive court decisions since January. This isn’t one of them.

Biden imposed tariffs by EO as well and extended some of Trump’s first-term ones: he kept Trump’s China tariffs, as well as later raising them. You can read more details here.

As far as the legality of tariffs by EO generally goes, see this:

A key question is whether a president has the authority to implement the types of across-the-board tariffs being discussed by Trump. The U.S. Constitution plainly grants the power to impose tariffs to Congress, not the president: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” (Article 1, Section 8). However, Congress has delegated extensive authorities that allow the president to impose tariffs if certain statutory conditions are met.

While some analysts have tried to reassure investors and markets by asserting that Trump would lack the legal authority to implement his tariffs plans, this reflects an overly optimistic view of the limits of presidential tariff authority. As of today, there are multiple legal authorities that Trump could rely on to justify the imposition of increased tariffs, including many that Trump already availed himself of during his presidency. These include Sections 232 and 301, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Section 122 Balance-of-Payments Authority, and Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. While Section 232 requires an investigation by the Department of Commerce and Section 301 requires an investigation and determination by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), these procedural niceties could be accomplished in relatively short order by cabinet officials, particularly since undue delay could put them at risk of getting fired. Regardless, any investigation or public comment period would allow anticipation to build, enhancing Trump’s negotiating leverage, which is likely one of the main points of the exercise.

That was published by CSIS, which bills itself as bipartisan but is currently headed by Thomas Pritzker. The article describes each law and how it could be used to justify Trump’s tariffs; it was written shortly prior to Trump’s 2024 election.

But some the tariffs in Trump’s second are somewhat different and were imposed under the National Emergencies Act. Wiki summarizes Trump’s second-term tariffs this way:

In his second term, Trump added tariffs to steel, aluminum, and auto imports under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act (TEA), which allows the President to modify imports if the Secretary of Commerce conducts an investigation, holds public hearings, and determines that the imports threaten national security. Trump directed the USTR to initiate similar investigations to impose tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Trump also invoked unprecedented powers under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) by declaring multiple “national emergencies” related to border security, energy, and trade deficits. Declaring these emergencies allowed Trump to enact tariffs quickly without following the complex procedures required by TEA or other trade statutes. While the IEEPA had been used for sanctions, it had never before been used for tariffs. …The New York Times reported that “many economists and legal experts believe that the idea of an emergency has been concocted to justify Mr. Trump’s desire to impose sweeping import duties without regard to congressional approval or international trade rules.”

Congress didn’t act against those tariffs:

To terminate a national emergency under the NEA, a member of Congress may file a privileged resolution requiring their chamber to vote on the topic within 15 days. Democratic representatives introduced resolutions to end several of Trump’s national emergencies justifying tariffs, but these efforts were blocked by the Republican congressional majority. JD Vance cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to uphold the emergency underpinning the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Trump’s opposition was ready with many cases challenging his tariff imposition under this particular act – although of course they’d be on the other side if it was Biden trying to impose them:

In May 2025, the United States Court of International Trade (CIT) held hearings for V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump and Oregon v. Trump. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump was heard before the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia. On May 28, a three-judge panel of the court unanimously ruled in favor of a permanent injunction preventing Trump’s 30% China tariffs, 25% Mexico and Canada tariffs, and the 10% universal tariff on most imported U.S. goods. They concurred with the plaintiffs in finding that IEEPA “does not authorize any of the worldwide, retaliatory, or trafficking tariff orders.”

The Trump administration will appeal, of course, and the case is likely to go to SCOTUS. I have no idea what will happen there, but here’s an article at Legal Insurrection laying out some of the legal complexities. It’s not a slam dunk either way, IMHO.

In other words, statutes are open to interpretation, and most court decisions these days seem to be mostly political.

NOTE: Here’s Jonathan Turley on the subject. As usual, well worth reading, and I basically agree with him that Congress needs to act.