u/iamthegodemperor

This podcast does a great job explaining the close US relationship to compact of free association states, the immense physical distances covered by these islands, Chinese intent to use local economic need & corruption to build influence and eventually a base as well as the necessity of thinking about the economics to overcome the tyranny of distance.

>this episode, Mike is joined by Ambassador Laura Stone, who most recently served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands and previously held senior leadership roles at the U.S. Department of State, including Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia. They discuss the role that the Marshall Islands and the broader Pacific Islands play in U.S. engagement with the Indo-Pacific, how they factor into U.S.–China strategic competition, and how the United States can work more effectively with its allies and partners to strengthen its approach to the region.

In light of recent events (including the self immolation of a Tibetan man near the UN), it's worth revisiting this CFR explainer. In a nutshell, the new law pushes Xi thought about aggressive assimilation into law, mandatory education in Mandarin, liability for institutions that fail to teach love of China, CCP & Chinese people. It may possibly be used to justify relocations and targeting of overseas Chinese.

A more recent backgrounder from CNN here

Taipei Times article

On March 12, China’s legislature adopted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Chinese; English translation), a sweeping new statute that codifies Beijing’s approach toward China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. Substantively, the law enshrines a decades-long shift towards aggressive assimilationist policies. Structurally, it reflects a deepening merger of Party ideology and state law that is becoming increasingly prevalent under Xi Jinping.

This new law is the culmination of a policy trajectory that has been building for over a decade, dating back to the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference. Under Xi, Beijing is steering away from the post-1949 legal framework of nominal ethnic autonomy (albeit under tight Party control) imported from the Soviet Union. In its place, officials have steadily been pivoting towards what scholars have termed “second-generation ethnic policies”—an aggressive assimilationist approach that emphasizes a common Chinese national identity over accommodation of ethnic differences. Provincial and municipal authorities across China have enacted a wave of local “ethnic unity and progress” regulations in recent years, such as those in Xinjiang (2015) or Inner Mongolia (2021). The new national legislation elevates this approach to the level of a national statute governing all of China.

The new law’s core concept is captured in the term zhulao (铸牢) – to “forge” or “cast” metal – and its instruction that “forging the communal consciousness of the Chinese nation” is core to the Party’s ethnic policies. As James Leibold has pointed out, this phrasing reflects a hardening of Beijing’s political line under Xi Jinping – explicitly written into the Party’s Charter at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 – aimed at “melting” subnational and ethnic identities into a shared collective one.

This is a sharp departure from the framework of the 1984 Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law, which explicitly provided for education in minority languages and warned against majoritarian (i.e., Han) chauvinism in an effort to reset ethnic relations in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. In contrast, the new 2026 law has no such warning, mandates pre-school education in Mandarin, directs government authorities and private firms to “give prominence” to the display of Chinese characters over minority languages in public settings, and instructs them to promote the “forging of national identity” as a component of all official work on families and family education.

Naturally, Beijing’s assimilationist pivot risks worsening ethnic tensions in China. Efforts to roll out similar policies in Inner Mongolia back in 2020 (including ramping up Chinese-medium instruction in elementary schools) generated widespread citizen protests and boycotts, followed by a purge of ethnic Mongolian Party and government officials viewed as insufficiently committed to Beijing’s new line.

Apart from its substance, the new ethnic unity law is also notable for its structure. As the legal scholar Changhao Wei has observed, two features of the text are highly unusual. It opens with a narrative preamble—a device used in only three other PRC statutes in over four decades. And core chapters are organized around political slogans directly lifted from Xi Jinping’s ethnic work doctrine, rather than the functional legal categories that are standard in Chinese legislation.

This parallels a broader trend: the steady blurring of the boundary between Party regulations and state law. As political scientist Holly Snape has documented, Beijing is steadily constructing a comprehensive network of Party regulations that increasingly reaches beyond the Party itself to regulate state and society. On the one hand, this process has involved the importation of quasi-legal mechanisms within the Party’s own regulatory system, such as the introduction of filing and review mechanisms to verify whether regulations issued by lower-level Party organs are compliant with Xi’s personal political doctrine. But on the other, it is leading Party ideological practices to steadily “seep into state law.” And the newly issued ethnic unity law is a clear example of that latter trend, with the top leader’s specific ideological formulations being used as the statute’s organizing skeleton. Taken together, both the substance and structure of the new ethnic unity law point in the same direction. China’s reform-era legal institutions and practices – the framework of nominal ethnic autonomy, and the conventions that maintained some degree of separation between Party and state – are steadily eroding as the country moves yet deeper into the counter-reform era.

Jerusalem Demsas' mini essay that accompanies her discussion w/Matt Yglesias.

I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but when I travel around the world, I don’t have to tell people I’m an American.

It’s not just that I “pass” as American, it’s that I am American. Like millions before me, I went through an assimilation process that included public K-12 schools, cross-cultural friendships, and workplace norms and expectations.

Assimilation has become more controversial. It implies that to become an American, you have to change yourself. It’s also difficult to promote assimilating into a culture you think is fundamentally rotten.

“Assimilation has fallen into disrepute,” begins a 1997 academic article in The International Migration Review. And the left in particular, which is the strongest pro-immigration constituency in America, has had to reconcile its pro-immigration views with arguments that America is, at its core, structurally bigoted, built for the purpose of preserving slavery, and imbued with institutions that are oppositional to social progress.

From 2016 to 2020, the share of Democrats saying that it’s important to share American customs and traditions fell from 79% to 59%.1 Anecdotally, the melting pot metaphor has been abandoned in favor of “salad bowl,” “mosaic,” and “kaleidoscope.”

In 1991, New Deal liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. warned that new ideas were taking root that rejected America as a nation of individuals from all nations melting into a new nationality. Rather, these ideas recast America as a nation of groups that “threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as ‘one people’, a common culture, a single nation.”

The result is pieces like this recent one by The Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, who argued that “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong.”

Hamid was responding to a bigoted tweet from Rep. Andy Ogles, who wrote that Muslims don’t belong in American society and that pluralism is a lie.

Read distraction-free on Substack The Argument Podcast Why the left is wrong about assimilation Do immigrants need to assimilate to belong? Jerusalem Demsas Jul 02, 2026 ∙ Paid

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Immigrants, by definition, are not ashamed to become “more American.” (Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) Iwas born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but when I travel around the world, I don’t have to tell people I’m an American.

It’s not just that I “pass” as American, it’s that I am American. Like millions before me, I went through an assimilation process that included public K-12 schools, cross-cultural friendships, and workplace norms and expectations.

Assimilation has become more controversial. It implies that to become an American, you have to change yourself. It’s also difficult to promote assimilating into a culture you think is fundamentally rotten.

“Assimilation has fallen into disrepute,” begins a 1997 academic article in The International Migration Review. And the left in particular, which is the strongest pro-immigration constituency in America, has had to reconcile its pro-immigration views with arguments that America is, at its core, structurally bigoted, built for the purpose of preserving slavery, and imbued with institutions that are oppositional to social progress.

From 2016 to 2020, the share of Democrats saying that it’s important to share American customs and traditions fell from 79% to 59%.1 Anecdotally, the melting pot metaphor has been abandoned in favor of “salad bowl,” “mosaic,” and “kaleidoscope.”

In 1991, New Deal liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. warned that new ideas were taking root that rejected America as a nation of individuals from all nations melting into a new nationality. Rather, these ideas recast America as a nation of groups that “threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as ‘one people’, a common culture, a single nation.”

The result is pieces like this recent one by The Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, who argued that “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong.”

Hamid was responding to a bigoted tweet from Rep. Andy Ogles, who wrote that Muslims don’t belong in American society and that pluralism is a lie.

Of course, Muslims do belong, and pluralism is self-evidently all around us.

But promoting assimilation is both necessary for a healthy pro-immigration politics and good on its own terms. Being an American is great, people who come here largely think so, and we should help them achieve the ideal of American identity (just as they help us).

In 2014, just 39% of immigrants agreed that “there are some things about America today that make me feel ashamed,” versus 69% of native-born Americans. Immigrants and their children also express more trust in all three branches of government than native-born Americans.

Anti-assimilation advocates tend to ignore that immigrants largely self-select for liking America. Many grew up on our books, movies, and music, and they arrived wanting to fit in.

They may keep their faith and remain culturally or socially distinctive in some ways, but most people don’t want a stranger clocking them on the street as different. Many immigrants report having an easier time assimilating here than in more homogenous countries. America lets you fade into the background and do your own thing.

And immigrants are often clear-eyed about what the alternatives presented by other countries actually are: The U.S. ranks first globally in the share of foreign-born adults who say their local area is a good place for immigrants to live (96%).

We’ve been doing a great job of assimilating for over 100 years. In Streets of Gold, economists Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky went through millions of census records and found that the children of immigrants climb the income ladder today at roughly the same rate as those who entered through Ellis Island at the turn of the last century, with Mexican immigrants among the fastest assimilators. It’s just not common for a kid to arrive here not knowing any English and still have that issue by the time they reach adulthood. Nearly 98% of immigrants who arrive before age 5 know English.

Hamid closed his column by arguing that America was founded on the idea that citizens never have to converge on foundational questions. I think this is partly true. You’ll find wildly different visions of the good life in this country.

But there are better and worse ideas that we should try to select for and inculcate in both native-born and foreign-born Americans. I don’t want a wave of authoritarian-minded newcomers trying to install a dictatorship. The real question of assimilation has little to do with what you eat or how you pray. It’s really about whether you can get on board with liberal democracy and basic equality.

People imagine that assimilation has to be a sort of violent process that seeks to strip people of their cultural garments, religion, and language. But most assimilation comes through second-generation kids telling their parents not to microwave fish in the company kitchen.

The best definition of assimilation that I’ve seen comes from 1921: “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.”

At some level, it probably seems a bit condescending to teach someone how to be a “good American,” but I think most people would actually appreciate knowing the rules. A pluralistic, diverse country benefits from more explicit rules about common standards of behavior because everyone is coming from a different standpoint about what is reasonable.

Before my first solo trip to Germany, my dad warned me not to take long showers. I reluctantly took a quick one, and the next morning, my host thanked me for not being like those wasteful Americans. I was glad my father cared enough to tell me. I didn’t want to come off as rude or ignorant.

My co-host Matt Yglesias agrees on the merits of assimilation and wants to push it further: He thinks progressives treat ethnic conflict as a uniquely American problem, although in reality, it’s simply an unfortunate feature of the human condition. They have let America become defined by its worst chapters, and, in that process, are ceding the ideas of patriotism to the right — a problem I’ve written about previously.

But the progressive story is an American one. It’s the abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement. When liberals invite immigrants into this country, we’re not inviting them into a world of slavery and exclusion. We’re inviting them into the part that fought it.

Brookings assigns scores to state readiness to adopt EVs based on presence or absence of 13 indicators. (incentives, grid upgrades, direct sale from manufacturer, rebates, govt fleet use etc)

Unsurprisingly, states with higher scores also have higher EV adoption.

The interactive scorecard map allows you to look at how states fare on one or all indicators.

This post summarizes the Slaughter decision, granting POTUS ability to fire heads of independent agencies & opinions of Justices. Gorsuch in particular, demonstrates the mixed feelings regarding the decision----i.e. while they might find unitary executive to be correct that should also exist in the context of a strong Congress. Given the century of precedent and lawmaking that took this for granted, Slaughter will leave unprecedented power in the hands of the Executive, which Congress cannot easily reclaim.

Before the selected passages: this decision and the ruling maintaining the Fed is covered by recent Advisory Opinions, where French & Isgur consider how the Court is forced to confront the real stakes of simply following "dorm room originalism" & whether there is consistency in how stare decisis is being invoked.

>The Supreme Court on Monday gave President Donald Trump sweeping new authority over approximately two dozen multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent. By a vote of 6-3, the justices struck down a federal law that bars the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That law, a majority of the justices ruled, violates the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government. And in reaching that decision, the court overruled its 91-year-old decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had upheld the law at the center of the dispute.

>More broadly, Monday’s decision was a major victory for proponents of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers.

......

> a 16-page solo concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch praised the court for, in his view, “tak[ing] a notable step back toward the Constitution.” But he stated that this step was not “enough on its own.” Rather, given the agencies’ “enormous legislative and judicial powers,” “the only sure path is to finish the the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts.”

>In her dissent, Sotomayor stressed that Congress established multi-member agencies like the FTC “to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control.” In holding that the president can remove Slaughter and other FTC commissioners for any reason, she argued, the majority “gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

>Monday’s decision, Sotomayor contended, “reshapes our Government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands”

Describes how Venezuela's small, mostly elderly Jewish community is dealing with the 2 severe earthquakes, while also doing their civic duty.

>The magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes struck seconds apart, killing more than 1,700 people, leaving tens of thousands missing or trapped, destroying hundreds of buildings, and causing billions of dollars in damage, according to reports.

“It was just after 6 p.m. on Wednesday, and it was a national holiday, so most people were in their homes,” recalled Roberto Mishkin, president of Venezuela’s main Ashkenazi congregation, Union Israelita de Caracas. “It was a massive earthquake. I don’t know of anyone who didn’t have some sort of damage in their house.”

The Jewish community is well organized when it comes to security procedures, said Mishkin, and in the hours that followed the quake, hundreds of people arrived at the Hebraica Jewish Community Center and the main synagogue, buildings that serve as the community’s main hubs.

“They were filled with people whose homes were damaged or destroyed, as well as many who came because they were too frightened to sleep in their buildings,” Mishkin said. “We started looking for food, water and blankets for everyone. Only around midnight, after everyone had checked on their own families, did the community’s crisis committee finally have a chance to sit down to meet.”

.....

As of Sunday evening, three members of the country’s 5,000-strong Jewish community have been confirmed dead, and four are still missing, Mishkin said. At least 15 Jewish families have seen their homes destroyed, along with another 30-35 families whose apartments have been rendered unlivable. About 100 people continue to sleep in the Hebraica center every night since the tremor, Mishkin said.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) officially expired on Friday, June 12, more than two weeks ago—with major consequences for the US intelligence community.

During its existence, the law gave significant latitude to the intelligence community to operate against foreign targets without the need for judicial oversight. Proponents have argued that its absence could create dangerous blind spots against foreign adversaries. Conversely, civil-liberties advocates have seen a rare opportunity to scale back a surveillance authority that has expanded and expanded, repeatedly sweeping up Americans’ communications without warrants. The debate now centers on a fundamental question over how to balance security with liberty.

.......... Since Section 702’s passage, officials have argued it is one of the most valuable tools for counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cyber defense, and monitoring foreign adversaries, and have claimed that the authority it provides has foiled dozens of terrorist attacks, both against the United States and third countries. The law’s defenders also highlight safeguards in it meant to prevent unethical data collection: it prohibits gathering data on non-citizens inside the United States, and also “reverse targeting,” or attempting to gather data on US citizens by spying on their contacts abroad. Moreover, understanding the seriousness of the law, it was created with a sunset clause, generally requiring reauthorization every two years.

The problem is that while Americans are not supposed to be directly targeted, communications involving Americans are frequently collected incidentally. Critics argue this has created a massive loophole around the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, the FBI has repeatedly searched 702 databases for information involving US persons without obtaining traditional warrants.

This problem is a bipartisan one. Under the first Trump administration, the FBI reportedly used the tool to indirectly gather information on Black Lives Matter protesters, while the Biden administration used it to surveil groups suspected of participation in the January 6 attack. Both of these instances were later determined to be improper in court. These “backdoor searches” have fueled years of bipartisan criticism, with both the libertarian right and progressive left expressing ire over the constitutional violations.

.........However, in the absence of Section 702, agencies can no longer simply expand their espionage programs indefinitely. New directives and future collection authorities now face significant legal uncertainty, with the intelligence community effectively operating on borrowed time.

Despite a core of bipartisan support for the law, the political will to quickly reauthorize the tool has collapsed on Capitol Hill. For years, lawmakers from both the left and right have argued that intelligence agencies have abused the system, and stressed that any renewal needed to include stronger protections for Americans and their Fourth Amendment rights. If the government wants to search communications involving Americans, the argument goes, it needs a warrant

........ How will the crisis end? The most likely outcome is a compromise reauthorization, with more oversight and more restrictions on domestic queries, potentially with warrant requirements for searches involving Americans. As such, the expiration of Section 702 is not the end of US foreign intelligence collection. It is, however, a rare moment when Congress is being forced to reconsider where the line between security and liberty should be drawn.

Including a second link below quote:

>According to the United States Geological Survey, the two earthquakes were a rare phenomenon called a “doublet.” This occurs when two quakes of a similar magnitude occur in quick succession, often causing more damage than a single event.

In this case, the larger 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck only 39 seconds after a 7.2 magnitude foreshock. This marks the largest recorded earthquake in Venezuela for more than a century.

Explainer from NBC

>The doublet pattern took place on a tangled system of faults near San Felipe, Venezuela. The zone is so complex that it will take more time for researchers to understand precisely which faults within it ruptured Wednesday.

>Maria Beatrice Magnani, a professor of seismology at Southern Methodist University, who mapped faults in Venezuela in the early 2000s, said the ruptures happened along a boundary between the South American and Caribbean tectonic plates, where the two are essentially sliding laterally past one another. In this area, the USGS estimates the Caribbean plate is moving eastward relative to the South American plate at a rate of about 20 millimeters per year (about three-quarters of an inch). The plates are also subject to compression — they’re being squeezed together as they move past one another.

>Initial data indicates both of these earthquakes were strike-slip, Magnani said, meaning one plate lurched past the other along the boundary. But she added that much about how the quakes played out is still to be determined.

This essay describes how drones are shaping war fare in Africa. It begins with Ethiopia & Libya where governments used drones to fight rebels. But eventually insurgent groups of varying ideologies throughout the continent began acquiring them & using them to counter airforces. Drones make governments reliant on foreign suppliers, who bear little or no cost in prolonged wars, which makes African states vulnerable to use for proxy warfare.

The author makes a case that African countries need to better integrate drones into their armies, while ramping up domestic productions

>Close to 90 percent of Africa’s military drones, almost all of which are in the hands of African governments, come from external suppliers. A decline since 2020 in the sale of drones from the United States, whose systems tend to be pricier and whose leaders have been reluctant to sell to autocratic African regimes with spotty human rights records, has opened the door for China, whose cheap, effective drones now account for a quarter of all those procured by African states, to become the continent’s largest supplier. The net effect has been a shift of Africa’s defense partnerships away from traditional Western suppliers and toward a more diverse marketplace that includes middle-power producers such as Iran, Israel, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. These manufacturers offer an explicitly transactional approach, selling the technology to whoever is willing to pay. For African governments seeking to diversify their security partnerships and hedge against great-power competition, it is an attractive bargain.

>But the diversification of the continent’s drone supply chains has been destabilizing. The ease with which outside powers can produce and export drones and the outsize effect of those drones on conventional warfare has made African conflicts particularly prone to foreign meddling. Foreign drones have turned civil conflicts into destabilizing proxy wars, a dynamic that reached its apogee in Sudan.

.................

>Rather than continue to fight insurgents using the methods of Africa’s early drone wars, they must find ways to better incorporate drones into irregular conflict. They must also resist the temptation to acquire airpower at the cost of other critical capabilities, including infantry and forces trained in policing, civil-military affairs, and administering justice. Ideally, drones should be used in tandem with these capabilities, and alongside mobile strike teams and tactical vehicles, not as standalone systems tasked with taking on militant groups by themselves. These less glamorous capabilities will ultimately determine whether African states can hold and govern the territory drones help them take back.

This essay discusses how some states are experiencing and dealing with the effects of the OBBA on food stamps. It also describes some of the ways previous administrations loosened requirements/increased funding.

>When House leadership demanded spending cuts to finance it, Agriculture Committee lawmakers looked to food benefits, whose cost had ballooned during the Biden administration.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Agriculture Department had loosened the red tape around SNAP sign-ups, making it easier for states, which administer program funds, to add people to their rolls and temporarily offered additional benefit increases during the economic downturn. The Biden administration also made the first permanent update in more than 40 years to SNAP benefit calculations, adjusting them to dietary guidelines and modern eating habits as food prices spiked.

When congressional Republicans set out to slash social spending in 2025, SNAP stood as one of the most obvious targets. They looked to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich negotiated a transformation of what was then America’s foundational welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to impose work requirements and time limits on recipients. The reimagined Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program now serves a fraction of the eligible families who once relied on welfare, and economists have found the changes did press some people into the workforce. The 1996 law also instituted the first requirement that able-bodied SNAP participants find work after three months or risk losing benefits.

The experience also provided a model for Republicans who wanted to tighten that bootstraps orientation around a program they argue is too permissive and lacks incentives for the states to rein in spending. “

..........

Clinton’s welfare reform also left food benefits — which was formally rebranded as SNAP via the 2008 Farm Bill after a decadelong transition from stigmatized food stamps to innocuous debit cards — as the most widely used anti-poverty in-kind benefit still standing. More than two-thirds of people receiving SNAP benefits are not expected to work because they are children, elderly or disabled, according to a pre-One Big Beautiful Bill analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But others must prove they are meeting the SNAP work requirement: 80 hours a month in a paying job, a similar number of volunteer hours, or enrollment in a state-approved job training program.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes these same work requirements on a much broader group of participants, including parents of teenagers, adults over the age of 55, veterans, youth aging out of the foster care system, people who are homeless. The law also tightened eligibility standards for some lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and Afghans who helped the U.S. military in the war.

..........

These changes cut SNAP spending by roughly 20 percent over a decade, a significant portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s total savings. The CBO estimates these changes to SNAP will save the federal government $187 billion over a decade, including $69 billion specifically from tightened work requirements. The law also creates nationwide Medicaid work requirements for the first time, changes that are expected to save an additional $326 billion over a decade by removing millions from that program.

Summary: Israeli government continuing attempts to weaken the power of the judiciary, has recently passed constitutional legislation which would allow politicians control over Supreme Court appointments.

Panel of 11 Supreme Court justices seem unanimous in opposition to new law and signals that a majority exists to rule it unconstitutional.

Study finds that elites misperceive Americans as more isolationist than they are. They also find that Americans foreign policy thinking does not correlate strongly with their domestic politics.

These conclusions were reached based on comparisons between how elites and lay individuals responded to surveys from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs dating from 2004.

Relatedly: these do not seem to be artifacts of wording or elites modeling specific sub populations. While elites are often better at gauging public opinion on domestic issues, better than lay individuals, the reverse seems to occur with foreign policy.

Title. Rabbis, cantors & teachers deliver short talks & songs around general theme of claiming Jerusalem Day as a day of peace, reconciliation & inclusion.

This also appears on the JBS feed.

April 7, China’s State Council promulgated Order No. 834, entitled the “Provisions on the Security of Industrial and Supply Chains.” The regulation took effect on promulgation, with no transition period. Embedded within it are two provisions, Articles 13 and 15, that establish a direct enforcement trap for multinational firms. Together, they empower Chinese regulators to penalize routine supply chain investigations and impose sweeping countermeasures on foreign companies whose compliance decisions “interrupt normal transactions” with Chinese parties and “threaten actual damage” to Chinese supply chain security. These penalties include import and export bans, fines, asset seizures, entry bans on corporate personnel, and designation on China’s Unreliable Entity List (UEL). Nothing in the text treats compliance with U.S. sanctions or export controls as an affirmative defense.

Pew creates a typology of 9 political groupings based on how respondents answer to a battery of questions.

The groupings show how Americans align and don't align with political parties, their responses to questions about domestic & international policy and the degree to which they feel represented. This report also covers the demographic characteristics of each group.

While each group (save one) has a partisan lean they don't neatly map onto either party. For ex. "Order & Opportunity Left" makes up 10% of Republicans, 24% of Republicans. "Pragmatic Polite Right" makes up 9% of Democrats; 14% of Republicans.

Also included is a very brief quiz for readers to get a feel for the typology.

Summary: administration is seeking other mechanisms to pursue its "anti-weaponization" fund. Selected passages below:

Shortly after Trump took office for the second time, the White House asked the Justice Department and Trump’s legal advisers to find a way to reimburse him and those close to him for the millions of dollars in legal expenses he has incurred, including over the Mueller probe into his campaign’s relationship with Russia as well as multiple impeachments and criminal investigations. That effort was later combined with a separate but related push by Trump supporters to pursue financial restitution for those convicted of crimes related to January 6, providing a broader context for a massive transfer of taxpayer dollars from the government to those who have been charged with, and in many cases convicted of, federal crimes.

On May 18, Blanche announced the establishment of a $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund as part of a settlement to a suit brought by Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization against the IRS and Treasury Department. The settlement resolved claims related to the disclosure of Trump’s tax returns, and a subsequent addendum barred the IRS from auditing the tax returns of Trump, his family, and his businesses. A DOJ press release highlighted Blanche’s central role in the fund’s creation and administration, explaining that he would appoint a five-member commission to decide who would get paid, and how much. The president was given the authority to remove any of the commission’s members. “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Blanche said at the time.

The announcement provoked bipartisan criticism. Democrats pointed out that the fund could be used to pay January 6 defendants who had assaulted police officers. Some Republican critics said the same, while noting that the political optics of paying taxpayer money to presidential allies would be terrible for the party at a time of rising gas prices and other costs. Tillis derided the fund as a “payout for punks.”

Under pressure from fellow Republicans, the administration backed off the plan—but never renounced it. One DOJ official and one political strategist close to the White House told me that that officials there didn’t think the fund was a bad idea; they just regretted that the rollout, which had been intended in part as a way of shoring up Republican support ahead of the midterm elections, had been too public and invited too much scrutiny. They hoped to do things more quietly in the future—and those who are seeking money from the government say that’s exactly what’s happening.

“Right now, you have to be an insider to know who to talk to,” one attorney who had advised multiple individuals seeking compensation told me. One Republican former member of Congress told me that he and others had been assured that the administration’s public statements about the weaponization fund being abandoned were “all part of the plan; nothing has changed.” One Justice Department official and two Republican political advisers told me that public backing for the fund was dropped to clear the way for Blanche’s confirmation, but that they had been promised that payments would eventually be made to January 6 defendants, pardon recipients, and those close to the president. “Trump didn’t want to fight this out in public,” the official told me.

........

Blanche may have denied before Congress that the weaponization fund was moving ahead, but others have been less categorical, dropping hints that payouts remain in play. Last week, Stanley Woodward Jr., a former Trump White House official who now serves as associate attorney general and who signed the settlement agreement, appeared to telegraph that the financial-restitution effort was still in progress. He responded “we’re on it” to a post by Senator Lindsey Graham on X that suggested that victims of so-called weaponization during the Biden era could still be compensated through claims under the Federal Torts Claims Act. That law enables individuals to pursue claims in federal court for personal injuries, wrongful death, or property loss caused by the negligent or wrongful acts of federal employees. Woodward later deleted the post. In multiple interviews over the past week, Trump has declined to confirm that the payout effort has been abandoned. When asked by NBC News if he was “looking for a way to revive it,” Trump did not dispute that: “Well, look. If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve,” he said. He added, “I think the weaponization fund is a great idea, and so do many other Republicans.” Although officials say the fund was intended to be available to any victims of government weaponization, regardless of party, the president has focused his comments exclusively on allies who he feels were wrongfully targeted.

Middle East Institute's head of Turkish programs argues that after over a decade of cultivating closer ties with Russia in part due to perception NATO wouldn't protect them enough. Author describes how Turkey benefited from the invasion of Ukraine and how this brought Turkey at a maximal distance from the West from buying Russian energy, weapons & even a contract for Russia to operate a nuclear reactor.

Turkey has since reversed and moved towards NATO & Europe again, while decreasing energy dependence from Russia.

Causes of the pivot: domestic economic woes & realization that worsening relations with Europe endangered Turkish defense. Regional changes: enhanced Turkish role in Syria & Iranian attacks during current war.

Dr Fukuyama briefly outlines how Britain & Western Europe developed courts and legal systems that were independent from monarchs. He then explains how the evolution of an independent judiciary in Anglo-American experience facilitated protection of property rights and subsequent explosions of economic growth.

>Judicial independence can be traced back to a series of events known as the Investiture Controversy that took place in the second half of the 11th century. This crisis pitted Pope Gregory VII against Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, over the issue of whether the Pope or the Emperor should have the right to appoint priests and bishops within the Church. As is the case today, appointment power over senior officials was the source of control of the Catholic Church itself, which was the dominant institution apart from political authority.

>The matter was settled only in 1122 in the Concordat of Worms, which allowed the Church to keep control over the appointment of its own cadres. Thus, control over ecclesiastical law remained in the hands of an institution, the Church, that was independent of dominant political authority.

>Over time, law evolved, both on the continent and in a separate common law tradition in England, into a body of rules that was not directly controlled by executive authorities.

>There is a bigger picture to observe here. The fact that law came to be controlled by an independent judiciary was one of the sources of the rise and dominance of Western civilization in succeeding centuries. China, Persia, and Byzantium all practiced a form of what is labeled “Caesaropapism,” in which state authority was fused with ecclesiastical power, giving emperors and kings ultimate control over the law. In England and other parts of Western Europe from the 18th century onwards, by contrast, the law was controlled by independent judicial authorities. This counterbalanced executive power, and made possible the modern economic world. As any economist will tell you, a rule of law (by which they mean property rights and contract enforcement) is critical to modern economic growth. And a rule of law (as opposed to authoritarian rule by law) is made possible only by the existence of an independent judiciary. If kings and presidents can interfere arbitrarily in economic transactions and take property at will, no one will invest or innovate.