Famous States

 The CIA was reportedly involved in providing key intelligence to enable the hit this week on an alleged cartel boss in Mexico. And even as Mexican authorities sought to downplay the level of U.S. involvement in the strike—perhaps for internal political reasons—Trump bragged about it openly. 

Given that the U.S. has murdered 150 people and counting in ongoing strikes on civilian vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific—not to mentions all those earlier U.S. drone strikes—it may seem that the taboo against extrajudicial killings and foreign assassinations has simply vanished. 

Death in Cuba

 Like everyone else, I am unsure what to make of the reported incident yesterday, in which an American-registered speedboat apparently exchanged fire with the Cuban coast guard. 

The Secretary of State of course immediately disavowed any U.S. government involvement in the incident. And indeed—it must be said—if this was a CIA op, it was an even more obviously foolhardy and doomed one than the Bay of Pigs. Ten people on a motor boat in the Gulf were not going to incite a revolution that would topple the Castroist regime. 

Taking Fright

 In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller challenged us to name the last time a single poem, unassisted, had succeeded in changing the world—the way it had in his subject's day. 

Well, I don't know about a poem. But I do know that a single Substack post appears to have briefly tanked the U.S. stock market yesterday. The week before that, a single X post generated a similar panic in the software industry.

Buying Peace?

 As another round of talks start up to try to negotiate an end to the war sparked by Putin's invasion of Ukraine, President Zelensky of Ukraine has continued to warn about the risks inherent in trying to buy Putin off by offering him pieces of another country's territory. It is "a big mistake to allow the aggressor to take something," he reportedly put it. 

I was reminded of something I was just reading in Montesquieu's Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. He says that the Western Roman Empire, in its waning days, sometimes made overtures "to appease with money the peoples threatening invasion." 

Governing in Prose

 The old phrase "campaign in poetry; govern in prose" got tossed around a lot back when Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City. 

Now, I guess we are getting a sense of what that means. 

A Sneer is Not an Argument

 Trump officials are always very proud of their crude aggressiveness in interviews. 

Pam Bondi gave a disgraceful performance on Capitol Hill last week. When she was grilled about the Epstein case or whatever it was, she responded by calling Jamie Raskin a "washed-up loser lawyer." 

I imagine she considered this a great rhetorical victory. 

Invisible

 Trump's campaign of extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean and Pacific has long since fallen below the top fold of the newspapers. It is no longer treated as either a major news story or a particularly urgent political scandal. 

But that's not because the killings have stopped. Just yesterday, the U.S. government murdered another 11 people at sea. The week before that, they killed 3 people in yet another strike on a civilian vessel.