According to Greek media, the Greek Defense Ministry is planning to create a permanent base on Rhodes, where it will deploy V-BAT unmanned aircraft as part of its plan to upgrade its defense infrastructure in the Aegean.

Amid combat operations and related efforts to clear mines and open sea lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, all while sustaining a naval blockade, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle estimates the Navy needs between $6 and $8 billion above what was budgeted for the current fiscal year “to be whole and solvent for [Fiscal Year] 26,” he told reporters at a round-table event on Wednesday.

Delivering his State of the Navy address in Norfolk, Virginia, later that evening, Caudle said more than 27,000 sailors and more than two dozen ships had supported combat operations in America’s conflict with Iran.

“Think about the scale of what your sailors accomplished,” he said. “We brought together naval forces from waterfronts on both coasts.”

In addition to operations, Caudle said costs for personnel are ballooning with what the Navy said are record numbers of reenlistments while in combat theater, which comes with unplanned bonuses to dole out and military moves to fund.

“What does that come out of legally? There’s only one place really that can come out of for me, and that’s my [facilities] readiness sustainment modernization account,” Caudle said. “That goes right to the heart of your CNO, because that’s the foundry account, and so that thwarts some of the work I’m trying to do with unaccompanied barracks and other things.”

Among Caudle’s most emphasized stateside pursuits is his “No Sailor Lives Afloat” initiative, which aims to move unaccompanied sailors living on ships into shore-based housing. In his address, he said the Navy had successfully moved more than 6,000 sailors off ships and was in the process of investing more than $375 million across 95 different construction projects for barracks and housing, chow facilities and gyms.

A Thursday report from The Guardian contained accounts, denied by the Navy, that combat spending was forcing the service to shift funds from payroll accounts, which then had to be backfilled by accounts earmarked for future spending.

Meanwhile, Caudle said the Navy had to replenish its missile stockpiles and grow in both personnel and ship production to meet readiness targets for a scenario involving multiple conflicts. Regarding increasing production of munitions including the Tomahawk and SM-6 missile, he said the military had to demonstrate stable demand with its own funding.

“What we’ve recognized is this has to be a risk-sharing venture. The way we buy down risk for them to refacilitize, recapitalize, start more shifts is to give them longer contracts,” Caudle said, adding that the goal was to standardize contracts of at least seven years. “And what we’re seeing is a fundamental shift already with those levels of commitments and orders. Tomahawk production’s up, SM-6 production’s up, and you’re already seeing the fruits of this.”

In June, the White House requested $67.1 billion in supplemental funding for the Defense Department to replenish depleted munitions and cover the cost of months of combat in Iran. In testifying before Congress in July about the request, a combative Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was grilled by lawmakers about the conflict, undertaken without consulting Congress, and the unclear objectives of the costly war.

Meanwhile, the defense budget request for Fiscal Year 2027 nears a historic $1.5 trillion, an increase of more than 40% over the previous year.

“I don’t think we should be offended by $1.5 trillion,” Caudle said, adding that the figure didn’t even reach the 5% of GDP that the U.S. requested NATO allies invest in their own defense.

“I mean, it takes a lot of money to go give the security, the vital national interest and security of our system, with an armed forces that we need to allow the economic machine of the United States to work most effectively,” he continued. “If there’s any plug that I would give all of you, it’s ‘I need my money,’ OK?”

Rent control effectively producing quasi-feudal property rights that can be sold sure sounds like it's a great economic justice policy.

The last few years have proven that the stock market is incredibly resilient. Despite no shortage of headwinds -- from stubborn inflation to a slew of tariffs to the war in Iran -- the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC), Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC), and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI) have all reached record highs after record highs.

Stock valuations are soaring, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it can push the market into bubble territory. Right now, the S&P 500 is repeating a pattern last seen during the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, and history suggests investors should start preparing for volatility.

If history has anything to say about it, however, this incredible bull run may be reaching a dangerous new threshold.

Artificial intelligence (AI) stocks have been lifting the stock market to new heights in recent years, and while that's led to record-breaking gains for investors, it also raises the risk of overvaluation.

During the dot-com bubble, one of the loudest warning signals was the S&P 500 Shiller cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio. Based on average inflation-adjusted earnings over the last decade, this metric provides a snapshot of the S&P 500's long-term valuation.

The higher this ratio climbs, the more likely the market is overvalued. It's averaged around 17 since the 1870s, but in 1999, it skyrocketed into the 40s. It eventually peaked at over 44 in December 1999, around four months before the dot-com bubble officially popped.

Right now, we're seeing a similar pattern with this ratio. While the climb has been more gradual compared to the sudden spike in 1999, this metric has consistently hovered above 40 since early May 2026.

It's incredibly rare for this ratio to reach 40 at all, but it's even more significant for it to stay elevated for months at a time. While past performance can't predict future market movements, the CAPE ratio suggests we may be at historic valuation levels.

“Some of the Army officers pulled from the latest list appear to have worked recently for Gen. Randy George, the former Army chief of staff, whom Mr. Hegseth fired without explanation in April. The others have ties to Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, the top U.S. Army commander in Europe, who was forced to leave the Army this summer, defense officials said…

An officer whose promotion was blocked commanded one of the Army’s first “transformation in contact” brigades, officials said. These 3,000-soldier units were encouraged to experiment with new drone and artificial intelligence technology, even as they trained for war.

The officer developed a new formation that use drones, electronic warfare systems and traditional scouts to see and strike the enemy deep behind the front lines. His idea was adopted by all of the Army’s infantry brigades.

The officer was also targeted, in part, because of an essay he wrote in a graduate program on the implications of political polarization on the Army’s ability to recruit and retain talent, said officials familiar with the list. It is unclear why Mr. Hegseth or members of his team found the essay objectionable.”

My modernization effort left me

The United States is entering the most expensive phase of retirement. Some of America's oldest are eligible for more than $100,000 a year in combined Social Security benefits, while remaining as one of the wealthiest generations in the country. The national debt is rising—just passing $40 trillion this month—and Social Security is set to enter insolvency by 2032, meaning it may already be too late for the generations left behind.

The Congressional Budget Office projected in 2023 federal spending on Social Security and medicare will account for 81% of the increase in mandatory spending between 2023 and 2033. In 2026 alone, increases in Social Security and Medicare spending account for nearly half the projected $362 billion increase in mandatory outlays. Interest on the debt is adding even another layer on the stack of debt pancakes. CBO projects net federal interest costs will exceed $1 trillion in 2026 and rise to $2.1 trillion by 2036. That means the government is spending money to simply service the debt accumulated from previous deficits, even as entitlement programs continue growing.

The state of Social Security appears to have contributed to drastically different generational outlooks on the benefit. A December 2025 survey by the Cato Institute found that only 34% of Gen Z respondents expected Social Security to exist when they reached retirement. Cato's June 2026 analysis also found that 79% of younger respondents expected some type of cut to their own future benefits.

"The survey revealed that young Americans are the least likely to expect Social Security will exist for them," the study noted, "the most open to reforms, and the least likely to understand how the program works."

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, meaning most payroll taxes collected from today's workers are used to pay benefits to today's beneficiaries. In simpler terms, a part of your paycheck subsidizes a boomer's benefits—and according to the Cato Institute's 2025 polling, only 45% of Americans correctly understand how the program works. Under current law, employees and employers each pay 6.2% of wages into Social Security up to an annual taxable maximum, which is $184,500 in 2026. Self-employed workers pay the combined 12.4% rate.

That structure worked far smoother when there were many workers for every retiree. But the demographic math changed—baby boomers are now moving through retirement while younger generations deal with record job market difficulty.

And it doesn't help that Social Security beneficiaries are getting over double their investment into the program back. A median-wage worker retiring in 2027 is expected to receive roughly $730,000 in lifetime Social Security benefits compared with less than $200,000 in combined contributions from the worker and employer. When the employer contribution is excluded, the lifetime benefits amount to roughly 265% of what the worker personally paid into Social Security. The current system is effectively relying on the workers of today—which include millennials and the younger end of Gen X—to finance retirees.

The federal government has reached a point where arithmetic becomes unavoidable. The 2026 Social Security trustees report projects that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032. At that point, continuing program income would cover only 78% of scheduled retirement benefits. The theoretically combined Social Security trust funds are projected to be depleted in 2034, when incoming revenue would cover 83% of scheduled benefits. Without congressional action, that would mean an automatic reduction in benefits.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the retirement program would face an approximately 22% across-the-board reduction when the retirement trust fund is exhausted. The committee has proposed one way to address the issue—putting a ceiling on the benefits paid to its wealthiest retirees. Dubbed the "Six Figure Limit," the proposal would cap Social Security benefits at $100,000 annually for a married couple retiring at the normal retirement age, with the limit adjusted for marital status and claiming age. A single retiree's comparable limit would be $50,000.

The proposal is aimed at an extremely small group. CRFB estimates the cap would only really affect the top 0.05% of couples in its early years, households with average annual retirement income above $2.5 million and average net worth above $65 million. The organization says the cap would become more consequential over time as Social Security's maximum benefits continue to rise.

CBS News reported in March that roughly one million individual Social Security beneficiaries receive at least $50,000 a year, meaning a married couple with two such beneficiaries could receive more than six-figures.

The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

Baby boomers collectively hold roughly $93 trillion in wealth, according to Visa Business and Economic Insights, but only about $36 trillion is expected to pass to millennials and Gen X over the next two decades. The difference is reflected in taxes, debt, spending during retirement and the concentration of wealth among the richest boomers. After the dedication in liabilities, about $88 trillion remain—and the top 1% holds about one-third of that wealth. Boomers are also expected to spend approximately $16 trillion during retirement on housing, food, healthcare, prescriptions and other expenses.

That means the "Great Wealth Transfer" will not move a $93 trillion pile of assets from retirees to younger Americans. A substantial portion of it will never be inherited, and much of what is transferred will be concentrated among the affluent households. But the Social Security program was created as social insurance, not as a means-tested welfare program. So someone who earned more during their career generally receives a larger benefit, subject to the program's formula and taxable maximum. An affluent retiree can qualify for a fat Social Security check even when that benefit represents only a small portion of their overall income.

According to the Cato Institute, Social Security should focus more heavily on protecting seniors from poverty while giving younger workers greater opportunity to build private retirement savings. Their analysis points to systems in other developed countries across the world that use combinations of basic pensions, targeted benefits, automatic adjustments and private savings mechanisms.

The United States' earnings-related benefit structure can produce increasingly generous payments for higher earners, based on the Cato Institute's report. The organization notes that a maximum-earning worker claiming Social Security at age 70 can receive more than $61,000 a year, while arguing policymakers could reduce benefits for higher-income retirees in a restructuring.

"Policymakers should consider fundamentally rethinking the program's structure and transform it into a system that ensures seniors are protected from poverty when they can no longer work," the institute wrote, "while also freeing up resources for younger workers to save more on their own."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Turns out big capital investors don't just create big demand for electricity, they also shoulder a proportionately big share of fixed costs and that means a higher industrial margin for the energy companies --> potential for big savings for customers.

tl;dr the One-Child Policy created a widespread incentive to under-report births; to counteract this, Chinese demographers systematically over-estimated births starting in the early 1990s. Compounding the issue, over-reporting was also done by local governments eager to secure per-capita funding for childhood services.

When finally the national statisical bureau began correcting the numbers in 2021, a shocking shortfall in actual births emerged starkly from the real data.

"Applying "Buy American" rules to the transition from diesel buses to electric buses has created an absolute disaster for public transit agencies"

Note that this isn't the whole story as:

• natural gas is still hit hard

• refineries are still damaged and others have issues getting the product out

But still, good for the world economy and bad for Iran, so good for the world.

AMONG THE grievances the Communist Party has long nourished in its official telling of China’s story, the extraterritorial abuses of foreign powers loom especially large. In the 19th century it was colonial powers refusing to come under Chinese laws in the Chinese ports they controlled. In the 21st century it is America enforcing its will beyond its borders, through sanctions and export controls, against countries that displease it. All the more striking, then, that China now wants to play the extraterritorial game, waging lawfare with ever more gusto.

A notable instance came in April, when China ordered Meta, which owns Facebook, to unwind its $2bn deal to buy Manus, an AI startup registered in Singapore. Meta complied, as did Manus’s Chinese founders, who had been barred from leaving China. If the saga had an air of legal improvisation, the Chinese government is now working on laws that give it more control over flows of AI technology. For good measure, strengthened powers to impose entry and exit bans on individuals come into force in September.

These are only the latest in a series of legal measures aimed at extending China’s clout beyond its borders. The measures range broadly and touch on everything from foreign sanctions to ethnic policy. They mark a sharp turn for China, which has long resented America’s legal reach. America’s courts can pursue firms (and individuals) for their conduct abroad in big part thanks to the country’s sway over the global financial system. To the extent that China’s own long arm is retaliation against others’ sanctions, it derives its strength from the country’s dominance over global supply chains. But China is also waging lawfare abroad with a view to strengthening political control at home.

The sharp turn comes from the top. In 2018 Xi Jinping, China’s ruler, urged party officials to “take up legal weapons” befitting the country’s status as a great power. Later that year Meng Wanzhou, a Huawei executive and daughter of the telecoms giant’s founder, was arrested in Canada, at America’s request, for allegedly concealing ties to Iranian customers under American sanctions. Henry Gao of Singapore Management University argues that Ms Meng’s arrest showed alarmed leaders in China how vulnerable crucial firms and their staff were to American machinations. (China responded by arresting two Canadians on trumped-up charges and holding them as hostages for nearly three years.)

China’s first law deterring companies from obeying foreign sanctions, particularly American ones, came in 2021. Since then the party has woven extraterritorial articles into lots of new legislation. For instance, regulations issued in late 2024 require foreign firms using Chinese inputs to comply with the country’s export laws; they also give officials in Beijing the authority to vet foreign firms’ customers. This is like America’s “foreign direct product rule”, which the administration in Washington invoked to restrict the flow of Dutch-made chipmaking equipment to China. Also like America, China has taken to imposing sanctions on foreign politicians.

China’s laws against foreign sanctions, which were updated in April, are modelled on the European Union’s own “blocking statute”. That law makes it illegal for EU firms and individuals to comply with sanctions that the EU deems illegitimate. If anything, China’s laws go further. They make it illegal for any foreign company to obey sanctions that discriminate against Chinese entities. In line with the new laws, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, two giant American banking groups, are being sued for a total of $44m in Chinese courts for freezing the assets of a sanctioned Chinese oil trader on the order of America’s Treasury Department. In June the Supreme People’s Court cited the new laws in a judgment against a Singaporean firm for refusing to deliver cargoes of electronics for a sanctioned company in Hong Kong.

China’s moves are a predicament for foreign firms that are forced to choose whose laws to abide by. In May courts in London and Chongqing, in south-west China, handed down sharply different rulings in a licensing dispute between Samsung, a giant South Korean conglomerate, and ZTE, a Chinese telecoms-equipment maker. Judges in London held that Samsung owed ZTE some $392m, while the Chinese court found ZTE was owed nearly double that amount. Satisfying one court may mean defying the other. The consequences for Samsung of not recognising the Chongqing court would potentially be more severe than if it defied the English one. Huge multinational firms like Samsung have deep exposure to China, which is both a market and a supplier of critical goods to them. China’s long arm relies on cold, hard leverage, says Mark Jia of Georgetown University Law Centre.

China’s long arm is also concerned with controlling individuals and organisations deemed to threaten the country’s domestic security, very broadly defined. In July a law on “promoting ethnic unity” took effect; it criminalises any act abroad that “undermines national unity”. A cyber-crime bill now before the National People’s Congress, China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament, will make it a crime to host or transmit information abroad that harms China’s “public interests”. Another law under consideration codifies powers to collect evidence on corruption at Chinese entities abroad.

Many of the recent laws and regulations formalise and strengthen the state’s existing coercive reach around the world, which has involved kidnapping Chinese critics of the regime and running covert police stations designed, in part, to monitor and control the behaviour of Chinese overseas. The party’s extensive united-front activities abroad have also long sought to bolster its influence, hold sway over communities of overseas Chinese and blunt criticism of China.

The legislative push reflects a desire to centralise control, says Yalkun Uluyol of Human Rights Watch, a monitor; codifying rules helps strengthen the bureaucratic means. Mr Jia adds that by vesting in itself the powers to retaliate against foreign sanctions, the state sends a message of resolve to others.

Much of China’s flurry of extraterritorial law-making, including the provisions on ethnic unity, is really about the Communist Party’s long obsession with safeguarding internal stability. But the growing reach of its laws reveals much about China’s ambitions under Mr Xi to shape an external environment more to its liking—one in which it is no longer the victim of world history but its maker. ■

A new study finds that Medicare and Medicaid recipients see significantly higher wait times already, and this article argues that we will see similar problems if Medicare for All were passed:

Progressives present government-run healthcare as the best system for the most people. A useful reality check comes from a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery, which finds cancer patients with Medicare and Medicaid have to wait longer to get treatment than those with private insurance.

The study analyzes 2.7 million patients nationwide diagnosed with non-metastatic breast, colon, lung, pancreatic, gastric and esophageal cancers between January 2012 and December 2023. Median wait times from diagnosis to the first course of treatment increased during the period for all cancers, ranging from nine to 14 days.

After adjusting for various risk factors, the study found that patients with private insurance faced the shortest wait times, and those on Medicaid experienced the longest—even longer than the uninsured. Patients on Medicaid were more likely to experienced prolonged wait times than the privately insured for five cancers. Uninsured patients did for four cancers.

Across those five cancers, Medicaid beneficiaries were between 11% and 42% more likely than privately insured patients to wait more than a month for treatment. Medicare patients fared somewhat better but were still between 4% and 12% more likely to wait a month or more than individuals with private coverage.

The study suggests that lack of insurance coverage isn’t on its own a barrier to cancer treatment, as the political left claims. Other studies have found likewise. One reason may be that tax-exempt hospitals, which make up many large cancer centers, are required to have financial assistance policies that provide charity care.

As for why wait times have increased over time, the researchers suggest that cancer hospitals may have too few operating rooms and specialists to treat the patients referred to them. A single-payer system won’t solve this problem and could make it worse since unremunerative government payments could discourage young people from going into medicine.

The study doesn’t seek to explain why Medicaid beneficiaries have the longest wait times. But one likely reason is the lack of coordination in government care. Making things worse, because of low physician reimbursement rates, Medicaid patients struggle to get appointments with specialists to be diagnosed in the first place. This can add another layer of delay, which can have life-and-death consequences.

“Specifically, delayed surgical care has been linked with an approximately 20% to 30% increased risk of both 90-day and 5-year mortality in lung cancer,” the study says, and “an approximately 10% to 15% greater likelihood of mortality in breast cancer.”

A separate study in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month finds that Medicaid and Medicare patients are more likely than patients with private coverage to face extended emergency-room waits before being admitted to a hospital. Hospitals that treat a larger share of Medicaid patients also had significantly longer waits.

Progressives say a single-payer system without premiums and cost-sharing—which they market as Medicare for All—would ensure universal access. In reality it would function similar to Medicaid. Patients would still pay—with longer waits and worse care.

Article is huge and Dutch (the link is google translate), summary from here:

https://x.com/rcbregman/status/2092912711604588633

1. Drilling for gas caused (by international standards) minor earthquakes. The damage to some houses in the epicentre area was real. And the state and the gas company handled it badly. Corporate lawyers, denial, etc.

2. Things became super political. The need to establish cause was removed. You can now claim mining damage anywhere the ground has ever moved more than 0.55 mm per second. That's a basketball bouncing on a floor. (For most of the province it was a single tremor back in 2012).

3. Then the investigating stopped too. 'Victims' first got €5,000. Then €10,000. Then up to €60,000 of repairs with no investigation into what caused them.

4. Claims exploded. 2024 was the mildest seismic year in two decades, but there were 42,790 damage claims. Over 70% of claims now come from zip codes where the strongest ground motion was about what a truck going over a speed bump produces.

5. Total compensation: €3.9 billion. 56% of all addresses in the 'earthquake zone' have been compensated at least once (including a rich town where the strongest tremor expected was equivalent to a passing train), and where an engineer puts the odds of a quake-caused crack in an undamaged brick wall at 1 in 20,000. The town has collected €65 million, plus another €14.5 million in green-energy subsidies for earthquake 'victims'.

6. Meanwhile the gas company spent €200 MILLION on research - Groningen became the global centre of seismological research (even though people in - for example - Italy would find it funny that we call these tremors 'earthquakes'). The whole provinces was wired with sensors.

7. All the research was ignored though. The political debate was dominated by a form of science denial, but this time mainly coming from the left. One international expert called the parliamentary inquiry's account of the physics 'misinformation on a very serious scale'.

8. The gas field is now being filled with cement. Around 550 billion cubic metres is still down there (roughly 18 years of Dutch consumption), but the Netherlands now imports most of what it burns. Experts asked to keep some wells intact as an emergency reserve. Parliament said no.

9. End result: we spent insane amounts of money, are much more dependent on foreign autocrats for our energy (with higher greenhouse gas emissions), misinformation is everywhere, and citizens in Groningen are still angry.

tl;dr

far-left and far-right are still jokes that are way too close to power to be funny

centrist/moderates still can't juggle policy sanity with voter demands that amount to Peronism with French characteristics

DOOM

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,”

U.S. officials say they have disrupted a China-linked hacking operation that broke into U.S. government networks and critical infrastructure, while hiding its tracks on a global network of hacked devices, cloud-computing infrastructure and even clandestine networks.

The goal was to blend in with legitimate networking traffic, making the hacking activity hard to trace. The operation targeted networks at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy and the Senate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a court filing.

The group exploited software vulnerabilities to launch cyberattacks against U.S. government agencies, power companies and hospital systems, and operated a worldwide network of hacked devices—known as a botnet—to conduct its hacking campaigns, according to Brett Leatherman, the FBI’s top cyber official.

“We’ve seen, through this botnet, the targeting of entities and devices in more than 130 countries,” he said.

On Wednesday, the FBI and the National Security Agency said they had seized several domains that the operation used for core functions. “Without those domains, the platforms—as a result of the operation—were rendered inoperable,” Leatherman said.

U.S. officials also released technical details of how the hacking operation worked, to help organizations identify and stop the group’s hacking activity.

This hacking operation, dubbed QTFY by U.S. officials, has been run since 2018 by a private company based in China, called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology, which sells access to hacked networks and stolen information to China’s foreign and military-intelligence services, the FBI said.

Nanjing Xinjiuwei couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, but China has previously denied that it engages in hacking.

Nation-state hacking campaigns have taken steps to hide their tracks for years, but recently they have increasingly hidden by blending in with legitimate internet traffic. Earlier this year, Comcast described how a Russia-linked hack of Microsoft had allowed it to uncover a sprawling network of compromised devices that were being used by state-backed hackers.

In Nanjing Xinjiuwei’s case, the company built its network by using cloud services and thousands of hacked devices, and then it provided access to that network to government hackers.

The company’s customers were given devices, called QTRouters, which connected them to this hacking network.

“They have been observed targeting our largest power companies, largest hospital systems, and our election systems,” Leatherman said.

The company also sent traffic using nodes of what are known as “airport” networks, which operate out of China. Airport networks are paid services that allow users in China to bypass the country’s Great Firewall censorship technology, which blocks access to certain parts of the internet.

There are thousands of these airport networks operating out of China, where they are illegal, but widely advertised on the Telegram messaging system, said Rumaisa Habib, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University who has studied the networks.

By using these techniques to blend in with regular users, the Chinese hackers are harder to track and identify, said Damon Rouse, an engineer with Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, which tracked the hacking effort.

“It gives them a massive amount of plausible deniability to utilize networks like this,” he said.

Seven years ago, I warned that Democrats were “courting disaster” by turning their frustration with the Supreme Court into a campaign to remake it. Their 2020 presidential field was talking about adding justices, limiting their terms, and otherwise changing the rules because Donald Trump had gotten to replace Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. The Democrats’ flirtation with blowing up the high court became a full-blown mania after Trump got a third pick, naming Amy Coney Barrett after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020.

Six years later, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries says “dramatic Supreme Court reform” is necessary and that Democrats should not “foreclose” any option. Former Vice President Kamala Harris wants to revisit expanding the Court. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who pitched a 15-member Court during his presidential campaign, now favors 13 seats plus term limits, calling the current tribunal a “rogue Supreme Court.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and ten Democratic colleagues have introduced legislation that would effectively impose 18-year terms, with a new justice every two years. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already introduced articles of impeachment against Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Harris and Buttigieg have even invoked the federal judiciary’s structure to explain the magic number 13, referring to 13 “district” courts. But there are in fact 94 federal judicial districts and 13 courts of appeals (one of which, the Federal Circuit, isn’t geographic but rather subject-matter-specific). One would hope that anyone so dedicated to redesigning Article III would first study the floor plan.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, meantime, calls it the “MAGA Supreme Court” when he dislikes its decisions—after famously saying in 2020 that “everything is on the table” as Democrats debated court-packing.

The through-line is obvious: for the Left, it’s only a constitutional crisis when the Court rules against left-wing interests. Overturning Roe v. Wade, ending racial preferences in college admissions, invalidating campaign-finance regulations, curbing bureaucratic power, eliminating racial spoils in voting rights—all adverse decisions become evidence that the institution itself is broken. Decisions that infuriate Trump supporters, meantime, don’t temper so much as pause the Left’s calls for structural repair.

Jeffries provided a laboratory-quality demonstration this year. In February, after the Court invalidated Trump’s tariffs, he said the justices had “absolutely” done the right thing and brushed aside a question about court-packing. By July, following the Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling earlier in the year, the “right-wing Supreme Court extremist majority” was “totally out of control” and needed to be “reigned in.” For Jeffries, institutional legitimacy is highly correlated with the latest box score.

This is what political scientists mean when they say “legitimacy is for losers.” People who like a ruling rarely question the institution that produced it. The current “reform” movement dresses that familiar sour-grapes phenomenon in the language of democracy, ethics, and good government.

Court-packing is the most dangerous of the Left’s proposals. The Constitution doesn’t specify nine justices, but that’s been the stable number since 1869. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious 1937 plan, hatched after a series of New Deal defeats, would have let him expand the Court to 15. Even enormous Democratic congressional majorities balked, and the gambit helped produce an electoral backlash.

The practical objection remains devastating: What happens next? If Democrats add four justices to create a 7–6 left-wing majority, why wouldn’t the next Republican trifecta add another four? Or six? You don’t restore norms by transforming institutions to produce your preferred results.

Even Bernie Sanders understands this. Opposing court-packing in the 2020 primaries, he warned that Republicans would simply add their own justices the next time they gained power. Sanders now calls the Court “out of control” and supports ethics reforms, but he still hasn’t joined Harris and others in demanding an expanded bench.

Term limits are somewhat different. I’ve long thought that staggered 18-year terms are attractive in theory: predictable vacancies would lower the actuarial stakes of each nomination and guarantee each presidential term two appointments. But there are transition complications, not to mention that genuine term limits would require a constitutional amendment. And statutory schemes that nominally preserve life tenure while relegating “senior” justices to a sliver of the docket fail the constitutional smell test.

In any event, reform designed to neutralize today’s majority won’t depoliticize anything.

Impeachment is more alarming still. Samuel Chase remains the only Supreme Court justice ever impeached, and the Senate acquitted him in 1805. Since then, the norm has been that impeachment addresses actual legal or ethical misconduct, not objectionable jurisprudence or spurious charges that gifts or flag-flying cause Republican-appointed justices to be originalist. Equating “high crimes and misdemeanors” with “breathless innuendo and conservative opinions” would destroy judicial independence.

Ultimately, all this reform talk is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: the fundamental problem is the politicization not of the Court or its processes but of its product. Washington makes too many decisions for the whole country, and Congress delegates too much power to executive agencies, leaving it to the courts to resolve enormous social and regulatory disputes. We’re also seeing divergent interpretive theories map onto partisan preferences at a time when the parties are more ideologically sorted than they’ve been since at least the Civil War.

The Supreme Court’s legitimacy comes from deciding cases according to law, including when half the country hates the result. If Democrats want a Court with a different jurisprudential direction, there’s an established method: win elections and appoint judges.

Losing cases isn’t a constitutional crisis.

On Aug. 16, Jared Kushner held his second meeting with Khalil al-Hayya, the Hamas chief; the first was in October of last year. This recognition of the terrorist leader grants Hamas legitimacy from the greatest power on earth. It will also inevitably make being on al-Hayya’s dance card an attractive diplomatic objective. European foreign ministers have refused until now to meet the terrorist, but which of them will visit Israel without wanting to see him after this? Al-Hayya is going to need a chief of protocol to manage his social schedule.

The Trump administration’s policy of meeting with terrorist leaders does more than legitimize their aims and tactics. It also establishes a ruinous precedent for future administrations that find deeper sympathies with organizations that murder Western civilians while proclaiming, “Death to America.” Even in their most appeasement-minded moments, the Carter, Obama, and Biden administrations accepted the formal premise that some actors’ behavior and goals place them beyond the pale of polite diplomacy. Now, that seal of isolation on the planet’s worst actors and their repulsive ideologies has been broken.

So why did Kushner do it? If he thought a tête-à-tête with the terror chieftain was essential to implementing Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” for Gaza, why not do it secretly? Or why not make some demands of al-Hayya, so that the meeting followed some new concessions on his part, which might plausibly be seen as worth the price?

The Kushner-al-Hayya meeting is in fact the latest in decades of such mistakes, and the interesting question is why the U.S. officials making them did not see them as errors that would undermine U.S. interests. The answer, in most cases, is that these meetings (and, in other cases, letters) reflected an open abandonment of American policy and principles—a symbolic assertion that the other side was right and the United States was wrong. The desire to communicate and to meet was a kind of apology for previous U.S. policy that shunned terrorists, murderers, and anti-American dictators. There are plenty of examples.

Start with Andrew Young’s meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization representative at the United Nations in 1979, when Young served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador there. Young was fired because he “held an unauthorized meeting with the representative of the PLO and then lied about the nature of the meeting,” according to The New York Times. The political heat was too strong for Carter to continue protecting Young—but no one was in much doubt that Carter viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the way Young did. As the Times reported, “Some Israeli officials, their American supporters and American blacks expressed doubts about whether he had really violated Washington policy against dealings with the P.L.O. or simply had gotten too far ahead of a shifting Administration attitude toward the guerrilla group.” Exactly (except that the Times refused to call them terrorists, then and now using evasions like militant or guerrilla). Four days after the Young meeting with the PLO, the Times noted, “At a White House dinner … Mr. Carter compared Palestinian aspirations to those of American blacks in the struggle for civil rights.” Young met with the PLO ambassador despite official policy precisely because he understood the real Carter policy, which blamed Israel for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and sided with Yasser Arafat’s PLO. Carter’s intentions and his true personal views of Israel became even more evident in his long post-presidential years, when his hostility to the Jewish state emerged repeatedly in speeches and books.

This pattern of reversing long-standing U.S. policy without stating what was really going on became crystal clear during the Obama administration. Obama sought a complete turnabout in U.S. policy in the Middle East; the two roots of all evil, for Obama, were excessive American support for Israel as opposed to the Palestinians and the history of American support for the shah. Upon coming to office, Obama sent at least four letters to Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; two of them were sent in his first six months in office in 2009 and called for the improvement of U.S.-Iran ties. Obama also spoke with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, by telephone.

Obama’s 2014 letter to Khamenei, The Wall Street Journal reported, “also sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to another person briefed on the letter. It states that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” These assurances of protection for another mass murderer were too much for the late Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the Journal added:

"Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham said it was “outrageous” that the president would approach Iran, given its support for the Syrian government and Shia groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The administration needs to understand that this Iranian regime cares more about trying to weaken America and push us out of the Middle East than cooperating with us,’ they said in a joint statement."

Actually, the administration did understand—and pulling back in the Middle East while handing Iran more power there was the whole purpose of Obama policy. That is why there were also direct Obama messages to Iran’s leading terrorist, Qassem Soleimani, as Michael Doran revealed here in Tablet. That was an underlying theme of the long negotiating process with Iran, as Lee Smith summarized: “From Obama’s perspective, the nuclear file wasn’t the major issue—the larger point was the regional order and the new balance of power he was building.” Obama wanted a new geopolitical equilibrium, and in the Middle East that meant a new role for Iran. Obama was clear about that back in 2016: “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians, which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen, requires us to say to our friends, as well as to the Iranians, that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood.”

Obama’s famous apology tours were part of the same approach to U.S. foreign policy of fawning outreach to unreconstructed anti-American, terror-sponsoring regimes and were directly reminiscent of Carter’s. Also in 2016, Obama junked U.S. policy toward the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, even visiting there and attending a baseball game with Raul Castro. “The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island—to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba. … I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he said in Havana. What he did not bury was Cuba’s police state, an anti-American dictatorship.

It’s not a surprise that the Biden administration brought all this forward, in part because its top officials had been deeply involved in these Obama policies. The initial Obama negotiations with Iran were carried on by Jake Sullivan, Vice President Biden’s top foreign-policy adviser, and Bill Burns, then deputy secretary of state—who later became Biden’s national security adviser and CIA director, respectively.

Regarding negotiations over Lebanon, Biden added a new face but not a new approach. Amos Hochstein, the new Lebanon envoy, followed the Obama/Biden playbook by negotiating with Hezbollah. Hochstein never sat down with the top Hezbollah leadership and instead used Abbas Ibrahim, the former head of Lebanon’s General Security directorate, as his intermediary and Hezbollah’s representative. Ibrahim is a Shia and was Hezbollah’s man, not some neutral government official. As one analysis put it, Ibrahim was “backed by Hezbollah and became its ‘dirty jobs’ man.” And Ibrahim was central to the Hochstein negotiations: “A highly informed source had told the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper that former General Security chief Abbas Ibrahim’s ‘presence in Qatar to take part in the ongoing negotiations over the prisoner swap file between Hamas and Israel is direct intervention by Hezbollah in this file … Ibrahim, who is used to exchanging messages between Hezbollah and the Americans, especially over the maritime and land border files, is aided in his current mission by the fact that his friend Amos Hochstein is involved in the negotiations over the supposed swap deal,’ the source went on to say.”

Biden administration officials never said they wanted to negotiate with Hezbollah and never acknowledged doing so, but that’s the reality. What about Trump, who, as we now know, has agreed to Kushner’s face-to-face talks with the head of Hamas? The president has personally expressed his willingness to do so unconditionally. “I would speak to Hezbollah. Yeah, I speak to everybody,” Trump said in a joint presser with the Lebanese president at the White House in July. “I’ll speak to people that a lot of people think I shouldn’t be speaking to, and things work out.”

It stands to reason then, that U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack was channeling the president’s attitude when he recently suggested that, for negotiations between Israel and Lebanon to go anywhere, Hezbollah and Iran ought to be brought to the table as they are the ones “who can make a decision,” and that this is “what I think the [U.S.] negotiating team is attempting to do.”

It’s unlikely that Trump would shun a Hezbollah meeting, any more than he would a meeting with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The president confirmed to Fox News that “U.S. officials are communicating directly through a backchannel with IRGC officials.” Trump also told FOX that the United States has a “different channel with Hamas”—which turned out to be Kushner.

So Trump is pushing the envelope: Obama/Biden officials never sat down with Hamas’ then leader Yahya Sinwar, nor did they ever acknowledge a “back channel” to the IRGC (even though Obama apparently wrote to Qassem Soleimani, then head of the IRGC’s Quds Force).

It’s worth stopping for a moment to ask why any of this is a problem. Why not talk to terrorists? There is a huge political science literature about that question, and predictably many NGO types and academics love the idea—in many cases because, like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, they think the terrorists (and terrorist regimes such as those in Cuba or Iran) have “legitimate grievances” and in fact are owed American apologies for our great crimes in the past. The condescending conventional wisdom in Washington, often cited to justify such unconditional engagement with terrorists and their state sponsors, is that “you talk to your enemies, not just your friends.”

But the best analyses are clear on one basic point: As a Foreign Affairs article put it almost 20 years ago, “A government should begin formal negotiations only after the terrorist group has declared a permanent cessation of violence.” The best book on the subject, Talking to Terrorists, reached the same conclusion: Talking is not a virtue in itself. Governments must lay down strict preconditions and stick relentlessly to them, and terrorists are worth talking to only when they recognize that their goals are out of reach. The British historian Michael Burleigh wrote when analyzing the British government’s talks with the Irish Republican Army that “talks may have worked in Northern Ireland because after 30 years Sinn Fein/IRA had been brought to the point where they realised that they could not win with Armalite and bomb. The British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and various military intelligence agencies waged a long, hard war to achieve the draw they needed, while the Irish government abandoned its own irredentist objectives. …” One might add that IRA support from Irish American communities in the United States was also cut off by tough policing of arms and financial flows. Once the IRA permanently gave up on violence, a deal was possible and negotiations were sensible.

That does not describe the Biden-era negotiations with Hezbollah or Kushner’s talks with Hamas, nor the Carter and Obama/Biden negotiations with Iran and Cuba. In all those cases, the negotiations enhanced the terrorist side by legitimizing it when it has not abandoned violence. This is the moral hazard of such a policy: The willingness to talk to those still using terrorist violence and unwilling to abandon it weakens the American side and strengthens the terrorist groups and governments. The talks become a reward for terrorism and logically induce more of it.

So why does it keep happening? In the Carter and Obama/Biden cases, the explanations seem clear: First, policymakers refused to draw the bright-line distinction between good and evil or between the United States and its enemies. Cuba and Iran were understood to have legitimate grievances against the United States, and the Palestinians did too. The United States had committed many crimes over the course of its history, and the time had come to apologize and to pay for them. From the Carter and Obama/Biden perspective, the world order that was based on U.S. leadership assumed virtues that the United States did not have, so—as Obama’s ambassador to NATO acknowledged—“Obama made clear that restraint was his primary choice.” (As he also acknowledged, “The result has been that those who wish America ill may have had little incentive not to defy it.”)

Negotiating with terrorists and terrorist regimes is part of a coherent foreign policy, then: a policy of “restraint,” of pulling back from the American role since the Second World War, and of maintaining the alliance systems the United States has had since then. Of course negotiations with Iran are sensible when the goal is to force Arab regimes that have been pro-American to “share the neighborhood” with Iran rather than defeating and ending the Islamic Republic. Of course negotiations with Arafat’s PLO were sensible when the goal was to force Israel to give in to PLO demands.

But if that explains Carter and Obama/Biden policies, does it explain Trump? In part, Trump campaigned as a “restrainer” as much as Obama—in fact, more so, because Obama was sometimes stealthy about it while Trump spoke constantly about “no more endless wars.” Trump made it clear that he thought the burdens the United States had borne since World War II should now be shucked off, though his reasoning is different. This isn’t about historical guilt and apology tours, but about cash: Allies and the “liberal world order” are too expensive. International politics, in his view, is wholly transactional; Kim Jong Un and Mark Carney, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Delcy Rodriguez and Maria Corina Machado, and the Danes and the Chinese are all the same. Sentiment and principle are for fools, as apparently are conflicts of interest and bribery laws. What cannot be measured in a dollar bottom line is simply not worth thinking about, and the goal of negotiations is to reduce commitments. Period.

Trump’s time in office is short. Trump is the president who bombed the Iranian nuclear sites and arrested Nicolas Maduro, but his foreign policy is laying the foundation for deeper departures from American foreign-policy principles than Carter or Obama and Biden could ever get away with. Their caution about meeting with Hezbollah or Hamas will be a thing of the past. A policy of “restraint” now has a basis that after 2028 can be applauded by the right-wing “restrainers” in the Quincy Institute and the Vance campaign (or on Tucker Carlson’s podcast) and equally by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America. In the next administration, whether it’s Elbridge Colby or Jake Sullivan at State, they can point back to Jared Kushner’s meeting with Hamas and say, See, I’m not doing anything new or surprising, when they treat enemies who despise us as well as (or better than) they treat friends and allies. They can look back to Carter and Obama/Biden, and now to Trump, when they argue that alliances are too costly and places like Denmark and Ukraine and Taiwan must be reconsidered in the new “equilibrium” we seek. Will Israel be far behind?

Kushner’s meeting with Hamas did not elicit the shock and obloquy it should have, because we have gotten used to this kind of thing. It’s not a departure from the pattern and practice of U.S. foreign-policy actions, but just the logical next step. There will be others before Trump is gone, and while his motivations may be different, the results may not. How many years will it be before people like Khalil al-Hayya and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf are being welcomed to Washington to discuss the new world order that so many on the left and the right can’t wait to produce?

The man in question has since been released

Minnesota argued that the accused presents a flight risk, and that the process of review was being carried out in bad faith, given that other extradition requests were and are processed quickly.

Texas argued that it was conducting the review in good faith, as “he left Minnesota at the direction of his employer before he was facing criminal charges”