In a Sunday night missive, the White House Office of Communications shared big news: the South American country of Colombia has succumbed to America’s demands and will not be subject to crippling sanctions unless it “fails to honor this agreement.”

Sometimes, you have to cry uncle, and it appears that Colombian President Gustavo Petro did just that after acting defiant earlier Sunday by saying his country would refuse to take back its citizens who were in America illegally.

The current president of the United States, however, is not named Joe Biden.

After realizing who he was dealing with, Petro apparently even retweeted the White House’s statement:

Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar
·
The president of Colombia has retweeted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post.
Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar
NEW

Statement from the White House on the situation in Colombia.

I do not believe we have heard from the Colombian side yet on this announcement.
10:37 PM · Jan 26, 2025

Leavitt said tariffs and financial sanctions will be paused, but visa sanctions against Colombian officials and stricter customs inspections of Colombian nationals and cargo ships ordered by Trump earlier Sunday will remain in effect “until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned.” //

Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius
·
To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.

I’ll illustrate.

Traditional Approach:

1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
3. The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
4. The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
5. The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper.
6. The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
7. SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
8. The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
9. Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is.
10. The White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
11. Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.

Trump Approach:

1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
3. By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
4. Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
5. Winning.

See the difference? It’s called LEADERSHIP.
6:09 PM · Jan 26, 2025

anon-d9in
19 hours ago
The President of Columbia did not think through his resistance. Trump wrote The Art Of The Deal. He already planned in advance what he would if countries deny entry of their own criminals. The Columbian President's knee jerk reaction only proved he is no match for Trump and he is not a true leader. Doing his chest-pounding on X proved to be oh so embarassing. //

What is a GUID?
A GUID is a globally unique identifier that can be generated through several different algorithms. The GUIDs on this site are generated using a secure random number generator.

An ironclad law of economics regarding employment is this: To be retained, an employee must return value to the employer in excess of the cost of employment. Minimum wage laws place an artificial floor on the cost of employment; these laws not only price the entry-level job-seekers out of the market but they force employers to seek alternatives to hiring people.

Now, Chick-fil-A, while not citing any minimum wage laws as a reason for implementing this, has introduced the automated lemon squeezer for their vaunted lemonade prep. //

These burger bots and lemon squeezers will price the low-skilled worker out of a range of jobs. True, to some extent, the move to automation is inevitable; automation increases efficiency, which every business seeks. Even so, there was a time, not all that long ago, when many young people's introduction to the workplace as entry-level workers was a job in a fast-food joint. Increasingly, automation, in order-taking and food preparation, is taking over from those young people and depriving them of valuable experience. Minimum wage law accelerates the loss of these entry-level jobs.

This is why, whenever a minimum wage law is proposed, the question to ask is, "Do you want more burger bots? Because this is how you get more burger bots.". //

DarthCY
17 days ago
The minimum wage is there for unions to have something to raise their wages from. That is why Dims covet it so much. Anybody who thinks you need to raise it to be able to sustain yourself off of a single minimum wage job is economically illiterate. //

Steamfish jacktate82
17 days ago
Keypunch operators, highway toll takers, telephone operators, uniformed gas station attendants, and newspaper delivery boys have all joined the jobs you mentioned as positions filled by humans in my youth but vanishing or gone today. The rise of AI will undoubtably be adding to that list soon.

Laocoön of Troy Steprock
3 hours ago
We've done this before...

From March 16, 1916, to February 14, 1917, an expeditionary force of more than fourteen thousand regular army troops under the command of Brig. Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing operated in northern Mexico "in pursuit of Villa with the single objective of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays. Another 140,000 regular army and National Guard troops patrolled the vast border between Mexico and the United States to discourage further raids. //

anon-pkys Laocoön of Troy
36 minutes ago
Back in the 1840s the U.S. declared war on Mexico. We had two small armies that attacked, one from the north across the border, and one by sea from Vera Cruz. Our troops, although greatly out numbered kicked A$$ and took names in several battles with the Mexican Army. We conquered and held Mexico City in a battle in which we were outnumbered. Texas Rangers served as Scouts for the Army and as shock troops. They were hated and feared by the Mexicans. To this day the Mexican people have no love for the Texas Rangers. During the 1870s-80s the Texas Rangers guarded much of the border with Mexico. They were not afraid to go into Mexico after Mexican rustlers.

Over the millennia, we have created security systems to deal with the sorts of mistakes humans commonly make. //

But it’s not the frequency or severity of AI systems’ mistakes that differentiates them from human mistakes. It’s their weirdness. AI systems do not make mistakes in the same ways that humans do.

Much of the friction—and risk—associated with our use of AI arise from that difference. We need to invent new security systems that adapt to these differences and prevent harm from AI mistakes. //

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

And AI mistakes aren’t accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong—and obviously so, to a human—as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is. //

Matt • January 21, 2025 11:54 AM

“Technologies like large language models (LLMs) can perform many cognitive tasks”

No, they can’t perform ANY cognitive tasks. They do not cogitate. They do not think and are not capable of reasoning. They are nothing more than word-prediction engines. (This is not the same as saying they are useless.)

You should know better than that, Bruce.

RealFakeNews • January 21, 2025 12:35 PM

Part of the problem is AI can’t fundamentally differentiate a fact from something it just made up. It can check cabbages and goats are related via some probability, but it can’t check that a cabbage doesn’t eat goats because it can’t use the lack of data to verify if that is correct.

BRENNAN: You know FEMA has specialized expertise that some of these states just don't have in their arsenal...

VANCE: Oh, Margaret, I wish that they...

BRENNAN: And how will these states who are lower-income states, the Mississippis, the Kentuckys, the Alabamas, be able to do this for themselves without federal help?

VANCE: Well, the president, to be clear, is not saying we are going to leave anybody behind. He's saying that the way in which we administrator these resources, some of which is coming from the federal level, some of which is coming from the state level, we've got to get the bureaucrats out of the way and get the aid to the people who need it most.

Look at the disgust on her face as she calls red states "low-income" hellholes that can't possibly manage themselves without overpaid, useless federal bureaucrats telling them what to do. Notice that she didn't bother to mention California, though, which has shown a lack of ability to effectively respond to natural disasters. Instead, she only sneers at those uneducated rubes in the "Mississippis, Kentuckys, and Alabamas."

That's not an accident. People like Brennan live in a bubble where they truly think credentialism and dollar totals on a spreadsheet dictate competency. For example, calling the above states "low-income" and suggesting that makes them incapable ignores that the cost of living exists. Incomes are indeed lower in Southern states but so are costs, which means the standard of living is not necessarily any worse than high-cost blue states.

Yet, Brennan sees the average income and just assumes everyone in Alabama is an idiot because that's the mindset held by Beltway dwellers such as herself. They can't fathom that other people are not only just as smart as they are but in many cases, are smarter. There's a reason the top states in the country regarding economic growth and employment are almost exclusively Republican-led states, many that Brennan would claim are "low-income."

The reality is that the federal bureaucracies have shown themselves to be the most incompetent entities in the country. If they had "specialized expertise" that simply can't be replicated at the state level, then North Carolinians wouldn't still be living in tents right now.

Error #1: The citizenship clause merely adopted the pre-Dred Scott common law rule that everyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen.

In 1856, the Supreme Court held in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford that the U.S.-born descendants of African slaves were not and could never become citizens, even though under the traditional common law rule, a person automatically became a citizen of the nation on whose soil he or she was born. The plaintiffs contend that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was intended to restore this earlier common law rule of universal birthright citizenship.

They support this claim with a single, highly edited quotation from Sen. Jacob Howard, a Republican from Michigan, who was instrumental in drafting the citizenship clause: “This amendment … is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is … a citizen of the United States.” //

Instead, Howard was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was valid federal law. That act was Congress’s first attempt to override Dred Scott, and statutorily defined birthright citizenship for the first time in American history: “[A]ll persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”

Far from being an adoption of common law universal birthright citizenship, the Civil Rights Act intended to bestow birthright citizenship only on the children of those who, like the newly freed slaves, owed complete allegiance to the United States and were subject to the fullest extent of its political jurisdiction. //

Indeed, the most damning indictment of the plaintiff’s contention comes from the very quotation they use to support it—at least when that quotation isn’t disingenuously edited. The very next line of the quote, which the plaintiffs in this lawsuit conveniently cut, reads: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of embassadors [sic] or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”

This clearly demonstrates that Howard believed they weren’t constitutionalizing the common law rule, but rather a rule that—consistent with the Civil Rights Act’s focus on allegiance to foreign powers—was much more selective in its bestowal of birthright citizenship. //

Error #2: This is an unprecedented action—the executive branch has long recognized that it can’t deny citizenship to children based on the immigration or citizenship status of their parents.

This assertion is only true if history begins in the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, it doesn’t. In the decades following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the federal government regularly articulated a view of the citizenship clause that’s remarkably similar to that espoused in Trump’s order, and the executive branch issued citizenship documents accordingly. //

Error #3: The Supreme Court confirmed in Wong Kim Ark that the citizenship clause automatically bestows citizenship on the U.S.-born children of noncitizen parents.

Contrary to popular assertions, this is not what the Supreme Court held in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark v. United States. The question decided by the court in that case was far narrower: whether a child born in the U.S. to lawfully present and permanently domiciled immigrant parents was a U.S. citizen. And the court concluded that, indeed, the U.S.-born child of this narrow and specific subset of noncitizen parents is a citizen. //

In fact, the court repeatedly emphasized the lawful and permanent domicile of Wong Kim Ark’s parents, factors that are utterly irrelevant under the common law. A true common law opinion would have said, “He was born on U.S. soil, his parents aren’t diplomats or part of some invading army, so therefore he is a citizen.”

This is also why, for decades after Wong Kim Ark, leading constitutional law scholars continued to articulate a distinction between American birthright citizenship—“where the alien must be permanently domiciled”—and birthright citizenship under English common law, which applied even to temporary sojourners. //

Error #4: The president’s order will leave many children deportable and stateless.

It would rarely, if ever, be true that a U.S.-born child of illegal or nonpermanent resident aliens would be left stateless simply because he or she isn’t automatically granted U.S. citizenship. Virtually every nation (including the United States) recognizes some manner of citizenship “by blood,” under which a child is automatically eligible for citizenship when one or both parents are citizens, even if that child is born abroad. //

The plaintiffs, meanwhile, don’t bother articulating a single set of circumstances under which a U.S.-born child of foreign nationals would ever be completely ineligible for—or disqualified from—citizenship or nationality in every other country the world due to a confluence of legal technicalities and the fact of his or her birth on U.S. soil.

Bonchie
@bonchieredstate
·
Follow
Jake Tapper has found time to post about an 18th-century composer in the last couple of hours.

He has not found time to post about Joe Biden pardoning a drug lord who mu*dered a child and his mother.
9:41 AM · Jan 27, 2025

Bonchie
@bonchieredstate
·
Follow
Jim Acosta has found time to post about the January 6th pardons (again) in the last 24 hours.

He has not found time to post about Joe Biden pardoning a drug lord who mu*dered a child and his mother.
9:43 AM · Jan 27, 2025

Returning to Biden's culpability, isn't it a pretty big scandal that the only excuse one can come up with is that the then-president was so mentally incompetent that he didn't even know what he was signing? I get that the guy is out of office and there's a desire to look toward the future, but I think Republicans can't let this stuff lie. If they do, it just incentivizes more bad behavior from Democrats.

We need to know who drew up these pardons, who vetted the list of names, and why Adrian Peeler was included. Was it truly an "accident?" Or was this another act of "social justice" by one of the former president's handlers? Biden's mental incapacity remains the biggest scandal in presidential history. Every person involved in the cover-up needs to be exposed. Letting bygones by bygones isn't an option.

The discovery of a ship, missing for five centuries, in a southwest African desert, filled with gold coins, is one of the most thrilling archaeological finds in recent times.

The Bom Jesus (The Good Jesus) was a Portuguese vessel that set sail from Lisbon, Portugal on Friday, March 7, 1533. Its fate was unknown until 2008 when its remains were discovered in the desert of Namibia during diamond mining operations near the coast of the African nation.

Still the best speech on Westernised Cultural Marxism ever made. The mind virus enables this.

One example he provides is the Coffey Park Fire, in Santa Rosa California in 2017.
—— Several highly flammable trees were left entirely intact despite homes burning to the ground around it. Like what we see in the LA Fires.

🔴 In all of his 120 trips to fire ravaged areas mostly in California, he has found strange consistent anomalies… such as melted glass and aluminum, where there shouldn’t be.

• In other scenarios, fence posts made of wood only ignited near the screws or metal, leading him to believe it’s being heated up with some kind of microwave technology.

• Another example he shows are trees that are literally cooking from the inside out, burning, while not one single leaf burned on the same trees.

• Brame strongly believes some of these fires, like those in Lahaina, Maui, have been started or exacerbated by directed energy weapons (DEWS)

China is beset by many problems. Their economy is deeply flawed, plagued by a massive real-estate bubble and years of currency manipulation and central planning. Their population is about to drop off a demographic cliff. The one thing that all of the various ethnic groups in China seem to have in common is that they aren't having many babies. But, we must note, these are problems that the Western world suffers from as well; here in the United States, we are struggling under $36 trillion in debt, and our people aren't having many babies, either. //

China is our primary geopolitical rival. We, meaning the United States, must do business with them. We must conduct diplomacy with them. We must reassure our Western Pacific allies that we stand with them against any possible Chinese aggression. And, if it comes to that, we may well have to fight a war with China.

We may do all of these things. But the one thing we will probably never do is to understand them. And we have to deal with them accordingly - knowing that China will be what it is, and not what we would wish for it to be. //

Surfer Boy OrneryCoot
19 hours ago
The Chinese in Taiwan seem to have picked up democracy, freedom, and capitalism pretty well for the most part.

Not Mao Surfer Boy
18 hours ago
It is totally different from the mainland. Hong Kong used to be that way too until the CCP took over there. We can also say the same of North and South Korea.

oldgimpy&cranky Surfer Boy
14 hours ago
The Taiwanese are rooted in the KMT, not the CCP. Which explains why the CCP wants Taiwan (beyond the tech and money). The fact that Taiwan adopted Capitalism & Democracy - which started in the 80's - simply means they got tired of being poor commies ;-). //

Redleg
a day ago
Understanding China is easy. They believe that they are the biggest and most powerful country (other than the US) and that this entitles them to be a bully. Hence their predations in the South China Sea, their aggression against the Philippines, and the like. Their intention of being a bully makes them hostile to the US-led rules based order, because the purpose of that order is to restrain bullies.

Protectionism worked for China’s Internet companies, which leapfrogged their American counterparts. Online sales comprised 27% of total retail sales in China in 2022, compared to 15% in the United States. Mobile payments in China reached $US 70 trillion with a total of 158 billion transactions, compared to $8 trillion in the United States. //

Washington, DC, in October 2022, banned the export of high-end computer chips (with a transistor gate width of 7 nanometers or less) as well as the tools and software needed to make them. //

It isn’t clear what the Biden Administration was thinking. The official rationale for the chip control was to stop the Chinese military from gaining an advantage. According to a 2022 RAND Corporation study, virtually all military applications employ older chips (see chart below). The older processes are easier to harden, and most military software has been tested for years on existing hardware rather than rewritten for newer chips. //

If the objective was to hamstring China’s economy, it has failed. The chip ban undoubtedly imposed severe costs on China, which is attempting to reinvent large parts of the semiconductor supply chain at high cost. But China can recompense itself for those costs by turning excess supply into a vehicle to dominate semiconductor markets globally in the not-too-distant future.

Americans imagine that inside every Chinese person an American is struggling to get out. But China is different, so different that the categories of Western political science are meaningless. China will not change because we think it should, or because we want it to, or because we exhort the Chinese to embrace the benefits of democracy and free markets. If it changes, it will do so very slowly. We shall have to deal with China as it is, and has been for thousands of years. We can demonstrate the superiority of our system with economic growth, technological innovation, and military strength—although we haven’t done so of late. We can show that our ways are better—when we stick to our ways—and set an example. But we can’t change China by preaching to the Chinese.

China’s unique geographic conditions required from antiquity a centralized tax system to fund infrastructure and a centralized bureaucracy to administer it. It never persuaded the peoples it absorbed into the Chinese empire to speak a common language or to confess the same religion. Ethnicity has no role in Chinese statehood. //

When Chinese dynasties failed, either because of internal corruption or natural disaster, bandit rebellions replaced them. China has no hereditary aristocracy, unlike Europe, because the new dynasty levels the ground that preceded it. The Communist Party of China arose as a bandit rebellion in China’s classic historical pattern, and governs as a new incarnation of China’s ancient Mandarin caste. In place of the old Mandarin exam based on Chinese classics, China now has the gaokao, the fearsome university entrance exam. The biggest difference between today’s Communists and the old Mandarins is that the CCP is larger and more comprehensive, with nearly 100 million members.

China’s Emperor is not a revered demigod on the Japanese model, or an anointed sovereign claiming divine right, but simply the one ruler whose job it is to prevent all the other would-be rulers from killing each other. He is Lucky Luciano, the capo di capi whose function is to keep the peace among the underbosses who fear him more than they fear each other. And, to extend the metaphor, the CCP is Marxist in the same way the Mafia is Catholic; both organizations take their ideology seriously, although its practical significance is limited. The Chinese people therefore don’t love their emperor, any more than rank-and-file Mafia soldiers love the capo. They say resignedly, “Without an emperor, we’d kill each other.” And that is just what they have done in the tragic periods when imperial dynasties collapsed.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi conveyed the message in a phone call Friday, their first conversation since Marco Rubio’s confirmation as President Donald Trump’s top diplomat four days earlier.

“I hope you will act accordingly,” Wang told Rubio, according to a Foreign Ministry statement, employing a Chinese phrase typically used by a teacher or a boss warning a student or employee to behave and be responsible for their actions.

The short phrase seemed aimed at Rubio’s vocal criticism of China and its human rights record when he was a U.S. senator, which prompted the Chinese government to put sanctions on him twice in 2020. //

This may be a tempest in a teapot. Chairman Xi has met and engaged with President Trump before; the two men know each other, and while Xi may be a Communist, he's not stupid. He knows what to expect from President Trump, and the same applies in return.

But no official, minor or otherwise, in China speaks out of turn without reason. We can assume that Wang Yi delivered this veiled warning at Chairman Xi and the CCP's direction; it's a statement of policy. And, we might note, China has slapped sanctions on U.S. government officials in the past, including Texas' Senator Ted Cruz (R) - and then-Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL).

China knows they have a new American president to deal with. They know what to expect. But it's important to note that China has, through its long history, considered itself the Middle Kingdom, placed between heaven and earth, and despite the strictures of communism, that's still a common way of thinking in China. And while China is, as I'm continually pointing out, a land of great momentum rather than a land of great ideas, they are also a land and a people that take the long view. We think of our history in terms of hundreds of years; China thinks in terms of thousands; they know that sooner or later America will again have a weak leader. We have, after all, had two weak presidents in the last quarter-century. //

OrneryCoot
14 hours ago
We need to take China very seriously. We need to seriously bring them to heel regarding spy balloons, forced technology transfer, election interference, hacking of private and public domains, fentanyl, and unfair trade practices. My hope is that we curb stomp those a$$h0!e$ over that and all of their other aggressive actions. Take them seriously. Seriously enough to fully and purposefully respond to all of their belligerent and dangerous actions, in a way that leaves no room for misunderstanding. Screw China. We saved their butts from the Japanese in WWII, and they have repaid us for the last 80 years with nothing but antagonism, up and to the point of sending troops to fight our soldiers in combat. Give them what they so richly deserve.

James Hopf
@HopfJames
An Indiana bill would create a pilot program to build two SMRs in the state. The bill would also allow tech companies to share the cost (i.e., finance the project), so that ratepayers would not have to foot the entire bill. Article link in reply.

So far, tech/datacenter companies have only been interested in long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) where they buy the power at a fixed (and often generous) price. They haven't expressed interest in financing reactor projects (which would expose them to financial risk).

https://t.co/QWrDxVxRMc

What if the particles we hunt for in high-energy physics laboratories—those fleeting fragments of matter and energy—aren’t just out there, waiting to be found, but are, in some way, created by the very act of looking? The anomalon particle, first observed as an inexplicable anomaly in nuclear physics experiments, might not just be a curiosity of nature but a profound clue to a deeper truth: that consciousness itself could shape the physical world. This provocative idea finds its most compelling champion in the late Robert G. Jahn, a visionary physicist who spent decades exploring the mysterious interplay between mind and matter.

On Monday night, over the course of around 4 hours, about 225 Jan6 inmates were summarily released from custody in 40 or more BOP facilities.

When there was some reluctance/resistance to those releases happening late at night on federal holiday, the word went out -- I know because I had something to do with that -- for staff to come into the facilities and process the necessary paperwork.

So, the idea that some number of J6 defendants were "lost" or "overlooked" or "hidden" is must stupidity of the highest level.

DOC is not part of BOP. The J6 defendants at DOC were housed under a contract with the US Marshal Service. They dont work for Pres. Trump like BOP works for Pres. Trump. He can't fire them for not doing their job when told like he can fire BOP workers for not doing their job when told.

That's why BOP snapped to when told to do so on Monday night.

Some number of J6 defendants at DOC had "detainers" -- an electronic "hold" that says "Before this person is released pleas contact _____ -- which is usually a state or county prosecutor. That means the person is facing different charges somewhere else in the country. Could be federal too. They need to make a court appearance so that terms of bail can be resolved in that court. //

The incoming Trump Admin had it planned well enough to get 225 inmates released in 4 hours, filed more than 2000 court documents in 48 hours to resolve all charges against 1600 people, yet somehow the "Deep State" is "hiding" 10 people.

Think of it this way. Someone from Great Britain visiting the United States is subject to our laws while here, which is to say subject to our partial or territorial jurisdiction. He must drive on the right-hand side of the road rather than the left, for example. But he does not thereby owe allegiance to the United States; he is not subject to being drafted into our army; and he cannot be prosecuted for treason (as opposed to ordinary violations of law) if he takes up arms against the United States, for he has breached no oath of allegiance.

So which understanding of “subject to the jurisdiction” did the drafters of the 14th Amendment have in mind?

Happily, we don’t need to speculate, as they were asked that very question. They unambiguously stated that it meant “complete” jurisdiction, such as existed under the law at the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which excluded from citizenship those born on U.S. soil who were “subject to a foreign power.”

Happily, we don’t need to speculate, as they were asked that very question. They unambiguously stated that it meant “complete” jurisdiction, such as existed under the law at the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which excluded from citizenship those born on U.S. soil who were “subject to a foreign power.”

The Supreme Court confirmed that understanding (albeit in dicta) in the first case addressing the 14th Amendment, noting in The Slaughterhouse Cases in 1872 that “[t]he phrase, ‘subject to its jurisdiction’ was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” It then confirmed that understanding in the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins, holding that the “subject to the jurisdiction” phrase required that one be “not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.” John Elk, the Native American claimant in the case, did not meet that requirement because, as a mem­ber of an Indian tribe at his birth, he “owed imme­diate allegiance to” his tribe and not to the United States.

Thomas Cooley, the leading treatise writer of the era, also confirmed that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “meant full and complete jurisdic­tion to which citizens are generally subject, and not any qualified and partial jurisdiction, such as may consist with allegiance to some other government.” More fundamentally, this understanding of the Citizenship Clause is the only one compatible with the consent of the governed principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

Prime Minister Frederiksen may not have left the call motivated to divest herself of Greenland, but she wasn't laughing about the seriousness of the situation.

Many European officials had hoped Trump's comments about seeking control of Greenland for national security reasons were a negotiating ploy to gain more control over an increasingly vital area as nuclear-powered ice breakers are making the fabled Northwest viable and Russia and China are both also jostling for position there. Greenland is sparsely populated and would be an ideal target for China's "elite capture" strategy, which they have aggressively pursued in suborning island nations in the Pacific. Quite honestly, Denmark is only a little less vulnerable than Greenland to China buying it outright. //

The Euros and the New York Times have concluded that Trump is deadly serious.

I think Trump is largely right in his assessment. //

Quite honestly, I don't see how Greenland could sustain independence in the face of a concerted Chinese effort to establish control (Vitkor Orban's Hungary allows uniformed Chinese police in Budapest). Our free association model is also showing weakness as China exerts influence there. The best arrangement would seem to be declaring Greenland to be a commonwealth (like Puerto Rico) or a territory (like Guam and the Virgin Islands). But no matter how it arrives, I think Greenland's internal politics, which has had the right to declare independence since 2009 and that option is favored by 64 percent of the population, and the geopolitics of our competition with China indicate that Greenland becoming US territory is inevitable. //

j. o. lantern
4 hours ago
I think one of Trump's least appreciated abilities is his awareness of strategic considerations in our national interest. Even here in Red State forums, he was being roundly derided for being distracted and off course when he began speaking about Greenland and the Panama Canal. I maintained then and still do that he was seeing the Big Picture, that hardly anyone else did.

anon-tk7z j. o. lantern
2 hours ago
he IS the Big Picture. We each think a piece of what he is thinking. He pulls them all together into the American Flag. He is helping us to weave the New Glory. //

surfcat50
4 hours ago
“The Guardian cites former Obama administration climate adviser Alice Hill, who observes: “It’s ironic that we are getting a president who famously called climate change a hoax but is now expressing interest in taking over areas gaining greater importance because of climate change.””

What’s ironic is a “climate advisor” who thinks America’s strategic interest in Greenland is because of climate change when we occupied the place in WWII to keep the NAZIs from controlling it, protected it during the Cold War to keep the Soviets from controlling it, and now want to keep the ChiComs from controlling it!