The short answer is no. The long answer is no. The medium answer is no.

The answer is no.

Stephen “Please make me look good when you take my picture” Miller is Trump’s chief saber-rattler when it comes to invading foreign countries we don’t need to invade, such as Venezuela and Greenland. Miller attempted to justify what Trump wants to do in both places on Sunday when he told Jake Tapper of CNN, “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Since Miller was not there at the beginning of time, but I was, I will take this time to set forth how hard the “iron” laws of the world are when they apply to the United States. The answer is, not very.

At age 40, Mr. Miller, you are too young to recall the time in the last century when the United States attempted to “govern” the country of Vietnam by strength and force and power. Here is a photograph of how that worked out for us.

This is the iconic photo of the last rescue helicopter to leave the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975. It’s not even an Army helicopter. It’s an Air America “Huey” flown by a civilian contractor. Another helicopter, a Marine CH-46, came along soon after and evacuated the few Marine guards who were left guarding the embassy.

More recently, in 2001 and 2003, the United States attempted to force its iron will on the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. It didn’t work. Here is a photo of the final American military cargo jet to leave the Kabul airport on August 30, 2021. That aircraft was carrying the last U.S. soldiers out of Afghanistan.

These photographs are not stills from some Hollywood movie. They are not fantasies. They illustrate Miller’s concept of how American “strength” and “force” and “power” end up when they are put to use in the real world.

Stephen Miller, as he strides around the halls of the White House exercising what The Atlantic called his “dogmatic force” and “wrath,” has clearly not bothered to read two treaties between the United States and Denmark, “The Agreement Between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, April 27, 1951,” and “The Amending and Supplementing Agreement of April 27, 1951” signed by Secretary of State Colin Powell on August 2004.

So, I took the time to read them. Here are a few of the provisions of those agreements which permit the United States, with the cooperation and aid of Denmark, to establish defense areas and bases “necessary for the development of the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area.” To that end, the United States “may use such defense area in cooperation with the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark for the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area and may construct such facilities and undertake such activities therein as will not impede the activities of the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark in such area.”

“The United States of America shall have the right to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over those defense areas in Greenland for which it is responsible,” and may “construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment,” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and water-borne craft and vehicles,” as well as “improve and deepen harbors, channels, entrances, and anchorages.”

The supplemental treaty of 2004 updates the treaty of 1951 to apply the terms of the NATO Status of Forces Agreement of 1955, which had apparently been overlooked when that document was signed. There is one clause mandating that in “the exceptional case of planned landings of military aircraft in Greenland outside airports,” the U.S. agrees to notify both the government of Denmark and the Home Rule Government of Greenland and pledges to “insure the protection of the environment and hunting areas in Greenland.”

The fact of the matter is that according to a treaty that has been in effect for 75 years, the United States can do whatever the hell it wants in Greenland, is already doing it. The U.S. is pledged to defend not only Greenland and the interests of Denmark, but all of NATO against any aggression by Russia, China, or anybody else. Miller might take the position that treaties are written on paper and not engraved on the “iron laws of the world,” but I would point out to him that the surrender documents of Japan and Germany that ended World War II, and the subsequent treaties that the United States signed with those two nations making them our allies, have held.

Our treaties with Denmark regarding Greenland are written in such a way that they are an adjunct of the NATO treaty to which 32 member countries are signatories. Yesterday, the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Great Britain, and Denmark signed a statement affirming Denmark’s sovereignty and the status of Greenland as a self-governing, autonomous territory. The statement declared that the Arctic is a region of strategic importance for all of Europe and is crucial for international and transatlantic stability. All five countries agreed to increase their “presence, activities, and investments” in the Arctic region.

I have a better idea. Call a meeting. Declare that the strategic importance of Greenland is so great that it is time for NATO to have military exercises there. Dispatch ten or twenty thousand or so soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women from all five countries that signed the “Joint Statement on Greenland” and any other NATO country that wants to contribute its forces. Establish, under the aegis of Denmark, permanent bases to house NATO forces in Greenland. Call Stephen Miller and notify him that a NATO “Iron Wall” has been established to defend Greenland from all the Russian and Chinese aggression Trump has asserted is a big problem in the region.

That’s what NATO is for: defending the members of the alliance. Invite Stephen Miller, since he is at the top of the totem pole in the White House, to observe NATO’s defenses in Greenland. Tell him that if he wants, he can bring along his wife and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Have a few NATO generals meet them on the tarmac in full combat gear. Show him what NATO’s strength and force and power look like in the real world. Have a photographer take his picture. Make him look good. For some reason known only to himself, Stephen Miller is concerned about how he looks in photographs.

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On Wednesday, ICE agents pulled up to Minnesota mother Renee Good’s car and shouted a series of confusing, contradictory demands. When Good attempted to drive away, one of the agents aimed his gun through her side window and shot her multiple times in the head. ICE agents then refused to let medical professionals through to render aid. They blocked an ambulance; paramedics had to get to Good on foot. She died at the scene.

The Trump administration is calling Good a domestic terrorist. The Department of Homeland Security put out what is, in my view, one of the scariest statements I’ve ever seen from a federal authority. “Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism,” the statement reads in part. DHS secretary Kristi Noem offered a totally different lie, claiming that ICE officers got their car stuck in the snow and “they were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”

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You can easily find multiple videos of this incident online. Good was not rioting. She did not block ICE officers. She did not attempt to kill ICE officers. The ICE officers were not trying to push a car out of the snow; they were surrounding Good’s vehicle. The whole thing is just invented, and the story keeps changing.

Think what you will about her actions — and ICE supporters generally argue she didn’t follow the ICE agent’s directives, and that as her car rolled forward he believed he had a right to act in self-defense — but the evidence is front of all of our faces. It’s clear that, whatever you believe about the ICE agent’s self-defense claim, Good was not a violent rioter. She did not attempt to run over ICE agents who were simply trying to push their car out of the snow. This government is demanding that you accept their patently false version of events — that you talk yourself out of what you can actually see, and into whatever they say.

This comes just a day after the Trump administration released its rewritten Jan. 6th history. MAGA loyalists jumped on board: “On this day in history in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers and others gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building,” tweeted Republican Rep. Mike Collins, in a truly stunning series of lies (if I break into your house in the middle of the night and threaten to kill you, am I a peaceful mother taking a self-guided albeit unauthorized tour of your bedroom?).

Many of these “peaceful grandmothers” were actually able-bodied adult men and women who scaled walls, busted through doors and windows, hunted for politicians to murder, plotted to lynch Mike Pence, beat police officers within inches of their lives, and were eventually convicted of many serious crimes. Nearly 140 police officers were injured on Jan. 6th. They were beaten with flag poles and hockey sticks, sprayed with bear spray and hit with pieces of broken furniture. Lawmakers, including Republicans, hid in their offices, fearing for their lives. That reality has simply been whited-out of conservative history. The administration’s rewrite accuses former vice president Mike Pence of “cowardice and sabotage” for certifying the election results; it continues to claim, falsely, that the election was stolen.

Trump and his team are rewriting the truth. They’re insisting that you didn’t see what you know you saw. They are have already created a fake history to make themselves the heroes. They are selling you a fake reality right now. And their followers are going along with it.

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That Good’s murder happened in the first place was the entirely predictable outcome of having barely-trained masked and heavily armed thugs trawling American streets looking for people to abuse. But now that it has happened (and was caught on camera), the justifications have begun. ICE supporters say Good was accelerating toward an officer who feared for his life. If you watch the video, it’s hard to see a deadly threat. The most generous interpretation in favor of the officer is that he was scared and he overreacted with deadly results — but even that interpretation is pretty damning, because people who are handed guns and authority by the state should be trained to know how to respond to stressful situations. And the law governing most federal law enforcement agents, as far as I can tell, is fairly clear: Federal law enforcement officers cannot shoot at a moving vehicle unless the person in it is threatening them with deadly force using a non-vehicular weapon (i.e., pointing a gun at them), or unless the person is using the vehicle in a way that imminently threatens their life or safety “and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.” Emphasis mine. It’s possible this standard doesn’t apply to ICE, which is at this point little more than a personal presidential militia. But we should ask: Why not? Why aren’t we expecting ICE officers to comport themselves with basic professionalism?

This is one of those moments when I find myself pushed down to the deepest depths of despair. Not just because an innocent woman was killed, but because my country has fallen to such a profound low that a significant minority of its citizens continue to support a man who lies to their faces, and they hate people who politically disagree with them so much that they’ll justify murdering us in the streets and call it a morally righteous.

It’s important to understand why ICE was in Minneapolis specifically, and the answer also comes down to a series of right-wing lies alternately amplified and created by the Trump administration. ICE is of course all over the country. But they have lately focused on Minnesota because the state is home to many Somali immigrants, and Somalis have been in the MAGA crosshairs after allegations of mass fraud. Here’s the truth about the “Somali fraud” allegations: There really was a mass post-Covid fraud in Minnesota related to a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future (run by a white woman), that involved hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen in a scheme involving fake programs for autistic kids. It was a despicable plundering of public resources, and after a big criminal investigation, dozens of people were indicted; convictions have been steadily mounting. Most of the people prosecuted in this fraud scheme are Somali-Americans; the fraud worked because people within a specific community brought in friends and family members, which isn’t particularly unusual in a fraud case (heavily Mormon Utah is America’s fraud capital, seeing more Ponzi schemes than any other state specifically because of this in-group dynamic). What was unusual in Minnesota was the scope and brazenness of the crimes. It was very bad. And justice is being fairly served. The story might have ended there, except conservative johnny-come-latelies jumped on the story and used it as evidence of some inherent Somali criminality. They then started theorizing about other frauds, which culminated in MAGA influencers showing up at daycares with cameras, demanding to be let in to see the children. When they were rightly rebuffed, they accused scores of daycares of being fraudulent. So far, investigators haven’t found any daycares that weren’t operating as expected.

In other words, the original fraud was real, and had already been dealt with by law enforcement. But the great big Somali daycare fraud just… isn’t. Subsequent accusations of fraud worked kinda like the claims that Haitians were eating people’s pets in Ohio: They were mostly just racist, and not based in any reality, but they’re having devastating consequences for people whose only crime is being a member of a currently disfavored ethnic group.

Lack of evidence supporting the fraud allegations hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from reacting. They’ve already cut off childcare funding to Minnesotans until the state proves that their daycares are real. Trump called Somalis “garbage.” And his administration ramped up ICE activity in Minnesota explicitly to hunt down Somalis, who are the current favored target of all manner of MAGA racists.

Now a woman is dead. She is dead because of a MAGA lie. And her death is being used to create more MAGA lies.

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I don’t know what to do about people who are happy to be lied to, so long as the lies bolster their sense of righteousness and paint those who disagree with them as mortally dangerous enemies. I don’t know what to do about people who think it’s ok to kill people because their politics differ from yours. I don’t know how to get through to people who believe an armed agent of the state should be free to act with total impunity.

Law enforcement officers do not get to kill you just because you don’t listen to what they say. In most of the world’s democracies, an armed agent of the state killing an unarmed citizen would be an earthshaking scandal. In the US, it’s just Wednesday. What’s different now, though, is that the people in the White House aren’t even pretending they want to find out the truth; they aren’t even pretending that ICE officers are held to high (or any) standards. The president and his lackeys want a loyal personal militia, and they’ve created one in ICE.

It’s increasingly clear that Americans are not being governed; we are being ruled.

Narratives about authoritarianism often suggest that entire populations were browbeaten and intimidated into submission. But that’s not true. It seems to me that, in most societies, there is a critical mass of people who desire authoritarian rule. They want a big strong man to protect them and beat up on their perceived enemies. They don’t want the obligations and hardships that freedom brings — a free and pluralistic society requires owning your own life and decisions; it puts you into contact with people who have different ideas and ways of life; it forces you to think and to sometimes be challenged. If you’re part of the dominant and in-charge group, authoritarianism is an easier route, at least at first. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to be responsible for yourself. You can feel good and valuable by being the kind of person those in power say is good and valuable — you don’t have to work to prove anything. Things might go very badly for you if you are suddenly pushed to the outside (something Indian-American Trump supporters are currently learning the hard way). But for a certain kind of person, affiliation with the powerful — even superficial affiliation, by virtue of race or heritage or religion — can feel pretty meaningful. For a certain kind of (sadistic) person, seeing the powerful crush and abuse others can feel pretty good.

This is where we are. No one is being fooled or forced into accepting authoritarian governance. The people with Don’t Tread On Me flags who have for years stockpiled weapons in anticipation of a rogue federal government infringing on Americans’ rights are quite happy to see the Trump administration’s boot treading on Americans they deem less worthy of basic rights. Millions of Americans voted for this. And while I am heartened that many will see what happened in Minneapolis and feel sickened — that many less-plugged-in Trump voters will see what happened and feel sickened — I am troubled by the reality that millions of my fellow citizens do not want to live in a free and democratic society, but rather desire a totalitarian one that tells them what to do, what to think, and what is real. I don’t know how we salvage a nation of people who want to be lied to.

xx Jill

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Let’s say you are an American president, and you decide that with all the oil being produced in your own country – the U.S. is the world’s top oil producer, pumping more than 13 million barrels a day – that is not enough. You want more oil. You want oil from Iraq. You want oil from Syria. Those places are far, far away, in the Middle East.

And then you look south, in your own hemisphere, and you see Venezuela, and you think, I’d like some oil from there. We used to have American oil companies in that South American country. Then in 1976 – 50 years ago – Venezuela nationalized its oil industry and took over the oil fields and infrastructure built by American oil companies.

You are an American president whose favorite word, next to “billions,” is “unfair.” You think to yourself, how unfair it was to take all that oil away from U.S. oil companies. You don’t like the president who’s running Venezuela, this Maduro guy, because he doesn’t show you the respect you think you are due as the King of All That You See. So, you decide you’ll get rid of the disrespectful dictator of Venezuela, and you will take the oil.

You see yourself as much, much smarter than the bumbling George W. Bush, whose major error, when he invaded Iraq to get rid of its disrespectful dictator, Saddam Hussein, did not take the oil. You ignore the fact that the Bush family – Junior and Senior both – were in the oil business in Texas, so they at least knew something of what was involved in taking the oil, whether it was out of the ground in the U.S. or out of a foreign country such as Iraq.

You think you are smarter than George W. Bush because you know a lot of oil men. They supported your campaign in 2024. They have come to visit you at your resort/hotel/home in Palm Beach, Mar a Lago, and they have come to visit you in the White House. Some of those oil men run the companies whose oil was stolen from them back in 1976. They want their oil back, and you told them that you would get it for them, probably for a royalty (wonderful word, that one) to be paid to you personally through whatever your latest crypto scam is.

So, you call up your spray-tanned and tattooed Secretary of War, and you tell him, go get that fuckstick Maduro in Venezuela and put him in jail in New York City and take their oil.

There is always a problem. This is a rare one that isn’t caused by Democrats, or at least you haven’t figured out a way to blame it on Democrats yet. What do you do after you depose a South American dictator? Bush famously didn’t have a plan after he got rid of Saddam. It became his nickname: George W. “didn’t have a plan” Bush.

You don’t have a plan, either. What you have is a gaggle of yes-men, just like Bush had, who tell you not to worry, that you are King of All You See, so taking the oil won’t be a problem. You have the greatest military in the history of the world. Hell, your greatest military has been killing drug smugglers in boats for months now – the count is more than 100 – and it took your greatest military only two hours to spirit Maduro out of his fortified compound and put him on the USS Iwo Jima to send him on his way to New York City, where the national media is waiting to report on everything that happens to him in court, so they won’t be reporting on the 5.2 million new Jeffrey Epstein files. Or at least they won’t be reporting on the files as much.

What could go wrong down there in Venezuela? Your Chief Adviser on Everything in the World, Stephen Miller, tells you that power is the only thing you need to get whatever you want. The world will cower in the shadow of your power, says Stephen Miller. He even went on TV on Sunday and explained to Jake Tapper how you did what you did in Venezuela:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So, for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country.”

See, that’s all it takes. You pick up the phone, you go on Truth Social, you say some stuff in ALL CAPS, and the world bends to your will.

Except for those pesky people who live in the countries from which you want to take the oil, and some of the pesky people who don’t even live in those countries.

Look at what happened in Iraq when Bush took over the country from Saddam Hussein. He hired some big U.S. companies such as KBR and Halliburton and Bechtel to go to Iraq and rebuild the country’s “infrastructure.” The Congress passed a $70 billion supplemental funding bill in November of 2003 to pay for the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure. I was in Iraq when that bill was passed. A West Point classmate of mine was in charge of USAID in Baghdad. All the infrastructure money was to go through USAID to help rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure so the big U.S. companies could get the oil fields pumping and the oil pipelines running. My friend, the USAID guy, told me all of the rebuilding money was going to the oil infrastructure. Not for sanitation and roads and rail systems and the electrical grid, except as those systems served the Iraqi oil business.

This was not reported in the press. One of the big U.S. companies, the Bechtel Corporation, issued a press release announcing its contract with USAID to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure. The press release was a lie. For one thing, Bechtel was hired with rebuilding oil infrastructure in northern Iraq, but the Americans working for the company got shot at and mortared and attacked by insurgents so much, they pulled out.

Attacks in northern Iraq on pipelines that carried oil from the Kurdish region around Kirkuk to a pipeline that ran north towards Turkey and south towards Baiji and Baghdad took place nightly. The 101^st Airborne Division, one brigade of which was stationed near Al-Qayyarah, was tasked with defending the pipeline that ran near the Tigris River. Well, they didn’t have enough soldiers to defend more than 100 miles of pipeline. Insurgents would watch where the U.S. soldiers went on their defensive patrols, then they would go to where the soldiers weren’t, and they would blow up a section of the pipeline, which ran aboveground, and was vulnerable to attacks with as simple a weapon as an IED made from a 155 mm Howitzer round, of which there were thousands in Iraq.

The Bechtel guys weren’t working on the infrastructure; the U.S. Army couldn’t defend the oil pipeline from Kirkuk, or the pipeline that ran north and south along the Tigris. So, what was happening? A comparatively small number of Iraqi insurgents were stymying American efforts to “take the oil.”

It’s still happening. Last summer, insurgents supported by Iran used drones to attack oilfields and pipelines run by Americans in the Kurdish region of Iraq. They hit an oil field run by HKN Energy, a company owned by the son of Texas billionaire Ross Perot, a big financial supporter of Donald Trump. According to Reuters, the Iran-backed insurgents also hit an Iraqi oil field run by another Texas oil company, Hunt Oil.

These are all friends of Donald Trump. According to Reuters, the attacks halted half of the Kurdistan region’s oil production. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio got very mad. He told Iraq’s leaders in Baghdad that Trump would impose sanctions on Iraq’s oil business if they did not reopen the oil pipeline to Turkey that led to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. Facing sanctions, Iraq and Turkey got together and reopened the pipeline, tilting Iraq away from its relationship with Iran and towards the U.S., according to Reuters.

All because some oil fields and an oil pipeline were attacked by Iran-backed insurgents.

In 2003, the attacks on the same pipeline were carried out by Iraqis on foot carrying IED’s in canvas sacks. Now those attacks can be carried out remotely by a guy sitting in a building somewhere looking at a little screen holding what amounts to a video game controller in his hands.

There are a zillion factions in Iraq today. There were a zillion factions in Iraq in 2003. There were vulnerable pipelines then, there are vulnerable pipelines now. The lesson here is that this shit never stops. There is always someone who doesn’t want American companies to “take the oil.”

What do you think is going to happen in Venezuela with its oil fields and oil pipelines when Trump sends American companies down there to “take the oil?” There are drug gangs like Tren de Aragua and Cartel de las Soles who are running cocaine through the areas where pipelines are. There is the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia, which has strong units and allies in Venezuela. The FARC guerilla group from Colombia still has factions operating in Venezuela. There are so-called Colectivos, pro-government militias which control neighborhoods of Caracas and areas of Venezuela and frequently do battle with countervailing gangs and militias from the other side of the political spectrum.

There are pro-government militias and anti-government militias in Venezuela just like there were in Iraq. When we invaded, the sectarian struggle between the Shiites and Sunnis did not suddenly come to a stop just because George W. Bush got a hair up his ass and sent American soldiers there. When the Iraqi army was disbanded, factions formed their own militias. Some of them funded their operations by hacking into pipelines, stealing oil and selling it on the black market.

Gee, do you think that a country such as Venezuela, with a major system of cocaine production and smuggling, might also have a system of stealing oil and selling it on the black market? Bloomberg Business says it’s already happening. Do you think that there might be people in Venezuela who liked Maduro, and voted for him, who are unhappy that he was kidnapped? Do you think they might have an opinion about what happens to the oil in Venezuela that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller think is their right to take as Big Powerful People? Do you think that there might be some groups who plan to attack the complex system of oil pipelines that run through Venezuela to stop the U.S. from taking the oil?

This is how stupid Trump and Miller and Rubio are. They announced what they want to do with Venezuela’s oil. Trump used the word “oil” twenty times in his press conference about the attack on Venezuela at Mar a Lago on Sunday. Trump said Venezuela owes us oil, because they took it from us, so we’re going to take it back. I’m pretty sure they can get CNN International in Venezuela. They know we’re coming.

At least Bush and Cheney had the sense to tell a big fat lie that they weren’t in Iraq to take the oil, even though they were there for exactly that and used USAID to funnel borrowed money that wasn’t even appropriated from taxpayer funds in the U.S. Treasury to fund their attempt to rebuild and take over Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

We are still paying interest on those borrowed billions. How long will we be paying interest on the money Trump and Miller and Rubio spend to “take the oil” from Venezuela they think American oil companies are owed?

Because we know one thing for sure from the incredibly ill-advised adventure in Iraq that left us in debt for about two trillion dollars: Whatever we get up to in Venezuela won’t pay for itself. Trump thinks that “running the country” of Venezuela, to use Stephen Miller’s arrogant assertion, will make the U.S. and Trump rich. What neither of them understand is that when you exercise power using the U.S. military, it doesn’t make money. It costs money. Lots and lots of money, and usually American lives as well.

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Trump has been in office for less than a year. The Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade less than three years ago. And today, if you are a woman in the United States, your rights change when you cross state lines — men’s rights do not.

It’s easy to lose sight of just how debilitating this administration has been for reproductive rights, because they are doing so much else so loudly (apologies to Greenland). But this administration has quietly attacked abortion rights from just about every angle. A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights makes clear just how aggressive they’ve been. A few highlights:

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• The Trump administration has effectively told emergency rooms and hospitals that they do not have to save pregnant women’s lives or preserve their health. Under a long-standing federal law, emergency rooms have to stabilize patients regardless of whether or not those patients can pay; if the hospital cannot provide the care the patient needs, they are required to stabilize them and then transfer them somewhere that can. For pregnant patients, this means that hospitals and ERs may sometimes have to provide abortion care: If a pregnant woman is in a health- or life-threatening emergency, in some cases, the only way to stabilize her is to end the pregnancy. But “pro-life” groups don’t like this law; they prefer to let women lose their uteruses, or hemorrhage, or wind up on a ventilator, or nearly die of sepsis or other infection — they claim that abortion is never medically necessary, and threaten to prosecute any doctor who deems it so. The result is that some women are dying; many more are nearly dying, particular women in the midst of miscarriages. In Texas, rates of sepsis infection among miscarrying women increased by more than 50% after their abortion ban — doctors are waiting until pregnant women have serious potentially deadly infections before giving them the care they need. And they’re doing this because new Trump administration rules do not require them to treat pregnant patients like all other people; pregnant women are a legal sub-category of person, not entitled the same requirement of care as everyone else.

• The Trump administration has launched a politically-motivated safety review of mifepristone, “the abortion pill,” seeking to challenge its approval by the FDA. Mifepristone is overwhelmingly safe, and has been used all over the world for decades now — for safe abortions, but also for a variety of other indications. The drug’s safety record is excellent, and the only reason to have the FDA review its approval is because it’s used for abortion — not because there are any real safety concerns. If the review results in a change to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, it would leave millions of women without access to a safe abortion option.

• The Trump administration destroyed millions of dollars of contraceptives bound for women in Africa, because anti-abortion extremists claim that modern birth control is “abortifacient.” Millions of US dollars were basically set on fire so that some of the world’s poorest women wouldn’t be able to plan their pregnancies. The result? A projected 1.5 million unplanned pregnancies. And that is in addition to the millions of people, including children, who lost basics like HIV treatment, contraception, prenatal care, and infant care with the demise of USAID. Today, starving women are birthing premature babies, and the US has barely saved a cent (the “pro-life” movement is also nowhere to be found when it comes to saving the lives of these babies).

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The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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Oh helllll fucking no! President Donald "I rape little girls” Trump thinks he’s going to use billions of American taxpayer dollars to fund his little South American road trip? Eat shit, piggy.

If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, let me catch you up on current events. Obviously, you know we invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president, Nicolas Maduro, and, inexplicably, his wife, Cilia Flores. You should also know by now that all of the reasons the regime gave for targeting Venezuela up until the last couple of weeks were a lie. Fentanyl. Cocaine. The newly invented and completely fictional “narcoterrorism.” Spreading freedom and democracy. Bullshit. All of it.

Then Trump just decided to stop lying and told everyone it was about the oil. Trump wanted the oil. He really REALLY wanted the oil. He said it over and over and over again. That was OUR oil. Venezuela stole it from us and we wanted it back!

It was the whitest, most colonizer shit I have ever heard in my life. I don’t even think in terms of “colonizer,” and that’s all I could hear when Trump opened his creepy little anus mouth. That’s how blatant it was. I just watched all three Avatar movies in the last two weeks,1 and the invading bad guys from Earth are quite literally colonizers looking to steal the native resources and even THEY weren’t that much of a fucking caricature.

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Now, I don’t mean Trump is going to have us pay for the invasion itself. We’re already paying for the military’s almost trillion-dollar budget. Yaaaaay military-industrial complex. What I mean is that Trump thinks we’re going to foot the bill for the fucking disaster that’s already unfolding because he’s a fucking moron and so is everyone else in his regime of morons.

This is from NBC:

Moreover, he said, the U.S. may subsidize an effort by oil companies to rebuild the country’s energy infrastructure — a project he said could take less than 18 months.

“I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,” he said. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”

Less than 18 months? The fuck it will. But Pedobrain is right that it will cost a lot of money. Conservative estimates suggest it will cost over $50 billion and take years just to maintain the decrepit systems already in place. To rebuild, much less expand, would take over a decade and cost over $180 billion.

The reason Trump is “offering” OUR fucking money to pay for it is because there is not one single oil company interested in doing business in Venezuela.

“But Uncle Ogre!,” you say, “Weren’t the oil companies behind this war in the first place?! Didn’t they push Trump to invade so they could steal the oil and make money?”

That seems like a really obvious conclusion, right? What kind of fucking moron invades a country to steal its oil only to discover no oil companies WANT the oil?

Allow me to reintroduce you to Donald “I stare directly into solar eclipses” Trump, the dumbest motherfucking pedophile to ever sit in the Oval Office.2

Yeah, this fucking genius, the greatest businessman in allll of American history I tells ya!, has been planning this invasion for months and overlooked a few crucial details. Such as:

1. What happens the next day. Like THE VERY NEXT FUCKING DAY! Who knows? We didn’t bother to plan that far ahead. Too boring. We’ll just fucking wing it!

2. Which bootlicking Trump lackey would run point on the whole thing after declaring ourselves conquering heroes? WE STILL DO NOT FUCKING KNOW WHO IS MAKING THE DECISIONS HERE AT HOME!

3. If the goal was to secure the oil, how would that be done? Would we just pump it onto American tankers? Would we just take over their oil industry? Would we hand it over to a friendly oil company and take a piece of the profits? NO ONE FUCKING KNOWS BECAUSE NO ONE THOUGHT TO ASK!

It seems like we were planning to have an American oil company move in and run the whole thing for us. ‘Murika! But after, Jesus Fucking Christ AFTER!!!!, we invaded, that’s when Trump and the imbeciles working for him/pulling his puppet strings looked around and realized no one wanted to touch Venezuela with a ten-foot pole.

And I get it. And so will you.

$50 billion just to keep the lights on is a lot of money. Venezuela is only producing about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day. Even getting it up to 2 million, it will take years to recoup a $50 billion investment. Let’s say someone drops the $180 billion to really get that oil flowing. It’s still going to take well over a decade to see a profit. Possibly twenty years.

Now, oil companies have the money and the patience. Buuuuut why the fuck would they EVER risk dropping that kind of money in a country where the oil industry was nationalized? Trump will be dead or in prison or living in exile within the next five years. The next Democratic president in 2029 is not going to go to war for oil in fucking Venezuela and every oil CEO knows it.

That’s why they all said “No.”

But if the United States government is paying for it? Well…that might be worth it. After all, if the whole thing falls apart, my oil company didn’t lose anything but some time and manhours and some equipment that’s already paid for. And the reward is access to a massive oil field.

Sure, the price of oil is kind of low right now and opening up a new giant market would be bad for business, but imagine being able to tell OPEC to fuck itself whenever I, the CEO of whichever oil company controls Venezuela, want? Kind of tempting…

But that means you and I, the American taxpayer, would be footing the bill while the oil company CEO gets all the profits. We already subsidize these greedy fucks to the tune of around $35 billion a year in the US. Fuck them and fuck giving them a single penny more to steal Venezuelan oil. If the people of Venezuela want Exxon or Chevron there, they can invite them in and cut their own deal. I’m not paying for a goddman thing so Trump can collect more bribes and soulless CEOs can buy a third or fourth yacht.

This whole thing is going to be a fucking disaster, and I’m tired of MY fucking money being set on fire by neo-con fucksticks with delusions of empire.

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“They said it was like having a teacher in their pocket,” she said. The tools could help students work through a particular problem, brainstorm ideas, research for projects and provide feedback, she said.

 "Help" and "work through" are doing some heavy lifting here. "Provide feedback" remains one of the popular items in the AI arsenal. I remain unconvinced. Feedback that does not understand or include student intent-- what they thought they were doing, what they meant to do-- is just correction. "Do this instead of that." If you don't know why the student did "that" in the first place, you can't provide much in the way of useful correction, and since AI does not "know" anything, all it can do is edit the student's work for them. What do students learn from this? This is the pedagogical equivalent of an adult who shoulders the student aside and fixes their work while the student watches.

But the proud example of an AI project, shared by the superintendent in a board meeting, is even worse. 

Students in a middle school social studies class used AI to create and question “digital peers” and “characters” from the Middle Ages while the teacher guided them in evaluating responses for accuracy and evidence.

Many teachers (including me) would recognize this assignment immediately, only Back In The Day, we would have the students create and role play the characters themselves. In Mrs. O'Keefe's eighth grade English class (back in 1971), we had to research a historical person and then portray them as a guest on a talk show (my friends Andy and Stewart drew Van Gogh, and in the middle of his interview he became over-emotional and cut off his own ear, complete with fake blood).  My sister-in-teaching Merrill annually had her students put Milton's Paradise Lost on trial, with students role playing characters from the work.

This is a variation on that same assignment except AI does the role playing and students are transformed from actors into spectators.

Almost any version of this assignment would be better. Let students role play. Let them craft faux social media accounts for their characters. Anything that had them actively creating the character based on their own research, rather than feeding some stuff into an AI and sitting back to observe and judge the result. What does the teacher even assess in such an assignment? How is this any better than just watching a video about the topic?

If you're considering incorporating AI in your lesson and wondering how to decide what to have it do, here's a hint-- do not have it turn students from active participants into spectators who simply watch what the bot does for them. Students should be main characters in their own education, and not observers, sidelined so that the plagiarism machine can shine.