All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change.  I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region.  But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war.  My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution, an outcome I found unlikely from the first day.

Postscript:  I would have thought it a perfectly defensible position in a war like this to argue against the efficacy of our attacks while still believing the target regime is awful.  Apparently that seems to be a bridge too far for most war opponents, as I increasingly see those on the anti-war side attempting to portray the Iranian government as morally superior to the US.  For all our flaws and our failure to live up to our own standards, that is frankly absurd.  But I still see it every day, women in the US running around protesting conditions for women in the US wearing Handmaid's Tale outfits while simultaneously defending the ethics of the Iranian (or Gaza) governments.

So I will add my usual postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.

The only vague hope I might have harbored was that the CIA had some secret plan in place with the opposition organized by agents on the ground.  Really, this was an absurd hope, but I grew up in the 60's and the 70's when the CIA had a certain aura of competent deviousness.  Intellectually, I disabused myself of this mythology years ago, but its remnants must have still been lurking around my brain.

For others who might be harboring such vague hopes of secret master spy plans, there is this:

Even a massive military assault on Iran is unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran and its state system, according to a classified assessment produced by the US intelligence community shortly before the US and Israel launched their current 'shock and awe-style' military campaign on Tehran. The Washington Post first reported it, perhaps based on some kind of leak or briefing by an anonymous intelligence official, and calls it—

a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials sayhas "only just begun."

The report, compiled by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) roughly a week before the war began, concluded that Iran's political system is structured to survive even major leadership losses, The Washington Post reports. However, this should really come as no surprise to anyone awake and observant throughout the past two plus decades of America's 'nation building' efforts in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. ...

The intelligence report also poured cold water on the idea that Iran's opposition could quickly fill any power vacuum. US intelligence analysts assessed that the country's fragmented opposition movements remain too divided to seize control, regardless of whether Washington pursued limited strikes against leadership targets or a broader assault on state institutions.

Equally unlikely, according to current and former US officials familiar with the analysis, is the prospect of a spontaneous nationwide uprising. We could speculate that this possibility may have had a chance of some degree of success within the opening one or two days of the mass US-Israel bombing campaign, but it clearly didn't materialize.

I will observe that no such promised revolution has occurred so far after the Maduro snatch.  You can almost visualize the Administration look of confusion when the revolutions they were convinced would magically appear did not occur.  Sort of like the look on the coyote's face when some trap he has created fails to work.

Postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.

The US is really good at getting rid of leaders like this, and if anything is getting better.  I won't go further back than my lifetime, but the Diem coup (and execution) in South Vietnam, the lukewarm (at best) support for the Shah of Iran that contributed to his ouster, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion, Gaddafi in Libya, Maduro in Venezuela, Noriega in Panama -- the list goes on.  But in many or most of these cases, what followed the US-led decapitation was as bad or worse than what came before.  Vietnam - equally bad or worse.  Iran - worse.  Iraq - better but took a really long commitment.  Afghanistan - at least as bad or worse.  Venezuela - unknown but no immediate revolution as hoped.  Libya - much worse.  Panama - probably better.

We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated."  As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.

Even beyond the job of seeing Iran no longer acting as a leading agent of chaos, I would greatly love to see their people liberated.  Women in Iran who were just emerging into the 20th Century under the Shah's leadership have a chance to emerge from gender apartheid again, and I am 100% hoping to see this.  (I wrote a while back about the utter lunacy of US women on the Left consistently siding with hardcore Islam and ignoring the plight of women in these countries).

Unfortunately for my optimism, I said the exact same thing, almost word for word, when we invaded Iraq.  Iraq has since struggled to fulfill this promise, though to be fair a lot of the blame for that rests not on US failures or the Iraqis but on the ongoing efforts by Iran to subvert the country and keep it roiled in chaos.  But getting there took a HUGE US commitment of money and lives, way more than a pushbutton decapitation of the leadership.

A parting thought -- there is clearly an Iranian opposition.  We have seen them bravely marching in the streets (far braver than our anti-fascists here as they faced actual imprisonment and death for such protests against real fascists).  This is an honest question -- around whom does the Iranian opposition rally and organize?  As in many such authoritarian societies, only the authorities have organization.  So even decapitated, the military and former government theoretically have a huge head start in pulling things together under their control in the aftermath than an unorganized populace.  This is the same problem faced by many post-colonial governments.  It's not that their populace wanted a military dictatorship when the colonizer left or was thrown out, but in many cases the only organized and educated group in the country was the military which stepped into the vacuum.  I am not an expert on this but I have always assumed India escaped this fate because it had a relatively large, educated group of indigenous people trained in government and not in the military.

Postscript:  I continue to find it sort of hilarious that media that go out of their way not to deadname a transexual teen insist on describing Iran as part of the Arab world and their citizens as Arabs.  I can tell you with great confidence and many experiences that there is no way to piss off an Iranian faster than to call them an Arab.

First, a digression.  Anyone who is more than a casual user of Microsoft Word understands that there are fundamental bugs in the core of the program that have existed since almost the very first version and have never been fixed in almost 30 years.  Two that come immediately to mind are the difficulty in getting images to stay where you put them and the absolutely terrible structured outlining (eg section II-B-iv-2-a).  The former is so bad you can find a zillion memes on it.  The latter is so bad that Word Perfect still survives focused on lawyers who write a lot of documents with hierarchical bulleting.

Everyone knows these problems exist.  Presumably they are fixable with some amount of effort.  But they are not fixed.  Instead, release after new release in Word trumpets new niche functionality without ever focusing on the core functionality. I can't remember ever using a feature of Word that was added since 2005, and maybe earlier, but yet adding those new features is what consumes all the development time.

My fear is that AI companies are doing the same thing.  New features and capabilities of the major AI models are impressive.  But at their core, at least for researching and writing, they still have the critical, fatal flaw of hallucinations.  Almost every day we can watch some law firm get reprimanded by a judge for submitting briefs that include fake, made-up, hallucinated cases.

I don't care how capable and human sounding these ai models are, if they are inserting reputation-destroying hallucinations in a firm's output, or writing in an identifiable AI style, they are worse than useless.  And companies that say "Oh, we don't use AI" are fooling themselves because even the best and brightest kids that they are hiring have become habituated to using AI to finish research and writing assignments.  A young woman I know who manages case teams for one of the big strategic consultants (I won't give the name but think McKinsey, BCG, Baine, etc) says that a huge part of her job as engagement manager is to stop AI-generated slop with obvious errors and recognizable AI writing style from getting to the client.  Her case team keeps handing her things that at best are obviously AI prose and at worst contain errors.  Interestingly, she checks all this stuff not because she was assigned to do it, but because she grew up on the AI/non-AI temporal border and sees the risks.  I have a bet online where I believe one of these firms is going to be caught up in a public scandal and lawsuit in 2026 for turning in ai-generated client presentations while billing that client 7 figures a month (imagine the explosion when a CEO finds out they were paying $1 million a month for the output of a few ChatGPT prompts).

The problem is actually bad enough that I briefly considered starting a new firm whose sole job was to independently review, fact-check, and edit all of a firm's output to help them identify hallucinations and AI tells.  You could probably go hire 100 of the older generation of Washington Post layoffs right now who have actual reporting, editing, and fact checking experience (avoid the younger ones who grew up in the journalism as advocacy era).  Go out and sell your services to law firms and consultants and such.  Gotta be a business there.  Right now I am too newly retired to pursue it but I will leave the idea to you guys.  You're welcome.

Obviously, nothing about what I describe above sounds like the employment apocalypse everyone is expecting.  You are simply not going to see the promised productivity gains until AI cleans up its house and in my mind that would include transparency about hallucinations -- what are the rates, what have they done to fix them in this version, are the rates going down, etc.

The incident that set me to thinking started at a gorgeous winery called Bond, part of the Harlan family series of vineyards.  I had never heard of Bond or Harlan, which generated approximately the same reaction from wine-lovers as, say, telling my daughter I can't name any Taylor Swift songs.  Anyway, we had a tasting there, which I understand was something of a coup in in itself.  At the tasting we tried 5 different cabernets from 5 different parts of the valley.  It was actually cool, they had a jar of the soil each wine's grape was grown in next to the bottles and there were very dramatic differences.  I found this infinitely more enlightening than being told the word "terroir" over and over.

They did a couple of things that I have come to learn make for the best high-end vineyard tasting experience.  First, the whole thing was quiet and private for just our group.  And secondly, in addition to opening up all their current vintage wines (all cabernet sauvignon) for tasting, they pulled a few 2013 versions of the same wine from the library -- "library" being wine-speak for inventory of older stuff.  2013 was apparently a very good year for them and this was by far the oldest stuff we had been offered anywhere.

I had always been told that you can't drink cabs right away.  They have to age in the bottle for 10 or 15 or more years to really be their best.  I had never experienced that for myself but drinking the 2013 version next to the 2023 version was eye-opening to me.  TL;DR it makes a big difference that even I could readily taste.

By the way, if you have any scientific bent, good luck asking any of these tasting room types what -- chemically -- happens in the aging process once in the bottle.  I am more used to bourbons that really do not continue to age once they are out of the barrel and into glass bottles (aging for bourbons requires molecular exchange with the wood in addition to evaporation from porous barrels and even changes to the weather).  So I was curious how wines age in the bottle.  But I asked wine folks about what happens in the bottle -- do long chain molecules break down, do molecules combine, do some chemicals vaporize and leave solution -- and all I could ever get was new-agey stuff about ... something or other.  Something happens to the tannins -- I could probably look it up.

But this is where I hit my conceptual wall I am still struggling with.  To understand this you need to know that the current vintage bottles of cab at this winery go for $800 a bottle -- that is for the 2023 version.  The problem is that I don't really buy $800 bottles of wine.  I don't actually buy $800 bottles of bourbon (see footnote below).  But I knew that people fight to get even a few bottles on allocation from this winery at this price.  So I thought about buying something because a) it was really a lovely tasting and buying a bottle or two seemed good manners and b) it might be fun to have a special bottle tucked away for a special occasion, maybe for the birth of our first grandchild or the night before I get put up against the wall come the revolution.

Outside the tasting, though, I searched on my phone for the 2013 Bond Pluribus we had tried.  I learned that this was considered a very good wine and scored a 100 from wine critic Robert Parker, which is apparently a good thing.  This very highly regarded and more fully aged 2013 vintage was going for $600 in several places. $600 aged 10 years vs $800 new -- I was confused.

My wine friends did not even blink when I said this.  Their reaction was "well, that wine was probably originally sold for $200 and $600 is a pretty big markup."  But that makes zero sense to me -- the original sales price should be irrelevant.  The 2013 is known to be one of their very best years and likely a better year than 2023.  But more importantly it had already been aged for 10 years in the bottle.  By any possible wine drinker metric, the 2013 had way more value than the 2023.  We all agreed the 2013 tasted way better, at least today, than the 2023.  But it was $200 cheaper.  Another way to think about that is that if I have to store the 2023 for at least 10 years for it to really be drinkable, that means the future value at 8% discount rate of my $800 I pay today is $1,727 in 10 years.  Why buy a young bottle today if I can buy an aged bottle from a really good vintage for cheaper?

I had a professor at HBS who taught investing -- I am sorry, I have forgotten his name but he was quasi-famous.  He would put crazy arbitrage opportunities on the board, and we would all argue about why they existed and how money could be made from them.  He would end all such discussions with the same phrase, "either this is a real opportunity or there is something you don't understand."  I am willing to believe there is something I don't understand and am open to commenters educating me.  I can think of a few possible explanations:

1. The online offer is counterfeit, like a fake Hermes bag  (I don't think so, I ended up ordering a bottle from a very reputable store and it appears quite real).
2. People don't trust the provenance of wine sold by third parties -- what if it has not been stored well?  Maybe they left it in a hot car trunk for a month?
3. People are buying lottery tickets -- just as a Pokémon card collector might buy a huge box of unopened card packs hoping to score a super-rare card, perhaps people are willing to pay more for wines at great vineyards in hopes that one will be that wine or vintage people talk about for decades.
4. With bourbon, people pay a premium to put together collections of all the different runs of a particular brand.  Do people do this in wine, try to collect all the years of a certain label?
5. Perhaps wine people are the ultimate marshmallow test kings, actually expressing a preference for 10-years deferred gratification.
6. Maybe it gives wine people an excuse to keep buying wine because none of what they already own is ready to drink yet

Footnote on Bourbon:

I have various types of bourbon tucked away all around my house, but I don't think I have ever paid $800 for anything.  And it is certainly possible to do so.  The most famous, the 23-year Pappy Van Winkle usually goes for $4000-$5000 a bottle on the secondary market. I saw a special bottle of Eagle Rare going for $10,000 a 2-ounce pour in a Nashville bar.  Woof.

I have been lucky enough to try Pappy and other very rare bourbons on someone else's dime.  And my general conclusion is that they are not worth it.  My wife and I did a very special trip to Buffalo Trace several years ago and somehow scored a tour and tasting from the CEO of Sazerac.  So even my wife, who hates bourbon, knows that Pappy and Weller start out in the same barrel.   I signed a Pappy/Weller barrel that my wife hammered the cork into -- it should be available for my funeral.  Anyway, the main difference is Pappy stays in the barrel longer -- which is NOT always a good thing in bourbon IMO -- and it has a higher proof, about 20 points higher on ABV proof (10 points higher on ABV),

So my wife ran a blind test last weekend with a friend and I between Weller 12 and Pappy (18?)  Anyway, my friend could not tell the difference and I could tell only because I knew Pappy had a higher ABV and I could taste the burn from the greater alcohol content.  Had we diluted the Pappy down to Weller level, not sure I could tell the difference.

I find almost any bourbon quite drinkable.  If you like your Angel's Envy or Woodford or Knob Creek or Makers Mark -- great, and I am more than happy to share them with you.  If you want a recommendation, however, here are my go-to's:

• Everyday bourbon, $55 at Total Wine -- Colonel EH Taylor Small Batch.  Seriously if you told me that this was the only one I could drink the rest of my life, I would be fine
• Pricier bourbon, $150-ish on secondary market -- Weller 12.  Probably my favorite of all bourbons and much more affordable recently (several years ago it was going for $400)

Special variations of these, like the EH Taylor Single Barrel and the Weller CYPB are great and fun to compare to the base models.  If you like these, you will probably like the other Buffalo Trace offerings like Eagle Rare and Blanton's as well.  Blanton's definitely has the best bottle, looks great on the shelf, and everyone loves the little horse.  If you are in a bar and see a nearly empty bottle of Blanton's, finishing it off in any good bar should score you the horse.

From these selections you can guess I hang out a lot in the upper left right of this map but I still enjoy things all over the spectrum.

Note:  Watch for a podcast coming out soon.  I am working on an outline I have tentatively called "the birth and death of a small business" covering issues across the range of small business life.

Unfortunately there is a growing populist theory that the Supreme Court's job is not to strictly follow the law but to act as a sort of legislature of last resort, to impose new law when Congress is deadlocked on an issue or to override "Bad" law, with "bad" defined based on the speaker's preferences.

While this theory has mainly been propounded by the Progressive Left, it increasingly is used by whatever party that occupies the White House to expand the power of the President vs other branches of government.  Depending on your party, it is either totally legal for the President to unilaterally cancel all student loans but illegal to unilaterally create new tariffs -- or vice versa.  Unfortunately, even the Supreme Court Justices themselves seem susceptible to this. To their credit only Barrett, Gorsuch, and Roberts were on the same side of both cases in the Supreme Court.  All the six other justices switched sides -- I am sure entirely coincidently -- siding with the President in each case that most closely matched their party affiliation against the President that did not.

One would think, given how many times Trump has won of late at the Supreme Court, that he would try to reinforce their legitimacy.  Sure he has lost some, but after all, if it were not for the Supreme Court overruling any number of lower court challenges and injunctions against him, most of his agenda would be totally stalled.

But no, Trump cannot help himself and acts like a spoiled child whenever he loses even the smallest battle.  His response to the Supreme Court tariff decision included this, via Reason:

"The Supreme Court's ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I'm ashamed of certain members of the Court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what's right for our country," Trump told reporters on Friday. Those "certain members," it became clear, were Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who had the temerity to vote against Trump even though he appointed them to the Court.

Here is Trump reinforcing the heart of the growing misconception about the role of the Supreme Court.  Their job is NOT to do what is right for our country.  Their job is to judge cases against the standard of the law.  The law used as a yardstick may be awesome or it may be deeply flawed, but it is not the Supreme Court's job in that case to fix it.  Of course, Trump cannot stop himself from ridiculous name-calling, even of (or especially of) his potential allies:

"The Supreme Court's ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I'm ashamed of certain members of the Court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what's right for our country," Trump told reporters on Friday. Those "certain members," it became clear, were Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who had the temerity to vote against Trump even though he appointed them to the Court.

Apparently he believes the justices ruled against him because:

" Gorsuch and Barrett "may think they're being politically correct," he averred, but "they're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution." He suggested they were "swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think."

Although the Americans who oppose Trump's agenda represent "a small movement," he said, they are "obnoxious, ignorant and loud," and "I think certain justices are afraid of that. They don't want to do the right thing. They're afraid of it."

Jacob Sullum argues that for Trump, it is all about loyalty and nothing else:

Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh did not agree with this particular application of the major questions doctrine. In Trump's view, that shows "their strength and wisdom and love of our country." By contrast, Gorsuch and Barrett (and presumably Roberts too) turned out to be "very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution."

Those assessments have nothing to do with the merits of the justices' legal reasoning. They hinge entirely on whether the justices ultimately took Trump's side. Because Trump equates love of country with love of him, he sees any ruling against him as "unpatriotic." And because he recognizes no distinction between respecting the law and respecting him, he thinks justices are "disloyal to our Constitution" when they disagree with him.

I will not go back into my arguments about why tariffs were both a bad idea and illegally imposed.  That is all here.  I do have a couple of additional thoughts though:

1. It is absurd to call this decision unpatriotic.  At some level, legal decisions should always be neutral and have little to do with patriotic feelings -- patriotism is for Congress and Presidents.  But ironically, even given that, this is perhaps the most patriotic decision by the Supreme Court in recent memory.  A key part of the freaking Declaration of Independence is about the arbitrary imposition of tariffs.  Remember the Boston Tea Party?  "[the King] has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:...For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world [and] For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent."  How can there be anything more patriotic than restoring the original intent of the Declaration of Independence.  Basically, the Supreme Court just threw Trump's tea in the water.  God bless America.
2. Trump had every opportunity to impose tariffs through an entirely Constitutional avenue, ie via Congress.  He did not even try.  I am not sure it even occurred to Mr. "art of the deal" to try.  And this is one issue (it pains me to admit) where there might have been the possibility of bipartisan agreement -- after all, Democrats have been the main supporters of tariffs over the last several decades.  Bernie Sanders in particular is a huge tariff hawk.  Of course instead Trump as taken the approach of mocking the Congress, even to the extent that we saw the Attorney General using childish insults against the ranking minority member of the her own key oversight committee in Congress.
3. Congressional gridlock on national issues that are narrowly split is a feature, not a bug.  Jamming through radical agendas based on a 51-49 popular vote or legislative body advantage can be tremendously damaging -- just look at Minnesota where the Progressive Left has slammed through a quite radical agenda based on a one vote margin in their legislative chamber.  There is too much impatience on this stuff -- eventually issues ripen and there tends to be a preference cascade in one direction or the other and progress is made in the legislature.   End-running this process via the Executive or even worse the Supreme Court is guaranteed to make things worse.
4. Kudos to Gorsuch, who I have not always agreed with, but with whom I am 100% on board with on this statement from the decision:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

This is exactly the sort of wedge strategy that our public and private control freaks use to normalize dystopian systems and technologies.  You don't sell surveillance out of the gate with a system that tracks down a person in the neighborhood behind on taxes or child support.  No, you sell it as a system to find that adorable lost dog (notice not even generic pets or certainly not cats because dogs are the new children for this generation**).  They can fight all the backlash by saying, "Oh come on, who can be against finding lost dogs?"  Then, months or years later, the terms and conditions have morphed and broader search capabilities are enabled without the user even knowing (I own a Ring doorbell and I guarantee I never knew this feature was turned on by default or even existed). When it really gets scary, they are not even going to tell you about it.

I do not believe this is just a marketing mistake -- Ring appears to have adopted neighborhood surveillance as their core business model.  I have had a Ring doorbell for years and in its basic form of sending doorbell chimes to your phone and allowing you to see who is at the door and even talk to them remotely, it is a nice product.   I have always liked it.  But over the years I have noticed Amazon/Ring slowly morphing the app from just a doorbell / security tool into a neighborhood surveillance network.  If you have the app, you can see that most of the functionality is now about messaging and notifications shared around the neighborhood, generally dominated by local Karen's putting up panicky posts about someone they saw they thought was creepy.  In the main menu of the app, the very first option after a link to the dashboard is called "neighbors."  This is the neighborhood watch group on steroids.

As a libertarian, what do I have against private neighborhood voluntary surveillance networks?  Nothing, but this is neither voluntary nor private.  As for voluntary, this functionality was added on an opt-out basis with zero notification, at least until this commercial came out.  But what about privacy?

Well, I spent more time in the app yesterday than I probably had cumulatively over 5+ years.  The first thing I did was turn off this advertised feature.  From the main menu (the three bars in the upper left) you need to choose control center (not settings) and then scroll way down to "search party" (that is what they call it, to evoke maybe a bunch of guys with St Bernards looking for a lost hiker) and turn it off.

So while I was in the app I started trying to see if there was a way to block Amazon from sharing all this with the government or other third parties.  There is an intriguing option in the control center labelled public safety which says it controls public safety agency notification settings -- maybe one can block sharing with the government?  Nope.  Turns out this option is just to change what police and other agencies can post to your neighborhood feed.

In the same control center there is a privacy tab.  I clicked on that, but there are no settings.  Only a promise to be really really nice  and make our privacy their highest priority but no specific commitments on data privacy.  Also note the use of "neighbors" over and over.  It is as if they are trying to establish some right to collective privacy (whatever the f*ck that is) instead of individual privacy.

But it does say that I am in complete control so maybe there is a data sharing option somewhere else.  Further down we finally get to the "data management" option.  It says "Request a copy of your data, manage third-part access, or delete your data."  There we go!  Here is the screen you get:

This is the whole screen. Notice anything?  As promised, you can download your personal data, I guess just to see what the CIA is looking at.  You can delete your data, at the cost of bricking your products.  But there is no actual option to manage 3rd party data access.  It is promised in the privacy statement, it is promised in the menu header, but it does not exist.  After an hour on their site and in the app, I still don't know who has access to my doorbell camera image.

**footnote: The other day in Orange County CA I was doing my 4 mile walk through some neighborhoods and I passed 4 young (at least relative to me) women pushing strollers.  When I looked, all 4 strollers had dogs in them, not children.  Some time ago someone said (sorry I can't give credit, can't remember) "dogs are the new children, plants are the new dogs."  I didn't really understand that until recently but I believe it.  I can't remember an airline flight I have been on that had more babies in the cabin than dogs.

Before getting into it, a bit of history. 

In my lifetime, IMO the country has never allowed enough legal immigration.  The reasons are complicated but I used to say simplistically that Republicans wanted immigrants to work but not vote (appreciating their economic contribution but fearful of their political impact) while Democrats wanted immigrants to vote but not work (assuming the immigrants would support Democrats but bowing to pressure from unions fearful of employment and wage competition from immigrants).  Bernie Sanders, who is as Left as they come, was opposed immigration for years for exactly these wage competition concerns.

The problem was that the legal immigration level was really too low to support our economic growth, and thus there were always opportunities and relative prosperity for immigrants even when they did not enter legally.   From time to time Congress would be forced to act, generally giving amnesties every so often to immigrants already here and fairly well integrated into the economy.  Immigrants from certain countries were restricted (sometimes for bad reasons, but sometimes for good reasons (eg immigrants from low-trust societies that had dominant clan or tribal relationships -- think Sicily in the early 1900s).  And a good number of immigrants were rejected or deported, often for criminal ties and it is useful to note that until 10 years ago there was pretty solid bipartisan support for doing so.

Beyond the ideological and policy changes over the last 10 years I will describe below, a couple of other changes have been happening that make the immigration problem worse.  First, Presidents have largely given up on the hard work of taking policy choices to Congress and now manage issues like immigration through Presidential decree.  In this environment no engagement with the other side is necessary, which is entirely against the original design of our country.  People get frustrated that Congress does not move fast enough on contentious issues, but in fact that was never the intention.  If the country is divided 51-49 on some issue and the Congress is divided 51-49 and the President was elected 51-49, it should not be possible to stampede an extreme solution to the issue through executive action, but that is the growing approach we have seen over 20 years (at least).

The second changing factor is one of polarization.  The country has any number of times been severely polarized around certain issues, but seldom has it been polarized around ALL issues.  This is largely a result, in my observation, of the knee-jerk partisan behavior we see today.  For example, I wrote the other day that I don't think there is any way to reasonably explain the Left's embrace of Islam, which in its current manifestation tends to be hostile to many of the Left's other values such as secularity, empowerment of women, and sexual tolerance, except as a tit for tat opposition to Conservative post-9/11 criticisms of Islam.  So when one side says that we need less immigration, the other side says we want to take immigration to infinity, and the other side then says we want it negative.

A pox on Republicans, and in particular Trump.

If I had to teach American history thematically, rather than chronologically, one of the top five themes that made the US the nation it is today has to be immigration.  It is impossible to understate the net positive impact of immigration in our history, both in aggregate as well as the many great individuals.  And for our growth and greatness to continue, we need more immigration.  Every economist I have seen present over the last several years (including to such crazy left-wing groups like the board of the California Chamber of Commerce) has said that the economic growth rates we have experienced in the past and wish to see in the future are impossible without substantial increased immigration (I know there is some argument that reduced immigration will lead to re-entry of US citizens into the workforce, which will certainly happen in some small way but not enough to sustain growth and besides, the exit of citizens from the workforce likely has more to do with entitlements than immigration).  Remember that fertility levels in the US have fallen well below replacement levels, which means our native population will begin to shrink with the passing of us baby boomers.

And this is not even to consider the desire we should have to continue to import the best and most talented people into our country.  For decades, other countries have lamented their "brain drain" to the United States as being such an obvious advantage to the US.  Their best and brightest would take a job in the US and never come back.  Their brightest kids would go to US colleges and come to love the country so much they wanted to stay.  It is hard to come up with any parallel case in modern history -- we have lots of examples of talented people running away from certain countries, but I can think of only one where so many talented people ran towards a country.  And insanely, Trump wants to end that because some small percentage are vocal and irritating.   His plan to fight China is to keep their students out of the country.  My plan to fight China would be to take 100,000 of their top kids into our universities every year and offer automatic green cards to the top half of these on graduation.  Skim a million of their best youth off over a generation.

Perhaps driven by years of his private zero-sum deal-making (e.g either the lenders retain more out of bankruptcy or Trump does), Trump brings a really harmful zero-sum thinking to both trade policy and immigration law.  He sees each new immigrant as taking a job from a US citizen, just as he sees each import as reducing US output by the same amount.  This is incredibly narrow thinking that is not born out in theory or in 200 years of practice.  New people and sources of supply allow the US to shift people and capital to more productive pursuits, while accessing the whole world of talent via immigration and trade spurs new ideas and technologies.  This zero-sum thinking is ironic to see in a Republican, because traditionally most Progressive-Left-Marxist economics are founded on zero-sum thinking.  Specifically, trade protectionism and immigration restrictions as a means to protect US jobs has always been the Left's policy position, yet another reason I find Trump to be more Left than Right in much of his economic policy.

Whatever the background, Trump and his MAGA followers cheered the news in 2025 that the US had achieved negative net immigration, a policy I consider entirely equivalent to net-zero climate policy and just as destructive to economic growth.  Traditional Conservatives may try to argue that, well, he is only fixing the worst features of Biden-era immigration policy. But in fact he goes much further than this, blaming immigration of all sorts as a net harm and infecting his followers with an unhealthy mythology about the evils of immigration.  Worse, the over-wrought language about immigration, even calling it an invasion, is being used to justify extreme enforcement tactics up to and including the use of the military for regular policing, something that has always been an anathema in this country.  The tactics have become provocative and dangerous --perhaps even purposefully so -- and Trump really hit a new low by cutting a deal to send the deportees he liked the least to the horrible prisons of El Salvador, which I once called Trump's Constitution-free zone.  Precedents last forever, and frankly I don't care how bad a criminal immigrant is, nothing justifies escalating enforcement to such terrible levels.

A pox on Democrats, and particularly Progressives.

Had the Left set out in 2020 to do everything they could to turn the central third of the political spectrum against immigration, they could not have done a better job.  They actively encouraged people to pour through the deserts of Mexico creating a series of humanitarian crises while at the same time overwhelming the country's ability to humanely receive and integrate them.  They tossed out historic vetting of immigrants with problematic backgrounds.  In the midst of a housing crisis in many cities, they took over whole hotels and housing projects and filled them with these recently arrived immigrants, handing them taxpayer money to live on (necessary because while blue cities tolerated or encouraged their presence, they did not allow them to work).  If you wanted to try to piss off the middle band of Americans who are not hard-core Left or Right, one couldn't do much better than the picture of unvetted immigrants who are effectively exempted from current immigration law living in government funded housing (that many Americans were struggling to afford) and receiving generous government assistance.

And then there is the issue of criminality.  Contrary to mythology on the Right, neither immigrants in general nor illegal immigrants in particular have historically (at least prior to 2020 and maybe still) had higher crime rates than native born Americans.  In fact, much of the data I have seen tends to show them committing fewer crimes.  This does not, by the way, come as a surprise to me from living in Arizona.  These folks were coming here to work and seek prosperity, and nothing would get them tossed out of the American dream faster than encountering the law.  Years ago, I once only slightly tongue in cheek observed that the best way to spot an illegal immigrant in Phoenix was to find the only car actually driving the speed limit.

There was a pretty bipartisan left-right consensus that -- even if we all disagree on the correct level of immigration -- immigrants without permanent residency that commit crimes get sent back via a fairly speedy process.   This is the deal with Joe Sixpack, who is skeptical of immigration but largely accepts it as long as the criminals are stopped at the gates or sent home.  But this consensus got interrupted by the sanctuary city movement.

I will admit that at first, the sanctuary city idea sounded OK to me.  For years I used to rail at our former Sheriff Joe Arpaio (lol just search this site for his name) who used to do crazy stuff like descend on a local business, zip-tie everyone with brown skin, and release them only when some panicked family member brought proof of their legal residency.  Having seen my city actively harassing peaceful, productive people who were in violation of immigration laws (only), I thought at first that sanctuary city meant that the city would allow their illegal immigrants to live in peace.

But it turns out this was not exactly what sanctuary city means in practice.  Phoenix was something of an outlier on this and most cities never had their police actively searching out immigration violations among peaceful, law-abiding residents.  The only time city police really got involved with immigration was when they arrested someone for a crime (eg robbery or assault) and it turned out the person was not a legal immigrant.  Thus the main actual impact of sanctuary city status is that the city does not turn over criminals for deportation, breaking the old deal with Joe Sixpack.  And it has had the additional effect that every high profile, make-the-national-news story about the Left fighting a deportation in the streets or in the courts usually involves a criminal for whom few in the middle are going to have sympathy.  My hard-working and friendly yard guy was deported 9 months ago without a peep of support, but the Left is seen on the news rallying for Venezuelan gang leaders.  The optics are terrible.

Some suggestions (none of which is likely to happen)

• In the short term, back off in Minneapolis.  It is dangerous there and both sides are to blame for being purposely provocative, though I must admit that Waltz and the rest of the Minnesota government has done what I thought was impossible -- they are being even more outrageous than Trump, purposefully painting targets on law enforcement officers and encouraging their citizens to get into dangerous confrontations.  The Feds are going to have to make the first move to de-escalate -- F*ck saving face, and its only like 1% of the country anyway.  Even Patton had to back off and try again later a few times.
• In the short term, I would love to see the Feds and sanctuary cities negotiating local agreements to avoid the Minnesota chaos.  The Feds could agree that if the city cooperates on immigrants who have committed crimes on an agreed list, they will not take enforcement actions against others in the city.  In other words, the Feds agree that if the city will hand over their violent and repeat offenders, the Feds will leave the day laborers at the Home Depot alone.  Then if the city still objects, the Feds can publicly proclaim that they only wanted to deport criminals and the city wanted to keep them.  The PR battle they are losing now could go the other way.
• Longer-term, Congress has to act.  Yes, given that the Senate will remain close to 50-50 for years to come, some sort of compromise will have to happen but this is what is supposed to happen on issues where the citizenry is equally divided.   My guess is that in such a compromise Republicans will have to accept some sort of amnesty and higher immigration limits while Democrats would have to accept greater enforcement activity, more vetting, limits on certain government assistance to immigrants and perhaps more voter ID requirements.  I know this is possible because similar deals have happened in the past.  I am not optimistic as the moderates in the Senate like Krysten Sinema and Jeff Flake have all been driven out and such a compromise can only come with Presidential leadership and its not going to happen here.  More than wanting their stuff, partisans will demand the other guys don't get their stuff.  I would see the Right screaming against anything with amnesty regardless of what they get in return and the Left screaming about voter ID.

Update:  about an hour after I hit publish, the Trump Administration began signaling that looks very close to the first two suggestions above.  We shall see, though this Administration tends to stick to a policy position about as long as a 5-year-old who has mainlined 3 Hershey Bars stays on task.

There are a lot of parts to his theory and he shares a good bit of data, but the theory boils down to certain psychological traits amplified via social media.  The article is worth a read -- I think it is firewalled but can be accessed with a free registration.

But, as I mentioned, it was also off-putting, for a couple of reasons.  First, I don't really like robbing individuals of their agency by talking about them in groups, and besides I know a number of young females who don't match these descriptions at all.

More importantly, though, the whole thing felt to me on first read like an ammunition dump for future ad hominem attacks -- eg we don't have to take what you say seriously because you are just another neurotic female.  And really, there is not much need for ad hominem attacks on Left anyway when you see gays for Gaza marching in the streets -- you know right away they are intellectually bankrupt without having to do a Meyers-Briggs on them.  Yes, I realize this somewhat puts me out of touch with the world. After all, the woke/Marxists causing chaos on the Left all absolutely argue via ad hominem attacks on the group (eg you are white/male/cis/American/Christian/Jewish so you are inherently evil and we don't have to respond to you).  As an aside, I always found it ironic that Progressives have so much vitriol for white supremacists when in fact white supremacists are the one other prominent group that shares the Progressive intersectional assumption that an induvial is defined first and foremost by their race and other hard-coded personal traits, rather than their beliefs, arguments, or actions.  The white supremacists share the same fundamental intersection assumption, they just root for a different team.

But I had occasion to think about this article again the other day thanks to the new Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani when he promised New Yorkers he would "replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

My first reaction was what the actual f*ck?  Who could have the benefit of learning from the 20th century and say any such thing?  Was this the warmth of Nazi book-burning bonfires, or of the Soviet Siberian Gulags, or maybe of the tropical Cambodian killing fields?  I and many other greeted this slogan as laugh-out-loud ridiculous.  Give me rugged individualism all the way.

But I had to think again.  This guy got elected out of nowhere, with a resume that included not much more than grad school struggle sessions, so let's assume he is a good marketer.  And then it hit me -- the "warmth of collectivism" is absolutely a precision-crafted slogan for the demographic described in the article above.  If we think of that article as political market research, and if it were correct, then this is exactly the slogan a politician would offer.  Here are a few selected bits from the piece:

Social incentives further amplify vulnerability. Women tend to have higher levels what psychologist call Agreeable. That is women are more likely than other demographic groups to be:

• more socially attuned,
• more sensitive to peer approval, and
• more likely to conform to perceived moral consensus within their networks.

Unlike Neuroticism, which declines with age, Agreebleness increases. In tightly connected social environments—especially digital ones—ideological alignment becomes a prerequisite for social belonging.

Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies offer a ready-made moral identity that signals compassion, awareness, and virtue. Adoption of that identity is rewarded socially, while deviation carries reputational risk. For individuals already sensitive to social threat, the cost of dissent can feel existential rather than merely intellectual.

further

Modern progressive ideology is articulated in terms that resonate strongly with traditionally feminine moral intuitions: care, safety, inclusion, protection, and emotional validation [ed-- the warmth of collectivism]. These values are not inventions of ideology; they reflect real differences in moral emphasis that have been documented across sexes. When an ideology elevates these values to absolute status and frames disagreement as harm, it becomes especially compelling to those already oriented toward preventing suffering and maintaining social harmony.

Taken together, these factors help explain why young white unmarried women are not merely participating in Post-Modern Left-of-Center movements but often occupying their emotional core.

He explains why this can still occur despite women being more empowered and materially secure than ever in history:

In a world where material constraints have loosened but meaning has thinned, vulnerability is no longer defined by poverty or exclusion. It is defined by exposure:

• exposure to threat narratives,
• social pressure, and
• moral systems that convert personal distress into political certainty.

This vulnerability does not predetermine radicalization, but it makes it far more likely when the surrounding environment consistently rewards emotional alignment over skepticism and moral intensity over restraint.

Those of us aware of the disaster that socialism always wrecks on populations see Mamdani selling an obviously failed prescription.  But looked at in the context above, it makes more sense that he is not selling policy, he is selling inclusion and belonging and approval and threat-protection -- essentially the same as a cult with -- come to think of it --the same mass death waiting somewhere at the end.