What Are Letters Of Marque And Reprisal And How Could They Be Used To Weaken Drug Cartels?
2/ Letters of marque and reprisal are government-issued commissions that authorize private citizens (privateers) to perform acts that would otherwise be considered piracy, like attacking enemy ships during wartime
Privateers are rewarded with a cut of the loot they “bring home”
3/ Legal Basis in the U.S.
The U.S. Constitution authorizes these commissions in Article I, Section 8, giving Congress the power to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal”
While Congress hasn’t issued one in over a century, the authority to do so still exists
President Donald Trump is keeping his promise to eliminate government diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs by now banning the practice from the military.
Trump plans to sign two executive orders this week that will both eliminate DEI from the military and prohibit transgender people from the services, DailyMail.com confirmed.
He already signed an executive order on his first day in office last week reversing Joe Biden‘s 2021 directive allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
A new order will go even further and lay out new military standards regarding pronoun usage and gender identity.
It also directly bans transgender troops from serving in the U.S. military.
Trump has already taken several actions seeking to outlaw DEI initiatives in the federal government.
The practices require that certain protected groups – like minorities, women and those with disabilities – be prioritized for job placement.
The LA Fire Dept is a vivid example of how wrong and dangerous DEI policies are. Academia is another. The compass of the Western world is swinging all over the place. But it’s easy to correct. Just set your aim on reality. It should never be the government’s job to legally require us to associate with anyone (a lamentable lapse in the First Amendment), but to force us to work with incompetent hires is to endanger all of us while also causing social and intellectual standards to sink like a stone. Import the third world, become the third world. Promote the incompetent, expect disaster. ABN
Liberal media has been uninterested in investigating the couple involved in shooting dead a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Coventry, Vermont near the Canadian border on inauguration day. Why? Both in the duo are leftist trans militants. One of the deceased armed militants is a German believed to be in the country on an H-1B visa. The duo is allegedly connected to a trans terror cell.
Federal law enforcement had been surveilling German man Felix “Ophelia” Baukholt and Seattle @UW student Teresa “Milo” Youngblut (xe/xem/xyrs) after staff at a Lyndonville, Vt. motel reported seeing them with black tactical clothing, weapons and protective militia-style equipment.
When the duo was pulled over on Jan. 20, Youngblut allegedly shot dead Officer David Maland in a surprise attack. In the returning fire, Baukholt, who was also armed, was killed. Youngblut was injured and survived.
I spoke with Jessica Taylor @jessi_cata, a Berkeley, Calif. woman who had met Baukholt over the years. She confirmed that Baulkholt is trans.
DeepSeek, China’s new Ai model, is disrupting the entire world of artificial intelligence…in the blink of an eye.
If you don’t know…DeepSeek is an open sourced Ai program that anyone can use.
It’s the top app in all app stores today.
It’s free and the paid models are cheaper than competitors.
It’s also very powerful, matching or beating all the American competitors on all major benchmarks.
The reason this is significant – and the reason it’s crashing the financial markets this morning…is because they did this with OUT all the powerful US ‘hyperscalers’ or GPU Superconductors that the US has banned the export of to China.
They also don’t give the ridiculous valuations to this company like we do to our OpenAi and Meta, etc.
So China, against all our efforts and sanctions, created a cheaper, more efficient and more powerful Ai model by being creative and working around all our efforts to block their progress.
And from what I hear, DeepSeek is just the beginning. Many think it cracked AGI!
My sense is these statistics are roughly correct. They also bolster the Buddhist ethical position that compassion must be based on wisdom. Indeed, the greatest virtue in Buddhism is wisdom, not compassion. Buddhism counsels dispassion and calm reflection on all speech and behavior; I would add perception as well. An argument that appeals to emotion is not necessarily all bad. But one that uses emotion as mind-control is all bad. The wise often lose political debates because their positions are more complex, based on dispassionate analysis rather than single-minded emotion. Women have had many years in power now and the results are not good. This is probably due to greater emotionality among our dearly loved fair sex. Not sure where this will lead but it is always best to place your bets on reason and sound ethics above all else. Of course, emotion and compassion can and should be factors in any complex position, just not the preeminent, leading factors. ABN
To date, I, personally, have not seen anything particularly wise or interesting coming from Dugin. But since Ricardo posted this video, it is worth thinking about. A world of well-defined empires would resemble the 19th Century to some extent. I imagine each empire would have to be more responsive to its citizenry, while inter-empire politics would rely on 20th Century ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD). MAD is a semi-stable world order, a semi-stasis of KOBK global game theory. This state of affairs, assuming non-violent or low violence to get there, would probably be better than any form of one-world government, which would always be susceptible to overweening conformity, mind-control, totalitarian abuse of individuals. I fear the left much more than the right, based on historical precedents. I have not yet watched the Dugin video above but plan to. It may change my views on him or what I say here. Notice, I am not shilling for empire, I am simply saying what is obvious — that KOBK game theory is real with potentially horrific outcomes. Any decent stasis is better than mutual destruction of the whole world. ABN
American Buddhist Net 