So has everyone seen this man vs. bear thing? It's all over reddit at least. The premise is that you ask a woman* if she'd rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear, and she says a bear, and everyone is supposed to shake our heads in recognition that man is more monstrous than bear.**

I'm hoping we can collectively help me determine what's so massively irritating about this question and set up? Like, it feels gigantically phony.
- Are these women really claiming that if they're on a street at night and they pass by a man, they feel more fear and adrenaline than if they were on a trail in the woods and they pass by a bear?
- Or do they think the context of "man in the woods" gives an ordinary man sufficient pretext to let his inner rapist out?
- Or are they so traumatized from this relentless stream of harassment that we can only consider this question hyperbolically, when the whole point is that we're supposedly answering it literally?

(The other possibility is that these women have all been trained on the innate peacefulness of bears, and they're confident in their ability to maintain eye contact/rear up to their full height/etc. But clearly "bear" is stand-in for "monster" and the gotcha bit is that man is the real monster, Dr. Frankenstein.)

*Or a father, about which he would prefer for his daughter.

** There was a much better one a few months ago, where you're supposed to ask your boyfriend*** how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, and the joke/twist is that a surprising number of men think about the Roman Empire daily, whereas you/the narrator never contemplate the Roman Empire at all.

*** Implicit in this is that you're a young woman in your 20s-30s with a boyfriend. Are you not?

NickS writes: I found this remarkable piece describing quite clearly the legal and diplomatic concerns involved in a case from the 1920s, and I'm curious what the lawyers here make of it. It concerns the I'm Alone a Canadian ship running liquor to the US during prohibition. It had successfully evaded capture multiple times until March 20 1920 when it was stopped by a Coast Guard cutter.

The coast guard asked them to surrender; they refused. The Coast Guard opened fire, and their cannon jammed. The ship began sailing away, the Coast Guard pursued until the morning of March 22nd when a second vessel arrived to assist. The rum-runner again refused to surrender and the second Coast Guard ship fired upon and sank them (resulting in one death).

The captain of the I'm Alone objected that the entire sequence of events had taken place outside US territorial waters, and they had no jurisdiction.

The article describes the case:

The appearance of the Canadian ambassador at the State Department five days after the sinking came as no surprise to department officials. The legal questions alone proved to be complex enough, but as the department scrambled to compose an answer to Ambassador Massey's inquiry, it appeared that even the facts of the case were debatable. For the United States to argue that the Wolcott's original order to the I'm Alone to heave to and be boarded was valid, the I'm Alone's position within treaty waters had to be firmly established. Original estimates and subsequent investigations performed by the Coast Guard fixed the original point of hailing at various places between 8.6 and 10.6 miles, but never farther than eleven miles out to sea. Moreover, U.S. forces assembled an impressive array of evidence, based on Coast Guard experience, building specifications, and testimony of her crew, proving that the unusual speed of the I'm Alone extended her one hour's sailing distance beyond the point at which she was originally spoken, indeed in some cases beyond the point at which the Canadian skipper claimed he was first hailed. Randell emphatically clung to the position that he had been safely outside treaty waters fourteen and a half to fifteen miles offshore. On the surface, there would seem to have been little comparison between the word of a confessed rum skipper and that of a United States Coast Guard officer, but there was one case--and proponents of the Canadian view cited it often--in which a Coast Guard officer, Sigard Johnson, had lied about the position at which he had seized the Coal Harbor, been court-martialed, and later sentenced for perjury.

One question, which understandably was not contested, was the issue of the vessel's activities at the time of sinking. Randell talked freely of his smuggling operations. ... Canada's distaste for basing her legal case on the activities of a smuggler was evident in her repeated condemnations of the I'm Alone's operations; she concentrated on the principle of sinking any vessel flying her flag on the open seas.

The legalities in the first test of the 1924 treaty proved to be complicated, but basically three laws would govern the interpretation of the I'm Alone case. To prevent smuggling and resulting loss of customs revenue, the U.S. domestic Tariff Act of 1922 permitted the United States to exercise certain authority within a twelve-mile offshore limit. One purpose of the act was to swell the coffers of the U.S. Treasury, a purpose clearly thwarted if the taxable cargo came to rest on the ocean floor. The attempt to impose a domestic statute internationally was undiplomatic at best, foolhardy at worst. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon apparently saw no incompatibility between U.S. jurisdiction twelve miles offshore and the internationally accepted freedom of the seas beyond three territorial miles. He either ignored or was unaware of occasions in the past when Great Britain, often fighting for her economic life, had asserted her domestic laws over all seafarers. On such occasions--notably before the War of 1812 and during World War I--the United States had protested vigorously the infringement of her international rights. Mellon's interpretation of an international incident according to domestic law was quickly supplanted by the views of State Department officials who were better versed in the intricacies of international relations and who were also fearful that Great Britain would turn Woodrow Wilson's World War I protest notes against them.

The second law upon which most of the I'm Alone case would turn was not a written statute, but the internationally recognized right of hot pursuit. In an effort to permit nations to protect their coastlines, this doctrine permitted a vessel of the threatened nation to pursue, overhaul, and seize an offending vessel in international waters provided that the chase began within the three-mile limit, that the pursuit was uninterrupted, and that the pursuing vessel kept the fleeing vessel constantly in sight. The third condition fulfilled the qualification of "hot" pursuit. As to the matter of continuous pursuit, it was expected that Canada would challenge the right of the Dexter to fire on the I'm Alone, since only the Wolcott had continuously pursued the smuggler.

For a long time the relationship of hot pursuit to the special conditions of the 1924 one hour's distance liquor enforcement treaty promised to be the crux of the controversy. Related to this question was the query raised by the Boston Herald and other dailies: does the right to search and seize at one point confer the right to do it at a much greater distance to which the vessel flees before being overhauled? Often unaware of the legal intricacies of violating imaginary boundary lines, the Coast Guard tended to view the question from a simple police point of view. . . .

Heebie's take: Guys. I'm having an extremely dumb morning filled with oversleeping teenagers, orthodontist appointments, recurrent strep, and lots of traffic. Left my lunch and my computer at home, and I'm feeling vaguely pleased that I was able to format all this on my phone. Maybe tomorrow will be less dumb.

Nick S. writes: Jonathan Katz's description of attending the White House Correspondents Dinner is amusing.

In short, he can't understand why he's invited; decides to show up, and has the opportunity to ask Biden a question and decides to press him on the war in Gaza. The answer is interesting and also doesn't reveal any new information.

The piece is a description of both how he happened to have the opportunity to ask his questions of
Biden directly, and also the clear fact that just being in the room does not imply any real power.

Heebie's take: It's quick and breezy, and there's video at the bottom of his questions to Biden.

Then he leaned forward, looking me dead in the eye with his intense pair of baby blues: "My point is this. I have made it very clear to the Israelis what they have to do in the near term. If they don't, what's going to happen."

"What's going to happen?" I asked.

"A lot," he replied.

I tried to follow up -- asking if the U.S. would cut off funding. But my brief interview was over.

But his avoidance of specifics spoke to the other side of that coin: the fact that there has been zero evidence of any serious consequences in the seven months of this ungodly war. So far the U.S. response to countless war crimes in Gaza has been to briefly threaten symbolic sanctions against individual Israeli units and officials, then reverse them immediately. And to allow a weakened ceasefire resolution to pass the U.N. Security Council, then pretend like the resolution doesn't count.

All the while, Biden -- personally annoyed or otherwise -- has kept the bombs and billions flowing.

Some visuals of what Tenochtitlan could have looked like in the 1500s.

I thought it was kinda cool! They didn't draw in all the axelotls, though. Sort of a grim commentary on how much of Mexico City was a lake.

I'm reading Dsquared's The Unaccountability Machine, and made it to page 39 before I stalled on a combination of disbelief and wondering what is wrong with the British. The book is relating the early career of cybernetics pioneer and management guru Stafford Beer in the British Army:

After the war, he was given a job as an army psychologist and put in charge of a unit of illiterate soldiers who had been diagnosed as having 'psychopathological personalities'.

A unit of what? This seems radically, but radically, underexplained. I'm not saying there's no possible way for it to make sense, but "let's put all the mentally ill illiterates in the same unit," is really not, to me, an obviously sensible decision to make in the name of military efficiency. Whatever Beer did with them, however, it does seem to have led to people thinking well of him.

Henry Farrell also has a new book, The Underground Empire, on how US physical and organizational control over the global flow of information, particularly financial information, has developed into a tool of US power. This one, I managed to read the whole thing without the same sort of bafflement. While it's the kind of topic that I usually feel like I should be paying attention to but can't quite make myself do it, it was clear and engaging enough that it was genuinely helpful in mentally organizing all sorts of things I'd known about the news of the last couple of decades but hadn't really made sense of.