American troops in Syria are violating international law by being there. They should come home. nytimes.com/2023/03/24/us/… If you condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law (as I did), and you support the continued presence of US troops in Syria (a violation of international law, since the Syrian government doesn't want them there), you have some explaining to do.

My theory: Trump's docs are telling the truth about his mild symptoms (though one may have lied about date of treatment or diagnosis) and Mark Meadows is exaggerating symptoms ("very concerning") to make Trump's recovery a more dramatic and heroic story. Some people (e.g. my wife) think Trump had a kind of panic attack at White House (about his covid), got oxygen for that, and insisted on going to hospital. That could explain why his doc was evasive about whether he'd had oxygen. And why docs reported only mild symptoms.

Since this July tweet ridiculing people who doubted that Biden had the race locked up, Biden's edge in RCP Battleground States average has dropped from 6.2 to 3.0.

https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1287414055565701121

I repeat what I tweeted in reply to Derek's tweet at the time:

https://twitter.com/robertwrighter/status/1287418544909701125

Am I the only who thinks too many of the initiatives emerging from the George Floyd moment are either modest corporate concessions, symbolic moves of unclear value, or non-viable policy proposals? Anyway, that’s what I just wrote about in @NonzeroNews. nonzero.org/post/george-fl… In particular, in this piece on how addressing economic injustice can help address racial injustice-- nonzero.org/post/floyd-rac… --I examine this challenge:

In the latest @NonzeroNews, I argue that the agenda emerging from the George Floyd protests should expand to encompass more Bernie-esque policies, because racial justice and economic justice are so tightly intertwined. nonzero.org/post/floyd-rac… Also, there’s the pragmatic reality that the George Floyd moment is an opportunity to demand more in the way of taxing the rich and directing resources toward the poor, helping blacks disproportionately as well as many whites. Why not seize it?

Right now on Fox Tucker Carlson is implicitly belittling Trump for not having shown he can protect America: "People will not forgive weakness." I've got a bad feeling about where this is heading. Carlson preceded this with a narrated mashup of looting/violence, etc. He's inflaming Trump's base while basically telling Trump he better hurry up and respond to the inflammation.

WHO's early performance wasn't perfect--as I wrote in this @NonzeroNews piece: nonzero.org/post/did-who-f… --but WHO declared a global emergency Jan 30 & it took Trump 6 more weeks to put 2 and 2 together and declare a national emergency. I'm pretty sure WHO wasn't the main problem. And as for the charge that WHO was influenced by China: Well, as I also noted in that piece-- nonzero.org/post/did-who-f… --the problem of powerful nations corrupting the mission of international bodies is a real one, and the US has been guilty at least as often as China:

Good to see that these curves seem to have gotten at least a little less steep over the past week or so. And I think the social distancing has been going on long enough in both countries for that to be part of the explanation. Here is the same data except with the bumps smoothed out via 3-day-averaging. Both graphs are from ourworldindata.org/coronavirus .

New covid hospitalizations in US dropped for the fourth day in a row, to 2,587. (starting 3/26: 3,995, 3,567, 3,011, 3,001, 2,587). There are lots of reasons to interpret these numbers cautiously. Still, this could well reflect the social distancing started a couple of weeks ago. One reason to interpret cautiously: As new hot spots--some in places that haven't practiced strict social distancing--grow, they could swamp progress being made in earlier hot spots. So US numbers could well rise even if social distancing has worked in early hot spots, e.g., NY.

Way too soon to get excited about this, but new covid hospitalizations dropped slightly in US yesterday (from 3,995 to 3,587) after steadily rising day after day. And now--around 2 weeks after serious social distancing--is when you'd hope this number would start leveling off. Reason to be cautious: previous day had surged, from 1,668 to 3,995 and so may have been misleadingly high. Likely the growth in testing had something to do with that; we won't get a clear picture until after more days of extensive testing, especially in NY area. Still...

Presumably Iran will eventually kill US personnel somewhere, yes. But it may proceed carefully in Iraq, working within the political system to evict US troops. Trump, by doing the strike on Iraqi soil, and killing a prominent Iraqi in the process, has made that much easier.

https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1213133437747511296

If more Americans appreciated this--that Iran is a rational actor, deftly pursuing national security interests as it sees them--we wouldn't be in this mess. The US stereotype of Iran as driven by religious fervor, or bent on headlong imperialism, has fostered stupid provocation.

Sorry, but I think this is a bit too simple. I argue in this week's Nonzero Newsletter ( nonzero.substack.com/p/nzn04-how-us… ) that the US foreign policy establishment broadly is responsible for the Syrian disaster--and shares at least some blame with Trump for this latest chapter.

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1183139104659300354

By this I don't *just* mean that the establishment's support of the Iraq War, Libya regime change, and proxy war in Syria all contributed to the slaughter, chaos, and mass refugee exodus that set the stage for Turkey’s lawless incursion.