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.

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.