Donald Trump’s renewed talk of seizing Greenland—once dismissed as bluster—is now being taken seriously after the “gunboat diplomacy” in Venezuela. Because Greenland is part of Denmark, a NATO member, any U.S. attempt to annex or coerce it would amount to an attack on an ally and could effectively collapse NATO. European leaders are pushing back forcefully, framing the issue as a test of whether postwar norms, alliance commitments, and international law still restrain great-power ambition.(Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jonathan Lemire via The Atlantic)
‘If Trump understood what he was saying, he was violating all concepts of checks-and-balances. If he didn’t understand, he is incapacitated.
It’s bad enough for Trump to disrupt the entire world trading system, at his whim, with one-man decisions to raise and lower tariffs. (As the Supreme Court might eventually get around to recognizing.) What he announced today is one man (plus his enablers) violating the Constitution of 1787, the War Powers Act of 1973, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, all of which require a president to involve the Congress in war-and-peace decisions. …’ (James Fallows via James Fallows)
‘…(T)here’s lots of chest pounding and grand standing from various politicians and the big names have all issued statements which seem mostly upset that they weren’t notified ahead of time. There’s also a lot of people proclaiming this is illegal which is an almost laughable claim at this point because first of all, what is the basis for what is legal or isn’t?
The US only cites international law when it benefits, and ignores it (or outright rejects it) when they or their allies are implicated. If international law mattered to the US, Netanyahu wouldn’t be basking in the afterglow of his 5th US visit since Trump was reelected and ICC Judge Kimberly Prost would still be able to ask her Amazon Echo to turn on the livingroom lights.
Even federally the claim is a joke because thanks to 2001’s AUMF a president has an almost blank check to order strikes without telling anyone as long as they slap “terrorism” on the after the fact justification.
And this isn’t a left/right thing either, the 2001 joint resolution passed almost unanimously (only one vote against) and since then both D and R presidents have taken full advantage of it for any number of different actions.
…So if you see a politician saying this action is illegal check to see if they’ve called for the AUMF to be repealed or if they were in office then how they voted at the time. Because the sad fact is most US politicians are very much opposed to many policies when their opponents use them, but very much in favor of those same policies when they get to use them. …’ ( via SEAN BONNER)
‘In a landmark study, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WashU) have shown for the first time that stimulant medications mainly act on the brain’s reward and wakefulness centers, rather than on its attention circuitry. This upends traditional thought on how drugs like Adderall and Ritalin work.…’ (via New Atlas)
‘A massive global genetics study is reshaping how we understand mental illness—and why diagnoses so often pile up. By analyzing genetic data from more than six million people, researchers uncovered deep genetic connections across 14 psychiatric conditions, showing that many disorders share common biological roots. Instead of existing in isolation, these conditions fall into five overlapping families, helping explain why depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders so frequently occur together.…’ (via ScienceDaily)
Findings such as these resonate strongly with the stance of diagnostic skepticism that I have held throughout my career as a clinical and academic psychiatrist. Psychiatry has repeatedly taught us that its categories are provisional tools rather than natural kinds, and that our confidence in them often outpaces the solidity of the underlying science. The recurrent experience of patients accumulating diagnoses over time—sometimes within a single hospitalization, sometimes across decades—has always suggested that something more fundamental than discrete disease entities is at work.
Historically, this tension is not new. Psychiatric classification has oscillated for more than a century between lumping and splitting. At certain moments, the field has favored broad, integrative constructs—neurosis, psychosis, affective illness—emphasizing shared phenomenology and presumed common mechanisms. At other times, it has moved toward increasingly fine-grained distinctions, carving syndromes into narrower subtypes in the hope of diagnostic precision, prognostic clarity, and targeted treatment. Each swing has been accompanied by a sense that the current framework finally “gets it right,” only to be followed by revision as anomalies accumulate.
Large-scale genetic findings like these offer a compelling biological explanation for why neither extreme has ever fully succeeded. If multiple psychiatric syndromes share substantial genetic architecture, then comorbidity is not an artifact of poor interviewing or diagnostic sloppiness, but an expected consequence of overlapping vulnerability systems expressing themselves differently across development, context, and stress. The apparent neatness of our diagnostic manuals may therefore obscure a far messier underlying reality.
Importantly, this does not invalidate diagnosis itself, nor does it imply that all conditions should be collapsed into a single undifferentiated category. Lumping and splitting are not opposing dogmas so much as complementary lenses. Lumping has value when the goal is to understand shared mechanisms, reduce artificial boundaries, recognize common trajectories, and avoid reifying distinctions that lack biological or clinical robustness. Splitting, by contrast, becomes indispensable when precise phenomenology matters—when predicting course, tailoring treatment, communicating risk, or conducting focused research on well-defined clinical problems.
In practice, good psychiatry has always involved knowing when to do each. A clinician may need to lump in order to see the larger pattern of vulnerability, suffering, and adaptation in a patient’s life, while simultaneously splitting enough to recognize specific syndromes that carry distinct risks or treatment implications. The emerging genetic evidence does not demand allegiance to one approach over the other; rather, it reinforces the wisdom of holding our categories lightly, using them pragmatically, and remaining open to revision as our understanding deepens.
Seen this way, the enduring oscillation between lumping and splitting is not a failure of the field, but a reflection of the complexity of the phenomena it seeks to describe.
‘The shift in this scenario is from today’s highly polarized but still shared world — where groups interpret events differently — to a fractured reality in which the events themselves cannot be verified, origins cannot be traced, and no authoritative source can prove what is real. Instead of opposing political narratives and conspiracy theories, society enters a state of psychosocial freefall where AI creates a series of parallel realities. It will mark a transition not from disagreement to deeper disagreement, but from disagreement to the collapse of a shared reality altogether.…’ (via POLITICO)
‘By going around Congress, the president is showing contempt for the will of the public… The probable illegality of Trump’s actions does not foreclose the possibility that his approach will improve life for Venezuelans. Like too many world leaders, Maduro is a brutal thug, and opposition figures have good reason to insist he isn’t the country’s legitimate leader. I hope and pray his ouster yields peace and prosperity, not blood-soaked anarchy or years of grinding factional violence.…’ (Conor Friedersdorf via The Atlantic)
New York Times Editorial: Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise
‘If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse.…’ (via New York Times)
‘“Wow, she hates him more than I even imagined. They never look at each other. They never touch each other. I guess he didn’t pay her enough for the night.”…’ (Patrick Penrose via TVovermind)
‘Trump’s ego, Rob Dannenberg argues, is a vulnerability that Putin knows how to exploit —and Trump, the CIA veteran fears, is “incredibly naïve” where the Russian president is concerned.
Danneberg told the iPaper, “Putin looks at Trump and sees a weak guy, vain, with huge ego…. He’s being manipulated in the way that a good case officer like Putin would manipulate this guy. He’s not monogamous, he’s greedy, he’s fascinated by gold — all these are things that, if I were a case officer, I would be leveraging to get this guy to do what I want him to do. When that happens to align with Trump’s ambition to get a Nobel Peace Prize, so much the easier, right? You’re pushing on an open door.”…’ (Alex Henderson via Alternet.org)
