The Trump regime broke the Law of War —Republicans need to be sure there are consequences

& Northwestern becomes the latest university to give in to blackmail

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Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Trump logic would have us shooting on sight those we suspect of being drug dealers

Killing suspected drug runners in the Caribbean by blowing their boats out of the water and then making sure any survivors of the attack are dead is a sickening, infamous contravention of our understanding of justice. Particularly when we are not at war. Particularly when the suspected drug runners pose no direct or immediate threat to Americans. Particularly when evidence that they are ferrying drugs to the United States is thin to non-existent.

The idea seems to be that these illegal drugs, if they make their way to our shores and into the mouths and arms of our citizens, will cause such harm that it justifies executions without trial of those in the supply chain. According to a CNN timeline, our military has killed 83 people in more than 20 such attacks since September.

The animating idea could easily be applied to suspected street-corner dope peddlers — why not just gun them down first and ask questions later? Sure, our laws prohibit summary executions. For now. But so does international law.

It’s worth noting parenthetically that the White House’s barbarous battle against drug traffickers did not apply to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was sentenced in 2024 to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute hundreds of tons of cocaine in the U.S. and then pardoned by President Donald Trump on Friday.

The Washington Post reported Friday that our military conducted a second strike on one of the destroyed boats once it was determined that some passengers had survived the attack, and were “clinging to the smoldering wreck.” The second strike — confirmed Monday by the White House — killed those survivors. That act was in direct contravention of regulations on page 206 of the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual, which prohibits conducting “hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors. … This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations.”

Page 236 of the manual addresses “Persons placed hors de combat,” employing a French phrase meaning “out of the battle.”

It is generally used as a term of art to mean persons who may not be made the object of attack because they are out of the fighting and who therefore must be treated humanely.

Such people “may not be made the object of attack” according to the manual, which specifically lists “persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck.

Amazingly, some members of the typically supine Republican Congressional majority have at last awakened to the very strong possibility that Trump’s goons are committing war crimes:

Both the House and the Senate have started inquiries into a reported second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September that killed the survivors of an initial strike. …

“The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in the statement.

The Republican-led House Armed Services Committee followed suit Saturday, with Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., saying in a joint statement that the House committee is “committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”

It’s about time.

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses.

I received many responses to the item last week in which I reprinted a post from a high school classmate who was weighing whether to attend our 50th reunion next summer and offered my encouragement for him to attend.

Richard Ramlow — I was treated poorly as a kid, particularly in Junior High. Watching shows like “The Wonder Years” was not rewarding in the least. By the time I was a senior, things had changed, but the pain lingers. Still, as survivors of 50 years post high school, it’s been good to go to reunions and see the people I liked, and interesting to see those that I found difficult back then. Most are gracious, some apologetic and some still odd. I’d find a friend to go with and see what happens.

Patricia Motto —Count me as pro reunions. We just had our 60th and it was fascinating and enlightening. The guy we thought was a snob was desperately insecure. The quiet kid who seemed awkward went home to immigrant parents struggling to get by. The girl who always had a hickey ended up running a charitable organization. Eye opening and fun!

Phillip Seeberg —I’ve been to every one of my high school reunions. My experience is that it’s not the bullies who are attending; it’s the regular folks. Here’s a true story from my 40th: I was talking to the girl I had a crush on in 6th grade. I told her I gave her a brooch for a gift back then and asked if she remembered. She said, “Remember? I still have it.” That made my day so much that I still think of it.

Mark Anderson —- I’ve been to all of my high school reunions. At first they were a little awkward, as I was not super popular in high school. But the last few have been great fun, as we all connect as the people we are now.

Monica Metzler — I’m getting a lot of pressure to attend an upcoming law school reunion and my ambivalence is sort of the flipside of your writer. Time has muted bad memories of my time there and the unpleasant people, leaving mostly positive memories along with my interest in seeing a number of folks I liked but I haven’t kept up with. But the past five years have been the most challenging and unpleasant of my life with a lot of failure and loss. So I dread having numerous “so what have you been up to” conversations with people who are sliding into comfortable retirements while I cope with unemployment, job-hunting, and other stresses. Perhaps that just means the high school-level insecurities still remain. I have about a month to decide whether to attend.

Robert Renfro — I attended my 50^th HS reunion last year. It was both fun and melancholy at the same time. A number of my classmates expressed the same feeling; that we were moved by the occasion in ways that still linger. While it was nice to renew old friendships, I was really hit by having to face the fact that, yeah, I don’t have a lot of time left in this world and I haven’t even started living the way I dreamed about. I’m a little surprised you didn’t link to your 2006 article on the topic.

Zorn — I’d forgotten about that column I’ve posted it below.

Jane Lupton — A few months ago I went back and forth about whether to attend my 50th. I live in a blue, Chicago-area bubble, and I went to high school in ruby red MAGA country in Wisconsin. I was pleasantly surprised that no one wore a MAGA hat or shirt, and I enjoyed catching up with everyone I spoke to. The biggest surprise involved someone I didn’t speak to—a woman who viciously bullied me all through middle school. A few weeks after the reunion, I received a letter from her apologizing and telling me about her deep regrets about her behavior 55 years ago. I was stunned, and am so glad I went to the reunion.

Michael M. — Facebook pretty much has eliminated the need for high school reunions.

Zorn - It certainly changes some of the conversations at reunions when you’re not needing to catch up on so much. In fact, Facebook posts can be good conversation starters (but be careful with politics!)

Dan P. — As a quiet, introverted HS student way back when, I too felt bullied at times. Since then, I’ve attended every reunion except one and we have them every five years. I joined the committee for our 20th and we are now planning our 50th for next year. We have had a lot of people over the years who wanted nothing to do with even being contacted. Their loss. By the tenth, all the facades had dropped away and as young adults we were getting our lives started and had little worry about the old high school issues. I remember from time to time thinking, “I was afraid of that guy?!?” I often recommend people come and give it a try. I’ve made friends on the committee with classmates I didn’t really know back then. Our class was about 750. We do seem to be having a higher interest for the 50th than in the past. After all, this might be the last time for a lot of them to see some of their classmates who they may want to connect with.

Marc Martinez — My high school years were a mixed bag of very harsh and pretty great. I had no interest in attending my 50th reunion a few years ago, but I got a note from a classmate and decided to go. I figured I could go in, say hi to the person that sent the note and then leave. I actually found it very fun and interesting and am very glad I went. I agree that the old hurts no longer mattered. I also got to share positive memories with people. I also found it very interesting how permanent the main personality traits are. One guy I felt very competitive with, who I also thought looked down on me, was very successful, very nice, and I had a really nice conversation with him. So go, float around, and talk to anyone who feels interesting.

Curt Fredrikson — I stopped going to class reunions for a couple of reasons. First, the people with whom I’d associated stopped attending. The “cool” crowd did not associate with me then and I have no interest in associating with them now, even though I have learned that some of them had higher opinions of me than I had perceived. Second, I asked myself why I would want to overwrite my memories of classmates when they were young and attractive with memories of them as older adults. There’s no future in the past.

---

Letters from mom

Last week I shared some of my feelings about finding and transcribing my mother’s old love letters to my father and her letters to me from many years ago. The responses were touching.

Mark K. —I am in a similar stage of life with my mom and I appreciate you sharing your experience and perspective, my thoughts are with you and your family. I’ve also kept all of the letters and birthday cards my mom sent me over the years. She also kept a diary for a few years. However, I only read a few entries and was wary of going deeper into them. I will just say that her life was very hard and leave it at that. I want to respond to one line of yours: “It’s bittersweet to “hear” her voice again and be reminded of what we’ve lost.” My coping mechanism is to reframe these memories as gifts to be grateful for, not losses to be lamented. The arrow of time points inexorably in one direction. Loss is universal and inevitable. The way to cope is to cherish the gifts we have the fortune to experience.

Gillean Wilsak —One Christmas, my dad transcribed all his letters home from World War II that my grandmother had saved, and bound them into books for us kids. It was fascinating to “meet” my dad as a very young man. Perhaps helpful that he was drafted just before Japan surrendered so his service was an adventure in the Pacific and not horrors of war.

Mark Anderson — I recently came across a bunch of letters my mom wrote to my aunt in the ‘70s. Wonderful reminders of what was going on. And I have every letter I ever received when I was in college and law school (and a few that I sent, amazingly). Talk about Memory Lane. I only dip into them when I have limited time; otherwise the day would be shot.

Shelley Riskin — My brilliant and beautiful, active mother descended into dementia, and by the time she died, she couldn’t walk, talk or recognize us. But she did smile all the time, and everyone loved her. It took me several years after she died before I could remember her in her strength. Something that helped me was discovering her letters to me when I lived in Israel during the summer of 1973. The letters were written in her distinctive handwriting, on that (no longer used) thin, blue paper for overseas mail, with the stamps used back then. Just seeing her handwriting brought her back, in that specific time, along with her vibrant personality and interests. And her great love for my dad shone through as well. She also saved my letters back to her, from my 21-year-old self. Today, I always handwrite cards--thank you, condolences, etc; to people (who have told me they often keep them.) And my daughter in law also handwrites cards, and is teaching my granddaughter to do so. What a treasure!

Loren Santow — My mom died five years ago this month at the age of 95. She, too, was a letter writer as well as a recipient of a lifetime’s correspondence, much of which she’d saved. Upon her passing, my brother and I planned a memorial that made use of this unique archive. We selected passages that were telling, funny, and touching and printed them out. We distributed these to guests at the memorial, who were cued to read their snippets as photographs were projected. The breadth and depth and fullness of our mom’s life unspooled through these fragments. I felt we had done justice to her memory.

Dr. GPT will see you now

Marc Martinez — Regarding AI and health: If a chatbot gives medical advice or explanation to specific queries, then it should also provide a disclaimer that it is likely wrong x% of the time and that an actual doctor should be consulted. The chatbot company should also have civil liability for malpractice. It should also be required to keep a complete record of the interactions with its patients. I think that medical diagnosis is one of the best uses of AI, but that results are best interpreted by medical professionals. The AI that would be useful for this is one that is specifically developed, tailored (’trained”) and tested for accurate medical diagnosis. Chatbots do not meet this standard. Also, anyone that uses a chatbot for this purpose should understand that they are part of the ‘training’ data pool for the tool, the tool is also building a personal profile of them, and that they have no rights in the data that the tool is acquiring.

Bob E. — A chatbot can be good for a second opinion - or perhaps a pre-opinion, in advance of seeking a medical doctor’s opinion. I recently had a full panel of blood work [typical, associated with my annual physical exam], and a type of heart scan, recommended by a friend my age. When the results of each became available, I submitted them to a chatbot [perplexity is my favorite] for analysis. I also asked for suggestions of questions to ask my doctor about the results. This made for a much more constructive and satisfying conversation with my primary care physician.

Unpopular opinions?

Associated Press:

Northwestern University has agreed to pay $75 million to the U.S. government in a deal with the Trump administration to end a series of investigations and restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding.

President Donald Trump’s administration had cut off $790 million in grants in a standoff that contributed to university layoffs … The administration argued the school had not done enough to fight antisemitism.

Setting aside my firm conviction that the ascendant Christian nationalists in the White House don’t actually give a damn about antisemitism, I’m of the view that Northwestern should not have given in to rank extortion in a way that, as the government’s news release crowed, marked “another victory in the Trump Administration’s fight to ensure that American educational institutions protect Jewish students and put merit first.”

Inside Higher Ed summarizes:

As part of the settlement, Northwestern agreed to adhere to federal antidiscrimination laws and to not give preferences in admissions, scholarships, hiring or promotion that are based on race, color or national origin; to maintain clear free speech policies; and to mandate antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff. University officials will also reverse a 2024 deal made with pro-Palestinian student protesters in which Northwestern agreed to provide more support for Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African students. …

The settlement also bars Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine from performing “hormonal interventions and transgender surgeries” on minor patients, according to language in the agreement. … Northwestern is now the sixth university to strike a deal with the Trump administration, following settlements with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Virginia and Cornell University. Of those settlements, Northwestern has the second-highest financial payout at $75 million, trailing only Columbia, which agreed to pay $221 million.

The settlement agreement also contains severe restrictions on campus protests and a prohibition of the wearing of facial coverings “for the purposes of concealment of an individual’s identity,” both of which seem perilously close to running afoul of the First Amendment.

Not to debate the changes in policy or even what does and doesn’t fall under the category of antisemitism. No one should be subject to harassment or discrimination based on their religious or political views, or their ethnicity, nationality or gender identity, for that matter. But I don’t want any government agency micromanaging any institution’s regulations with threats to withhold unrelated funding — there truly is no end to the logic that says it’s OK for the White House to hold academic grants hostage to exert its political will. To make cancer research funding contingent on hewing to a particular view on the thorny issue of affirmative action is obscene.

What will be next in their “Nice little university you have here. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it” game?

I can only imagine how the right would be howling if a Democratic administration were to demand tribute and liberal policy implementations from conservative leaning colleges and universities in exchange for releasing federal dollars. The precedent here is awful — it amounts to negotiating with terrorists and paying blackmail — and although it’s easy to stand on principles when you don’t have any skin in the game — when it’s not your institution that would be severely impacted by telling the sanctimonious bullies in Washington to go pound sand up their asses — I wish Northwestern had done so.

My family was split on this when we discussed it over the Thanksgiving weekend. The contrary view was that $75 million was an acceptable price to pay for the restoration of $790 million in funds and for saving countless jobs that would have been lost had the money not come in.

Your view?

Last week’s result

516 votes

Last weekend’s snowstorm might have changed a few minds, but my argument that the city’s unusually strict winter parking regulations feel like a cash grab prevailed.

Apologies given, received can be bonus of reunion

Originally published in October, 2006

At my 30th high school reunion recently I walked in on the end of a compelling conversation between a man and a woman with whom I had gone to elementary school.

The man was apologizing to her for an incident from 1967 that he remembered vividly:

They were in 4th grade. He and another boy were mercilessly teasing a girl in their class — the woman then standing in front of him — for having a pronounced lisp (that she has since lost).

The teacher saw what was happening back then, called the boys into the hallway and gave them a long, strong talking to about how unfair, how hurtful, how wrong it was to treat someone that way.

“It changed my life,” the man said. “I never forgot it and I never, ever did it again, though I never told you.”

I was jealous. Jealous that he’d been caught and corrected at an early age, well before I absorbed the same lesson on my own in high school; and jealous that he’d gotten the opportunity to make peace with his victim, who was gracious and grateful despite having no specific memory of the incident.

The 4th-grade victim of mine I remember best wasn’t there. I was part of a nasty group of boys who tormented a misfit girl that same year. She and her family moved out of town before I realized how wrong I was, and how unkind acts can haunt the perpetrator as well as the victim well into adulthood.

I understand why people skip reunions. School days were a fraught and confusing time for most of us, and seeing all those people again is like dredging a pond–bringing things to the surface that would have lain deep and out of sight forever.

Also, everyone’s busy. We don’t need to revive old friendships because we barely have time for our new friendships.

Still. Old friends, old acquaintances, even old nemeses hold keys to our self-understanding and put our lives in context in a way that no one else can. Having a shared history with someone can be educational as well as delightful, comforting as well as mortifying.

And for all that confrontations with one’s past can stir up old pains, they can also resolve old ambivalences, bury old hatchets and even, in some small ways, rewrite history. Having a warm, grown-up conversation with someone with whom you were once awkward, frosty or nasty is a way to achieve closure, which the passage of time itself can never accomplish.

When you’re my age, you can never make old friendships. Reunions are the oxygen they need to survive until next time.

NewsWheel

Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. The solution is at the bottom of the newsletter.

Early childhood educators, represent!

Three years ago I posted a tweet from Katie Martin, a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Department of Linguistics, satirizing right-wing hysteria in the culture wars:

I’m a kindergarten teacher​, and every day I make my students choose new pronouns. And when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance, they have to say ​”pride flag​” instead of​”flag of the United States of America​,” and ​”under gay​” instead of ​”under God​.”

Those who got the joke contributed their own versions:

• I am also a kindergarten teacher, and I have my students say “Thank You, Joe Biden” every time they answer a question correctly, and each student gets a gold star before the end of class just for showing up.

• I started giving cookies to the kids who identify as trans and now most of them do! I make ciswhites go last for everything as reparations.

• I’m the school nurse and after lunch I get them set up with hormones and surgery.

• I’m also a kindergarten teacher and every morning I make my students recite the lyrics to Madonna’s “Vogue” and cat walk in high heels while I have margaritas with my husband’s brother.

• If a kid says “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” I pelt them with unsharpened pencils.

• I’m a kindergarten teacher too, but I’m not working this year because I’ve lined up various drag queens to substitute for me each week and teach the kids how to twerk. They promise to clean the classroom litter boxes.

A Facebook friend recently reposted these, and his commenters added a few:

• I’m a Kindergarten teacher, and on alternate weeks I have my students watch “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.” On other days they view makeup tutorials from Las Vegas showgirls or burlesque performers. Next month I’m having a brass pole installed in the middle of the playground.

• I’m a grade school librarian. I tell all the K-3 students that all the other books are bad and stupid and I provide only banned books. Everyone gets an official certificate when they read: “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

Any other suggestions?

The week’s best visual jokes

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Quip of the Week poll!

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

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Answer to the NewsWheel puzzle

WAR CRIME