🎬 We’re halfway through the year so here’s my midway movie update. I set a goal this year for watching under 100 films and I’m on track for 92. I’ve seen 41 narrative movies, 2 documentaries, 2 limited series, and 1 short film. I saw 17 in theater and 15 that came out this year.
Here’s my ranking for 2024 releases and my ranking for everything I’ve seen this year. I’d say it’s been a weak year so far and I can only really recommend Dune: Part Two and Shōgun. I wrote a bit about both a while back. Out of everything that I’ve seen though I can strongly recommend all of these, all ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️+. Most were first time views for me (except for Uncut Gems and Mad Max: Fury Road).
Some films coming out in the second half of the year that I’m excited to see: Longlegs (Jul 12), Twisters (Jul 19), Anora (Oct 18), Gladiator II (Nov 22), Nosferatu (Dec 25)
Highlights in this issue:
Biden’s horrible debate
Sweden’s military service program
the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling
“unachievable” military victory in Gaza
Good reading,
—TK
If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here.
Free subscribers get the full version in a week. Upgrading to premium gets you early access and helps support the newsletter. Thanks!
🇺🇸📉 President Biden had a disastrous performance last week in the presidential debate with Donald Trump (highlights). Back in December, one of my predictions for 2024 was that Trump would win the election this year. At that time they were about even in the prediction markets. Trump is at 66% now to Biden’s 17%. Biden is down to only 62% to even get the Democratic nomination.
Ben Hunt wrote a good piece on why the debate was so critical for coordinating common knowledge about Biden’s mental impairments and what happens next:
Obama saying it was a ‘bad night’ is a classic limited hangout, where you confess truthfully to a small thing to stop the questioning on a big thing. Obama can’t be seen as the guy with the knife, but he can absolutely give his boys Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes the green light to, if not stab away, then at least to distance themselves, their social media and their fundraising from the Biden campaign.
Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jim Clyburn have started publicly questioning Biden’s mental fitness. Even the The New York Times published an editorial calling on Biden to withdraw from the race and is keeping up a steady stream of reporting about Biden’s infirmities prior to the debate:
In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations… Last week’s debate prompted some around him to express concern that the decline had accelerated lately.
When cracks like this begin to show, things tend to develop quickly. Post-debate, we’re in a new paradigm and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Biden steps down, despite reporting that his family is encouraging him to stay in it.
🏛 In Trump v. United States (oral arguments), a landmark case on executive power, the Supreme Court ruled that the president has broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” made during their time in office.
In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court held that a former president has absolute immunity from actions taken to exercise his “core constitutional powers” and “is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”. “The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “But Congress may not criminalise the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the constitution. And the system of separated powers designed by the framers has always demanded an energetic, independent executive.” (FT)
Of course, the crucial question now is what exactly is an official act and how is it distinguished from an unofficial act. That’s the question that Judge Tanya Chutkan will have to answer as the case gets sent back to the lower court to resolve the immunity questions.
With regard to the allegation that Trump attempted to pressure his former vice president, Mike Pence, in his role as president of the senate, to reject the states’ electoral votes or send them back to state legislatures, the court deemed Trump “presumptively immune” from prosecution on the theory that the president and vice president are acting officially when they discuss their official responsibilities. On the other hand, Roberts observed, the vice president’s role as president of the senate is not an executive branch role. The court therefore left it for the district court to decide whether prosecuting Trump for this conduct would intrude on the power and operation of the executive branch. (SCOTUSblog)
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurrence:
Applying that principle to the facts of this case, she suggested that at least some of the conduct that serves as the basis for the charges against Trump – such as his request that the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives hold a special session about election fraud claims – would not be immune. “The President,” she concluded, “has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power.”
Justice Barrett also disagreed with the majority opinion in that:
she does not sign to Roberts’s finding in Part III-C, which “holds that the Constitution limits the introduction of protected conduct as evidence in a criminal prosecution of a president, beyond the limits of executive privilege.”
Justice Barrett asserts that she disagrees with the majority's holding, and instead agrees with Sotomayor’s dissent. To make this point, she offers a hypothetical: If a president is prosecuted for bribery, the federal bribery statute prohibits public officials from “seek[ing] or accept[ing] a thing of value ‘for or because of any official act.’” And since the Constitution does not grant the president the authority to accept bribes, he is eligible to be prosecuted under this statute if he does so. Under the majority opinion in Part III-C, however, any mention of the president’s official act would have to be excluded from trial. (Lawfare)
Here’s an in-depth summary of the arguments found in each opinion for the case, from Lawfare.
The WSJ had a good editorial take on the case, although it is hard to imagine the Journal’s Editorial Board being so sanguine if the immediate context were a liberal Democrat president’s alleged criminal activities.
Charlie Savage writes on the ruling with some more historical context on executive power.
🇮🇱 The Israeli military says “destroying Hamas in Gaza is unachievable”, a rebuke to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s stated goal of “total victory.”
Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.
“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”
🇸🇪 The Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece on Sweden’s highly competitive military service program. The country just joined NATO this March.
All young men and women in Sweden must enlist, but rigorous testing sorts the best from the rest. That has created a virtuous recruitment circle where military service, lasting up to 15 months depending on the role, is regarded as prestigious and conscripts compete for spots… The system has proved so successful at nurturing talent that former conscripts are headhunted by the civil service and prized by tech companies… Because Swedish military service attracts the best in class of any generation, civilian employers value former conscripts.
People like to talk about mandatory military or national service in the US as a silver bullet, or at least a first step, to addressing some of our fundamental civic and social issues. It’s hard to imagine that kind of program being politically plausible but the article did make me think we could take inspiration from the Swedish model.
Instead of a sweeping conscription, we could have a selective and competitive program that people would self-select into. Less national draft, more military Y Combinator. You’d test in and go to bootcamp for 6-12 months and come out with this imprimatur, a community, and eventually an alumni network. In fact, you probably wouldn’t need the government at all to do a small scale version of this, a privately funded Thiel fellowship-type thing. I wonder if this is already happening?
The randomized controlled trial, called Purpose 1, was conducted in Uganda and South Africa. It tested whether the every-six-months injection of lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, would provide better protection against H.I.V. infection than two other drugs in wide use in high-income countries, both daily pills. The results were so convincing that the trial was halted early…
🇧🇴 A short-lived coup attempt happened in Bolivia last week. Here’s some video of the brief affair.
The coup attempt came at a tense moment for Bolivia, a landlocked nation of 12 million people in South America. Mr. Arce, a leftist and the handpicked successor of Mr. Morales — the country’s first Indigenous president and a towering figure in Bolivian politics — is battling with Mr. Morales for control over their party and who will be its candidate in a 2025 race… Bolivia, a deeply polarized country, has had 190 coups throughout its 200 years of history.
You’ve made it all the way to the end! Thanks for reading fD. You can support my work by upgrading to premium or share the newsletter with a friend. —TK
Here’s a link to my 2024 News Journal where I'm collecting the headlines that catch my interest each day so that when we look back at that at the end of the year, we'll see when things happened, what kind of patterns emerged, without the problem of hindsight bias.
📈 first Derivative [115]