Good morning. It is October 15. It's a partly cloudy morning in New York City, on what's due to be a mild day. Some kind of power equipment is grinding away in the background, nevertheless, this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host. Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

President Donald Trump announced that the United States had murdered six more people on the high seas yesterday, in its fifth unprovoked attack on unarmed boats in the Caribbean, "asserting," as the New York Times puts it, "without evidence that they had been transporting drugs." Along with the social media post announcing the killing, the Times writes, "the President also posted a 33 second aerial surveillance video showing a small boat floating and then being struck by a missile and exploding. Unlike some previous announcements, the President did not identify the nationality of the people who were killed, or name a specific drug cartel or criminal gang with which they were supposedly associated." The Times goes on to once again run through the ways in which these killings are entirely illegal and unjustified under every legal analysis, and how the Trump administration has produced no substantive arguments otherwise, and how Congress has not identifiably authorized any such use of military force. And then the article notes that this time around, Trump did not even bother invoking any sort of framework of justification. "In his posting on Tuesday" the Times writes, "Mr. Trump did not mention self defense or a purported state of armed conflict. Instead, the president invoked his constitutional role as the head of the US armed forces without further discussion, saying he had authorized Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, whom he calls the Secretary of War, to order to strike. 'Under my standing authority as commander in chief this morning, the Secretary of War,'"—then comes a stray comma—"'ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a designated terrorist organization, DTO, conducting narco trafficking in the US SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,' Mr. Trump wrote, 'just off the coast of Venezuela.'" 

This continuation of the President's killing spree and his choice this time around, to attribute the killing to nothing more than his inherent power as the Commander in Chief of the military, appears in a single column on page A10 of the Times, next to a story taking up most of the rest of the page, that begins with "when the United States military launched an airstrike on a speedboat as it approached the southern shore of the Dominican Republic last month, killing three people on board, Dominican authorities said more than 375 packages of cocaine went flying into the Caribbean Sea. Dozens of them had red packaging with a brand name clearly labeled in black and white capital letters, 'MEN,' according to photos distributed by the Dominican anti narcotics agency." Okay, but what's the point? The headline is, "drug smugglers change tactics to evade us, warships, illegal flights drop cargo into the sea," and then after the lead where the drug cops say that the US did, in fact, interdict some drugs, in the course of murdering people, the Times writes, "The 1000 kilos of cocaine recovered from the wreckage were added to the nearly 19,000 kilos of drugs the Dominican Republic's anti narcotics agency had already captured since January, in what had been a record setting year of narcotics seizures at sea before us, warships moved into the region." Then the story says the Trump administration, claiming to battle drug trafficking cartels it labels terrorists, has been destroying speedboats in the Caribbean, shining a fresh light on a decades old industry responsible for bringing tons of cocaine into the United States each year." 

"Shining a fresh light," here ,appears to mean occasioning a roundup of facts. These are busy times for the cocaine industry, or the world has never been awash in so much cocaine, as the Times puts it, the preferred routes have changed through the years, with the once outmoded Caribbean coming back into play, though most of the traffic to the US is in the Pacific, and none of the traffic in fentanyl, which the Trump administration holds out as the great urgent threat to the American public. Comes through the Caribbean at all. And, as always, the expert outlook is that drugs will find a way to keep coming. 

None of this, none of this, whether it's the more informative parts or the less informative ones, has any real bearing on the relevant news, which is not what may or may not be on a speedboat, or where it may be going, but how the President of the United States has decided to make unlawful killings into routine government business, and social media content. There's nothing wrong with doing a contextual roundup on page A 10, but there is something wrong with giving it more play than the story of the genuine crisis, of what the President is doing with the military. 

In an important update to yesterday's newsletter, item about catastrophic weather, and particularly the typhoon destruction in Alaska, CNN now reports "the forecast for the powerful and deadly storm that battered small communities in western Alaska over the weekend was likely made worse by a lack of weather data triggered by the Trump administration's cuts. There is a gaping hole in weather balloon coverage in western Alaska, a critical shortage bedeviling US forecasts and the National Weather Service, since layoffs hit the agency as part of the Department of Government Efficiency's push to shrink the federal government back in February." The story continues, "weather balloons, which are typically launched twice a day, provide crucial information on wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity and other measurements. Balloon data is fed directly into the sophisticated computer models used to predict the weather. However, there were few, if any, balloons to take measurements of what the weather was doing, as the remains of Typhoon Halong approached Alaska late last week."

 The story then says "models like the National Weather Service's global forecast system consistently showed a stronger storm to the northwest of where it eventually struck. The communities that ended up seeing the worst storm surge flooding were not in the original forecasts." Then the story says, "how big of a difference the missing balloon data made, though, may never be known. The best way to determine that would be to run computer models with weather balloon data fed into them and without it in what is known as a data denial experiment, impossible to do without the data itself." 

On the front page of today's New York Times, where the boat murder story is not the lead News Spot is two columns wide, "How U.S. and Arab World Teamed Up on Gaza Deal / Pressure on Both Israel and Hamas Yielded Compromise on Troop Withdrawal." There's a tick-tock about the negotiations, which says pretty much what the headline says. 

Next to that is a picture of three different forests, sending readers inside the paper to the news that "Four years after a global pledge to end deforestation, the amount of money going toward conserving forests is not enough, a U.N. analysis found." 

Below the trees, above the fold, on the left hand side, the headline is, "Roe Defeated, Activists Shift Battle to U.K." It's a long and in many respects, a very well done investigation into the process by which the Alliance Defending Freedom, the activist organization busy gutting people's rights in the United States, most strikingly, the right to abortion, has set out to influence British politics by coopting the xenophobic Nigel Farage and his reform UK party, and by packaging their initial efforts around the theme of free speech and the right of abortion opponents to express their Opposition, even right outside of clinics a simple, uncomplicated civil liberties proposition that even some people who say they support abortion rights can get behind, allowing the ADF to start carrying out its script, by which it uses appeals to individual people's liberties and consciences to abridge the larger liberties of the public.

The one piece that's weirdly missing from this otherwise frank analysis of what this group is up to, and how it goes about doing it, is any reference to who is doing it. The ADF is represented in the piece only by its official members and its political allies, and not by the publicity-averse billionaires, who are through a fairly opaque structure of foundations using the organization to inflict their personal will on everyone else. Jacobin, working with records published by ProPublica, concluded that the Alliance Defending Freedom received more than $50 million in funding from a group called the Servant Foundation, whose supporters include David Green, the the antiquities thief and head of Hobby Lobby. Given that these people are basically rewriting the Constitution, and now trying to extend that effort through the Anglosphere, it would probably be good if a major newspaper were to use its investigative resources to work out exactly who is buying this stuff. 

Next to the ADF story, the headline is "A New Pulse for Factory Towns In the Weaponry of the Future." Dateline "Auburn Hills, Michigan, the factory in Auburn Hills had stood vacant for months, surrounded by unoccupied warehouses that had once been used by car companies in the heartland of America's auto industry. Last year, a startup called Swarm Defense Technologies moved into an 8000 square foot section of the building to begin making drones for defense. By this summer, demand for its drones had grown so rapidly that the company took over the entire 14,000 square foot factory. Today," the Times continues "47 swarm employees work in the cavernous space pumping out 1000s of drones each month for the US military and other clients. The drones, a little over 10 inches long and less than two pounds, can be used to test anti drone systems and to simulate attacks. That has made Swarm's factory a hive of activity in an area where dozens of four lease signs are visible." These aren't even really defense technology, though,  they're just simulators to spur the development of the actual defense technology. In a similar vein, after the jump, The Times writes, "with advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, young defense tech firms will probably never employ hundreds of 1000s of laborers. Still, the defense tech investor Christian Garrett said," The Times writes, "'the companies can train workers in skills that could translate to other tech jobs.'" There's a productive future in this. It's just somewhere else, but quite nearby. Surely. 

Next to that is the news that Janet Mills, the 77 year old governor of Maine, has decided, after much recruiting by National Democratic Party leaders, to enter the race to run against 72 year old Republican Senator Susan Collins. "Typically," the Times writes, "a Democrat of MS Mills' stature would be warmly welcomed into such a contest, with other Democrats deferring to her. But Ms Mills, 77 will find herself navigating a crowded primary, including against a 41 year old oyster farmer and veteran named Graham Plattner. Despite having never previously run for office, Mr. Plattner has generated a national progressive following and raised $4 million in less than two months. The state's Senate primary" The Times writes "is expected to be a test of some of the ideological and generational fault lines dividing the Democratic Party as it finds itself locked out of power in Washington. If she wins next year, Ms Mills would be 79 at her swearing-in the next January, which would make her the oldest elected freshman senator in American history." The story goes on to say "Ms Mills is one of three older, seemingly blue chip recruits, along with former Governor Roy Cooper, 68 in North Carolina and former Senator Sherrod Brown, 72 in Ohio, that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has wooed into the 2026 elections."

And, inside the paper On page A11 in the international section the Times does circle back to some of the lingering unexplored questions from its feature story about how young Nepalese protesters felt that events were wrenched away from them. "Scale of blazes in Nepal suggests tight planning," is the headline."On September 9," The Times writes, "coordinated arson attacks across the Himalayan nation destroyed hundreds of government buildings, from a storied palace and top courts to Grand ministries and humble ward offices." That's a poorly constructed range, but "hundreds of other properties were targeted too, including businesses and schools connected to the political elite as well as homes of politicians. The arson, ' the story continues "followed the fatal shootings the day before of 19 anti corruption protesters by security forces in Kathmandu, the capital. The prevailing narrative is that mobs of young protesters sought retribution setting fires as their outrage over the killings flared. But a New York Times investigation, based on dozens of interviews with witnesses, participants and arson experts, a review of photos and videos from the havoc, and visits by The Times to the wreckage sites, reveals new details that cast doubt on the idea that such a tightly coordinated nationwide campaign of destruction could have been an entirely spontaneous response to the deaths the day before."  The Story notes that no one seems to actually be investigating the fires, which makes reconstructing what happened very difficult. But the experts the Times talked to believe that the rapidity and intensity of the fires suggest sophisticated accelerants were used, and that arsonists made plans to ensure that the fires would spread rapidly. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MACLEOD, and the theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho, enjoy the decent weather if you are getting it, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.