These are the most important words you will read today

It is a dark reality what is happening and something needs to be done. YOU ARE LOSING YOUR COUNTRY. IT IS TIME TO DO SOMETHING.

DO SOMETHING.

Sandspur

---------------------------------------------
January 19, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JAN 20
Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”

International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.

This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”

Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”

“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”

In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.

In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.

Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”

And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”

The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.
And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.

Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.

Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.

Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”

Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.

He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.

Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.
Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.
—
Notes:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-norway/685676/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/22/honduras-elections-leftist-party-libre

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/19/europe/putin-board-of-peace-gaza-trump-intl

https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/vladimir-vladimirovich-putin

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/1941/08/14/the-atlantic-charter

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/nato-history/a-short-history-of-nato

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/summary/

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/acceptance-speech/

https://eng.belta.by/president/view/trumps-letter-to-lukashenko-full-text-and-what-it-means-175942-2026/

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-catholic-cardinals-urge-trump-administration-embrace-moral-129346423

https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-to-boost-military-presence-in-greenland/

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/1949/04/04/the-north-atlantic-treaty

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2024/07/10/washington-summit-declaration

https://fortune.com/2026/01/17/trump-nations-1-billion-membership-payment-peace-board-united-nations/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-17/trump-wants-nations-to-pay-1-billion-to-stay-on-his-peace-board

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2025-12/Smith-Depo-Transcript_Redacted-w-Errata.pdf

X:
nickschifrin/status/2013107018081489006
faisalislam/status/2013143632522445099
faisalislam/status/2013177130536890877

Bluesky:
joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3mcs5zlstp224
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mcslnjb2622n
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mcsmygfb3c2k
vermontgmg.bsky.social/post/3mcsqlpp6ls2g
noelreports.com/post/3mcsndx5qcs2e
antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3mcse2pf5js2v


© 2026 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Unsubscribe

Messing with DNA

On January 25, 2008  what was then the Tampa Tribune I stumbled upon the below article by Rick Weiss in its “Nation/World” section.  It struck me as something extraordinary even though it was apparently not considered of significant news value since it was buried in a back section of the paper on page three.  

If you’ve seen the movie “Legend”, it will send shivers up your spine.  

If you’re a strict Creationist, it’ll probably make you anxious that mankind may be about to transgress on turf that should be strictly reserved for the Heavenly Creator.  And, if you’re an evolutionist who finds comfort in the thought that whatever will evolve will evolve and it won’t be your fault, you’ll probably not be able to sleep at night for fear of what we may be on the verge of doing to ourselves and our only known home in the cosmos. 

Is this really an extraordinary development in mankind’s penchant for dabbling in dangerous places?  I don’t know, but if you don’t think this is worth registering in your list of life’s priority events that happened when you were alive, you might want to consider this thought:  

It appears we are moving toward a point where mankind may be able to finally improve his miserable lot in some manner that meets at least somebody’s idea of earthly perfection, or, as is more likely the case given our history of violence and abuse of forethought, we may be stumbling stupidly toward our own final destruction.

Ponder that as you go about your day today.

Sandspur

------------------------------------

Md. Scientists Build Bacterial Chromosome

By Rick Weiss

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 25, 2008

Scientists in Maryland yesterday said they had built from scratch an entire microbial chromosome, a loop of synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce.

The feat marks the first time that anyone has made such a large strand of hereditary material from off-the-shelf chemical ingredients. Previous efforts had yielded DNA strands less than one-twentieth the size, and those pieces lacked many of the key biological programs that tell a cell how to stay alive.

On the basis of earlier experiments, the researchers believe the new, full-length loop would spontaneously "boot up" inside a cell, just as a downloaded operating system can awaken a computer -- a potentially historic event that would amount to the creation of the first truly artificial life form.

Team members emphasized that they have not done that yet but expressed confidence that they would do so before the end of the year.

"There are barriers . . . but we are confident that they can be overcome," said J. Craig Venter, who led the effort with Daniel G. Gibson and Hamilton O. Smith at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville. The work appears in yesterday's online edition of the journal Science.

Venter said the goal is to design novel microbes whose handcrafted genomes endow them with the ability produce useful chemicals, including renewable synthetic fuels that could substitute for oil.

Critics, however, countered that without better oversight of the fledgling field, synthetic biology is more likely to lead to the creation of potent biological weapons and runaway microbes that could wreak environmental havoc.

"Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world's longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn't everything. The important question is not 'How long?' but 'How wise?' " said Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Montreal-based group that has called for a moratorium on the release and commercialization of synthetic organisms pending further public debate.

Venter's team started by determining the precise order of all 580,076 base pairs, or "letters" of DNA code, inside one of the simplest microbes known to science: Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that can infect the human genital tract. The scientists bought small pieces of DNA, then perfected painstaking methods to stitch them together inside bacteria and yeast cells in exactly the right order.

The final product -- 582,970 base pairs in all -- is a near-exact replica of M. genitalium's genome, with a few intentional differences. The team omitted a DNA snippet that allows the microbe to infect other cells, for example, and added extra DNA as "watermarks" to differentiate their construct from the naturally occurring variety.

"It's the first synthetic bacterial chromosome," Venter said. "Every one of those base pairs started as a chemical in a bottle."

George Church, a Harvard geneticist leading competing efforts to develop novel life forms -- not from scratch but by modifying existing bacteria -- said the work marks something less than the dawn of a new era.

"This is not a 'creating life' paper. It is not a test of vitalism. It's an assembly paper," Church said. "The question is: Is it faster or cheaper than other methods? But they don't lay out their economics. They missed an opportunity there."

Venter said he could not provide an estimate of the project's cost.

Venter and others have already made synthetic genomes for viruses, which are about one-hundredth the size of bacterial genomes. Some activists contend that synthetic bacteria pose more dangers because, unlike viruses, they can replicate on their own and can survive a long time in the environment.

Venter said the work was green-lighted by government offices, the National Academies and an independent ethics review board.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

A killing at sea marks America’s descent into lawless power

 

The peremptory strike on a speedboat is a warning to all who serve. Remember your oath.

By Jon Duffy

September 8, 2025

The United States has crossed a dangerous line.

Last week, an American military platform destroyed a small vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers. It was not an interception. It was not a boarding with Coast Guard legal authority. It was a strike—ordered from Washington, executed in international waters, and justified with little more than “trust us.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox that officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing.” He offered no evidence.

This was not a counterdrug operation. It was not law enforcement. It was killing without process. And it was, to all appearances, against the letter and the spirit of the law.

For decades, the U.S. military and Coast Guard have intercepted drug shipments in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific under a careful legal framework: Coast Guard officers would tactically control Navy ships, invoke law enforcement authority, stop vessels, and detain crews for prosecution. The goal is not execution; it is interdiction within international law.

This week’s strike ripped up that framework. The people on board were not given the chance to surrender. No evidence was presented. No rules of engagement were cited. The administration claimed authority to kill on suspicion alone.

International law does not permit such action. A vessel in international waters is not a lawful target simply because officials say so. Contending that narcotics pose a long-term danger to Americans is at best a weak policy argument, not a legal justification for force. Unless this boat posed an imminent threat of attack—which no one has claimed—blowing it out of the water is not self-defense. It is killing at sea. A government that ignores these distinctions is not fighting cartels. It is discarding the rule of law.

Beyond the gross violations of the law and the Constitution lies an enormous strategic danger. By redefining traffickers as legitimate military targets, the administration has plunged the United States into another war without limits.

Who is the enemy? “Cartels,” we are told. But cartels are not armies. They are networks that span countries and blend with civilians. Declaring war on them is like declaring war on poverty or terrorism—a plunge into an endless campaign that cannot be “won.”

Where is the battlefield? The Caribbean? Venezuela? Central America? Overnight, officials shifted their story about the destroyed vessel’s destination: first, it was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” then it was among “imminent threats to the United States.” If geography is that malleable, there is no limit to where the next strike may fall.

And what is the objective? To “blow up and get rid of them,” in the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. That is not strategy; it is bravado. We have tried it before, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Killing “high-value targets” didn’t end the war on terror.

The U.S. is drifting into an undeclared war of assassination across half a hemisphere, led by unaccountable officials who equate explosions with effectiveness.

Even more dangerous is the backdrop: the Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for “official acts.” Experts warned this would give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder. The majority waved those fears away. Now the president has ordered killings in international waters.

Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.

This is no longer abstract. The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.

What does this mean for the principle of civilian control, when those who wield it face no consequence for abuse? What does it mean for our military, when they are ordered to carry out missions that violate the standards they have sworn to uphold?

What happens abroad does not stay abroad. A government that stretches legal authority overseas will not hesitate to do the same at home. The same commander-in-chief who ordered a strike on a boat in international waters has already ordered National Guard troops into American cities over the objections of local leaders. The logic is identical: redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first tool. Today it is “traffickers” in the Caribbean. Tomorrow it will be “criminals” in Chicago or “radicals” in Atlanta.

This strike is not only about 11 lives lost at sea. It is about the precedent set when the military is unmoored from law, and when silence from senior leaders normalizes the abuse. 

The cost will not be measured in a destroyed boat. It will be measured in the corrosion of law, strategy, and trust. Legally, the U.S. has abandoned the framework that distinguished interdiction from assassination. Constitutionally, presidential immunity has been laid bare: the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law. Strategically, we have entered another endless war against a concept, not an enemy. Internally, the erosion of boundaries abroad feeds the erosion of boundaries at home.

The laws of war, the principles of proportionality, the training drilled into every officer—all run counter to what happened in the Caribbean. Yet silence has prevailed. And silence is acquiescence. Each concession ratifies the misuse of force until it becomes routine. That is how institutions corrode. That is how democracies die.

The strike in the Caribbean is not the action of a strong nation. It is a warning. This is about whether the U.S. military remains an institution of law and principle, or whether it becomes an obedient weapon in the hands of a lawless president.

A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution.

The oath is clear: unlawful orders—foreign or domestic—must be disobeyed. To stand silent as the military is misused is not restraint. It is betrayal. 

Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about leadership and democracy.