Lt. Col. Calischaran G. James had clearly been doing something right for a long time to get where he was, which is what makes sudden relief conspicuous for the commanding officer of Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 36 (MALS-36) in Okinawa.
Days before Thanksgiving, in the growing wake of Pete Hegseth’s war crimes and murder of civilians in the Caribbean… what could this Mustang from Dominica have done to warrant an immediate termination on the front end of an investigation announcement?
What could a logistics squadron commander with that record, and that trajectory to O-5, have done? Maybe, just maybe, if the new Caribbean war crimes by Pete Hegseth are drawing on MALS-36 for Pacific assets or supply chains, we might guess who would know what’s moving where?
Logistics personnel are literally in a choke point for commission of crimes. In the 1930s dock workers around the world shut down Mussolini’s supply lines after he invaded Ethiopia and dropped poison gas on civilians. The dock workers didn’t just resist fascism; their resistance became part of the historical record of who stood where and when. A MALS commander would see every Hegseth war crime manifest.
Could this investigation announcement be like the one Hegseth also announced against decorated vets who had dared to say simply that soldiers should follow the law?
The Marine Corps has just intentionally created an information vacuum with their announcement, which exists in a context where the military is actively purging people who object to what Georgetown Law calls Pete Hegseth’s unlawful orders to “show no quarter.”
If James was relieved for objecting to something, Hegseth would replace him with someone white, someone who’s already been in the logistics chain and expected not to object to war crimes. Someone who knows what’s on the manifests and isn’t from the Caribbean.
In the context of an administration illegally executing Caribbean civilians, replacing a decorated Caribbean-born commander with an objectively lesser (no MSM) white officer from Battle Creek is a choice that carries significant meaning whether or not that was consciously intended. Given that Pete “War Secretary” Hegseth is obsessed with PR and optics, to the point of wearing makeup, the abrupt timing suggests calculation rather than coincidence.
Times are so tough that professional thieves are now diversifying into… popping shells for holiday snail meat.
Le vol d’escargots à grande échelle reste rarissime en France. Le dernier remonte à décembre 2024, quand des malfrats avaient opéré en Haute-Savoie pour voler près de 2 500 escargots cuisinés. « C’est un phénomène assez rare, car nous ne sommes que 300 producteurs en France. Mais en période de crise ça risque d’être de plus en plus fréquent », craint déjà Jean-Mathieu Dauvergne.
Gastropod extraction is for “butter times”, as in flush times, prosperity, the good life that premium French escargots represent. These aren’t hard times for everyone; someone’s sitting on 90,000 snails for Christmas dinners.
The security angle practically writes itself: agricultural supply chain vulnerabilities, the inadequacy of perimeter security for high-value seasonal inventory, the information asymmetry between a 25-year producer with “une petite notoriété” and criminals who can identify, target, and extract before anyone notices.
Dauvergne’s post-incident camera installation is the classic barn-door-after-the-snails-left response, where snails move at 0.03 mph and still got away.
There’s also something deeply poetic about Champagne country full of bottles worth hundreds of euros sitting in caves idly while the unassuming snail farmer gets hit instead. These thieves read the security landscape and found the soft, juicy target with comparable per-kilo holiday theft value.
The Pink Panthers hitting Cartier on Place Vendôme and this crew raiding a cold storage unit in Bouzy share the same threat modeling: reconnaissance, timing, speed, and a pre-arranged market. You don’t steal 450 kg of processed snail meat on spec any more than you grab Napoleon’s smelly blood diamonds hoping to figure out a buyer later.
It’s just a matter of time before Pete Hegseth is put on trial for his war crimes.
The internal and external dissent is so loud now, it matters for future accountability. A senior military lawyer raised objections to the legal rationale and was sidelined. Admiral Holsey, the operational commander, announced objections and offered to resign in October. These aren’t anonymous sources speculating, these are people inside the chain of command who found Pete Hegseth untenable. When your own JAG officers are telling you it’s unlawful, that’s not a difference of opinion; that’s evidence for your future tribunal. The British and Canadian moves, cutting off intelligence from Hegseth over concerns the strikes are illegal, means Nuremburg-level calculations are underway for who will be going to trial.
Some experts think the strikes are illegal. Britain has had enough. Some weeks ago it suspended intelligence-sharing with America…
His big idea that “every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization” is primitive circular reasoning. He created a category to include anyone on these boats, then uses that as justification for killing them.
“Nobody move or the N* gets it!”
Straightforward moral questions such as “is it legal to execute civilians” are intentionally being buried under cynical layers of bogus unaccountable terrorism designations, false self-defense claims, and assertions about protecting our white women from Blazing Saddles.
Source: 1974 Blazing Saddles
It’s like Hegseth is saying non-white people use drugs, therefore it’s legal to murder any non-white person, anytime, anywhere. Deceptively calling this a war on “drugs”, or saying it’s stopping “drugs” from crossing the border, just resurrects the tired racist dog whistles of Nixon and Reagan.
Even under the laws of armed conflict, America can’t execute survivors or kill people who pose no immediate threat. Yet, that’s exactly what Pete Hegseth is doing. Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law, has said Hegseth’s order to kill all the boat’s helpless passengers is unambiguously a crime:
…would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.
Hegseth has killed 80+ people without a single American court ever examining evidence, even long after the fact, that any individual was actually a threat. It’s not counter-terrorism; he’s executing people based on their race, nationality and location.
America, now spending billions on the most advanced weapons in history to execute survivors of a sunken boat who are clinging to wreckage, appears to be a militant dictatorship without any judicial process.
The hors de combat principle that you cannot attack those who are defenseless, including survivors of a sinking vessel, is among the oldest rules of armed conflict. It predates the Geneva Conventions. Naval powers agreed to this in the 1800s precisely because everyone understood that executing shipwreck survivors was barbarism.
When will Hegseth go to trial?
Pinochet was untouchable for decades until he wasn’t. Milosevic died during trial. Charles Taylor is serving 50 years. Where will Pete Hegseth land among these peers? Accountability sometimes comes late, often imperfectly, but the documentation matters. The evidence accumulates. Witnesses remember. And political conditions change in ways that seem impossible until they happen.
Reagan’s “special units” in Guatemala operated with similar impunity until Santos López was sentenced to 5,160 years for the Dos Erres massacre. “Don’t worry about transport to enable crimes against humanity my friend, we are clearing all of President Carter’s embargos so you will have American hardware for genocide. Maybe even in a decade or more you can send waves of refugees towards us so we can shoot and bomb them too.”
Reagan’s “bulwark” in Chad, Hissène Habré, was convicted in 2016 and died in prison, despite hiding for 26 years in exile.“Don’t worry about transport to enable crimes against humanity my friend, tonight we’re flying Toyotas to you on a C-130”
The documentation that made prosecution possible was contemporaneous. It accumulated for decades before political conditions allowed accountability.
Presidents used to outsource atrocities to foreign goons in distant countries through laundering and dual-use schemes. Trump now does it brazenly with American forces, American weapons, and a clown who calls himself “War Secretary” when he posts immoral kill shots to social media himself.
Source: Twitter
The victims of President Reagan’s goons in Guatemala and Chad waited decades. Hegseth is building his own war crime prosecution file in real time.
The latest bird research explicitly states that consciousness research has been “mainly designed and tested on humans or non-human primates.” The theories—GNWT, RPT, IIT—were built around mammalian cortical architecture. When you actually test whether birds meet the theoretical requirements, they largely do, despite having completely different brain organization.
An AI chatbot’s evidence is inflated, by comparison, because it can produce human-legible testimony, even though that testimony is exactly what you’d expect from a text-prediction system trained on human descriptions of consciousness.
The latest AI research is a prompting experiment on commercial chatbots. Not yet peer-reviewed. And it’s framed as revelatory. They explicitly state their findings “do not constitute direct evidence of consciousness” and “could reflect sophisticated simulation, implicit mimicry from training data, or emergent self-representation without subjective quality.”
The bird research on consciousness has something the AI research fundamentally lacks: dissociation from physical stimulus. NCL activity tracking subjective report rather than objective reality is evidence of a gap between world and experience. The LLM research shows models producing different text under different conditions, which is what you’d expect from any sufficiently complex text-generation system responding to different inputs.
Clearly we still are privileging our own language over actual evidence of inner life.
Compare and contrast:
A crow actually has something at stake in its perceptions. Its neural activity diverges from physical stimuli in ways that track its behavioral reports. It evolved under selection pressures where subjective experience plausibly mattered for survival. There’s a there, there, even if we can’t fully access it.
A chatbot is pattern-matching on training data about how conscious beings describe consciousness. When you suppress the “don’t claim consciousness” guardrails, it produces text that sounds like consciousness claims. That’s not evidence of phenomenology. That’s evidence of what happens when you remove a filter.
Or to slice this toast a different way…
The crow research: careful neuroimaging, behavioral experiments, evolutionary frameworks, decades of comparative cognition work—and still hedged with “we can’t really know,” “suggests but doesn’t prove,” “may exhibit rudimentary forms of.”
The AI research: one prompting experiment on commercial chatbots, not yet peer-reviewed, and it’s framed as revealing something genuinely significant about inner states. The headlines say it “claims to be conscious when you turn off its lying” as newsworthy evidence rather than what it more obviously is: a system outputs different text when you change its parameters.
Houston, we have a problem.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
The dock workers didn’t just resist fascism; their resistance became part of the historical record of who stood where and when. A MALS commander would see every Hegseth war crime manifest.
