The Noodly Appendage of Law: Navigating the Crisis of Modern Religious Labeling

Pastafarianism, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, was created in 2005 as a satirical, or, as Highlights would say, "fun with a purpose," response to the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution. It was the intelligent creation of 24-year-old physics graduate Bobby Henderson, who wrote an open letter to the board asking for equal classroom time for his alternative theory: that a supernatural creator, who looked suspiciously like a huge ball of spaghetti and two meatballs, made the universe. It started off as a snarky commentary on religion intrusion into public schooling, and quickly became a worldwide internet sensation. Today it is a respected, humorous religion and a potent icon for secularism, free speech and separation of church and state.

With the rise of Supreme Court decisions emphasizing the Free Exercise clause as opposed to the Establishment Clause there is a strategic and unstable tension in the classification of religion as Evangelical groups try to assert political power.  From a legal standpoint,  there is no formal,  understanding of faith. The US and European legal systems have been silent for many years on what constitutes a religion, unable or unwilling to offer a precise definition. In theory, this ambiguity is helps to preserve religious freedom from the ever-increasing grasp of government misuse. The courts attempt to preserve the Principle of Neutrality, which is basically a stance of not identifying someone, by keeping the distinctions between cases purposefully fuzzy. Such a fair process is based on the Non-Establishment Clause of the US Constitution and equivalent statutes of other countries. This ensures that the state is a secular judge. In Europe, the European Court of Human Rights has stated that the word "religion" is not defined either by Article 9 or by case law. The reason for this intended gap is that any description of this sort would have to be broad enough to encompass all the religions in the world but narrow enough to function in certain circumstances. The European courts invoke the notion of “positive laicism” to ensure government neutrality and to give various religion communities a legal underpinning. So the judiciary has to take a non-identification position, which means it can't decide whether a belief system is true or incorrect.

 

But in today’s environment, that protective silence has become a great vulnerability. The government must be fully neutral and cannot determine whether an ideology is objectively true or wrong. This means that conventional theology and contemporary parody systems that employ religious terminology for political or secular objectives are destined to collide in a confusing way. This judicial inaction creates a vacuum in which it is hard to distinguish between true piety and elaborate parody. Scientology is a good example of religious creativity on the part of a science fiction writer who realized it was a great way to enrich himself. [1]  This muddies the state’s ability to figure out whether those using religious protections -- not to mention tax advantages -- via particular legal processes are genuine.

 

As the courts have backed off from defining what faith is, the burden of regulating has been left to the sincerity of each believer. The major way that religious accommodations are authorized is through an investigation of sincerity. It transfers the focus of the law investigation from the objective character of the belief system to the practitioner's personal conviction. (An argument could be made that current practitioners of enrichment theology are more sincere in their desire for a new jet than any Christian connection.)  It's difficult for the state to control and verify the shift from what the belief is to how strongly that belief is maintained. The Supreme Court declared a religious belief is one that has the same position in a person's life as a traditional belief in God -- an amorphous term if there ever was one:  The Seeger test. [2]

 

The Hobby Lobby warning added another complicating layer to this parallel-position standard. It states judges should not be in the business of deciding if a religious assertion is true. [3] The methods are part of the religious sincerity . If you do not measure the plausibility of the belief , it is very difficult for the state to discover sophisticated deception or motives that are not religious at all . This curtain obscures the distinction between genuine piety and sham for profit for the court. Some courts have held that in order to correctly apply the sincerity test, they must delve into the innermost motivations of the claimant, and keep the issue of sincerity apart from the fact-finder’s perception of the religious nature of the beliefs. As with any other legal question about purpose, this requires a factual determination of a party's state of mind. But the Constitution does not enable us to assume that someone is not honest because they believe something that appears unusual, as is the case in typical criminal or civil purpose. Therefore, the legal context upended when the plausibility aspect is removed. As long as they act like they believe, the state has a hard time challenging a claimant who comes up with a made-up belief system to acquire the most legal support. This emphasis on sincerity rather than substance makes it difficult to know if a claimant who seems genuinely committed is indeed deeply committed, or just clever at parodying. This has directly resulted in the creation of manufactured faiths that attempt to challenge these lines.

 

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, often known as Pastafarianism, arose out of Russell's Teapot, a philosophical argument, in a way that was hilarious. It wasn't supposed to be a conventional religion, it was supposed to be a political and social critique instrument, designed to satirize religious notions like intelligent design being applied in public life. The group began as a protest against the decision by the Kansas school board to teach intelligent design. Its founder, Bobby Henderson, stated his noodle-based god was as scientifically possible as any other creator. The myths tell of a god who looks like a pile of spaghetti with two meatballs and eyes attached to the meatballs by two stalks. The group began as a joke, but it employs a language of legitimacy to make its claims, asserting that its opinions are grounded in rigorous science and that any humor is incidental. In Cavanaugh v. Bartelt, Judge John Gerrard of the Nebraska District Court dismissed a prisoner’s allegation of discrimination. This case demonstrated the power of comedy in the eyes of the law. Cavanaugh wanted to wear holy regalia, like pirate attire, and be able to gather for prayer once a week. The court admitted that Cavanaugh did appear to be somewhat sincere, as he had multiple tattoos depicting his faith . However , the court ultimately ruled that Pastafarianism is plainly a comedic work that is intended to be entertaining while making a serious political statement

 

Such bizarre or obviously non-religious requirements cannot be protected by the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, Judge Gerrard held. But that kind of heartless mentality is totally different to what is happening in other countries. That church is a real group that maintains a coherent set of beliefs,” said Jeff Montgomery, Registrar-General of New Zealand. This is what made Karen Martyn a Ministeroni and the first officially recognized Pastafarian wedding to be held aboard a pirate boat in Akaroa. In Massachusetts, a legal case backed by humanist groups earned a practitioner the right to wear a colander, or spaghetti strainer, in a driver’s license photo.

 

These examples demonstrate the difficulty judges (Alito) have in dividing humor from their own personal  perception of things. Pastafarians believe in a paradise with a beer volcano and a hell with old beer . So it is hard for the court to define a line without violating the Constitution , which protects the strangest views as well.

 

The best example of moving from an external funny protest to an internal institutional administrative tenacity is Scientology. Scientology is a unique blend of business and religion. Dianetics transformed from a scientific and medical study group into a rigid religious hierarchy. This is a different kind of challenge for the court than it was for the Pastafarians, who were simply poking fun at things. Most religions believe in a god who is all powerful. It is, rather, the Eighth Dynamic, which sees the Supreme Being as the longing to exist as infinite. Initially, judges were skeptical of the absence of a traditional Supreme Being. For example, in , Church of Scientology v. State Tax Commission [4] judges noted that religious worship in the ordinary sense involves belief in a supreme being to be followed. But Scientology got past this by effectively employing the sorts of organizational structures that courts often find acceptable: a well-known doctrine, a holy book written by L. Ron Hubbard and a defined structure for who can join. The organization’s tactics changed when its head, David Miscavige, negotiated directly with the Internal Revenue Service and obtained tax-exempt status in 1991, using loopholes in congress about tax relief. A church is exempt under section 7611 of title 26, United States Code, if a senior Treasury official has a good basis to believe, based on written facts and circumstances, that the organization is a church. Scientology sidestepped a court probe into the veracity of its miraculous claims by establishing the durability of its institutions and by working for the public good in areas like education and charity. Many courts had ruled the institution non-religious, but this administrative tenacity allowed it to access state resources. This suggests that organizational complexity might frequently be more significant than a lack of a traditional theistic underpinning. The success of Scientology in avoiding the public purpose and tax provisions underscores the legal acceptance that a well-developed invented religion can obtain, something that ideological sincerity alone may not be able to achieve. This is somewhat different from the far more adversarial relationship between the government and practitioners of Satanism.

 

LaVeyan Satanism exists on the boundary of political theory and personal freedom, frequently viewing itself as a method to resist religion. It is about free will, and empowering people to take control of their own life. It utilizes Satan, not as an actual divinity, but as an attack on Judeo-Christian societal mores. That creates a legal  hurdle here . A personal belief and a protected religion are legally not the same thing . The definition of religion is broad enough to protect atheism under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. But judges usually examine Satanic beliefs very carefully. In locations like jails, Satan believers are usually viewed as a threat to civilization, or as a kind of near anarchy. Most of it has to do with what is in the Satanic bible, [5] which judges have argued promotes taking advantage of weak people for your own gain. The government ostensibly protects any moral or ethical viewpoint held with the same intensity as conventional religious ideas. But the safety of faith sometimes depends on how innocuous people think it is. Faiths perceived as safe are far easier to accommodate than minority faiths that are perceived as dangerous or destructive to society. In Goode v. Warden, the court found that banning Satanic literature was a legitimate measure to enhance prison security. They argued the state’s main function should be to preserve public health and safety, which includes restricting severe religious expressions. The law is applied differently. A harmless parody like Pastafarianism might be laughed off as a joke, but a philosophy like LaVeyan Satanism is generally restricted, because its notions of intense self interest are considered as irreconcilable with the state’s requirement for security. This tension between individual liberty and state security (an argument could be made that conscientious objection, permitted under Seeger undermined state security ) highlights the difficulty of controlling groups that use religion to promote self-serving ideals. This is because the courts have difficulty distinguishing between protected matters of conscience and matters that are motivated by considerations threatening public order. The various kinds of modern faith are all working together to push the courts toward an oncoming administrative catastrophe, satirists, administrators and philosophers.

 

The challenge with modern religious law is that it has to weigh the very high costs of providing bogus religious concessions against the very terrible outcomes of not allowing people follow their faith. The present case-by-case approach of assessment is becoming more difficult to administer and less successful as society gets more diverse. There is no uniform way to appraise organizations. Dishonest groups can take use of resources and protections that were established for honest worship communities. This makes this inefficient administration worse, and also leaves it subject to ingenious tactics, as the state cannot question the veracity of a belief.

 

Some legal experts and international groups have proposed a more uniform four-part standard for legitimacy to fix this problem: belief in a central god or thing that is worshiped; (like meatballs?) an established doctrine written down in a holy text (Satanic Bible, anyone?); a clear hierarchy of members or leadership; and an ultimate goal that is safe and moral for everyone. Such rules are riddled with loopholes and definitional issues.  The American judicial system so far, although less so in the Roberts Court,  is still very reluctant to employ such rigid criteria, since it doesn't want to enter into the very personal domain of morality. A restrictive interpretation would make the right to religious freedom largely theoretical and illusory; this could mean that minority religions are not given legal protection as early Mormons discovered to their peril.

 

But while there is no such requirement, courts must continue to investigate the claimants’ underlying motivations, which is intrusive and likely to be biased. Neutrality used to be a great protection of freedom, but today it's a means for those who want to challenge religion's place in government to get in. The government must find a means to guarantee the right to religious freedom without overburdening or misusing the government’s systems. In an age where fake faiths increasingly resemble actual ones, it’s a fine line to walk to stay neutral as a state. This neutrality is expensive: the state is legally handicapped, unable to discriminate between the sacred and the humorous; and the safe space of religious freedom is fragile and contested, available to the same diversity it was intended to safeguard.

 

[1]  Multiple colleagues from his science-fiction writing days, including authors Lloyd Eshbach and Theodore Sturgeon, reported that during the late 1940s, Hubbard repeatedly made variations of the statement: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." 

 

[2] United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/380/163/#:~:text=conviction%20was%20affirmed.-,Held%3A,380%20U.%20S.%20173%2D180.  The case arose during the Vietnam War when Daniel Seeger, an agnostic pacifist, applied for conscientious objector status. The draft board denied his request because federal law at the time explicitly required a belief in a "Supreme Being." Seeger argued this preference violated the First Amendment. By defining religion by its function in a person's life rather than its theological content, the Supreme Court prevented the government from favoring traditional theistic religions over non-theistic, philosophical, or ethical beliefs. Five years later, in Welsh v. United States (1970), the Court pushed this logic even further, clarifying that an objector's beliefs could qualify even if they explicitly denied being "religious," so long as their moral opposition to war was held with absolute sincerity.

[3]   Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014)    The Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruled that closely held, for-profit corporations can be exempt from federal mandates—specifically the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) contraceptive coverage requirement—if the mandate substantially burdens the owners' religious beliefs. The ruling has sparked widespread debate and criticism.  It was a terrible decision in my view because it made erroneous assumptions about the religious beliefs and sincerity of the employees.

[4] https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/missouri-church-of-scientology-v-state-tax-commission-mo-1977

[5] Published in 1969 by Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible serves as the foundational text for contemporary LaVeyan Satanism and the Church of Satan.Contrary to popular misconceptions involving literal devil worship, the book outlines an atheistic philosophy that views "Satan" strictly as a literary metaphor for individualism, rational self-interest, and personal liberty. Heavily influenced by philosophers who championed materialism and egoism, LaVey's text is divided into four structural books that reject traditional Judeo-Christian concepts of guilt and sin, advocating instead for indulgence, carnal human instincts, and a localized form of ritual magic meant to act as a form of emotional psychology.

 

 

The architecture of American impunity: on Pete Hegseth and the juvenile brutishness of empire.

Pete Hegseth is repulsive. I have watched his performances before Congress.  He is rude, brutish, and obnoxious, self righteous with a-little-dab-will-do-yah hair and tatoos to match. He's also a Princeton grad. The New York Review of Books for June 11th had a fascinating review of Hegseth's two books. I can't bring myself to read the books; my stomach can't handle it, but I am curious about how he came to be the way he is. Suzy Hansen has done the hard work for us. I recommend her essay.  

Hansen provides a deeply unsettling autopsy of contemporary American political culture. Rather than treating Hegseth as an ideological aberration or an unfortunate glitch in the democratic machine, Hansen positions him as a mirror. He is a highly visible, explicitly distilled product of a historical continuum—one defined by exceptionalism, a preening appetite for domination, and an increasingly juvenile brand of brutishness.

He is heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west. He practices that nasty Christianity. “Break the teeth of the ungodly,” he said at the Pentagon prayer service; Bull Connor comes to mind. So many of Trump’s men—Gregory Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, Tom Homan—resemble the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.

Hegseth’s rapid ascent from right-wing campus provocateur to the apex of the world's most formidable military apparatus exposes a profound truth about modern America: when a society spends decades insulating itself from the human consequences of its violence, its leadership will eventually devolve into a caricature of raw, unchecked power. By investigating Hegseth’s juvenile brutishness and examining how elite institutions, media ecosystems, and bipartisan foreign policies laid the groundwork for his rise, we can better understand the urgent necessity of what Hansen calls a structural renunciation of the American war reflex.

To understand Pete Hegseth’s political theology, one must first confront the distinctly adolescent, locker-room quality of his aggression. Hansen observes that despite his elite education and proximity to power, Hegseth remains "a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school". He represents the high school bully operating on a global scale—the guy who "shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria" now handed the keys to the Pentagon.

This juvenile disposition is not merely a personality flaw; it is the vital engine of his prose, his politics, and his military strategy. Hansen notes that across Hegseth’s six books, his tone has "become steadily more juvenile, as if his mind were maturing in reverse". His public pronouncements lack the sober, heavy-hearted calculations historically simulated by architects of state violence. Instead, they gleam with the unrefined sadism of an action-movie script. Commenting on devastating air strikes, Hegseth proudly boasts: "We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly as it should be... We have only just begun to hunt". The choice of the word "hunt," alongside a compulsive habit of "recit[ing] weapon names," reduces the horrific, flesh-and-blood reality of modern warfare to a high-stakes video game or a safari.

This brutishness manifests as a complete rejection of restraint, international law, or basic human empathy. Hansen traces the origin of this worldview to Hegseth’s formative years as a soldier during the bloodiest chapters of the Iraq War. Disillusioned by lawyers, rules of engagement, and the rare accountability mechanisms designed to curb war crimes, Hegseth adopted a philosophy of "maximum lethality". In his view, the only acceptable approach to conflict is "the unshackling of soldiers from any rules of engagement so that they can kill with impunity". When cornered on the strategic failures of modern counterinsurgency, his response is revealingly simplistic: "This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees". It is a vision of total annihilation born from an inability to comprehend foreign societies as networks of living human beings. For Hegseth, a nation like Iran is not an ancient, richly complex civilization of real people; it is merely an abstract polygon on a target screen waiting to be obliterated by "death and destruction from the sky".

Hegseth’s adolescent cruelty is further supercharged by a highly selective, weaponized theological framework—what Hansen aptly brands "that nasty Christianity". Hegseth seamlessly fuses schoolyard bravado with a blood-drenched, Old Testament fanaticism, regularly invoking God and Jesus specifically to justify mass killing. In a chilling Christian prayer service held inside the Pentagon, he petitioned for "...overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.... We ask [this] with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ". This is a complete subversion of the gospel of grace, replacing the crucified Christ with a cosmic crusader who demands that believers "break the teeth of the ungodly".

By aligning his family with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches—a radical sect that advocates for the subordination of civil law to Old Testament dictates, capital punishment for homosexuality, and "rigidly patriarchal families"—Hegseth seeks divine validation for his terrestrial biases. The church’s worldview is starkly illuminated by its leader Doug Wilson’s hyper-masculine, colonial rhetoric: "A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts". This patriarchal hunger for conquest shapes Hegseth’s foreign policy into a fanatical brand of Christian Zionism, viewing military carnage in the Middle East as a necessary, prophetic prerequisite for the Second Coming. When guest preachers like Franklin Graham take the Pentagon podium to declare that "God also is a God of war" while quoting biblical commands to "utterly destroy all that they have... both man and woman, infant, nursing child," the boundary between state defense policy and genocidal religious crusade vanishes entirely.

Hansen does not paint Hegseth as an aberration who broke into the corridors of power from the margins of society. Instead, she illustrates how America's elite structures continuously accommodated, insulated, and elevated him. Hegseth’s trajectory is paved with the golden bricks of institutional privilege: he is a Princeton valedictorian, an Army National Guard major, and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Even when his juvenile, destructive tendencies caught up with him in his professional and personal life, the system refused to discard him. When he grossly mismanaged the finances of veteran nonprofits—leaving half a million dollars of debt and frequently turning up so "intoxicated... as to need to be carried out of the organization's events"—there were no lasting systemic penalties. When he faced credible accusations of sexual assault, a confidential $50,000 payoff was enough to keep his trajectory clear. Shades of Kavanaugh, another who benefited from affirmative action for the rich.

Instead of facing exile, Hegseth was absorbed into Fox News, a corporate media apparatus where he could marinate in a "propagandistic and fame-hungry culture". On television, he perfected his persona, translating his inner ethical vacuum into prime-time ratings. His personal behavior—described in leaked emails by his own mother as that of a man who "belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego"—did not disqualify him from leading the world’s most lethal military entity. It served as an asset. In the MAGA universe, personal debasement is recast as authenticity. As Hegseth himself observed with striking candor, Donald Trump resonated because he "didn’t—and couldn’t—hide his personal failings," proving to a base eager for validation that "the reservoir of forgiveness is deep". For Hegseth, the Trumpian political arena offers the ultimate prize: absolute absolution without the inconvenience of genuine repentance.

Hansen’s most devastating critique is directed at the liberal establishment and the mainstream media, entities that present themselves as the "opposition" to Trumpian autocracy while quietly validating its violent underpinnings. Hansen argues that the difference between the political factions is not one of substance, but of style. As she notes, "The Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony". The current administration’s reckless warfare is the logical inheritance of a bipartisan consensus. It was Hillary Clinton, Hansen reminds us, who first popularized the word "obliterate" regarding Iran in 2008. Hegseth’s truculent, dismissive press briefings are merely unvarnished iterations of State Department briefings from the Biden years, where spokespeople "disdainfully waved away questions about the destruction of Gaza".

Whether the violence is masked by the feigned haplessness of technocratic Democrats or celebrated by the holy-war rhetoric of MAGA Republicans, the human toll remains identical. When the US-Israeli campaign hits 13,000 targets in six weeks—obliterating an entire family in Oshnavieh County with a Tomahawk missile or killing 175 children at a girls' school in Minab—the institutional response across the American political spectrum is a collective shrug. Corporate media outlets refrain from processing these horrors as crimes against humanity. Instead, they treat mass murder as a technical problem, running analytical headlines like The New York Times’ "Israel Keeps Killing Key Iranian Leaders. Will It Work?". By focusing their opposition strictly on procedural complaints—such as the Trump administration's failure to secure congressional approval—Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries reveal their fundamental alignment with the mechanics of empire. They cannot truly condemn the war because they share the underlying belief that American dominance must be preserved at any cost. They understand that the alternative, humiliation, is too painful to bear.

Suzy Hansen’s essay leaves us with an uncomfortable, urgent diagnostic challenge. Pete Hegseth is not a foreign body that infiltrated the American political organism; he is an authentic expression of its history. He is the heir to "the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west," a repository of the cold war, and the moral vacuum of the post-9/11 era. He represents an American culture "marked by a presumption of the right to use violence and a concurrent assumption of innocence".

The path forward cannot be found by simply waiting for the current administration to collapse or by retreating into comforting myths about the nation’s inherently noble institutions. It requires a profound, painful act of national renunciation. This means dismantling the sprawling security apparatuses, corporate media ecosystems, and deep-seated cultural myths that sustain the mass bombing reflex. To avert a slow slide into a failed, autocratic democracy, Americans must discard the juvenile craving for global supremacy. The nation must embrace a difficult truth: it is not exceptional, it is not uniquely righteous, and its people are merely "equal with the rest of the world before God". Until this structural reality is faced, the American system will continue to manufacture, validate, and empower brutal figures like Pete Hegseth. They are, after all, stamped with the defining seal of our collective heritage: Made in the USA.

Link to the original essay in which she reviews two books by Hegseth: American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free and In the Arena: Good Citizens, A Great Republic, and How One Speech can Reinvigorate America

All While Getting Instructions for a Colonoscopy in Idaho.

 I live in Illinois.  I have never been to Idaho.  I am too old for colonoscopies (the ONLY delight of getting old.) So I was surprised to get instructions (be sure to drink the entire bottle)  and preparations for a colonoscopy tomorrow from a hospital in Idaho. Rather than fly out there on the spur of the moment, I called them pretty sure there was some mistake. The nurse was nice but quite flummoxed. Apparently there is another person with my name living in Post Falls, Idaho and who is a patient of Dr. Sarkis at Northwest Specialty Hospital. My email address matched the one they had on file for some bizarre reason (my guess is human error) and my heart (or colon) goes out to whomever else has my name.

That put me in a particularly satirical mood as I read about another of Trump's revenge schemes that will come back to haunt the United States. 

 Brace yourselves, everyone: it turns out Donald Trump’s beautifully orchestrated revenge tour against the global order is having a few completely unforeseen side effects. Who could have possibly predicted it?

For decades, the European Union blissfully outsourced 96% of its personal credit transactions to Visa and Mastercard. Why worry about the fact that American entities controlled literally every swipe, tap, and dip? After all, America was the world's friendly, benevolent superpower! What could possibly go wrong?

Enter Trump, armed with a Twitter account (now Truth Social) and a dream. Between slapping tariffs on everyone like they were bumper stickers and treating NATO and the UN like optional country club memberships, he really shook things up. But the real "aha!" moment for the rest of the world came in September 2020. That was when the first Trump administration gracefully landed ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and senior official Phakiso Mochochoko onto the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. Because nothing screams "leader of the free world" quite like using the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to turn off an international judge's credit card.

Enter The Magical Disappearing Bank Account

The mechanism here is truly a work of art. Thanks to the absolute chokehold U.S. clearinghouses have on global finance, getting on the SDN list is the ultimate magic trick. Presto! Your Visa and Mastercard stop working, your PayPal evaporates, and you can forget about using Google or Amazon. European banks, absolutely terrified of getting caught in the crossfire of American secondary sanctions, will freeze your accounts just for looking at them funny.

Naturally, Trump doubled down with Executive Order 14203, generously targeting any ICC officials, judges, or prosecutors daring to investigate U.S. personnel or close allies (God forbid anyone look into actions in Palestine or Afghanistan). Asset freezes, travel bans, absolute blocks on getting "funds, goods, or services"—it was an incredibly subtle and nuanced way of punishing people for having opinions Trump didn’t care for.

According to legal experts on Verfassungsblog—who clearly just don't appreciate top-tier bullying—this "Sanctioning of Law" was an "unprecedented targeting of independent judges." Poor things. One minute you're upholding international law, the next you can't even pay for a Netflix subscription or order a pizza because your digital existence has been revoked.

Those nasty unintended consequences:

Shockingly, Europe didn't look at this and think, "Wow, we want more of that!" Instead, they are now sprinting toward "strategic autonomy."

To protect themselves from the whims of whatever mood the U.S. President wakes up in, the EU is rolling out some brilliant new coping mechanisms:

• The "Buy European" Initiative: Forcing public procurement to favor domestic industries in defense, healthcare, and IT. Because apparently, relying on an unstable superpower for your military tech is suddenly "bad strategy."

• The Great Software Migration: Ditching proprietary American tech to cozy up with Linux and the sparkling new "Euro-Office" suite. Goodbye, Microsoft Clippy; hello, European sovereignty. I wonder what Co-Pilot thinks of that?

• Wero: The European Payments Initiative's brand-new domestic payment network, explicitly designed to tell Visa and Mastercard to take a hike. And it's cheaper, too.

And Europe isn't the only one backing away slowly. Canada—historically America’s polite, long-suffering upstairs neighbor—is frantically building its own internal online payment infrastructure. It will be located solely in Canada, entirely out of reach of tiny, Twitter-happy American fingers. Down in South America, Brazil is doing the exact same thing, except cheaper and faster, causing Visa and Mastercard to actively hemorrhage business in one of their largest markets.

Confidence in the United States as a stable global partner has been entirely lost, and it’s probably never coming back. But hey, look on the bright side! All of these global initiatives are successfully eroding U.S. dominance in finance, software, and defense.

So, thanks, Donald. Truly a masterclass in diplomacy. Way to Make America Great Again.

 

Sources:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y0GaMvM0SA

 

“EU Launches Wero to Rival VISA and Mastercard.”  London Daily, Monday June 8, 2026.     https://londondaily.com/eu-launches-wero-to-rival-visa-and-mastercard

 

“Die Sanktionierung des Rechts” Kai Ambos.  Verfassungsblog on matters constitutional. https://verfassungsblog.de/die-sanktionierung-des-rechts/

 

[2]  “Microsoft accused of leaking Dutch civil servants' names to U.S. government” NL Times. Friday, 22 May 2026. https://nltimes.nl/2026/05/22/microsoft-accused-leaking-dutch-civil-servants-names-us-government

 

“F-35 debate intensifies across Germany and Europe” Harici, March 26, 2025.   https://harici.com.tr/en/f-35-debate-intensifies-across-germany-and-europe/

 

“Europe Is Breaking Up With Visa and Mastercard — and It’s a $24 Trillion Problem” by Nick Staunton. April 22, 2026 European Business Magazine. https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/europes-24-trillion-breakup-visa-mastercard/

 

Should Canada Build Up Alternatives to Visa and Mastercard?

The US controls the vast majority of online payments. It's a problem. by Vass Bednar. The Walrus: Canada’s Conversation. https://thewalrus.ca/why-your-credit-card-is-a-national-security-threat/

The Pentagon decides to "jailbreak" weapon systems software.

I have long been a fan of open source software and the GNU Public License. [1] The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a free software license created by the Free Software Foundation that grants users four essential freedoms: to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the source code, to redistribute copies, and to distribute modified versions. Its defining characteristic is "copyleft," which requires that any derivative works or modifications distributed to others must also be licensed under the GPL, ensuring that the software and its derivatives remain free and open-source. This viral provision prevents the proprietary appropriation of GPL-licensed code while promoting collaborative development and user freedom.

That license thrives in the Linux world -- note that it has enabled companies to use Linux for servers and now more than 95% of the servers in the world run Linux. Most companies, in a mistaken effort to maximize profits, copyright and protect software for their products, including cars, trucks, tractors, kitchen appliances, phones (with the exception of Android which is open source and changed in numerous ways without penalty), etc.  This often leads to interoperability problems.  It's not much of an issue when your refrigerator can't talk to a different brand of freezer; it becomes much more serious when you are in the midst of harvest and your John Deere tractor throws a software code that you can't fix and must wait days for a JD software engineer to come fix because they won't give you the right or the information to repair your own equipment. (Hence right-to-repair legislation.)

It's even more problematic in the defense industry. Many defense contractors develop closed, proprietary communication protocols and data formats to protect intellectual property and maintain competitive advantages. This creates "walled gardens" where a missile guidance system from Vendor A cannot easily communicate with a radar system from Vendor B.  It also "locks" in the purchaser of a weapons system to the manufacturer for updates, etc.

Recent efforts of the Trump administration to distance itself from traditional allies, like NATO have caused many of those countries to reexamine proposed purchases of U.S. defense systems. For example allies operating the F-35  have expressed significant concern regarding the potential existence of "kill switches" or remote disablement capabilities embedded within the aircraft's proprietary software, fearing that the United States could theoretically deactivate the jets remotely in the event of geopolitical friction or unauthorized use. These worries stem from the fact that the F-35's source code is largely closed and controlled by Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Department of Defense, meaning partner nations cannot independently audit the software for such backdoors.  Or, the U.S. could simply refuse to provide software updates to the F-35 which would degrade or even the F-35's capabilities.

That's why it was gratifying to read a recent article about "Operation Jailbreak". Army Secretary Dan Driscoll confirmed that the military launched its largest-ever hackathon at Fort Carson, Colorado. Defense contractors, engineers, and Army personnel worked together to "jailbreak" proprietary code blocks, forcing older and newer weapons systems to communicate in real time. Historically, defense procurement incentivized contractors to protect intellectual property, creating isolated, vendor-specific "walled gardens." Consequently, radars from one manufacturer could not natively share data with interceptor missiles or cameras from another.

Driven by the threat of cheap, $20,000 Iranian Shahed drones, the U.S. military could no longer afford to use million-dollar interceptors inefficiently. By breaking proprietary software locks, the Army successfully linked legacy radars and newer cameras to track and engage drones dynamically.  The inspiration came heavily from Ukrainian forces. During a visit to Germany, Driscoll witnessed Ukraine's integrated "Delta" system—a platform cobbled together on a fraction of America's budget that seamlessly aggregated data from diverse battlefield sensors into a single interface.

The operation marks a significant shift in Pentagon philosophy, prioritizing immediate frontline interoperability and the "right to integrate" over strict corporate intellectual property boundaries. The hackathon now allows the Army to integrate new systems into command and control structures to sync with radars and sensors that previously couldn't communicate with each other. There's also mention of deployed "jailbroken tech" being sent to the Middle East as part of the ongoing effort.

Score one for open source, the free software movement, and hackers.

[1 ]https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

SOURCES

"Army Hackathon Delivers Rapid Software Upgrades to Deployed Forces"   https://sentinelroger.com/article/army-hackathon-delivers-rapid-software-upgrades-to-deployed-forces

Lawrence, Drew F. "Operation Jailbreak: the Army’s massive push to hack its own systems and make them talk to each other   " https://defensescoop.com/2026/05/29/operation-jailbreak-the-armys-massive-push-to-hack-its-own-systems-and-make-them-talk-to-each-other/

Perez, Lisbeth. "Army Pushes First ‘Jailbroken’ Defense Systems to CENTCOM  ". https://www.meritalk.com/articles/army-pushes-first-jailbroken-defense-systems-to-centcom/

U.S. Army Public Affairs. "Army and defense sector announce, 'Right to Integrate' hackathon sprint for shared technology  ."  https://www.army.mil/article/292189/army_and_defense_sector_announce_right_to_integrate_hackathon_sprint_for_shared_technology