"During Trump's 2017-2021 presidency, he considered terrorism designations for cartels but ultimately shelved the plans."

But now: "US declares Tren de Aragua, other cartels are global terrorist organizations" (Reuters)

Some top U.S. officials at the time had privately expressed misgivings that the measure could damage relations with Mexico.... Another concern was that the designations could make it easier for migrants to win U.S. asylum by claiming they were fleeing terrorism. Some analysts have said the terrorism designations could expose asylum seekers who pay cartels to be smuggled to the possibility of prosecution or being barred from the U.S....

.

"Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "Bannon Calls Musk a ‘Parasitic Illegal Immigrant’/Stephen Bannon, a top adviser during President Trump’s first term and a popular figure among his supporters, said Elon Musk wants to 'play-act as God' as part of his push to overhaul the federal government" (NYT).

He appeared to be referring to news reports that Mr. Musk, who was born in South Africa and who has become an aggressive voice against undocumented immigrants, overstayed his visa as he built a company in the United States. Mr. Musk has denied the accusation....

“It’s pretty evident the president’s using [Musk] as an armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state,” Mr. Bannon said in the interview....

"If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people that elected me and elected President Trump."

Said JD Vance, quoted by Jonathan Turley, in "Vance rightly excoriates Europe: What values are we defending?" (NY Post).

Turley: "The outrage of the Europeans was only surpassed by our own anti-free speech voices in government, the media and academia. Commentator and CNN regular Bill Kristol called the speech 'a humiliation for the US and a confirmation that this administration isn’t on the side of the democracies.' It appears that free speech is no longer viewed as pro-democracy. Indeed, it could be outright fascism...."

President Trump and Elon Musk vouch for each other's goodness.

On Fox News, in the presence of a mumbly, inert Sean Hannity:

At 1:05:

MUSK: I think President Trump is a good man. The President has been so unfairly attacked in the media. It's really outrageous. At this point I've spent a lot of time with the President and not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or wrong. Not once....

At 6:10:

"She still loves recording herself and often thinks of her life decisions as things to debut on a platform...."

"But the memoir ends with a declaration of intention to protect, if not necessarily her privacy, then perhaps her interiority. 'I’m trying this new thing where I keep certain things to myself,' Ms. Mulvaney writes. 'Little yummy womanly moments just for me.'"

From "Dylan Mulvaney Dreams of Privacy. Really. Her bubbly video diaries about her gender transition were once a study in oversharing. Now on the other side of a nationwide boycott, she sees the value in keeping some things to herself" (NYT).

What are you doing, just for you? Is it manly/womanly... and how would you know? Is it yummy? Is it bubbly? When you're in there, in your interiority, can it be bubbly?

How is your interiority? It's the NYT writer, Maggie Lange, not Mulvaney, who's using that word. I was moved to ask Grok: What kind of people use the word "interiority"? 

I'm told: "Writers, especially novelists and literary critics, use it a lot when dissecting characters or narratives—think folks analyzing Dostoevsky or Woolf for their deep dives into the human psyche."

And maybe also NYT writers helping very lightweight pop culture figures promote their memoirs. 

"Interiority" is showily contemplative. "Everyday people don’t typically say 'interiority' unless they’re parroting something they read or heard in a niche context."

I wondered if — in the 21 years of this blog — I'd ever used it. Quick search. I see it appears 5 times, but each time, I'm quoting someone else: 

"In order to create a 'snowy' atmosphere the tourist village purchased cotton for the snow. But it did not achieve the expected effect, leaving a very bad impression on tourists who came to visit."

Chengdu Snow Village confessed on its website, quoted in From "China snow village ‘cheats’ tourists with cotton wool and soap/Chengdu Snow Village, in Sichuan, was forced to apologise after visitors were left feeling ‘insulted'" (London Times).

Other cheesy tourism trickery from China:

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can talk all night.

Another sign that the Trump movement is extending far into the culture.

This NYT article about how people are wearing furs again: "What Happened to the Stigma of Wearing Fur? After years of protests and strides in fake skins, vintage furs are popping up all over."

The first paragraph uses the word "fur-a-palooza."

"A federal judge in Washington declined to grant a request by 14 state attorneys general to temporarily bar Elon Musk and his associates from accessing data at seven federal agencies..."

"... and moving forward with their efforts to slash the federal work force. The judge said the states had not shown specific examples of how the work of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency could cause the states irreparable harm."

The NYT reports.

AND: Here's the opinion, written by Tanya S. Chutkan of the D.C. District Court. Excerpt: "Plaintiffs' declarations are replete with attestations that if Musk and DOGE Defendants cancel, pause, or significantly reduce federal funding or eliminate federal-state contracts, Plaintiff States will suffer extreme financial and programmatic harm.... But the 'possibility' that Defendants may take actions that irreparably harm Plaintiffs 'is not enough.'... Plaintiffs ask the court to take judicial notice of widespread media reports that DOGE has taken or will soon take certain actions, such as mass terminations.... The court may take judicial notice of news articles for their existence, but not for the truth of the statements asserted therein.... Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight. In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority."

"We weren’t just listening to each other, but we heard each other. I have reason to believe that the American side started to better understand our positions."

Said Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, quoted in "U.S. and Russia Pursue Partnership in a Head-Spinning Shift in Relations/The two sides met in Saudi Arabia for their most extensive discussions in years. In addition to Ukraine, business ties were on the table" (NYT).

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, American officials did not dwell on Russia’s violation of international law in attacking Ukraine, its alleged war crimes or the three years of devastation that Russian shelling and bombardment had wrought in parts of Ukraine. Instead, they repeatedly lauded Mr. Trump for trying to stop the fighting by talking to Russia in a way that his predecessor did not.

“For three years,” Mr. Rubio said, “no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today, because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.”... 

“We were not invited to this Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Zelensky said while on a visit to Turkey. “It was a surprise for us — I think for many others as well.”

"One of the more perplexing criticisms we have received is that under our account of the common law rule, the freed people would not be citizens...."

"If our understanding of the rule fails to account for that, then that understanding cannot be right. But our account of the rule does extend birthright citizenship to the newly freed people. To reiterate, by social compact, we do not mean the explicit consent from both parties to citizenship as would be required for a contract between private parties. We mean that allegiance of some kind has been exchanged for protection, remedying the defects of the state of nature. Any child born to someone who had entered into that kind of social compact with America would be a citizen. The newly freed people obviously qualify. In our view, enslaved persons brought here against their will were not afforded protection of the law. But obedience and ligeance were demanded of them nonetheless. It was a failure on America's part that it did not provide the protection that it owed in return for that allegiance...."

Write Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman, at The Volokh Conspiracy, responding to critics of their NYT op-ed, "Don't Assume Trump is Wrong About Birthright Citizenship."

There's a lot more to the Barnett and Wurman response, and here's my post from 3 days ago linking to their original NYT piece.

Whose heart goes out to the fired federal workers?

The 60,000 people who got cut loose when the Keystone XL pipeline extension was canceled after Biden took office know the feeling. Except they weren't bureaucrats. They were skilled construction workers and engineers. https://t.co/5Xv18C84u9

— Joel Engel (@joelengel) February 17, 2025

Elon as Braveheart.

Everybody dies, but not everybody lives https://t.co/rYtoq01ygH

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025

AND: There's also this, from Seneca (at page 46-47 of this collection (commission earned)): 

"It was just incredibly fast. There was a giant firewall down the side. I could actually feel the heat through the glass."

"Then we were going sideways. I'm not even sure how many times we tumbled, but we ended upside down."

Said passenger John Nelson, quoted in "'Hanging...like bats': Toronto plane crash survivor speaks out after aircraft flips on runway" (ABC News). 

When the plane finally came to a stop, Nelson recounted[,]... the cabin was suddenly quiet before the 80 people onboard -- most of whom were hanging upside down [like] bats in the cabin – attempted to “make a sense of what just had happened. We released the seat belts. I kind of fell to the floor, which is now the ceiling...."

I would have said "I fell to the ceiling, which was now the floor," but I get it and he was there. Do we have video of the scene with 80 people silent, but hanging like bats? 

Here's another view from the outside:

This is INSANE

pic.twitter.com/qegJ1P3wCa

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 18, 2025

"But it’s time to catch up with a new batch of mopey millionaires who apparently didn’t do any due diligence to confirm..."

"... that the White Lotus is a luxury hotel where they could relax in peace and without any homicides on the premises."

I'm reading "The White Lotus Kill-or-Be-Killed Report: Chattering Monkey Minds" (Vulture)(analyzing, after Episode 1, who might be killing whom, this time around).

The article goes through a number of options. I'll cherry pick one, just because the actor is Patrick Schwarzenegger (as Saxon Ratliff, who went to Duke):

I got Grok 3, and here's the first question I asked (and where things went).

"In the Latvian animated movie 'Flow,' what do viewers think has happened to make the world the way it is seen? It can't be Earth and it can't be rising waters of the sort our environmentalists warn us about."

I wrote about the movie yesterday, and here's my comment on that post with my explanation why it can't be Earth and does not depict a conventional earthly climate-change catastrophe. 

Grok 3 answered (so this is the first thing Grok 3 ever said to me):

At the Extra-Cold Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead."

"While we have previously upheld limits on the president's removal authority in certain contexts, we decline to do so when it comes to principal officers who, acting alone, wield significant executive power."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, 5 years ago, quoted in "Trump's firings of independent agency heads put 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent in crosshairs" (CBS News).

In what is likely to be the Trump administration's first Supreme Court emergency appeal of his second term, the solicitor general is expected to ask the high court to permit Dellinger's firing, according to documents obtained Sunday.

Dellinger = Hampton Dellinger, "who oversees the office that investigates whistleblower complaints"

The 90-year-old case =  Humphrey's Executor. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, called Humphrey's Executor "a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people," and said he "would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent."

(It's Humphrey's Executor because the man, who was fired by FDR, had died, and the family was suing for back pay.)

"Musk has said... 'Lil X is my emotional support human.' The idea that X was not a child, with the needs and routines of children, but a trained care worker..."

"... for a father with self-confessed 'stormy' emotional needs was no doubt a joke. However, [Musk biographer Walter] Isaacson wrote that almost as soon as X was born, to the singer Grimes, Musk considered him something special, and described how the baby had a medicating effect on his father. He 'had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence,' Isaacson wrote. 'He took X everywhere.' From infancy X accompanied Musk through a demanding work schedule, sitting on his lap at meetings, dancing on conference tables, attending film premieres.... Musk has repeatedly expressed how his lonely childhood instilled in him a desire that he 'never be alone.' His close working life with his four-year-old, or the person Isaacson describes as Musk’s 'cheerful energiser,' means that desire is met. Musk is a maths person, and perhaps having an awful lot of children is the equivalent of having one child but seeing an awful lot of them...."

From "Elon Musk takes his four-year-old son to work. Why? Musk has described ‘Lil X’ as his ‘cuteness prop’ — but his mother seems less delighted" (London Times),

"[T]his is like an amazing puzzle, uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilization that went extinct … except it’s still around."

The logic flow diagram for the Social Security system looks INSANE. No one person actually knows how it works.

The payment files that move between Social Security and Treasury have significant inconsistencies that are not reconciled. It’s wild. https://t.co/BQUyxG72AC

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025

And what's going on here — mostly typos?!:

"My quest is to become the first person to cross Saudi Arabia north to south on foot, an expedition I’m completing in two parts..."

"It has really only just become possible for me to do this kind of trip, now that Saudi Arabia is opening up for tourism and welcoming non-Muslim tourists....  [A]t the border with Jordan... [w]e were planning to camp in the desert but when the farmer Abu Saqqar heard what we were doing he exclaimed, 'What God wills, what God wills, I must slaughter a sheep for you!'... This was my first taste of the Saudi hospitality that was such a delight on this journey. All the district notables were invited and we sat on the floor together to eat. I was the only woman so asked the men if they minded if I ate with them. They all politely invited me even though it may have been uncomfortable for them.... [T]he flat plains of pastel desert... were deeply soothing to the spirit.... The final stage will be a totally different experience as I head to the cool, misty mountains of the south, where the men wear flowers in their hair.... [T]he Saudis I have met on the way have been universally excited by the quest and desperate to show hospitality.... 'May God make you strong, may he bring you success, may you reach your goal if he wills it' are the words that will linger in my mind...."

Writes Alice Morrison, in "What I discovered on my journey to be the first to cross Saudi Arabia on foot/The explorer Alice Morrison describes the first stage of her 1,500 mile journey across volcanic fields and pastel deserts — and what she learnt along the way" (London Times).

ADDED: Here are some nice photos of those "Flower Men." The area is called the Asir province.

"Musk is trying to buy off Brad Schimel and take over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court so that Schimel can rubber-stamp an extreme agenda of banning abortion and cozying up to corporations."

"It’s not surprising that Schimel is groveling for the support of shady special interests — he’s already been caught begging on his knees for far-right donors to give him cash, and now Elon seems to be answering his pleas."

Said the spokesman for the Susan Crawford campaign, Derrick Honeyman, quoted in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that says "Elon Musk-backed group Building America's Future purchased over $670,000 in TV ads supporting conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel." 

Elon is everywhere.

Citizen journalism.

PASSENGER STARTS FILMING IMMEDIATELY AFTER UPSIDE DOWN DELTA JET CRASH AT TORONTO AIRPORT.

80 people on board, minor injuries reported, no deaths.pic.twitter.com/BCxA6yblU3

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 17, 2025

Joe Rogan observes that "There's actually some things that are organic for some weird reason."

I'm listening to his podcast with Adam Curry (who invented podcasting). Scroll to 2:49:39 for this part, which comes after some discussion of the role of the CIA in the field of arts (Abstract Expressionism) and entertainment (the music of Laurel Canyon):

ROGAN: The real kooky people probably think you're my handler or something. Because you created podcasting. Because there's that thought that... there's a whole financed and backed right-wing ecosystem that's created these podcasts.... This is just stupidity. This is the problem where when you look at some conspiracies, you think, oh, well that applies to all things.... There's actually some things that are organic for some weird reason.

Notice that the use of "organic" is the same as we saw — in the first post of the day — from the Canada hockey coach. The fighting was, he claimed, "as organic as it gets."

"Part of me thinks that I will always be somewhat disappointed if what ends up becoming one of the most important relationships in my life is with another white person."

Says some unnamed man writing in to the NYT ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah. Headline: "As a White Man, Can I Date Women of Color to Advance My Antiracism?"

I haven't read to the end yet, but I've seen many hostile references to this column. Are they hostile to the letter-writer or to the ethicist? I don't know, but I became hostile to the letter writer when I got to the sentence quoted above. 

First, he's a man in bits and pieces: "Part of me... somewhat disappointed ... one of the most important..." I was so disgusted I had to restore myself by listening to "All or Nothing at All" by Frank Sinatra.

"Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease.... In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone...."

"She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.... Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as 'five to 12' — five minutes to midnight... the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking. They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.... Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her."

From "She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death/In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it" (NYT).

We hear about another woman who had "dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years.... She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours."

Understand the problem: Mekel has to go early.

Assuming the Democratic Party needs someone to come in and remake it, as Trump did for the Republican Party, who could that person be?

I asked Grok, and it set out 4 "key attributes" : "1. Charisma and Media Savvy.... 2. Outsider Status or Unconventional Background.... 3. Clear, Bold Vision.... 4. Connection with the Base...."

Grok then came up with 5 individuals who might have the attributes, and I'll put this below the fold so you can guess before you look — guess, then laugh... or cry: 

"It would be disingenuous to my uh you know the way I like to act or my approach... It just happened.... It's nobody's business how I go about these things."

"It's within the law and... it might not be as interesting as people think or it could be a lot more interesting than people think."

Said Timothée Chalamet, responding to a question about how he ended up holding this one note for a long time when that's nothing Bob Dylan did when he sang that song. Presumably, Chalamet is channeling some deeper knowledge of how Bob might sing on some other occasion, never recorded, which seems like something Bob himself would do, and Timmy's channeling that too.

Here's his full "60 Minutes" interview:

 

It's within the law... I like that. You know, to live within the law you don't have to be honest.

"Flow."

I watched this on Max over the weekend and recommend it for the beauty of the visuals — I love the light and the water — and the wordlessness of the storytelling. 

There are various animals — cat, dog, secretary bird, lemur — but I was interested to see the capybara, because I'd just been reading this New Yorker article by Gary Shteyngart, "How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s/It’s not hard to understand why capys have a cultlike following on Instagram and TikTok. I fell for the giant rodent decades ago."

Looking back at that now, I see that Shteyngart discusses the movie "Flow":

"It wasn’t planned. That wasn’t two coaches throwing guys over and saying 'This is happening' — none of that happened. That was as organic as it gets."

Said Jon Cooper, the coach for Canada, quoted in The London Times:

Here's the video at YouTube. Judge for yourself. Political theater? Is this about Trump — Trump and his tariffs and his fifty-oneness?

Meanwhile, Trump himself was at The Daytona 500 and — with his lovely tiny little granddaughter — the sports-related masculine political theater was not brutishly macho but nobly patriarchal:

ADDED: The oversized MAGA hat emphasizes the tininess of the granddaughter, and it made me think of this image of Elon Musk in a giant hat:

pic.twitter.com/nhRCtyA3wj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2025

You can see the hat as it is — large — or you can perceive the optical illusion that Musk is a tiny person, a child. Musk famously tweeted: "I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man." And I've been thinking the love is a boy's love for the father he never had. Musk real father was — as Musk tells it — "a terrible human being" who has done "almost every evil thing you could possibly think of." The giant hat is a bid to be seen as a boy, to be loved by a father.

Sunrise — 7:00.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

"The 14th Amendment Right of American Citizenship never had anything to do with modern day 'gate crashers,' illegal immigrants who break the Law by being in our Country..."

"... it had everything to do with giving Citizenship to former slaves. Our Founding Fathers are 'spinning in their graves' at the idea that our Country can be taken away from us. No Nation in the World has anything like this. Our lawyers and Judges have to be tough, and protect America!"

Writes Trump, this morning, on Truth Social.

And let me just point you to yesterday's post — "Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship" — about a NYT column by Randy E. Barnett and Ilan Wurman (in the NYT), which has an update I put up this morning linking to Ilya Somin's response (in Reason) — "Birthright Citizenship - A Response to Barnett and Wurman" (Reason).

"It started decades ago, in my opinion. It started decades ago with timeouts and last-place participation trophies."

"And sorry to put it so harsh, but it seems to me like we lost a good portion of a few generations of men who've just turned into complete fucking pussies."

Said Kid Rock, getting the last word in a discussion — with Bill Maher, Tim Ryan, and Pamela Paul — that started out with a criticism of the Boy Scouts changing its name to Scouting America.

"The EV charging station tale marks what amounts to a 'Wizard of Oz' moment for progressives."

"They want to prevent abuse and use government to serve the greater good. But as its snail-like rollout demonstrates, government today is more like the man behind the curtain than the great and powerful Oz. Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again."

Yeah, progressives: Figure it out!

I'm reading "Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses" (WaPo)(free-access link). The article is by Marc J. Dunkelman, author of "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back."

8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trump. Even if Trump had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

Wrote Albert Camus, in my favorite of the 8 responses I got when I asked Grok "List similar quotes to 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.'" (The quote is something Trump put up, without context, on Truth Social.)

Is that a "similar" quote? Eh. "Similar" is a weak word. What's not "similar"? And what does it mean to "save" your country?

Here are the other 7 quotes:

"Unlike many AI models that rely on real-world data, Grok 3 was trained on synthetic data, which includes a self-correcting mechanism to enhance logical consistency and reduce misinformation or 'AI hallucinations.'"

So says Grok 2, noting that Grok 3 will come out tomorrow.

Things I've asked Grok this morning:

1. Why did Trump write "He who saves his Country does not violate any Laws"?

2. Who originally said "He who travels alone travels fastest but he who travels with a good companion travels best"?

3. At what speed is the Earth traveling through space?

4. List quotes similar to "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." 

ADDED: In the discussion I had that began with question #1, I came up with this motivation (which Grok had not noticed): 

I think that's what they call the Fox Butterfield Effect.

I ran across this headline in The Washington Post: "Soldiers are arriving at the border — but hardly any migrants are crossing/Trump’s order to send troops to the border comes as the number of migrant crossings is plummeting. Residents in some border cities wonder what the soldiers will be doing."

Here's a Cato Institute description of the Fox Butterfield Effect:

A former reporter for the New York Times, Fox Butterfield, became a bit of a laughingstock in the 1990s for publishing a series of articles addressing the supposed quandary of how crime rates could be falling during periods when prison populations were expanding. A number of critics sarcastically explained that crimes rates were falling because bad guys were behind bars and invented the term “Butterfield Effect” to describe the failure of someone to put 2 + 2 together.

There's also this WaPo headline: "ICE struggles to boost arrest numbers despite infusion of resources/Trump has ordered a wartime effort to increase deportations, but ICE statistics show arrests have dipped so far this month." It's harder to say Fox Butterfield Effect about that.