Trump's Mosquito Mandate & Pete Hegseth's Pentagon Crusade

Hi readers, happy Thursday! Today we’re covering Pete Hegseth’s plans for the U.S. military, a diverted disaster in the Middle East, more U.S.-Iran peace talks, a NATO divide, Trump’s big AI “solution,” a U.S. mosquito mandate, and why Switzerland’s disappearing glaciers are a big problem.

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”― Aldo Leopold

Hegseth Continues His Crusade

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced plans to make massive cuts to the U.S. military’s top brass. The cuts, according to Hegseth, will remove 20% of all generals and admirals – he also announced that “no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps” would be allowed to serve in the military, whatever that means.

The 20% leadership culling is an extension to the 10% leadership cuts Hegseth ordered last year, with a deadline of January 1, 2027. “I call it accountability and long overdue,” he said, adding, “We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.” 

After that hate-filled outburst, Hegseth went on to detail other new plans for the U.S. military. He announced a new initiative aimed at studying the future of warfare, which will be headed by the unholy trinity of Newt Gingrich, Elon Musk, and Palmer Lucky (co-founder of automated weapons firm Anduril Industries). The defense secretary also announced plans to build the first new U.S. military base in 40 years – encouraging states to compete for the opportunity to host it – and unveiled the establishment of a military Office of Religious Affairs, which will help him feed his strange obsession with the crusades.

A Planeful Of Heroes

Yesterday, a FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was forced to land in Saudi Arabia after one of the pilots stabbed the other and, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “apparently tried to crash the plane.” The incident saw the plane plunge 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds before a group of passengers and crewmembers entered the cockpit, breaking up the altercation. A second pair of FlyDubai pilots who happened to be aboard the plane took control from there, allowing the jet and the 174 aboard it to land safely in Saudi Arabia.

Yaniv Hayun, one of the passengers, has emerged as an Israeli national hero in the wake of the incident. After Captain Smit Machchhar was stabbed by his copilot (whose information has not been made public), he was able to open the cockpit door while the plane began to dive. Hayun and a group of others were then able to break in, stopping the attacker who was “trying to destroy the instruments in order to disable the plane,” putting him in a chokehold, and tying him up with zipties. Captain Machchhar was also received as a hero by both Israel and India (he’s from Mumbai) for resisting the attack and opening the door. The offending pilot is currently being held in Saudi Arabia for questioning and has been identified as an Omani national, though other details are still unknown.

NATO’s Naughty/Nice Divide

• It’s been a rough day for NATO news. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it would be leaving key NATO members out of a meeting scheduled to take place in Poland next month, following up on threats to create a “naughty and nice list” of alliance members. The nations sidelined from the meeting include the U.K., France, and the Baltic countries, while Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and Poland are on the invite list. Given the fact that the summit is focused on the future of NATO, the decision to divide the alliance has Western diplomats worried.

• Earlier in the day, Russia added to the list of NATO concerns by threatening nuclear war. The Kremlin stated that Russia would not hesitate to retaliate with nuclear strikes if NATO decides to cut off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a tiny province on the coast of the Black Sea sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. The threat was issued after Moscow said it had received “information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region.” NATO spokesperson Allison Hart replied by denouncing the threatening language, adding, “NATO is a defensive alliance and none of our activities or exercises pose a risk to any part of Russia.”

Iran’s On-Again Stage

• Yesterday, Iran announced that it had received a response from the White House regarding its latest proposal to end the war. Tehran’s claims are … interesting given the fact that Trump publicly rejected the proposal on Sunday (a few days after Iran extended the offer), though both sides are still engaged in peace talks which are being mediated by diplomats from Qatar. 

• Citing an anonymous official briefed on those talks, Reuters is reporting that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was handed a U.S. response to the peace proposal by way of Qatar on Tuesday. According to the official, both sides are aligned on what’s needed to end the conflict, but disagree on which steps to take first. Iran’s proposal – if accepted by both parties – would kick off a seven-day period of “trust-building” aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz eventually returning to the memorandum of understanding signed in June.

Additional World News

• Ukraine’s war chest is running low at the worst possible moment (Politico)

• The U.S. military withdraws from Iraq over 2 decades after its invasion (NPR) 

• Japan raises permanent residency fees for foreign nationals by twenty-fold (BBC)

• UK Believes Iran Played a Part in RAF Fairford Air Base Incident, Burnham Says (NYT, $)

• MI5 warns UK universities over ‘theft of tech secrets by Chinese front company’ (Guardian)

• What to know about the viral claim about Brazil's patron saint jolting a tight presidential race (AP)

Self-Policing The AI Problem

• What’s the most effective way of regulating an industry that could (according to some people) bring about the end of humanity? According to the Trump administration, the answer is “self-policing.” On Tuesday, the president gathered a group of AI industry leaders at the White House, where they all signed an agreement promising to implement new “self-policing” policies. The agreement is likely aimed at soothing fears about the pace of AI development, though asking AI companies to “self-police” is like unleashing a five year old in a candy shop and asking them to not eat too much.

• “I’m seeing tremendous self-policing, and they understand that they have to self-police,” the president told reporters after the agreement was signed. “These models are very complex and, again, I believe they’re going to be used for the good.” 

• In a TruthSocial post, Trump outlined the four main points of the self-policing agreement, which the companies present (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia, X, Amazon, and Palantir) all agreed to implement. Those include: implementing internal controls to make sure models aren’t causing cybersecurity breaches; strengthening internal monitoring and detection teams; working with external groups to conduct independent model assessments; and designating an “independent committee of the board of directors” to follow through on those findings.

The Mosquito Mandate

• Some things are bigger than politics. Like, say, hating mosquitos with a burning passion. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order directing various federal agencies to reduce Washington’s invasive mosquito populations by at least 90% and its tick population by at least 50%, with a deadline of 2028. 

• The initiative, which will be led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), seeks to reach that goal by speeding up the government approval process for projects that will control mosquito and tick populations. According to the order, those projects could include “sterilization techniques, safe genetic modification, and use of safe, beneficial bacteria,” and the agency has been ordered to rapidly “register novel tick and mosquito control methods or products” as long as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin finds them “to be both safe and effective.” 

• Many efforts likely to be fast-tracked by the order are various types of mosquito birth control projects, which involve releasing sterilized male mosquitoes into the environment in order to keep the pests from producing offspring. 

Additional USA News

• Cornell fraternity rape case: What we know (NPR)

• US government debt rout triggers ‘vicious loop’ of selling (FT) 

• Man arrested over alleged plot to attack Texas state capitol (Guardian)

• Tennessee Fails to Execute Woman After 2 Doses of Lethal Injection (NYT, $) 

• Bari Weiss 'Likely Out' at CBS After Paramount/Warner Bros. Merger (Radar Online)

• US economy shows resilience on solid consumer spending, growth data (Semafor): “Cooler-than-expected August inflation data and strong consumer spending lifted markets Wednesday before a frantic final hour of trading erased gains, underlining US economic resilience amid enduring concerns over elevated fuel prices.”

Time Is Ticking For Swiss Glaciers

• According to a recent report, Switzerland's glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice this year. That marks the second-largest year of glacier loss in recent history by a small margin – Swiss glaciers shrunk by 6% in 2022. For comparison, the country’s glaciers have mostly lost between 0.5% and 2.5% of their ice each year over the past two decades, meaning the recent ice loss is unprecedented. The only reason this year’s ice loss was lower than 2022’s was because the winter left a particularly thick layer of snow atop the glaciers.

• “They are completely devoid of ice,” said Matthias Huss, the head of Switzerland’s glacier monitoring network which co-published the report alongside the Swiss Academy of Sciences. “It's a moon landscape that is dry and dead. There are some little remnants, some ice blocks still lying around and melting there on the hot rocks.” 

• Why does this all matter? Put simply, Switzerland’s glaciers feed into Europe’s rivers. The Rhine River, for example, flows north from the Swiss Alps, providing water and transport to France, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries. Swiss glaciers also feed the Danube River, which heads east from Germany, touching Ukraine, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Both of those rivers hit historic lows this summer, bringing crises to the countries that rely on them and highlighting how critical Swiss snowpack is to the entire continent.

Additional Reads

• The AI Tamagotchis are coming (Verge)

• The Great Data-Center Rebellion (Atlantic, $)

• When you feel moral disgust, what’s the emotion telling you? (Psyche)

• A local network of implants uses your body as the wiring (Ars Technica)

• Clues to Why a Breakthrough Pancreatic Cancer Drug Eventually Stops Working (NYT, $)

• The Case for Cooking (Almost) Everything From Scratch (Grubstreet): “I know I could take a shortcut at every turn, but I trust that my discipline will pay off in some way in the end, even if it feels like suffering in real time.”

Please consider supporting Daily Pnut, an independently operated and bootstrapped publication. Many thanks to everyone who already supports us!

Peanut For Your Thoughts

I think that we as humans living in our high-tech society have forgotten how much we rely on the things nature just hands to us (like rivers fed by glaciers), and we also don’t appreciate how delicate the systems underpinning nature’s status quo really are.

Editor + Writer: Marcus Gee-Lim

Designer: Joe Stella