Ostensibly yes, but I feel like the way the ruling was built—virtually anything they did, from taking a shit to ordering the hit on their grade school bully would fall under their “official duties” and you also weren’t allowed to use any communications from any of their staffers, etc. I just remember that it was basically a blanket immunity, once you factored in the burden of arguing the case.
That said, of course they will apply a different standard/ignore whatever they want. I’m still thinking it won’t go farther than performative statements and social media, but they’re so whacky that it’s almost impossible to make proper predictions about anything.
Would be crazy funny to send bush and Obama to Guantanamo to hang with the 5 mentally ill dudes left from their GWOT years plus a bunch of Venezuelans and Haitians and such. I think they’d have a great time. Obama could teach them about playlist making and bush could start a new painting series…
Well I mean they can arrest him. But presumably they’ll still have to have a trial and his lawyers will point to the ruling. But who knows, maybe they will denaturalize him as a national security threat and deport him to Guantanamo as an enemy combatant and avoid due process altogether.
Bro saw the good, the bad and the ugly and has never looked back.
Sidebet: he’s read some pickup artist literature at some point during his formative years where he learned that all you need to be successful is to adopt a cris angel adjacent aesthetic and disparage women’s physical features to their face.
I’d give him points for fully committing, and not worrying how other people perceive him, but there’s no way he’s affecting this look because he’s emotionally resilient and enlightened; more likely he’s full send on some bullshit method, or just wants a unique vibe to hang over his grift.
Yeah that’s a fair point—I feel like you could manage this incident with a police helicopter or something. Maybe NORAD was just bored and itching for an excuse to scramble…
It’s a bit more complicated than that I think. It was a NORAD response and that has a fair amount of integration between US and Canada. The base the American jets flew from has Canadian air force pilots stationed there—and is a western norad air defense post, so likely they are closest responding, and the Canadian hornets were coming from farther out (possibly Alberta?). But operationally the request came from a NORAD division in Canada, so it wasn’t like the US Air Force deciding to unilaterally violate Canadas sovereignty over a rogue Cessna. More like joint operation under mutual defense treaty kind of stuff like you’d get with NATO countries.
I don’t fully understand exactly how it all works but back in the pandemic a us F-22 shot down a spy ballon in Canada also I think, run via NORAD also. Canada maintains a lot of the northern radar and early warning stuff that NORAD uses as well.
Anyhow I wouldn’t blame Canadians for not being thrilled about American military assets zipping around overhead right now, just saying it’s not specifically remarkable as the article headline seems to suggest.
Lots of excellent info here, thanks for the detailed response—appreciated. When I went to China a while back, I brought and old iPhone I still had and got a Chinese sim so I could search and navigate—idea being ok I’ll sever iCloud and they can mine whatever they want off the phone, etc. the thing there was not immigration I was worried about, but having my phone compromised via the sim/software, so I still had my main phone also at the time, it was just offline and turned off mostly.
Almost makes me want to adopt a similar approach for any travel where I’m crossing boarders now—just kit up the old phone with a pay as you go sim, strip out anything non utility on it, etc. probably wouldn’t help that much for any really intrusive hacking stuff they would do back room, but might be boring enough to not interest them.
It does sorta feel like a logical conclusion to the west’s long-running obsession with the self.