I loved Han Song's Tombs of the Universe, which is why I curated it into Sinopticon, so it's wonderful to see him now nominated as a Hugo finalist for Answerless Journey, and to be able to translate his interview. 1/ #scifi #scifibooks file770.com/interview-wi...
I love this because HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS is about how inequity is baked into these systems, and how and why we have to transform them. But I believe and argue that we absolutely *can* make them work better, for everyone. And that it matters enormously that we do.
Comfort doesn’t mean escapism.
OMG! It's here at last! Cover reveal for my book THE FAKE GHOST designed by awesome @shanepierce.bsky.social Chuffed! A racist, sexist, homophonic USA president gets his comeuppance when he's reborn as an African baby in this dark & comedic magical realism farce🤣 Can't wait to share this! Out Aug 12
ICE posted this. (1) The message is missing the "who, what, when, where, why, how." (2) The message was posted to X, Elon Musk's platform. (3) The message has no alt text.
HuffPost: Though ICE doesn't comment on ongoing investigations, "Homan said later Thursday [January 23] the number of arrests so far was closer to 1,300 people, adding that collateral arrests of citizens or others legally allowed to be in the country would be higher than normal because so-called sanctuary cities were not helping ICE agents." In other words, he blamed city officials, saying that because they didn't cooperate by turning in the people he was targeting, he had to go broad and arrest everyone.
"The Laken Riley Act is a proposed United States law that requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of theft-related crimes, assaulting a police officer, or a crime that results in death or serious bodily injury like drunk driving. The Act would also allow states to sue the Department of Homeland Security for alleged failures in immigration enforcement.
The bill was introduced following the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal migrant, who had previously been cited for shoplifting, on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. On January 22, 2025, the House agreed to the Senate version of the bill with a 263–156 vote. The bill is awaiting presidential signature.
Anyway, barring some miracle, it seems increasingly likely that a sizeable minority of Senate Dems are about to join with the entire Senate GOP to greenlight a law that will hand Ken Paxton and any random federal judge more power over immigration than any state or judge has ever had in US history.
congress will rubber stamp mass detention and deportations by handing yet more unaccountable power to local police (and in some cases, perhaps among these 48 people with a D next to their name, pretend that’s not exactly what they’re doing)
"Two US military flights bound for Colombia overnight [January 25–26, 2025] were turned back, according to a flight tracker, after Petro wrote in a post on X [January 26] that he is denying the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants." CNN
"According to data ICE posted on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, the agency arrested 8,276 people between Jan. 22 and Jan. 31. It also issued 6,577 "detainers lodged" for people arrested by other law-enforcement agencies whom ICE has reason to believe are eligible for deportation. That's an average of 828 arrests and 658 detainers lodged per day — 980 arrests and 762 detainers lodged per day since Jan. 25, when ICE really started beefing up enforcement with widely reported raids in Chicago and other cities.
That's a big increase from the last year of published statistics under former President Joe Biden's administration. During fiscal year 2024 (from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024), ICE reported 113,431 arrests, or an average of 310 per day. So Trump is certainly cracking down on immigration more than his predecessor did.
* * *
Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive, real-time source for ICE data; we only know the numbers for Jan. 22-31 because the agency posted them on social media, and it has not posted any data so far in February. ...
Furthermore, ICE hasn't posted any public data about how many of the people it has arrested this year have been accused of crimes, violent or otherwise."
I am making a personal appeal to those of you in media or critical scenes. You gotta talk about r.e. Burke's,s renditioning. You can't be silent. She doesn't deserve this cruelty. If you're a journalist, please, speak about this cruelty visited upon this woman. Be brave with your voice
"...giving away the game of the mostly braindead Don’t Tread On Me folks. He was saying, in effect, that society does not exist. A human community doesn’t exist either in Mitchell’s telling. There is no connection between people and nations, and we were all born to fearfully defend our little lots of land (if you can get one) until we are dead.
* * *
I’ve seen the question posed online: Where are the libertarians who have for generations said they would openly revolt against a tyrannical federal government, that they would use any means necessary to stop an out-of-control ruling class? The answer is that they’re here, observing it all with indifference or glee because they have always wanted the government to deploy its power against those they hate. Because their hatreds and grievances and prejudices have always – always – outweighed whatever principles they might think they have.
* * *
To think one can pick and choose who gets protection from government abuse is the ultimate in back-breaking ignorance. The same way Trump voters thought they could empower a petty tyrant to visit pain and suffering upon certain people and certain groups – to handpick individuals to persecute while everyone else carries on with their happy lives – the Don’t Tread On Me crowd believes, stupidly, that hyper-individualized defense against government overreach is an effective way for people to be free and remain free. That they won't say this means they are operating in bad faith."
There is no measured way to say what I am about to say.
If the Supreme Court agrees with the Trump administration to end birthright citizenship, we must end this current Supreme Court.
I do not say this lightly.
"This is the context for the Trump regime’s attack on birthright citizenship. It is, at its core, not merely a policy dispute or a disagreement over constitutional interpretation. It is a battleground for what this nation should be, what its identity, its defining aspiration should be going forward, and who deserves to belong as equal.
Vance, Schmitt, and Miller want to abolish birthright citizenship because they understand precisely that what is enshrined in the 14th Amendment is fundamentally incompatible with their blood-and-soil nationalism. In a narrow sense, the birthright citizenship clause – the first sentence in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment – was intended to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves. But the framers knew exactly that its implications went far beyond that. It constituted a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dredd Scott that Black people couldn’t be citizens because they were inferior and they didn’t have the necessary hereditary connection – and, more generally, a profound rejection of the notion that some people, because of heritage and blood, had more of a claim to being “American” than others. The Trumpist assault is so preposterous not only because the text of the Amendment is clear – but also because we know what the framers intended to do. They knew exactly what they were doing. They explicitly debated the fact that this clause would bestow guaranteed citizenship not just upon freed slaves, but to lots of other groups as well. No tiered citizenship in America – that is what the text declares, that was the intent of the framers."
This sort of reinforces the Discovery Institute analogy I made last week. You dredge up half a dozen dissenters from an overwhelming scholarly consensus, not because their arguments are particularly compelling, but to establish that the issue is “controversial”. This creates a permission structure…
The National Center for Science Education responded to the DI's list with "Project Steve" (ncse.ngo/project-steve): a list signed only by scientists and academics whose first name is some variation of "Steve" (Stephanie, Stefan, Etienne, etc.).
Good morning! The website of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy is LIVE! And it’s 🔥.
You need this resource pinned in your favorites. Especially now.
14thamendmentctr.org
Jesus Christ. DHS has held this guy in the hospital handcuffed to a bed and under constant guard for over a MONTH without ANY warrant or even ANY steps taken towards putting him into the removal system!
NEW: ICE has finally released post-shutdown detention data. The latest data reveals that a full 40%(!) of people arrested in the interior and held in ICE detention have no criminal record; no criminal charges or prior convictions. That is up from just 4% when Trump took office.
Magaziner: The Trump administration have been lying to the American people from day one about what they are doing. They said they were going to go after the worst of the worst but by their own data, the vast majority of people that they have detained are people who had no criminal record
Read: The hell of being a ‘Kavanaugh stop’ victim: A Maryland man originally from Colombia describes his journey from detainment to incarceration—and miraculous freedom. Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, January 7, 2026
BREAKING: After ProPublica published letters written by children at the Dilley concentration camp, ICE officers raided the dormitories and confiscated the children's letters. I'm suing ICE to get them back. I'll explain it all in 45 minutes on @meidastouch.com here: www.youtube.com/live/H-D8SzR...
from 1868 to 2025 there was little dispute about what the birthright clause meant and the idea that the past year has been some great scholarly debate is absurd. a handful of partisans and hacks have churned out junk so that the president can get what he wants. that’s it.
Stephen Miller allegedly urged Department of Homeland Security agents to “force confrontations” with protesters in Minneapolis in order to win a “PR battle." trib.al/NcbpdiX
"The rule states that the Trump administration is considering whether to add a question to the 2030 census inquiring about immigration status. “The Census Bureau welcomes comments on the inclusion of a legal-status question on the short-form decennial census questionnaire,” the final rule reads.
Thomas Saenz, President and General Counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told TPM that such a question would be “completely untested and potentially far worse than a citizenship question.”
Inquiring about status would add immense complexity to the process, Saenz argued, forcing the bureau to “distinguish lawful permanent residents and asylees/refugees from all other immigrants.”
Excluding anyone living in the U.S. from the population count is a violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, Terry Ao Minnis, vice president of Census and Voting Programs at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, told TPM in an email."
Denny Carter wrote a couple days ago: If you "reject the message that some people should be at the top of the hierarchies of oppression, and others are meant to be at the bottom of that hierarchy, and that’s just the way it is," then your heart is "not in need of fixing in this way." Let's not be "ignoring people’s agency;" let's not be "treating them like empty, thoughtless vessels that can be infiltrated and propagandized and ultimately tricked into adopting a worldview in which some humans are more equal than others."
"I wrote in March 2023 about the eternal stream of bad faith necessary for the American right to believe in the myth of “wokeness” and to craft policies that extinguish the various forms of woke in American culture."
How about this, Carter suggests: "See the things that have made your heart so hideous and so horrible and, consequently, so very weak, and fix it before it’s too late."
"Maybe it’s always been that simple, to grab those with hate and fear in their hearts and minds and to tell them to stop it, stop being assholes, stop treating as subhuman those who do not look or speak or think like you. Your heart is blackened, poisoned, corrupted. Lynch’s instruction was direct: Recognize the corruption of your heart, become conscious of it, and fix the fucking thing. Gordon Cole did not dance around the cultural and political leanings and influences of those who might have made jokes at the expense of a transgender colleague. He did not ignore their petty hatred and discrimination against someone who may have challenged their bedrock views of sex and gender, or excuse those views because they did not know better."
We could keep it simple.
"I could have simply listened to David Lynch. Or more precisely, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole. It was Cole, played by the inimitable Lynch over three seasons of Twin Peaks, who cut right through the bullshit with which I have covered myself over these past couple years.
In a 2015 exchange with FBI Chief of Staff Denise Bryan, a trans woman who had risen through the Bureau’s ranks since last we saw her in the early 1990s, Cole (Lynch) reminds Bryan (played by David Duchovny) that he had stepped up in her defense when others in the FBI had mocked her transition. Cole is trying to darndest to extract information from Bryan in what is proving to be the culmination of a 25-year cold case when he delivers the line..."
Excellent new review from @weatherwest.bsky.social @climate-guy.bsky.social @manuelaibrunner.bsky.social @climatechirper.bsky.social on one of the most useful organizing concepts I've run across for understanding climate impacts on extreme events - the "expanding atmospheric sponge" 1/🧵
When you wring out a bigger wet sponge, you produce more water - the "wet gets wetter" view of climate change driving increases in extreme precip.
But if the sponge is dry, it can absorb more - from the soil, from vegetation, driving drought and fire. 2/
Now is a good time to get into preparedness, wherever you are. Being individually prepared is a good way to be in a better position to help others.
Your basic goal, to start, is to be ready for three days in your home without power or water and to be able to leave quickly if need be.
Get yourself a go bag. This is an always-packed bag you can take with you everywhere. For most people, this is a backpack, not luggage or a duffel bag. You will keep basic hygiene and emergency supplies in this bag.
A go bag isn't a "the world has ended now" bag. It's a "I have to sleep in my car during this ice storm" bag or a "I have to leave my house because of a crisis" bag. You want digital and/or print copies of any documentation in here as well.
I don't know if the LA fire department is properly funded or not but the claim that the city cut its budget last year — which is circulating widely on the right — is false.
As Politico notes, the budget actually INCREASED by $50 million. A portion of the funding was approved in a separate bill.
You will read countless times today that the LA mayor cut the LA Fire Department's budget by $23 million.
That is a lie.
The budget was actually *increased* by $50 million.
Chris Hayes says "it’s still actually not 100% clear to me":
Yes there was an official budget reduction of 2% ($17.5 million, not $23) but it’s unclear if the increases in the contract negotiation add up to a larger amount in total (as article says) or the mayor’s office is basically double counting.
As best as we can tell there was a 2% cut that did eliminate a number of administrative positions and overtime. Then in November an additional $76 million of unallocated funds was given to the LAFD as part of the wages package. Which means the total spending for it was up $53 mil yoy.
Which means it’s technically true that
1) there were budgets cuts that eliminated positions
2) there was an increase of the total funding the LAFD was given by city council appropriators.
More here.
abcnews.go.com/US/los-angel...
Put another way. The head of the LAFD can say, truthfully “we had budget cuts” and express concerns about impact of readiness and the mayor and council can say, truthfully “we gave the FD millions more than the previous year.”
And put another way, we can say that when police unions managed to make the LAPD into a well paid and armed military force, they sucked up untold resources that are now missing as Southern Cal tries to face global warming. Unbelievably, LAPD got $2.14 billion in funding last year.
So sorry. Yet another rant:
We are losing the information war in real-time. LA is on fire, and the conservatives are seizing the moment, drafting on the fear, the panic, and the pain to target democratic officials, policies, and power centers and salting the earth along the way.
A thread. 🧵
It’s a five-alarm fire alongside an actual five-alarm fire, and the proverbial water is run dry.
Listen, it’s hard to put out fires and save ourselves when our neighbors are arsonists.
Ignore it, again, at our own peril. But there is a coordinated political attack campaign underway.
Should we be having to spend ANY time defending politicians and policies in the middle of a crisis of this scale and urgency? Fuck no.
But, there will be significant fallout from allowing these narratives to fester without checking their shit and quickly.
The narrative that somehow a $17M cut to a massive $800M+ LAFD budget is to blame is insane, illogical and fucked on so many levels but taking root across the media and social media landscape.
It's matched by an equally ridiculous narrative about water running out that's equally garbage.
Let's be clear - this is targeted and methodical. Trump, Musk, Shapiro, NYPost, and all the regular conservative talking point amplification networks are echoing the same shit.
While Dems, and most normies are out here just trying to do the work of surviving, the GOP is fanning flames of discord.
We all know it’s completely dishonest and disingenuous. Budget hawks calling out a 2% decrease in a budget being used as justification for public sacrifice of an elected official. The same people creating DOGE are bemoaning a 2% budget reduction because- own the libs and get points on the board.
Worse yet, it’s not even subtle in its racism, misogyny, and ignorance. One comment in, and you are awash in "DEI hire" nonsense and ‘good old times’ nostalgia for a world that never existed. People posting pictures of the 3 amazing women who run the $800M LAFD as a gotcha... you know, 'cuz - women.
The number of people who are calling out the Mayor of LA being in Ghana who was on a scheduled trip as an official delegate for the US to mark their new Presidents election.
Oh the hypocrisy from the folx who justified or were silent when Cruz went to Cancun
… and the ‘running out of water’ thing? We’re fighting wildfires on urban fire systems - in Santa Ana conditions without air support.
WT-actual-Fuck don't you get about supply and demand? They were using the water faster than the tanks could refill.
Good explainer from @colleenhagerty.com about what happened with the inaccurate fire altert in LA. The public’s expectations of government alerting (think Greenland) don’t always line up with reality.
www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...
I know, I’m a Fire Commissioner & I’ve been doing my best to tamp down some of the worst, but honestly, it’s impossible. James Woods, famous Maga gadfly,whose house burned down, is blaming Gavin Newsom for not keeping the resevoirs full. So ridiculous.
"The absolute barrage of garbage being pumped into the brains of people is unbelievable," says @chrislhayes.bsky.social on the LA wildfire misinformation. "It does not help when the guy who owns the so-called digital town square is tweeting about globalist plots and blaming wokeness for the fires."
People think AI images of Hollywood sign burning are real
AI generated slop is tricking people into thinking an already devastating series of wildfires in Los Angeles are even worse than they are — and using it to score political points.
🔗 www.404media.co/hollywood-si...
In 1998 brilliant Mike Davis wrote ‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn’. 30 years later the wealthiest aren’t necessarily any safer from climate disaster, they’re just richer. I predict more events like the King & Queen of Spain getting shit thrown at them in Valencia. longreads.com/2018/12/04/t...
If you're shocked and/or surprised by the Los Angeles wildfires, you should read John Vaillant's "Fire Weather: A True Story from A Hotter World." www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/a... @johnvaillant.bsky.social
the LA fires inspire a lot of thoughts, one being how absolutely baby-brained some people are to think that journalists with personal blogs can replace the resources, teamwork, and coordination of actual newspapers
