They're telling you to believe them and not your eyes. ... So the message from this administration is clear: only they determine the truth, and when their forces come to your city, obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.
This week's featured post is "Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis".
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. A woman got in ICE's way, so they killed her. Then the top people in the regime smeared her. See the featured post.
- Climate change. Trump renounced the Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty and pulled the US out of 66 international groups that combat climate change. The groups "advance globalist agendas over US priorities".
- War. With the regime so enthused by its Mission-Accomplished moment in Venezuela, we all wait to see where they'll strike next: Cuba, Colombia, Greenland?
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about ICE killing Renee Good
See the featured post. One thing I didn't get into that post: Border Czar Tom Homan is working to intimidate protesters, now that one of them is dead.
“The hateful rhetoric has caused a lot of this violence,” Homan said in a Sunday interview on “Fox News Sunday” with host Jacqui Heinrich. “So I said way back in March if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decrease, there will be bloodshed, and, unfortunately, I was right, and it’s not over. There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.”
Homan added that “I don’t want to see anybody die,” asking Minnesota leaders to “work with us” despite allegations from Frey and Walz that federal officials have not collaborated with them in investigating the incident.
If everyone would just do what he tells them, nobody would have to die. Lots of thugs say things like that.
The day after Renee Good's death, ICE agents shot two men in Portland, Oregon. ICE claims they had "ties" to the Tren de Aragua criminal group, whatever that means.
DHS said the duo "weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol" and the agent fired at them in self-defense.
That seems to be what ICE says whenever they shoot somebody in a car. Maybe sometimes it's true, but there have definitely been times where evidence shows they lied. There is no independent video of the Portland incident, but two eye-witnesses fail to support the ICE narrative.
One witness in the Portland shooting said he heard five gunshots fired in the parking lot of a Southeast Portland medical office after federal officers boxed in a Toyota truck that had pulled into the lot Thursday afternoon.
The man had been seeking care at the office near Adventist Health hospital when he said he saw the officers follow the truck into the lot at 10201 S.E. Main St. and approach it.
One officer pounded on the truck’s window and the driver appeared scared, the man said. The driver then backed up and moved forward, striking a car behind him at least twice, before turning and speeding off, he said.
About five shots rang out from the contingent of officers as the truck raced away, he said.
Back in October, Pro Publica wrote about the dangers of rapidly expanding ICE's size and mission while simultaneously scrapping all independent oversight.
Check out the Marsh Family's updating of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
and Venezuela
We're still waiting for things to shake out on the ground. So far, the US isn't occupying Venezuela, but Trump is acting as if he had the country completely pacified. Maduro is in US custody and facing trial, but his VP is now in charge and the rest of Maduro's government remains in place. How cooperative they will be is still not clear.
If the point was to seize Venezuela's oil, the Trump regime doesn't seem to have thought it out very well. The country's oil infrastructure is in bad shape, and US oil companies haven't expressed much interest in fixing it. The CEO of ExxonMobil called the Venezuelan oil industry "uninvestable".
Meanwhile, the tactical success of the Maduro operation has emboldened the regime. Trump has threatened to cut off the supply of oil Cuba has been getting from Venezuela, warning them to "make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE". As usual, Trump's threats contain no specific demands, so it's not clear what Cuba is supposed to do.
And the pressure on Greenland has ramped up again, with Trump saying that "one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland."
Once again, it's not clear what Trump specifically wants -- and in particular, what he wants that he can't get from Greenland as a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Trump claims to be worried about Russia or China taking over Greenland, but it's not clear why we can't defend as part of NATO.
Jake Tapper tried to get Stephen Miller to rule out taking Greenland by force, and Miller sidestepped.
The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you're asking of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.
and Iran
Anti-government demonstrations rage on in Iran.
The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group raised its toll to 192, while HRANA, a rights group based in Washington, said it had confirmed the deaths of nearly 500 protesters and almost 50 security personnel.
and you also might be interested in ...
Anybody who stands in Trump's way is going to have the Justice Department go after them sooner or later. Now it appears to be the turn of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
In a highly unusual move, Powell disclosed that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) served the agency with subpoenas and threatened a criminal indictment over testimony he gave to a Senate committee about renovations to Federal Reserve buildings.
Calling the probe "unprecedented", Powell said he believed it was opened due to Donald Trump's anger over the Fed's refusal to cut interest rates despite repeated public pressure from the president.
So Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has its own chatbot, Grok, which offers this amazing free-market feature: If you give it a picture of a person and ask it to give you an image of the same person naked, it will. Wired reports:
Paid tools that “strip” clothes from photos have been available on the darker corners of the internet for years. Elon Musk’s X is now removing barriers to entry—and making the results public.
So you might publicly or privately undress a celebrity like Taylor Swift, your colleague at work, your colleague's 13-year-old daughter, or anybody else.
But wait, it gets worse:
Grok’s website and app, which are are separate from X, include sophisticated video generation that is not available on X and is being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X. It may also have been used to create sexualized videos of apparent minors.
Is that a problem? Well, Elon's people came up with this solution: They took the image-generating engine out of Grok's free version. So if you want sexualized images of your pretty niece, you'll have to upgrade to the paid subscription.
If you think this is an occasion for regulation, two governments agree with you: Malaysia and Indonesia, which aren't the countries we usually count on to lead the world. Why hasn't Europe acted? Well, maybe because X is an American company, and the Trump regime has threatened reprisals against attempts to regulate the US tech lords.
Financial Times found an interesting way to strike back without breaking its own policies against pornography: It used Grok to produce clown-face images of X executives.
I'm waiting for some curmudgeon to do this research: Prove that computer-generated deepfakes are hurting the economy by causing young men to lose their visual imaginations. That'll get some action. "In my day, if you wanted to picture your teacher naked, you had to work at it."
Ah, the romantic MAGA movement: As the ACA subsidies go away, people are getting married so that they can afford health insurance.
"I find myself in the middle of some sort of rom-com plot," he says. "For me to be able to see my doctor to tend to my autoimmune disease, I had to marry my best friend — it's like some weird twisted plot of Will and Grace."
and let's close with something too, too cute
After a week like this one, we can all use some baby animals.
No comments:
Post a Comment