You may think the camps are for someone else. DHS has already floated “100 million deportations” as a real number. Only 47 million people living in America were born somewhere else. Hitting 100 million means coming for citizens too, native-born and naturalized alike.
"These concentration camps are being built for us. We can stop them."
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This week's featured post is "Why everything seems to be getting worse".
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. Trump's primetime speech about "election security" had nothing new and was widely dismissed, even by Fox News. But some see it as the beginning of his attempt to steal the 2026 midterms.
- Climate change. Wildfires in Canada and Mexico led to bad air quality along the East Coast. One day last week, the sky above my house in Massachusetts was a disturbing yellow color.
- Iran. The deaths of two more Americans puts us firmly back in an escalation phase. I agree with Amanda Marcotte: "as long as Trump is president, we will be at war with Iran. He's impetuous, stupid, and sociopathic. Iran will always be able to provoke him. His ego can't handle losing, so he will always get sucked back in."
- Ukraine. Nothing really new this week. More Russian missile attacks on civilian targets in Kiev. More Ukrainian missile attacks against Russia's oil infrastructure.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about ICE killings
As I was writing this blog last week, ICE was killing another person: Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian man who had a work permit and no outstanding warrants.
Weirdly, the DHS statement didn't even make the usual claim that the ICE shooter feared for his life. It said merely that he "feared for public safety", whatever that means. Since then, details about the shooter have come out:
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who allegedly fatally shot a Colombian man in Maine on Monday was prone to violence and held racist beliefs, according to some of the people who were close to him.
Meanwhile, an employee of the company that runs an ICE detention center in Colorado shot a woman who had been photographing employees' cars. Another man was killed in Florida when he was hit by a truck while running away from ICE.
The New Yorker has an article about the horrific conditions at an ICE detention center near El Paso. The article follows Rey, a Cuban man with diabetes, high blood pressure, and a US-citizen wife.
The ICE officials who regularly appeared at Camp East Montana are called deportation officers. Officially, their job is to make sure that detainees with final orders of removal are deported; unofficially, they often pressured those without orders to agree to be deported anyway. The officers were aided, in the second task, by the conditions at the camp. Many detainees with valid or pending legal claims simply couldn’t stand to be held there any longer. But the deportation officers also had other means of persuading the holdouts. According to testimony given to the A.C.L.U. by multiple detainees from Cuba, the officers would periodically handcuff those who refused to be deported and drive them to remote stretches along the Mexican border. Buses with masked men, presumably agents from Mexico, waited on the other side. “I started yelling and screaming at the immigration guard in Mexico that this is a kidnapping,” a fifty-one-year-old Cuban man from Florida said. “Out of the thirteen people who came with me on the bus, only four people returned with me.”
Every few days, an officer showed up in Rey’s tent to ask if he was ready to sign a document acceding to his deportation. “Are you staying or are you leaving?” he’d ask Rey flatly. For weeks, Rey waved the officer away, but he was spending hours each day in bed with debilitating headaches. He could barely urinate, and he had lost about thirty pounds. “I couldn’t even tell you if there was a medical tent at the facility,” he said. “I just didn’t understand how, in an immigration detention center, they can’t give you medicine. Not only that, how is it that I can’t see a doctor?”
After six weeks in detention he did agree to self-deport, out of fear that he would die without access to his medications.
That seems to be the point. People in the camp have unresolved immigration cases. But if ICE can make them miserable enough, they may drop whatever claims they have and leave the country.
The ACLU put out a report on more than 1200 incidents related to immigration law enforcement.
The incidents we reviewed indicate agents used force and the threat of force as default tactics and tools to coerce immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat. Agents also turned to intimidation tactics — bullying, harassing, humiliating, and deceiving people — as they conducted enforcement, creating greater fear in communities and further undermining trust in law enforcement.
Physicians for Human Rights has a different report out.
Doctors and human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd-control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons”, from June 2025 through May 2026. ... The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd-control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.
A. R. Moxon sums up the opposing worldviews underlying the debate over letting ICE do whatever it wants to its targets.
The oppositional worldviews? Let's call them progressive humanism and regressive supremacy.
Progressive humanism is the belief that all people matter and deserve life, that generative human value springs from an inextricable and diverse mutually cooperative interconnectivity, and that we have a natural responsibility and moral duty to take the natural human system we have inherited and use our energies and skills to progress and improve it.
Regressive supremacy is the belief that only specific types of people matter and deserve life, and then only to the degree that they conform to specific and rigid hierarchical roles and doctrines; that all other human beings, who must earn life, get what they deserve and deserve what they get, because they are the natural property of the people who matter most.
and Senate confirmation hearings
Two laughably unqualified nominees for important posts had their Senate confirmation hearings this week: Todd Blanche is the acting Attorney General and wants to be confirmed in that role permanently. Jay Clayton is Trump's nominee for Director of National Intelligence.
Both were asked hard questions, sometimes by Republicans, and repeatedly dodged them. The lowlight was the exchange between Clayton and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. Ossoff asked him who won the 2020 election, to which Clayton replied: "I'm not gonna do this with you." Ossoff reminded Clayton of his obligation to give "honest and forthright" answers. And Clayton insisted that "I'm not gonna do this with you" was an honest and forthright answer. Finally Ossoff said:
Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question. Why can you not give it?
Thom Tillis pressed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, which he finally did after all this time. Afterward, a survivor described his attitude as "dismissive".
and The Odyssey
I saw it Friday morning when it opened, in IMAX as Christopher Nolan intended (or as close as you can get in Massachusetts). For nearly three hours I was completely enthralled. The movie's artful mixture of action with character development and story-telling never drags.
The script leaves out several pieces of Homer's original: conversations on Olympus, Aeolus and the bag of winds, the Phaeacians, Hermes, and some other things that have slipped my mind. That's why it's not a five-hour movie. But the omissions are only noticeable if you're a bit of a Homer buff (as I am). The potential plot holes have been cleanly sewn shut.
A few things have been added. Most notably: the Trojan War making Greece vulnerable to the Sea Peoples (who are rumored to be coming but don't appear), and the contribution Odysseus' inner doubts and guilt make to his inability to get home. But the additions do not feel grafted on. Most of them are either hinted at in the text or are already part of the post-Homeric tradition. (For example, the Sea Peoples are historical, and play a role in the sequel to The Odyssey that Nikos Kazantzakis wrote in the 1930s. The underlying immorality of Odysseus's tricks and stratagems is in Euripides. That Odysseus himself may have felt conflicted about them is not a big stretch. In many ways Odysseus is the first modern man. A character lacking self-awareness and self-criticism would be an unconvincing Odysseus.)
The scenery is stunningly beautiful. The image of "chasing the escaping Sun" as it sinks into the western Mediterranean is a haunting invocation of freedom.
As for the various trumped-up controversies about casting and such: ignore them. Helen is Black? She's the daughter of Zeus; she should stand out from every other woman in Sparta. You shouldn't expect her to look like the girl next door. A trans actor (Elliot Page) as a Greek soldier? Odysseus got his character killed by fooling him into playing a part in selling the horse trick to the Trojans. He should look both young and vulnerable, which Page does.
Adaptations (especially of classic works) fail in two ways: Either they are unfaithful to the original and take off in their own directions, or they are too faithful and don't account for the differences in media and audience. I think Nolan has hit the sweet spot. Clearly he thought long and hard about The Odyssey, and he has made me think hard about it again.
but here's a point of view I'd like to see take off
One of the arguments anti-immigration people make is that certain (conveniently non-White) groups of people can't assimilate into America. The Sudanese, the Somalis, the Haitians ...
Now, we all know this is ahistorical. Somebody could have gone to New York's Little Italy in the late 1800s, heard a bunch of people speaking Italian, and argued that Italians are inherently incapable of assimilating. A lot of people probably did make that argument.
But here's a response I'd like to hear from the defenders of immigration: No nation in the history of the world has ever been as good at assimilating people as the United States. It's our superpower, and it's what made us great.
You may believe, when you say certain people can't assimilate, that you're insulting them. But really, you're insulting America. If you think the US can't assimilate Somalis or anybody else, think again. Believe in America.
and you also might be interested in ...
So Trump gave a prime-time speech Thursday, in an attempt to convince the public that election fraud is a problem, and that foreign countries (but not Russia) have tried to interfere in our elections.
Here's a paragraph that needs to be repeated any time a news outlet quotes Trump's 2020-election-rigging nonsense:
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes. It was not close. Joe Biden kicked his butt. Trump's fragile ego does not allow him to face those facts, so he has made up a lot of complete bullshit to divert attention from his humiliation. He has had numerous opportunities to present evidence of his alleged fraud in court, and has never done so. In fact, he has never even assembled a coherent theory of how the election might have been stolen, and instead jumps around from one unsupported notion to another -- from voting-machine hacking to vote-counting fraud to manufacturing fake ballots to non-citizens voting and so on. The one time one of these theories was about to be tested in court, Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than go to trial.
It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Pete Hegseth really said this:
I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best,
Critics pointed out that hormone therapies to raise testosterone is "gender-affirming care".
Nearly half the Democrats in the House voted to block $3.3 billion in aid to Israel, most of which is military aid. Only one Republican joined them, so the attempt failed.
I'm with the rebel Democrats here. I understand that many Israelis believe they are in a life-or-death struggle with Palestinian organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, so they're going to do whatever they think they need to do, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. But they can do it with their own resources. I don't want to be implicated in Israel's crimes against humanity.
NBC News tells the story of a trans high school student in Idaho, who committed suicide after being hounded by state laws.
The weak spot in any bigotry is the personal stories of its victims. Change comes by telling those stories.
It's official: The Mint is casting a Trump $1 coin, with his portrait next to "In God We Trust". (Is he the God we're trusting?) Apparently it's meant as a collectible coin rather than a circulating coin, which creates a possible loophole in the law against memorializing living people on money. We need a circulating dollar coin, but not this one. If anyone tries to circulate it, I will refuse to accept one as change.
and let's close with something obvious
I will never understand why the use of solar panels to create shade isn't ubiquitous. Here, South Korea turns a highway median into a shaded bike path that produces electricity.
