I'm pretty sure Abrego is going to be a thirteen-part Netflix mini-series that doesn't have to pad its episodes with fiction at all, considering the number of turns and twists his legal team has been forced to navigate.
The Trump regime has painted itself an absolute villain in the process.
This was one of the reasons US state department attaches tried really hard to deal fairly with defectors from the Soviet Union. They often committed no crimes or if they did, did so against operatives who were criminal, themselves. Regardless, their take was too useful not to protect them.
We didn't just debrief migrants from behind the Iron Curtain, but had intelligence operations throughout the world, especially in the Americas, so when someone came with juicy intel against a rival state, it was important we made sure they were safe and comfortable long after the usefulness of their reports was exhausted.
In most cases, them talking smack about their home state to the US was a grave betrayal, beyond a mere criminal sentence. The kind of thing blast furnace executions and immurement were reserved for.
By selling out on our South American criminal informants the US hasn't merely sent a message to potential sources from criminal sectors but also to those from international sectors.
We've just lost all our future spies.
Coach Kavanaugh was only confirmed as a justice after the entire nation had established it wasn't doing the freedom thing or even the due process thing. We called them terrorists rather than criminals or aliens but the deal was the same.
Our failure was in not challenging the legitimacy of the Federalist Society Six once Trump was out of power. Or even challenging when Garland was denied a seat in 2016.
Considering the kinds of shenanigans being done with Trump back in office, a re-squaring and reformation of the Federal justice system would have been a low stakes project, and might even have spared us the razing of democracy we're seeing today.
When our grandkids' kids are tired of Same As The Old Boss maybe we'll see some reform. Unlikely in our lifetime without a bit of the ol' ultraviolence; riots are the language of the unheard, and a lot of people are getting hurt while no one speaks for them.
In 2015-ish, about four Americans were killed via officer-involved homicide, over half of whom were neither armed nor resisting. (That's a rough guess with a wide error margin.) Negative consequences to the officers-involved (whether losing their job or imprisonment or merely a reduction in rank) are notoriously rare, usually making news more often than the killings themselves.
O-IH was tracked only through small volunteer activist groups until the slaying of Michael Brown and the Ferguson unrest of 2014, after which some news agencies started tracking their own records, and still missed spots. By 2019, it was determined that precinct coroners had a primary task of determining that a cadaver did not die due to officer action if it could be plausibly determined and sometimes when it couldn't, in the name of backing the blue.
In the meantime judges still held a presumption of regularity, not only assuming law enforcement personnel did not lie -- especially in court -- but also did not shoot anyone who didn't need shooting. It's the same presumption of regularity that is being gutted by the blatancy of the current regime.
So it would not surprise me if Kavanaugh -- and other justices -- believed the TV copaganda that no innocent person got shot without the protagonist officer crying in his beer over it after the fact, and that such instances were exceedingly rare (id est, less than four Americans a day).
All this is to say, our system has been set up for decades now (if not centuries) to allow for such presumptions to exist, and it's about time they didn't anymore, with prejudice. Agents of state should be given no benefit of doubt.
Also, ICE-officer-involve homicides appear to be at a similar rate, and reported about as often.
I can't speak for AI systems but I find sometimes the horse-play of children and adolescents can sound convincingly similar to distress, to the point I end up diverting my own course and activities to investigate. Typically, then I only to find that kids have gotten a bit rowdy in their fun and no actual harm is being done.
Since, for now, such systems tend to be less accurate than human sitch-assessment, I anticipate police are going to show up where kids are being kids, and will then find cause to be offended, the way resource officers can't help but find reason to pugilize teens.
That is to say, this looks like Raven is a tool to justify more bullying of civilians by state agents.
...there's no reason to pretend you're not a fascist.
Some games like Monopoly, we play to reveal how the paradigm works that reflects what happens IRL.
The SCOTUS Federalist-Society Six will continue to push the limits of their authority until a correction by force, and the more we rule out law, the closer we get to violence.
SCOTUS has long established itself as a high-tower, checked by no-one, once malicious actors are in position, and thanks to Donald Trump and Leonard Leo, they are.
Some day one of them will get shot if they aren't impeached, and until then, nothing is stopping them from inflicting their ideology-driven rulings (conservative grievance, fringe theories and bad vibes) on the rest of us.
For congress, they have the ability to remove them from office. For everyone else, violent revolution becomes increasingly inevitable with each day.
I might be tempted to speak of a Democrat official, since I don't trust people to differentiate between one that is Democratic (of the political party) vs. one that is democratic (believes in the promotion of democracy and the strengthening of democratic features of the US and state governments).
Similarly, I wouldn't trust people to understand the difference between Soviet communism (communism as practiced in the USSR) and soviet communism (lower case -- communism as practiced by a revolutionary council) I usually have to flag the latter in both respective cases with a (lower case) comment.
So I would sooner blame general ignorance of political science terms and the confusion caused by such than MAGA habits of referring officials by the adjective Democrat over Democratic
But I'm ASD, a poli-sci enthusiast and a wordnik, so I am likely in the minority.
It came up that no-one is reporting officer-involved homicides during ICE actions. They're happening at a rate that one might expect considering the frequency of such incidents in ordinary police actions, but no-one is actively checking and tracking them.
But needless to say, people are dying during ICE actions though they tend to be persons of the sort that Stephen Miller wouldn't qualify as persons.
As per the you fuck one sheep rule, even if you do a lot of good, right and proper things, if you commit atrocities you get blamed for atrocities.
Besides which Andrew Jackson was possibly the scariest president of the lot.
But the internment camps of WWII remain a shame of the United States, and a shame of FDR. This holds true right up through Obama's mass deportation programs. State violence is state violence, and is frowned upon no matter who happens to be doing it.
In fact, the twice a day that Trump does something right, lib sources are quick to credit him for doing good, as that validates all the times their comments are critical.
It's not about Orange Man Bad it's about all the particular and specific ways that the dude in orange make-up (and these days, his cronies using his name and seat of power) are destroying the US and destroying families.
So...proceed.
Before the drama of Trump deciding how things are run, police who were not given priorities would go after the easy marks: Teens loitering too long in low-income neighborhoods, broken taillight stops that often didn't feature a broken light, essentially, anyone who is low threat that is likely to be committing a citable offense.
Or, in the twenty-first century, anyone who might be carrying $50 or more in seizable assets.
This is the reason for task forces and precinct subdivisions, so that so many officers are actually investigating homicides or drug trafficking or human trafficking. Murderers might otherwise go uninvestigated since someone who's killed before might fight back. Organized crime with hired guns? Right out.
Trump takes what's wrong with the world and makes it worse, and does it in plain view. Not that he'll directly lead to reform, but he may piss off enough civilians who want to live in a society of rules and norms, and by that route lead to a proper revolt.
One could hope, at least. Trump's corporate and billionaire supporters are doing a lot to enable MAGA.
If I was going to coordinate my terror attack, I'd do it on Signal.
Given that gaming sites are havens for the alt-right (especially intensely shooty games like COD), I might recruit in games but then would radicalize in private chat.
More accurately, I'd find candidates already radicalized and on the verge of suicide for whatever grievances, and then direct them towards targets that interest me. (🎶 I have a little list, I have a little list... 🎵)
Or if I had a multi-participant scheme, would direct them to a signal group, as per the Hegseth department of defense.
It's conspicuous how, when a Republican gets into power, often with control of the legislature, a whole lot of anti-public shit follows, and then when a Democrat gets into power, only some of it is rolled back. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's been a pattern since Reagan, and consistent with the Heritage Foundation's Project For Leadership the last version of which was Project 2025 mostly to strip public works and benefits from the federal government back to before the New Deal (e.g. with shanty towns and people dying of malnutrition, and all sorts of jury-rigged survival tricks named after Hoover).
As Joanne Freeman noted, the OBBBA budget reconciliation omnibus wasn't a Trump bill, but a standard GOP bill to strip away more services and benefits from the public so that the wealthy don't have to pay taxes to cover it. This is the same shit as happens with every Republican presidency.
I'd think, after George W. Bush, Americans would have learned never to vote Republican again, having watched the horror of what happened. But no. Twice. I want to blame it on the massive far right propaganda machine that dominates viewership in the US. It's more complicated than that, but not by much.
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon could be counted on to run the country, even if you happened not to vote for them. That hasn't been the case since Reagan, and even our Democrat alternatives have been less-than-ideal. We can blame PACs and SIGs but the paradigm is more complicated than that.
In any case, work to restore the nation wouldn't have stopped even if Harris won. We'd have chosen the enemy we might negotiate with or fight against, but we still would have needed to continue the effort to change minds. If we're lucky, Trump may be leading us to a Magna Carta moment, where things get so bad that pressure to reform is inexorable, if not merely a violent onslaught.
I think we're going to see what happens when we cross the three-skipped-meals threshold. It may not be completely ugly, but it won't be sublime.
Throwing a tantrum like a toddler (albeit one slightly more articulate) is entirely on brand for Stephen Miller. As with the Federalist Society members of SCOTUS, anything that serves Miller's version of MAGA is right and proper, and anything that doesn't, isn't.
This is hardly news. It wasn't news in the aughts during the George W. Bush administration in which GOP earmarks were given preference over those requested by Democrat legislators. The whole Republican party is, and since Reagan, has been, about privileging those who are in the party or fit their demographic ideal over everyone else, to the point of punishing those who exist too far from their ideal.
Loyalty over principle. Unilateral autocracy over just distribution of power and resources. Eventually one person owns everything, usually to the necessary demise of any significant rivals.
Still hope miller gets stabbed in the back, perhaps literally, by one of his trusted lieutenants, preferably someone working for a rival all along. Eaten by hyenas would be fine too.
The quote by Lynden Baines Johnson is attributed by Bill Moyers, WaPo 1988.
It's also been getting a lot of traction in the last decade serving to explain well a driving force behind MAGA... which has been active since Johnson.
That's the beginning. We've already seen that an administration will hold onto power after the President is no longer fit to serve, whether via Wilson's stroke or Reagan's alzheimers or George W. Bush's... lack of grasp on reality. In fact, it is these sorts of scenarios that allow for oligarchs and shadow regents to slip in and take over, since they can act without personal responsibility.
Of course, SCOTUS, by giving POTUS immunity (governed by SCOTUS itself) has created circumstances in which the President can still have his faculties and still govern in bad faith, or be directed to do so by a kitchen cabinet.
So we're going to need a far greater amount of reform than some new age brackets in order to restore the good-faith integrity of the federal executive... or for that matter, the legislative and judicial as well.
As terrifying a constitutional convention might be, we should have one. There's too little of what is left to be worth salvaging.
We knew this was going to happen if Trump became President. He's been manipulated before and since.
And yet we found seventy-seven million Americans could also be manipulated into voting for him.
All war is deception.
I always thought it is an assassination if the target is based on importance (such as an official of state) or celebrity (such as a popular artist). John Lennon was assassinated in that he was targeted on account of being famous.
If someone killed John Lennon because Lennon owed them $10K and Lennon refused to pay (and courts weren't an option) then it'd just be a private affair in which Lennon's fame was incidental, and it'd be plain old murder.
But Kirk was a target because he was a political figure and a celebrity, and that sounds like assassination to me.
Of course, some legal systems may have their own definitions of assassination and statutes that differentiate it from plain intentional homicide. But then that can be different from how a term is used commonly by the public.
As for executions, those are done by the state, and are supposed to be made legal according to the state. When CIA sends a field agent to kill someone, that's assassination, again. But when the state puts someone in front of a firing squad, or the disposition matrix decides that someone must die, that's execution. An independent individual can't execute, except as an agent of state assigned to perform the specific execution. The rather elaborate procession that comes with an execution is supposed to emphasize that this is an action of the state, and the state holds responsibility for the death.
Curiously when someone is killed by hellfire missile and burns the whole village down, the POI was executed for having received (limited, secret) due process. But everyone else massacred in the strike was just plain murdered by the state, and written off as casualties of war. It gets kinda gross.
Coming soon to a TV near you
I'm pretty sure Abrego is going to be a thirteen-part Netflix mini-series that doesn't have to pad its episodes with fiction at all, considering the number of turns and twists his legal team has been forced to navigate. The Trump regime has painted itself an absolute villain in the process.
Criminality doesn't matter
This was one of the reasons US state department attaches tried really hard to deal fairly with defectors from the Soviet Union. They often committed no crimes or if they did, did so against operatives who were criminal, themselves. Regardless, their take was too useful not to protect them. We didn't just debrief migrants from behind the Iron Curtain, but had intelligence operations throughout the world, especially in the Americas, so when someone came with juicy intel against a rival state, it was important we made sure they were safe and comfortable long after the usefulness of their reports was exhausted. In most cases, them talking smack about their home state to the US was a grave betrayal, beyond a mere criminal sentence. The kind of thing blast furnace executions and immurement were reserved for. By selling out on our South American criminal informants the US hasn't merely sent a message to potential sources from criminal sectors but also to those from international sectors. We've just lost all our future spies.
a deep, dark stain
Coach Kavanaugh was only confirmed as a justice after the entire nation had established it wasn't doing the freedom thing or even the due process thing. We called them terrorists rather than criminals or aliens but the deal was the same. Our failure was in not challenging the legitimacy of the Federalist Society Six once Trump was out of power. Or even challenging when Garland was denied a seat in 2016. Considering the kinds of shenanigans being done with Trump back in office, a re-squaring and reformation of the Federal justice system would have been a low stakes project, and might even have spared us the razing of democracy we're seeing today. When our grandkids' kids are tired of Same As The Old Boss maybe we'll see some reform. Unlikely in our lifetime without a bit of the ol' ultraviolence; riots are the language of the unheard, and a lot of people are getting hurt while no one speaks for them.
I wonder if Kavanaugh has a similar imagining with O-I homicide
In 2015-ish, about four Americans were killed via officer-involved homicide, over half of whom were neither armed nor resisting. (That's a rough guess with a wide error margin.) Negative consequences to the officers-involved (whether losing their job or imprisonment or merely a reduction in rank) are notoriously rare, usually making news more often than the killings themselves. O-IH was tracked only through small volunteer activist groups until the slaying of Michael Brown and the Ferguson unrest of 2014, after which some news agencies started tracking their own records, and still missed spots. By 2019, it was determined that precinct coroners had a primary task of determining that a cadaver did not die due to officer action if it could be plausibly determined and sometimes when it couldn't, in the name of backing the blue. In the meantime judges still held a presumption of regularity, not only assuming law enforcement personnel did not lie -- especially in court -- but also did not shoot anyone who didn't need shooting. It's the same presumption of regularity that is being gutted by the blatancy of the current regime. So it would not surprise me if Kavanaugh -- and other justices -- believed the TV copaganda that no innocent person got shot without the protagonist officer crying in his beer over it after the fact, and that such instances were exceedingly rare (id est, less than four Americans a day). All this is to say, our system has been set up for decades now (if not centuries) to allow for such presumptions to exist, and it's about time they didn't anymore, with prejudice. Agents of state should be given no benefit of doubt. Also, ICE-officer-involve homicides appear to be at a similar rate, and reported about as often.
Kids playing vs. distress
I can't speak for AI systems but I find sometimes the horse-play of children and adolescents can sound convincingly similar to distress, to the point I end up diverting my own course and activities to investigate. Typically, then I only to find that kids have gotten a bit rowdy in their fun and no actual harm is being done. Since, for now, such systems tend to be less accurate than human sitch-assessment, I anticipate police are going to show up where kids are being kids, and will then find cause to be offended, the way resource officers can't help but find reason to pugilize teens. That is to say, this looks like Raven is a tool to justify more bullying of civilians by state agents.
Once Secret Hitler is in power...
...there's no reason to pretend you're not a fascist. Some games like Monopoly, we play to reveal how the paradigm works that reflects what happens IRL.
The sooner the rest of us come to...
The SCOTUS Federalist-Society Six will continue to push the limits of their authority until a correction by force, and the more we rule out law, the closer we get to violence. SCOTUS has long established itself as a high-tower, checked by no-one, once malicious actors are in position, and thanks to Donald Trump and Leonard Leo, they are. Some day one of them will get shot if they aren't impeached, and until then, nothing is stopping them from inflicting their ideology-driven rulings (conservative grievance, fringe theories and bad vibes) on the rest of us. For congress, they have the ability to remove them from office. For everyone else, violent revolution becomes increasingly inevitable with each day.
Democrat vs democrat (lower case) / Democratic vs. democratic
I might be tempted to speak of a Democrat official, since I don't trust people to differentiate between one that is Democratic (of the political party) vs. one that is democratic (believes in the promotion of democracy and the strengthening of democratic features of the US and state governments). Similarly, I wouldn't trust people to understand the difference between Soviet communism (communism as practiced in the USSR) and soviet communism (lower case -- communism as practiced by a revolutionary council) I usually have to flag the latter in both respective cases with a (lower case) comment. So I would sooner blame general ignorance of political science terms and the confusion caused by such than MAGA habits of referring officials by the adjective Democrat over Democratic But I'm ASD, a poli-sci enthusiast and a wordnik, so I am likely in the minority.
Deaths during ICE action
It came up that no-one is reporting officer-involved homicides during ICE actions. They're happening at a rate that one might expect considering the frequency of such incidents in ordinary police actions, but no-one is actively checking and tracking them. But needless to say, people are dying during ICE actions though they tend to be persons of the sort that Stephen Miller wouldn't qualify as persons.
Um, yes, actually?
As per the you fuck one sheep rule, even if you do a lot of good, right and proper things, if you commit atrocities you get blamed for atrocities. Besides which Andrew Jackson was possibly the scariest president of the lot. But the internment camps of WWII remain a shame of the United States, and a shame of FDR. This holds true right up through Obama's mass deportation programs. State violence is state violence, and is frowned upon no matter who happens to be doing it. In fact, the twice a day that Trump does something right, lib sources are quick to credit him for doing good, as that validates all the times their comments are critical. It's not about Orange Man Bad it's about all the particular and specific ways that the dude in orange make-up (and these days, his cronies using his name and seat of power) are destroying the US and destroying families. So...proceed.
Low Hanging Fruit is the norm for law enforcement
Before the drama of Trump deciding how things are run, police who were not given priorities would go after the easy marks: Teens loitering too long in low-income neighborhoods, broken taillight stops that often didn't feature a broken light, essentially, anyone who is low threat that is likely to be committing a citable offense. Or, in the twenty-first century, anyone who might be carrying $50 or more in seizable assets. This is the reason for task forces and precinct subdivisions, so that so many officers are actually investigating homicides or drug trafficking or human trafficking. Murderers might otherwise go uninvestigated since someone who's killed before might fight back. Organized crime with hired guns? Right out. Trump takes what's wrong with the world and makes it worse, and does it in plain view. Not that he'll directly lead to reform, but he may piss off enough civilians who want to live in a society of rules and norms, and by that route lead to a proper revolt. One could hope, at least. Trump's corporate and billionaire supporters are doing a lot to enable MAGA.
If it's good enough for SoD Hegseth, it's good enough for me.
If I was going to coordinate my terror attack, I'd do it on Signal. Given that gaming sites are havens for the alt-right (especially intensely shooty games like COD), I might recruit in games but then would radicalize in private chat. More accurately, I'd find candidates already radicalized and on the verge of suicide for whatever grievances, and then direct them towards targets that interest me. (🎶 I have a little list, I have a little list... 🎵) Or if I had a multi-participant scheme, would direct them to a signal group, as per the Hegseth department of defense.
"just" lost the election
It's conspicuous how, when a Republican gets into power, often with control of the legislature, a whole lot of anti-public shit follows, and then when a Democrat gets into power, only some of it is rolled back. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's been a pattern since Reagan, and consistent with the Heritage Foundation's Project For Leadership the last version of which was Project 2025 mostly to strip public works and benefits from the federal government back to before the New Deal (e.g. with shanty towns and people dying of malnutrition, and all sorts of jury-rigged survival tricks named after Hoover). As Joanne Freeman noted, the OBBBA budget reconciliation omnibus wasn't a Trump bill, but a standard GOP bill to strip away more services and benefits from the public so that the wealthy don't have to pay taxes to cover it. This is the same shit as happens with every Republican presidency. I'd think, after George W. Bush, Americans would have learned never to vote Republican again, having watched the horror of what happened. But no. Twice. I want to blame it on the massive far right propaganda machine that dominates viewership in the US. It's more complicated than that, but not by much. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon could be counted on to run the country, even if you happened not to vote for them. That hasn't been the case since Reagan, and even our Democrat alternatives have been less-than-ideal. We can blame PACs and SIGs but the paradigm is more complicated than that. In any case, work to restore the nation wouldn't have stopped even if Harris won. We'd have chosen the enemy we might negotiate with or fight against, but we still would have needed to continue the effort to change minds. If we're lucky, Trump may be leading us to a Magna Carta moment, where things get so bad that pressure to reform is inexorable, if not merely a violent onslaught. I think we're going to see what happens when we cross the three-skipped-meals threshold. It may not be completely ugly, but it won't be sublime.
Stephen Miller
Throwing a tantrum like a toddler (albeit one slightly more articulate) is entirely on brand for Stephen Miller. As with the Federalist Society members of SCOTUS, anything that serves Miller's version of MAGA is right and proper, and anything that doesn't, isn't. This is hardly news. It wasn't news in the aughts during the George W. Bush administration in which GOP earmarks were given preference over those requested by Democrat legislators. The whole Republican party is, and since Reagan, has been, about privileging those who are in the party or fit their demographic ideal over everyone else, to the point of punishing those who exist too far from their ideal. Loyalty over principle. Unilateral autocracy over just distribution of power and resources. Eventually one person owns everything, usually to the necessary demise of any significant rivals. Still hope miller gets stabbed in the back, perhaps literally, by one of his trusted lieutenants, preferably someone working for a rival all along. Eaten by hyenas would be fine too.
The LBJ quote...
The quote by Lynden Baines Johnson is attributed by Bill Moyers, WaPo 1988. It's also been getting a lot of traction in the last decade serving to explain well a driving force behind MAGA... which has been active since Johnson.
Too many notes for the royal ear
Situations like this really highlight how appealing to aristocracy can make for shitty art and shitty policy.
Upper age limit for presidency
That's the beginning. We've already seen that an administration will hold onto power after the President is no longer fit to serve, whether via Wilson's stroke or Reagan's alzheimers or George W. Bush's... lack of grasp on reality. In fact, it is these sorts of scenarios that allow for oligarchs and shadow regents to slip in and take over, since they can act without personal responsibility. Of course, SCOTUS, by giving POTUS immunity (governed by SCOTUS itself) has created circumstances in which the President can still have his faculties and still govern in bad faith, or be directed to do so by a kitchen cabinet. So we're going to need a far greater amount of reform than some new age brackets in order to restore the good-faith integrity of the federal executive... or for that matter, the legislative and judicial as well. As terrifying a constitutional convention might be, we should have one. There's too little of what is left to be worth salvaging.
DID I NOT TELL HECTOR TO STEER CLEAR OF ACHILLES?
We knew this was going to happen if Trump became President. He's been manipulated before and since. And yet we found seventy-seven million Americans could also be manipulated into voting for him. All war is deception.
Back but not for everyone
Sinclair, Nexstar and ABC are still withholding Jimmy Kimmel until the torches and pitchforks reach their respective portcullises.
Assassinations vs. Executions vs. Basic Murder.
I always thought it is an assassination if the target is based on importance (such as an official of state) or celebrity (such as a popular artist). John Lennon was assassinated in that he was targeted on account of being famous. If someone killed John Lennon because Lennon owed them $10K and Lennon refused to pay (and courts weren't an option) then it'd just be a private affair in which Lennon's fame was incidental, and it'd be plain old murder. But Kirk was a target because he was a political figure and a celebrity, and that sounds like assassination to me. Of course, some legal systems may have their own definitions of assassination and statutes that differentiate it from plain intentional homicide. But then that can be different from how a term is used commonly by the public. As for executions, those are done by the state, and are supposed to be made legal according to the state. When CIA sends a field agent to kill someone, that's assassination, again. But when the state puts someone in front of a firing squad, or the disposition matrix decides that someone must die, that's execution. An independent individual can't execute, except as an agent of state assigned to perform the specific execution. The rather elaborate procession that comes with an execution is supposed to emphasize that this is an action of the state, and the state holds responsibility for the death. Curiously when someone is killed by hellfire missile and burns the whole village down, the POI was executed for having received (limited, secret) due process. But everyone else massacred in the strike was just plain murdered by the state, and written off as casualties of war. It gets kinda gross.