Mitch's Blog

The rally got a few hundred people. There were a dozen events throughout the county and the rally in downtown San Diego reportedly got thousands of participants. Protesters rallied nationwide

Klein:

The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin.

On Monday, President Trump said, in the Oval Office, in front of the cameras, sitting next to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, that he would like to do this to U.S. citizens, as well.

Klein goes into some detail on the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration itself admits was mistakenly sent to CECOT. The Trump administration itself admits Garcia is no terrorist or gang member. But they won’t lift a finger to get him back.

If Trump can do this to Garcia, he can do this to anyone. You, me, anyone.

J.D. Vance on Twitter:

To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.

Matt Birchler:

I try to only bust out the curses when they’re warranted on this blog, but fuck everything about this. This clown who pretends to be an intellectual argues that due process, which the US Constitution guarantees to all “persons” in the 5th Amendment is more of a suggestion than a mandate.

…

Vance argues that someone facing the death penalty obviously deserves more due process than someone facing deportation. But that misses the point: the purpose of due process is to determine whether the government’s charge is legitimate in the first place, not just to scale the process to the severity of the punishment.

Ian Welsh:

This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.

I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner.

This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.

I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner.

And Zuckerberg is seeing that his paying off and sucking up to Trump and the right hasn’t bought Meta any protection. Trump is happy to take your money and sycophancy and then fuck you over anyway.

Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen, was detained by ICE as an “unauthorized alien,” despite his mother’s presenting authorities with his birth certificate and Social Security card. Lopez Gomez was born in Georgia.

Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic:

He appears to have been arrested and charged under an “anti-immigration” law passed in Florida two months ago, despite the fact that the law is currently under a temporary restraining order and isn’t supposed to be enforced.

Also: ICE officers literally smashed a car window open to arrest the wrong man

He slept in caves and walked a 365-mile circle over and over for decades.

Sam Anderson at the New York Times:

In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.

…

The 21st century, unfortunately, turns out to be the perfect moment to be obsessed with his story. America keeps spasming, with increasing violence, in many of the same ways it spasmed in the 1800s.

And so Anderson decided to walk the Old Leatherman’s route.

A grim longread by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor at The Guardian: “The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.”

[Right-wing American oligarchs] have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

These billonaires see the world burning down and they’re not trying to stop it. They’re pouring gasoline on it. The oligarchs “believe “our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved.”

How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.==

Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

Ben Werdmuller prescribes building value-added services on top of the AT protocol while encouraging others to do the same. This is a similar business model to GitHub.

“Perhaps ironically, this vision comes closer to building an “everything app” than will ever be possible in a closed ecosystem. That’s been Elon Musk’s longtime goal for X, but Bluesky’s approach, in my opinion, is far more likely to succeed. It’s not an approach that aims to build it all themselves; it’s a truly open social web that we can all build collaboratively.”

Werdmuller also plans to lay out some prescriptions for Mastodon, and I am looking forward to reading those.

I get that Mastodon is, at least for now, open while BlueSky is, for now, as much a silo as Facebook or Twitter. But BlueSky is where the energy is, and I’d like to see it thrive and open up.

I’d also like to see the walls come down between Mastodon, BlueSky and the web. Because for now it looks like we’re rebuilding the silos of Web 2.0, but doing it with open source. Open source doesn’t matter if everything is still siloed, which it now is. And it’s painful to see Mastodon users scoff at BlueSky and BlueSky users dismiss Mastodon. We’re all on the same team here.

I’d also like to see both Mastodon and BlueSky support long posts, but I get that might be antithetical to their cultures.

If one’s name is a brand, then mine is tarnished.

—Elon Green at The New York Times

Like Green, I am a man with a relatively uncommon first name. I share that name with the recent Republican Speaker of the House. I am active in the local Democratic Club, and one of the women on the board is a sweetheart who gets quite exercised over Republican abuses. She has a thunderous voice and swears blisteringly when she’s worked up. At meetings, I’d hear her shout, “FUCKING MITCH!” and I’d flinch. “What?! What did I do?!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval."

That’s me. Or was, until I started taking Trazadone a few months ago. It’s an amazing miracle drug.

My insomnia almost always follows the same pattern: I don’t have any trouble getting to sleep at first. I fall asleep, deep and sweet, for a couple of hours, and then I get up to pee and can’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed a little while, trying various mind tricks and torturing myself with anxiety and self-loathing. Sometimes that lasts for hours, until morning. Sometimes I get up for a couple of hours, which reduces the anxiety and self-loathing but it’s not sleeping. Sometimes I can get back to sleep before the alarm goes off, but it’s not enough sleep and I stagger through the rest of the day. Sometimes I just sit there until it’s time to wash up and start the day.

I used to get insomnia attacks like that a few times a week. Now, it’s down to a couple of times a month, thanks to Trazadone.