Commenter Archive

You could go the route of Fantastic Mr. Fox:

Badger: In summation, I think you just got to not do it, man. That's all.
Mr. Fox: I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
Badger: The cuss you are.
Mr. Fox: The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?
Badger: No, you cussing with me?
Mr. Fox: Don't cussing point at me!
Badger: If you're gonna cuss with somebody, you're not gonna cuss with me, you little cuss!
Mr. Fox: You're not gonna cuss with me!
[Both start snarling at each other, and then settle down]
Mr. Fox: Just buy the tree.
Badger: Okay.

nous for the win!

That's "Farging ICEholes."

Maybe I'll go with the Johnny Dangerously lingo.

Farging iceholes! Sonamabatch!!

A little humor with the spice can't be bad.

And yeah, these people are farging iceholes. I'm kinda looking forward to the Epstein stuff clearing the decks - send them all to jail. If that includes Bill Clinton, I'm OK with it.

I gotta go play some music now so I don't lose my mind.

What cleek said.

FWIW. i like spicy russell. his presence confirms the severity of the situation.

but, breaks are always good, too.

I can tell from the increasing frequency of F-bombs in my comments that it's time for me to take a little break from current events.

We are governed by greedheads and sociopathic weirdos. It is what it is, and it is what it's gonna be until we can figure out how to change it.

And, nonetheless, we all still need to live our lives as best we can.

Stay safe and sane out there, keep on keeping on, and don't let the bastards get inside your head. Saying that to myself as much as anything else.

How did the local cops get that person in jail in the first place? They got a warrant and went and took physical custody of them. In many cases, they went to their house and arrested them.

Without an MRAP.

So I think ICE is capable of doing the same.

I beg leave to doubt that ICS is capable of doing the same. It would require a level of competence that they show no sign of possessing.

Say, rather, that ICE should do the same.

Here's the thing. This statement right here:

"We're prioritizing the types of people we're arresting. We're going after the worst of the worst. And we're not just going out there willy-nilly picking up people."

Is bullshit.

Miller has set a quota for deportations that is orders of magnitude greater than the number of criminal undocumented people. ICE and CBP folks are getting bonuses for making their quotas. So they grab anyone who is brown or has an accent.

Immigration enforcement is not the job of local police. We don't ask ICE or CBP to enforce traffic violations etc., and we should not ask local cops to do immigration work. For all the reasons discussed in the piece.

You don't need 6 or 8 guys to arrest a criminal undocumented alien. You don't need an MRAP, or a sound cannon, or "less lethal" ordinance to arrest a criminal undocumented alien.

ICE has to go to somebody's house to arrest someone? OMFG, what a burden.

How did the local cops get that person in jail in the first place? They got a warrant and went and took physical custody of them. In many cases, they went to their house and arrested them.

Without an MRAP.

So I think ICE is capable of doing the same.

These guys have killed people, blinded people, shot people, rammed into people's cars, beaten the shit out of people, threatened people with guns drawn. It's an exercise in dominance. Aimed in particular at blue cities in blue states.

Fuck that.

Want co-operation? Stop terrorizing people. Short of that, get the fuck out.

And I appreciate that Homan is a kinder gentler version of Bovino, but we have the man on tape taking a $50K bribe.

That's the best Trump and Miller can come up with?

These guys have a long history of killing and abusing people and coloring outside the legal lines. The only difference now is they're killing white people.

Time to burn it down and start over from a clean slate.

wj - Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol’s remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn’t.

True, but the CBP agents and the BOP personnel who are there in MN are there not as part of their departments' actions, but on assignment to ICE to make up for not having enough agents to make the surge sustainable any other way.

And then there are the bounty hunters and other contractors who are doing the legwork to find enough immigrant-y looking folks to round up and keep those quotas met. Doesn't matter if they have to release them later on, all the bonuses are tied to the front end.

It's a peckerwood banquet.

anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.

I suspect that, for most people, ICE and Border Patrol are indistinguishable. The difference is just too inside baseball for most of us. Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol's remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn't. Not that those sorts of niggling legal details make any difference to the Orange Nero.

Thanks, lj. I didn't realize how much had changed. Although in retrospect that number for photovoltaic manufacturing should have been a clue -- those factories don't appear all at once.

lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.

Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:

https://www.pogo.org/investigates/hundreds-of-oath-keepers-have-worked-for-dhs-leaked-list-shows

Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:

The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”

(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)

In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.

Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515

So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.

That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.

Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.

However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit

we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020. 

whereas the US’s total installed solar capacity is on the order of 250GW, “China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200GW of photovoltaic panels in a single year.” 

China has a huge power infrastructure, which currently is overwhelmingly coal-based. Nothing effective happens on the climate front without that changing. Not that we shouldn't all be doing what we can. Just that Chinese power generation is the elephant in the room.

With that kind of capacity to build solar panels, they should be dramatically changing their generation mix. Which, IMHO, is something to celebrate. Not to mention that economies of scale in building them should make Chinese solar panels more affordable for the rest of the world.

Take the damn win.

I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job

CBP has a history of shooting people. Also of doing the "stand in front of the vehicle so I can say my life was threatened" thing.

Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"

One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.

I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.

I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.

...will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.

Here's the fuel mix for my pissant little non-profit local power authority for the last 24 hours. 20 years ago it was, except for the same amount of hydro, all fossil fuels. The wind is from turbines built somewhere in the US. The solar is from panels built in Georgia. Another 100MW of solar comes online late this year, along with a 100MW 400MWh battery system. The batteries are from a Korean company's US plant. For coal, 100MW is the minimum plant output that still allows for a warm start. The wholly-owned coal plant's power is as cheap as the wind or solar because local circumstances, so gets dispatched by the balancing authority.

Despite Trump's efforts, there are still things going on in the US, even if we aren't leading.

From lj's Guardian link:

At the New School, Tooze made a similar argument. He cited another favourite statistic: whereas the US’s total installed solar capacity is on the order of 250GW, “China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200GW of photovoltaic panels in a single year.” In those Chinese solar panels Tooze sees a climate-era analogue to the Soviet T-34 tanks. At development and climate meetings, he said, you can go a long time without hearing anyone acknowledge that China matters vastly more to the climate-change story than anything happening anywhere else, very much including the US. The point of all this, Tooze insists, is not to chasten liberal self-regard – or not only that. The point is to get people to confront our radical new reality.

Tooze told me that the climate book he started working on after Crashed, which is now nearing completion, will argue “that if we’re serious in the west, if you’re serious about climate, then you have to face the popular front question”. In other words, many of the same countries that chose 80 years ago to ally with the Soviet Union to fight Germany will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.

Interesting, no? I wasn't expecting to read something like that.

hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.

They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?

And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.

Pluralism is for chumps and failed states.

I'm sure the "black helicopter" types are ready to use all the guns they've been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.

Right? Isn't that what they said? I mean, they have to be really upset about this stuff, don't they?

remember when the first amendment meant the government couldn't punish you for criticizing it?

good times

IANAL, but this opinion seems extraordinarily blistering.

It's not unusual for a judge to cite the US Constitution in a ruling. Even citing the Declaration of Independence isn't unknown. (Although quoting multiple of its complaints against George III probably is.) But this?

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.

or

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.

or

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,

It is so ORDERED

Zing!