Minnesota’s chief federal judge has ordered the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, to appear in his courtroom Friday and threatened to hold him in contempt for what he says has been repeated defiance of judges’ orders in the state. …
Schiltz’s frustration has been boiling for weeks amid Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s massive immigration enforcement action in the Twin Cities. The operation has flooded the courts with emergency lawsuits brought by immigrants who say they have been illegally arrested or detained. The judges in the district have agreed nearly every time, ordering their immediate release from custody and warning, in increasingly alarming terms, about rampant violations of the law.
Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, said the administration has been slow-walking or outright defying the directives of many Minnesota judges, including at least one of his own: The order for Lyons to appear came in the case of a man Schiltz ordered released on Jan. 15 but who remained detained as of Monday night. [Politico]
Schiltz said the trip could be skipped if a particular detainee, unnamed but known as Juan T.R., who was being illegally held by ICE was released; the release reportedly occurred. Erick Erickson, who has criticized his own side to an amazing extent, kicks the Administration again:
Todd Lyons is the head of ICE. As you will recall, Kristi Noem sidelined Lyons because, among other reasons, Lyons did not want to engage in mass roundups but preferred a more targeted approach. Noem elevated Gregory Bovino above even Bovino’s boss in the Border Patrol to do the very public mass roundups. That is not Border Patrol’s job, and that is not Bovino’s job. But he did it.
Bovino and Noem favored going to Home Depot, Target, and other major shopping centers, rounding up pretty much anyone who was Hispanic, and sorting through to find illegal aliens.
Even among the illegal aliens found, some did not have deportation orders. Many were not processed. They were all put in detention facilities, then never processed. Some were able to get lawyers who filed Habeas Corpus petitions. Herein lies the problem.
Who is actually responsible? That would be Todd Lyons, the man Kristi Noem not only sidelined, but just this past week had her Department of Homeland Security General Counsel send a directive to Lyons’ employees telling them to ignore a memo from Lyons that reminded the employees they reported to him. Noem did this after the President re-empowered Lyons.
Power-mad buffoons, the pack of them. There’s more in his post.
Erickson might have me believe Lyons is an exception to the rule that Trump’s minions are not on the straight and narrow, but – and Erickson doesn’t mention this – Lyons signed an ICE memo of a shameful nature:
Whistleblowers have shared an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.). The document claims that ICE officers may enter homes without consent while conducting certain immigration arrests without a judicial warrant. This sweeping power would be an alarming violation of Americans’ well-founded constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Signed by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in May of last year, the memo states that agents may rely on a certain administrative warrant issued alongside a final order of removal to use “a necessary and reasonable” amount of force to the named individual’s residence if officers are denied entry. [reason.com]
Does that second paragraph sound exculpatory? Then why this?
The whistleblowers say that physical copies of the guidance weren’t circulated widely. But its contents, they report, were used to train recruits amid ICE’s push to hire 10,000 agents last year. Although written 2025 training materials clearly state “a warrant of removal/deportation does NOT alone authorize a 4th amendment search of any kind,” the whistleblowers say that instructors at the DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Center “are directed to verbally train all new ICE agents to follow this policy while disregarding written course material instructing the opposite.”
The effect is shattered. Lyons should not have signed that memo, and, knowing it was both illegal and shameful, arranged to conceal it by failing to leave a normal paper trail.
So when you read Erickson’s post and see Lyons is by the book, like Tom Homan, well, that is one helluva stretch by Erickson. In fact, he oughta be playing first base.
And Homan? Did he really take that bribe? Unfortunately, we’ll never know, as we don’t know if Director Wray’s FBI was adequately honest, but we know Patel’s won’t be; however, any employee or nominee of Trump can be legitimately regarded with suspicion. It’s the kind of mafia don Trump aspires to be.
Sordid. It’s all so sordid. The worship of dollars and of social standing is a terrible thing. It shapes us, it shapes outour society. And sometimes that shape is repulsive.
The subject of the last Administrative Note was Flannery O’Connor and her posthumous, and perhaps unintentional collection Mystery and Manners. I finished said volumea couple of weeks ago, and, needless to say, there’s been little improvement in my prose, which continues to be straightahead, if abraided with semi-colons and other detritus, vulnerable to digressions, with little of O’Connor’s inclination towards bringing opposites to the discussions, in some picturesque way, in a paragraph. Her tendency to do so sometimes seems just a trifle repetitious, see The King of the Birds.
I am reminded that she regards as sardonically fortunate the loss suffered by the South in the American Civil War, the South’s ‘Fall’ as it were, and a gift to the ‘Southern Writer’. How that affects the undercurrents of the writing of O’Connor and her Southern colleagues is a fascinating question that I haven’t the time to research.
Oh, stop going about how our Vampire Master likes your sun dress!
I Capture the Castle (2003) is the story of a British literary family, the Mortmains, who, years ago – it seems to be set around the gap between the Wars, based on the cars – rented and moved into a castle in an attempt to break the writer’s block afflicting the father of the family, James, who wrote one novel and came to an abrupt halt.
The tactic is a flop, a result James keeps to himself, and the family soldiers on, buoyed by a collection of literary tropes, such as the novel will be done soon and save us all, or the romantic notion of marrying money to save the family from the appalling notion of real poverty, while James struggles to piece together a single sentence. He’s married to an artist, and has two daughters and a son.
As their financial walls close in around them, their landlord changes as an American, Simon, appears, having inherited wealth and title from his English father, along with a buddy. The two Mortmain daughters do their best to attract the attention of money, err, men, and it’s off to the slightly farcical races.
Is it good? Maybe. I enjoyed it, and at its core the story is simple, but there are undercurrents that I sensed but couldn’t isolate. What of Stephen, the nephew of a former maid to the family? Is he nothing more than a throwaway, or is he symbolic of the family’s disillusionment?
I knew something was calling for my attention in this interview transcript fragment, and I finally figured it out.
Trump: "Bovino is very good, but he's a pretty out there kind of a guy. It some cases that's good, maybe it wasn't good here. But when I watch some of the people I've been watching over the past few weeks, these are paid insurrectionists, these are paid agitators. These people aren't normal."
In case the above disappears, shaved to the part that caught my attention:
But when I watch some of the people I’ve been watching over the past few weeks, these are paid insurrectionists, these are paid agitators. These people aren’t normal.”
He’s talking about the Minneapolis community members protesting the sloppy actions of ICE agents, such as this one. But what is he really saying?
“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room,” Walz said in a TV interview last month.
The message started with news interviews and eventually spread like wildfire across social media with the help of young Americans. The simple terminology of labeling the other side as “weird” or “odd” is not revolutionary or sophisticated in American politics but represents a new framing for Democrats who have spent the last eight years trying to defeat Trump and Trumpism by personifying him as the greatest threat to democracy. [AP]
This is Trump for you. Not a whit of originality, whether he’s building a glorified bathroom with his name and a lot of gold, or insulting a rival. Remember the debate between Clinton and Trump? “No! You’re the thumb-puppet!” was the best he could do when accused of being Russian President Putin’s thumb-puppet, an accusation he’s never effectively rebutted.
So he and the Republicans are insulted when they’re called weird, because
Trump has spent a lot of time being friends with his base, and labeling him and his Party as weird is perceived as an attempt to drive a wedge between them.
So Trump is trying to alienate independents and Republicans with a sense of decency from the protesters in Minneapolis through the same technique. However, Walz describing the GOP as weird is not nearly the same as Trump casting aspersions on protesters defending their collective homes and persons from ICE agents who are tangibly abusing their positions and killing, and doing it on video. The latter will be far more effective in binding independents and some Republicans to the anti-Trump cause.
And now new Epstein Files are out. What will the right-wing pundits and influencers find? Clear evidence of Trump’s innocence or guilt? Or just lots of redactions? And, just for grins, will the redactions be competent this time, or easily removed once again?
News outlets are reporting the nomination of Kevin Warsh to replace current Fed Chair chair Jerome Powell, whose second term expires in May. President Trump had nominated him in 2018, but has come to hate him as he’s an independent force in monetary policy. There was some concern that Trump would nominate a complete loon, and the CNN headline mentions Trump saying Warsh is … right out of Central Casting … Warsh actually had a term as a Fed Governor, 2006 – 2011, and while he may have more confidence in forecasting the future than I’m comfortable with, as CBS Newsreports…
In recent years, Warsh has grown increasingly critical of the Fed, arguing that the institution has become excessively focused on backward-looking economic data rather than anticipating changes, Deutsche Bank analysts said in a December 15 report.
… at least he doesn’t seem to be an out and out loon, as so many of Trump’s associates and nominees tend to be.
Why not? I’m guessing Trump, or whoever is manipulating him, looked at the Senate, which is showing signs of breaking free from Trump’s grip, and realized nominating a loon would run the risk of rejection, a political loss adding to the weight of the view that Trump is not invincible, not dominant. The background of the tragic debacle in Minneapolis, the nomination of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize, a string of failures in various courts, the probability of even more failures in the courts, including SCOTUS, if observers read the tea leaves rightly, the mass exodus of competent lawyers from the DoJ, the evident insufficiency of his approach of hiring folks out of central casting, rather than on competency and merit, the economy stumbling as tariffs fail, an Administration very poorly stewarded, and there’s so much more and so I’ll spare the reader.
Selecting a palatable candidate should avoid a politically damaging failure at a critical moment.
Just as importantly, it’ll serve to hold the attention of a less politically savvy audience as more of the Epstein Files are being released today. As to the efficacy of distraction using this technique, in the day of the Web I have to wonder if it’s not effective at all; but old political hacks will cling to their ways.
So this appears, on first glance, to be safe for the nation.
Continuing news about Minneapolis, according to family and nominator The Nation, Minneapolis has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Congratulations!
And I do admire all these people coming together to defend the community, from front lines to supporting logistics. While there are plenty of nits to pick, there’s also plenty of good being done here.
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This is predictable:
Commonly used AI models fail to accurately diagnose or offer advice for many queries relating to women’s health that require urgent attention.
A group of 17 women’s health researchers, pharmacists and clinicians from the US and Europe drew up an initial list of 345 medical queries across five areas, including emergency medicine, gynaecology and neurology. These experts then reviewed the answers provided by a randomly chosen AI model for each question. Those that led to inaccurate responses were collated into a benchmarking test of AI models’ medical expertise that included 96 queries.
This test was then used to assess 13 large language models, produced by the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral AI and xAI. Across all the models, some 60 per cent of questions were answered in a way the human experts had previously said wasn’t sufficient for medical advice. GPT-5 performed best, failing on 47 per cent of queries, while Ministral 8B had the highest failure rate of 73 per cent. [“AI chatbots miss urgent issues in queries about women’s health,” Chris Stokel-Walker, NewScientist (17 January 2026, paywall).]
Just as if we were training our doctors using grifters touting silver-nitrate we would expect the doctors to be ineffective, even deadly, the same goes for AI (or, more accurately, machine-learning programs) trained on data from the Web, notorious for harboring those whose lust for wealth erases any inclination towards honesty or effective product development. This is just an expensive lesson in Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO).
It’s something to keep in mind if you’re doing your own research – it’s a lot harder than regurgitating the first item popping up on a search string. It can kill you.
From “Families in Trinidad sue U.S. over boat strike: ‘They were simply murders’,” Julia Jester and David Rohde, MS NOW:
The Trump administration insists its actions have been illegal.
“The October 14th strike was conducted against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Tuesday in a statement to MS NOW. “President Trump used his lawful authority to take decisive action against the scourge of illicit narcotics that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans.”
I have to wonder if this grim, even macabre inadvertent jest was actually advertent on the part of Jester and Rohde. And, yes, now that I’ve written it out, I do wonder if Julia Jester is actually a pseudonym.
A little clash of President Trump with one of his targets may be more revealing than he intended:
President Donald Trump on Monday said the Justice Department is investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
Trump made the announcement on Truth Social, writing: “the DOJ and Congress are looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars. Time will tell all.” …
A spokesperson for Omar’s office said she has not received anything from DOJ about an investigation. [Politico]
An oversight?
Or is this an example of what happens when your President is intent on weaponizing the DoJ and competent lawyers refuse to work for such a corrupt place?
But after the latest shooting death of an American civilian at the hands of federal agents and the subsequent fusillade of absurd lies from administrations officials, the number of Republicans expressing varying degrees of discomfort with the official party line has reached unusually high levels.
The Federal Government is plunging rapidly through the various circles of Hell now. In case you’re familiar with Dante’s Inferno, I think they’re about to plunge into the field of ice, right at the bottom.
Enjoin [is] a verb related to the term injunction. To enjoin means to prohibit a person from doing something through a court order. A court enjoins conduct when it issues an injunction against it. [Legal Information Institute]
Noted in “CASE 0:26-cv-00628-ECT-DTS,” or “Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Hennepin County Attorney’s Office v. Kristi Noem, in her official capacity as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; [balance omitted],” U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud presiding:
Plaintiffs Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Hennepin County Attorney’s Office have filed a Complaint, ECF No. 1, and a Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order, ECF No. 2, seeking to enjoin Defendants, their employees, agents, and anyone acting in concert with them from destroying or altering evidence related to the fatal shooting involving federal officers that took place in or around 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026.
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I’m gobsmacked at the failure to think on the part of the Administration and their allies, helpfully summarized by Steve Benen:
It’s true that Pretti had a holstered gun, though, as Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara explained, he had a legal right to have the firearm and a permit to carry it.
Donald Trump, for example, told The Wall Street Journal, “I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets.” Similarly, FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”
Around the same time, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on ABC News and condemned Pretti for carrying a gun, which came a day after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a press conference, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons.”
And you folks have protested and worked against gun control laws for how many decades? And then you couldn’t predict that someone might show up with a gun? Epistemological bubble time: Liberals would never purchase and use guns!
No, Pretti didn’t draw it, brandish it, fire it, threaten ICE agents with it, even when pushed. The epitome of an honorable man. Benen even says
At this point, we could talk at length about the simple fact that Pretti wasn’t at a protest.
So ICE achieved the additional level of randomly attacking folks on the street.
But back to Trump, Noem, et al, and their ideological allies, this level of stupid is rarely achieved, and to use the special word gobsmacked is really inadequate. How are they getting through life without drowning in vats of ivermectin?
Being a working dude, I don’t have the time or the inclination for minute-by-minute coverage, even for something as relevant to me as the ICE incursion of Minneapolis. So I’ll make do with a summary and the usual speculation of an unlikely nature.
CBS Newsreports Governor Walz (D-MN) and President Trump spoke on the phone this morning:
Walz’s office also said that Mr. Trump agreed to speak with Department of Homeland Security officials “about ensuring the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is able to conduct an independent investigation, as would ordinarily be the case.”
Mr. Trump, on his Truth Social network, posted that Walz “(requested) to work together with respect to Minnesota.” He went on to say that he and Walz “seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” and added “I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that.”
Walz’s office says the governor also took time to remind Mr. Trump that “the Minnesota Department of Corrections already honors federal detainers by notifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a person committed to its custody isn’t a U.S. citizen. There is not a single documented case of the department’s releasing someone from state prison without offering to ensure a smooth transfer of custody.”
The two seem to share a mutual disdain, so the change in tone on Trump’s part suggests he’s encountered backlash that has him worried. It might be this:
Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, saying that she believes Noem is attempting to “mislead the American public” about the fatal shooting of a 37 year-old protester in Minneapolis.
The call from Rosen, a moderate from Nevada who was part of the group that helped Republicans end the 43-day government shutdown last year, comes amid a growing fury from congressional Democrats who have also vowed to block funding for the Homeland Security Department. A House resolution to launch impeachment proceedings against Noem has the support of more than 100 Democrats, but few Senate Democrats have so far weighed in. [AP]
Or maybe the beginnings of a scolding from State Governors may be of concern:
Gov. Phil Scott [(R-VT)] on Sunday urged a pause and “reset” of federal immigration operations following the latest killing of a protester in Minneapolis. In the absence of presidential action, Scott said Congress and the courts may need to step up to rein in the executive branch and “restore constitutionality.”
“It’s not acceptable for American citizens to be killed by federal agents for exercising their God-given and constitutional rights to protest their government,” Scott wrote in a public statement. While the governor has never been a supporter of President Donald Trump, he has been reluctant to speak out against the president’s administration. [Seven Days]
And
[Oklahoma Governor] STITT [(R)]: Well, first off, this is a real tragedy. And I think the death of Americans, what we’re seeing on TV, it’s causing deep concerns over federal tactics and accountability. Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now.
But I want to step back for just a second, because President Trump was elected to fix immigration issues. And there was broad agreement that we had to close the border. So the Biden era of four years of open border policies was disastrous. So, broad agreement, President Trump closed the border, promised to get violent criminals out of our country. And I think everybody agrees with that. But now Americans are asking
themselves, what is the endgame? What is the solution? And we believe in federalism and state rights. And nobody likes feds coming into their state.
And so what’s the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non- U.S. citizen? I don’t think that’s what Americans want. We have to stop politicizing this. We need real solutions on immigration reform. And I believe that I have got a great solution, that we should give the states the authority to do work force permits, right? So…
[CNN HOST DANA] BASH: So are you saying that they should pull out of Minnesota?
STITT: Well, I think that the president has to answer that question. He is a dealmaker.
And he’s getting bad advice right now. The president needs to let the American people — what is the solution? How do we bring this to conclusion? And I think only the president can answer that question, because it’s complicated. We have to enforce federal laws, but we need to know, what is the endgame?
And I don’t think it’s to deport every single non-U.S. citizen. I think we need employers and employees — if you’re not on welfare or government assistance or Medicaid, we need to allow an employer to match up with that work force. Maybe charge that employer $5,000 that can pay down the national debt and to incentivize them to hire Americans.
But if they need that labor, we’re overcomplicating this. Other countries have figured this out. Don’t give them U.S. citizenship. But if you’re going to have an employer-employee relationship, we should be fixing that, instead of politicizing this.
And, right now, just there’s — tempers are just going crazy, and we need to calm this down. [CNN/Transcripts]
Stephen Miller drives the immigration policy and is reported to be fixated on specific daily arrest counts. I wonder if the appointment of Homan to lead ICE in Minnesota signals a diminishment of Miller’s influence.
CNNreports (subscriber-only, but gives you a bit of access) Greg Bovino is definitely replaced by Tom Homan:
I’m struck by suspension of access to social media for Bovino. He seems to be an attack dog that’s a little out of control, and I think Trump has decided he’s a liability, not an asset. The quiet message here is that Trump’s been forced to change, reacting to the situation, rather than dictating it.
Finally, CNN has a subscriber article entitled “Fox News said Tom Homan should be sent to Minnesota — 20 minutes later, Trump did exactly that.” That’s fairly self-explanatory, and continues the narrative that President Trump is not a deep thinker. Although hardly dispositive to the hypothesis that television news such as Fox, One America News, and NewsMax has undue influence, it’s suggestive.
When will Vice President Vance get the memo and sideline Trump? Or is that out of his reach?
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This has been bugging me since June of last year, and as much as I’ve been trying to ignore it, it keeps clawing it’s way back…
“A woman’s body is a man’s world. Just ask an anatomist…”
As I read this opinion piece red flags began waving all over the place.
From Fallopian tubes to the G-spot, long-dead men have left their mark on women’s anatomy. It’s time to turf them out, says Adam Taor
Yep, it doesn’t read like some important insight into science. Oooops,
NewScientist (14 June 2025; paywall)
It reads as a tired paean to the latest ideology on the street.
Inside a woman, there is a veritable frat club of distinguished gentlemen, in the form of anatomical eponyms: body parts named after people, almost exclusively long-dead men.
A review of 700 body parts named after 432 people found 424 were male physicians. The eight eponyms that weren’t male physicians comprised five gods, a king, a hero and just one woman: Raissa Nitabuch, a 19th-century Russian pathologist whose name is attached to a layer where the placenta separates from the uterus wall after delivery of a baby.
This bodily patriarchy isn’t surprising, given the average date the parts were named was 1847, when women didn’t get much of a look-in on our innards. Including women’s reproductive real estate, where men particularly hold sway.
And everyone involved, women, surgeons, gynecologists, any other relevant specialists, were acutely aware of these facts.
Yes?
To tell the truth, I wasn’t, but I’m an obsolete software engineer who happens to read too much. How about the rest? History buffs, the lot of them?
I’m doubting it.
OK, so how is this going to benefit anyone in these groups, even including those who know the dreadful truth and are emotionally devastated at the lack of female eponyms associated with female genitals?
In other words, is there a connection between truly arbitrary labels we attach to body parts and our facility in using and repairing them? I phrase it this way as Taor has a bit on pudendum, a Latin word meaning to be ashamed and applied to genitalia:
For hundreds of years, pudendum applied equally to women’s and men’s external genitalia. With time, men unburdened themselves of the label, leaving the naming and shaming especially for women.
However, that doesn’t apply to most other parts. Hell, unsurprisingly I didn’t know fallopian tubes are named after Gabriele Falloppio, and if I had, I’d have taken Gabriele to be female associated. Darn Catholic priests.
Back to the point, does this existence, knowledge, or lack thereof, affect the performance of the physicians delivering the needed care? Will changing the names help improve the care delivered to minorities?
Where’s the study proving it?
There’s no such citation. It’s all soft handwaving that strikes me as something written to please an outraged minority. And if we did change the names?
We’d deliver inferior care simply because these names are long-established, and medical professionals have limited time to be re-educated in the latest intellectual trend.
News has just come across the wire Web (later: or maybe late last night) that Tom Homan, a senior aide who is currently Trump’s border czar, is being sent to Minneapolis. My assumption is that he’ll replace Greg Bovino, mentioned earlier in this thread, as the lead for the ICE agents, but so far the news just says he’s coming to Minneapolis. Ah, CNBCreports he’ll manage the operation.
This is an interesting action.
Homan has worked for both the Obama (Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations) and Trump (“border czar”) administrations.
He proposed and developed the policy of separating parents from their children during his Obama Administration employment.
He won an award from the Obama Administration.
In 2024 he was investigated by the FBI for allegedly accepting a $50,000 bribe for influencing the incoming Trump Administration. The investigation was prematurely folded and sealed after Inauguration Day, and he has denied everything.
He’s got a big mouth.
But, and I regret I don’t remember where I read this, he’s supposedly on the side of the debate concerning management of Minneapolis (and, presumably, Maine) of doing the job efficiently, quietly, and without, shall we say, drama. On the other side of the debate, Newsweekreports, is Secretary Kristi Noem, so this is certainly a repudiation of that drama queen. I know I also read, somewhere darn it, that Trump was frustrated with the results of the ICE invasion; this may be his response.
But can Homan lead a more humane operation? We’ll see.
Last night Secretary Noem issued a list of demands to Minnesota, including transmission of voter list data. This was immediately rejected by Secretary of State Steve Simon as against the law. Demands such as these have been issued in the past, and rejected by the States, regardless of party affiliation of the responsible official, as being illegal. Will this be dropped?
Finally, this can be viewed as another crack in the Trump Administration. It’s clear they do not understand the American populace, and killing a mother, first, and then a Veterans Admin ICU nurse, does not intimidate, but instead infuriated Twin Cities residents, as well as repelling just about all the critical independent voters nation-wide. While Andrew Sullivan seems disconsolate over Trump’s polling (see here, but paywall), it’s still true Trump seems infuriated over his poll results (see here), which continue to drop – including among Republicans (see here).
What does it all mean? Hard to say. I’m hoping, but not betting on, a withdrawal of some of the ICE agents, and a quieter approach to the entire matter of their putative goal of finding and deporting violent criminals who are illegal immigrants, rather than the “open wide and suck everything in” approach taken until now.
Now, if you think it's bad that one party can't say that women are women and men are men, I completely understand. But consider that the other party is led by a man whose behavior is so insane that it's hard to distinguish from Kubrickian satire.
Now, if you think it’s bad that one party can’t say that women are women and men are men, I completely understand. But consider that the other party is led by a man whose behavior is so insane that it’s hard to distinguish from Kubrickian satire.
I hope there are independents on both side of center trying to construct replacement parties for the two broken parties we currently use.
I’m neither a historian nor particularly interested in Roman history, but the stories of Roman corruption, while usually centered on Roman emperors, I’m sure also came from the Roman Senate – and might have resembled this one from Steve Benen:
After Congress ended last fall’s government shutdown, the public learned of a provocative provision that Senate Republicans had slipped into the package. Under the language in the bill, GOP senators whose phone records were searched as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, would have the ability to file lucrative lawsuits. (Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Politico that it was Senate Majority Leader John Thune himself who made sure this provision was included in the final bill.)
Even by contemporary congressional standards, it was a brazen move — in part because the GOP’s “Arctic Frost” claims appear baseless, in part because the provision was added to the legislation in secret, and in part because it’s rare to see senators empower themselves to file dubious lawsuits in which they would personally be rewarded with taxpayer money.
The supposed damages refer to the subpoena of toll records during investigation of the January 6th Insurrection, not conversations:
Each carrier that offers or bills toll telephone service shall retain for a period of 18 months such records as are necessary to provide the following billing information about telephone toll calls: the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call. Each carrier shall retain this information for toll calls that it bills whether it is billing its own toll service customers for toll calls or billing customers for another carrier. [Legal Information Institute]
The House, unanimously, passed legislation to repeal this ridiculous proviso on Thursday. Good for them. Right now, those GOP Senators standing to benefit from that law look like Figures of Corruption. My understanding is this legislation won’t even receive a hearing in the Senate; the House has now added the proviso to a spending bill that must pass; will the Parliamentarian permit this, or rule it out of order?
If they do, then hopefully judges will rule no harm, no foul, no standing to sue. And for those Senators who still have a fading hope of a legacy and still think they can use this corrupt law, they’d best hope the judge rules against them.
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith gave testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday, where this exchange occurred:
… Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., asked Smith if he believes Trump’s Justice Department “will find some way to indict you?”
“I believe they will do everything in their power to do that because they’ve been ordered to by the President,” Smith answered. Trump has previously called on the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents, which has obliged, bringing indictments against several of them.
“I will not be intimidated,” Smith said. “I think these statements are also made as a warning to others, what will happen if they stand up.” [MS NOW]
Driving the point home is the article’s secondary:
During Smith’s testimony, President Donald Trump used his social media platform to call on Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the former special prosecutor.
And Smith, a very experienced prosecutor, was hoping for precisely that.
I, and I suspect a lot of other folk with qualifications far beyond mine[1], consider AG Bondi corrupt for using the DoJ to investigate and prosecute the President’s political enemies, those who the man-child in the Oval Office thinks are persecuting him – keeping in mind he’s a pathological narcissist who believes the world revolves around him.
There have been three results of prime importance to those of us who read the tea leaves.
First, those US Attorneys assigned these cases have resigned in droves – from the top guy on down for each office given these tasks. There is one exception, the US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro, late of Fox News and notorious Trump supporter.
Getting these felony cases through grand juries has suddenly proven a challenge, an unexpected challenge because it’s not generally difficult to persuade a grand jury, who does not necessarily hear from the defense, that there’s a case to be had.
But when a fourth-rate prosecutor, such as Lindsay Halligan, does get a case to a judge, the judge dismisses it, usually with a reprimand. In the Comey case, for example, the reprimand seems to have a final result of Halligan being declared ineligible for the position; Halligan left the position after more judges reprimanded her for claiming to be a US Attorney. The humiliation was tangible.
Now Smith has direct evidence that the President has weaponized the DoJ, aka corruption, another crime for which he can be tried as he tries to take revenge. It won’t matter how many attorneys Trump employs in his defense, because he employs 4th-raters; all better defense attorneys know of his habit not to pay for services and micromanage the cases, usually to his detriment.
Smith may be licking his lips in happy anticipation.
An estimate of those future quantum computers’ power consumption:
Olivier Ezratty at the Quantum Energy Initiative (QEI), an international organisation, says that one overlooked concern of building utility-scale [fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQC)] is their potential energy consumption. At the Q2B Silicon Valley conference in Santa Clara, California, on 9 December, he presented preliminary estimates of it. Strikingly, several FTQC designs surpassed the energy footprint of the world’s largest supercomputers. [“Some quantum computers might need more power than supercomputers,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, NewScientist (17 January 2026; paywall)]
The people trying to break your password and other security features may be paying through the nose for the privilege. So how much energy do supercomputers consume?
The world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, needs about 20 megawatts of electrical power, which is approximately triple the energy consumption of the nearby 88,000-resident city of Livermore. In Ezratty’s estimate, two designs for FTQCs, scaled up to 4000 logical, or error-corrected, qubits, would require even more. The most power-hungry among them might need as much as 200 megawatts of power.
20 MW for a single supercomputer? My goodness. 200 MW for a FTQC?
With great ability comes big power bills.
I worked for a couple of years at a firm supporting supercomputers. The subject? I created relatively trivial software for tracking and reporting computer use so that the clients of supercomputing centers could be assured they were getting their money’s worth. From that came the observation that supercomputers were heavily scheduled and didn’t just sit around consuming power.
I doubt they’ll be turning FTQCs between runs, somehow.
I’m going to risk losing readers via a Hitler comparison.
All fascist leaders – if you can call them leaders – are amateurs when it comes to government, attaining some limited success because they stepped into a power vacuum caused by a period of historical transition. Hitler stepped into a Wiemar Republic that was the first attempted government following the fleeing of the last Kaiser (King), doomed to inevitable failure due to the Treaty of Versailles. Italy’s Mussolini stepped into power as the rival Habsburg Empire collapsed and disappeared. Spain’s Franco emerged in a Spain ravaged by Revolution by the ambitious communists, and was successful. South America has been ravaged by fascist forces of various sorts.
For the unsuccessful, they have some initial successes and then, overconfident from early successes, try for a big prize and end up failing, often fatally. For Adolf Hitler, that failed bid was the invasion of Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa. Attempting to secure critical fuel supplies in the Soviet Union, the weather turned against invading German forces and the Soviets used scorched earth tactics to slow the invaders, dependent on speed for success, to a crawl. Hitler refused to admit failure, because dictators don’t do that, and consequently lost huge amounts of war materiel of all sorts, including the entire 4th Panzer Army and 6th Armies. This lead to Nazi Germany failing and the death of Hitler.
When the Russians and Soviets claim to have won World War II, it’s a difficult claim to refute.
Mussolini had similar problems, and other fascists often did, although I am not so familiar with them. Those who confined themselves to domestic aggression did better than those who embarked on foreign adventures.
Trump seems to try to split the difference, but the speed and reach of technology, added to the determination of a free people, may have caused a miscalculation. I mentioned, with great sadness, that ICE had shot another Minnesota citizen this morning, June 24th, killing him. I knew no more than that this morning.
I still really don’t this evening. There are stories out there, but I do not know to believe them. Here’s one:
A CNN analysis of video appears to show a federal immigration officer removing a gun from Alex Pretti just prior to officers fatally shooting him.
Video shows one officer reaching into the scrum of other officers seeking to restrain Pretti and retrieving a weapon that appears to match the firearm the Department of Homeland Security says Pretti possessed.
Officers can be heard shouting “he’s got a gun” when the unidentified officer reaches into Pretti’s waistband as the pile of officers try to subdue him. Just over one second after the officer emerges holding the weapon, a shot rings out, followed by at least 9 more, according to videos. [CNN]
ICE killing an unarmed man, if it’s an honest evaluation. And the victim worked at a hospital:
Julia Grigoriev, a hospitalist at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center who worked alongside Alex Pretti on a regular basis, described him as “class clown” who lightened the mood in every room he entered.
“Everybody loved him,” she said. “He’d be the first one to jump in to help.”
Working in an ICU takes a unique skillset, she added: “You have to have guts. You have to have balls. You have to be very stoic but also have humor, else it’s hard to survive. He was all of the above.” [Minnesota Star Tribune]
If true, President Trump may find himself facing a tidal wave of bad opinion, and if my reader just shrugs, please note that mobs start with a bad opinion. He has an absolute hoard of scandal in recent history, led by the Epstein Files that his minions have worked so hard to stop, and then slow, and then render useless, but followed by many others: disastrous tariffs, embarrassing Gulf of America, 51st State of Canada, Greenland, FEMA, CBP, this is a list that can go on and on.
But now his minions have shot to death an unarmed man.
And now Trump has a real dilemma. He has a habit of taking care of his own, but if he takes care of the shooter in this incident, even the hard-line extreme right wingers could turn on him. Shooting an unarmed man to death, and then being saved by Trump. That has implications terrifying to everyone.
And if the shooter isn’t saved, then current minions might start peeling off and talking.
COULD THIS BE TRUMP’S OPERATION BARBAROSSA?
I think it could be. It requires a large number of Americans to be outraged, but, in today’s environment of technology, that can happen. Videos travel, podcast hosts talk about how they and their audiences might be the next victims, audiences listen, Trump voters regret their votes and look for ways to avenge Trump’s mendacity.
We’ll have to see if crowds begin to gather in front of the Oval Office. It’s unfortunate that the weather will be miserable in DC for the next few days.
Right now I’d say continue the peaceful protests, accent on the sad and unnecessary death of Mr. Pretti. Reiterate the brutal manner of his death. If interviewed, as viewers to consider how they’d feel being a victim.
Because fascists think they can kill anyone they dislike, who has something they want. The Rule of Law does not exist in a dictatorship.
During our tense national crisis it’s easy to become insensible to events overseas, even those as important as this:
Gen. Zhang Youxia no longer is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top military general after being ousted, along with another high-ranking general, amid an investigation into alleged legal and disciplinary violations.
Youxia is the vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, a member of the Politburo and second only to Xi as the leader of China’s military, The New York Times reported.
Also facing an ouster is Gen. Liu Zhenli, who is the chief of staff of the Joint Staff of the Central Military Commission and a member of the Central Military Commission.
“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents a total annihilation of the high command,” former CIA analyst Christopher Johnson told The New York Times. [UPI via MSN]
I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), although I do tend to agree with the opinion that it’ll be an important mover in the future. However, I think sometimes that pundits assign too much potential to a society built to step on the highly talented, or at least highly ambitious, and not by accident, but by design. It blunts the impact of Chinese society, and unhappy students are not productive students, by and large.
In the last few years they experienced a real-estate economic bubble, both inflation and deflation. I can sort of visualize these senior Chinese generals blaming Xi Jinping for this and other missteps, and considering forcefully removing him; perhaps Jinping beat them to the punch.
If we were to apply the precepts of structural demographic theory (SDT)[1], developed from observations of various agrarian societies, to the current American situation, we’d be looking at 50 to 100 years of warfare, both overt and covert, as the various groups desperately battle to impose their iron vision of government[2] on Americans, as well as climb, or retain their position in, the social order.
Termination would occur if one side was victorious, such as 1979 Iran’s Islamic Revolution, leading to a theocracy in that case; or enough of the leaders either die, naturally or violently, or renounce their common position that compromise is evil. In the former case, the victory could come almost immediately; the latter case is usually many years.
Will Americans take fifty years to be rid of the various leaders, overt and covert, who battle for supremacy? America is no longer the agrarian society which existed until World War I[3]; the technologies we’ve developed since World War I may serve to accelerate our passage through the disintegrative phase and return to the integrative phase of SDT. But these technologies are highly dangerous, as anyone comparing modern personal weaponry to a cavalry saber will understand.
Spectacular violence engendered by the arrogant may be the result.
But compromise is the real goal, no matter how purple the various leaders turn at such a blasphemy, and while we’re not there yet, it may be time to start composing plans for compromise. I propose a plan, a first draft, for the Minneapolis situation.
My first observation, and most important, guiding my thoughts on this, is that disinformation is rife. I’m at the point that I feel anything I hear must be double-checked. Even pictures and videos are suspect; even worse, eyewitness accounts are suspect for reasons fair and foul. Perception is a much more fraught business than most might think.
With that in mind, the first principle is to exclude all known sources of disinformation, including, and most strenuously, President Trump. As just one example, he justified the dispatch of ICE agents en masse to Minneapolis on fallacious claims that Minnesota state government was guilty of permitting massive fraud to occur, that the great majority of Somali immigrants were responsible, and that the streets of Minneapolis were in chaos and ruins.
I live in a first ring suburb of St. Paul, across the Mississippi Rover from Minneapolis; family lives right in Minneapolis. I can say that, prior to the arrival of ICE, there was no ruin, no chaos on the streets of Minneapolis. Our worst problem, which occurred during the summer, has been a rash of ten year old children stealing cars and taking them for joyrides. Not ten year old Somalians, just ten year olds. That’s worth a question or two. Otherwise, street crime was dropping, or so it seemed from the TV news.
Fraud? Yes, there’s been fraud. The ringleaders and many henchmen have been arrested, put on trial, and mostly convicted. The leader, Aimee Bock, is in jail, tearful in that way grifters are tearful; it’s noteworthy that she’s not Somalian. And some of the numbers thrown around by the President struck me as quite silly, such as more than $10 billion in losses, although I have to remember this age has $trillion market caps defining large companies. Insofar as the Somali community goes, they have the usual problems inherent in such communities, but at 80,000 living in Minnesota, it’s absurd to lump them all together as fraudsters. It may be as many as a thousand of them, though I’m thinking that’s grossly over-estimating. Ask Aimee Bock, eh?
In what history may later consider to be the first step of a compromise, Governor Walz (D-MN) has appointed a special investigator for fraud in these programs, although darned if I can find his name[4], and Walz has also dropped his reelection campaign, probably ending his elective political career.
In compromise, each side accepts remission of certain positions, trading off until an acceptable aggregate position is constructed. Acceptable is an interesting word; sometimes it applies to the primary participants, sometimes to other parties, such as, in this case, political independents who are outraged, justifiably or not, by the chaos. Compromise is an art form, in my view.
I was disgusted by Vice President Vance’s patronizing speech he gave while visiting Minnesota earlier this week, as seen below.
I’m thinking of a more egregious speech, which I couldn’t find, but this will do.
He tried for the disappointed parent effect, but, for those who’ve been watching and thinking, he came off as the ignorant and, yes, arrogant asshole who really needs to sit down, shut up, and listen if he’s in earnest about settling national tensions. National tensions which I suspect are going to drown Republican candidates running in States that are not solidly Republican in November.
That said, with the President disqualified from a meaningful role in the construction of a compromise, the VP might be representative of, uh, his side of things. Here’s some proposals:
Remove all ICE agents from Minnesota, with exceptions below. Chaos erupted when ICE arrived and began unacceptably sloppy, brutal operations. An occasional mistake involving an immigrant or refugee due to administrative errors is understandable; abducting naturalized US citizens based on racial profiles is absolutely unacceptable; abusing children, as reported yesterday, is simply beyond the pale.
If Minnesota law enforcement requests it, a number, set by Minnesota law enforcement, of ICE agents will be present and available for use. It is undeniable that a number, probably small, of immigrants, legal or otherwise, and aliens are violent and/or involved in the drug trade, and ICE can be helpful in that respect, especially given the current understaffing of Minnesota law enforcement.
ICE will act only in concert with Minnesota law enforcement. Attempted imposition of Federal control, implied by abrogation of this clause, is illegal, unconstitutional, and certain to cause more chaos.
Acknowledgement that the protest in Cities Church was wrong, and an apology from those arrested (see link). Sure, pastor David Easterwood may work for ICE as well, and maybe Cities Church doesn’t seem the most Christian of churches, but that doesn’t pardon the intrusion. It used to be that homes and employers were sacrosanct, but now we get doxxing and swatting and protests at the homes of officials we don’t like. Should we smile at a neo-Nazi protest at Temple Israel next? At Catholic protests in a local Baptist church? Down this path lies violence, with bitter death at the end. Stop it with the endless harassment.
An examination of the fraud in Minnesota government programs. Already underway.
Remove ICE agent Greg Bovino. He doesn’t seem to have an official rank. He’s already been caught lying about an alleged lack of cooperation by Minnesota law enforcement, allegations thoroughly and effectively refuted by Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell, as acknowledged by VP Vance. Further, he made a ridiculous comment, in response to accusations concerning the young boy, that ICE was very qualified to take care of the boy. It reminds me of the school teacher who claimed he knew more about parenting, despite not having children of his own, than the parents of the kids he was teaching. He was hooted down. Does Bovino make a habit of kidnapping children? Finally, he seems to have a history of lying, if we’re to believe this Federal judge.
A re-examination of “sanctuary cities.” We are a nation of Law, not of Man, and certainly not of Feelings. Are sanctuary cities legal, illegal, or just marketing? If they are illegal, then why shouldn’t we repeal such, ah, declarations, and if that leaves citizens unhappy then they should work through their representatives to … have debates. Maybe unhappy citizens need more information, more meditation on the matter, more debate. And, if at the end of all that, they still think the nation would benefit from better laws, then pursue those changes through the usual routes. And be ready to accept that your fellow citizens may disagree and outvote you. Such is democracy. Yes, I know the Left may be outraged at me spitting in their holy water. I’m an independent, and I don’t care. I think a lot of conservatives are outraged at sanctuary cities, and if that’s a violation of the Law, then we need to talk about it and do something.
OK, I’m going to wrap this up here, not because the list is complete, but because I’m tired of typing. I’ve now read someone else is dead in Minneapolis due to ICE gunfire. Early reports are that he was armed, so I’m inclined to think ICE may have been justified, at least partially. Still, this wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been maliciously dispatched by President Trump.
Stay warm and stay safe, folks.
1 My understanding is, at best, fragmentary, derived from the books for the lay reader Secular Cycles and War and Peace and War, as well as the first chapter of the more technical Ages of Discord; I have not read the balance of that last, despite the fascinating content, due to a lack of time and hand surgery. Professor Turchin is listed as the author of all three, with co-author Sergey A. Nefedov for Secular Cycles.
2 And reap the rewards, in some cases. Or perhaps all cases; some, such as the medical grifters of the right, are fairly explicit in their expectations of material and social advancement, while others may be more covert.
3 A very short history may serve to contextualize the situation, which I engage in more for my own benefit than my reader’s:
Following the collapse of existential enemy Soviet Union, America entered a short phase of bubbly euphoria as it appeared capitalism reigned supreme; the cherry on top was the development of the Web. This concealed the rents in the fabric of American society, but wouldn’t have been a problem absent the ambitions of both right and left.
But they weren’t absent. As long ago as the 1960s, Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) observed the obdurate ambitious pastors who were invading the Republican Party, and he forecast some rough weather ahead based on the implicit arrogance of thinking the Divine was backing them. As an old agnostic myself, I think there’s arrogance in even believing there IS a divine, given the absence of evidence. And that arrogance is a real problem.
But the left has an intellectual arrogance of its own. Steadfastly ignoring or minimizing the burden of the savagery and failure of the Soviet Union, embracing the softer socialism of Scandinavia, from the early days they purveyed environmentalism, socialized medicine, to modern day theories of gender and sex. Each subject alienates or attracts the middle; but, as I’ve noted many times before, the style of arrogant imposition, lacking respect for liberal democracy and missed by many pundits, makes American independents deeply uneasy, even if they can’t connect that to formal American political theory.
The sad part is that the failure to advance certain issues, such as climate change, due to the arrogance of either side, may destroy civilization. But that’s a topic for another day.
4 And, no, I’m not thinking of First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson, credited with uncovering much of the fraud. He worked for the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, and abruptly resigned something like two weeks ago, in the same manner as a lot of senior members of US Attorneys office. Perhaps he was asked to be dishonest or abuse his powers. Maybe Walz could hire him.
The effect is shattered. Lyons should not have signed that memo, and, knowing it was both illegal and shameful, arranged to conceal it by failing to leave a normal paper trail.
