Category Archives: Uncategorized

New parties? This guy doesn’t quite say it:

In case it disappears…

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

¹ Which are zero, none.

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.

Stay safe and stay warm.

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.

It’ll be worth keeping half an eye on China, now.

[h/t Irontortoise@Daily Kos]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. An examination of the fraud in Minnesota government programs. Already underway.
6. 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.
7. 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.

Regarding that all-powerful ICE memo, Andrew Napolitano clarifies its, aaaaaah, evil nature:

This is a direct and profound violation of the Fourth Amendment, which expressly says people are entitled to be secure in their homes and that security can only be invaded by a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause of crime. [NewsMax via MediaMatters For America]

Napolitano might be described as a right-winger, but he seems to be able to think ahead:

But the thought that ICE wants to break down doors without a search warrant is profoundly un-American, and has been un-American since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.

There we go, much better than I.

The left is feeling a bit antsy because President Trump, the Mendacity Machine, is making threatening noises.

Trump: "It was a rigged election. Everyone knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-01-21T15:18:23.612Z

In case the above disappears:

Trump: “It was a rigged election. Everyone knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election.”

Here’s the thing about prosecutors: if they are caught abusing their office, they are well-aware that they could do a stretch in prison and maybe even lose their law license. Hence the reference to self-preservation, above.

So if & when President Trump tries to pressure Federal prosecutors to go after those he considers his enemies, he may run into difficulties because the prosecutors, along with often having a sense of honor, or at least discretion for future business, also don’t want to risk going to prison just to bring false charges against the President’s enemies.

Keep in mind how Trump has already seen a veritable flood of quality prosecutors abruptly resign rather than take that risk, along with the more honorable reasons as well – I actually suspect most or all have reasons in the honorable category, rather than the risk category. Trump was reduced to nominating Lindsey Halligan, whose previous experience was in insurance, was rejected by a collection of judges as U.S. Attorney and, on January 20th, left her untenable position. If he orders more abuses by prosecutors he may see Bondi’s DoJ empty into a shell. It’ll be Bondi and Washington, DC U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and a lot of empty desks. Would Pirro do Trump’s bidding? Hard to say, she’s had many failures atypical for her office since she began her service, and she may decide No more!

I suspect the threats, above, are another smoke screen to conceal the President’s consistent and long string of failures, this time in Davos, Switzerland, concerning Greenland and NATO, as I mentioned here. He’s trying to put critics on their back foot with all the smoke, but continuing to expose his duplicity is the way forward.

The smoke is getting thick, let’s try not to stumble off a cliff.

This is a follow-up to my derisive post concerning abortion and gun control legislation concerning a decision in which SCOTUS attempted to invent and hide behind a test called History and Tradition, as advanced by Erick Erickson, and I shot it down.

The followup is that Associate Justice Brown has advanced an analysis, as part of her questioning of attorneys in Wolford v. Lopez, that exposes History and Tradition’s weaknesses, as discussed by Madiba Dennie at Balls and Strikes:

Wolford v. Lopez is the Court’s second confrontation with the absurdities produced by Bruen’s embrace of originalism, the idea that the Constitution has one true, historically discoverable meaning. At oral argument on Tuesday, the Republican justices were deeply disturbed that Hawaii defended its statute in part by pointing to an 1865 Louisiana law that prohibited people from entering private property with guns “without the consent of the owner or proprietor”—a statute that lawmakers originally adopted in order to disarm Black people. Nodding to the genesis of the “vampire rule” nickname, Justice Neil Gorsuch marveled at the fact that “a lot of people” who would normally react to historical anti-Black laws like “garlic in front of a vampire” are now citing them to promote gun restrictions. “I’m really interested in why,” he said.

The Bruen opinion, which Gorsuch joined, contains the answer to his question. State lawmakers digging up historical gun regulations to justify modern gun regulations are simply doing what the Court told them to do. It is not their fault that many historical gun regulations are racist.

The History and Tradition test contains an implicit belief that the past is the location of excellence, a belief that falls apart the moment it’s examined. Our advances in everything from tangible science to moral reasoning renders that implicit belief moronic and is the mark of people who fear change and how it’ll impact their social standing. Decisions must withstand reasoned argument on their own and throw that damn robe on the all-consuming fire.

Sorry, that’s a bit harsh, but this software engineer is just callin’ them as he sees them.

Excuse me?

With an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that allows officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant, the Trump administration is seeking to usurp guardrails that are enshrined in the Fourth Amendment and have protected Americans’ civil liberties for centuries, experts in constitutional law and immigration policy told CNN.

Even in an administration that has always pushed an expansive vision of its law enforcement authority, the directive is notable for the way it tosses aside longstanding prohibitions against warrantless searches on private property — a legal concept that predates the creation of the United States and is among the country’s most foundational principles. [CNN/Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/politics/ice-memo-warrantless-entry-what-we-know]

No, departmental policies are not law and do not override judicial opinion and directives.

And I await, in horror, the inevitable occurrence of them breaking and entering a home protected by an AK-47 and a no-nonsense owner. We’ll have dead ICE agents everywhere and a Secretary of DHS who, frankly, should never have been appointed.

At this point, up here in Minnesota we’re at -22°F and I believe the storm is just about to start up for you folks down south and southeast.

And when did Trump’s Chumps figure it out? Just today.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has abruptly halted ongoing terminations of hundreds of disaster workers as the agency prepares for an enormous winter storm expected to pound a large swath of the country in the coming days.

In an email Thursday afternoon, obtained by CNN, staff were told that FEMA would “cease offboarding” disaster workers whose employment contracts are expiring in the days ahead — a practice that had been ongoing since the start of January.

Two sources familiar with the decision said the looming storm was a significant factor in the sudden pause, though Homeland Security officials have been quietly grappling with the fate of these workers for weeks. [CNN]

It seems a bit late there, darlin’s?!

Well, let it never be said that the current generation of conservatives aren’t all about appearances, eh? Just like, ah, grifters. Funny, that.

In the last hour or so the thermometer has been measuring the outside temperature to be -7°F, and most of that drop (from +11°) has happened over the last hour or so, and it’s supposed to stay cold for the next few days. If I may engage in some faux-sympathetic magic, here’s some summertime pics.

Stay warm and stay safe, folks.

Trunnion:

A trunnion (from Old French trognon ‘trunk‘) is a cylindrical protrusion used as a mounting or pivoting point. First associated with cannons, they are an important military development.

In mechanical engineering (…), it is one part of a rotating joint where a shaft (the trunnion) is inserted into (and turns inside) a full or partial cylinder. [Wikipedia]

Well, noted near the end of this Cruising the Cut video.

I noticed another couple of failures yesterday for the Bondi DoJ:

Lindsey Halligan, a Trump administration lawyer who was named head of a key U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia last year with instructions to seek criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s perceived political adversaries, left her post at the Justice Department on Tuesday.

Halligan’s departure followed a pair of extraordinary moves by two federal judges who issued court orders hours earlier saying they intended to replace Halligan at the helm of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia and threatening disciplinary sanctions for any government lawyer who continued to refer to her as U.S. attorney in legal filings.

The separate actions by Chief Judge M. Hannah Lauck and Judge David J. Novak, who were nominated by President Barack Obama and Trump, respectively, signaled a breaking point for the federal bench in the Eastern District of Virginia months after Halligan was disqualified from serving as U.S. attorney in the high-profile office. [WaPo]

Having moves like this one successfully rebuffed makes Trump look not only weak, but not very bright. A Trump-nominated judge was a nice touch. Then along came this admission that letting the faux Federal department DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, be invented and run wild has resulted in one of the biggest and potentially most damaging leaks of voter information in American history:

If you don’t pay attention to the national weather scene, you may not be aware that a large, nay, even huge storm is about to pop up over the South, Midwest and upper East Coast, the result of abominably cold Arctic air sliding in underneath warm & juicy air from the south – or at least that’s my understanding from meteorologist Ryan Hall. He’s describing it as historic in proportion and intensity, with freezing rain possibly destabilizing power networks, many inches of snow, and that sort of thing.

What I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere is emergency response, including that traditionally provided by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). While FEMA nominally still exists, it’s been disassembled and doesn’t even having an acting director, according to its Wikipedia page. While I know anti-government types like to look down on FEMA, especially given its poor performance during Hurricane Katrina, in other disasters it has performed quite well and gets full marks, even from Republican governors.

If you live in an area affected by this storm, please try to be prepared for it. Assume imminent catastrophe and prepare accordingly.

And if you’re a Federal official, please be aware that shrinking the Federal government by getting rid of FEMA is just another example of blind adherence to ideology. It’s my guess that if the storm does turn out to be historic, and I hope it doesn’t, there’ll be some Federal asses roasting over an out of control fire. Yes, including him.

Stay safe.

Former Ambassador to Russia McFaul agrees with me about the renaming of Greenland:

McFaul argued that seizing Greenland has “nothing to do with our security” and instead “has everything to do with Trump’s vanity.”

“This is a vanity project he wants. He wants Greenland to become Trump-land,” he said, “and it’s just as simple as that.” [MS NOW]

He also calls this … the worst idea ever.

The Minneapolis Art Sled Rally of 2026 – not entirely safe for work:

But it’s possible, and Erick Erickson knows it as he responds to the European Union rallying to defend Greenland, causing Trump to tell the Norwegian Prime Minister off:

And there is no Trump Derangement Syndrome here except from his most ardent supporters who feel compelled to justify, explain, and defend every single thing Trump does, no matter how crazy. You can read the texts for yourself. It’s the ramblings of an obsessive eighty-year-old who just cannot let something go.

Those supporters are probably composed of trouble-makers, posting with a malicious grin, and folks who’ve gained some social stature because of their connections to the President. This latter group are typically now working in government and are addicts of power, their conceptions of how the government should be run and the policies it pursues composed of theories of how humanity works which are, to be polite, inaccurate.

Today I was watching Tasting History with Max Miller’s episode for the week, in which he gave a very light history of English workhouses from, oh, the 17th century to the start of the 20th century, and I was struck by the similar attitudes of the GOP over the last maybe 60 years, and Miller’s description of the work houses through the eyes of the elite:

The welfare queen, for the GOP, and a worry that the poor will get themselves sent to the workhouse in order to get free, delicious meals, for the English elite of the cited period.

This lack of understanding of how the bulk of humanity works, and what they want, seems to be a common theme, even a plague, for those who oppose charity, although it defeats me as to whether it’s a cause or effect. But it remains true that modern polls and experiments, such as universal basic income, show people do want to work and not laze about. It may be an example of confirmation theory, as it’s certainly a bias that I suspect many “successful” people pick up, thinking their success has been due to their hard work, discounting the usual factors of random chance, or luck as we call it, that have served them.

Andrew Sullivan is thoroughly tired, and a little frightened, of the Greenland tilt:

The essence of tyranny is the imposition of one man’s will on an entire polity — with no checks, balances, or even reasons cited to back him up. It is, to coin a phrase, a triumph of will. In fact, you could argue that a tyrant aims for exactly such a demonstrable act of pure solipsism as soon as he can pull it off — against all elite and popular opinion and common sense — because it proves by its very arbitrary irrationality that only he matters.

That’s why President Trump’s threat to the sovereignty of a NATO ally, Denmark, is a red line. No one — neither Greenlanders nor Americans — wants what is an insane idea. No one needs it. No reason can be given for it. And yet Trump keeps insisting, like a mafia boss, that he will take it. He must be stopped.

The reasons given have changed, as they do when they are being invented on the fly to justify something already decided and totally bonkers. We were first told that this was about national security, because the Arctic — thanks to the climate’s rapid heating of the North Pole — is becoming a far more disputed part of the globe, with more valuable shipping lanes and military activity. Russia and China have their eyes on it. And so should we. …

So what’s left to defend the madness? According to Trump, the “psychological” benefit of “owning” the place. The best way to understand that, I think, is simply that Trump wants, like all tyrants, to expand the footprint of his domain. We missed this in the first term. [The Weekly Dish]

Not everyone. My friend Lisa called it pathological narcissism a few days after Trump announced his first candidacy, and from that it’s not hard to deduce his frantic grasps for power, for respect, for legitimacy.

None of which he attains.

Now he’s working on legacy, and only the howls of the power-addicted support him. It’s not as if he’s attracting new supporters with his antics. But will that matter? Someone has to remove him; who can, and will, bell the cat?

We saw this on the local news and were appalled:

Federal immigration agents bashed open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press.

ChongLy “Scott” Thao told the AP that his daughter-in-law alerted him on Sunday afternoon that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were banging at the door of his residence in St. Paul. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled.

“I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.” [The Seattle Times]

The WCCO report includes the video clip. Fortunately, they let him go, although the report says

Thao said agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and made him get out of the car in the frigid weather so they could photograph him. He said he feared they would beat him. He was asked for his ID, which agents earlier prevented him from retrieving.

Agents eventually realized that he was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, Thao said, and an hour or two later, they brought him back to his house. There they made him show his ID and then left without apologizing for detaining him or breaking his door, Thao said.

Another report had him driven and kicked out of the vehicle in Elk River, an exurb to the north, to find his own way home. Regardless, this behavior is, to my mind, criminal.

And taped.

So when Trump is shoved out of Washington, ICE agents that have engaged in this shameful behavior can be charged and, hopefully, found guilty and imprisoned.

And if Trump tries to defend their behavior, he can be charged with conspiracy. OK, OK, it’s just fantasy on my part, since I’m not a lawyer, but that’s what this looks like to me.

But this is why I’m surly today.

Attribution science:

In general, extreme event attribution, also known as attribution science, evaluates relative contributions of multiple causes of an event, and assigns statistical confidence to that evaluation. Most often, the term is applied to the science of identifying and quantifying the role that human-caused climate change plays in the frequency, intensity, duration, and impacts of individual extreme weather events. Attribution science aims to determine the degree to which such events can be explained by or linked to human-caused global warming, and are not simply due to random climate variability or natural weather patterns.

Noted in “The secret weapon that could finally force climate action,” Thomas Lewton, NewScientist (10 January 2026, paywall):

But climate models can be put to another use if they are run in a slightly different way. The idea is to simulate counterfactual scenarios and compare them with how things really turned out. How would the world look if we had left a certain portion of fossil fuels in the ground, for example? Climate scientists have spent decades using this technique to figure out the consequences of carbon emissions, in a field that is broadly called attribution science.

In all of the recent uproar, Minneapolis and Greenland and the East Wing, yes all that, I’m not hearing anything about the Epstein Files. Yes, the Epstein Files, the issue that was tearing MAGA apart and had the President sweating a couple of months ago.

At least, until last week, when this showed up:

The U.S. Department of Justice has formally moved to block the appointment of an independent monitor or special master to oversee the release of Epstein-related records in the long-closed criminal case of Ghislaine Maxwell—arguing that no federal court has the authority to compel such disclosures.

In a six-page letter filed tonight, to U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, prosecutors contend that recent efforts by members of Congress to force production of the so-called “Epstein files” amount to an improper attempt to reopen a concluded criminal case and to create a form of judicial oversight that Congress itself did not authorize. [MTN]

I read this as Trump going back on his approval of the original legislation requiring the publication of the Epstein Files. Sure, I could have a discussion as to whether that interpretation is going a bit far or not.

But, to my ear, the dogged refusal to obey a law approved by the President himself speaks catastrophically, yes that’s not just a decorative adjective but a real description of the situation, catastrophically of what the Trump name in the Epstein Files may imply: knowledge, participation, principal architect.

Do we even need to know the sordid details?

Or should the rank & file of MAGA simply begin gathering at the White House, calling for Trump’s resignation, ready to run him out of office if he tries to prance forth and convince them their lying eyes have lied to them again? Down that path lies sure redemption.

And, by doing so, we can avoid the world-wide humiliation of invading Greenland, of harassing Minneapolitans, of our economy continuing to head into the crapper, the whole nine yards.

Time to wake up, MAGA, to your humiliating buy-in of a lifelong grifter. Don’t be embarrassed, Trump’s had a lifetime of fooling people, and the Democrats have botched things, too.

“I dunno, they both look like cardboard cutouts. Has your brother moved yet?” she asked. He replied, “I doubt it, Mom was made of paper and Dad was a crude glue casting.”

The impact of Destination Wedding (2018) on me is much like how Groundhog Day (1993) affected me: predictable, silly … and teary-eyed charming. As the leads carried Groundhog Day, the leads of Destination Wedding provide the main lift for this mildly odd story – and it works.

A current-day destination wedding has been decreed for Keith, who we never meet, and brother Frank and Keith’s former fiancée, Lindsay, are invited. These two meet, for the first time, on the way to Keith’s wedding; why they’ve never met before is explained away as a consequence of Frank’s antipathy for Keith, and, in fact, neither of them care for Keith. Keith may be a real jerk, though it occurred to me that conclusion may be more the prism through which Frank and Lindsay view their worlds than a forthright commentary on the ever-faraway Keith.

Frank is the Cynic, questioning everything and putting the black spin on all the answers. Lindsay, still shattered at the breakup with Keith all these years later, is not so dark, and they soon fall to arguing, discussing, agreeing, disagreeing.

And, maybe, falling in love. I mean, they talk so much that you can’t really tell. It’s almost a philosophy seminar disguised as a movie.

Found in the rom-com bin at the store, Destination Wedding may have some hidden currents in it for the philosophy major, while still getting laughs for the casual viewer. You may not remember this cute story a week post-viewing – but, then again, depending on your intellectual composition, you may.

Enjoy.

I get the feeling President Trump wants to be something like a statesman:

Leaders from several countries on Saturday received a letter inviting them to join a so-called U.S.-led “Board of Peace” initiative that would initially aim to end conflict in Gaza but then be expanded to tackle conflicts elsewhere, diplomats said.

The White House on Friday announced some members of this board, which would outlive its role supervising the temporary governance of Gaza, under a fragile ceasefire since October.

The names include U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, former British prime minister Tony Blair and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump is the chair of the board, according to a plan his White House unveiled in October.

Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas signed off on Trump’s plan, which says a Palestinian technocratic administration will be overseen by an international board, which will supervise Gaza’s governance for a transitional period. [Reuters]

Unfortunately for him, most world leaders understand that trusting Trump is a major unforced error. I suspect this’ll go nowhere while Trump keeps screaming that everyone wants to join up.

Welcome to prosperity church cant.