I'll try to hide it all behind another pop song

Everywhere you look, the news is bad and getting worse. Every day is a battle to avoid the doom spiral. I am thankful for art, community, and friendship. Music is magic. Here’s an amazing playlist. Enjoy.

Featuring great new music from: Ratboys, Broken Record, Ben Quad, The Carolyn, Molly O’Malley, radical joy, Big Girl, Camp Trash, phoneswithchords, Banquets, The Sonder Bombs, Bicycle Inn, Louisa Stancioff, and Sydney Sprague.

the constant low hum of a failed state

Mass shootings have become a fact of American life. This is nothing new. They just are. Schools. Malls. Houses of worship. There are no safe places left. These tragedies used to at least make headlines but now that’s not always true.

Sometimes you say to a friend “see the shooting yesterday?” and they’ll sigh and say “yeah…” followed by something about it that makes it crystal clear you’re each talking about a separate event. Like you were talking about one in Arizona but they mention Alabama. No, no, the other life-altering tragedy that’s barely a blip in the lives of most Americans. Yeah, that one. Ya gotta be more specific, buddy. This is a country where these things just keep happening and nothing is being done to seriously fix the problem. That’s the price of admission. It’s like a radio that’s always on quietly in the background. If you don’t want to hear it, you probably won’t. And sometimes you do but you just ignore it. People will say “oh good, only two people died” as if that’s acceptable because it’s a small number, while completely ignoring all the other people who were shot and/or witnessed the shooting. How their lives are made forever worse by this act of violence. Completely ignoring a community changed forever.

I fear ICE kidnappings have become the new mass shootings. Not that shootings are going to stop or be replaced. They will continue. The people in power will continue doing nothing to solve them. But now secret, masked, unaccountable men snatching people are adding to the background noise. More cruelty. More death. More pain. Another radio left on in the background. A little louder. The static crackles loudly. Searching for a station across the whole band but never finding it. Drowning out our day to day. The discordant cacophony of American life. The droning low hum of real lives changed forever. The constant low hum of a failed state. The walls are closing in.

As it was once said, “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.”

This will prove to be true of mass shootings and ICE raids too. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas,” as the line from The Simpsons goes. ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens as The Onion headline says.

Three tragically American sentences.

Here’s a 3,000+ comment thread on Reddit about people who have had run-ins with ICE. There’s so, so many we don’t know about.

We cannot let this happen. We cannot allow the government to convince us that their arguments —

that being called a fascist is worse than their fascist ideology and actions;
that standing outside an ICE facility protesting their cruelty is somehow worse than the torture going on inside the walls;
that ICE agents are under attack, considering they almost always travel with a camera crew (to make content for social media to brag about their crimes) so if that was true they’d have plenty of footage;
that anyone who speaks out against them is an America-hating terrorist being paid by a group that does not exist;
that anyone who disagrees with Dear Leader on even one subject is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, while they bend over backwards to completely agree with every single thing he does even when it’s completely contradictory, is normal and not at all deranged;
that cities are burning down and full of violent crime;
that they care about children and mothers when their actions say the exact opposite;
that they need to send troops in to protect ICE when ICE themselves are responsible for almost all of the violence;

— are just, moral, or acceptable. 

They are bullshit. They are made up. “Hippos from Jupiter have invaded” has the same amount of truth. None. They are propagandists. They are provocateurs. Power and domination is the goal. Most media is far behind on this. The President keeps making shit up out of whole cloth to advance his violent interests should be a blinking red headline every day. Someone should ask him to provide any evidence for his claims. There is no such thing as good faith in this administration. This isn’t the same ballgame as it used to be. A loud minority in this country wants the rest of us to suffer and die. This isn’t just regular policy disagreements. They are amoral, sadistic nihilists and they will not stop.

It’s all for a nefarious goal. They are making up problems to justify doing what they’ve always wanted to do. This has always been their project. They want this fight. They want this violence. Any violence. It doesn’t matter to them who actually caused it. They will paint it as antifa, radical left, etc. All violence serves their purpose when they can bend reality to their will.

They know they are weak. They know they are unpopular. Their reign is not inevitable. Their coalition gets smaller every day. The opposition will continue to grow. A (Trump-appointed!) judge recently said he is “simply untethered to the facts.” Not only are they terrorizing the country, they bring cameras everywhere they go. This is their chosen project, yes, but it’s also all about the content. They are moving fast to consolidate power while they still can. Their social media channels are a flood of truly ghastly clips. If you haven’t seen I don’t even recommend it and won’t link to it. They can’t help but show off their arrests, their brutality, their bigotry, their power. The posts are now indistinguishable from some of the worst forum posts of just a few years ago. A white supremacy meme didn’t end up there by accident. When they post Pepe, they know who their audience is. When the Border Patrol Instagram posts and pins a reel with antisemitic slurs, they know what’s up. They are actively courting far right extremists. They keep telling us who they are. Believe them.

all hail the inflatable frogs. seriously.

Look at the people in those crowds at these protests. Men of faith being pepper sprayed. Journalists being attacked. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, people in costumes dancing. The people wearing inflatable frog and unicorn costumes are honestly doing this country an enormous service. When they say violent criminals are protesting but the video shows inflatable animals dancing around to “YMCA” there’s no way for them to spin it. The inflatable army mocks them, encourages more people to join, gets media attention, and refuses to give this administration the optics they crave. Heroes.

These crowds are their worst fear. Diverse across all lines. Multicultural. Righteous anger at their bigoted hatred. That’s why they can’t stop panicking about No King’s Day. They’re trying to paint it as a “Hate America Rally” because they desperately need their followers to see it that way. It ruins their narrative when millions of people take their Saturday off to use their physical presence to loudly say ‘we reject you.’ Just like the frogs ruin their lies, a broad coalition with a bunch of normies and grandmas make it difficult for them to claim the crowd is nothing but a bunch of hardcore radical terrorists.

ice. who? why?

Have you seen the ICE ads on TV? Maybe it’s because I live in Boston but I see it constantly on all channels. Spotify is running them too. Good time to cancel. They are spending millions on ads aimed at cops. My blood boils every time. I hit mute if I can. Think about what kind of person you have to be to see all of this going on and want to sign up and participate. “You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family, your city, safe,” the narrator in the ad says. “But in sanctuary cities, you’re ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals walk free.” In other words, what they really mean: hey cops, are you mad that you can’t just do whatever the hell you want to anyone you think doesn’t belong in this country and anyone who doesn’t agree with your political beliefs? That’s their hook! They want racist, violent men who will follow any order. The things that would instantly disqualify you from any other job make you perfect for this one. ICE is offering up to $50,000 as a sign-on bonus, and student loan forgiveness. Despicable. When Joe Biden wanted student loan forgiveness they said he was a radical lunatic. We gave them an unlimited budget from our money to cosplay Call of Duty and attack us.

Do these guys wake up, kiss their wife and kids goodbye, (I hope they don’t have a wife and kids, because they deserve to be lonely and no women or children deserve to deal with them) and drive over to the secret facility to strap on guns and armor, thinking about all the immigrants they’re going to ziptie together and haul away from their families? Do they get turned on thinking about the lives they’re about to ruin? Do they talk to each other about how fun it will be to hit a peaceful protester? Do they feel like big tough men throwing people to the ground, pointing guns at them, shooting pepper balls at their heads? What if any kind of training do they receive? Are they just handed a gun and told to fuck shit up? Do they stop for a second and think about how wrong it all is? Do they really believe they’re the good guys, that they’re helping? Did they never learn about Nazi Germany? Do they watch Star Wars and cheer when the Stormtroopers are marching in? Do they realize they are the President’s secret army and he would turn on them in one second if they disobeyed an order, disagreed with anything he said, or questioned their mission? Do they drive home after a shift and think they did a good job? The job is attractive because they know they operate above the law. And anyone who doesn’t agree with the mission but does it for the money is no better. I would like to believe no one can be bought and turned against their neighbors for 50k, as naive as that may be.

Every single one of them who can be identified must be put away for good if we ever get past this. They are stepping up to take a job that is based on gleeful violence and sadism, using the power of the state with no rules or accountability against their neighbors. Anyone who would make that choice has completely abandoned the social compact. I can’t trust them. I don’t want them in my community. They have no decency or morals. I believe in redemption for plenty of various bad decisions, but not this one. Anyone who could do that during the day and sleep at night is evil. There is no room in society for them.

that one building in chicago: “it felt like a war zone”

Though I feel this about multiple stories every week, I really feel like this should have been the one that made everyone stop and ask ‘what the fuck are we doing here?’ The details and photos are harrowing.

September 30 on South Side of Chicago, ICE targeted an entire building. They threw flash bangs, they rappelled down from helicopters, broke down apartment doors, looted apartments, in all arresting 37 people from the building. These folks were dragged out of the building, including children, some without any clothes on, and put into UHauls. The federal officers marched naked people outside with no due process and held some for hours, because the government claimed without evidence Tren de Aragua frequents the building. DHS claimed two of the 37 were TdA, but then again they lie constantly. Now that some time has passed, they’ve admitted it was actually only ONE TdA member and one US citizen with an active warrant. They upended all of these lives for that. But they don’t care. They got what they wanted: footage of them being big tough guys, cosplaying a war zone. They will move onto the next raid while these lives are left in shambles.

There has been so much great reporting on the building. The rest of this section is just details pulled from those seven articles.

further reading

Here are links to what I’ve been reading lately. I also just read Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao and loooved it. It’s a magical tale about a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets. It reads like a waking dream. It was nice to escape into some fiction in between all of this shit:

• ICE took a 13-year-old they said had a gun. Local cops say he didn’t. Now he’s detained 500 miles away from his Massachusetts home.

• Postcard From Chicago: There’s an ICE Facility in My Backyard

• “Back on August 27, Kristi Noem’s goons raided a car wash in Carson, CA. In the process, they badly broke Bayron Rovidio Marin’s leg. The break was so bad, he has been hospitalized ever since. And in spite of the fact that they’ve never obtained a warrant or even claimed that Rovidio Marin is undocumented, ICE has been paying private guards to guard him 24/7 since then. On top of the original injury, ICE hid this guy using fake names at the hospital, they’ve questioned him without reading him his rights, they’ve restricted his access to lawyers. So just that one victim of ICE violence — someone against whom ICE had no warrant or even knowledge of his identity — may cost taxpayers upwards of $400,000.”

• The Nazi group chat isn’t shocking. That the Vice President says they are just kids goofin’ around is not shocking. He knows they aren’t kids! They work in politics! They are in their 20s and 30s! Being able to talk like this is one of the explicit goals of the whole anti-woke anti-DEI project. They didn’t like being told they were racist, and rather than some self-reflection, they fully leaned into it in an attempt to make it okay to be racist. Pushing the goalposts with their whole ass. Society asked 'what if we were kinder to everyone?’ and they said ‘fuck you, we’re going to bury the needle in the opposite direction.’ McSweeney’s has a great piece about this. He has the same beliefs. It is criminally underreported who he follows on X and who he pals around with and listens to.

• Karoline Leavitt: “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” But everyone else needs to turn down the rhetoric, sure. They still whine about “deplorables” but continue to paint anyone who isn’t loyal as evil. Newscycle after newscycle about Democrats and their “violent” rhetoric but this comment will barely make a sound. People who accurately quoted their favorite podcaster lost their jobs, but she can say this and it’s fine.

• Salesforce told ICE that it could use AI to help them triple their staff. Evil company.

• Border Patrol shot a woman in Chicago and almost every single thing they reported about the incident was a lie. 10 cars rammed us, they said. No cars rammed them. She boxed us in, they said. They boxed her in. She shot a rifle at us, they said. She did not have a rifle. ICE was just returning fire, they said. Only ICE fired. She drove herself to the hospital, she said. She drove herself to a nearby business and walked in “bleeding profusely,” so they called 911. She’s now on trial and the feds drove her vehicle to Maine (~1,000 miles from Chicago) for some reason, despite the fact that it’s obviously evidence. Just a little light tampering.

• ICE’s Growing Feud With Chicago Now Includes Fake 911 Calls

• Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver

• Gregory Bovino (a CBP commander, described here as a man who “combines Bull Connor’s aggression with Don King’s showmanship”) gave away the whole game when he told a WBEZ reporter they were arresting people based on “how they look.” That’s what they wanted. That’s how they operate. That’s what they were going to do anyway, and now they have the “Kavanaugh Stop” to back them up. A new lawsuit is being brought against the administration now that Kavanaugh’s words have been shown to be laughably false over and over.

• Donald Trump has murdered at least 28 people in six boats in the Caribbean Sea. Needless to say, assassinating people with no due process, no input from Congress, no review or oversight, and with no obligation to provide any information or evidence is not legal. Even if they were smuggling drugs, that’s just straight up murder. And now they’re holding survivors from one of the strikes.

• Watch this clip of Adam Schiff listing all the questions Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to answer during what, as Schiff says, is an oversight hearing.

• SignalGate 2: Stephen Miller’s guy was in Minnesota for his uncle’s funeral, texting on Signal out in the open about military deployments in Portland, and someone was able to get pics of the conversations. These people are evil and so, so stupid.

• ICE is planning to hire a team of 30 people to surveil social media, build dossiers on people, and flag them for arrest and deportation.

• DOJ forced Apple to remove ICEBlock from the App Store, an app that lets people crowdsource ICE sightings. Pathetic.

• Chemtrail conspiracies are back. TBT chemtrails! More nonsense from RFK Jr. “It’s unmoored to reality. Our government is being driven by nonsensical dreck from dark corners of social media.”

• ProPublica found immigration agents have held more than 170 citizens, including nearly 20 kids, two with cancer.

• Everything is terrorism in Trump’s America

• Bari Weiss, with has no news experience, who has never been a reporter, is the new Editor in Chief of CBS News. The only thing she’s ever been good at is telling rich people what they want to hear. I enjoyed this article about one of her reporters who can’t seem to imagine that being an amoral loser could cause her friends to abandon her.

• YouTube Bends the Knee: Welcome to the era of Big-Tech capitulation 

• Trump, in a moment of clarity: “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice. But I said ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place… it looks terrible.” Yeah grandpa, those people are lying to you because you’re very stupid and they’re using you. What you’re seeing is not what’s happening. You got confused by footage from 2020 and an image from two different South American countries. The White House also shared a video of “Chicago” full of outdated footage from other states.

• Fake Protest Videos Are the Latest AI Slop to Go Viral in MAGA World

• Koreans arrested at Hyundai factory describe moment ICE swept in and how the US is ‘not a safe place to work’

• Tilly Norwood is an AI-generated avatar, not a real person. I don’t know about you but I have zero, and I mean absolutely ZERO interest in watching a film with an AI actress. I have zero interest in listening to a band that’s AI. Art is a unique alchemy of emotions and intentions and humanity. AI can’t do that. A London production studio created it (not her, it is not a person) calling their creation “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.” No. Gross. Stop.

• Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck features this incredible line: “I was married, but I’m not married anymore. Women don't like the vehicle.”

• Trump is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages of Fraud. Records Show 3 of His Cabinet Members Have Them

• We’ve almost up to 1,600 measles cases. This is a policy choice. People will get sick and die because the government decided that was fine.

• Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived

• This is a great visual view of how Trump is attacking Democratic districts. He has canceled over $27 billion of funding in blue districts, and less than $1 billion in red ones.

• He was wrongfully imprisoned for 43 years. Moments after being released, ICE took him

• Religious freedom to these people means their right to shove their religion, and only one, you know which one, down all of our throats. Funny how that stops the second there are faith-based protests against ICE.

• He Grew Obsessed With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks

• Frozen meals from Walmart and Trader Joe’s left 4 dead and 19 hospitalized due to listeria contamination. In possibly related news, in July the CDC quietly scaled back a surveillance program for 6 of the 8 foodborne illnesses and one of them was… you’ll never guess… listeria.

• Electricity now costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant AI data center activity.

• Germans are meeting up to eat pudding with forks. Sure, why not!

one good post to end this post

The New York Yankees will not win the World Series this year.