ICE

ICE was created by laws enacted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  The laws that many people said had been cooked up in advance, and 9/11 provided the emergency* to get them passed.  ICE was a key part of the new Department of Home Security.  

Previously, INS handled both immigration services and immigration enforcement.  Originally INS had been (most appropriately?) part of Department of Labor, before it became part of the Department of Justice.

So effectively the creation of DHS and ICE was a way of creating a quasi military "security" force devoted to immigration** and get it away from the more broadly focused Department of Justice (DOJ) which might actually be concerned about civil rights, etc.  The FBI is part of the DOJ and has a better reputation for professionalism than ICE.

No less than the American Friends Service Committee calls for the Abolition of ICE on those grounds.

On January 30, 2026 was the congressional move to separate ICE funding (a mind boggling $170 Billion) from the rest of the budget a good strategy for reforming or abolishing ICE, or a strategy for face saving of top Democrats who have in fact long favored big ICE funding increases themselves?  I don't know, I've seen both opinions.

Who are the undocumented immigrants in the US?  They come from any countries which used to be led by Mexico, though recently more Mexicans have been leaving the US than coming to it.  More recently undocumented immigration has been dominated by influx from broken Central American countries, which the US had a large hand in breaking.

When did these immigrants come to the US?  Most undocumented immigrants in the US came here a long time ago.  The undocumented population of the US grew from 3.5 million in 1990 on a steady ramp upwards through the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and GW Bush peaking before the Global Financial Crisis at 12.2 million then slowly falling during the Obama administration (who did record numbers of deporations) to 10.2 million, then gradually rising with an extra boost of Central Americans in 2023 to about 13 million.  I would call this trajectory basically horizontal since 2008, and while buffeted by external events shows no consistent differences between Democrat and Republican Presidents.

The states that most undocumented immigrants go to is also neither Blue nor Red States but both.  California and Illinois and two leading Blue states for undocumented immigrants, as are Red states Texas and Florida.  Hardly any undocumented immigrants go to most states.

(*Count me among those who believe that the 9/11 was not carried out by government agents as 9/11 Truthers assert, but allowed to happen both through the evil designs of necons like Dick Cheney and GW Bush, and the incompetence of appointees like Donald Rumsfeld.  This makes me doubly suspicious of any laws that were inspired by it, like the infamous Patriot Act which is well known to have long been in the works, just like the War in Iraq.)

(**Supposedly devoted to immigration anyway.  They seem to have taken up an unspoken political mission of quashing dissent to the fascist politics of President Trump, operating something like Gestapo or Brown Shirts.)

Is animal predation evil?

This is a kind of utilitarianism I cannot get behind:

https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html

I see this is wrong on many levels, but it's only an extreme version of ideas many people have.

1. Firstly, it's all about the subjective experience (and apparently of herbivorous species only--he hates cats and believe they should be abolished if they can't be reprogrammed).

I have a long overdue essay in the queue which keeps not being finished about how the focus on subjective experience leads us into social destruction, genocide, etc.  (e.g., the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which focuses on the subjective experiences of Zionist Jews, and similarly the philosophy which enabled Nazism is highly subjective...and it focused on eliminating Marxist materialism because that makes nationalists and capitalists feel bad).

2.  Secondly, it's imagining ourselves to be gods, with our best intuitions being ultimate wisdom.  The road to hell is paved with our best intentions.  The road to wisdom begins with realizing we are really very small, and the world that existed before us was grand.  We should never (have) tried to change it very much.

3.  It's a cornucopian view which ignores physical limits like Limits to Growth.

Whatever their immediate prey might feel, animal predators serve an essential function in ecology.  The essential function of keeping things from getting out of balance.  It's a form of negative feedback.

The important thing is not how people or animals feel.  The important thing is continuation vs extinction.

The problem with people is not that they sometimes make animals feel bad.  The problem with people is that their collective activities are driving a global mass extinction.   This is hard to see if you have a small field of vision.  A human society of vegetarians might be slightly better than otherwise (note: Hitler was a vegetarian), but it could still be driving mass extinction through habitat loss, pollution, and climate modification.  Even if those things were slowed down considerably they would still continue.  The solution involves some combination of limiting the human population size and the destructiveness of human technology.

Cats are not driving a global mass extinction, and I doubt they ever have.  Ordinary predation has limits.  It is human technology, including especially agriculture and mining, which lacks those kinds of limits.

Lies about the Talmud

I've stated in general terms the same thing before, but a Reddit poster gives a lengthy rebuttal to some of the common tropes about the Talmud:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/18fz2h2/a_response_to_arguments_containing_false_talmudic/

Where it is claimed the Talmud calls non-jews 'beasts,' the actual term is 'worshipper of stars' (contextually meaning polytheistic idolators).

The passage cited is actually an argument as to why visiting non-jewish graves does not require ritual purification.

Now that's not to say the Talmud is not without good criticism, I've made those before too.  While in fact the Talmud says that to save a non-Jews life is more important that all but 3 things: murder, disallowed sex, and idolatry, it does not in fact call for equality for all people, it calls for fairness to non-jews, and more-than-fairness to Jews.  That's where the supremacism can creep in.  Though it doesn't necessarily have to, I've never experienced any myself, Jews have always been more-than-fair to me personally, and I can see numerous historical examples (eg Jonas Salk).  And hardly any other religion offers equality for all (only such as Unitarian Universalism) anyway.  

But what we've seen with Zionism and Israel is disgusting, and in my mind a complete negation of both the Talmud and the Torah.  Zionists have utterly lost their Judaism in all but name only.  They have become the idolators of death and destruction, genocide, and not just statehood (which would be bad enough, actually, to qualify as an an idolatry, even if it could be done without death and destruction, just merely by the slightest unfairness--which is still against God's rules--and it's obvious this is not humanly possible...hence not surprising the Talmud and Torah both say Jews must wait for the Messiah).  But such is the modern infotainment reality, Zionist Jews can live in their own bubble of lies and be fine with the death, destruction, and genocide Zionism requires in the name of idolatrous statehood.  

I love my hobbies, but I don't murder, steal, lie or do anything unfair to pursue them.  I always try to be as fair as I can be, or more than fair.  Fairness is a good idea in business and banking too.  That's how you get good will.  And that's what the Talmud is supposed to help people learn.  It was fairly successful in that for over a thousand years before the rise of Zionism, which sadly it was unable to stop.

Though the Talmud (seems to?) denounce Jesus (I wonder if in fact it is denouncing Paul, the real inventor of modern Christianity and in my view that denunciation is just about warranted), it seems to me the story of Jesus is a perfectly fitting illustration of both Torah and Talmudic 'values'.  Jesus was quoting Leviticus when he said to love others as yourself.  The New Testament figures were themselves all Jews, including Jesus and Paul, and many of their followers as well.

Warner Bros Discovery

Warner-Bros Discovery is one of the five big Hollywood Studios, has a wealth of classic films, and is the #3 streamer.  It's already as big as any such thing needs to be.  All the previous mergers and acquisitions which produced the present entity led to a decline in production and production quality.  And yet, the Board savors more.  Why?

It's already been at the point where it can collect ever greater monopoly rents.  The board is hoping to merge it to become an even bigger monopolist, which raises the present value of the current monopolies (if nothing else).

IOW, what they're selling is monopoly itself.

This should, of course, be illegal.

And then there's Netflix and Paramount, which ought to be forbidden from buying rival giant companies in the hopes of even greater monopoly than they already have.  Netflix is already the top streamer, who would be buying the #3, and then they'd own all the content other streamers rent from Warner-Bros Discovery.  Paramount would put half of Hollywood under one right-wing family.

For a long time, anti-trust enforcement relied on the bad doctrine that where greater size yielded greater efficiencies, it should be allowed.  We've seen that disproven time and again when resulting companies lose the qualities which originally made them special (like Boeing, who made the most reliable planes).  But restoring proper antitrust enforcement (in which the existing companies like Warner Bros Discover would already seem to be monopolies whose very size limited public choices--an inefficient outcome for consumers) would only be a small part of the de-financialization which needs to occur in the US economy.

Finance needs to be boring, and only then can everything else become exciting again.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros

AI is the digital asbestos we'll be digging out of our walls for decades

Cory Doctorow at his best, incredible, I couldn't have brought this all together in one essay said any better.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Cory dismisses all the garbage claims and worries, and gets to the heart of it all.  AI is intended to cost middle class thinking and creative jobs, like computer coding, that's why so much is being invested in it.  The plan is to lay lots of those people off,  Then what about them?

Well, if AI delivered what it promised, this might well make consumers happy.  Why pay those people if AI does the job better?  But it won't.  It will make things go bad quickly.

Unlike earlier technologies which empowered people, creating centaurs like a human driving a car with the car doing the muscle work, AI creates reverse-centaurs, where humans are reduced to the function of monitoring the AI that does the "original" thinking.

The problem here is that people don't monitor things very well.  They are much better wired for actually doing things, including the original thinking.  Monitoring AI's thinking, when AI is designed to always choose the next most probable choice which always looks fine on the face of things, is an impossible task for people to do.  Especially the less experienced and less well paid people corporations plan to hire after the mass AI layoffs.  The basic problem is well known already and called automation blindness.

So we'll be left with shitty everything, delivered to us by corporate monopolies that offered us no choice, with mass unemployment and underemployment like never before.  And no easy way back.

Producers AND Consumers must unite to fight this monster.

Maybe after the bubble is popped, some of the developments and capabilities will be useful in limited ways, Cory details this too, but nothing like the investment going into them.  It won't be as simple as the WorldCom bust, which actually left useful fiber in the ground still being used.

I'd encourage people to never abandon real thinking and skills.  I myself continue writing blogs and computer programs the old fashioned way.

Cory also expounds on something relevant to this blog.  Cory says he writes parables and not forecasts.  That's what I do also.  It's like, if we keep doing business as usual, the climate in 2100 will be devastating.  But I don't know if we'll continue to do 'business as usual' by then.  I hope we don't, and at some point people accept the correct ideas, I'm hoping to create some here, and steer away from the greater disaster.  Then suppose 2100 arrives and disaster doesn't happen because of great social changes were made, similar to those I've suggested, to prevent it.  It would seem by then that my prognostications while wrong were useful.  And that is the point.  Not to foresee the future but to help guide it, by helping to illuminate the entire view.

Passports and Gender

Firstly, there is no good reason for passports to indicate the holder's "Sex" at all, it's supposedly for "identification" but such "identification" is of very limited value compared with the picture.  It's based on norms or stereotypes.  There are tall muscular women and short less muscular men, the reverse of the norms, and such people shouldn't be subject to extra suspicion.  I hate stereotypes*.  

Sex wasn't added to passports until 1976.  Somehow, humanity got by for thousands of years without such identification.  In 1976 the excuse was that changing styling norms made implicit Sex harder to identify.  But I can't understand why that was even an issue.  The look is the look, regardless of what Sex it suggests or embodies, and the look is what you see, unless you are disrobing people.  No government official needs to know the Sex.  They just need to see that the picture matches, and now we have sophisticated biometric facial matching.  Those are now considered so good that specifying height and weight is not done anymore.  (I think height and weight would be more useful than Sex for identification in most cases.  They can change but usually not that quickly.)

Anyway, a "Sex" requirement for Passports is now in international agreements.  I'd have my country comply with current international agreements by making X the requirement for all.  We don't participate in stereotyping.  Look at the picture, look at the other information.  Sex assignment is none of your damned business.  Both libertarians and communists should support that, with different reasoning.  Communists should realize such information only serves some kind of discrimination or exploitation, which is what pure communism is supposed to eliminate.  Libertarians should see any information that does not serve a legitimate government purpose should not be provided to it, because it enables some kind of unwanted government control.  Sex at birth neither identifies the current presentation (clothes, styling) nor the current genitals.

But if you ARE going to have Sex for identification, it's pretty good follow the rules established in 1992 for such purposes.  After sexual modification, one becomes the new gender for identification purposes.  Even the Soviet Union recognized that.  Then X is for people who haven't yet met those modification requirements.  This was a very reasonable system, neither fully libertarian (everyone is X) or not.

Requiring only sex at birth does not serve identification requirements.  It is political posturing against trans sexuality, and nothing more.

It might not be entirely unreasonable to add more explicit labels than X.  For example, trans-Male and trans-Female.  These would be used if people didn't yet qualify for labeling as their chosen gender under the '92 rules.  This works for identification even better than the '92 system.  It's not the preferred solution of either libertarians or communists, but it's not unreasonable either.

Identification by current sex status could be useful with dead bodies.  That is, what are the genitals now, not what were they at birth.  That's basically what the '92 rules do, and indicating the trans status goes farther than X which could be either.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/politics/supreme-court-passport-sex-markers-transgender

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/opinion/supreme-court-trump-passports-gender.html

The Supreme Court claimed "sex at birth" is a historical fact.  Fine, but Customs is not an academic or medical history department.  It is involved with identification for which "Sex at birth" is not even a relevant fact.  The fact relevant to identification would be Sex at Present.

*I'm kind of an odd person myself, and that seems to attract the most aggressive dogs, thugs, and racist cops, except that as a lucky white guy I haven't had any trouble with cops.  I would prefer being judged by rules rather than stereotypes.  If I'm not stepping on owner's property, or if I'm doing so for a legitimate purpose like delivering the mail, leave me alone.  I don't want to be attacked because I look fearful or indecisive or just different.

Debunking October 7 Rape Allegations

https://x.com/zei_squirrel/status/1984972198520492039

Norman Finkelstein points to the very same UN report that Israelis tout as proof that there was rape by Hamas (based on "witness" reports).  That very same report concluded there was no physical evidence of any kind (photographic, video, or forensic).  5000 photos and 50 hours of video were examined.

The claimed rapes were in public, gang rapes, with the Israeli witnesses claiming to be hiding nearby.  Any one of these witnesses could have take a photograph or cell phone video, but none exist.  The region next to Gaza has more security cameras than anywhere on earth.  And yet, there is no security camera footage of these alleged rapes.

Finkelstein concludes there is not merely "no evidence," there is strong evidence the rapes did not occur.

A number of the other viral photographs and videos are also debunked in this thread.

Hundreds of independent journalists are boycotting the NYTimes opinion page because of their fueling of Hamas rape hoaxes.

https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1982854007514095657

*****

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers flaunt their actual documented rapes and those who dare prosecute them are persecuted.

https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1985516055414862065