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.