I fear for the loss of my country, of the very idea of this liberal democracy. I worry about the pithy ways we will experience it when it goes, through push notifications and endless think pieces.
What hollow ways to memorialize something so deserving of our gratitude.
Montana Becomes First State To Close the Law Enforcement Data Broker Loophole
Montana has enacted SB 282, becoming the first state to prohibit law enforcement from purchasing personal data they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The landmark legislation closes what privacy advocates call the “data broker loophole,” which previously allowed police to buy geolocation data, electronic communications, and other sensitive information from third-party vendors without judicial oversight.
The new law specifically restricts government access to precise geolocation data, communications content, electronic funds transfers, and “sensitive data” including health status, religious affiliation, and biometric information. Police can still access this information through traditional means: warrants, investigative subpoenas, or device owner consent.
Alternate headline: in 49 states, it’s legal for police to purchase your geolocation data from cell phone companies, the apps you use, etc., and all without a warrant.
Can Trump Really Deport One Million Migrants This Year?
The answer lies in the messy on-the-ground reality of America’s immigration system, which throws up many practical, legal, and political obstacles. And despite the moves Trump has made, such as invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, many of those obstacles remain in place.
It seems that the pieces are falling into place. That executive order. The suspension of habeas corpus. The ultimate goal.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Article One, Section 9, clause 2 of the Constitution, habeas corpus guarantees the right of Americans to be seen by a judge before imprisonment or confinement by the government. The full clause reads "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
The aforementioned executive order, signed on April 28, states that "Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement."
So by July 27, 2025, local and state law enforcement will have access to military assets. Your right to see a judge before being imprisoned indefinitely may be suspended. And there is no guarantee American citizens or legal permanent residents (Green cards) won’t be deported or imprisoned, too.
America.
Wake up.
Trump wants to weaken protections against forever chemicals in drinking water
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the nation’s first legally enforceable federal drinking water limits on the most common types of forever chemicals. Today, the EPA announced an about-face. The agency now wants to exclude several types of the chemicals from the rule, including so-called GenX substances initially intended to replace older versions of forever chemicals but that ended up creating new concerns. It also proposed extending compliance deadlines for the two most prevalent forms of forever chemicals, and says it’ll establish a “framework” for more exemptions.
Frame a politician as “friendly to business” and people eat it up. But frame them as “friendly to corporations” and public sentiment sours.
Trump may call himself “friendly to business,” but he’s really in bed with the corporations. (After all, they can give him the most money.)
With announcements like this, you wonder if the Trump administration just…hates the American public. And to my endless confusion, Trumpets love the man more and more with each passing day.
I mean, how can anyone be against getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals in our water?
It’s absolutely mystifying.
Congress Sneaks Public Land Sales Into 11th Hour Amendment
Hundreds of thousands of acres of federally managed lands in Utah and Nevada could soon be sold in a convoluted and fast-moving effort to balance the nation’s budget. The highly controversial public land sell-off plans were forced into a reconciliation package in the middle of the night on May 6 and then quickly passed by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Natural Resources. Hunting and fishing conservation groups—which have opposed the inclusion of public land sell-offs in the budget package from the start—are now ringing alarm bells as the House budget bill heads to the Senate.
Malheur Enterprise closing after 115 years as owners retire
The closure comes after the rural weekly, founded in 1909, earned a national reputation for tough investigative reporting holding public officials accountable. Last year, it was judged the best newspaper of its size in Oregon.
Publisher Les Zaitz, 69, and his wife, Scotta Callister, 72, former Enterprise publisher, have owned the newspaper since 2015. They each have been in Oregon journalism for 50 years – a combined record of a century of service to the state.
“The Enterprise is a strong business and represents the very best in community journalism,” said Zaitz. “With no successor in sight, it’s time for us to step back from decades of journalism to a slower pace with a renewed focused on family and friends.”
The decision was hard, the couple said, but inevitable. Large newspaper groups no longer buy such independent newspapers, and the pool has shrunk of people who want to, as owners, both run a business and a news organization.
I’ve been a subscriber for a few years and they do indeed conduct some of the best independent journalism in the American West.
The plight of local, independent journalism continues to break my heart…and the foundation of our democracy.
Long live the free press.
Joel Plaskett - Through & Through & Through
The best song of 2009 (but heard for the first time today).
The whole album is fantastic.
AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships
“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.
If “The Personal is Political,” Why Are You All So Fucking Sensitive?
…when you erase the line between the political and the personal, you end up with these weird social prohibitions against openly and frankly debating elements of politics that must be debated. If you say that your politics are who you are and that who you are is your politics, then criticism of certain elements of your politics will inevitably be represented as impolite and aggressive personal insult.
Any idiot can play Greek for a day and join a sorority or write a tragedy and articulate all that pain and maybe you will get paid
But it’s a sin when success complains and your writer’s block, it don’t mean shit just throw it against the wall and see what sticks Gotta write a hit; I think this is it…
One of most beautiful moments of modern music.
How perverse that ennui is a privilege.
‘Cook chose poorly’: how Apple blew up its control over the App Store
In 2021, a federal judge ruled that Apple had to loosen its grip, ever so slightly, on the App Store. On Wednesday, nearly four years later, that same judge found that Apple deliberately failed to do so and tried to hide its noncompliance in the process. In a furious opinion, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said that she wouldn’t give Apple a second chance to get it right: instead, she’s demanding specific changes to the App Store, ripping away Apple’s grip after years of unsubstantial alterations in response.
Long overdue.
Sec. 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement. (b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.
America.
Time to wake up.
Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
For decades, experts have connected health problems to exposure to certain phthalates found in cosmetics, detergents, solvents, plastic pipes, bug repellents, and other products. When these chemicals break down into microscopic particles and are ingested, studies have linked them to an increased risk of conditions ranging from obesity and diabetes to fertility issues and cancer.
Led by researchers at NYU Langone Health, the current study focused on a kind of phthalate called di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), which is used to make food containers, medical equipment, and other plastic softer and more flexible. Exposure has been shown in other studies to prompt an overactive immune response (inflammation) in the heart’s arteries, which, over time, is associated with an increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
In their new analysis, the authors estimated that DEHP exposure contributed to 368,764 deaths, or more than 10% of all global mortality from heart disease in 2018 among men and women aged 55 through 64.
reading: Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon 📚
This woman is not smart.
The book has a decent premise, but my goodness, her conclusions are downright incoherent.
Watching ‘Andor’ Is No Substitute for Actual Resistance
I worry that for many people the consumption of this television show feels pacifying, as if watching it is a replacement for joining a protest, their fandom for the rebel alliance a stand-in for their politics in the real world. Disney wants to provide every product to you, even the language of your rebellion against Disney. What’s the point of feeling affirmed if the ultimate goal of Disney is to get you to spend more money on its brands?
I feel the same about the effects of social media on the general population. People take to Facebook or X or Bluesky and feel like they're doing something by commenting, liking, or retweeting.
But of course they're not. They're still glued to their phone, tricked into feeling like they're making a difference.
One of my favorite Prince songs, and one of his most prescient.
It slaps.
Nikka Costa & Prince - Push & Pull
My two favorites, together.
‘He Took My Girl’: Your Memories Of The Artist Forever Known As Prince
“August 14th, 2004: MCI Center in Washington DC. It was the Prince Musicology Tour. I went with my wife (then girlfriend) and her sister. They both had specially made t-shirts with Prince’s face airbrushed on them. I thought they were nuts. We were seated on the floor in the second row from the front. We were then treated to what became THEE greatest concert I’ve ever seen. A little over halfway through the show, I think it was ‘U Got the Look,’ Prince starts to point out a handful of ladies in the crowd to get on stage and dance with him. Then…. .in SLOW MOTION… he turns our way…. with both index fingers, he points out my wife and her sister. I said to myself, ‘it’s been a wonderful 2 years with this woman, but i’ll never see here again.’ It was those DUMB SHIRTS. ONLY through the grace of God, she came back. I can always say that for a few short minutes, Prince took my girl….. with PRIDE.” – Robert Carter
I was a late bloomer. The DJ at my junior prom played Kiss while I was on the dance floor and it stopped me dead in my tracks. What was this? At that time, I was listening to Cat Power and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Modest Mouse and the White Stripes, none of whom sounded like this.
I spent the next year listening to Prince (and Al Green) incessantly. I’d go for long walks in the woods with my portable CD player tucked into the back pocket of my Dickies, the headphone cord running under my shirt.
I was gay, but not out, and here was a man singing in a way that made me feel like my sexuality both mattered and mattered not at all. The way his voice shifted between Prince and Camille, his music from guitar to falsetto… it was a revelation.
Along with Nikka Costa’s Everybody Got Their Something, Prince’s Musicology changed the trajectory of my life. I would not be who I am today without those two — I can’t imagine my life without those albums, without them.
Prince died nine years ago today.
Israel’s Military Cites ‘Professional Failures’ in Killings of Gaza Medics
Military officials had initially asserted, repeatedly and erroneously, that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” toward the troops “without headlights or emergency signals.”
The military backtracked on that assertion a day after The New York Times published a video, discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics, that showed the clearly marked vehicles flashing their lights and coming to a halt before the attack.
Israeli soldiers later buried most of the bodies in a mass grave, crushed the ambulances, fire truck and a U.N. vehicle, and buried those as well.
In the statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said that “removing the bodies was reasonable under the circumstances, but the decision to crush the vehicles was wrong.”
Emphasis mine.
DOGE is reportedly building a ‘master database’ of government information
In a letter to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General’s office requesting an investigation into DOGE, Ranking Member Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) alleged that the government entity created by Elon Musk supposedly to reduce the size of the federal government is now constructing a “cross-agency master database” of sensitive personal information.
Wired appeared to back up Connolly’s allegations on Friday, detailing an effort at DOGE to fold this database into the Department of Homeland Security, the counterterrorism agency founded after 9/11. Specifically, “mass amounts” of personal data harvested from the IRS, SSA, and voting records in Pennsylvania and Florida were recently uploaded into servers at the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes immigration cases.
In politics, as with everything, a movement, moment, or event can be studied and understood in isolation, or it can be seen as a reaction to a previous action.
The amassing of private, personal data can be understood as an event unto itself, or it can be understood as a reaction to something else.
I believe this, and the last presidential election as a whole, is a reaction to the Democrat’s woeful inability to acknowledge immigration as an issue of importance to the American people, and thus I largely blame them for this mess of a situation we find ourselves in.
There are two kinds of political parties: those that take accountability for their own actions, and those that merely blame their opponents. The Republicans have long been the latter, and I thought the Democratic Party would eventually position itself as the antidote to them.
But over the last decade, this began to feel unlikely, and now it feels downright impossible. Democrats seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from Trump. In response to him, they became more like him, deflecting accountability rather than accepting responsibility for the mistakes they’ve made.
Democrats or Republicans, it now makes no difference. We are being governed by children.
That should be scary enough, but it’s made terrifying when one of those parties has autocratic aspirations.
Cops can’t do cell tower mass surveillance ‘dumps,’ court rules
A federal judge in Nevada has ruled that it’s unconstitutional to obtain swaths of cellular records through “tower dumps” — but will still let police get away with using it as evidence, as reported earlier by 404 Media and Court Watch.
With tower dumps, authorities can dig through the cell records that pinged off a particular tower during a specific time. Though police may be looking for just one record, these dumps often expose the data of thousands of people, making it a major privacy concern. In a 2010 case involving the High Country Bandits, for example, officers caught the two bank robbers by looking through a tower dump containing more than 150,000 phone numbers.
Trump Halts Data Collection on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change, More
Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.
The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.
Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.