“The new orders prevent transgender people from openly serving in the military, greenlight the process of developing a missile defense shield to protect the U.S., and reinstate service members that voluntarily left or were forced out of the military over COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Trump also penned an expected executive order that would “abolish” every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) office within the DOD and Department of Homeland Security, the latter of which houses the U.S. Coast Guard.”
When it comes to the Jan 6 rioters there’s an emphasis on what they did to police offers. That matters, but the most important part about the incident wasn’t the attack on the police, but the attack on United States democracy. The rioters attacked the legislature of the United States in their seat of power, and some did so with the intent of, at least temporarily, ending U.S. democracy by keeping a president who lost an election in power.
“The new law will require the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes such as theft. Federal immigration officials have warned it could impact 60,000 people.”
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“ICE warned Congress that the Laken Riley Act could require detention for 60,000 people, and that the agency would need billions of dollars and thousands more detention beds to comply with the law, Axios reported.”
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“The federal government has prioritized deporting immigrants with criminal records since the Obama administration”
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“Study after study has indicated that immigrants — those in the U.S. legally or undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens, Axios’ Russell Contreras reports.”
“DeepSeek also claims to have needed only about 2,000 specialized chips from Nvidia to train V3, compared to the 16,000 or more required to train leading models, according to the New York Times. These unverified claims are leading developers and investors to question the compute-intensive approach favored by the world’s leading AI companies. And if true, it means that DeepSeek engineers had to get creative in the face of trade restrictions meant to ensure US domination of AI.”
“The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is walking back the federal funding freeze memo that set off a day of chaos and confusion on Tuesday up until a judge paused the order right before it was set to take effect.
“In light of the injunction, OMB has rescinded the memo to end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. Leavitt said that other executive orders on “funding reviews” would remain in effect and that more would follow. “This action should effectively end the court case and allow the government to focus on enforcing the President’s orders on controlling federal spending. In the coming weeks and months, more executive action will continue to end the egregious waste of federal funding.”
The original memo would have paused the disbursement of federal grants and financial assistance programs, but its ambiguity and breadth led to a scramble for answers on what exactly would be impacted.”
Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so any atmosphere someone tries to terraform will just be blown away by solar winds.
It may make sense to focus on Earth and technological development for now. Better technology will make moving civilization to Mars more possible in the future.
“In 2023, the Military Police in Brazil recorded having killed 6,296 people (approximately 17 people per day)—eight times the U.S. police lethality rate—yet evidence points to the actual number being much higher. The overwhelming majority of the victims are black, poor, young, male, uneducated, and living in the urban peripheries.”
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“As Brazil’s militarized policing has continued to expand, so have the gangs’ control and influence. Brazilian authorities seized 72.3 tons of cocaine in 2023. Gangs have bought, threatened, and manipulated elections, politicians, and members of the judiciary. Last year, 3,238 people were found to be enslaved by gangs, and gangs have control of entire cities and the prison system. They have major stakes in real estate, mining, petroleum, casinos, and cryptocurrency, valued at billions of dollars. There have been hundreds of cases of police working directly for organized crime, including as contract killers, creating an incentive against eliminating criminality.”
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“Most of the weapons used by Brazilian police come from U.S. suppliers. This includes the Colt M4 carbine, the Mossberg 590A1 shotgun, the Browning M2 machine gun, various sniper rifles, night vision systems, armored vehicles, and helicopters—all American-made.
The gangs also use American weapons, sold to intermediaries without strong checks by U.S. manufacturers (and very often provided by police officers involved with gangs and militias). These U.S. weapons were once legally sold by the U.S. government to the Brazilian police.”
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“The U.S. State Department, along with the FBI, has provided various training programs and exercises with the Brazilian military police. One of these programs, promoted by both the Trump and Biden administrations, the “Rapid Response to Active Shooters Course,” began in 2019 and is meant to “quickly and effectively respond to attacks involving shooters in public spaces.” In the overwhelming majority of police killings in Brazil, officers and their precincts insist that they “were met with gunfire,” despite many prominent cases showing that the police shot first.”
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“Today’s Military Police is a remnant of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which was also supported by the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and the CIA during the Cold War. Then, the Military Police was used as a political hammer to bludgeon political opponents, union leaders, and any Communist threats. The U.S. government produced local anti-Communist propaganda while funding and arming the state’s death squads. U.S. agencies also trained the Military Police to use some of the most extreme tactics still in use today.
A democratic Brazil has done little to reform the Military Police’s ruthless and repressive practices, with continued U.S. backing. Last year, the U.S. State Department gave $11.7 million to the Brazilian security state, returning to Bush-era numbers despite little progress made. The overwhelming majority of U.S. security assistance went to Brazilian law enforcement, financially rewarding ineffective policing.”
“China banned the export of gallium, germanium, antimony, and industrial diamonds to the U.S., in response to U.S. trade and investment restrictions on Chinese technology companies. Though tit-for-tat tariffs occasionally lead to bilateral trade agreements, protectionism is more frequently a response in kind. China’s rare materials ban is the latest such response in the ongoing U.S.–China semiconductor trade war.”
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“The technological trade war reduces the productive and military capacity of both countries, not just China. Technonationalism harms American and Chinese consumers, hinders economic growth, reduces cross-cultural cooperation, and makes aggression more attractive.”
“As with so many overly punitive or privacy-invading schemes surrounding sex work, policies like the one taking effect in North Carolina have been sold under the guise of stopping human trafficking—despite targeting anyone involved in paid sexual exchange, even when it’s between consenting adults.
Cops, politicians, and antiprostitution activists argue that by targeting anyone who would pay for sex, they’re going to “end demand” for all prostitution—thereby also thwarting forced, coerced, and underage prostitution, aka human trafficking or sex trafficking.
This is absurd, of course. We can’t eradicate the human sex drive, nor can we ensure that everyone can fulfill it without money changing hands. The state is not going to “end demand” for sex, no matter how hard it tries.
Besides, we know from other types of prohibition that increasingly punitive laws don’t have the major deterrent effect that proponents suggest. A certain sort of person will be deterred by something being criminalized at all, but many people willing to risk arrest and punishment aren’t likely to be deterred by the fact that they could potentially receive a longer sentence.
What is likely to happen with increased criminalization of prostitution customers is that customers will actually gain more power and more of an upper hand in sex work negotiations. After all, they’re the ones incurring more risk (at least in North Carolina and Texas; Oklahoma seems to have ramped up penalties on everyone involved). Undoubtedly, this will make customers less likely to submit to screening methods and perhaps less likely to act in other ways that are beneficial to sex workers.
In the end, sex workers will be the real victims of this policy change.
The vast majority of customers will never be caught and never face increased punishment. But the threat exists for everyone, and the ramifications of this increased threat will reverberate throughout the sex work scene in North Carolina, with potential consequences for anyone involved in selling sex.”
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“Ramping up penalties for prostitution customers illustrates one of the many ways in which authorities are repeating the mistakes of the war on drugs in their war on sex trafficking.
As the drug war ramped up, we saw ever-escalating penalties: more prison time, more severe charges, more conditions on those convicted, etc.
As the drug war ramped up, we saw a shift from law enforcement focus on major drug suppliers to anyone selling drugs to anyone buying drugs.
The drug war shift to targeting drug buyers was even sold as an “end demand” strategy, with advocates arguing that we could stamp out drug trafficking (the supply side) by going harder after drug users (the demand side).”
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“Yes, we massively ramped up drug arrests, prosecutions, and convictions. We filled our jails and prisons beyond capacity with people found guilty of drug crimes. We devastated many lower-income communities by putting so many people from them behind bars while simultaneously creating incentives for gang activity to thrive. We threw boatloads of money at enforcement, and enabled all sorts of crazy police-state schemes in service of this. We militarized police and poked a million holes in civil liberties.
We did not, however, end demand for drugs. We did not stamp out drug addiction and drug-related gang activity. We most emphatically did not win the drug war.
And we will not end demand for sex, nor stamp out sexual exploitation and sex-related crime, by repeating all of the drug war’s mistakes. But states like North Carolina seem intent on trying. ”