Here's another European tourist detained indefinitely, confirmed by UK officials:

https://bsky.app/profile/jenniferlcroft.bsky.social/post/3ljxjdhfv4s22

Becky Burke was on a 4-month holiday in Mexico, the US and Canada.  She stayed with a host family in Portland, then travelled to the Vancouver border for a stay with another family in Canada.  The Canadians refused entry, claiming doing chores for the host family constituted illegally working.  When they returned her to the US side, ICE arrested her and shipped her to Tacoma, where she's been detained ever since the end of February.

US law specifies that no-one may be detained more than 48 hours in the normal course of events, and are guaranteed legal representation.  Once again, where's the ACLU?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80y3yx1jdyo for the BBC take on this.  Immigration says they first offer the arrestee the option of returning to their home country; Ms Burke wanted to return to her home country; what's going on?

At this point, do not come to the US unless you have a US passport. You may be detained for any reason, and detention may be indefinite.

Heard this morning about the legal resident Palestinian picked up and imprisoned by ICE for his pro-Palestine work during the protests at Columbia University last year.  The pretext is working with a known terrorist organization, Hamas, which is on its face bogus; the protest was against the Israeli response, not for the Hamas atrocities preceding it.  Where is free speech, where is having to prove a case of collusion or support?  We understand: the administration is determined to use state violence against regular people, to promote fear and reinforce the instinct to stay in line, while they execute on their corrupt agenda. That should mean we make a loud and public case against it when we see it.

This has got to be right in the ACLU wheelhouse, but as I noted before, no way to contact them electronically, no news on their site showing they are aware of the situation (same for the previous case I mentioned, btw).  Columbia admin should be all over this, too, with the cooperation of the ACLU and most significantly with Senator and Leader of the Loyal Opposition Chuck Schumer, within whose district this action was carried out and who, by virtue of his being Jewish, can legitimately make the free speech point without being accused of partisanship.  Hold a hearing in Congress, or on the steps outside! Invoke habeas corpus! Make the thugs prove their case!

UPDATE: I got a call back from a volunteer two days later.  He assured me they were on the case, urged me to keep on top of what was happening by monitoring their news feed, and said they'd been really busy trying to stay on top of all the requests that were coming in.  Good.

I discovered this in a Cory Doctorow blog post the other day, and went and investigated further.  And today, it showed up again when my wife came home from work early and told me about her day.

https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/

As the article notes,

"The next time you encounter an apparently outdated tradition, pause and compassionately ask why it first arose before demanding its demolition."  Good advice, for prospective Muck-o-vites.

I read about a situation involving a German tourist and a privately-held ICE facility, where she's being held indefinitely.  I wanted to contact the ACLU and make sure they had this on their radar and were doing something about it; I've been donating to them monthly since the Patriot Act was introduced with Bush Junior, and I want to know that they're listening.

Their website is atrocious.  Lots of opportunities to buy things, including swag (!) with their logo on it, up my donation (popups galore), propagandistic images of patriotic looking young people with flags and banners.  But no email address.

A link to subsidiaries by state, so I found the one for SoCal.  Attempting to email them through the address info@aclusocal.org results in an "undeliverable" returned message in my own Inbox.  I finally found a usable (I think) address for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and sent my message.

I hope this incompetence isn't representative of their actual function.  If I ever need them, I'm going to want more than photos, slogans, swag and opportunities to donate even more money.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/trumps-war-on-constitutional-democracy/

Nice, clear exposition of the heart of the issue.  There's a followup diagnosing the changes to the international situation, too.  Cuts through the noise from an overseas perspective.

I read that the federal government is intending to exclude its own expenditure from official GDP numbers, to make them look better.  Media might treat this as a call to henceforth treat all our federal information sources as propaganda as they would from suspect foreign government official sources.  If they don’t already, given the sorry history preceding the invasion of Iraq after 9/11.  Unfortunately, this includes formerly trustworthy sources such as NOAA hurricane warnings, now subject to manipulation to avoid recognition of climate change effects.

Hmm. Time to resurrect occupy?  Sit-ins in Tesla showrooms?  In Trump hotels?  In Amazon facilities?  In federal buildings, like national park service offices?

— Read on the.ink/p/anat-shenker-osorios-actual-plan

I didn’t watch, I read the transcript. Lots of useful stuff in there, specifically:

– do, don’t make appeals for reps to do. Wear the shirt. Carry the sign. Show up at the council meeting and say something. The loyal opposition is dysfunctional.

– the message is “bullies taking over the government for the billionaires so they can steal our money.”, according to the article. Overly simplistic, direct and to the point, so everybody gets it.  I think it’s the wrong message.  I’d say “mafia don taking over the government and turning it into a patronage fiefdom with himself at the top, with the willing cooperation of billionaires who think this will be in their best interest”.

Last weekend I had an idea.  I saw video of Palestinians setting up ragged tents in their former homes in North Gaza, where they are going to live while they get on with rebuilding their homes.  I thought, I know a company, Pallet, in Everett that makes shelters way better than those tents.  They build flat pak villages of small units, some for sleeping, some for cooking and eating, some for showering and using the bathroom.  They ship them to a site, and set them up with nothing more than a screwdriver and a socket set.  They provide temperature controlled comfortable functional pods for families to live together while getting their lives sorted: meeting with counselors, getting off drugs, getting into social support programs.  These pods are way better than the crap tents I was looking at.

Of course, this company is not in a position to manufacture and ship units for 1M people on the other side of the world.  But, also in Everett, there’s a company that is: Boeing.  They’ve done it before.  With the right incentive, they could build a line, take the Pallet designs and crank them out, airfreight or ship them to the coast of Israel. They’d need money, and an army of people.

Money’s not the issue, there’s tons of money floating around.  Who knows how to ship, distribute, set up all these things, and has an army of people?  The UN.  And coincidentally one of the more senior UN people is someone from Auckland, New Zealand, who clearly knows who the right people would be to get an initiative like this happening.

Turns out the ex-CEO of Boeing lives right on Whidbey.  I know half a dozen ex Boeing employees.  I know people in New Zealand who could talk to Helen Clark.  This is totally doable.

I talked to everyone I know.  And they all pushed back.  Within a few days I understood that, while this is clearly a fixable problem from an engineering point of view, it wasn’t going to be fixed by someone like me, or by anyone I know.

Dave Winer’s editor.  If he’s right, it’s a way out of the Twitterverse, for those who need it.