Witness them

There is a group of people who monitor deportation flights out of Boeing Field, and other airports.

Heroes witness fascists

The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies.

While news organizations have reported on some of these incidents aboard what the government calls ICE Air, key details about how the system works would still be hidden were it not for a group of researchers who are now part of the work inside the observation room.

The people and organizations behind these flights have been playing dumb for years — they don’t want to talk about them. They drive busses loaded with people right up to the boarding stairs for these planes; they position jailers and vehicles to obscure any view of the people being herded into the planes. They don’t want us to know about them.

The Washington human rights center’s investigation of ICE Air began in 2018 with a modest goal: to prove that deportation operations took place at King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is officially known. Liberal local officials had enacted various “sanctuary” policies to insulate their residents from then-President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, but they were unaware (or could at least claim to be unaware) of ICE flights at the county-owned airport. “They all played dumb,” said Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “All of them were like, ‘Wait, what, there are deportations happening here?’”

Yes, we know they are, thanks to dedicated defenders of civil liberties who try to monitor these flights.

The center began gathering documents that proved it, and also hinted at the worldwide breadth of ICE Air’s network. Their investigation grew. Through records requests to ICE, and after interventions by Washington’s congressional delegation, researchers obtained an ICE Air database spanning eight years of global operations: 1.73 million passenger records from nearly 15,000 flights to and from 88 U.S. airports — Boeing Field indeed among them — and to 134 international airports in 119 countries around the world.

Those dang liberals in Western Washington state began shutting off support to these flights, and ICE began getting even more secretive about them.

A game of cat and mouse had begun, pitting the Trump administration — and later the Biden administration — against local sanctuary advocates.

First, ICE switched locations. It began charter operations out of a municipal airport in the small city of Yakima, located in the farming region about three hours east of Seattle.

But activists began showing up at the Yakima airfield, recording tail numbers and keeping count of people being deported.

Second, ICE changed its flight numbering system. The human rights center had disclosed in its 2019 report that it used the federally assigned prefix “RPN-” for “repatriate” to plug information into free flight-tracking websites and obtain a plane’s tail number and ownership. So ICE dropped the “RPN-” and adopted the call signs of its various charter companies.

Wait a minute…if these flights are perfectly legal, why is ICE trying to hide them?

I repeat: WHY ANY SECRECY AT ALL?

And why does ICE only release strongly edited, even blurred, images of detainees on flights? It’s almost as if they think we might see some brutality.

The 97 videos ProPublica examined, ranging in length from 22 seconds to almost 3 minutes, show signs of careful framing and editing. While detainees are commonly shown climbing the steps in handcuffs and the waist chains that secure them, the videos often cut to a new shot before leg shackles can make an appearance. When leg shackles are visible, they are typically out of focus, discernible only if you know to look for them.

It is common on ICE Air to place passengers in five-point restraints — wrists, ankles, and waists in chains — even as the agency’s own statistics show that less than half of the people deported in 2023 had any kind of criminal conviction, let alone for serious felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.

What ICE’s online videos don’t show is revealing in its own right. In spring 2023, the center obtained a series of ICE Air incident reports detailing various accidents during charter operations, including the one in which a detainee in Alexandria, Louisiana, tumbled down the boarding stairs. Agency investigators recommended that contractors and subcontractors avoid such accidents in the future by placing a guard midway up the stairs to help detainees board and to catch any who lose their balance.

You will not be surprised that ICE has not bothered to place those guards, thanks to the diligent work of outside observers, documenting everything despite the best efforts of ICE to conceal them.

The flights continue. They will increase in numbers, if Republicans get their way.

But, you say, I am a native born American. I’m not at risk of deportation. Consider this: “A relatively overlooked set of companies whose shares have also seen stellar surges are the controversial American private prison firms. “

The immediate reading of the prison stock rally is that the Republicans have positioned themselves as ‘tough on crime’ – though former President Bill Clinton did much to bring the Democratic party to the game as well – meaning that the number of incarcerated persons under the Trump administration is likely to increase.

There are already about 1.9 million people in American prisons – about 0.5% of the U.S. population, estimated at 345 million in 2024 – per the data from the Prison Policy Initiative.

It is worth pointing out that the figure is comparable to incarceration rates in the USSR at the height of the infamous GULAG System. Adam Gopnik even wrote in 2012 that the U.S. has more people under ‘correctional supervision’ than the Soviet Union ever did.

(By the way, screw Bill Clinton, too.)

I think a clear sign of an expanding fascist state is the police hiding their activities, as well as an eager industry looking forward to building even more prisons.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

It was hard to get motivated this morning — Fridays are typically low attendance days in the classroom, and I had worked hard to get today’s topic condensed down into a lot of digestible information (we’re talking about the rediscovery of Mendel, the biometrician and Mendelians arguing with each other). I had a presentation that was pretty tight and I thought would help make the conflict comprehensible to a group of liberal arts majors, none of whom are biology majors.

So I get to class today, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had 80% attendance, which is kind of a miracle. I tell you, standing at the front of a classroom with only 3 students who don’t really appreciate the work you put in to the class is mighty depressing. So I was temporarily heartened that maybe this lecture wouldn’t go to waste, I fired up my laptop and the projector and got ready to tell this exciting story…and the projector is glitched out. It’s not connecting to anything, and is showing me a message that the projector and microphones were not receiving any data since 5:21pm yesterday. Isn’t technology nice that it has become so sophisticated that it can tell you precisely when it broke down?

I fumbled with it for about 15 minutes — that was the show today, watching the old geezer prof toggling switches and poking at a keyboard in front of the class, and seeing everything fail. I ended up giving up, giving them a brief oral summary of the history of biology from 1900-1915, telling them I’ll give them all the details on Monday, and sending them home early. So many smiles from the students! I didn’t tell them that I don’t find that encouraging at all.

Now I’m sitting in an empty classroom waiting for the IT people to show up. At least I can cheer myself up by thinking, hey, this isn’t the worst thing to happen this week.

The little things we can do

If all of us take little steps to deprive billionaires of some of their power, maybe we can eventually make them care about us little people. Here are some simple things that could make them sting a little bit.

  • Obviously, get off Twitter. There’s no excuse anymore — tweeting enables fascists.
  • Unsubscribe from any big, national newspapers. They’re all bought and paid for. Subscribe to a local paper. Alternatively, read The Guardian, it’s not American and it’s totally free.
  • No more books from Amazon. This one is going to be tough: we don’t have a real bookstore in town (the University Bookstore is a joke, selling only the necessary textbooks, and most of the floor is dedicated to t-shirts and souvenirs). The nearest bookstores are 45 minutes away, but I guess they’ll get more of my business. Here’s a good list of alternatives to Amazon. Added complication: Amazon has been buying up competing vendors aggressively.
  • Even better, use your local library.
  • Don’t buy anything else from Amazon. That’s difficult here in small town America, too — we rely so much on ordering things from Amazon because we can’t get them here. Huh…I wonder why local availability has been drying up?
  • Just generally buy local. It deprives the massive rich stores (which are usually owned by assholes) of money, and is better for the environment, too.
  • And finally, never ever vote for a Republican, no matter how nice they may be and how much they promise you.

Teeny tiny steps. It’s not much, but it’s a way for me to cope.

I grieve for my country

I lived for 8 years under President Ronald Reagan, a shallow, stupid, evil man who wrecked the economy and laughed as gay men, and others, died of AIDS, who made deals with our enemies to get elected, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.”

I lived for 8 years under President George W. Bush, a bumbling incompetent, a spoiled scion of Texan wealth, a man who got us into a wasteful, pointless war with the wrong country and killed over half a million people, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.”

Then I lived for 4 years under President Donald Trump, a narcissistic grifter, a rapist, a racist, a convicted felon, a misogynist, a man who promised to deport 20 million people, a demagogue who threatened vengeance on Americans who opposed him, a senile monster, and we re-elected him.

I am now wise enough to finally say, “It will get much, much worse.” We have the president the American people deserve.

My deepest apologies to the millions who will suffer and die in the near future.

I did the thing

I went to the polls as soon as they opened. Here in small town America, voting is painless — no lines, no problems, just instant service and quick gratification.

However, it did feel a bit grim and unsatisfying. I felt like I’d been sent out to stop a raging, drug-addled hippopotamus with a hatpin, and my vote was just the tiniest little pinprick. I’ll feel better about it if everyone gets out there with their individually ineffectual hatpin and stabs the beast to the heart. We can do it!

The perils of wokeness

The latest Stephanie Stirling video dropped a tantalizing mention. There exists something called a “woke content detector“, which is basically a small group of self-appointed censors who are busily telling everyone which video games are bad. Not particularly interesting, except that the criteria they use to decide which games are too woke are hilarious. They have a spreadsheet listing their reasoning.

Here are some examples of things that make a game unrecommended or too woke. These are things the censors consider bad.

  • “The Myplayer clothes shop features apparel with BLM slogans.”
  • “has Non-binary gender option”
  • “Features a diverse cast and LGBTQ+ characters”
  • “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them”
  • “POC soldiers on both sides”
  • “LGBTQ+ decorations/furniture, diverse students, students can enter same sex relationships”
  • “LGBTQ+ and diverse characters including a plus size POC queen”
  • “Pride flags displayed in the police station and fire station”
  • “Optional homosexual romance”
  • “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them. Homosexual and non-binary romance options”
  • “Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. ‘an environmental card strategy game with climate change as your opponent.'”
  • “Demonizes golfers and golf-courses by highlighting potentially negative environmental impacts of the sport”
  • “The player character is a woman with depression. Features a story about living with depression”
  • “Features a story about living with a disability”
  • “Features a story about a world where ‘climate change has made life hard'”
  • “Contains overtly anti-capitalism and anti-western society messaging”
  • “The player character is a WOC who can fix any antique. She immediately finds plenty of work in a town she has never been to before”
  • “Features a diverse cast of 1st gen immigrants to the USA. Features a female CEO of a green tech startup”

I’m impressed with the pettiness, and how they can be offended by just the existence of LGBTQ+, women, disabled people, pronouns, and decorative features that don’t affect the game. I’m amazed that anyone would want to play such culturally impoverished video games. Checkers is probably a safe game for them.

You will be relieved to know that “Alex Jones: NWO Wars” is recommended and has no woke content, so there are some games you can play.

Another day in my history of evolutionary thought class

Today I’m teaching a perilous topic: the eclipse of Darwinism. There was a period of several decades where you could make an honest intellectual argument against evolution, roughly from the time it was first published (1860) to the development of population genetics (say, roughly 1920). All the arguments since then are fundamentally garbage, but before then, some smart, reputable, qualified scientists did have sincere disagreements with the theory. Also there were some terrible arguments against Darwin, but I’m focusing on just the intelligent principled arguments.

One part of Darwin’s problem is that we have to admit that there were some gigantic holes in his theory — in particular, he didn’t have a good theory of inheritance. He tried to come up with one, his theory of pangenesis, which was a combination of Lamarckian and blending inheritance. It was wrong. It was also incompatible with his theory of evolution.

What I’ll be arguing, though, is that there was a greater problem than the flaws, and that was not that people were punching holes in The Origin. Good criticism is a treasured thing in science, and critical evaluation of an idea is essential to refining and improving it. Eventually, the people ripping on Darwin’s model of inheritance were going to produce a much more solid theory.

I’m going to make the somewhat controversial claim that the people who were burying evolution were the ones who were must uncritical and gung-ho about the idea — the ones who wholeheartedly embraced Darwinism, warts and all, and extended it in unproductive ways. That means that today I’m going to talk about two people who were disastrous to Darwinism while simultaneously acting as prominent cheerleaders for it.

So yeah, I’m going to rake a couple of historical figures over the coals, specifically Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. We’re going to discuss the positive claims of a couple of prominent 19th century boosters of evolution, and I’m going to make the case that their excesses were a contributing factor to the eclipse. Worse, their version of evolution was popular and persuasive and despite their rejection as good science, we’re still dealing with people who think recapitulation and “survival of the fittest” are great shorthand summaries of the principle of evolution.

The reading I’ve assigned for the week is this article, The Beauty and Violence of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrations, which is an extremely harsh condemnation of Haeckel’s views. “Haeckel’s visions of nature were less objective depictions of life and more projected notions about the proper ‘order’ of nature,” it says. I’m telling the students to read Haeckel critically and also to regard this article skeptically. I’m hoping maybe they’ll be provoked into good, vigorous debate in the classroom, and that they’ll put together some thoughtful essays on the topic.