The threat posed by masked law enforcement

There have been a vast number of news stories and videos of masked plain clothes ICE agents going around in unmarked cars and grabbing people, striking terror with this death squad-like behavior. Astonishingly, the attorney general Pam Bondi claims that she is unaware of this practice.

The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.

Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.

“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”

Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.

Yes, she has the nerve to claim that the federal agents who are terrorizing ordinary people are the real victims and scared. Law enforcement officer have long had their names and badges visible so why are ICE agents so scared? It is because they know that they are doing wrong. They are probably ashamed to have their friends and neighbors know what they are doing.
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Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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Great moments in legislation

The Republican controlled legislature of Louisiana has passed a bill that bans what they call ‘chemtrails’, the sinister sounding label given to contrails (short for condensation trails) that form, if the atmospheric conditions are right, when hot, humid air from the plane’s jet engines mixes with the cold, dry air of the upper atmosphere, causing the formation of ice crystals. 

Louisiana is not alone. Seven other states have passed similar bills.

Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.
…

Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.

At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.

While there are no penalties for violations, the bill calls for further investigation and documentation. Opponents fear it could be used to force airlines to re-route flights, challenge the location of airports and bring legal action against carriers.

There are many outlandish things that people believe and this may be one of the more harmless ones. But unlike many other wacky conspiracy theories, (like the moon lading being faked or alien spacecraft having crashed to Earth), this one requires a vast number of people to be involved, as this critic notes

In order to undertake such a conspiracy, literally tens of thousands of people across the globe would have to be in on it, including people manufacturing the fictional weather control chemicals and dispersing equipment, the baggage handlers standing there while the fake technicians are loading it into planes, pilots, plane mechanics, air traffic controllers, and political leaders of countries that don’t like each other. That’s not even considering the untold thousands of red-tape loving, approval stamp wielding bureaucrats needed to undertake such a feat.

But once you have swallowed the big idea, all these other things are seen as just minor details.

The moves to stop Zohran Mamdani have begun

The win by Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoralty Democratic primary has provided a much needed boost to the spirits of progressives everywhere and stunned political observers. Andrew Cuomo, with nearly $30 million dollars donated by wealthy people, had been comfortably in the lead until Mamdani started making gains in the closing weeks. Mamdani’s supporters had been hopeful of pulling off an upset win but even they expected it to be a drawn out affair, with Cuomo likely leading at the end of the first round of counting and Mamdani hoping to pull ahead with the second and lower preference votes of the other candidates, especially those of Brad Lander, who came in third. Few expected to have Cuomo concede as early as 10:00pm on election night.

It is astonishing that the Democratic party establishment decided that the candidate they would back should be a 69-year year old disgraced former governor who was forced to resign due to allegations of sexual harassment. Even after the election, party leaders like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries have refrained from endorsing Mamdani. That shows how stuck they are in their old mindset, that they cannot not see that their time is over. But on the other hand, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez strongly backed him all through the campaign, and Jerry Nadler, a New York congressman and one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders, endorsed Mamdani after the election, though not before.
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The dangerous practice of subway surfing

Just when I thought that the needless risks that some people take for thrills could not get any crazier, along comes news of something called ‘subway surfing’. This is a phenomenon spurred by social media, where people climb onto to the roofs of subway cars and stand while the cars move. As you can imagine, this can, and does, sometimes end in tragedy when they fall off.

Jaida Rivera’s 11-year son, Cayden, was supposed to be in school at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene preparatory academy on the morning of 16 September last year. Staff saw him in the cafeteria after his grandmother dropped him off at 7.45am.

But 30 minutes later he was marked as absent. Cayden had somehow slipped out, boarded a G subway train traveling south and was riding on top of one of its carriages when he fell on to the tracks at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station just after 10.00am. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The boy was the youngest of six to die subway surfing in New York City last year – a highly dangerous practice of balancing on top of the swift-moving subway trains as they rattle through the city. It is typically attempted in Brooklyn and Queens, where New York’s subways often run aboveground, and typically in warmer months when schools are in session – suggesting that it has become a dangerous type of after-school activity often spurred by social media cachet.

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MAGA loses its mind over Mamdani win

They have seized on the fact that the New York mayoral Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim to release their ugliest anti-Muslim sentiments.

In a series of posts, conservative social media personality Laura Loomer wrote “New York City will be destroyed,” Muslims will start “committing jihad all over New York” and that “NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”

If elected in November, Mamdani would become the first Muslim mayor in New York City’s history. And while many conservatives have criticized Mamdani’s progressive policies, others have taken aim at Mamdani for his religion.

“24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11,” conservative activist Charlie Kirk posted on X, referencing the number of people killed in New York. “Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.”

“New York City has fallen,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote, quoting a post by Michael Malice about when New Yorkers “endured 9/11 instead of voting for it.”

“After 9/11 we said ‘Never Forget.’ I think we sadly have forgotten,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) posted on X Wednesday, accompanied by a photo of Mamdani.

For these people, every single Muslim is a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer. Disgusting.

Finally, a bit of good news

The Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani seems to be on track to win the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City, defeating former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

After 91% of votes were counted in the primary’s first round, Mamdani, a state representative, had 43.5% of the vote. Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who had been a heavy favorite until recent weeks, was at 36.4%, and conceded on Tuesday night. Speaking at a campaign rally Cuomo said Mamdani had run a “really smart and good and impactful campaign”.

“Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won,” Cuomo said. Brad Lander, the progressive New York comptroller, was third with 11.4%.

New York City uses a ranked-choice voting system, and as neither candidate is likely to reach 50%, the board of elections will now tally people’s second-choice candidates. Mamdani, who cross-endorsed with Lander last week, is predicted to benefit more than Cuomo from the count.

Mamdani’s stunning rise will serve as a rebuke to the Democratic establishment, and give hope to other progressives hoping to run in elections around the country. Cuomo was backed by deep pocketed donors and endorsed by a wave of centrist figures including Bill Clinton, but Mamdani benefitted from a surge of grassroots support among young people in particular.

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Texas lottery controversy

In the US, lotteries are a big business, raising huge revenues for state governments. But recently, here has been a controversy over the Texas state lottery.

There are various versions of the lottery but the one that gives out the biggest prize is where you pick six numbers from 1 through 54, with no number being repeated. If the drawing throws up that particular combination, then you win. The odds of winning are easy to calculate. The number of permutations of six numbers with none repeated is 18,595,558,800 (=54x53x52x51x50x49). Since the order of the numbers does not matter, there are 720 combinations that are equivalent (=6x5x4x3x2x1). Hence the number of possible results is the first number divided by the second, which gives 25,827,165. Since it costs $1 to pick a set of six, in theory if you buy one ticket for every possible combination, thus spending $25,827,165, you are guaranteed to win.

The catch is that the prize is usually less than that amount. A second problem is that if more than one person picks the same combination, then the prize gets split between the winners. A third problem is the sheer logistics of buying so many tickets, because the tickets are printed out by machines at various locations like convenience stores.
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