What the newly released JFK files reveal

Trump has ordered the release of a whole trove, over 80,000 pages, of formerly classified CIA and FBI documents purportedly dealing with the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963. The killing has been the source of endless conspiracy theories about who was responsible, throwing doubt on the official Warren Commission finding that it was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald working alone.

David Price has done a quick sampling of the documents and estimates that less than 20% of them deal with the actual events leading up to that day and those who are expecting bombshell revelations are going to be disappointed. However, he says that there is a lot on interesting information that is revealed about how the CIA (and FBI) operates because Trump has released information that is usually redacted.
[Read more…]

Choosing to rent instead of buying a home

In the US, owning one’s own home has always been portrayed as the ultimate dream and people strive to do so as soon as they have some kind of stability in terms of jobs and location. The equity in one’s home was portrayed as the best way to save for financial security and indeed for most people, the value of their home is their most substantial asset.

An owned home is typically the most valuable asset for U.S. homeowners. Black and Hispanic homeowners typically derive a higher share of their wealth from owned homes than White and Asian households.
…

In 2021, 62% of U.S. households lived in homes they owned as their primary residence. But homeownership is less common among Black, Hispanic and multiracial households. In 2021, 40% of Black households, 47% of Hispanic households and 45% of multiracial households owned their primary residence. In the same year, 70% of White households and 58% of Asian households lived in homes they owned.

But as the prices of homes have increased along with mortgage rates, that dream of homeownership has become increasingly elusive for many. Now people are beginning to question whether buying a home is even desirable.
[Read more…]

Successful immigrants seemingly always arrive with just $10

Former congresswoman Mia Love has died at the age of 49 of a brain tumor. She was the first Black Republican congresswoman elected to the House of Representatives.

She was the daughter of Haitian immigrants. In the story about her, this passage struck me.

Love said her parents immigrated to the US with $10 in their pocket and a belief that hard work would lead to success. She said she was raised to believe passionately in the “American dream” and “to love this country, warts and all”. America at its roots is respectful, resilient, giving and grounded in gritty determination, she said.

I see this trope of “my ancestors arrived in the US with just $10 in their pockets” in many stories about immigrants who later became successful. $10 seems to be the magic number, not more, not less.

TV review of Adolescence (2025) and incels and the manosphere

I just watched the four-part TV series Adolescence that has created quite a media splash. The show tells the story of a 13-year old boy Jamie who would come home from school and then spend all his time online on the computer in his room. The parents did not worry too much about this, seeing it as somewhat normal behavior, until he is charged with the knifing death of a classmate Katie. They are incredulous that he could have done this but, as the show unfolds, they discover that his world of peers in school and online has taken him down some dark roads. The parents, ordinary people who live ordinary lives and try to do their best to bring up their children well, wonder where and how they went wrong and how they could have missed all the signs that their son was being influenced by others who were feeding them ideas that led to dangerous feelings of inadequacy and grievance.

The show makes a point of noting how adults are oblivious to what is going on in the world of adolescents and even when they know, misread the signals. This is shown in a scene where the detective’s son tells the father that he is blundering ineffectively because he does not understand the nuances of emojis, and that those emojis that he thought showed a liking by Katie for Jamie were actually sarcastic.

It is Mascombe’s own son, Adam, (Amari Jayden Bacchus), a recalcitrant kid, Fredo’s favorite target, who gets his father to understand his own ignorance. “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it,” Adam explains. “You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.” He shows his father a comment that Katie posted on Jamie’s Instagram. “Looks like she’s being nice?” Actually, the boy explains, the emojis she uses are coded ways of denigrating Jamie, of calling him an incel. “Adolescence” lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made.

[Read more…]

You have no rights when trying to enter the US

My post about how badly visitors to the US are treated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the US, with them being sent to detention centers and kept in prison-like conditions without access to lawyers and other contacts, may have prompted questions in readers minds about exactly what rights they have when trying to enter the US. The answer is: not much. This article describes what can happen. There are a whole array of scenarios that can unfold depending on the type of visa you have and the mood of the ICE agents processing you.

The reason that you have almost no rights is because being on the ground in the US but before you are allowed by ICE to pass through immigration means that you are in a kind of no-man’s-land where the laws do not apply.

“If you’re a foreign national, first understand you haven’t affected an entry despite being physically on US soil until you’re admitted properly,” said immigration attorney Michael Wildes, managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.

“It’s a term of art when you’re admitted fully to the United States,” he said. When a person lands on US soil but is not technically admitted, “you might be considered to be what’s called an ‘arriving alien’.

“You have greater rights as a criminal than as a foreign national coming with a visa.”

[Read more…]

Finding cause and time of death is messy

The story about Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa has thrown up new complications.

A private healthcare clinic in New Mexico has cast doubt on official findings about the timing of the death of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, claiming that she rang them on 12 February – the day after police say she died.
…

Postmortem results indicated that Arakawa died of hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne respiratory disease, on 11 February, a week before her husband is believed to have died from heart disease. His pacemaker showed no activity after 18 February; he is also believed to have suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
…

Dr Child cast further doubt on the official cause of death of his clinic’s prospective client, saying: “I am not a hantavirus expert but most patients who have that diagnosis die in hospital. It is surprising that Mrs Hackman spoke to my office on the phone on 10 February and again on 12 February and didn’t appear in respiratory distress.

A Los Angeles-based doctor told the Mail on Sunday: “Respiratory failure is not sudden – it is something that worsens over several days. Most people get admitted to the ER [emergency room] because they are having trouble breathing. It’s exceedingly rare for a seemingly healthy 65-year-old to drop dead of it. In fact, no one’s heard of such a thing.”

[Read more…]

Exposé of Facebook

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, has written a best-seller Careless People that describes her former employer as having a culture that is pretty much what you would expect from one run by tech bros.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

[Read more…]

Trump gang’s message to other countries: We don’t want your people here

Jasmine Mooney is a Canadian who got caught in the nightmare that is run by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and held for nearly two weeks in appalling conditions because of a slight suspected irregularity in her visa documentation. Even though she offered to buy a ticket to return to Canada, they moved her around to various harsh detention detentions before finally releasing her. She has now written about her experience.

Many people from other parts of the world are treated like dirt by ICE agents. Why I have chosen to highlight her particular story is for three reasons. One is that if a young, white, fairly affluent, Canadian woman could be treated like this, one can only shudder at what poor people of color from other countries experience. The second is that she can write in the first person in English and that makes her story more compelling and accessible to English speakers than others. The third is that while she was shuttled around the various detention centers, she spoke with other women she was herded with and wrote about their stories. What emerges is that many of them were seized and imprisoned for minor visa irregularities but treated as if they were dangerous criminals.
[Read more…]

People are really mad at Musk

Since they cannot get to him since he lives in the cocoon that all rich people can put around themselves, they are going after Teslas.

The Las Vegas police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are investigating a blaze set at Tesla showroom as potential terrorism. The FBI is probing at least three other incidents of Molotov cocktails hurled at Tesla facilities since January, including one in Kansas City, Missouri, that took place on the same night as the alleged arson in Nevada.

In Las Vegas, in the middle of the night on Tuesday, a cluster of Tesla vehicles were set on fire as they sat in a lot at a Tesla collision center, according to the Las Vegas metropolitan police department. Security cameras caught a person dressed in all black tossing what appeared to be Molotov cocktails into the vehicles at approximately 2.45am.
[Read more…]