ICEBlock and other crowd-sourced initiatives are now driving civil resistance to mass deportation

 Time covers ICEBlock with a really deceptive title:

The only person in the story how hates it is Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. You know Todd, he's the guy who defends having all of his agents wear masks, and who is fearmongering -- without presenting the slightest amount of evidence that ICE agents' children are now being targeted. (One reason for doubting this story is that WJBC, which first ran with it, has abruptly taken the post down. 

At any rate, the ICEBlock app is available through the Apple App Store. There is no Android version because the app is intentionally designed NOT to collect or save identifying user data, and you apparently can't do that on android:

Here's what the app does:

An American Police State is not in our future: It's already here ...

A lot of Trump/MAGA vs Hitler/NAZI comparisons are out there, increasingly focusing on very real parallels between mass deportation based on racial ideology and Jewish persecution/genocide, along with the creation of a massive prison/concentration camp complex across not only America, but extending into other nations.

While these comparisons are both accurate and useful to serve as recruiting tools for civil resistance, it's critical not to neglect the most important parallel between the United States under the second Trump administration and Germany once Hitler became first chancellor and then fuhrer, which is to say the process by which the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic was rapidly converted into the textbook example of the modern police state.

In order to examine this process, I wanted to go back to a description of the creation of the German police state that could not possibly be tied to the politics of today. What I used is Professor Brian Chapman's book "Police State," published as part of MacMillan's series "Key Concepts in Political Science" in 1970. That's right: Chapman's book even predates Watergate and the subsequent emergence of President Nixon's abuses. Chapman cannot be accused of presentism in his accounting of the key factors of the establishment of the Nazi police state because he was writing 55 years ago (and in the UK, as a matter of fact).

The Strange Case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's alleged human trafficking and corporate media's compliance in advance

PART ONE: Media compliance in advance

Let's begin with an essentially random image of headlines from my Google news aggregator regarding the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador's CECOT death camp to the United States:

Here's what you notice immediately: the use of the transitive "to." Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the overwhelming majority of headlines tell us, is being returned TO the United States FOR THE PURPOSE OF facing criminal charges of human trafficking. (Do your own search if you don't believe me that this is the standard formulation.)

Pay attention to what is not said, either in the headlines or the body of an overwhelming majority of the stories, including that ... (1) the Trump administration denied vociferously that it would ever return Abrego Garcia to America; (2) that his return was a way to get around charges that the administration had been refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling; and (3) that the narrative presented by Attorney General Pam Bondi regarding the investigation and charges does not hold water in even the slightest.