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.

President Trump flees from his own promises on Ukraine -- and his MAGA followers cheer

ALTHOUGH THIS IS NOT SURPRISING, IT IS INDICATIVE OF HOW REPUBLICAN STATECRAFT AND MAGA DELUSIONS INTERACT

Possibly no promise except lowering the price of eggs became more of a Donald Trump signature line than his posturing on the Ukraine war:

////Former President Donald Trump said if reelected he would end the war in Ukraine before his inauguration because he is respected by Ukraine and Russia’s leaders.

////“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,” the Republican said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. If I win, when I’m president-elect and what I’ll do is I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other, I’ll get them together.”

////“I know Zelenskyy very well and I know Putin very well. I have a good relationship and they respect your president, O.K., they respect me, they don’t respect Biden.”////

It's completely unsurprising that he's been backing away from that since day one as well, with my personal favorite idiotic lie coming about a month ago:

////“Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that,” Trump said in a clip released ahead of the episode airing Sunday. “What I really mean is I’d like to get it settled and, I’ll, I think, I think I’ll be successful.”////

At the end of March, CNN published a timeline of the Trump administration reeling backward from his words, which could have been subtitled, "President Trump learns that neither Putin nor Zekenskyy actually respects him."

Now, predictably, comes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took time off from his daily masturbabory quest for foreigners who said something he doesn't like to announce that the United States is about to dump the entire enterprise:

////“We are now reaching a point where we need to decide whether this is even possible or not,” Rubio told reporters upon departure. “Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on.”

////“It’s not our war,” Rubio said. “We have other priorities to focus on.” He said the U.S. administration wants to decide “in a matter of days.”////

This was, of course, inevitable, but there's an aspect of the situation that deserves closer attention: how successfully the Trump administration has been in terms of undermining pro-Ukraine legislators in his own party.

Why the US military cannot suppress the protests of millions of people ...

Washington DC Summer of 2020: Calling in the National Guard does not
always work out the way the government plans.

Sending troops into the streets -- regardless of the issue -- is always trying to solve a political problem with a military solution, which is why you tend to see it done most often by authoritarian governments.

But there is a specific calculus for that: authoritarians try to move in fast, crush dissent quickly, ruthlessly, and publicly to strike terror in the hearts of those who might consider joining the protests because ...

Even authoritarians know the 3.5% rule, as noted by the Harvard Kennedy School:

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

"In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands."

In a country of 340 million people like the US, this means that we need 12 million people in the streets, protesting non-violently, and sustained for multiple continuous days -- in effect an ongoing general strike to topple the government (we can discuss the mechanics of that later).

It turns out that while this will be a big challenge for the various organizations like Indivisible or the 50501 Movement, achieving that over the next few months is far from impossible, and there is surprisingly little the government can do to stop it with force.

We are not here because of Donald Trump; Donald Trump is here because we created the conditions for him to emerge

We are too conditioned to see history in terms of changes rather than continuity.

The political narratives of the day represent the rubble that the historian or political scientist has to clear away in order to reconstruct what really happened. Those reconstructions are often so painful that, instead of being examined by the public and policymakers, they are often completely rejected in favor of a reinforced narrative of "good vs evil" in zero-sum game politics.

Here are two end points for you, from an historian's point of the terminus a quo (beginning point) and terminus a quem (ending point, or, in our case, today):

The real beginning point is between 1948 - 1951, but that would make zero sense to you without a detour through 1968, because that's where most people's major historical misconception about American politics begins.

The 1960s are, of course, famous for the counter-culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, urban riots, and LBJ's extension of the New Deal welfare state. We look back on that as an era of protest, rock music, long hair, and weed. It was, in fact, a year of worldwide social protest and calls for revolution.

It gave birth -- in the eyes of many social commentators -- to the transition from Cold War America to what is often called the "liberal consensus" about human rights (evolved from FDR's "Four freedoms"), the role of the State, and the necessity for even greater democracy. (If you are interested in learning more about the exact nature of the revised social contract that formed this liberal consensus, you cannot do better than the first chapter of Matthew J. Costello's Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.)

But here's the ugly little secret: the liberal consensus and the social revolution in America was a mile wide and an inch deep. The reality is that the majority of American citizens -- especially white American citizens -- were always significantly more conservative than our popular political narratives suggest.

Most of what you think you know about the presidential election 1968 is wrong.

This can be fully documented, but I am going to give you one overwhelming example to prove my point: the Presidential election of 1968, which pitted Republican former VP Richard Nixon against Democratic VP Hubert Humphrey and the insurgent independent campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace.

On the freedom of information

Millions of us purchase ebooks through Amazon Kindle.

Most do not realize that the terms of service for Amazon Kindle permit Jeff Bezos to: 

(a) not only track your purchases but your reading (it's partly how I, as an author, gets paid, but it obviously has other uses);

(b) Amazon can literally yank any book out of your library at any moment without warning; what you purchase with Kindle is not the content but access to the content only;

(c) Amazon can literally edit/change the contents of any book at any time you sync your library and you CANNOT go back to the old version. I use this, as an author, to correct typos and small errors in my own books, but I have a friend who literally rewrote a character arc in one of his own books -- in a way I hated -- and I could never get back to the old one).

Plus, under the Patriot Act, Amazon complies with any and all government requests for information.

Except for my escapist reading of a few authors, I have stopped acquiring books on Kindle, but Facebook would not let me tell you about my alternative.

It's this: Anna's Archive. Anna's literally is 

the largest truly open library in human history. ⭐️ We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 📈 42,295,586 books, 36,486,718 papers — preserved forever. All our code and data are completely open source.

You do not have to purchase a membership to try it out, just select Slow Download #1 as your download option. The only thing slow is that it will give you a wait time of up to 5-6 minutes to start your download. If you like it, then I would recommend a membership.

Most books are available in  multiple file types -- epub, pdf, mobi, etc. -- but if one isn't there are any number of cheap, simple eBook converter apps out there.

I used to use libgen, but it is constantly under attack, and on any given day it can take you 10-15 minutes to figure out what mirror sites are working. Anna's, so far, has been stable, although I am sure it will come under attack at some point. And then we will adapt again.

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