On the border

A report from Bloomberg , found on Chuck Darwin’s Mastodon account (@cdarwin@c.im), is pretty chilling.

MANY years ago (1972?), we were stopped somewhere between Eagle Pass and Austin, TX, for no apparent reason… this will be much worse.

https://c.im/@cdarwin/113541904712837850

Here’s what Chuck said:

In the “border zone,” different legal standards apply.
🆘Agents can enter private property, set up highway checkpoints,
have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations
—and can even use race and ethnicity as factors to do so.
That’s striking because
the border zone is home to 65.3 percent of the entire U.S. population,
and around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population,
according to a CityLab analysis based on data from location intelligence company ESRI.
This zone, which hugs the entire edge of the United States and runs 100 air miles inside, includes some of the densest cities
—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
It also includes all of Michigan and Florida, and half of Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a prior rough analysis by Will Lowe, a data scientist at MIT.
(Border Patrol considers the boundary of the Great Lakes to be the “functional equivalent” of the border, per government documents revealed in an ACLU lawsuit.
Elsewhere, too, the agency interprets the international boundary in a way that concerns the ACLU.)
🔥“It really is kind of a constitution-free zone,”
says Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst who has been compiling data on border patrol’s internal checkpoints at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank.
🆘 “I guess the best way to phrase it is that in this area, [border patrol agents] are being allowed to nullify people’s rights.”
According to critics, checkpoints and other internal operations in the 100-mile zone aren’t serving their intended purpose:
Just 2 percent of CBP’s total arrests of deportable non-citizens happened at checkpoints.
And since 2010, far more people who had legal status and weren’t eligible for deportation were arrested this way.
Meanwhile,
💥individuals in this zone
—citizen or otherwise
—are at risk of having their Fourth Amendment rights violated by border patrol, critics say.

Note well that last paragraph. We were a carload of four Anglos, and we got stopped.

#Persist
#Resist
#StopSayingMandate
#TrumpEtAliaDelendaEst

American Health… Care?

And this is what awaits me in the next phase of my journey…

“How Lincare Cashed In on the Disastrous Recall of Philips Breathing Machines — at the Expense of Patients”

… longish read, but eye-opening. Once again, it all comes down to money.

#Persist
#Resist
#StopSayingMandate
#TrumpEtAliaDelendaEst

Act 3, scene 2 … it’s curtains time

The lady doth protest too much, methinks…

I voted for Joe and Kamala. I voted for Kamala

But I did so knowing that we might wind up on the wrong side of history if the US continued to pursue its policies towards Palestine and Israel. What is outrageous is that Americans, in particular, do not understand the difference between being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.

For that matter, my experience living in Germany taught me that they, too, have a similar problem. And now the EU has a problem.

No, Joe, what is outrageous is what the slaughter and genocide that the US continues. And we aren’t doing nearly enough to stop it.

#Persist
#Resist
#StopSayingMandate
#TrumpEtAliaDelendaEst