Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist

Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.

In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)

Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.

The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.

Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)

Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?

Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.

As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.

Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.

As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.

Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.

Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?

Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.

But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.

Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.

You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.

Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?

Osman: Yeah.

Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?

Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.

My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.

In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)

Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —

Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”

When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.

In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.

Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.

But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.

Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.

But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.

My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.

My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)

Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.

Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.

The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.

Cottle: That’s my goal.

Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?

That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.

And that feels like a revolutionary act.

by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse.  I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]

I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me.

“Please hold,” the caller said, “while I transfer you to my supervisor.”

It was a Wednesday in August, a little before lunch. The call came from a 212 number, which for a New Yorker could be almost anything — the school, the pharmacy, the roof guy — so I answered.

The caller asked for me by name and stated in measured tones that he was from Chase Bank and he wanted to verify transfers being made from my account to someone in Texas.

Wrong number, I said. I don’t have a Chase account.

But one was recently opened in your name, he replied, with two Zelle transfers. And minutes ago, someone tried to transfer those funds, $2,100, to San Antonio.

Now, this carried the whiff of plausibility. I’m one of some 150 million people who have access to Zelle, the payments platform that lets you send and receive money from your phone. But my scam radar was also fully operational and pinging.

“How do I know this isn’t a scam?” I asked, sounding like that guy in every movie who asks an undercover cop if he’s a cop.

He had a quick answer. Look at the number showing on your phone and Google it, he replied. “Now look up the Chase branch at 3 Times Square,” he instructed. “See the office phone number?” I did, and it matched the one on my phone’s screen.

Then he added, “Here at Chase, we’ll never ask for your personal information or passwords.” On the contrary, he gave me more information — two “cancellation codes” and a long case number with four letters and 10 digits.

That’s when he offered to transfer me to his supervisor. That simple phrase, familiar from countless customer-service calls, draped a cloak of corporate competence over this unfolding drama. His supervisor. I mean, would a scammer have a supervisor?

The line went mute for a few seconds, and a second man greeted me with a voice of authority. “My name is Mike Wallace,” he said, and asked for my case number from the first guy. I dutifully read it back to him.

“Yes, yes, I see,” the man said, as if looking at a screen. He explained the situation — new account, Zelle transfers, Texas — and suggested we reverse the attempted withdrawal.

I’m not proud to report that by now, he had my full attention, and I was ready to proceed with whatever plan he had in mind. 

Internet fraud has grown steadily, with 2024 setting new record-high losses — “a staggering $16.6 billion,” the F.B.I.’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center wrote in a recent report. These crimes include elaborate cryptocurrency schemes and ransomware attacks on entire cities, but phishing and spoofing — the cloning of an actual phone number — still lead the list of some 860,000 complaints last year.

Are these scams entering some sort of improved, 2.0 version of the old-school Nigerian-prince-type setup?

“I wouldn’t call it an improvement,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York offices of the F.B.I. “It’s an adaptation. As the public becomes more aware of schemes, they need to adjust.”

The man claiming to be a Chase supervisor asked me to open Zelle. Where it says, “Enter an amount,” he instructed me to type $2,100, the amount of the withdrawals he was going to help me reverse.

Then, in the “Enter phone number or email” window — where the other party in a Zelle transaction goes — he instructed me to type the case number the first caller had given me, but to leave out the four letters. Numbers only. I dutifully entered the 10 digits, but my skepticism was finally showing up.

“Mr. Wallace,” I said, somewhat apologetically. “This case number sure looks like a phone number, and I’m about to send that number $2,100.”

No, he replied, because of this important next step. In the window that says “What’s this for? ” where you might add “babysitter” or “block party donation,” he told me to enter a unique code that would alert his team that this transaction should be reversed.

It was incredibly long, and he read it out slowly — “S, T, P, P, six, seven, one, two …” — and I typed along. Now and then he even threw in some military-style lingo: “… zero, zero, Charlie, X-ray, nine, eight …”

Once we were done, he had me read the whole 19-character code back to him.

Now, he said, press “Send.”

But one word above the “What’s this for?” box containing our special code with the X-ray and the Charlie kept bothering me: “Optional.”

Then I had an idea, and asked the supervisor if he was calling from 3 Times Square. Yes, he said.

I’ll come to you, I said, and we’ll fix this together.

By then it will probably be too late, he said.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and he said that would be fine, and I hung up.

I called my bank and confirmed what I’d come to suspect. There had been no recent Zelle activity.

My jaw dropped when I went back and looked at my call history. Sixteen minutes — that’s how long they had me on the line.

In decades as a crime reporter, I’ve covered many, many scams — psychic scams, sweetheart swindles, real-estate scams, even the obscure “nanny scam,” where a fake mother reaches out to a young caregiver to try to rip her off.

I should be able to spot a scam in under 16 seconds, I thought — but 16 minutes?

I wanted to know why this scam seemed to work so much better than others.

by Michael Wilson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jordan Speer/Chase

Already Pardoned, Jan. 6 Rioters Push for Compensation

The rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, secured a shocking double victory this year.

President Trump granted them clemency for their crimes on his first day back in the White House, and in the months that followed, he allowed his Justice Department to purge many of the federal agents and prosecutors who sought to hold them accountable.

But even though the president has given the rioters their freedom and has taken steps toward satisfying their desire for retribution, they are asking for more. In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.

On Thursday, one of the lawyers, Mark McCloskey, said during a public meeting on social media that he had recently met with top officials at the Justice Department and pitched them on a plan to create a special panel that would dole out financial damages to the rioters — much like the arrangement of a special master to award money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The panel, which Mr. McCloskey called a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee,” would consider rioters’ cases individually, he said, then assign them sums according to harms they had purportedly suffered at the hands of the federal government.

Mr. McCloskey said that he wanted the panel to be overseen by Jeanine Pirro, who runs the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington that took the lead in filing charges against nearly 1,600 rioters who joined in the Capitol attack.

“The only thing I can do as your lawyer,” he told the rioters who were at the online meeting, “is to turn your losses into dollar bills.” (...)

Mr. McCloskey, who rose to prominence five years ago after he pointed an AR-15-style rifle at social justice protesters outside his home in St. Louis, has been leading the efforts to secure restitution for the rioters since at least March, when he announced that he and another lawyer, Peter Ticktin, a former classmate and longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, were planning to sue the government. (...)

During the online meeting last week, Mr. McCloskey acknowledged that he and Mr. Ticktin had also run into “significant difficulties” in pursuing legal action on behalf of the rioters.

He acknowledged that there could be problems following through on his initial plan to file cases under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows individuals to sue the government for injuries caused by federal employees. He also said it could be challenging to overcome the two-year statute of limitations on bringing tort claims against the government for things that happened nearly five years ago.

But Mr. McCloskey assured the rioters that they had allies inside Mr. Trump’s Justice Department. Chief among them, he said, was Ed Martin, who runs the so-called weaponization working group, a body that was created to investigate those who investigated Jan. 6 and other people whom Mr. Trump perceives to be his enemies.

“He’s 100 percent on our side,” Mr. McCloskey said of Mr. Martin.

Mr. Trump’s grant of clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants was one of the most remarkable uses of presidential mercy in modern history. But also remarkable is the extent to which many of the rioters have remained unsatisfied by the measure, as well as by the subsequent firings and demotions of more than two dozen federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who worked on Capitol riot cases.

On Saturday, for example, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was freed by Mr. Trump from a 22-year prison term stemming from Jan. 6, posted what amounted to a list of demands to the administration in a social media message. Among the things he called for were compensation for the rioters “for their suffering and that of their families” and the firing of “everyone involved” in the riot cases.

“If this isn’t done,” Mr. Tarrio wrote, “we will all hang together.”

On Sunday, another rioter, Ryan Nichols, a former Marine who was sentenced to more than five years in prison for joining a crowd that shoved at officers in a tunnel outside the Capitol, doubled down on his attacks against the police in a post on social media.

“I’d do it again given the same situation,” Mr. Nichols said of attacking officers. “They attacked Americans and killed innocent protesters.” He added that “we should have” dragged foes “through the streets.” (...)

One rioter, Shane Jenkins, who was sentenced to 84 months in prison for assaulting an officer and shattering a window at the Capitol with a tomahawk on Jan. 6, spoke during the online meeting and captured the spirit of loss and disillusionment that many of the pardoned defendants seem to feel.

Mr. Jenkins compared the rioters to the biblical story of the Israelites who were enslaved and then released by God from bondage in Egypt, only to roam for decades through the desert.

“Through Trump, God pardoned us and set us free, right?” Mr. Jenkins said. “Well, then what did they do? They wandered around the desert for 40 years and I don’t think very many of them got to see the Promised Land.”

“I just feel,” he went on, “like that’s kind of where we’re at right now.”

by Alan Feuer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
[ed. Missed this bit of stupidity when it came out but the smell eventually became unavoidable (like stepping on a dog turd). Courts already sent these assholes to the Promised Land once, but the Don broke them free. Now this is the thanks he gets? Speaking of stupidity (so much, so little time) remember the Cracker Barrel 'controversy' a few weeks ago? Conservative cancel culture (CCC, not KKK, although...) went apoplectic over corporate wokeness, old time values and something or other. In a logo. Anyway, ever wonder how and why this became a thing? Here you go (WSJ) - Sardar Biglari, activist investor, competitor, hedge fund manager with an axe to grind and an army of credulous MAGA idiots. Truth doesn't stand a chance these days. See also: Sure, Let’s Try Bribes! (Atlantic):]

***

Last year Tom Homan, the border czar, was allegedly recorded accepting $50,000 in cash in a bag (specifically, a bag from CAVA, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain) from undercover FBI agents posing as government contractors in a sting operation, in which Homan intimated that he would now try to steer DHS contracts their way. And then they … let him hang onto the cash, to see what he would do with it. Maybe nothing! Maybe report it to the IRS in a really scrupulous way!

When the Trump administration took over, it dropped the case. FBI Director Kash Patel even said that there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” Homan also denies doing anything wrong. Remember, a wad of money in a weird bag intended for food only looks like a bribe, as a City Hall adviser recently explained.

[ed. Update: Also this real piece of work: How One J6er Has Been Emboldened by His Pardon (New Yorker):]

***

"On January 7th, according to prosecutors, he head-butted someone and then punched that person while they were on the ground. He also texted a friend, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG cunt,” adding, “I hope you’re reading this Mr. FBI agent, FK U.”

The F.B.I. arrested Meredith, who goes by Cleve, at a Holiday Inn a mile from the Capitol. Inside his room were some THC edibles and a vial of testosterone. In Meredith’s trailer, authorities found a 9-millimetre semi-automatic firearm with a Stars and Stripes pattern, an assault-style rifle with a telescopic sight, approximately twenty-five hundred rounds of various kinds of ammunition—some of which could pierce armor, he’d noted in a text—and multiple large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices. He was charged with possessing unregistered firearms and unlawful ammunition, and with making a threat to injure someone from across state lines. (...)

Some J6ers have already run afoul of the law again. Baumgartner has counted nearly two dozen people who have so far committed a variety of offenses since the insurrection, including three who have been arrested since Trump’s mass-pardoning earlier this year. “They range from physical assaults to child pornography or sex-abuse charges,” he said. In January, a Missouri woman, photographed holding Nancy Pelosi’s broken nameplate on January 6th, received ten years in prison for killing a woman while driving drunk. In April, a Tennessee man, who’d been among the first to enter the Capitol, was found guilty of plotting to murder F.B.I. agents last year. (In July, he was sentenced to life in prison.) Also in April, a West Virginia man, who had attacked federal law enforcement during the insurrection, was indicted on charges of armed robbery and assault after stabbing the owner of a Mexican restaurant. (He took a plea deal and is serving six months in jail for unlawful assault.) Then there is Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent—who yelled, “Kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em, get ’em, get ’em,” as Capitol Police officers were being attacked—previously charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and aiding and abetting an assault on law-enforcement officers. Wise’s case was dismissed when Trump took office, before Wise had entered a plea, and in early August he received a new job: he is now a senior adviser in the Department of Justice."

The Gaslighting Spectacular

There's something breathtakingly audacious about Donald Trump—yet unsurprising—going on Fox & Friends to justify right-wing extremism while blaming "radicals on the left" for political violence.

“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime,” Trump explained, as if systematic constitutional destruction and threats to militarize American cities represent merely vigorous opposition to petty theft. “They don't want you burning our shopping centers; they don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.” One can only admire the exquisite inversion: the man who posts AI-generated memes threatening military assault on Chicago now positions himself as the voice of peaceful law and order.

Meanwhile, Utah Governor Spencer Cox—clearly suffering from the unfortunate delusion that adults should act like adults during national crises—made an emotional appeal for Americans to “lower the political temperature” and declared social media “a cancer in our society.” The irony of delivering this message while flanked by Kash Patel, whose own social media obsession has turned federal law enforcement into click-bait content creation, apparently escaped no one except Patel himself.

The cognitive dissonance required to maintain Trump's position would be impressive if it weren't so dangerous. The same movement that spent months minimizing January 6th as a minor disturbance, dismissing Charlottesville as isolated extremism, and spreading conspiracy theories about the assassination of Democratic legislators in Minnesota now presents itself as the victim of dangerous left-wing rhetoric following Charlie Kirk's murder.

But here's what makes the gaslighting particularly spectacular: Kirk himself spent years engaging in exactly the kind of rhetoric that Trump now claims is exclusively a left-wing problem. Kirk mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi, promoted conspiracy theories about the Minnesota legislative assassinations being false flag operations, and built his entire brand around the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that treats political opponents as existential enemies requiring destruction rather than fellow citizens requiring persuasion.

The man who made light of an elderly man being attacked with a hammer in his own home is now being martyred as a victim of the very political toxicity he helped create and amplify. The irony would be delicious if it weren't soaked in blood.

Trump's justification of right-wing extremism—"they're radical because they don't want to see crime"—represents the classic authoritarian move of treating systematic constitutional destruction as law enforcement, military deployment against cities as crime prevention, and elimination of democratic constraints as necessary security measures. When your definition of "crime" includes democratic opposition to authoritarian rule, then opposing crime becomes indistinguishable from supporting authoritarianism.

This is how authoritarians eliminate moral categories: by redefining violence as peace, oppression as liberation, and systematic criminality as law enforcement. When Trump claims unlimited authority to execute suspected drug traffickers without trial, that's not crime prevention. It's state-sponsored murder. When he deploys military forces against American cities, he's not fighting crime—he's committing constitutional violations that would make the Founders reach for their muskets.

But the most insidious aspect of the gaslighting is how it weaponizes Kirk's assassination to silence criticism of the very authoritarianism that creates conditions where political violence becomes inevitable. They want his death to function as proof that accurately describing Trump's systematic constitutional destruction somehow causes violence against conservatives.

This is precisely backwards: political violence becomes more likely when democratic alternatives get systematically eliminated, when constitutional constraints disappear, when peaceful opposition gets criminalized through immunity doctrines and weaponized federal agencies. Trump's destruction of democratic institutions doesn't prevent political violence—it makes political violence the only remaining form of political expression for people desperate enough to use it.

The same authoritarian consolidation that threatens democratic governance also creates the instability that makes assassination attempts against political figures from all directions more likely. When you eliminate legal accountability, democratic oversight, and constitutional constraints, you create exactly the kind of chaos where desperate actors turn to violence because systematic alternatives have been destroyed.

Trump's response to Kirk's assassination—justifying right-wing extremism while blaming left-wing rhetoric—reveals the complete moral bankruptcy of the MAGA movement. They want to use Kirk's death to silence their critics while ramping up the very authoritarian behavior that makes more political violence inevitable.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The 35% Answer:What to do when a Third of Your Country Lives in a Weird Fantasy (TER):]

***

Democracy only works if we can agree on what happened. Not what it means, just what actually happened. We can debate whether a war was justified. We can't debate whether it occurred.

That basic requirement is now broken. (...)

When someone claims Trump reduced the deficit, they're not just wrong about economic policy. They're wrong about reality. He added $7.8 trillion to it. When they claim crime is at record highs, they're denying FBI statistics showing violent crime near its lowest levels since the early 1970s. When they believe a billionaire who gold-plates his toilets actually cares about working families, they're living in a fantasy where a man who stiffed his own contractors for decades is somehow their champion.

This isn't a difference of perspective. It's a rejection of reality itself.

For democracy to function, people need to share basic facts even when they disagree about everything else. We need to agree that unemployment is either 4% or it isn't. That a hurricane either hit Florida or it didn't. That elections are valid when people you don't like win, not just when your team wins.

That agreement no longer exists.

Through a combination of social media algorithms, deliberate propaganda, and partisan news ecosystems, roughly a third of the country has moved to a different dimension. In their dimension, some argue that dragons are real but dinosaurs are fake. Climate change is a hoax but weather control machines exist. The moon landing was staged but JFK Jr. is coming back. And at the center of it all, a man who cheated on all three wives and called American war heroes "losers" is actually a noble patriot who loves his country and is just misunderstood by everyone who's mean to him.

They believe a man who wouldn't rent to Black families genuinely cares about them. A man who mocked a disabled reporter is their champion. A casino owner who bankrupted casinos is their business genius. They donate their last dollars to defend a billionaire who wouldn't let them set foot in Mar-a-Lago. It's like believing in Santa Claus, except Santa Claus at least gives presents to children instead of taking their parents' Social Security.

The comfortable liberal assumption is that this is an information problem. If we just fact-check harder, teach media literacy, or find the right messenger, people will come around to reality.

This is delusional.

These Americans aren't confused. They've chosen a story that feels true over facts that don't. Everyone has access to the same internet. The FBI crime statistics, deficit numbers, vote counts, death rates, Trump's actual business history, his documented lies, it's all right there. But millions have decided that all of this is fake while anonymous posts about microchips in your flu shot and Trump's secret genius reveal hidden truths.

You can't educate people out of beliefs they didn't reason themselves into.

Reichstag Moment

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s fire, conspiracy theories are sure to follow. At least, that’s what happened in Germany on February 27, 1933, when a sizeable portion of the parliamentary building in Berlin, the Reichstag, went up in flames from an arson attack.

It was the canary in the political coal mine—a flashpoint event when Adolf Hitler played upon public and political fears to consolidate power, setting the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. Since then, it’s become a powerful political metaphor. Whenever citizens and politicians feel threatened by executive overreach, the “Reichstag Fire” is referenced as a cautionary tale.

The True Story of the Reichstag Fire and the Nazi Rise to Power (Smithsonian)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

[ed. It's like princess Diana just died. See also: Antisemitism flares and ‘Reichstag’ mentions soar (JTA); and, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way (Ezra Klein, NYT):]

***

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.

We’ve been edging closer for some time now. In 2020, a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, was foiled by the F.B.I. In 2021, a mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the result of the election and pipe bombs were found at the Democratic and the Republican National Committee headquarters. In 2022, a man broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House at the time, intending to kidnap her. She was absent, but the intruder assaulted her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In 2024, President Trump was nearly assassinated. That same year, Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was murdered.

In 2025, Molotov cocktails were thrown into the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania during Passover. Melissa Hortman, the former House speaker of Minnesota, and her husband were murdered, and State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were severely injured by a gunman. And on Wednesday, Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was gunned down during a speech at Utah Valley University. (...)

On social media, I’ve seen mostly decent reactions to Kirk’s murder. There is grief and shock from both the left and the right. But I’ve seen two forms of reaction that are misguided, however comprehensible the rage or horror that provoked them. One is a move on the left to wrap Kirk’s death around his views — after all, he defended the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths. Another is on the right, to turn his murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time.

But as the list above reveals, there is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes. Even if that were possible, it would still be a world of horrors, a society that had collapsed into the most irreversible form of unfreedom.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). (...)

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications.

by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani
[ed. Zuckerberg should have his own chapter in the Book of Liars (a notable achievement, given the competition). See also: These People Are Weird (WWL). But there's also some good news: First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion (ArsT):]

"Today, Anthropic likely breathes a sigh of relief to avoid the costs of extended litigation and potentially paying more for pirating books. However, the rest of the AI industry is likely horrified by the settlement, which advocates had suggested could set an alarming precedent that could financially ruin emerging AI companies like Anthropic." 

August 25, 2025: Federal Assault on American Cities - This Week, Chicago

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes From An American |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh; via

[ed. A speech for the ages, summarizing nicely where we are and how we got here (and echoed by others (below). I think this country is primed for a massive disobedience event. It would be a good bookend to Woodstock (and provide some atonement for what we've done to this world, our lives, and future generations). Democracy Day(s): D-Day.]

via:

Constitutional Collapse in Real Time

This morning, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the same bureaucratic language once used to investigate Trump’s actual document theft, now weaponized against Trump’s critics.

We are no longer operating under constitutional government. We are witnessing its systematic dismantlement by the very people sworn to preserve it. This is what constitutional collapse looks like in real time—not dramatic overthrow or military coups, but the patient corruption of every institution designed to constrain power until they serve only to protect it.

Nobody wants to admit this reality because admitting it requires confronting what it means for everything else we’ve assumed about American democracy. But that comfort is a luxury we can no longer afford. The Bolton raid isn’t an aberration—it’s observable evidence that we’ve already crossed the line from constitutional republic to authoritarian protection racket.

The Bitter Irony of False Equivalence

There’s a devastating irony in Bolton becoming one of the first high-profile victims of Trump’s weaponized Justice Department. Throughout the 2024 election, Bolton and many establishment figures operated from the “anti-anti-Trump” position—treating both candidates as equally flawed, seeing no meaningful moral distinction between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, flattening existential differences into ordinary political disagreements.

Bolton couldn’t bring himself to endorse Harris despite understanding perfectly well what Trump represented. Like so many sophisticated voices, he was too committed to maintaining his independent credibility to make the obvious moral choice that democratic survival required. He performed the elaborate intellectual gymnastics necessary to avoid acknowledging the clear distinction between a candidate committed to constitutional governance and one openly promising to dismantle it.

Now Bolton experiences personally the constitutional crisis he refused to prevent politically. The FBI agents who ransacked his home weren’t rogue actors—they were following orders from an administration he couldn’t oppose when it mattered. His decades of public service, his genuine expertise, his legitimate policy concerns—none of it protected him once he crossed the regime he helped normalize through sophisticated neutrality.

This pattern extends far beyond Bolton. Across the political spectrum, intelligent people convinced themselves the stakes weren’t really that high, that institutions would constrain Trump’s worst impulses, that the “adults in the room” would prevent constitutional catastrophe. The anti-anti-Trump stance provided permission structure for millions of Americans to vote for authoritarianism while telling themselves they were making a normal political choice.

By flattening the moral difference between Harris and Trump, these voices enabled the very outcome they claimed to fear. Harris represented continuity with constitutional governance—flawed and frustrating, but operating within democratic frameworks. Trump represented systematic destruction of constitutional governance—openly promising to weaponize federal power and eliminate civil service protections. These weren’t equivalent positions requiring sophisticated analysis to distinguish.

The Propaganda Function of “Objectivity”

The most insidious aspect of this false equivalence is how it masquerades as intellectual sophistication while functioning as authoritarian propaganda. When someone with a platform responds to Trump’s systematic weaponization of federal law enforcement by invoking the “Biden Crime Family,” they’re not demonstrating objectivity—they’re selling surrender.

What exactly is the “Biden Crime Family”? Hunter’s laptop? Business dealings investigated by Republican committees for years that produced no criminal charges? Meanwhile, we have documented evidence of Trump selling pardons, accepting foreign bribes, conducting government business at his properties, and now using the FBI as his personal revenge service. These aren’t comparable phenomena requiring balanced analysis—they’re manufactured distractions designed to normalize actual criminality through false equivalence.

When public figures invoke “both sides” rhetoric during an active constitutional crisis, they’re not rising above partisanship—they’re providing cover for the side that systematically benefits from confusion and paralysis. They’re giving their audience permission to remain passive while democracy dies, to treat the collapse of constitutional government as just another partisan disagreement where reasonable people stay neutral.

This sophisticated-sounding neutrality serves the same function as “just asking questions” or “maintaining balance”—rhetorical devices that sound reasonable but provide cover for unreasonable things. The “Biden Crime Family” talking point in response to the Bolton raid essentially argues: “Well, both sides weaponize law enforcement, so this is just normal political hardball.” But one side investigated actual evidence through proper channels, while the other raids former officials for writing books critical of the president.

Authoritarians don’t need everyone to support them actively—they just need enough people to remain confused and passive while they capture the machinery of state. When people with influence treat constitutional governance and authoritarian rule as equivalent, they’re not maintaining objectivity—they’re actively participating in the normalization of authoritarianism.

The Observable Reality of Systematic Collapse

We need to stop pretending this is normal politics conducted by unusual means. The evidence of constitutional collapse surrounds us daily: the executive branch operates through fake emergency declarations to bypass Congressional authority. Trump conducts trade policy through personal decree, ignoring constitutional requirements for legislative approval. The Supreme Court creates immunity doctrines that place presidents above accountability. Congress suspends its own procedures to avoid constitutional duties.

Federal law enforcement has become a revenge machine targeting political opponents while providing protection services for regime loyalists. ICE operates as domestic surveillance apparatus building algorithmic dossiers on American citizens. The FBI raids critics while ignoring documented crimes by allies. The Justice Department empanels grand juries to investigate Barack Obama while dropping cases against Trump.

This is the systemic destruction of a government constrained by law. Not merely political dysfunction. The people orchestrating this understand exactly what they’re building: a protection racket masquerading as constitutional government, where loyalty determines legal consequences and opposition becomes criminal activity.

The Bolton raid demonstrates this logic perfectly. FBI Director Kash Patel, Trump’s personal enforcer now wearing federal authority, tweeted “NO ONE is above the law” while his agents searched the home of a man whose crime was exercising First Amendment rights. Attorney General Pam Bondi amplified: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” This is justice as theater, law enforcement as performance art, federal power as instrument of personal revenge.

by Mike Brock, Notes From The Circus |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock.com

[ed. For real. See also: Who Are the “Real” Americans Here? (NFTC); and, We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong (NYT).]

via:
[ed. American terrorists... making their nut and enjoying authority (incognito, of course.) (South Park).] 

Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities

The recent passage of Trump’s sprawling flagship legislation funnels tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security. While much of that funding will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bolster the administration’s arrest and deportation operations, a great deal is earmarked to purchase new technology and equipment for federal offices tasked with preventing immigrants from arriving in the first place: Customs and Border Protection, which administers the country’s border surveillance apparatus, and its subsidiary, the U.S. Border Patrol.

One page of the presentation, describing the wishlist of Border Patrol’s Law Enforcement Operations Division, says the agency needs “Advanced AI to identify and track suspicious activity in urban environment [sic],” citing the “challenges” posed by “Dense residential areas.” What’s considered “suspicious activity” is left unmentioned. (...)

The reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the “Southern AOR,” which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for “Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns” and “Long-range surveillance” because “city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.”

Although the Fourth Amendment provides protection against arbitrary police searches, federal law grants immigration agencies the power to conduct warrantless detentions and searches within 100 miles of the land borders with Canada, Mexico, or the coastline of the United States. This zone includes most of the largest cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, as well as the entirety of Florida.

The document mentions no specific surveillance methods or “advanced AI” tools that might be used in urban environments. Across the Southwest, residents of towns like Nogales and Calexico are already subjected to monitoring from surveillance towers placed in their neighborhoods. A 2014 DHS border surveillance privacy impact assessment warned these towers “may capture information about individuals or activities that are beyond the scope of CBP’s authorities. Video cameras can capture individuals entering places or engaging in activities as they relate to their daily lives because the border includes populated areas,” for example, “video of an individual entering a doctor’s office, attending public rallies, social events or meetings, or associating with other individuals.”

Last year, the Government Accountability Office found the DHS tower surveillance program failed six out of six privacy policies designed to prevent such overreach. CBP is also already known to use “artificial intelligence” tools to ferret out “suspicious activity,” according to agency documents. A 2024 inventory of DHS AI applications includes the Rapid Tactical Operations Reconnaissance program, or RAPTOR, which “leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance border security through real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The AI system processes data from radar, infrared sensors, and video surveillance to detect and track suspicious activities along U.S. borders.”

The document’s call for urban surveillance reflect the reality of Border Patrol, an agency empowered, despite its name, with broad legal authority to operate throughout the United States.

“Border Patrol’s escalating immigration raids and protest crackdowns show us the agency operates heavily in cities, not just remote deserts,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security who focused on intelligence matters. “Day by day, its activities appear less based on suspicion and more reliant on racial and ethnic profiling. References to operations in ‘dense residential areas’ are alarming in that they potentially signal planning for expanded operations or tracking in American neighborhoods.”

by Sam Biddle, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Jenny Kane/AP
[ed. See also, via The Intercept:]

***

~ Guess Who’s Eligible for Student Loan Forgiveness: New ICE Agents

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday it will offer student loan forgiveness and repayment options to new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits — along with a $50,000 signing bonus.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration works to limit the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for groups the president considers political enemies.

***

~ National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States

The Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states beginning early next month, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions.

The move undermines long-standing prohibitions on the use of the armed forces in domestic operations, sidestepping the Posse Comitatus Act and accelerating the U.S. transition into a police state, experts said.

The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information. (...)

Guard members will assist ICE officials in “alien processing” – administrative work preceding detention — in 20 states while ICE leadership will “direct” troops assigned to the mission, which will begin in early August, according to a memo first revealed on Wednesday by the New York Times.

***

~ “Intense Culture of Fear”: Behind the Scenes as Trump Destroys the EPA From Within

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had taken “significant actions” to protect public health and the environment while working “to Power the Great American Comeback.” The agency said it was also working to fulfill Trump’s promises to revitalize the auto industry, “restore the rule of law,” and give decision-making power back to the states.

In practice, the agency has done the opposite, several EPA staffers told The Intercept. 

Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA announced a set of new core priorities that includes making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and revitalizing the auto industry. (...)

“A lot of us are really confused about what our new mission is, when they’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs,” Hagen said. “I don’t know how we fit into that.”

The EPA’s role is not to create jobs; it’s to regulate and protect people from pollution, she said.

“Our mission is not to promote AI or energy dominance,” she said. “That’s not our mission.” (...)

Last week, the agency said it is planning to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, which does life-saving research on toxicity and developing sampling protocols, and helped in emergencies after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio and the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a result, more than 1,500 scientists will have to compete for 300 jobs, Hagen said.

“It’s essentially like lobotomizing our agency. If we don’t have the brain — the research behind protecting the environment — we can’t do that effectively, and I think that’s exactly what they want,” she said. “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”

‘Quishing’ Scams Dupe Millions

QR codes were once a quirky novelty that prompted a fun scan with the phone. Early on, you might have seen a QR code on a museum exhibit and scanned it to learn more about the eating habits of the woolly mammoth or military strategies of Genghis Khan. During the pandemic, QR codes became the default restaurant menu. However, as QR codes became a mainstay in more urgent aspects of American life, from boarding passes to parking payments, hackers have exploited their ubiquity.

“As with many technological advances that start with good intentions, QR codes have increasingly become targets for malicious use. Because they are everywhere — from gas pumps and yard signs to television commercials — they’re simultaneously useful and dangerous,” said Dustin Brewer, senior director of proactive cybersecurity services at BlueVoyant.

Brewer says that attackers exploit these seemingly harmless symbols to trick people into visiting malicious websites or unknowingly share private information, a scam that has become known as “quishing.”

The increasing prevalence of QR code scams prompted a warning from the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year about unwanted or unexpected packages showing up with a QR code that when scanned “could take you to a phishing website that steals your personal information, like credit card numbers or usernames and passwords. It could also download malware onto your phone and give hackers access to your device.”

State and local advisories this summer have reached across the U.S., with the New York Department of Transportation and Hawaii Electric warning customers about avoiding QR code scams.

The appeal to cybercriminals lies in the relative ease with which the scam operates: slap a fake QR code sticker on a parking meter or a utility bill payment warning and rely on urgency to do the rest.

“The crooks are relying on you being in a hurry and you needing to do something,” said Gaurav Sharma, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

On the rise as traditional phishing fails

Sharma expects QR scams to increase as the use of QR codes spreads. Another reason QR codes have increased in popularity with scammers is that more safeguards have been put into place to tamp down on traditional email phishing campaigns. A study this year from cybersecurity platform KeepNet Labs found that 26 percent of all malicious links are now sent via QR code. According to cybersecurity company, NordVPN, 73% of Americans scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites.

“The cat and mouse game of security will continue and that people will figure out solutions and the crooks will either figure out a way around or look at other places where the grass is greener,” Sharma said.

Sharma is working to develop a “smart” QR code called a SDMQR (Self-Authenticating Dual-Modulated QR) that has built-in security to prevent scams. But first, he needs buy-in from Google and Microsoft, the companies that build the cameras and control the camera infrastructure. Companies putting their logos into QR codes isn’t a fix because it can cause a false sense of security, and that criminals can usually simply copy the logos, he said.

Some Americans are wary of the increasing reliance on QR codes. [ed. Me!]

“I’m in my 60s and don’t like using QR codes,” said Denise Joyal of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I definitely worry about security issues. I really don’t like it when one is forced to use a QR code to participate in a promotion with no other way to connect. I don’t use them for entertainment-type information.”

Institutions are also trying to fortify their QR codes against intrusion.

Natalie Piggush, spokeswoman for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which welcomes over one million visitors a year, said their IT staff began upgrading their QR codes a couple of years ago to protect against what has become an increasingly significant threat.

“At the museum, we use stylized QR codes with our logo and colors as opposed to the standard monochrome codes. We also detail what users can expect to see when scanning one of our QR codes, and we regularly inspect our existing QR codes for tampering or for out-of-place codes,” Piggush said.

Museums are usually less vulnerable than places like train stations or parking lots because scammers are looking to collect cash from people expecting to pay for something. A patron at a museum is less likely to expect to pay, although Sharma said even in those settings, fake QR codes can be deployed to install malware on someone’s phone. (...)

Low investment, high return hacking tactic

A QR code is more dangerous than a traditional phishing email because users typically can’t read or verify the encoded web address. Even though QR codes normally include human-readable text, attackers can modify this text to deceive users into trusting the link and the website it directs to. The best defense against them is to not scan unwanted or unexpected QR codes and look for ones that display the URL address when you scan it.

Brewer says cybercriminals have also been leveraging QR codes to infiltrate critical networks.

“There are also credible reports that nation-state intelligence agencies have used QR codes to compromise messaging accounts of military personnel, sometimes using software like Signal that is also open to consumers,” Brewer said. Nation-state attackers have even used QR codes to distribute remote access trojans (RATs) — a type of malware designed to operate without a device owner’s consent or knowledge — enabling hackers to gain full access to targeted devices and networks.

Still, one of the most dangerous aspects of QR codes is how they are part of the fabric of everyday life, a cyberthreat hiding in plain sight.

“What’s especially concerning is that legitimate flyers, posters, billboards, or official documents can be easily compromised. Attackers can simply print their own QR code and paste it physically or digitally over a genuine one, making it nearly impossible for the average user to detect the deception,” Brewer said.

by Kevin Williams, CNBC |  Read more:
Image: Fongfong2 | Istock | Getty Images
[ed. Not surprised at all. I've avoided using them from the start.]

L'affaire Epstein Update: July 23, 2025

[ed. Crisis management 101: deflecting attention/responsibility.]

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that's not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.

Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.

What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.

Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary's ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.

Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.

This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.

In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.

Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”

The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, “specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?” and he responded, “No, no, she's—she's given us just a very quick briefing.” Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats. (...)

Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes from an American |  Read more:

[ed. Best to lay low, go golfing in Scotland (on the taxpayers dime), and let the lawyers do their job with Maxwell. See also: July 25, 2025; and, Before the Flood (Epsilon Theory):]

***

I am aware that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden was even less interested, if that’s imaginable, in identifying the rapists of more than a thousand young women, many of them children. Why? Because the Biden administration was pathetic and weak. That’s the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this:

• Because there are incredibly wealthy and/or influential men — Dem-coded, GOP-coded, nonpartisan-coded and everything in between-coded, men like Leon Black, Jes Staley, Glenn Dubin, Les Wexner, Bill Gates, and Larry Summers — who we know from publicly available documents and legal filings regularly ‘socialized’ privately with Epstein after his 2009 conviction and engaged in financial transactions with Epstein.
• Because there are so many more load-bearing names of wealth and power found throughout the publicly available Epstein record, including two American Presidents, an Israeli Prime Minister, and the brother of the King of England, and I suspect there are so many more load-bearing names in the sealed FBI records.
• Because I strongly doubt that any of the circumstantial evidence and grainy videos in the FBI records would hold up in a criminal proceeding against any of these incredibly wealthy and/or influential men, especially now that the only source of direct testimony was found dead in his jail cell while in Federal custody.
• Because I am certain that because of the aforementioned Presidents and Prime Minister, both US and Israeli spy agencies were at a minimum aware and in my opinion more likely up to their eyeballs in this covert intelligence operation systematic rape of children, and while circumstantial evidence and a grainy video may not work for a criminal trial, it is absolutely enough to turn a billionaire or a politician into an asset.

Put this together and any administration would want to run away from the Epstein case as fast as they can, because its full release would result in (probably) zero criminal convictions but (almost certainly) the reputational collapse of load-bearing names of wealth and power in multiple nations and (almost certainly) extremely damaging revelations about our government and allied governments. So that’s what Biden did. He ran away from this as fast and as far as he could. To his eternal shame.

The difference for Trump is that he can’t run away from it. He made Epstein a core part of the meaning of his candidacy and his Presidency in a way that was never part of the meaning of Biden’s candidacy and Presidency. Also, of course, the difference for Trump is that one of those load-bearing names of wealth and power that runs throughout the public Epstein record is his own.

There’s only one way for Trump to play this out from here, and it’s exactly what he’s doing: masks off!

All you Trump lieutenants and factotums and mouthpieces and hangers-on, time to toe the line and shut up about Epstein. You don’t like it? Tough. Case closed and we’re moving on. Bigger fish to fry. The ‘base’ is confused and angry? Who cares. Eff ’em.