Jackal Inside And Out

Except in the hour of need, a binface stepped up.

See, we're criricizing past administrators for their quantifiable betrayals of the American people because... well it *happened.* Instead of attempting to scry what may come through the looking glass and goats bones and tea leaves, we are pointing to the things by which the democrats gave the massive potential to these anti-science actors on a silver platter by downplaying everything their voting base brought up or cared about and sprinting to the right to appease people they called fascists not two months prior. Discussing the recent past is in no way "downplaying" a future which is malleable and has yet to come to pass. The Yellowstone caldera could blow in 6 months. Covid could put Trump down for the count like it did Biden. Aliens could land in China and attempt to bring us into their federation of planets, only to betray us and use us as beasts of burden. All you can do is speculate until the present has become the past. Focus on what's in your control. Focus on what's recorded. Quit trying to pretend like consuming the latest breaking shit out of every white house press briefing is helpful and not literally a control mechanism. News as distraction and manipulation isn't a new thing. Ready this book.

What is the plan? Do you expect an issue to get sufficiently acknowledged if you're not consistent and vigilant? If you pick and chose when you care or when it's bad? If you essentially take the phone off the hook for years then put it back when you feel like you're now in danger?

Because fuck the people sounding the alarm bell on something like this for years right? Screw their incessant calls. We'll sacrifice them, it's okay. Disabled people in particular have been talking about this, but ignore them because them you had an election to win!

I just... do the people who care now really give a fuck? Or is this just some convenient criticism to you? Something you're now willing to admit is bad because you can lob it at a Trump. But will drop, ignore, or excuse it should we get another Democratic president?

Because that is a moral failure of epic proportions and isn't going to get us anywhere.

If can't engage with the government and presidency honestly? If you're not willing to admit any kind of president is going to do screwed up things that you need to address and hold them to task for? That Democrats too uphold the system in a way that sacrifices people and empowers Republicans?

If you can't hold everyone accountable regardless of their connection to you and what they do for you?

You're not ready for conversations like these. Stop entering them. Because it's disingenuous and you look childish.

First, Biden is a fascist. He is not a bad person because of concepts of ableism and ageism you tie to him. He is a direct actor in state violence and genocide. I really need people to stop picturing Biden as bad because he's old or "geriatric" or "stupid."

Democrats have also been very directly complicit in the eradication of public health and specifically with the pandemic. He makes fascist, genocidal, eugenicist decisions with a clear and conscious mind.

We have when the Biden administration and Harris specifically abdicated responsibility concerning the Delta variant:

We have that time Biden himself urged others to divert funds related to covid protections and public health to instead increase policing that directly kills disabled, in particular Black disabled people at disproportionate rates:

People have been talking about the criminalization of masking that has already been in motion now:

There's been coverage for years now about how Biden's policy on the pandemic has been abysmal:

This isn't even getting into the Biden administration rulings on testing and vaccination distribution, household counting, and so much more.

Biden himself got covid and repeated much of the same propaganda and disinformation surrounding the level of danger covid poses and pushed the "back to work" narrative for a reason.

Hell, for all the talk about the election outcome, it was repeatedly crickets when we repeatedly pointed out how the effects of the pandemic have changed the political landscape because so many people more likely to even vote democrat are now dead or disabled.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark:

LORENZO SALGADO ARAUJO CAME TO THE UNITED STATES thirty-five years ago—a few years too late to benefit from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, popularly known as the “Reagan amnesty.” He worked in construction. By the 2000s, he was a small business owner who provided jobs and work for other men. They would drive to the North Houston suburbs and build houses. His dream was to build his own home for his family one day—a dream he achieved. On Tuesday morning, Lorenzo was picking up workers as usual shortly after 6 a.m. when he was confronted by ICE and killed. He was 52 years old. The shooting in Houston’s historically Mexican-American East End community near Magnolia Park took place just five minutes from the site of Houston’s FIFA Fan Festival.

Lorenzo’s son Ronaldo Salgado, a teacher, wrote on Facebook Tuesday night that his father had been in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process. Speaking at a press conference Wednesday morning, Ronaldo thanked his former students for being in attendance and Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) for spending time in the hospital with him overnight.

He said Lorenzo had been a hardworking man of routine, one who never cared for his name to be known outside his family, only for his children—three sons, all born in the United States—to be educated and to become good people.

“I love our dad, he worked hard,” Ronaldo told me in an interview after the press conference. “He always told us that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.”

On Tuesday, Lorenzo’s day began at 5 a.m., the same way it did every day: “with a hearty meal prepared by my mom,” Ronaldo said. But after taking his coffee and loading his work boots in the car to pick up his crew for work on houses in North Houston, Lorenzo was beset by ICE agents in unmarked cars. Some sort of confrontation ensued. He was shot. He died of his injuries at a hospital. As Ronaldo wrote this morning, “Today is the first day without him for all of us, and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work—the first time in their 30+ year marriage.”

In the emotional press conference, Ronaldo described his desperate scramble to find out information about what happened to his father. When he first heard about an interaction with ICE, the reports were conflicting. He hoped his father had simply been detained, so his first plan had been to find his father’s white work van and deliver it to his crew so that they might be able to finish work and get paid. As time went on, Ronaldo remained in the dark. He did not learn about his father’s final moments from a hospital or law enforcement. Instead, confirmation of his death came in the cruel form of videos on social media. “I recognized him immediately: not from his appearance, but from his voice crying in the street as he was bleeding out,” Ronaldo said through tears.

[...]

“Me estan matando”

ICE HAS PORTRAYED LORENZO in its statements to the media as an “illegal alien” who acted violently in the confrontation. “From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense,” an ICE spokesperson said. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve all heard it before. As Lorenzo’s family, activists, and Democratic officeholders have all pointed out, ICE’s response after this shooting has been the same as its response to each ICE-related killing during Trump 2.0: to claim its personnel acted responsibly, and not to wait for an investigation before casting blame on the dead. The New York Times found that Trump administration claims about shootings frequently unravel under legal scrutiny.

One witness told the Washington Post that he heard a man—Lorenzo—gurgling and shouting “Me estan matando”—they’re killing me, a haunting echo of “I can’t breathe,” the final words of Eric Garner and George Floyd, two others killed by law enforcement. Roman Palomares, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the oldest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country, accused ICE of a coverup.

“In the absence of facts from ICE we are left to conclude a man was unlawfully killed on the streets of Houston,” he said. “It’s unacceptable and un-American to use lethal force against a human being and lock away the evidence and expect his family, the people of Houston, the American people to say ‘We believe you.’ We don’t believe you. ICE has not earned that trust from the American people.”

“This is a tragedy,” Rep. Garcia said at the press conference. “A family led by a man here thirty-five years with absolutely no criminal history. Remember Renée Good? Has ICE learned nothing from that experience?” “Someone losing their life is a big goddamn deal,” Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) said at the press conference. Menefee emphasized that Houstonians are deeply familiar with immigrants, regardless of status. “We are a city of undocumented immigrants, they are our neighbors.”

[...] The shooting is the first big test for a Department of Homeland Security that has tried in recent months to avoid the kind of imagery we saw earlier this year of Renée Good and Alex Pretti being killed in the streets of Minneapolis and Border Patrol officer Greg Bovino ghoulishly swooping after publicity. The department has sought to refashion itself as a more professional organization that makes less noise while still executing the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Just this Monday, in fact, Politico Playbook asked whether the mass deportation drive was softening or whether ICE had simply gotten better at avoiding negative attention. They reported that Markwayne Mullin, the new homeland security secretary, championed a “quieter and smarter” approach, and that the nation shouldn’t “expect another Minneapolis anytime soon.” Reduced media attention, though, does not mean a less extreme approach to deportations. On Monday, White House Border Czar Tom Homan admitted what activists, lawmakers, and analysts have been observing for a while: that half of those targeted by ICE do not have criminal records.

ICE terrorists shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in a not too dissimilar manner to Alex Pretti and Renee Good while picking up a crew for a construction project. #AbolishICE

See Also:

The Guardian: ‘He did not deserve to die’: family of man fatally shot by ICE agent speaks out

Excerpt from this story from Sierra Magazine:

When Thomas Meinzen sees a monarch butterfly land on milkweed growing beside the road, the moment represents success. As an ecologist with Project 1100, an initiative to protect pollinators, Meinzen knows that such events are a culmination of his life’s work. Conservationists, like him, hope these strips of land can provide ecological refugia in a world where native grasslands have been converted to agriculture, suburbs, and urban development. 

However, the same roadside habitat that offers butterflies a place of respite also places them within inches of one of the most dangerous environments humans have created for animals.

Every year, countless insects collide with vehicles. A widely cited 2015 study estimated that traffic may kill billions of pollinating insects annually in North America. Butterflies, moths, bees, beetles, hoverflies, and dragonflies can be struck directly by vehicles or disrupted by the powerful air turbulence generated by passing trucks. The road also introduces less obvious threats. Tires release microscopic particles containing synthetic compounds and heavy metals. Brake pads shed materials including copper and antimony. Rain carries oil residues, de-icing salts, microplastics, and PFAS compounds from pavement into adjacent soils.

For scientists, this raises the possibility of habitats appearing attractive to an organism, but it ultimately reduces its survival or reproductive success. One concerned ecologist is Emile Snell-Rood, a researcher and professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota. She was recently funded by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to examine microplastics in monarch caterpillars collected in roadside habitats. She examined whether synthetic rubber from tires could impact their reproduction and survival. “Roadsides have a lot of potential as pollinator habitat,” Snell-Rood said in a university press release. “At the same time, though, we worry that they could be an ecological trap.”