professional space cadet

There are already 2000 gangsters from DHS deployed, and "hundreds" or "1000" more are on the way, depending on which Trumpland person you ask. As a point of reference, the Twin Cities' actual police total just under 1200 (600 in Minneapolis and 590 in Saint Paul according to the depts' sites).

The feds there are more or less attacking people at random. They've gone door-to-door for "citizenship checks" (completely illegal). They've knocked doors down when residents haven't complied (obviously also completely illegal). In addition to abducting and brutalizing the immigrants they come across during their rampages, they've done the same to US citizens of color and are also harassing, stalking and physically attacking observers.

Here are some local sources:

ICE intensifies Twin Cities operation after killing of Renee Good, protests (MPR News—link won't embed)

Privacy advocates: ICE using private data to intimidate observers and activists (MPR News—link won't embed)

Below are some videos from observers. I'm linking to Bluesky because that's where I saw them, though many are originally from/also available elsewhere. I apologize for the rancid formatting below but it was the best I could do quickly-ish. The images are previews; click the links in the timestamps to watch.

Elliott Payne (@elliottpayne.org) January 12, 2026 at 10:49 PM

Mickey Kuhns (@mickeykuhns.bsky.social) January 12, 2026 at 10:58 AM

Dumb Meg (@dmbmeg.bsky.social) Jan 11, 2026 at 6:10 PM (You need to be logged in to see this—while it's unclear what happened to the victim in this one, there's no reported death so far; CW for heightened violence)

Dom Ervolina (@dominicervolina.com) Jan 11, 2026 at 8:42 PM (You need to be logged in to see this)

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 12, 2026 at 4:37 PM

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 12, 2026 at 7:22 PM

Sundae Gurl (@sundaedivine.lol) January 10, 2026 at 4:39 AM

Sherrilyn Ifill (@sifill.bsky.social) January 12, 2026 at 9:19 PM

SaltyBitchables (@saltybitchables.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 4:19 PM

News2Share has more on YouTube:

I also recommend checking out this guy's work:

OP: Another year has passed, time to make another natural freezer

I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.

My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.

I’m a wildfire and disaster logistics specialist.

I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.

I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.

They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.

Then I found out.

Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.

Salvation Army reached out to Milknmuffins and asked what shelter she’s at with the promise to address the abuse in it. She…ended up saying where she was. She was thrown out onto the street. It’s also all on Twitter.

They invited her to a personal talk so she could explain the situation in person.

And then they threatened her with a screenshot of a rape-threat made supposedly by her:

And then threw her out into the street while claiming she broke house rules that

“The state came to massacre, it wasn’t a [police] operation. They came directly to kill, to take lives,” one woman in Penha Complex told the AFP news agency.

“There are people who have been executed, many of them shot in the back of the head, shot in the back. This cannot be considered public safety,” said 36-year-old resident and activist Raul Santiago.

Brazil’s Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski said President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is “horrified” by the scale of fatalities and surprised that such an operation went ahead without prior knowledge of the federal government.

I’d sincerely appreciate it if non-Brazilians reblogged this. Media outlets all over the world (and especially in my homeland) will try to sweep this under the rug but the horror has spread nationwide. We call it chacina for a reason.

And it's not always because some executive made a decision to favor a TERF. It's because the technology is broken in a way TERFs have learned to use to their advantage.

So content moderation is a HUGE task. It is incredibly inefficient to manually monitor all user reports-- when you "flag" something as spam or inappropriate or 'inciting harm' (what Blueskye is saying the banned users had in their posts). So what actually happens is that the bulk of it is reviewed by machine. The precise "how" is a bit of a black box (if you say exactly, it makes it more vulnerable to being bypasses), but we generally know it's a bit of machine learning ("ai", but not he chatgpt kind) and a bit of automation. Generically this gets referred to as an "algorithm" (which is a meaningless word I don't have time to unpack here).

The TERFs have a formula. A battle plan, if you will. I've been watching them use it for almost a decade. And they play social media sites like a fiddle every single time.

The way it works is that they coordinate attacks on targets they dislike. (Usually trans people, but ace discourse is a notable example of targets not necessarily fitting that demographic.) They send links to each other of posts to report. They'll flag it for whatever the nearest thing they can is. The blueskye users were wishing ill to JK Rowling, so "inciting harm" was the excuse selected. "Inappropriate or sexually explicit content" is a common selection for other trans content.

Then what happens is the content moderation "algorithm" sees a huge influx of reports for a certain post or user. And instead of making a human manually review all of that, it automatically initiates a ban or takedown. And if the "algorithm" has word censorship built in, it will begin to auto-flag for things containing words in posts frequently flagged, so it begins to auto-flag the word trans itself.

This has been happening for almost a decade. There was a trans youtuber who proved TERF hater group chats flagged his videos so much that it started auto-demonitizing identical videos with the word trans in the title, but leaving ones without the word alone. I strongly suspect this is why we see huge amounts of trans women banned for no reason on tumblr. And this is clearly what is happening now.

How do we fix it? There's no easy solution. All the things about the "algorithm" that make moderation easier for the social media platforms are the exact reasons it's so difficult to defeat. It's hard to teach a machine what's a genuine flag and a malicious one. Again, it's been almost a decade since the issue was raised with youtube, and there has yet to be a solution for rooting out malicious coordinated flagging.

the online safety act is an insane privacy breach, and if that does not scare you then you need to think harder about it. it is going to end up in a massive data leak - all the information is getting collected by random third party systems. can we trust them? no. can we even hold them accountable? no. because the government couldn’t even make their own system to do these age checks.

and i hear you - it is important that kids don’t see porn. but even if all this was about protecting kids, it’s sloppy and useless. it’s easy (for now) to get around with a vpn and the only thing the act doing is censoring things that it shouldnt. if the government wanted to protect kids, they would do something concrete about it - they would be putting more funding into education, for example.

of course the policy isnt called “national surveillance”. they’re not going to call it that. everything will be hidden behind things that people want.

Like, an adult someone.

Like, an adult someone who could pass age verification checks.

If you can donate now, start a sustaining membership, or increase the amount you donate, even a little bit, it will help to keep this vital public resource alive.

Every time you ask Copilot to write you a PowerShell script to stroke your boss' ego, a city experiences a brownout.

Every time you chat with your AI "girlfriend" a farmer doesn't get to water their animals.

Before the computing era, ILM was the master of oil matte painting, making audiences believe that some of the sets in the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogy were real when they weren’t. They were the work of geniuses like Chris Evans, Michael Pangrazio, Frank Ordaz, Harrison Ellenshaw and Ralph McQuarrie ! Forever thank you, to their handmade art and the work of their colleagues, that made us dream of impossible worlds and fantastic places across Earth and the Universe.

There are more background paintings on this article, featuring comments by the masters/artists themselves ! 

Some of the following pieces were made by other artists 2: