bsmall2

2025-06-28 09:46:10

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

From March 2020 !!

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will deploy Border Patrol’s special forces-style unit, known as BORTAC, and other Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents — dressed in plainclothes — into Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit, and Newark. And it is reportedly launching Operation Palladium, enlisting 500 special agents for an “enhanced arrest campaign” designed to “flood the streets” of these same cities.
...
The Trump administration claims that it needs to deploy BORTAC and other special agents to so-called “sanctuary cities” where, as DHS has said, “our officers are forced to make at-large arrests” — rather than take custody of individuals from state and local law enforcement who honor ICE hold requests (also known as detainers.) But nearly a quarter of all counties in the U.S. now restrict or refuse altogether to honor those hold requests from ICE according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, making them all potential targets for the administration’s attacks.
...
There’s much we still don’t know about how BORTAC will work with ICE. What we do know are some of the risks of further militarization of our streets. BORTAC agents are specifically trained for high-risk enforcement operations domestically and abroad. They operate in border communities that are already highly militarized. They receive additional weapons, such as stun grenades, and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification. BORTAC “acts essentially as the SWAT team of the Border Patrol.”
...
It is all too easy to imagine BORTAC agents further escalating situations where ICE agents are already known to use excessive force, including arrests at courthouses and worksite raids. And with Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf’s announcement that these SWAT-like agents would be dressed in plainclothes ⁠— disguising officers trained for special operations to navigate communities undetected— that risk will be heightened further.
In border communities, unaccountable CBP officers have repeatedly committed serious abuses. At least 94 people have died following CBP encounters since 2010, including in shootings, car chases ending in deadly crashes, and when CBP officers forced a young man to drink liquid methamphetamine. CBP claims unconstitutional authority to search and seize nearly anyone within the 100-mile border zone, raising a litany of civil rights concerns.
..
In border communities, unaccountable CBP officers have repeatedly committed serious abuses. At least 94 people have died following CBP encounters since 2010, including in shootings, car chases ending in deadly crashes, and when CBP officers forced a young man to drink liquid methamphetamine. CBP claims unconstitutional authority to search and seize nearly anyone within the 100-mile border zone, raising a litany of civil rights concerns.
ICE and CBP do not view themselves as accountable to Congress or the public. Police who work with these agencies risk being associated with their abuses. And local collaboration with federal immigration enforcement is bad for public safety: It destroys trust between law enforcement and local communities, as people fear that by interacting with police – reporting a crime tip, acting as a witness, seeking protection as a victim – they or their loved ones will end up being taken away by ICE. The Major Cities Chiefs Association, the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and attorneys general from New York, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, and DC and local law enforcement leaders from across the country have come out against local police entanglement with ICE.
Bottom line: Ramping up immigration enforcement makes local communities less safe. State and local governments are right to enact policies that protect immigrants and citizens alike from the Trump administration’s intimidation. ICE and CBP need to be reined in — not unleashed and let loose on our cities.

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/trump-is-sending-special-forces-style-agents-into-pro-immigrant-cities

#ICEThugs #ICEKidnappers #uspol #BORTAC

2025-06-28 08:12:47

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Greatest Summer Event: Mostest Awesome!!
The Life Dance...

Like Flowers Blooming on Asphalt
Let's talk of love in wild fields
アフアルトに咲く花のように
荒地で愛を語りましょう。

https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/753038421643352201

どんどこしょ;
https://mstdn.jp/@bsmall2/112855995000161977

FunkWhale:
https://audio.liberta.vip/library/artists/9548

ZaBon Dance :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joLuSMneZ9M

#南部式 #都城ふるさと夜市 #宮崎県都城市 #NanBuShiki

2025-06-27 08:04:18

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

She and her husband have been able to remain home since, and keep a low profile. She knew the group because they had organized initiatives to support vendors during the height of the coronavirus pandemic – and on occasion she had worked with them to distribute her tamales to unhoused people and others in need.

“That is why I believe that when you give love, you receive love,” ...

... Eunisses Hernandez, a 35-year-old city councilmember who represents a quarter-million people in a majority-Latino district in northern Los Angeles.

Many Angelenos who did not attend protests against the new Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids are doing other kinds of work, Hernandez said, like providing “know your rights” information to small businesses about interacting with law enforcement officials, or figuring out how to deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave home even to buy groceries.

Mutual aid networks created to help people affected by the January’s wildfires have been “reinvigorated” to respond to the Trump administration’s raids, Hernandez said.

“In this moment, while we’re seeing the worst of our federal administration, we are seeing the best here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said.
...
“Even with documents, people are afraid to go out. Even citizens are afraid to go out. People are afraid to encounter an Ice agent regardless of their status, because of the level of violence they have seen on social media or on TV,” she said.

Multiple US citizens in the Los Angeles area have reportedly been detained as part of immigration raids this month.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/26/los-angeles-residents-immigrants-ice-resistance
#EunissesHernandez #SolidarityInLA #LASolidarity #ICEThugs #USAImmigration #KTownForAll

2025-06-24 04:13:47

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Neither acquiescence in scepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the sceptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.

懐疑に'黙従'することも，独断に'黙従'することも，教育の生み出すべきものではない。教育が生み出すべきものは，①知識は，困難ではあるが，ある程度獲得できるものであり，②いかなる時代においても，知識として通用しているものは多かれ少なかれ誤っている可能性があるが，③しかしその誤りは'注意'と'勤勉'によって正すことができる，という'信念'である。'信念'に基づいて行動するにあたっては，小さな誤りが'災難'を招く可能性がある場合には，非常に注意しなければならない。しかしそれにもかかわらず，私たちは，'信念'に基づいて行動しなければならない。こういう'精神状態'は，かなり難しい。（なぜなら，この精神状態をうまくコントロールするには）感情を萎縮させずに，高度の'知的教養'を必要とするからである。しかし，難しいが，不可能ではない。それは，実は，'科学的な気質'（そのもの）である。知識は，他の良いものと同じく，困難ではあっても，獲得不可能なものではない。独断論者は知識獲得の難しさを忘れ，懐疑論者は知識獲得の可能性を否定する。両者は，ともに誤っている。そして，その誤りが世のなかに蔓延すれば，社会的な災難が引き起こされる。

http://russell-j.com/beginner/OE02-050.HTM

#RussellOnEducation #OnEducation #教育論 #レッセルの教育論

2025-06-08 02:02:14

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Reading about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation maneuvering for immunity from their Billion dollar mistakes in African agriculture reminded me of their Billion mistake in USA education. Howard Wainer uses the example of Gates yanking around USA educational administrations as an example of people misunderstanding the math for variance in Statistics.^2 It wouldn't be a surprise that rich guys touted as programming geniuses really aren't competent in various areas of math but it probably doesn't matter if Gates understood his policy would not have the announced effects for USA education. Anybody that reads a bit into food (FoodFirst! 12 myths^3) and agricultural policy (Vandana Shiva on the Green Revolution ) knows the corprate expensive-input high-debt approach is awful.. These intentional mistakes build around common misundersandings (unsupported myths) are just ways to capture organizations I imagine. It's must just be a way to inject obedient MBAs or other sorts of purposefully ignorant business people into various organization with authority, with policy-making and -implementing power... Or maybe they are just morons and not crafty diabolical controllers. Either way these examples provide more grounds, more support for Paul Goodman's explanation of the reasons for not allowing concentrated power. No particular individuals can be trusted with it, even the people that end up in the overly powerful positions were smart, kind, decent people.. It's hard to see how such people could end up in such positions...

In the late 1990s the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began supporting small schools on a broad-ranging, intensive, national basis. By 2001, the Foundation had given grants to education projects totaling approximately $1.7 billion. They have since been joined in support for smaller schools by the Annenberg Foundation..

... The availability of such large amounts of money to implement a smaller-schools policy yielded a concomitant increase in the pressure to do so, with programs to splinter large schools into smaller ones being proposed and implemented broadly (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle are just some examples).... What is the evidence in support of such a change? There are many claims made about the advantages of smaller schools, but I will focus here on just one—that when schools are smaller, student achievement improves. The supporting evidence for this is that among high-performing schools, there is an unrepresentatively large proportion of smaller schools...

We also identified the 50 lowest-scoring schools. Nine of these (18 percent) were among the 50 smallest schools. This result is completely consonant with what is expected from de Moivre's equation—smaller schools are expected to have higher variance and hence should be over-represented at both extremes. Note that the regression line shown on the left graph in Figure 4 is essentially flat, indicating that overall, there is no apparent relation between school size and performance. But this is not always true.

^1 https://nerdica.net/display/a85d7459-1168-44bd-1b64-1e7165724989
^2 https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-most-dangerous-equation
- ^3 https://archive.foodfirst.org/publication/12-myths-about-hunger/
#BillGates #BillionDollarMistakes #GatesInUSA #GatesMistake ? #BillionDollarMistake
#BillionDollarPolicyMistake #GatesBillionDollarMistake #GatesFoundation

2025-06-08 02:25:27

bsmall2

bsmall2@writing.exchange

Joke? ".. the foundation's established work in education and public health.."

> The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was initiated in 2006 by the... Gates Foundation, leveraging a major donation from financier Warren Buffet to add an international development program to the foundation’s established work in education and public health. The Rockefeller Foundation, the lead funder of the first Green Revolution, signed on as well.

https://sites.tufts.edu/gdae/files/2020/07/20-01_Wise_FailureToYield.pdf
#uspol
@bsmall2@tiksi.net

Tale of Two 80s Gringos

2025-06-08 01:21:18

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Pope Leo

“He saw the reality of poverty,” a Pennsylvania priest, Father Rich Mullen, who worked with the future Leo in the coastal city of Trujillo, said in a recent interview. “That’s when the seed was sown.” Another longtime friend, the Rev. Paul Galetto, told The Inquirer: “Having been a bishop in Peru and South America, I’m sure [Prevost’s] focus is on immigration and the movement of peoples.”

Corp. Trump

Trump’s path to world leadership was also forged in the 1980s — by embracing the dark side of the decade. The real estate mogul’s gospel of gilded prosperity took off in the moment of “greed is good” on Wall Street, even if many of his actual business ventures began failing at the dawn of the ’90s. In seeking to retain the glamour of his wealth, Trump also focused on those less fortunate than him — not as souls but as potential marks for his next scheme, which eventually became national politics. A battle for the soul of America and for the planet has been joined, on a collision course set in the 1980s.

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/ice-immigration-arrests-trump-pope-leo-xiv-villanova-20250513.html

#WIllBunch #TaleOfTwoGringos #EightiesGringos #LiberationTheology #PopeLeo #CorpTrump

2025-06-05 07:55:42

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

In No Country For Old Men Cormac McCarthy wrote about a black sheriff who knew the names of evey person in his county. Is there abook where the sheriff character is a slave lender? Or maybe getting creative and building an extra space ship or something with untracked money from Operation Stonegarden?? Inquiring Minds want to know!!

Jessica, let's talk a little about immigration for a moment because county sheriffs, as you write, have become almost like avatars for the anti-immigration movement. How did they become the law enforcement agency involved in immigration?

PISHKO: It was something that really began to happen when the United States decided that it would interlock the immigration system with the criminal legal system. So that's - some people call it the crimmigration system, which is not a term that I coined. It's something that immigration law experts coined. But when Congress passed a certain series of laws in the 1980s and '90s, what they wanted to do was create a system in which people who were accused of crimes, particularly at the time drug crimes, would be able to be immediately deported, in a way that was basically faster. So they didn't have to be convicted.
...
PISHKO: That's also the benefit for them. The federal government houses about 25% of immigrants in detention in county jails right now. And they pay these sheriffs per diem. So they get paid sort of per day to keep people in their jails. And it's one of the ways that sheriffs are able to use that jail, kind of as a political tool - right? - to make money for their county.
...
... using this anti-immigrant group, the Trump administration recruited more sheriffs to join a program called 287(g). And 287(g) is a federal program that essentially deputizes sheriffs and their deputies to act as immigration agents. So under Trump, many, many more sheriffs joined this 287(g) program. Now, the 287(g) program is a bit interesting because it doesn't include any funding for the sheriffs, but it is something that sheriffs used to say that they were tough on immigration.

MOSLEY: Trump sees sheriffs as his allies. But we should note that even after he left office, the Biden administration has also poured money into immigration enforcement at the border, at the Mexican border, more money than even before, and which translates really into big bucks for these sheriff's departments.

Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is in Pinal County, which is actually not on the border. But he is a person who receives quite a lot of money from the Department of Homeland Security under a program called Operation Stonegarden.
Operation Stonegarden is a bit of an unusual program because it funds local law enforcement to conduct sort of border policing. It's given also to sheriffs on the U.S.-Canada border, as well as the U.S.-Mexico border. And there have been previous reports that the DHS does not track where this money goes. So there's sort of a pre-existing problem in which they fail to track the money, see where the money is actually going and then monitor the effectiveness of the funding. So there's no reason here to think that putting more money into Operation Stonegarden in some way has a positive impact or any impact at all.
But Mark Lamb - I found that even though he did receive money under the Trump administration, that under the Biden administration, it had more than doubled. So he received money to purchase things like helicopters..
...
PISHKO: Some of them are buying snowmobiles to, you know, drive through the snow. Stonegarden money was used to buy, like, snow suits. So that's one common use in the North. In the South, it's a lot of ATVs, helicopters. Overtime is another big one. And again, what's very interesting is that the federal government doesn't really track how this money gets used.
There's not very good information about, you know, exactly where these dollars go. Like, are they going to weaponry or vehicles or overtime or additional staff? They seem to be able to go to all of it, but it's something that the federal government hasn't really decided to look into.
..
PISHKO: They wanted to take control of law enforcement in their county, and the idea was that if they elected a Black sheriff, that sheriff would protect them from forces like the Klan. Very logical thing to do. Now, it turned out that white people did not like that at all. And there's a quote that I found from someone saying that they would rather see a Black person elected to any other office than sheriff. And I think that points to how the sheriff was seen as the local figure who maintained the racial segregation.
...
... this tradition persists today, which is why sheriffs among law enforcement officers still have a lot of pay-for-service mechanisms. In many places, for example, landlords pay the sheriff to evict tenants. It's just a flat fee. So among also those things was that they would take people and lease them out to white land owners. They didn't just lease them out for farming. They were sent to mines, to poultry processing plants. In Florida, they were sent to collect tar in the Everglades. And I think it can't be understated just how dangerous and violent convict leasing was.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/g-s1-21802/constitutional-sheriffs-wield-unchecked-power-across-america-journalist-says
#JessicaPishko #ConstitutionalSheriffs #OperationStonegarden

2025-06-05 04:48:59

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Local Treasures!! Wood and a Band, well a sculpture, a sample, and a living festival...

https://pixelfed.social/p/bsmall2/836066746510439195
#南部式 #都城市 #ふるさと夜市 #ゲゲゲの芸能祭 #芸能祭
#WoodSculpture #CinnamonWood #肉桂木 #肉桂木材 #NanBuShiki #BeautifulWood #Wood

2025-05-30 09:36:44

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

To get to the root of why AI systems are so socially corrosive, it helps to first step back a bit and look at how they work. Physicist and critical AI researcher Dan McQuillan has described AI as 'pattern-finding' tech. For example, to create an LLM such as ChatGPT, you'd start with an enormous quantity of text, then do a lot of computationally-intense statistical analysis to map out which words and phrases are most likely to appear near to one another. Crunch the numbers long enough, and you end up with something similar to the next-word prediction tool in your phone's text messaging app, except that this tool can generate whole paragraphs of mostly plausible-sounding word salad.

AI systems reproduce bias, cheapen and homogenize our social interactions, deskill us, make our jobs more precarious, eliminate opportunities to practice care, and enable authoritarian modes of surveillance and control. Deployed in the public sector, they undercut workers' ability to meaningfully grapple with problems and make ethical decisions that move our society forward. These technologies dehumanize all of us. Collectively, we can choose to reject them.

https://thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai-is-dehumanization-technology.html

/HT @ASRG via @Alex Schroeder
#SalamiAI #TechProgress #DanMcQuillan

2025-05-30 04:53:15

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

I've been playing with Nightingale's Wedges Diagram ^1 and making some progress thanks to online resources about the history^1 and the math^2. Still without loads of confidence with the math the exercise is helping me to learn Racket's plot language: plot-polar... To test the procedures for making polar area diagrams I'm using vote count data for USA presidential elections. The visualization (if the math is right, the figures accurate, and the "square root transformation" appropriate: code^3) helps me to see how small the difference is between vote counts for the elections "winner" (the red or crimson part) in comparison with the election's "loser" (the green wedge).. I thought there was a mistake with the data for 2016 when I could not see a red, or crimson band for the winner's vote-count, but then I remembered that the electoral college set up allows for the election's "winner" to become president while getting a lower vote-count in the "popular vote"(terminology?)... Now I have to find the time to add some sort of legend to associate the colors for the Voting Age Population(brown here, for now), Voter Eligible Population(sky blue), the Voter Turnout(light slate gray), the "winner"'s votes(red), and the losing candidate's votes(pale green)... Later maybe I'll do the last 12 elections, so the "Rose" (coxcomb) has the same structures and Nightingale's Wedges diagram.