https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump-9f5d05469ce8c629d6fecf32d32098cd

«A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.»

We’re here! We’ve arrived at 1984! It’s been a long trip, but we finally got here.

Let’s go see what Big Brother’s got cooking. It sure smells delicious!

😀

Fuck your bio. Fuck your lyrics.

Two, count ’em, two separate thoughts in here. Maybe even three.

«There is brilliant writing out there. But finding it is like the needle in the haystack. I’m always feeling, What have I missed? Because somebody will say, Oh, did you read that great piece? It’s like, Where? I’ve got a thousand Substack things, I’m reading social media, I’m reading the old-guard stuff, but my head is exploding. And unfortunately what it’s leading to is a lot of people checking out. So it’s a very demoralizing time. I’m always being asked by young people, How do I get into journalism? Often I say you should go to India, because India, in fact, has a very vibrant literary culture.

I can’t believe your advice is go to India. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s not popular. When I say that, you do see the light fade from the eyes.

…

I think we’re underestimating the power of humanity. That’s what Mamdani showed. We’ve tended to think this is the inevitable direction. A.I., the über-barons will dictate how we’re all going to live, and everybody else is a peasant. All of these things have become very depressing. But maybe humanity has a bit more juice in it than they anticipated. Things can change very, very quickly in America. It’s one of the reasons I love living in America. It’s an exciting place. The whole mood can change overnight. All of a sudden, people will just turn around and say, Look, I don’t want you deciding how my life is going to go. So I’m feeling quite optimistic at the moment.»

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/magazine/tina-brown-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.108.BkEa.-Qk07lttBQNh&smid=url-share (gift)

Really good essay.

«The United States truly did need new approaches to widespread undertreated pain, and unleashing the private sector to offer them had strong political appeal in the anti-regulatory zeal of the Reagan era. Moreover, the scare over crack cocaine in the 1980s had associated addiction with urban racial minorities. Opioid marketers targeted white parts of the country, benefiting from the widespread stereotype that good heartland consumers (“patients”) were unlikely to become addicted.

Of course, race has no impact on someone’s risk of addiction. Trauma does, though. Research suggests that experiences of significant trauma increase the chance that a person will develop an addiction after using drugs. In the 1990s, as opioid sales boomed, rural and small-town white areas were suffering from unemployment, population decline and the erosion of social institutions such as labor unions and churches. The huge industry-driven expansion of opioid white markets [vs. black markets] in these already struggling communities led to a similarly huge rise in addiction.

…

People with addiction are strongly motivated to continue using drugs, however. Increasingly unable to buy in white markets, they formed a large potential consumer base for illicit opioids. In the 2010s, new suppliers emerged to meet the demand.

This moment of market disruption in the flow of opioids led to innovations that echoed the 21st century’s e-commerce revolution. Old supply chains moved heroin from poppy fields to central markets in major U.S. cities; traffickers in the 2010s built new supply chains bringing synthetic products such as fentanyl sourced with chemicals from China to American consumers wherever they lived — including the rural areas and small towns struck by the opioid crisis.

Which is to say: Fentanyl traffickers were responding to consumer demand. They did not create it. The opioid crisis initially struck white areas not because of a conspiracy to destroy heartland America. Rather, it was a devastatingly ironic result of white Americans’ privileged access to the medical system. Physicians’ willingness to recognize and treat their pain opened their communities to pharmaceutical companies’ flood of opioids. The drugs’ ubiquity meant that they were easy to get whether one had a prescription for them or not.

Three decades in, the opioid crisis is no longer mostly white. In recent years, overdose rates have been going up fastest among some racial minorities. They are now highest among Native Americans and in some of the poorest Black urban neighborhoods. This is in part because fentanyl outcompeted heroin everywhere, including the segregated, economically struggling urban neighborhoods where heroin’s prohibition markets had been quarantined by municipal authorities.»

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/opinion/fentanyl-trump-drug-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U8.FiFB.SHmsE0YLrsBk&smid=url-share (gift)

How have I gone this long before discovering this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/business/trump-administration-states-undo-full-snap-food-stamps.html

Blows my mind how the Trump administration thinks this is a winning position. Do they not realize how many white people need SNAP? Or is this that point where everybody sees that they really don’t care about the lowest economic quintile of the American population AND they don’t care that it’s visible?

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183489/population-of-the-us-by-ethnicity-since-2000/

31% of Black people × Black people are 13% of the population = 4% of the population.

15% of white people × 78% of the population = 12% of the population.

3× as many white people as Black have received SNAP benefits, but they’re in the lowest quintile.

Twice as many Democrats as Republicans.

Maybe the Trump admin knows the lowest quintile is not their voters? Maybe we should stop with the “why would they vote against their own self-interest?” questions? Maybe the Poor People’s Campaign is on to something? (Lots of poor people don’t vote, and if they did, they’d be a huge voting bloc. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnout-2020-2024/)

I wonder if those high-transfer counties that voted for Trump were characterized by lots of poor people who just didn’t vote? https://eig.org/economic-geography-2024/

«It’s the rattle of a person going on and professorially on, quite as if the substance of a discipline, or its intellectual trajectory, or even just the nourishing joy of sustained and serious study, mattered at all to the person he was talking to, or to the majestic institution he represents. And honestly, what could be more feeble?

It’s not that those things don’t matter: they absolutely goddamn do, and will keep on mattering, and I wouldn’t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It’s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. I should remember that, and so should you.»

https://lithub.com/maybe-dont-talk-to-the-new-york-times-about-zohran-mamdani/

(Before someone says, “ooh, John, you read Literary Hub?”: no, I don’t, but Memeorandum does, apparently.)

«During the long 2005-2021 rule of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s prosperity rested on three pillars: exports to China, cheap gas from Russia and U.S. protection through NATO. They have all crumbled….

…

The result is a country forced to reinvent itself — but the fear of fringe parties is keeping mainstream politicians frozen, said Sabine Kropp, a political science professor at the Freie Universität Berlin.

“A truly poor approach at the moment is the constant fear of the AfD,” she said. `”Everything is viewed through the lens of whether it benefits or harms the AfD, and that reduces the ability to solve problems.”»

https://www.politico.eu/article/friedrich-merz-fragile-coalition-pressure-reform-germany/

“tactics without a strategy.“ Seems about right.

«a suspension of port fees on Chinese ships and the delay of U.S. export controls that would have barred more Chinese firms from accessing American technology.

…

Some experts said China inevitably had the upper hand in the trade fight because the Trump administration never had a clear objective.

“I think it’s an approach that can safely be described as tactics without a strategy,” said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously analyzed Chinese politics at the C.I.A.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/world/asia/china-trump-xi-trade.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xU8.c-F1.8Yc9K02Z1dK8&smid=url-share

«”We know that there’s a lot of really quiet movements that are going on,” Pagitt said.

Dave Gibbons, lead pastor of the multiethnic Newsong Church in Santa Ana, Calif., tells Axios he’s talked with people quietly walking away from MAGA because of the mass deportations.

Reality check: Precisely how many evangelicals are “quietly quitting” MAGA isn’t clear — most don’t announce it publicly for fear of being criticized or harassed online.

Some evangelical church leaders also worry that speaking out — even when citing Scripture about helping strangers — could result in an exodus of members who back Trump, said Gibbons, a former fundamentalist.»

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/29/evangelicals-quietly-quitting-trump-maga

There’s a fair amount of this sort of quietness in (US) Christianity, not just among people de-MAGA-ifying themselves. The progressive Christians just aren’t as loud.

Meanwhile, tons of folks in the social-media-o-sphere continue to caricature Christians. (Granted, a fair number of people calling themselves “Christian” do a pretty good job of caricaturing themselves.)