Light It Up

Sometimes the stupid from the Trump regime is so extreme it just burns.

I was trying to ignore the fact that his FCC has approved the application of a company that plans to put up a satellite that wants to use a giant mirror to reflect the sun back to Earth, lighting the night sky for reasons I was not going to look into. All I knew was that astronomers and the Dark Skies folks were opposed to it (duh). 

I've been hoping they will get an injunction and stop this sheer idiocy. Maybe they will, but I keep seeing coverage of it so now I know more about it, unfortunately.

Jen Sorensen made a cartoon, and wrote about it in her weekly newsletter:

The company wants to put up 50,000 of these things by 2035. Jen wrote:

For a few years now, the company has been touting the illumination of solar farms at night as the primary reason for the mirrors. Setting aside whether this is feasible or even a priority in a country that is doing its best to undermine solar power, the company is openly promoting other, less noble uses: extending working hours at industrial sites, replacing streetlights in urban areas, and (as I mentioned in the comic) "unforgettable nighttime experiences." Here, have a screenshot from their website:



Is that supposed to be a European city square lit up with a night sun? What part of "light pollution" do these messianic tech bros not understand? What about the people who live in the cities and are trying to sleep there? And we're seriously talking about disrupting the life-sustaining rhythms of the natural world so people can have Instagrammable experiences? 

She recommended this November 2025 Scientific American article, which includes this stunning fact: 

Each [mirror] would be capable of casting a 5 km-wide beam about four times brighter than the full moon down to Earth. 

Imagine how much light a full moon gives. Then think of it being four times brighter, and there being thousands of them in the night sky. Maybe tens of thousands of them, all around the planet.

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Death Squads on Our Streets

As news comes out today that DHS (ICE, ERO, whoever) has killed a third person — this time in Florida, following killings in Texas and Maine — I can't keep avoiding posting about it. 

They're death squads. It has to be said. 

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford.

And now this person in St. Augustine.

And that's not even mentioning the killings in Memphis by National Guard and other militarized units — who should not be there either!

These are posts from BlueSky, in chronological order, starting from the days after Araujo was killed in Houston. Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

___

ICE may have moved off the front page, but another man is dead after an encounter with agents, and the administration is still defending detention without bond. This is why we keep watching, even when the headlines move on. 
Joyce White Vance

Lorenzo put 3 kids thru college with a blue collar job. Worked dawn to dusk, building homes. Loved his wife of 30 yrs and John Deere. Lived here longer than I've been alive. It doesn't make a life more valuable. But so many immigrants detained, deported, dying bear the trappings of "real America" we mythologize.
Nicole Foy

Someone I know had a good take on what we're seeing with ICE now in Massachusetts. It's not necessarily a surge, but rather this is likely a new normal as we see the effects of DHS funding and recruitment. I think that's probably right and reinforces the need to dismantle these organizations. The reality is that DHS has received so much money and built up so much infrastructure that unless Democrats tear it apart, ICE and CBP will just keep abducting people and running concentration camps. Once a bureaucracy is entrenched and well-funded it will keep harming people until it's dismantled.
Gravel Influencer

ICE claims that Araujo drove into one of their SUVs with his van and then tried to run over an agent. There were no marks on the van and KHOU11's Jeremy Rogalski found surveillance footage showing ICE chasing Araujo and cutting him off. Renee Good all over again.
Amee Vanderpool @girlsreallyrule.bsky.social

Houston, you need to lock in right fucking now. The federal government is claiming they put armed officers on your streets without body cameras, they're saying they can shoot you in the street without providing video footage and your mayor is lying to you, claiming the city cant even investigate it.
Jen Rice

If you believe a word that ICE says, then you’re either a gullible, checked-out fool, or someone predisposed to taking the word of violent racists. Best to correct yourself either way.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Masked government agents are literally murdering people in the streets, but hey, the stock market is up!
Patrick Chovanec

ICE shot and killed a man in Houston with no criminal record who was not even their target. They pushed him off the road. And now he is gone forever. ICE is a domestic terrorist organization. We need to abolish ICE now and stop Trump’s murderous thugs.
Sen. Ed Markey

It's fucked up that ICE runs around in unmarked cars randomly pulling guns on people and then when those same people react fearfully they use it as a justification for murdering them. Yet another reminder that just because ICE changed tactics, they never stopped being lawless thugs inflicting violence with impunity
Gravel Influencer

With two people dead in Memphis in four days and one the same week in Houston, that's four people federal agents have shot and killed over just nine days.

July 5: Tyrin Johnson
July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
July 8: Alfonso Ivy
July 13: Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero
unraveled @unraveledpress.com

news of a little girl in bluey pajamas witnessing ICE murder her dad happening concurrently with another discourse about "civility" towards those in power who...  enable/condone/want a little girl in bluey pajamas witnessing ICE murder her dad. makes you wonder what civility even means, ever meant
Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social

After multiple murders by ICE/CBP, Democrats refused to provide additional $$ for them without reforms and oversight. Republicans were opposed to reform and unilaterally provided more $$ through reconciliation. Now ICE has enough to run at 4x capacity through 2029 — with LESS oversight than before. This is the result.
Bobby Kogan

When you say ICE shot and killed the wrong person there’s an inference that it would have been okay if they shot and killed the right person, just saying
Jesse Hawken

The safest communities are the ones with the most resources. Not the ones with the most ICE agents shooting people. Terror is not public safety.
Ruth Zakarin

Johan Sebastien Guerrero had a social security number. He had legal authorization to work here - therefore, he is by definition not “an illegal alien.” In addition, DHS isn’t even claiming he “weaponized his vehicle,” they’re arguing he fled. ICE is now straightforwardly admitting to murder.
Hunter Dunn @hunterisntdunn.bsky.social


conifergirl.bsky.social

They aren't claiming the officer [in Maine] feared for his life, but "feared for public safety" when Guerrero attempted to flee. But he was not the target of the warrant. Which means they had no reason to think he was dangerous. Fleeing an immigration stop does not make you a threat to public safety. Moreover, for the umpteenth time, unless you're dealing with a mass killing in which a driver is actively trying to mow people down — which was not the case here -- shooting into a moving vehicle *increases* the threat to public safety. Because killing the driver doesn't stop the vehicle.
Radley Balko

The news should be covering ICE like a serial killer on the loose
Kevin M. Kruse

They say they shot Guerrero because they "feared for public safety". But Guerrero *was* part of the public they claim to defend. *They* were the real threat to public safety. These undisciplined racist sociopaths with guns and impunity are the threat, not hard working immigrants.
Bruce Wilson

Took me a while to find this [article from 2014], but it's clear that they're still utilizing these long-ingrained and specifically trained Border Patrol tactics of surrounding vehicles like they did Renee Good's in Minnesota and now Johan Sebastian Guerrero's in Maine —regardless of whether the person is a target. I want media to stop faithfully publishing the lies about victims weaponizing their vehicles and I want them required to cite this Border Patrol tactic that they've been training since at LEAST 2014 every time it happens regardless of whether they actually kill anyone. Every time they surround a car. 
Indigiqueer Hummingbird @riotousmuse.bsky.social

News organizations should periodically stop and look in the mirror and ask themselves “Have we internalized copspeak to the point that our headlines indistinguishable from police department email subject lines?”


Hamilton Nolan

Mainstream media’s use of the passive tense to describe ICE or police murdering someone is effectively running cover for the perpetrator of the crime.
Hunter Dunn

So, speaking of journalists just repeating copaganda... The St. Augustine "encounter" is that ICE agents were chasing him and he was hit by a truck. It is understandable to run when people roll up on you in an unmarked vehicle and pull their guns.
Gravel Influencer

We’re not going to be able to “just go back to normal” in 2029. At this point, abolishing ICE, followed by free, fair trials for treason for ICE agents and their collaborators is the bare minimum. We must do whatever it takes to make sure nothing like ICE can ever exist again:


Hunter Dunn @hunterisntdunn.bsky.social

Today is Bastille Day, something to think about as you read more stories of citizens murdered with impunity by government agents.
Bob Alberti @a1batross.bsky.social

a decade ago there was an entire movement dedicated to confronting the militarization of state power against its citizens. Not only did you not listen... our political actors increased police budgets across the entire country. Now military forces are killing White moms and nurses.
Solomon @solomonrmissouri.com

Skulking, lawless goons, empowered by a fascistic Republican Party, are destroying life in America. I say this in the micro and macro sense. Where there could be joy, there is panic. Where there could be family, there is loss. Where we could embrace in community, we bond in trauma. Enough.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

How Much Is Being Spent on Data Centers?

Christopher Schmidt, who works for Google and is a founding member of the Alphabet Workers Union, posted this thread today on BlueSky:

In 2026, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle plan to spend $725 billion on data center buildout.

I wonder what other things in the economy are happening at that scale. Like, how does this compare to, I dunno, all road-widening projects? Or global solar installations?

It's hard for me to picture what $725B looks like in terms of capital expenditures.

Like, Massacusetts has a $16B 5-year capital plan; expanding that per-capita to the US means something like $260B/year for the combination of all states in the US, so AI capex is 3x larger than all state-level capex spend.

It looks like the 2024 estimate of CapEx for solar installed in the US was $1.61/W, and US solar added 43GW in 2025, so total solar installed at that rate in the US in 2025 was around $69B (nice), so it's around 10 times as much as all US solar installations in 2025.

Total construction on US highway projects in 2025 is estimated at $188B, with ~$50B for expansion projects, so it's 4 times as much as all US highway spending, and 15 times as much as all highway expansion spending. 

He continues with numbers on urban rail, private home construction, and some numbers from other parts of the world. 

Then:

Total outlays for physical capital by the US government in 2025 were expected to be $463B as of March 2025. So the data center investment by hyperscalars is expected to be 50% higher than all US federal government physical capital investments combined.

So in 2026, the $725B capex to be spent on data centers:
 - 40% more than new housing construction.
 - 50% more spending than the US federal government.
 - ~3x US state capital spend.
 - 8x all of Africa infrastructure.
 - 5x all global rail.
 - 4x all US highway spend.
 - 10x US solar spend.

He ends by comparing with the boom and bust of U.S. railroad expansion, 1867–1873, which led to the devastating Panic of 1873.

Tom Tomorrow and Flaming Hydra

It's time for my more or less annual reminder to support cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's Sparky's List, as all of the publications that pay cartoonists go out of business in this media environment. 

With it, you get an early view of his weekly comic, which tries to make sense of this indescribable time we are living through, plus his additional thoughts on it, and comments on life in New York City and sometimes an inside view of minor celebrity culture from a guy who's been on the edge of things for 40 or so years.

This week he shared an extra comic, which had the benefit of informing me of the existence of flaminghydra.com. It's a co-op of journalists, essayists, and other creatives, many of whom I see on BlueSky. Not sure why I haven't heard of it before. Like all independent media, Flaming Hydra also needs subscribers ($3/month). 

Here's the comic, to entice you to subscribe to either or both... and to once again remind us all of just how batshit the past 11 years have been:

Double the Errors, Double the Fun

If I have to read about Trump's many misdeeds in one my thin local daily newspapers — this one owned by private equity and which I pay way too much money for — I wish it could at least give me headlines that don't have obvious typos.

In this case, there's a flagrant error in both the main headline and the deck just below it: 

Both involving the word "to." Such a difficult one to keep track of.

Clearly they have a thin to nonexistent set of copy editors.
 

Leave It on the Prairie

This morning, I read two stories about the new Little House on the Prairie television series (which I don't plan to watch). Not surprisingly, they both focused on how it differs from the 1970s version and from the books.

The first was brief, and talked only about the way the new show incorporates the Osage in one episode. In the original series (and in the book), the Osage men are unwelcome raiders who take food and jabber in a "savage" language. In the new series, in contrast, the Ingalls family shares the food and Laura sits and talks with them, learning that it's the Ingalls who are squatters on Osage land — which is the historical truth of the situation. The show even creates a Native best friend character for Laura!

The other story was by the Star Tribune's T.V. critic, Neal Justin. He gives details on the new show's greater historical accuracy (the physical hardship and post-Civil War trauma), but also the way it attempts to clean up the books' and the Ingalls' antipathy toward Native people. In the show Ma Ingalls, for instance, quickly becomes a champion for the Osage ("with Jane Fonda-like spunk," according to Justin). That fits with what the other article said about how Laura's interaction is portrayed toward the Osage men who visited.

The Little House books have fallen from favor among librarians, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's name has been removed from a prestigious library award in 2018 because of these very issues. 

What happens when children watch this rosy new show and then read the books, only to find the racist version in print? We can bet that book publishers will reissue the books with new covers tied in to this series. Where is that Native best friend character? Why are the Osage not even named as such, but instead only called savages?

Who does it help to have this show made at all? Only the owners of the production company and network, the Ingalls Wilder estate, and to a much lesser extent the people who worked on it. 

New ideas are what we need in media — not old, racist stories that need to be left to be understood in their context, not yanked into the present and promoted in a bright, shiny update.

Another Man Is Dead

ICE lies. That's all that needs to be said. 

 

One That's Definitely for the Filing Cabinet

Radley Balko has published an updated version of the guide to research findings on racism in the criminal justice system, which he started when he was at the Washington Post. He left there three years ago.

He says he will continue to update it a few times a year.

There are more than 60 studies listed. A couple of his shortest descriptions:

• A 2023 study used the geolocation data from the smart phones of police in 23 major U.S. cities. It found that police spend far more time patrolling Black neighborhoods than other neighborhoods with similar crime rates and similar socioeconomic demographics. 
• Between 2012 and 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department received more than 1,350 citizen complaints of racial profiling. The department didn’t uphold a single complaint.  

 Balko's page, of course, provides links to all of the studies.

SpudCells!

Have you heard about SpudCells?

This article in the Star Tribune (gift link) almost a week ago was the first thing I saw, but it had been written up in the New York Times as well.  

Bioengineering researcher Kate Adamala and her team have created the first "synthetic cells capable of growing, dividing and self-sustaining." They've made their findings open-source, and created a nonprofit organization called Biotic to "raise funds to perpetuate the communal, global research" that is needed to carry the research forward to the point where the technology can be used to produce plastics or fuels without petrochemicals, or novel drugs. The New York Times story listed another possibility: the cells could draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Star Tribune article is mostly an interview with Adamala, while the Times article (also a gift link) is more of an explainer. 

Here's a toast to basic science research, the kind of thing that is being defunded, along with all the other things the Trump regime doesn't see a value in.

Ten Years Ago

Philando Castile was killed by a cop named Jeronimo Yanez 10 years ago today. Yanez was charged with manslaughter, but found not guilty just a bit less than a year later.

Since then, Philando's mother, Valerie Castile, became an activist. Much of the coverage of this 10-year anniversary has focused on her work. Ramsey County prosecutor John Choi, who brought the charges against Yanez, continues to speak at the same conferences as Castile, both of them talking about how to handle police shootings.

According to Minnesota Public Radio,

“I'm a different prosecutor today compared to what I was back then,” Choi said. “It changed me as a human being, as a prosecutor, looking at a lot of things and getting to this place where I recognized that it's not right to have the type of policing that resulted in Philando's death.”

In the ensuing years, Choi and local law enforcement departments in Ramsey County have largely moved away from the sort of pretextual stops that led to Philando being pulled over, he said. Preliminary data from a new study shows cities like St. Paul have kept those numbers low.

 It has been a long 10 years since then. 

• My first post on the killing, from the day after.
• My post on the not-guilty verdict.
• There was an effort to name a new training fund for cops after Philando, but that idea was voted down by ... cops.
• A peace garden has been created next to the place where he was killed. 
• His family and friends created the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which gives small personal grants to families affected by gun violence. 
  
  

That's Just It

Rebecca Solnit wrote about the duality of America for the Guardian. 

Using her able way with words, she provided a number of contradictory pairs that will sound familiar to any fair-minded reader. That was her point in writing, but this was my favorite sentence in the piece:

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. 

That's just it: we are being ruled by a catastrophic crime scene. Governed is the wrong verb, because I have come to define that word as meaning something other than "imposition of one will over others." 

Bikecentennial

Fifty years ago, it seemed like the Bicentennial was everywhere, all the time. I was a cynical high schooler, post-Watergate, so it all seemed a bit much to me. Constant moments in history on television and red white and blue everywhere for a year or more… it was just a lot of sameness for a young person who lacked perspective. 

I don't remember that there were permanent infrastructure projects completed as part of the Bicentennial, but I've recently been reminded that all of these were timed to mark the anniversary:

• Opening of the first line of the Washington Metro system
• The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum
• Installation of Marc Chagall's America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago
• The renovation of the building that became Landmark Center in St. Paul

I'm sure there are a number of other local projects around the country, similar to St. Paul's Landmark Center or the America Windows, that I don't know about. All of these were permanent gifts to the country or states where they're located. Investments in the future, not just temporary celebrations.

One event that happened that year that I never heard about at the time — different from the usual fireworks or dress-up recreations — was the Bikecentennial.

From CoolBikeArt: 

As the USA commemorates its semiquincentennial, the question arises: What's the best way to celebrate a country's birthday? Fifty years ago, over 4,000 riders embraced the Spirit of '76 by cycling from sea to shining sea. It was known as Bikecentennial.


The main route, called the TransAmerica Trail, wound 4,250 miles (6,840 km) through small towns and less traveled roads from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia. Cyclists could participate in smaller sections of the route, but about 1,750 riders signed up for the entire length of the ride.

The riders were self-contained, carrying all their gear on their bikes. They either camped or stayed in community centers, church basements, and school gymnasiums.

"Two months with everything I needed on the bike made me realize that people, including me, have so much unnecessary stuff. All we really need is enough food, a warm and dry place to sleep, enough clothing to survive, something to interest your mind, and a few friends." –Walter Johnson

"Many cyclists who took part in 1976 (and those who take TransAmerica trips today) say essentially the same thing about the experience: 'I learned more about this country in 90 days than most people learn in a lifetime'." –Dan D’Ambrosio

Bike Centennial continues today as the organization Adventure Cycling, so that has also become a permanent gift. This is their write-up about the 1976 ride.

Of course, there's nothing like Bikecentennial for this year's 250th anniversary, and as far as I know, no lasting physical infrastructure projects, either.