curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Rebecca Solnit:
Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires
To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (“They don’t mean me”) or by despair (“There’s nothing we can do”). Each of us must find our work and do it.
–Audre Lorde
Some people like to strike worldly and cynical postures, perhaps because they don’t realize that worldly and cynical are only too often in conflict with each other. Those striking the posture often assume that the more you know about something the darker and grimmer it will get, and therefore, having not really bothered to learn more, they can set themselves up as worldly by waxing cynical. Often they’re wrong in assuming that any positive view is the result of – well the favorite word is naïveté – when often the opposite is true. There is naive cynicism, bitter naïveté, confident assumptions that things are worse than they actually are.
One arena in which this is startlingly true is climate. I have been around the climate movement for more than fifteen years. Everyone who’s up to their neck in climate politics, economics, and science knows the situation is serious, alarming, dismaying – but not doomed, and so they keep doing what they can do. Their valor, generosity of spirit, dedication is so profoundly beautiful that being around these people one of the rewards for doing climate work (though our main purpose trying to protect the miraculous, gorgeous, astonishing planet and all its elegantly orchestrated systems of life and the support systems of that life).
But outside that world of informed people who are doing the work are people who throw up their hands and give up. I will assume some of them sincerely believe that it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do, we have no solutions, and nobody cares. For others …
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
Brian K Sullivan, Leslie Kaufman, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg: How Climate Change Is Priming More of the World to Burn
Global warming is making many places hotter, drier and more combustible
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Defiance.org:
The humiliation is the point.ICE is fitting Haitian immigrants with ankle monitors, as if these residents who came to the U.S. legally were criminals.
(Defiance.org more…)
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Jason Koebler @ 404 Media:
Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed…
It is not difficult to imagine police in one state using Flock to track a resident of their state cross state lines to, for example, obtain an abortion that is legal in one state but not in another. Last year, 404 Media reported on police in Texas who searched more than 80,000 cameras across Flock’s nationwide network for a woman who had a self-administered abortion.
(Jason Koebler @ 404 Media more…)
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Paresh Dave, Brian Barrett @ Wired:
Rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have again been caught trying to disrupt servers and software—and leaving instructions for future bad behavior.
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Joyce Vance: Erasing January 6
Marcy Wheeler: DOJ Invokes Trump v. US to Protect Todd Blanche’s Fixer, Aakash Singh
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Katelyn Jetelina, Nikki Sapiro Vinckier @ Your Local Epidemiologist: The system should be on trial too.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – August 5, 2026
On August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a new tax to help fund the United States government during the Civil War. Far more than writing a traditional revenue act to address the catastrophic war that had demonstrated its horrors just two weeks earlier at the Battle of Bull Run, Congress deliberately constructed the law to shift ownership of the American government away from the bankers who had previously provided Treasury funds, to the American people.
Over the next four years, the Republican Congress would put taxes on virtually every product in the country and then, to guarantee that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it, they invented the nation’s first income tax.
…Although Republicans invented the American income tax, party leaders in the modern era have turned against it.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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