Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations

Rachel Hurley on Facebook: Federal government brought military weapons to Minnesota

Not for a war zone. For a protest in a parking lot outside a Marriott.

On January 26th – yesterday – law enforcement showed up to a protest in Maple Grove with an LRAD. That’s a Long Range Acoustic Device. The military developed them after the USS Cole bombing in 2000 to blast warnings at approaching boats from a quarter mile away. They can hit 162 decibels. A jet engine is 140. The threshold for permanent hearing damage is 130.
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One professor who got hit by an LRAD at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh described it this way: “The intensity of being hit at close range by a high-pitched sound blast designed to deter pirate boats and terrorists at least a quarter mile away is indescribable. The sound vibrates through you and causes pain throughout your body, not only in the ears. I thought I might die.”

That was Karen Piper. She sued the city. She has permanent hearing loss now.
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In 2017, a U.S. District Court determined that using an LRAD against protesters could constitute excessive force and violate the Constitution. The NYPD had to settle a lawsuit in 2021 over using one against Black Lives Matter protesters.
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Eyewitness accounts from January 7th describe them on Bearcats at the scene where Renee Good was killed. What I can’t confirm is whether they’ve actually fired the deterrent tone at protesters. But the presence alone is a threat. That’s the point.
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Charlie Sykes: What if There Were No Cameras?

“On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public…. What was once seen as a joke has attained the status of a prophecy. — Jonathan Chait
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What if we did not have those videos? How many Americans would have believed this? Or given the Administration the benefit of the doubt?

This raises another — and rather urgent — question.

What else is happening that we are not seeing on camera? What else is going on at the hands of an organization that thrives on cruelty porn and is willing to execute American citizens in broad daylight? What are they doing when no one is watching?
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Newsweek: Former Trump Administration DHS Lawyer Demands President’s Impeachment

John Mitnick, who served as general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during the first Trump administration, called for Congress to impeach and remove President Donald Trump after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.

“I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty,” Mitnick said in a post on X. “Impeach and remove Trump—now.”
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AP: The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says

Family members say the man killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis on Saturday was an intensive care nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital who cared deeply about people and was upset by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in his city.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed getting in adventures with Joule, his beloved Catahoula Leopard dog who also recently died. He had participated in protests following the killing of Renee Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs officer on Jan. 7.

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” said Michael Pretti, Alex’s father. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong, so he did participate in protests.”
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WSJ: Why Congress Can’t Claw Back War Powers From Trump

The changing nature of foreign conflict—and the president’s grip on the GOP—has allowed the White House to pursue a nearly unchecked agenda overseas
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So far, these lawmakers concede they are failing. The latest Republican-controlled Congress has accelerated a decadeslong shift giving the White House greater authority to take on America’s adversaries and even some allies. Threats from terror groups and foreign entities have fueled the dynamic by blurring the clear lines between war and peace. The Supreme Court has generally, but not always, favored a strong executive in this arena.
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Thom Hartmann: Is Donald Trump Trying to Crown Himself “King of the World”?

This isn’t merely scandalous or unethical: it’s impeachable on its face and dangerous to the survival of democracy worldwide.

Donald Trump is trying to use a United Nations resolution to justify making himself King of the World via a new “Board of Peace” that Trump says “might” replace the UN, with the ability to pass the title along to his son, Don Jr., if he continues to please his father.

No, this isn’t an exaggeration.

It all started when the United Nations Security Council voted to accept Resolution 2803 on 17 November 2025 to make effective the Gaza peace plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas in October 2025.
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In response to that, Trump had his administration lawyers create an entirely new private, non-governmental “treaty‑based international organization” with its own legal personality, that is not a U.S. government agency, corporation, or standard NGO/non‑profit. This new entity called the “Board of Peace” would …
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The draft charter Trump has proposed for his Board of Peace doesn’t even mention Gaza, anywhere; as a result, it appears designed to replace the United Nations as a new governing body for the entire world.
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Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a direct threat to American constitutional government because the US itself, under the terms of this charter, becomes subject to Trump’s personal authority. Under the proposed document, the U.S. can be expelled unless it pays a ransom or pleases the chairman.
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Forbes: Europe Halts US Trade Deal Over Trump’s Greenland Threats

The European Union will stop working to legally implement the U.S. trade deal touted by President Donald Trump in response to threats to the bloc’s “territorial integrity,” the chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade said on Wednesday, days after Trump threatened retaliatory tariffs on some European nations if they did not negotiate over ownership of Greenland.
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Business Insider: 7 charts show how the economy looked in Donald Trump’s first year of his second presidency

• Donald Trump just wrapped up the first year of his second term as president.
• Business Insider examined how the economy has changed in that year.
• The job market slowed down a lot, consumers kept spending, and tariffs affected inflation a little.

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Borowitz: MLK’s Final Message

The following is [excerpted] from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final essay, A Testament of Hope:
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This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?

The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly. Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people.

White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.
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Inside Climate News: Ocean Damage Nearly Doubles the Cost of Climate Change

The global cost of greenhouse gas emissions are nearly double what scientists previously thought, according to a study published Thursday by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment—a key measure of economic harm caused by climate change—has included damages to the ocean. Global coral loss, fisheries disruption and coastal infrastructure destruction are estimated to cost nearly $2 trillion annually, fundamentally changing how we measure climate finance.

“For decades, we’ve been estimating the economic cost of climate change while effectively assigning a value of zero to the ocean,” said Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, who led the study during his postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps. “Ocean loss is not just an environmental issue, but a central part of the economic story of climate change.”
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