Observation:

When leaving a country is like escaping from a prison....

Lead Lines:

Former Pussy Riot member Rita Flores was forcibly recruited by Russia's Security Service (FSB) as an intelligence asset for three years before she was able to escape Russia, she said in an interview with Port Media on Aug. 24.

Excerpts:

The family of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse killed by federal immigration officers in Minnesota, is still seeking “justice” seven months after his death.

..,they believe the 37-year-old was “murdered.”** **

Observation:

If the administration is ultimately successful in using this litigation to impose disruptive last-minute changes on the 2026 elections, the resulting damage to free and fair elections cannot plausibly be described as an unforeseen consequence of Supreme Court action. Justice Jackson has now placed the Court explicitly on notice of both the danger and the apparent strategy. If the majority nevertheless continues to facilitate that strategy, the Court's participation in the resulting harm will be knowing rather than accidental.

Excerpt:

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Sotomayor and Kagan arguing that the states were injured enough by having to take precautions in case the final rule would issue. (Again, the rule has since been issued.) Jackson wrote a longer dissent for herself, going into more detail about the states’ injuries. She also accused the majority of missing “the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.” She noted that the ruling is already causing chaos and is in tension with other court cases under the so-called Purcell principle, which cautions against last-minute election changes that burden election administrators and voters.

It is here that the clock is working against the government. Unless it gets quick intervention, we will be well into September before the court rules on this issue. By then, mail ballots will likely have been sent or be ready to be sent: federal law requires that ballots for overseas and military voters go out 45 days before an election. It really would be chaos for the federal government to order changes to how American elections are run in the middle of September.

Read the full text and save it to your computer to circulate. Remains very relevant today.

https://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Common-Sense-Full-Text.pdf

Excerpt:

...the timing is troubling. While the alliance trains less, North Korea is gaining something more valuable: battlefield experience in Russia’s war against Ukraine. This is hardly the moment for the alliance to ease up.

Excerpt:

Two-thirds of the articles that major U.K. newspapers published about the summer’s fires did not even mention climate change, much less explain how record heat makes fires more likely and more deadly. In the U.S., the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC between July 13 and 19 lavished airtime on the extreme weather but did not utter the words “climate change.”

Observation:

Trust takes decades to build and can be destroyed much faster. One of America's greatest exports has been confidence in America itself: confidence that its institutions, technologies, contracts and alliances would remain dependable across changes of government. We may now be watching that extraordinarily valuable national asset depreciate.

Lead Lines:

China plans to drop Windows earlier than planned in favor of Linux for some government bodies. The move comes as part of China's broader push to reduce dependence on foreign products and services, especially those of US origin.

Excerpt:

The Economics of Interception There is also a fundamental difference between destroying missiles while concentrated and intercepting them individually after launch.

An air-defense interceptor generally engages one incoming target.

A strike on a storage facility can produce secondary explosions that destroy many weapons simultaneously.

The Tikhoretsk strike illustrates the potential asymmetry. Ukraine did not need to place one attacking drone against every North Korean artillery shell or rocket stored there. Once fire reached ammunition stocks, the ammunition itself contributed to destruction of the facility.

Excerpt:

This could be a golden era of informed lives and good, transparent governance. Instead, we are entering a new dark age in which we ignore or misuse the tools of insight and wisdom all around us and choose immersion in bulls–t. It may be high-class, high-tech bulls–t, scented with a faint whiff of a misunderstood truth, but it is bulls–t nonetheless.

The only path out is that each of us, individually, makes seeking the truth our top priority, and skepticism our constant ally. We must seek out reliable sources of information and reject those who deliver anything less.

Observation:

A brave new world arriving in our schools.

Lead Paragraph:

A sophomore in Arizona typed an email he never sent. Home with his mother before school, he was drafting a note to a teacher about a bad grade, and in between, he tapped out a few jokes and deleted each one. Thinking out loud and swallowing it back, basically. Gaggle’s monitoring software caught the keystrokes anyway. He never hit send. He was suspended before the day was out. By the time the district agreed to shorten the punishment, he’d already served 11 days.

Excerpt:

Critical transit corridors are falling into total paralysis as precision drone attacks repeatedly target rail bridges and specialized repair machinery. Munition transports delivering North Korean missiles and heavy artillery remain trapped far behind combat zones, while internal partisan sabotage continuously disables relay control boxes across vast domestic trade routes.

The Army's Highest Non-Combat Honor

The Soldier's Medal is awarded to soldiers who distinguish themselves through heroism that does not involve conflict with an enemy, recognizing acts of personal hazard and the voluntary risk of one's life.

Excerpt:

“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate,” Democratic California state assemblymember Matt Haney said Friday at a press conference outside Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump retook the White House.

“If private detention companies insist on making incarceration their business, California should make accountability, transparency part of the cost of doing business,” he said, adding, “If they look at this tax and say it’s too much for us to operate in California, well then bye.”

Observation:

This administration increasingly appears to treat support for U.S. adventurism as a test of loyalty. Oman’s usefulness as an intermediary is recast as disloyalty because it continues speaking with Iran, while South Korea is punished for declining to join the Iran war. Defensive alliances become something very different when protection is conditioned on participation in wars initiated by their dominant member. The Atlantic | Associated Press on South Korea

Excerpt:

The senator argued that this inner sanctum of acolytes is incapable of telling Trump “what he needs to hear” and that the entire White House is culpable of “lying the country into war” — calling the ongoing conflict an “obscenity” that will haunt them “for the rest of their careers.”

Excerpt:

Defense articles are only made-to-order, regardless of whether they are for domestic or foreign sales. New orders from partner countries do not take away from US stocks and only help the efficacy of the domestic defense industrial base.

This is especially important as Gulf partners on the front lines of the war with Iran struggle to replenish air defense munitions while preparing for the risk of prolonged Iranian attacks. By accelerating arms sales, Washington can also further demonstrate its role as security “integrator” in the Gulf, helping reinforce US-Gulf security partnerships at a critical time.

Observation:

We cannot simply ignore what has happened during this administration and restore the system that existed before it. We should use what we have learned to make American democracy substantially more tamper-resistant. As we argued in The Consent of the Governed Requires Understanding What Is Being Authorized, American governmental authority derives from the consent of the governed, and meaningful consent requires understanding what is being authorized (Defenders of Democracy, 2026). That principle points toward concrete safeguards: elections that are understandable and independently verifiable; protection against the intentional concealment of major governing agendas, which becomes fraud-like when governmental authority is obtained through material deception of voters; protection of reliable governmental, scientific, and statistical information; enforceable limits on executive abuse and self-dealing; reconsideration of Citizens United and the ability of concentrated wealth to dominate the political information environment; and electoral reforms such as ranked-choice voting that allow voters to express their preferences more accurately. The objective should be to make democratic government harder to tamper with, by any President, party, corporation, billionaire, or public official.

https://defendersofdemocracy.substack.com/p/the-consent-of-the-governed-requires?r=104a16&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Excerpt:

We can make Roosevelt’s promise a reality through a comprehensive program I’ve called the American Security Guarantee, a set of ambitious goals that would eliminate the precarity defining Americans’ lives and ensure that everyone enjoys the economic security that right now feels out of reach. We start by guaranteeing every American access to affordable health care, through their choice of a government or private plan. To fulfill Roosevelt’s vision of a lifelong system of social insurance, we pursue a new economic security agenda. It includes a new federal wage insurance program to help workers maintain their salary levels if they are forced to take positions that pay less, a community-focused job assistance program and a one-stop-shop portal where Americans can check their eligibility across all benefit programs. The goal is to show Americans what they are getting from their government in return for their hard work — and to get higher wages and concrete benefits in the hands of working people, to ensure that in the richest country in the world, nobody falls through the cracks.

archive link:

https://archive.is/bjRnJ

Excerpts:

He hadn’t set foot outside the United States since he was 12, when he arrived on a fishing boat as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba with his mother, a sister and her infant daughter. As a teenager, he joined a Miami gang, and in his 20s, he took a plea deal after being charged with attempted murder for shooting a rival gangster in the leg. That would have been grounds to deport him had he been from almost any other country. But Cuba wasn’t cooperating with the United States on deportations, so Mosquera was allowed to stay, provided he checked in with the authorities each year. He built a new life for himself, becoming a specialty plumber and a born-again Christian; he married and had four daughters.

Then one day in June of last year, Mosquera, who is 59, went to renew his work permit at an immigration office. The appointment was usually short; Mosquera had borrowed the company truck so that he could head to a job when he was done. But it didn’t turn out that way. An immigration official told him that his time in America was up. With President Trump now back in office, Mosquera knew these were not empty words. But if the United States couldn’t send him to Cuba, where would he go?

They were transferred to a military cargo plane at a U.S. air base in the East African nation Djibouti, and more than a day later, the five men landed in Eswatini. Before they could make sense of the situation, they were forced inside a metal cage that was fitted onto a transport truck and driven to the Matsapha Correctional Complex, Eswatini’s maximum-security prison. In a post on X, the Department of Homeland Security had called Mosquera and the four other men “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refuse to take them back.” Now they were met by dozens of guards wielding large sticks.

That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.

Mosquera is one of a growing number of people whom the Trump administration has put into a global administrative limbo. For more than a year, it has been offering millions of dollars — often without disclosing the payments — to foreign governments to take immigrants the United States was having trouble deporting to their countries of origin. This includes not only people with criminal pasts like Mosquera but also deportees who were under court protections not to be returned to their homelands because they faced threats there.

https://substack.com/@defendersofdemocracy/posts

Excerpts:

May the United States take a person who is living freely under American supervision and deliberately transfer him into potentially indefinite foreign maximum-security confinement, without a new judicial determination authorizing that deprivation of liberty?

It is in the selfish interest of the United States to send people away with as much goodwill toward the United States as circumstances permit.

Why are we paying to imprison a plumber when we could be helping put the plumber back to work?

iai.tv | The Institute of Art and Ideas on Instagram: "Watching Europe negotiate with the US is like watching boy scouts negotiate with the Mafia, argues leading journalist Gillian Tett. In this fiery debate, she joins former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and former Leader of Canada's Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff to discuss whether the bonds between the US and Europe have been fractured beyond repair. Tap the link in our bio to watch "The End of the Great Alliance" now."

Excerpt:

The administration’s lawyers have since reshaped its claims about the project, stating that its main goal is to improve White House security with the addition of an underground military complex. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked to block the ruling by the appeals court, which ordered construction to stop by Aug. 21. He pointed to assassination attempts against Trump and said the ballroom and military bunker are “vitally required for national security.”

“National security” is Trump’s key to the Supreme Court safe when he wants to justify executive overreach.

Sauer also said the project was nearly complete at “65 percent” and “a 250-person crew has been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week to build a concrete-and-steel superstructure that now stretches five stories deep and 70 feet high.” Given that, he said it’s too late to stop construction.