The List

[Doctor Steuss]

Re-upping this one. Assuming SNAP benefits are not released at the first of the month (all signs point to them not), things are about to get even worse for your area food bank.

Curious for the anti-crime President to do something that is one of the few things proven to increase crime.

[Chap]

Re-upping this one. Assuming SNAP benefits are not released at the first of the month (all signs point to them not), things are about to get even worse for your area food bank.

Curious for the anti-crime President to do something that is one of the few things proven to increase crime.

Yup.

About the only thing that would make me consider shop-lifting would be if my children were hungry and I neither had money enough to feed them, not could honestly obtain it.

[Xenophon]

Re-upping this one. Assuming SNAP benefits are not released at the first of the month (all signs point to them not), things are about to get even worse for your area food bank.

Curious for the anti-crime President to do something that is one of the few things proven to increase crime.

And all the additional ramifications for non-grocery retailers. I'm not an economist but I imagine less money for food will pretty easily translate to reduced spending for non-food purchases.

Yup.

About the only thing that would make me consider shop-lifting would be if my children were hungry and I neither had money enough to feed them, not could honestly obtain it.

It isn't just property theft crimes either. There are strong links to SNAP directly reducing violent crime and domestic abuse as well.

[Doctor Steuss]

In my pessimistic conspiratorial moments, I can't help but wonder if there's actually a strategy to increase crime.

It would provide the pretext for military deployments, as well as increase incarceration rates. Quite a few private prison companies and investors are Trump donors, and the 13th Amendment provides a workaround for a cheap workforce, that has limited rights and is subsidized by the State, for the investor class.

Or, it could just be more rank cruelty. Occam's razor for Trump and his enablers generally points to cruelty rather than strategy.

[Xenophon]

In my pessimistic conspiratorial moments, I can't help but wonder if there's actually a strategy to increase crime.

It would provide the pretext for military deployments, as well as increase incarceration rates. Quite a few private prison companies and investors are Trump donors, and the 13th Amendment provides a workaround for a cheap workforce, that has limited rights and is subsidized by the State, for the investor class.

Or, it could just be more rank cruelty. Occam's razor for Trump and his enablers generally points to cruelty rather than strategy.

I think all of those are potential considerations. It isn't just because of needing the shutdown to continue, they could fairly easily keep most of the big parts of the shutdown but provide emergency funding here.

My money would it also being part of the larger strategy of looking to instigate the violent protests they need in order to crank down harder.

[canpakes]

My money would it also being part of the larger strategy of looking to instigate the violent protests they need in order to crank down harder.

This. Anything that becomes an excuse or a tool to more easily exert greater control is going to be part of the strategy. On the surface, saying so sounds cynical, but it’s a very practical approach for the Administration. An example is how it has been using ICE to try to instigate conflict.

[Jersey Girl]

This message received earlier today is directly from the DOD USAFA Refill Pharmacy. Adding it to the list here.

[canpakes]

.
‘No New Wars’ was a supposed concern of MAGA prior to the election. The Trump Administration may not care to follow that suggestion.

The Trump Administration has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment, sources with knowledge of the situation told the Miami Herald, as the U.S. prepares to initiate the next stage of its campaign against the Soles drug cartel.

The planned attacks, also reported by the Wall Street Journal, will seek to destroy military installations used by the drug-trafficking organization the U.S. says is headed by Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and run by top members of his regime.

Sources told the Herald that the targets — which could be struck by air in a matter of days or even hours — also aim to decapitate the cartel’s hierarchy. U.S. officials believe the cartel exports around 500 tons of cocaine yearly, split between Europe and the United States.

While sources declined to say whether Maduro himself is a target, one of them said his time is running out.

“Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the source said. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”

Washington has doubled the reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million—the largest such bounty ever offered—and currently offers $25 million rewards for the capture of some of his top lieutenants, including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who is believed to run cartel operations. Another key regime figure facing U.S. drug-trafficking charges is Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López.

When announcing the decision in August to double the $25 million reward on Maduro, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro leads the Cartel de los Soles — Cartel of the Suns — a drug-trafficking organization embedded in Venezuela’s military, and works with groups including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and other transnational criminal networks. Bondi called Maduro “one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers and a threat to our national security,” adding that the bounty increase was aimed at tightening the net around him.

The U.S. military has sharply increased its presence off Venezuela’s coast as part of an operation the White House says is aimed at disrupting drug trafficking and the criminal networks tied to the Caracas regime.

One of President Donald Trump’s first moves after returning to the White House in January 2025 was to direct the State Department to designate certain drug cartels as terrorist and transnational criminal organizations — including Tren de Aragua, and later, the Cartel of the Suns.

In August, the United States began assembling a large-scale deployment in the southern Caribbean Sea near northern Venezuela, creating a Joint Task Force that initially included three destroyers—equipped for air, anti-submarine and missile defense—and an amphibious group of roughly 4,500 troops. The mission has included maritime patrols by P-8 reconnaissance aircraft and long-range surveillance flights to map trafficking routes.

In September the deployment was reinforced with 10 F-35B fighters based at Ceiba Air Base in Puerto Rico and armed MQ-9 Reaper drones at Rafael Hernández Airport on the island. U.S. officials say those aircraft can conduct precision strikes against labs, clandestine airstrips, vehicles or vessels linked to drug operations.

On Oct. 24, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group—including the cruiser USS Normandy and the destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt—into the Caribbean. The carrier strike group, with more than 4,000 personnel and roughly 90 combat aircraft, is described by retired Venezuelan officers who spoke to the Herald as the centerpiece of a “final phase” intended to neutralize leaders of the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua and strike fixed and mobile targets inside Venezuela.

So far, the force has been used mainly in maritime operations. As of this week, U.S. strikes have targeted fast boats the administration says were carrying narcotics—most intercepted off Venezuela’s coast; the attacks have killed 61 suspected traffickers.

Administration officials say the task force will shift operations ashore because traffickers are now less willing to risk voyages that can be detected and targeted at sea. The sheer scale of the deployment has led many analysts to conclude that the mission’s ultimate aim is the removal of the Maduro regime, though U.S. officials have provided few specifics about any planned actions inside Venezuela.

Most experts doubt the United States intends a prolonged occupation—a stance Trump reiterated during his campaign for a second term. “What he favors are targeted operations, like the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, or attacks on Iran’s nuclear installations,”

Elliott Abrams, who served as U.S. special representative for Venezuela in Trump’s first term, told Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer. “I don’t think he wants something that could drag on. ”Still, a full-scale invasion would be far larger and costlier than the current posture. Even the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama—a smaller, militarily less complex country—required about 30,000 troops, Abrams noted.

Mark F. Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the forces now in the Caribbean are sufficient for strikes and intimidation but not for an invasion.

“There isn’t enough combat power for an invasion,” he said, “but there is plenty for air or missile strikes against the cartels or the Maduro regime.”

https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/nation ... 22642.html

A more disturbing issue, though, is that the original plan may have been to frame Venezuela with a false-flag attack on a US Navy warship, which would then have been used as a pretense to launch a ‘retaliatory’ strike.

With that ruse no longer an option, the Administration appears to be resigning itself to openly attempting regime change.

Oct 26 (Reuters) - Venezuela on Sunday condemned what it said was a military provocation by neighboring Trinidad and Tobago in coordination with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, aimed at spurring a full military confrontation with the Latin American nation.

Joint military exercises between the U.S. and Trinidad and Tobago are currently underway in the Caribbean and Venezuela said it had captured a group of mercenaries "with direct information of the American intelligence agency" and whose goal it was to carry out a false-flag attack in the region.

A false flag attack is an operation when an act is carried out in such a way that a different party appears responsible.

"A false flag attack is underway in waters bordering Trinidad and Tobago or from Trinidadian or Venezuelan territory to generate a full military confrontation with our country," Venezuela's government said in the statement.

The statement, issued by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, did not offer further details or evidence of the false flag attack accusations.

Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed reports that he authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations in Venezuela.
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has levied accusations of false flag attacks before, including a plan to plant explosives in the U.S. embassy in Caracas in early October.

The U.S. State Department and the CIA were not immediately available for comment.

Trump has carried out a number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that the administration claims are trafficking drugs. The Pentagon escalated its military build-up in the Caribbean this Friday by deploying the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier group.

Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Lincoln Feast

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 025-10-26/

[Doctor Steuss]

From the Marxist Progressives at Fox News:

President Donald Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would revive nuclear weapons testing — which the U.S. has not done since 1992 — left experts, lawmakers and military personnel scratching their heads Thursday.

The president announced, just before his high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he is instructing the Pentagon to start testing nuclear weapons on an "equal basis" as Russia and China, and that the process for testing these weapons would begin immediately.

"They seem to all be nuclear testing," Trump later told reporters on Air Force One. "We don’t do testing — we halted it years ago. But with others doing testing, it’s appropriate that we do also."

It’s unclear exactly what Trump meant, since no country has conducted a known nuclear test since North Korea in 2017. The last known tests for China and Russia date back to the 1990s, when Russia was still the Soviet Union.

Link

My grandfather was a downwinder. There's no telling how much of the health funk that's wrong with me and my siblings is because of the epigenetic dysregulation from radiation exposure (none of us have a functional thyroid, despite no family history prior to my mom and her siblings).

Physics haven't changed in the few decades surrounding nuclear weapons. This is silly.

Maybe a DOGE advocate can explain this one to me though, now that our debt has increased more in the last few months that at any time outside of a pandemic or recession... spending money on unnecessary testing, that has a myriad of adverse outcomes, kind of seems pretty wasteful.

[canpakes]

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Surprise! The Administration is growing the police and surveillance state.

ICE has powerful facial recognition app Illinois cops are barred from using — with little apparent oversight

The Trump administration has contracts with Clearview AI, a firm banned from doing business with Illinois police agencies. “This is what dystopian nightmares are made of, this kind of continual expansion of surveillance without any real oversight or restrictions,” says Jeramie Scott of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

By Tom Schuba - Oct 31, 2025, 4:30am MDT


The Trump administration has wiped a facial recognition policy from its website while further embracing the controversial technology and securing a $9 million contract with a company barred from selling to Illinois law enforcement agencies.

The ban was the result of a lawsuit filed in Cook County that alleged Clearview AI’s massive database of photographs pulled from across the internet violated a landmark state law protecting people’s personal information.

But a settlement of the case didn’t apply to federal law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration agents. ICE has long been monitoring immigrants in Chicago using facial recognition technology.

Clearview — described by an attorney who sued the company as “one of the largest threats to personal privacy” — can be used in Chicago by federal authorities carrying out President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign.

The FBI, Army, US. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security currently hold nearly $10 million in contracts with Clearview, whose chief executive reportedly has close ties to Trump allies.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using the largest contract — worth up to $9.2 million — to identify victims and perpetrators of child sex crimes, as well as people suspected of “assaults against law enforcement officers,” records show.

The contract began Sept. 5, days before ICE launched its aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the Chicago area known as “Midway Blitz.” As agents fan out across the city and suburbs, there’s no federal law governing the use of facial recognition technology and apparently little to no restrictions.

A facial recognition policy implemented under former President Joe Biden was removed from the DHS website shortly after Trump took office, according to an oversight body’s report, which said it’s unclear whether the policy still applies or is being updated.

A DHS spokesperson claims the policy remains in effect, but it still can’t be found online. Web pages that mention the policy have been wiped or archived.

“In an effort to keep DHS.gov current, the archive contains outdated information that may not reflect current policy or programs,” some of the pages say.

The DHS spokesperson said the notices “simply reflect standard web-management practices to prevent outdated materials from being presented as current; they do not represent a change in policy. DHS continually reviews issuances to strengthen clarity and accuracy.”

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., raised concerns about the potential rollback of protections and oversight.

“I find it appalling that the Trump Administration is attempting to silently revoke previous guidance that was put in place to protect our privacy and due process rights,” Durbin said. “We need answers on how and why the Trump Administration is using surveillance technology, such as what is provided by Clearview AI, especially as DHS continues to ruthlessly carry out cruel, excessive immigration raids and detain both immigrants and U.S. citizens.”

The Biometric Information Privacy Act

The Cook County legal settlement barring most businesses, entities and state law enforcement agencies from using Clearview stemmed from a lawsuit filed in May 2020 by the ACLU of Illinois and other advocacy organizations.

The lawsuit claimed the company was violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires people to consent to the collection and use of their personally identifying information such as fingerprints or face scans.

In March, a federal judge in Chicago approved another settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by people who claimed their biometrics were illegally scraped from the internet and used without their approval.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman created a novel settlement structure to resolve the class-action suit for thousands of potential plaintiffs.

They could get a possible 23% stake in Clearview that would be paid out based on a variety of factors, including if the company goes public or is liquidated. The company was valued at $225 million, putting the stake at $51.75 million.

Chicago police detectives were first trained on the use of facial recognition technology in 2014 at the police academy. As a result of a 2020 privacy lawsuit, their department and other local police agencies in Illinois were banned from using Clearview AI’s app, but police continue to use other companies’ technology.

In addition to the $9.2 million Clearview is now getting from ICE, the company has these contracts:

• $407,000 for the FBI to “reduce crime, fraud, and risk in order to make communities safer” in New York City

• $95,000 for the U.S. Marshals Service for “apprehending fugitives” in Springfield, Virginia

• $75,000 for the U.S. Army at the Fort Bragg military installation in North Carolina

• $30,000 for Customs and Border Protection at the Spokane Sector in Washington state

• $15,000 for Customs and Border Protection at the Yuma Sector in Arizona

A company spokesperson didn’t respond to questions.

Clearview allegedly tied to alt-right ideology

One of the cases consolidated to create the class-action suit was filed in California.

It claimed the company’s founder, Hoan Ton-That, and others associated with Manhattan-based Clearview had “longstanding ties to the alt-right, a far-right ideology based on the belief that white identity is under attack.”

Ton-That now works as chief technology officer for Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based financial firm. Reuters reported that Ton-That was replaced in February by Richard Schwartz, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s onetime adviser, and Republican megadonor Hal Lambert.

The suit was originally filed in Alameda County court in California by a group of advocates who said they didn’t consent to have their biometric information harvested. It alleged the company was tied to a “pizzagate” conspiracy theorist, a neo-Nazi hacker and a man who marched during the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

According to the lawsuit, Charles Johnson, a Holocaust denier and purported Clearview co-founder, allegedly made a Facebook post about “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squad.”

Johnson was pushed out of Clearview and ordered to pay $71 million in July after he was sued for allegedly posing as an intelligence agent as part of an extortion scheme targeting Lambert, Clearview’s co-chief executive officer, and his investment management firm.

Facial recognition ‘threatens privacy’

For years, Democrats in Washington have unsuccessfully tried to place limits on facial recognition technology.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., introduced legislation in July that would bar law enforcement officials from using “facial recognition to enforce the immigration laws of the United States or share facial recognition data with other agencies for the purposes of enforcing the immigration laws of the United States.”

The legislation was referred to both the House Judiciary and Science, Space, and Technology committees, which are controlled by Republicans.

On Jan. 16, four days before Trump returned to office, DHS officials announced what they described as “the most extensive requirements” of any federal agency to ensure facial recognition was “used properly.”

The next month, the agency removed the text of the underlying policy from its website, according to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the independent agency that questioned the move in May. By then, Trump’s administration had effectively whittled the watchdog group down to a single Republican member.

Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel at Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on civil liberties and privacy, said: “It’s very unclear what the policy is, or if there even is a policy that’s in effect with respect to DHS’ use of facial recognition technology.

“ICE is now seemingly using it without any guardrails to identify anyone they deem suspicious,” Scott said. “This is what dystopian nightmares are made of, this kind of continual expansion of surveillance without any real oversight or restrictions.”

Meanwhile, the uphill battle to curtail the use of facial recognition has only gotten tougher.

In September, nine Democrat senators wrote to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to question him about an app known as Mobile Fortify, which they said “reportedly allows agents to point a smartphone at an individual’s face or fingerprints and identify the individual based on a biometric match against several federal databases.”

Videos of masked agents scanning people with cellphones have begun cropping up on social media.

The Mobile Fortify app is part of a growing arsenal of tools the feds have to vet whether someone is in the country without legal status, including iris scanning, the use of license plate readers, and fingerprint matches between a DHS database of immigrants removed from the United States and an FBI database containing fingerprints from arrests by the Chicago Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies.

“Facial recognition technology is often biased and inaccurate, especially when used against communities of color,” said Sen. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who signed the letter and has introduced legislation aimed at regulating facial recognition.

“The use of this technology against protesters and private citizens is concerning, dangerous, and is not just a threat to privacy, but foments a threat on democracy itself.”

https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchd ... -oversight