United States (US)

Anelise Feldman, a freshman at Yarmouth High School in southern Maine, finished second to Soren Stark-Chessa, a multisport standout at rival North Yarmouth Academy, at a May 2 intramural meet. 

“I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards,” Feldman wrote in a letter to The Portland Press Herald published Wednesday. “I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race.” 

Feldman’s letter was prompted by State Rep. Laurel Libby’s (R-90) comments during a Fox News interview earlier this month in which the lawmaker, while not naming Stark-Chessa, referred to her accomplishments and accused transgender athletes of “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium.” 

 Feldman stressed: “I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.”

“We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school,” she added. “Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.” 

Not only is it scary to have all your data available to US spying, it is also a huge risk for your business/government continuity. From now on, all our business processes can be brought to a halt with the push of a button in the US. And not only will everything then stop, will we ever get our data back? Or are we being held hostage? This is not a theoretical scenario, something like this has already happened.

Here and there, some parts of at least the Dutch government are deciding not to migrate EVERYTHING to the US (kudos to the government workers who are fighting for this!).

But even here, the details of Dutch policy are that our data will only ‘for now’ stay on our own servers. Experts are also doubtful whether it’s actually possible with the current “partial cloud” plan to keep the data here exclusively.

And then we come to the apparent reason why we are putting our head on Trump’s chopping block: “American software is just so easy to use”.

Personally, I don’t know many fans of MS Teams, Office, and Outlook. We are, however, very used to these software products. We’ve become quite good at using them.

But this brings us to the unbearable conclusion that we are entrusting all our data and business processes to the new King of America… because we can’t be bothered to get used to a different word processor, or make an effort to support other software.

This is interesting. A considerably less bleak conclusion than I would have expected.

I interviewed 30 chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and legislative assistants—the key players who shape nearly every policy decision that moves through Congress. What I learned challenges conventional wisdom about how scientific information flows on Capitol Hill and reveals why many well-intentioned efforts by academics fall short.

It’s widely understood that data alone rarely drive decisionmaking. But nearly all the staffers I spoke with described relying on a hierarchy of information sources in which guidance from party leadership, committee staff, and lobbyists takes precedence over expertise from universities, think tanks, and nonprofit organizations. After working in Congress, I was not surprised by the significance of party positions—but I did not expect academic and NGO scientists to have such a low priority.

The hierarchy I observed upends two common notions among scientists: that peer-reviewed findings speak for themselves, and that more information about science leads to more favorable policy outcomes for the science community. […]

“My whole day is people coming in telling me that they have a crisis that I need to address,” one legislative assistant shared. “Ninety-five percent of the time they’re not telling the truth, and I have to figure out the 5% of the time that they are.”

As a result, experienced staffers rely heavily on established networks, both inside and outside Congress. “A lot of the time, it’s individuals you know, or know indirectly … just a friends-of-friends sort of situation,” explained one legislative director. By developing sophisticated networks of trusted people on and off the Hill, staffers can quickly separate signal from noise.

[…]

This relationship-based approach often puts academic scientists at a disadvantage, as they typically lack the sustained presence and personal connections that successful industry lobbyists cultivate over years. Not a single person I interviewed said they would call a member of the scientific community first when they needed to learn more about a science-related issue. The first people they turn to are those closest at hand, including party leaders, staff colleagues in other offices, and industry lobbyists.

The central goal of much anti-transgender rhetoric is to make cisgender people believe that their interests and trans people’s interests cannot be met at the same time. It’s not just the accusation that trans people are different or weird or creepy; it’s that our rights, our healthcare, and our well-being must come at the expense of your well-being. As the infamous ad from Trump’s reelection campaign put it, transphobes want cis people to think that someone who cares about “they/them” could never be for “us.” It fits neatly into the central thesis of Trumpism—that someone else’s suffering will be your gain. It also feeds into the portrayal of the Democratic Party as feckless, effete, and obsessed with the abstractions of identity.

For any politician facing them, there are two ways of handling these attacks: by promising to care less about trans people or by promising to care more about everyone. If you are not responsive to the needs and interests of a broad coalition of working people, you can be more easily caricatured as dedicated to the interests of some nefarious (and often racialized) other. But if you do have a compelling vision for how to improve all people’s lives, the fact that not all of those people are the same carries less weight. It is true that many Americans would rather starve than share a table with someone they view as less deserving or too deviant from their own experience. But it’s especially true if all that’s on the menu is scraps.

[…]

I am exhausted with begging for help and pleading for others to recognize transgender people’s humanity. I’m also exhausted with the shallow brand of identity politics removed from the material concerns of most people–including trans people–adopted by the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the 2010s when it seemed a useful wedge against progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Judith Butler told El País earlier this year, “Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandon our interdependent ties.”

It is exactly those interdependent ties that Mamdani won on and that our political future depends on. The politics of forced scarcity being sold by Trump and seemingly bought into by many Democrats is a myth deeply ingrained in our politics, our communities, and our culture. Rewriting it is not simply the work of rhetoric, talking points, and being open to disagreement. It’s also the work of changing how people experience politics to begin with, and showing them their freedom and dignity need not come at the expense of someone else’s. And what I see in Mamdani’s campaign is not only a promise of solidarity with a marginalized group I happen to be a member of. What I see is a promise that nobody will have to do that work alone.

On Thursday evening, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the FBI is developing tools to identify transgender suspects and classify them as “nihilistic violent extremists.” Within hours, the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation—the same outfit driving Project 2025’s blueprint now being implemented inside the federal government—released a four-page memo urging the bureau to go even further. Its proposal: formally designate all transgender activism as “Trans Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” a new category of domestic terror threat. It’s important to note that the Heritage Foundation is not itself the federal government, and to our knowledge, its proposals are not yet in place. But the group’s influence is vast, especially in the wake of a Trump administration openly committed to implementing Project 2025. That makes its latest push far more than just a think-tank memo—it’s a roadmap for policy. Here’s what you need to know about the proposal.

[…]

We’ve seen this playbook before. The U.S. government has a long record of turning surveillance tools against civil rights movements. COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI program from 1956 to 1971, targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and countless others in an effort to disrupt the civil rights movement. The same tactics were deployed against Vietnam War protestors and the gay rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s. After 9/11, Muslim communities bore the brunt of an expanded national security state, subjected to dragnet monitoring and infiltration. Now, under this proposal, those same techniques could be repurposed against transgender rights leaders and organizations—casting constitutionally protected advocacy as extremism to be neutralized.

This is a lot of fun. It really gets going at about twenty-five minutes in, where they start talking about ways that the government can can intervene in markets for essentials goods and services that don't function the way that undergrad textbooks say they should…

… which leads to this exchange about ten minutes later:

JON STEWART: So let's-- all these points go together in a larger thing. So let's take a step back. Lina Khan is redesigning the system of incentives. So we'll redesign the system for when markets don't really function that well, like with health care and utilities and broadband, those kinds of things that you say, the markets, even left to their own devices, we want them still to innovate, but they're not going to function properly on their own. How would you redesign the government's role in those? Would you advocate for always, as you said with the e-filing and that, for an always-accessible public option within those markets? 

LINA KHAN: I think when you look at markets that are really essential for the necessities of life, those need to be the first order area of focus for the government, these markets where people don't have a choice. Health care is an important one. Food and agriculture is an important one. Day-to-day transportation, especially in a place like New York City, where you're so reliant on infrastructure, those are the core parts of people's day-to-day infrastructure that we need to make sure they're not getting squeezed or price gouged. And so I would say that has to be the first layer of focus. And you need to figure out, are these markets where if we just take on illegal monopolistic practices, that'll be enough to make sure that companies aren't price gouging? Or do we need to have more of this public option?

Yay!

For Norway, it’s a consistently rosy picture. The top 10 per cent rank second for living standards among the top deciles in all countries; the median Norwegian household ranks second among all national averages, and all the way down at the other end, Norway’s poorest 5 per cent are the most prosperous bottom 5 per cent in the world. Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor.

Britain is a different story. While the top earners rank fifth, the average household ranks 12th and the poorest 5 per cent rank 15th. Far from simply losing touch with their western European peers, last year the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20 per cent weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia.

It’s a similar story in the middle. In 2007, the average UK household was 8 per cent worse off than its peers in north-western Europe, but the deficit has since ballooned to a record 20 per cent. On present trends, the average Slovenian household will be better off than its British counterpart by 2024, and the average Polish family will move ahead before the end of the decade. A country in desperate need of migrant labour may soon have to ask new arrivals to take a pay cut.

Funny 'cos it's true:

Political novices put far too much value on winning. Think about a game of basketball against your eight-year-old son. You may have scored more points, but now his feelings are hurt. Wouldn’t it have been better to simply let him win? The same thing goes for the Democratic Party. When progressives like Mamdani are too focused on winning, they don’t consider the feelings of more-established candidates who deserve to win because they want to. Or because it’s “their turn.” Or their dying wish.

Let’s imagine that Zohran Mamdani does win, with a coalition of multi-class young people, immigrants, unions, renters, faith leaders, and pansexual mustache men. What does that mean for the losers? The investment bankers, the landlords, and the Wall Street guys who ask women on the street if “they’re sisters or something”? Was winning worth their tears?

As someone who won one time, I can tell you winning is often not worth it. You know what happens after you win? Governing. You know how hard that is? Who wants that kind of responsibility? Making people’s lives better by advancing policies? Responsibility is incredibly stressful.

This is quite sweet…

… but what's really amusing is the response from fellow USians:

Most people detained by ICE are being housed in sprawling complexes in rural areas, where the land is cheap and the protests are few. Akiv Dawson, a criminologist at Georgia Southern University, has been conducting research at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, which can hold up to 2,000 people at a time. She said that since Trump took office, courtrooms have been packed with immigrants whose experiences would, according to polling, trouble the average American—people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, have American-born children, and have never been convicted of a serious crime. She told me about a lawful permanent resident of 50 years whose child is a U.S. citizen and whose deceased wife was as well. The man explained in court that ICE agents had mistaken him for someone else when they arrested him. But he admitted in court to having a single criminal conviction—simple marijuana possession from 30 years ago—so the judge decided to let the deportation case against him proceed. The man told the judge that his belongings would soon be thrown into the street if he wasn’t released; he needed to go back to work and pay rent. “He began to panic,” Dawson told me. “He said, ‘My people don’t even know that I’m here. They came and took me from my bed.’” Dawson said the man asked the judge why this was happening after he had spent so many decades in the United States. She replied, “Sir, this is happening across the country.”

Dawson also told me about a young mother from Ecuador who had followed the legal process for requesting asylum and pleaded to be released on bail so that she could be reunited with her 2-year-old son, whom she had left with a neighbor. “She begged,” Dawson said, and recalled the woman saying, “Please, give me an opportunity so that I can do the process the right way.” The woman said she wouldn’t be able to continue with her asylum case if she was going to have to do it from inside a detention center. “I have a child. I can’t be here too long without him,” she said. With that, the judge said the woman had waived her right to relief, and continued processing her for removal from the country.

“Are you going to deport me with my son?” the woman asked. “I don’t have anyone to keep him here.”

“You would need to talk to your deportation officer,” the judge replied, according to Dawson. “I’m only handling your case.”