Countdown to Oblivion

Good morning from my Hunker-Bunker overlooking the Puget Sound from the hillside of West Seattle. It is a chilly Wednesday morning out there and because there is frost on my windshield, my sausage gravy is without an onion this morning. I made up for it with four poached eggs, not my usual three.

When I finish eating and updating this mess here, I am going to dive right into finishing the setup of my studio here. I hope to have a couple of private YouTube streams by around noon.

My wife wants me to do a daily “DJ reacts to the News” podcast. Maybe a five or ten minute reaction to the headlines.

I dunno. That seems a lot like what I am doing here right now, but without all the cut and paste. I told her I would think about it — which, loosely translated means I hope she forgets about it.

Seems unlikely though…

I have a smattering of news that caught my attention this morning. I also have some funny memes and videos to share. So let’s get going with it.

Why is ANYONE surprised about this?

Migrants at Texas border in shock after Trump canceled their asylum appointments

Hours after Trump’s inauguration, his administration canceled appointments allowing migrants to enter the U.S. to request asylum, leaving many of them stranded on the U.S.-Mexico border.

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Margelis Tinoco Lopez arrived at the border at 4 a.m. Monday for her 1 p.m. immigration appointment along with her husband and her 13-year-old son. Standing on the bridge in below-freezing weather, Lopez got an email from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that made her heart drop: “Existing appointments scheduled through the CBP One application are no longer valid.”

She broke down in tears.

“I’m devastated,” she said, sitting on a chair at a Juárez migrant shelter. “It feels like a sense of instability, and I feel vulnerable and scared.”

Tinoco Lopez is among the thousands of migrants who had hoped to enter the United States legally but saw their long-awaited appointments canceled shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated Monday. Video of her crying at a bridge that connects El Paso and Juárez has spread across social media, which makes her worried for her safety, she said.

On his first day back in office, Trump made good on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration, starting with shutting down the use of an app that let migrants make appointments to request asylum. The Biden administration had allowed 1,450 appointments daily at eight different ports of entry along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.

Nearly 300,000 people a day tried to get an appointment, some waiting several months before they got lucky. More than 936,500 people had secured appointments since January 2023, according to CBP.

MY TAKE:

I find it hard to believe that there are still people who didn’t understand that the moment Donald Trump was sworn in, that any and all traffic at the border would come to a complete standstill. Anyone who recently was allowed into the US would be almost certain to be deported sooner than later. I would suggest heading South…

I don’t think, we’ve ever had a POTUS so eager on killing people

‘So much of this seems vengeful’: alarm as Trump recommits to death penalty

President says he’ll help states execute people but experts skeptical of bold pledge to expand capital punishment

Donald Trump has signed an executive order committing to pursue federal death sentences and pledging to ensure that states have sufficient supplies of lethal injection drugs for executions.

The order promises that Trump’s attorney general will seek capital punishment for “all crimes of a severity demanding its use”, specifying that the US will seek the death penalty in every case involving murder of law enforcement and a capital crime committed by an undocumented person, “regardless of other factors”. Trump has also pledged to pursue the overruling of longstanding US supreme court precedents that limit the scope of capital punishment.

Experts say the order is filled with vague campaign rhetoric, and that some of the actions it promises could be unconstitutional, infringe on defendants’ rights and intrude on state laws and processes. Many of the broad pronouncements, if carried out by his attorney general, could face major legal challenges.

Despite the ambiguity of the president’s directive, it marks a stunning reversal of the policies of the Biden administration and comes at a time of significant, bipartisan opposition to capital punishment in the US, fueled by multiple recent executions and capital cases of people with credible innocence claims.

The order will be significantly stunted by one of Joe Biden’s final clemency actions – resentencing 37 out of 40 people on federal death row to life imprisonment without parole.

Trump’s first term was marked by 13 federal executions in rapid succession – more people put to death in the federal system than under the previous 10 presidents combined – and Biden’s grants saved dozens from an expected resurgence in state killings under Trump.

Trump’s order directs the attorney general to evaluate the prison placements of the 37 people re-sentenced by Biden “to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes”. It also says the attorney general shall “evaluate whether these offenders can be charged with state capital crimes and shall recommend appropriate action to state and local authorities”.

Those pledges are dubious, experts said.

“The idea of going back to states where crimes were committed to see if states can prosecute capitally is probably unconstitutional in terms of double jeopardy,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, a group fighting to abolish capital punishment. “So much of this seems vengeful, not just about individual prisoners, but also just to poke back at President Biden’s commutations.”

The order is largely “bluster and grandstanding, because there’s really nothing new he can do”, said Bonowitz. “The real question is, does the rule of law continue to matter to the courts?”

MY TAKE:

I have a couple of thoughts on this — the first on being that this is the same Donald J. Trump, who, as a private citizen took out full-page ads in the New York Times demanding that the “Central Park Five” be put to death — even though it was eventually proven that they had nothing to do with the crime. Trump doesn’t care — once he made up his mind that they were guilty and should die, there would be no changing his mind.

What kind of a man would get so pissed off Joe Biden for commuting the sentences of all but three prisoner that he would direct his Attorney General to not only make these serve their time out in the worst possible conditions, but would also try and encourage the state to pursue capital charges at the state level.

Most states don’t have the time, money, or court space to just charge people just because Donald Trump wants to kill people.

This wasn’t on MY bingo card…

Trump pardons Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he has pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, an underground website that the FBI once called “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet.”

Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015.

Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media site, that he had spoken to Ulbricht’s mother on his first full day in office.

“It was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” he wrote. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”

He called Ulbricht’s prison sentence “ridiculous.”

During the campaign, he had promised to help Ulbricht in a speech at the Libertarian Party National Convention last May.

Libertarian activists, who generally oppose criminal drug policies, have long believed that government investigators overreached in building their case against Silk Road. Many held “Free Ross” signs.

The Silk Road site was set up by Ulbricht in 2011 on the dark web, a part of the internet that’s inaccessible to traditional search engines. It did not accept cash or credit cards; users had to pay with cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin. All transactions were encrypted and hence untraceable.

It became a place for people to buy and sell illicit drugs, weapons, poisons, and services such as computer hacking.

“Silk Road was the Amazon of drug sites,” former FBI Special Agent Milan Patel said in an interview for the CBS News series “FBI Declassified.”

“We saw murder-for-hire postings, hacking-for-hire postings, which was, ‘hey, pay me two bitcoin and I’ll hack into your ex-wife or ex-husband’s email account,'” Patel said. “…It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it.”

MY TAKE:

I will severely bitchslap the next person who tries to claim that Donald J. Trump is all about law and order.

You weren’t expecting Trump to know anything about basic biology, did you?

Sarah McBride points out fatal flaw in Trump’s executive order: ‘He just declared everyone a woman’

United States Representative Sarah McBride has pointed out a fatal flaw in President Donald Trump’s executive orders, in particular, an anti-trans measure stating that the US recognises only two sexes.

President Trump delivered a series of executive orders after being sworn into office, one of which declared that the US government will recognise “only two genders, male and female” on government-issued identification.

More specifically, the order defines someone female as “a person belonging, at conception to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” whilst someone male is a “person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell”.

But anyone with a background in biology will know that all human embryos follow a “female” developmental path until the activation of the SRY gene several weeks after conception, which sparks sexual differentiation.

Embryos with an XY genotype will develop biologically male traits linked to the Y chromosome at around six weeks. Before that point, human embryos only have biologically female traits linked to the X chromosome. In fact, genitalia at conception is “phenotypically female”, as the National Library of Medicine notes.

McBride, who is the first out trans congresswoman, quipped to The Independent that Trump “just declared everyone a woman from conception based on the language of the executive order”.

During his inaugural address on Monday (20 January), Trump said there were only two genders, “male and female”, adding that he will end “the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”.

Among the other executive orders were moves to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion policies, ending birth-right citizenship (which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil), withdrawing the country from the World Health Organization, and pardons for those convicted of crimes surrounding events on 6 January 2021.

MY TAKE:

We all started out on our journey in life — as a female.