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Sunday’s Forum
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10 responses to “Sunday’s Forum”
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The Grim Historian substack on the incident at Ceuta
TL;DR: “Social” media.
Quote: Then the ruling went online, where nuance is routinely stripped for parts.
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Releasing a mentally ill woman from ICE custody to a bus stop in Pittsburgh, in 20 degree temperatures, when she’s wearing summer clothes, isn’t the result of lack of training, jurisdictional ambiguity, or any other BS reason ICE might concoct to absolve themselves of responsibility for her death. It’s the failure of basic humanity, on the part of whoever did this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/02/ice-death-pittsburgh-daphy-michel-haiti
These horrors must end now. No waiting for the midterms, or the next presidential election, or the Supreme Court to eventually rouse itself out of its moral torpor, or the Second Coming, or the aliens to come down and sort us out. Now.
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A “failure of basic humanity, on the part of whoever did this,” and an organization that has normalized this behavior. About a week before this woman was released in Pittsburgh, Jonathan Last reported, What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis, which included ICE dumping people outside in the Minnesota winter, and what he witnessed (the Bulwark, excerpt paywalled)…
Many of the people abducted by the government are taken without cause. When the government runs out of excuses to hold them, or is forced to release them by the courts, they send them out the front door of the Whipple Building, often in the dead of night. Alone. No cell phone. No jacket. In the freezing cold and snow.
A civic group called Haven Watch now stands guard at Whipple around the clock so that former prisoners of the regime do not freeze to death after release. While we were at Whipple talking to observers, a mother and two small children emerged from the building. They had nothing with them other than the clothes on their backs. It was about 15 degrees, the day after an unexpected snow. The three small humans haltingly made their way across the ice and slush in the road. Someone from Haven Watch met them and ushered them into a warm car.
(Edit: Don’t know if/how to change the gravatar back to my default “EU”)
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No comments on the most recent Trump reduction in bombing of Iran. He says that negotiations are proceeding. Will the temperature be turned down permanently, or is this just another wobble in American policies? I don’t gamble, but I understand that there is a betting forum for almost everything. Is there an over/under bet out there?
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There’re too many vulnerabilities that Iran could hit with drones and missiles. If trump were to go ahead with a major attack on the country’s infrastructure, then our regional allies would suffer potentially catastrophic destruction, US servicemembers would be harm’s way, and our anti-missile munitions would be more severely depleted.
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The guardian has yet another article on the measles outbreak. (No fault of the Guardian, we’re just not a very serious nation and are failing)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/02/us-measles-cases-outbreak
I’m just wondering why we haven’t had any PSAs that literally state that antivaxxers breed disease. I know, it’s dehumanizing Nazi rhetoric that stirs up fear and hatred… but that just shows that it’s a tried and effective message with a strong emotional resonance.
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Another milepost in the AI road: a search that was impressive until it wasn’t. TL:DR, in a search for info on a subject I am very knowledgeable about, an initial impression of knowledge and depth soon materialized as buzzwords and mediocrity.
Every 9-12 months I do a deep dive search to see if there are any new air pumps on the market that would meet the requirements for an instrument my company sells. It’s a portable instrument and the pump is the heaviest, loudest and most power hungry component, so any improvement in those parameters of value is worth pursuing. This time I decided to hide Microsoft CoPilot because it has access to my work emails, chats and files and I thought that would give it a leg up. And sure enough, after I entered my requirements for air flow and pressure differential it responded, “If you are using this for aerosol or leak testing and given you pressure and flow requirements it looks like a diaphragm pump will meet your needs best”, (I’ve shortened the rather lengthy answer but that’s the gist) and then it gave me a list of seven vendors that made such pumps, a few more than I usually found on my own. I then asked it for specific models and it replied with six, and I had only ever found two before. So, a big improvement, yes? Well, as a I reread it, I realized the “aerosol” and “leak testing” references which made me think it had real depth, were just the AI equivalent of buzzwords, because while they were very important to the overall business they had nothing to do with pump selection. The only things that mattered were “air pump”, the specific pressure differential it had to overcome and the air flow. And when I drilled down on the six recommendations (what happened to the seventh?) only one actually met my requirements. I had found that one before, but it was at best equivalent to the one we used. And it didn’t find the one we have been using for the past 14 years and best met the requirements.
