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For the last 10 years or so we were having big fights about whether or not towns should embrace the building of truly massive warehouses. The argument by supporters was that online shopping growth and consumer expectations meant that everyone needed to be within an hour of a mega-warehouse. Consumers simply could not tolerate waiting a few days for deliveries of the stupid bullshit everyone was buying that week. And because we set up everything in our political system to be a race to the bottom, if your town didn’t build the warehouse, often with tax breaks and zoning exceptions, the next town over would.

Fast forward to today, when the fascists running the Federal Government are on a shopping spree for locations suitable to convert into concentration camps. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a ton of empty warehouse space. Seems like all that anticipated demand never actually materialized. And of course since the space exists, town and county governments (who literally helped pay to build these behemoths) have very little ability to prevent them from being used for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

While that is our current national crisis, it’s hard to see how AI data centers won’t be a similar blight on our humanity (and our physical world) in another 5 years. Just like the warehouses, politicians are tripping over one another, and the giant bags of tax incentives to get the data centers built in their area. And just like the projected surge in warehouse demand, it’s highly likely that the “need” for AI data centers is way overhyped.

In the past I’ve compared this to the abandoned malls that dot our current landscape.

That got pushback from folks that are bought in on AI. These tech genius and big funders would never invest in something that has no economic future value, they say. Maybe they'll come around when they see the vacant warehouses, built to secure our economic futures, being repurposed into concentration camps. Will we decide to argue over whether the guards should be allowed to unionize?

Two interesting side effects of the “AI Revolution Bubble” if you fire workers in favor of suicide coaches and CSAM factories:
1. You put a lot of people on the street with a lot of free time and a wide variety of useful skills (despite AI fanboys and billionaires pretending these people are worth very little)
2. You destroy a ton of economic activity that you’re supposedly trying to drive up (no Sam Altman, universal AI credits are not actual economic activity)

This highlights why billionaires represent a completely failed system. They no longer need workers or customers, they can just turtle into their shells, and continue to gain money despite no actual economic activity or value. That is why our democracy is failing at the same time our economy does. Unless we prevent billionaires (and lets be honest, hundred millionaires too) and acknowledge no human deserves or needs that much money and anything over a very sizable permanent fortune needs to be taxed at 100% to support our communities and societies everything will continue to crumble while bubble after bubble drains our communities of capital.

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Pro-Israel lobby group pressures ‘moderate’ US Democrat in new strategy by Joseph Stepansky

Coming out of Special Election Primary on a Thursday in February, it appears AIPAC spent over $2.2 million dollars to elect an extremely progressive (including on Palestine), woman of color, who campaigned on Abolishing ICE, to a safe Democratic district she should win easily in the April General Election, but AIPAC will 100% try to help the Republican win.

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The $2.2m spending by the United Democracy Project (UDP) targeting former US Representative Tom Malinowski in advance of the Democratic primary in New Jersey on Thursday comes as polls have consistently shown surging dismay among Democratic voters over unwavering US support for Israel.

Amid shifting views, critics see the spending strategy as a wider message to candidates as they prepare for party primaries in the months in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections, which will determine the makeup of the US Senate and House of Representatives.

“It shows that they are very concerned, obviously, about the shifting perspective of especially Democrats on funding for Israel, and they’re very, very keen to keep Democrats elected who are out of touch with the Democratic electorate more broadly,” Sadaf Jaffer, a former member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who has herself been a critic of Malinowski’s past refusal to take a harder line on Israel, told Al Jazeera.

Pro-Israel lobby group pressures ‘moderate’ US Democrat in new strategy | Elections News | Al Jazeera

Critics claim AIPAC spending aims to intimidate candidates questioning unconditional US support for Israeli policies.

Pursued by federal agents, suburban ICE observers remain resolved by Jon Collins

“It feels like we are genuinely alone, and it's just community members supporting community members, which is beautiful,” Solberg said. “It's impossible to escape, and I don't know if I'm going to come out of this alive.”

Elizabeth said many of the suburban observers, the majority of whom are women, share a personality type. 

“Many of us have encountered bullies our entire lives,” Elizabeth said. “Over the last decade, we've watched other people be bullied, and I think that turns you into somebody that, even if that bully is wearing full tactical gear, I'm not interested in laying down for you.” 

Elizabeth has shared a message with her husband, grandma and sister: “If I am killed doing this, throw my body at the White House, martyr the shit out of me and raise hell. Do not be sad. Do not think I would do anything differently. I would do it over and over again — this is too important to sit down and shut up and not do anything.” 

Researchers at Human Rights Watch Resign Over Blocked Report on Palestinian Refugee Return by Alex Kane

In an interview with Jewish Currents, Shakir said he worried that HRW planned to “take the finalized report back to the drawing board,” giving leadership “the opportunity to kill or distort the report at different stages.” He said that despite the clear “shift in discourse when it comes to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians,” with “concepts of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” now being broadly embraced, the right of return—which Israel’s supporters say would end the Jewish state by depriving it a Jewish majority—remains a third rail. “The one topic,” he said, “even at Human Rights Watch, for which there remains an unwillingness to apply the law and the facts in a principled way is the plight of refugees and their right to return to the homes that they were forced to flee.”

https://jewishcurrents.org/researchers-at-human-rights-watch-resign-over-blocked-report-on-palestinian-refugee-return

Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something Real Bad by Spencer Ackerman

All I can tell you is that Wyden's record of warning that there is deep and constitutionally-serious dirt being done by the intelligence agencies in secret is unblemished. Never once in the many years I have been reporting on Wyden have I ever encountered a warning of his to be hyperbolic, let alone baseless. Wyden is the only senator on the intelligence committee I have consistently found trustworthy and appropriately focused, even when I disagree with him. Whatever he means here may not be known for years. But I have never known Wyden to point to smoke that doesn't emerge from a five-alarm fire.

Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad

No, I don't know what they did. But I have a lot of experience with the senator

The Consequences of Rejecting "Defund the Police" by Hamilton Nolan

More than five years later, I still find the Democrats’ 2020 heel turn on policing to be one of the most despicable acts of political cowardice I have witnessed in my adult lifetime. Yet to this very day, the party and its favorite consultants and pundits still believe that they did the right thing. Guess what? You didn’t. Defunding the police is a good idea. By rejecting it, you have only allowed more and more guns to accumulate around our house. Yesterday, in Minnesota, one of them shot and killed Renee Good. Ironically, she was killed while protesting for the rights of her neighbors to be free from harassment by armed men. Her death is the latest awful and predictable consequence of our lunatic attachment to the myth that safety comes at gunpoint.

ICE Out of Minneapolis: A Battle the Whole Labor Movement Must Take Up! by Maryam Alaniz and Samuel Karlin

For several years, the multiracial working class in the United States has been organizing strikes and fighting to unionize their workplaces. Hundreds of thousands of workers all over the country have already shown they are willing to fight after the national day of action last week. 

And in Minneapolis, workers and immigrant communities have already taken important steps to sustain this fight beyond a single day of protest. In recent days, students have walked out of classes, neighbors have organized to defend their blocks, and workers have begun discussing how to bring the fight into their workplaces. But their fight must become the fight of the entire labor movement. They are showing the way forward, but they cannot fight alone. 

DHS Hunts Down 67-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Who Criticized Them in Email by Hafiz Rashid

Laws are supposed to restrict the use of administrative subpoenas, but DHS has used the tool against dissent protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Jon could not find who in the agency issued the subpoena, let alone a record of it to show an attorney.

Days later, DHS agents showed up at Jon’s door. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the U.K., Jon was worried about potential violence. The agents showed him a copy of the email and asked to see his side of the story. They didn’t know about the administrative subpoena but said they received orders to interview Jon by DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

DHS Hunts Down 67-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Who Criticized Them in Email | The New Republic

The Department of Homeland Security is using a little-known tool to go after its critics.

Senate Democrats’ DHS "Reforms" Shaping Up To Be Another Kneeling Kente Cloth Moment by Adam Johnson

Even if electeds are balking at “abolish” language, there’s a large grey area going totally unexplored. The fact that there’s no discussion of reducing DHS funding at all, or bringing it back to its 2024 levels by clawing back or redirecting the $170 billion in supplemental funds, is especially conspicuous when you consider that this is a position to the right of the public in general. A plurality of Americans now support abolishing ICE (46 percent for, vs. 41 percent against) and 76 percent of Democrats do. Meaningful budget cuts to the DHS are the compromise, centrist position. Yet Senate Democrats, and even supposed progressives in the House, don’t mention budget cuts in their messaging at all.

The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters by Anna Merlan

The day that we spoke, the Minneapolis woman was digesting Bovino’s departure, and Tom Homan’s installation. “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and learn about the new guy,” she told me. If ICE ever actually leaves her city, she adds, “I think sharing what we as a community have learned with the other cities that they’re going to go to will be huge. I think we’re going to be a model for the resistance of the occupation. I hope my videos showed one way of doing that, but there are so many more.”

The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters – Mother Jones

It's impossible to ignore the administration's blend of violent repression and overwhelming cringe.

Secret police by Lucian K. Truscott IV

The Fourth Amendment is being violated on a wholesale basis by Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs overseen by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff who has no connection to law enforcement. At least we know the names of Trump’s so-called immigration enforcement leaders. We do not know the names of practically everyone under them. The name of Gregory Bovino became known because he is a showoff who enjoyed having his picture taken and posting his exploits on social media. But everyone else in every photo of Bovino has been unidentified. The men standing around Bovino on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks could have been his college roommates or poker buddies, for all we know. They had no name tags. No identifying badges other than “Police.” But they were armed, every one of them, with guns and tear gas and cannisters of pepper spray.

Secret police - by Lucian K. Truscott IV

Let’s call Trump’s rampaging federal agents what they are: Secret police.

‘Streets of Minneapolis’: 32 protest songs inspired by the Twin Cities’ ICE resistance by Jim Walsh

With federal immigration agents crawling through our neighborhoods, murdering our neighbors and kidnapping our children here in the Twin Cities and all over Minnesota and beyond, songwriters have tapped into their talent, anger, artistry, and empathy, heard Minnesota’s cries for help, and responded. Suddenly, protest songs and songs of support for Minnesota are flying around like news updates and truth blasts you can dance and sing along to. 

‘Streets of Minneapolis’: 32 protest songs inspired by the city's ICE resistance

MinnPost contributor Jim Walsh compiles a playlist by songwriters who are tapping into their talent, anger, artistry and empathy to support Minnesota.