onfocus

In the 24 hours after Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced that he would not comply with the White House, the University received more than 3,800 online donations totaling more than $1 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Universities are important institutions and people are willing to support them even if the government is attacking them.

The majority’s decision to wade in straightaway points to a skepticism that the Justice Department was telling the truth. It’s damning, too, that the majority did not even wait for DOJ to file a brief with the court before acting. The only plausible explanation for the court’s order is that a majority feared the government would whisk away the migrants to El Salvador if it did not intervene immediately.

Trying to stop the lawlessness.

Round and round it goes with no resolution.

I don't think this is an accurate description. The constitutional crisis arrived when the administration pretended to not know what 'facilitates' means. That was the fuck you to the Supreme Court that signaled they were done pretending this is America.

The Food and Drug Administration is drawing up plans that would end most of its routine food safety inspections work, multiple federal health officials tell CBS News, and effectively outsource this oversight to state and local authorities.

I’m sure state and local authorities have the budget, staff, and training to make this a smooth transition. In the meantime we can all reread The Jungle.

Many of the things that winemakers regularly buy often come from abroad. Three notable examples: glass bottles, corks and barrels (which are used to age wine and refine its flavor).

Just one of the (checks notes) every industry that is going to be hurt by trying stop a global economy.

“Failure to provide notice and an opportunity to be heard violated Mr. Ortega Gonzalez’s rights under the Fifth Amendment,” attorney Stephen Manning, executive director of Innovation Law Lab, wrote in the complaint. Ortega Gonzalez is at risk of arrest and detention for removal proceedings, Manning said.

I'd be worried about even just trying the leave the country at this point. You have to interact at the border and there's no guarantee you'd get due process there. I think suing for rights is the right thing to do.

Trump appeared today in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who, when questioned by reporters, refused to return Garcia, saying flatly, “Of course I’m not going to do it.” Although he could put a diplomatic end to the entire matter by asking Bukele to return the illegally deported U.S. resident, Trump sat there and allowed the president of a tiny Central American country to run the Oval Office appearance as if he were in charge.

This is such a shameful time for America. The end result of Republican reactionary politics is destroying the country they pretended to love.

Evoking the Declaration of Independence, the draft insists “he has demonstrated his character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant.” Arguably a truer description of Trump than of George III. He openly pines for dictatorship, autocracy, even un-American monarchy. He recognizes no limits on his power, no law he must obey, no rights he must respect.

There's a lot of work to do. Let's get going.

Costco, which defied demands from the Trump administration for private companies to spike their DEI programs, notched its 15th straight week of foot-traffic gains, although this week just by the skin of its teeth, with a gain of 0.3%.

Good. We should continue to only do business with companies that want a functioning society.

In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.

Still thinking about this article. This description of an attack on the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) rings true to me.

As grim as some of these responses feel, I hope there’s at least some small solace to be taken from the fact that so many artists remain firm in their resistance to AI technology that devalues their work, and are championing human creators in the face of it.

This is a tough read but a good antidote to the ai cheerleading you see everywhere.

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

This administration uses pure BS to justify destroying the US. It’s a lot like their mode of governing during election denialism at the end of Trump I.