Killing the fathers

 

Adrian Carrasquillo covers the Trump tribe's war on immigrants for The Bulwark. Sometimes I wonder how even such a professional journalist can bear the anguish that is his subject.

ICE's new permanent family separation

... In the first Trump administration, opposition to the president’s immigration agenda was galvanized by the horrors of family separation. As Adam Serwer memorably noted back in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”

 

Today, the opposition is different, and the stakes seem far higher. It’s not separation that drives the fear; it’s disruption and death. There is deep mourning, but there is also a growing fury at these ICE killings all over Latino social media. It’s become clear that mass deportation comes with this type of violence—and maybe that’s by design.

 

Under images of Araujo and Guerrero as departed angels, the page Latino and Muslim Unity wrote,  “Our fathers deserve to come home to their families. We demand accountability.”
 

Carlos Espina, a social media influencer with 23 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, posted videos at turns angry and heartbroken.
 

“The Colombian immigrant that was assassinated in a hail of bullets by ICE in Maine was in the car with his three-year-old baby,” Espina said in one. “It shows this agency has no type of respect for human life, much less the lives of our people. They see us as dogs, animals or worse.”
 

JC Frias, a Mexican-American activist with nearly 250,000 Instagram followers, shared the final words of both men: “Me estan matando” and “I tried to stop.”
 

“They were fathers. They were providers. They were loved. And they were HUNTED because of the color of their skin,” he wrote. In another post, Frias echoed a sentiment I’ve seen repeated often, including in private messages to me from Latinos and Mexican-Americans who saw their own father in Lorenzo Araujo.
 

“Lorenzo’s memorial says more than words ever could,” Frias wrote, describing the candles, Mexican flags, soccer jerseys, and families stopping to pray. “One message echoed over and over,” he said. “Lorenzo could have been any of our dads.” ...

Follow Carrasquillo at Huddled Masses.

Are the AI tech bros conning us? And also themselves?

Last month, I bought a new Apple iPad to use for travel. Since I bought the last one in the mid-2010s, I thought the $450 price pretty cheap for a very powerful tool. But I was also aware that the Erudite Partner had two weeks before bought the same iPad for notably less. What led to the price increase?

Alex Reisner, a staff writer at The Atlantic, blames the AI boom [giftlink]. He's provocative.

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster: A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

... The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.

The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them. ...

He thinks the tech moguls who are building the AI future have blithely launched themselves into a morass.

... The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. ...

With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). 

The large in large language model [LLM] should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger. 

Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. ... By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed. 

But, Reisner concludes, the tech barons are enthralled by their messianic delusions.

Chatbot companies are aware that their products are inefficient. ... we seem stuck with LLMs, perhaps because they have been so aggressively marketed. They are now being added to everything, whether you want them or not. In 2024 and 2025, they were integrated into both Windows and MacOS, which means that more computing power is now needed to run a basic personal computer. Smartphones are also being sold with upgraded hardware as companies anticipate new AI features. Inefficient AI is also being added to common programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word, meaning that computers need to be more powerful to run this software.

This is all especially bad because computers are no longer improving at the rate they used to. Since the 1950s, manufacturers have learned to make microchips steadily faster, smaller, and cheaper, a trend known colloquially as Moore’s Law. But in the past few years, components have gotten so small that manufacturers have run into molecular-level limitations on shrinking them any further, which has slowed progress significantly.

Ultimately, inefficiency may be of little concern to the people within the tech industry who believe that they are replicating intelligence itself. There is an almost-religious conviction among many in Silicon Valley that something mindlike could arise from LLMs, which are ultimately just statistical language-generating software—this, despite the software’s inability to recall basic facts, its lack of common sense, and its complete dissimilarity to a biological brain. ... But the mythological lure of AI is so strong that many engineers believe that nothing should stand in their way. Not even the basic task of writing efficient software. 

Is Reisner correct that AI is powering toward a messy, expensive, debilitating dead end? I'm certainly not qualified to evaluate, but I'm glad to have read his case. You can do that yourself at this gift link.

What makes Reisner's case highly plausible to me is where it touches on an area in which I do think I have the capacity for discernment. (And you, the reader, likely do too.) In the US political arena, these tech boys act like intoxicated teenagers with unmerited riches to throw around. Nobody can directly gainsay them; with their kind of money, they are surrounded by supplicants, flatterers, and, of course, politicians eager for a piece. An experienced con man like the Orange Toddler may seem to them a mark, but he's the true professional swindler. 

Scientific and business "geniuses" have lent themselves to fascist regimes in the past. The results were not to their liking; the Trial of the Industrialists at Nuremberg exposed cooperation with Nazi war crimes and mass murders. (Yes -- many escaped justice become "the West" decided they were useful to the Cold War... but that's another story.) Some of these guys are making themselves targets for a future fall.

They are good at standing around and being seen

 

To a bemused observer, one of the weirdest things about the regime in Washington is that most of its appointees in significant executive roles seem to spend so much time being props at various performative events. Don't these people have jobs to do? 

On the other had, when they do attend to the agencies and offices they've been dropped into, they mostly serve only as wreckers. So maybe we should be glad that they view their roles primarily as extras on a stage set.

No more "consequence free world" -- thanks Donnie!

What's the Orange Toddler going to say in his national broadcast tonight? Looks like he wants to whine on about the 2020 election he lost -- and threaten the 2026 midterms which he is going to lose. I won't be watching; I've got something better to do.

But I know at least one purpose that inspires this unwanted intrusion in our evening: he's managed to start a war against Iran which he is losing. He is desperate for some distraction. He/we are being humiliated by a second rate theocracy with a lot more brains and a lot more guts than exist in the US government these days.

Military historian Phillips P. O'Brien provides an apt and accurate description of what's going on:

The US-Iran War is a war of superlatives, because it is so absurd. It has already been the most “corrupt” war in US history (easily), the most “strategy-free” war in US history, and the most pointless war in US history. It might also be the stupidest. Another thing it is, without a doubt, is Donald Trump’s War (indeed that might be its name in history). This makes it a war with the stability of Donald Trump’s personality (i.e., very little). This week, for instance, the ceasefire between Iran and the USA completely broke down (yes, four days of constant bombardment means it has broken down) but if it instantly reasserted itself today, no one could be surprised because that is how Trump operates. ....

... The most recent polls are pretty consistent—somewhere between 60-66% of Americans do not support the war and consider it a failure. Only the GOP/MAGA base still supports this unending war (ironically enough). Also, the Iranian regime has consolidated its hold on power and seems to have rebuilt some of its military assets. However that is an irrelevance in Donald Trump’s War. He will do anything not to accept defeat for now.

... Look, Khamenei was a terrible guy, but the USA had pursued and legitimized a policy of leader assassination. Now it complains about this policy that has made Trump himself a legitimate target for Iran. What did he think? Did Trump believe he could assassinate whomever he wanted in Iran and Iran would not contemplate retaliating in kind?

The US believed for too long that it was living in a consequence free world, where it could do what it wanted and was so powerful that other states would simply bow to its magnificence, accept all insults, and grovel for its friendship. Well guess what? Actions have consequences, and the US has deliberately chosen policies with pretty terrible ones.

Wake up and smell the roses America. You planted these ones.

Actually, I am not sure Donald Trump's War on Iran is the stupidest war in our history. I could make a case for what we call the "War of 1812" and what Europe, if it remembers it at all, thinks of as minor skirmish adjacent to the Napoleonic wars which shaped the modern era. The USofA got lucky in that one; the world powers were distracted by their own quarrels and couldn't follow up on the blows they'd dealt the Americans. (I'm an interested student of that one; one of its failures laid the basis for my family's subsequent well-being.) 

ICE out of the Bay

Enil has friends. And so, when he had to report in to immigration court on Sansome Street in downtown San Francisco today, his posse showed up.

According to Bay Resistance: 

Enil is a loving father of three and longtime community member who was brought to the U.S. as a baby and has lived most of his life here.

He is an advocate for immigrants’ rights and has strengthened our community through his leadership and care. ICE is trying to detain him again and rip him away from his family.

A long line of other migrants waited outside the doors. Every day dozens of anxious people show up for their various ICE check-ins, never quite knowing if this will be the day the regime arbitrarily decides to take them into custody. The occasional larger protest against ICE, like this one, they sometimes find confusing and a little scary, according to one of the Faith in Action regulars.

So far San Francisco has been spared one of the Trump regime's murderous immigration enforcement surges, but we never know -- and try to be ready.

The local legal community has done a valiant job of decoding and stymieing the multiple illegalities in the process. Immigration law is a snarled nightmare even in benign circumstances. The San Francisco Chronicle has produced a detailed, easy to understand account of how the San Francisco bar is working to protect migrants. Read it! [gift link]

Socially useful residue of great wealth ...

Around the corner from where I live, there's a public library building which has been under renovation since 2020. (I looked up how long construction had been going on ... there was the pandemic and some kind of beef with PG&E. ...) The City powers-that-be claim this is nearly complete; I sure hope so. I use libraries.

Carnegie libraries were built with the ill-gotten gains of late 19th century industrialist/self-made robber baron Andrew Carnegie. He spent the last 20 years of his life on good works, funding 1,679 public libraries in the US, and more in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. San Francisco has several, including a fine specimen in Chinatown.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson included Carnegie's story in her 250 to 250 project for the recent anniversary. It is read by Corey O’Connor, mayor of Carnegie's town, Pittsburgh, PA.

None of the current crop of billionaires seem to do anything so socially useful. Maybe if Elon succeeds with his rockets, we can shoot him off to Mars.

Misery in the Mission

When I see my neighbors who live on the street, I feel moved to repurpose these words of the great moral orator, Frederick Douglass: 

… At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. 

Nobody should be "living" like this.

These folks are gathered to score from the dealer, I assume. If you don't yet know, the bent-over posture is common among fentanyl users.

Hell of a place to sleep, but still breathing ... all these folks survive (mostly) within a half-block radius of our home.

As the city tries (and largely fails) to "clean up" other neighborhoods, people migrate. I'm not saying it's easy to intervene when we've allowed the creation of a whole class of under- or un-housed outcasts, but a decent society and polity would find a way.

Credit where due

I try to know as much history as I can study, but Kevin M. Levin has just taught me there's a lot I've missed about how the Union won the Civil War. 

By Committee of Ladies of Philadelphia via Wikipedia

Roughly 75 percent of free born African American men of military age in the North volunteered to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. No other demographic group in American history has mobilized for war at anything close to that rate.

These men enlisted knowing they would receive unequal pay until Congress relented in 1864, that they would serve under white officers and be denied commissions, and that capture might mean enslavement or execution rather than a prison camp. Finally, they served not knowing whether that service would translate into citizenship.

Roughly 180,000 Black men ultimately served in the United States Colored Troops, nearly a tenth of the Union army by the war’s end. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women who fled to Union lines and forced emancipation onto the war’s agenda before Washington had decided what the war was about.

Frederick Douglass understood precisely what this service meant, which is why he threw himself into recruitment. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” he declared in 1863, “let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” 

Apparently civilians in Union cities knew who was defending them. I feel pretty certain that Donald Trump and his merry band of vandals who are busily trying to cover up what we should learn in US history doesn't know this. And they'd only work harder to push lies if they were taught it. But we can do better.

Memories of delight

There are so many ways to reflect on America 250. I loved this one. 

The Center for Asian American Media writes: 

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we’re looking through our Memories to Light archives of home movies from our community and are moved by how Asian Americans have long been an integral part of our nation. 

Memories to Light is CAAM’s archive of Asian American home footage from across the country, spanning six decades (1920s through the 1980s). These images embody shared social, cultural, and political representations of Asian America and demonstrate the importance of collective storytelling as a path toward greater understanding of the Asian American experience. 

What a gift! 

Friday cat blogging -- sleepy time

Unlike most of the country, summer in San Francisco is cool and gray. Our cats, after being fed and loved by their human servants, take the mist to signal they should take naps.

What a life!

Showing up counts

Andrea Pitzer, author of a serious popular book on the history of concentration camps, surveys the literature on authoritarian governments and movements and comes up with a deceptively simple prescription for those of us who aren't agreeable to American fascism. 

... If support for authoritarian rule can be influenced by something as simple as knowing that others support authoritarian rule, then it’s incumbent upon all of us who can to publicly reject strongmen and their tactics. This study shows that in communities with a free flow of information (as should be the case), the malleability of public opinion will remain a real risk. And this kind of peer influence on people supporting strongmen—when they realize others do—means that norms can shift radically for the worse in a short period, just as we’ve seen in the U.S. in recent decades.

This runs deeper than Trumpism. And one way that each of us can push back is to let our peers know, though word and deed, that these abuses of power are against our values, and that the authoritarian response is a shameful one based in fear and weakness.

There are a million ways you can take on that challenge, publicly embracing freedom and openness to everyone in the community—through art, through writing, through community cleanup, through calls for accountability, through social get-togethers. The main thing is to do something to stake your claim and turn those who support authoritarian rule into the definite minority where you live and around the world. 

My emphasis. We have neighbors and friends. They see what we care about and what we do. A pebble tossed in a lake or stream changes the movement of the water, even if imperceptibly at first. Keep tossing; there is no humane alternative.