It was a simple mistake to make.

THE ERA OF VANISHING HAS BEGUN

They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.

Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.

She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.

Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.

They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.

A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS

Alireza Doroudi is gone too.

He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.

ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.

Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.

Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.

These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.

They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.

WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME

While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.

In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.

In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.

And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.

This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.

THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME

Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.

This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.

They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.

The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.

This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.

They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.

SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.

There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.

ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.

They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.

We cannot let them win.

This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.

This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.

Let the record show:

They took people.

And we did not look away.

We saw it.

We named it.

We raised hell.

And we did not stop.

(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)

Infuriatingly proud of each other’s contingency plans

Cory Booker fasted and stood all day and all night and spoke till his voice nearly gave out for his constituents. And Republicans can't even show up to town halls. The contrast could not be starker. Let Senator Booker be an inspiration to us all. "The power of the people is greater than the people in power."

Schumer: Does the senator yield for a question?

Booker: Chuck, this is the only time I can tell you no.

Schumer: I just wanted to say - do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?

Booker cries, wipes his face, puts his hand over his heart, as the senate fills with raucous applause and cheers and the chair calls for order.

Booker: You asked if I yielded for a question? You asked - did I know? I know now.

Booker: I don't want to wrap this up yet. My mom's watching.

—Dean Winchester, at some point

Holy shit… please…take this quiz…

My mom is a pharmacist and got 16 out of 30. SHE’S SO MAD.

HAH! I got 18. Barely. But I think one I got wrong by accident (like the screen was still loading when I pressed the answer but still, 18 isn’t bad?)

Here’s an updated link:

Ahhh!

AHHHHHHHH <3333333

Damn! I was about to be all, “Ahaha, it’s so easy once you know the way names work in Quenya and Sindarin, certain letter combinations simply do not appear, blahblahblah…”

And then, motherfucker, I got four of them wrong??

weirdest part of being an adult is the fact that you can put off watching a movie for nearly a decade and barely notice

Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.

Addition for those unaware: Cory Booker is black. Strom Thurmond set the previous record about 70 years ago in protest of civil rights. Booker spent much of the time I was watching talking about the importance of working together for the people and the idea that it's not "left versus right but right versus wrong."

The new record speech is on the right side of history.

Its weird how quickly stereotyping cats based on color has taken off online now

I'd say its just people wanting to lovingly tease their pets, but I've come across several conversations recently of people wondering what genetically causes orange cats "to be that way". I think it's because they are a cat.

It's even weirder because people act like "orange cat behaviour" is a long-standing cultural stereotype and not something that popped up in the last five years!

Oh some of my favorites include "my tortie loves to [insert normal cat behavior here], and only torties act that way!" and "I could never get a calico, they are mean!" Like bitch what? You think fur and skin color determines personality? You're cat racist. Make it make sense.

Sorry but I am 38 and my family have talked about 'orange cat behaviour' my whole life. When I got a ginger kitten everyone I know was like ooooh you've done it now.

So I guess cat racism has been around a while.

The funny thing is cat racism is actually based on cat sexism. The stereotypes of orange cat behavior, tortietude, etc. are most likely based on anecdotal observations of stereotypical sex roles. Orange cats are usually male, and torties and calicos are almost always female. Among cats, females TEND to be more territorial, and males TEND not to be, and the territoriality in an indoor environment reads as aggression to some. Males - and therefore orange boys - are contrasted to female behavior and seen as more happy-go-lucky.

Huge huge HUGE emphasis on the “tend”. These are people averaging anecdotal observations and making them prescriptive behaviors. Personally speaking, I have had two orange boys in my life and they were both the biggest bastards because they were ex-barn cats who resented being kept indoors and weren’t used to getting lots of physical affection. Meanwhile we joke that my rescue tortie is an”entry level cat” because she’s so cuddly and tolerant of both cats and people violating her boundaries. Context: she grew up in a shelter environment, where she was bottle fed and lived in one room with multiple cats at all times.

Of course, anecdotes are not evidence, but rather examples that can illuminate context. Our brains just really love trying to find shortcuts to truth and wind up making shitty normative rules in the process.

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity. 

via- @elidyce

One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.

Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever

the art of war is tedious and irritating when you read it as like, immortal prose by the most brilliant man ever to kick ass. but it’s incredibly fucking funny when you realize that sun tzu had to write every single one of those entries because someone somewhere did not know this ahead of time and made a really, really expensive oopsie doodles.

It's just a book of those incredibly specific and stupid sounding warning signs on stuff that you know mean somebody tried something ridiculous

"the doctor was completely colourblind for his first two incarnations" is hilarious for many reasons but at least partly because it implies the third doctor just woke up one day suddenly able to see in colour and immediately decided to start dressing like a gay parrot