Siege on Chicago

I girl-bossed too close to the sun, but Stuff still Happened.

So what's up?

Fun Fact!

Let's start things off with a fun fact. I would like to have some fun before I have to face unbridled reality. And so:

Some would argue that telephones are useful. They allow us to talk to each other across long distances. Cool stuff! But how did our voice travel that far, especially before the advent of broadband cell towers, especially into the vast rural landscapes of the US?

Barbed wire, that's how.

In the late 1800's, the patent for the telephone system expired, opening up opportunities for other companies to build out additional telephone infrastructure. A popular approach at the time was to build "party lines," where multiple households would share a single line. Different patterns of phone ringing meant a call was for a specific household on the line, but it still worked like a single telephone line in that anyone could just pick it up and listen in.

The barbed wire comes into play with those rural landscapes. Engineers realized that ranchers and farmers already had telephone infrastructure: the barbed wire used to fence in their pastures. The makeshift use of existing wired fences as telephone lines allowed for rapid expansion of the network to rural households for very low cost.

Of course, if you had a particularly wily cow, you might have your conversation cut short.

These systems spread rapidly, with thousands of them in effect for quite some time. Some barbed wire lines lasted until the 1970's.

Neat. Alright. Here we go.

Stateside

Shutdown Continues

It's day six of the latest shutdown of the United States government. What'd you do to mark the occasion?

Shutdowns usually either end within a day or two, or go on for a few weeks. The longest we've seen before was during Trump's first presidency, when the government shut down for 34 days.

Just a smidge under 2 million federal employees are either on unpaid leave or are working without pay. No meaningful negotiations between political parties have happened. Instead, our leaders are having a social media scuffle where the president of the currently shut down government is posting racist memes about the Democrats.

Trump has been threatening "irreversible" cuts to federal spending and firings of federal workers if Democrats don't agree to vote to approve the Republican spending bill in the senate. He has also frozen $28 Billion in funds for Democrat-run states earmarked for infrastructure and public transit projects.

These moves are pretty brazen, even as Republican's work overtime to push the claim that the reason the government is shut down is because Democrats want to "give illegal immigrants healthcare." This is widely agreed to be nonsense, enough that some Republican officials are quietly nervous about the precedents being set.

For now, it's really just a waiting game. Both parties think they're coming out on top here, but polls show that folks on average blame Republicans or both parties equally over just blaming Democrats. In the coming weeks, we'll see federal and military paydays come and go. If the government is still shut down by then, the stakes will rise significantly.

We Aren't Not Definitely Maybe Technically Not at War

Let's come back to the question I asked a few weeks back: "Are we at war?"

The answer has changed from, "kinda yes but not really" to "not really but kinda yes." Glad we could clarify that.

On October 2nd, the White House informed Congress that the US is in a "non-international armed conflict" with drug cartels, which is their reasoning for the recent series of military strikes on foreign nationals carried out in the Caribbean.

The "non-international armed conflict" designation mirrors what the George W Bush administration did regarding Al Qaeda after the attacks on September 11th, though back then, Congress still approved the use of military force against "designated targets." No such approval from congress has happened here. Officials from both parties reportedly pressed the Pentagon for an actual legal reason for the strikes, but left unsatisfied.

The United States government is working to manufacture consent for military strikes against targets deemed "dangerous" by… someone… without providing evidence.

The Trump administration has provided no evidence that anyone on any of the four boats they've bombed were drug smugglers.

The President of the United States doesn't have the power to declare war according to US law, but also US law hasn't much informed the actions of this administration, so we shouldn't expect that to be different here. They will continue to break the law until they receive enough pushback, but by then they've already done the damage.

We can't un-bomb civilian boats. But we sure can bomb 'em.

ICE Mass Violates Civil Rights

In the early hours of September 30th, 2025, The United States federal government launched a raid on an apartment building in Chicago, tearing nearly all of its residents from their homes indiscriminately, destroying property within their apartments, and even dragging children from their beds—naked, in some cases—zip-tying them on the street separated from their parents, citizen or otherwise.

When I say they launched a raid, I mean it. At 1:00 in the morning, Black Hawk helicopters let loose federal agents who rappelled down to the roof of the apartment building as others stormed in from the street. They deployed flash-bang grenades, kicked open doors, and detained everyone they found regardless of immigration status.

Here is an excerpt of reporting by WBEZ, a Chicago public broadcaster:

Rodrick Johnson, 67, is one of many residents who were detained by federal agents during the South Shore raid. A U.S. citizen, he said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties.

Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.

"I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up," Johnson said. "I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one."

When residents were eventually allowed to return to their homes, they found doors kicked down off their hinges and personal belongings strewn about, destroyed, or missing.

Let's be as clear-eyed as we can about this: the US federal government just sent masked agents to swarm a residential building in a major US city in the middle of the night, dragging residents handcuffed into the street with no warrant or legal basis, citizen or otherwise. They then turned around and posted a dramatic video to social media bragging about the operation's success.

This will not be the last time this happens, and it is a miracle that nobody was killed.

These were indisputable, massive civil rights violations, and I truly hope that every resident of that building sees a multi million dollar payout.

All the while, ICE is actively working to expand their ability to do country-wide digital surveillance, while companies like Apple continue to buckle to the administration, as Apple just pulled an app from their store whose purpose was to report ICE activity in your area. Notably, police scanners and literally every other app which can communicate the statement "ICE is in this area" have not been pulled.

I want to also note that there are deeply suspicious circumstances surrounding a real estate legal issue involving the building that ICE raided. I'm waiting until there's more information available before saying anything definitive on that, but you can read about the details in here.

Elsewhere

Kash's Challenge

US FBI Director Kash Patel truly represented American values in a recent trip to New Zealand, where he presented his Kiwi Counterpart with a gift which included 3D printed replicas of pistols adorning a challenge coin display.

In New Zealand, guns are heavily regulated, especially small firearms like pistols. Upon receipt of the gift, the replicas were investigated by officials who found that they could potentially be altered to be made functional, which is not legal. The firearms were surrendered and destroyed.

So that's fun, but also Patel was in New Zealand due to the recent establishment of an official FBI office there, which locals were not made aware of until after it had been established, which is just so much fun for them.

Hope in Gaza

Hamas has agreed to some points of a 20-point plan proposed by the United States to end the genocide that Israel has been waging in Gaza. Pretty bleak concept to begin with—the people funding your killers proposing an agreement to stop doing that.

Despite peace proposal talks and willingness to engage and negotiate from Hamas, Israel has continued to airstrike Gaza, to the surprise of absolutely nobody except apparently Trump, who had previously told Israel to stop bombing the region and reportedly said to Netanyahu, "I don't know why you're always so fucking negative. This is a win. Take it."

It remains to be seen if anything will come of this round of negotiations, especially since we know Netanyahu has no intention of anything less than the complete eradication of Palestine.

In Gaza, nearly 2 million humans of the 2.2 million population are displaced. Nearly everyone is facing severe food insecurity, with estimates that 2.15 million of 2.2 million people in Gaza are facing "crisis levels of hunger or worse." Truly, the path forward is unknown.

But remember—the world watched. In Italy, 2 million people protested in a one-day general strike after the Global Sumud Flotilla was intercepted by Israel. Palestine has more support from more nations than before. In the US—where Israel once held a stranglehold on public sentiment—has seen a generational change on how people view the state, with polls showing a stark drop in favorability of the Israeli government among US citizens.

Japan Goes Woke—Oh, Nevermind

Not long ago, I talked about the Prime Minister of Japan stepping down voluntarily. Unfortunately, it uh… it looks like they're about to have a new one.

The heir apparent is currently Sanae Takaichi, who may be the first female prime minister as well as the first female leader of her party, the Liberal Democratic Party.

Pah. These radical leftist Liberal Democrats—wait, what… are her positions?

Oh.

Takaichi is deeply conservative, and echoes a lot of populist conservative sentiment which has been growing in Japan as it has in other countries such as Brazil, the US, UK, Germany, France, and… a lot of places really. Huh. Maybe unfettered control of global communications in the hands of a few rich psychopaths wasn't the best idea we've ever had.

Anyway, she gleefully idolizes Margaret Thatcher, is strongly anti-queer and vocally against expanding women's rights such as allowing women to keep their maiden name after marriage.

Of course, Japan is a very different social landscape than the UK or United States. Same sex marriage is not legalized nationwide and there are even more significant gender gaps in public, private, and cultural regards.

Yet the themes are the same as we've seen in some western nations recently: conservatives in Japan have been trending more towards anti-immigration and nationalistic views, while the younger generation has been growing more supportive of populist conservative voices on the internet. A far-right party in Japan recently sprung into the scene with modest gains, which is likely why Takaichi was pushed to the forefront of her party: to undercut growing opposition.

As the chosen leader of the Liberal Democratic Party it is almost assured that she will win the vote for Prime Minister, but that vote doesn't happen until later this month. The LDP will still need to form a coalition to make it official, as they lost their majority control in recent elections.

Science & Tech

We Finally Have the Technology

The time has finally come. We finally live in the future. All this time, the work that we've all been doing has culminated in this one massive leap forward: Venmo and Paypal will now be able to send money to each other.

REVOLUTIONARY SHIT.

Venmo is owned by PayPal, so it's genuinely shocking that this has taken so long to happen, but it finally happened. Users of both platforms will be able to find and send money to users of either platform worldwide.

If you live outside the United States, you may wonder a bit about why we have so many payment apps, and also probably wondering how we manage to be so intensely behind on things like tap-to-pay when that's been the standard in the rest of the world for like a decade. The answer is very American: there's money to be made in moving money.

We don't really have a modern, government-provided money transfer system. They exist but they're not really consumer-grade or they're outright obtuse. Instead, we have myriad private companies who sell the service of moving money around, for a cost, of course.

Do You Prefer Your Eggs Skin-On?

Got no eggs? All good—give me your skin.

What?

Scientists conducting fertility research are developing a method to produce human egg cells from human skin cells.

The process is far from stable or safe, and doesn't yet produce anywhere near reliable enough results to be considered ready for actual use. But it shows a possible future where people struggling to get pregnant naturally may have another option to do so.

What they do is mind boggling. They take some skin cells, remove a nucleus from a cell, and inject the nucleus into an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed. It's like threading a needle, but instead of thread its minuscule soft tissue, and instead of a needle, its also minuscule soft tissue.

Hope you have steady hands (they don't use their bare hands, to be clear).

This procedure is still extremely early in development, and while it shows some progress towards a new method of fertility treatment, it is far from viable at this time. No embryos were cultured longer than a few days, and none of the embryos were without issues.

What's wild though is that this procedure could potentially enable couples with no egg bearing parent to still have genetically related children. In theory. Like, decades from now. If it works. And if it's even legal, because there's proximity to cloning science here.

Wild, though.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• A New York City apartment building partially collapsed, leaving a massive pile of rubble on the street
• Leaders of a church in Florida had a mansion where federal agents found 57 "victims of forced labor" working the mansion
• A blizzard has trapped hundreds of people on and near Mount Everest
• The head of a major US beef producer has noted that beef production in the US is being outpaced by demand as prices continue to rise