You have no rights when trying to enter the US

My post about how badly visitors to the US are treated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the US, with them being sent to detention centers and kept in prison-like conditions without access to lawyers and other contacts, may have prompted questions in readers minds about exactly what rights they have when trying to enter the US. The answer is: not much. This article describes what can happen. There are a whole array of scenarios that can unfold depending on the type of visa you have and the mood of the ICE agents processing you.

The reason that you have almost no rights is because being on the ground in the US but before you are allowed by ICE to pass through immigration means that you are in a kind of no-man’s-land where the laws do not apply.

“If you’re a foreign national, first understand you haven’t affected an entry despite being physically on US soil until you’re admitted properly,” said immigration attorney Michael Wildes, managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.

“It’s a term of art when you’re admitted fully to the United States,” he said. When a person lands on US soil but is not technically admitted, “you might be considered to be what’s called an ‘arriving alien’.

“You have greater rights as a criminal than as a foreign national coming with a visa.”

[Read more…]

Finding cause and time of death is messy

The story about Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa has thrown up new complications.

A private healthcare clinic in New Mexico has cast doubt on official findings about the timing of the death of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, claiming that she rang them on 12 February – the day after police say she died.
…

Postmortem results indicated that Arakawa died of hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne respiratory disease, on 11 February, a week before her husband is believed to have died from heart disease. His pacemaker showed no activity after 18 February; he is also believed to have suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
…

Dr Child cast further doubt on the official cause of death of his clinic’s prospective client, saying: “I am not a hantavirus expert but most patients who have that diagnosis die in hospital. It is surprising that Mrs Hackman spoke to my office on the phone on 10 February and again on 12 February and didn’t appear in respiratory distress.

A Los Angeles-based doctor told the Mail on Sunday: “Respiratory failure is not sudden – it is something that worsens over several days. Most people get admitted to the ER [emergency room] because they are having trouble breathing. It’s exceedingly rare for a seemingly healthy 65-year-old to drop dead of it. In fact, no one’s heard of such a thing.”

[Read more…]

Exposé of Facebook

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, has written a best-seller Careless People that describes her former employer as having a culture that is pretty much what you would expect from one run by tech bros.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

[Read more…]

Trump gang’s message to other countries: We don’t want your people here

Jasmine Mooney is a Canadian who got caught in the nightmare that is run by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and held for nearly two weeks in appalling conditions because of a slight suspected irregularity in her visa documentation. Even though she offered to buy a ticket to return to Canada, they moved her around to various harsh detention detentions before finally releasing her. She has now written about her experience.

Many people from other parts of the world are treated like dirt by ICE agents. Why I have chosen to highlight her particular story is for three reasons. One is that if a young, white, fairly affluent, Canadian woman could be treated like this, one can only shudder at what poor people of color from other countries experience. The second is that she can write in the first person in English and that makes her story more compelling and accessible to English speakers than others. The third is that while she was shuttled around the various detention centers, she spoke with other women she was herded with and wrote about their stories. What emerges is that many of them were seized and imprisoned for minor visa irregularities but treated as if they were dangerous criminals.
[Read more…]

People are really mad at Musk

Since they cannot get to him since he lives in the cocoon that all rich people can put around themselves, they are going after Teslas.

The Las Vegas police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are investigating a blaze set at Tesla showroom as potential terrorism. The FBI is probing at least three other incidents of Molotov cocktails hurled at Tesla facilities since January, including one in Kansas City, Missouri, that took place on the same night as the alleged arson in Nevada.

In Las Vegas, in the middle of the night on Tuesday, a cluster of Tesla vehicles were set on fire as they sat in a lot at a Tesla collision center, according to the Las Vegas metropolitan police department. Security cameras caught a person dressed in all black tossing what appeared to be Molotov cocktails into the vehicles at approximately 2.45am.
[Read more…]

On bullshitters

What do the following people have in common: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, George Santos, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Dr. Oz, Yuval Noah Harari, Barack Obama, Sam Harris, Elizabeth Holmes, Steven Pinker, and Jordan Peterson? According to Nathan J. Robinson writing in Current Affairs, they are all bullshitters.

So what constitutes a bullshitter?

The clearest philosophical exposition of a Theory of Bullshit was put forth by Harry Frankfurt in his short classic On Bullshit. Frankfurt argued that bullshit was different than lying, and in some ways worse. A liar knows what they are saying is false. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it is true or false. The liar has not abandoned all understanding of truth, but they are deliberately trying to manipulate people into thinking things are otherwise than they actually are, whereas the bullshitter has simply stopped checking whether the statements they are making have any resemblance to reality:
[Read more…]

The Trump gang keeps shredding civil liberties

The US seems to be following the path of authoritarian countries around the world in steadily abrogating the rights of people. One of the ways that this was done in many countries was to do away with such niceties as requiring warrants for the search of homes or the arrest of people.

Now the Trump gang is actually defying court orders, deporting people even after a federal judge ordered them not to.

The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.

The confirmation came hours after a US federal judge expanded his ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president broad leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations.

The US district judge James Boasberg had attempted to halt the deportations for all individuals deemed eligible for removal under Trump’s proclamation, which was issued on Friday. Boasberg also ordered deportation flights already in the air to return to the US.

“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.

Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader.

The law is just a joke to these people, to be ignored if they do not like it.
[Read more…]

Can there ever be real ‘closure’ after a tragedy?

It is interesting how words and concepts that originate in fields like psychology and psychotherapy seep into general public discourse and are used by regular people. One such word and concept is ‘closure’, something that is often invoked after some awful tragedy.

Take this report following the deaths of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa.

It’s the light that draws people here, Gürler, a photographer, mused, and then they find a deeply inclusive and welcoming community. Hackman and Arakawa fitted right in, she said.

“He was the kindest man. He would smile at everyone,” she said. “Everyone I’ve talked to since yesterday is genuinely sad.”

For many years, people would see the couple walking around downtown, visiting the library or eating at local restaurants. Some residents have begun sharing stories online about their interactions over the years. One man described how he helped Hackman as a library worker, and how the actor later invited him to join him and Arakawa for dinner. Now the community waits to learn what happened.

“Something is missing. I hope we get closure, but I’m hoping [their] family get closure even if we don’t,” Gürler said.

[Read more…]

Book and TV review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I am fond of the books of Charles Dickens but for some reason never got around to reading this particular one that was published in 1853. It is argued by some critics to be one of his best works. I was stimulated to read it because I came across a 2005 BBC adaptation into a seres that looked like it might be good but I thought I should read the book first.

I am not an authority on Dickens so will leave it to others to judge whether this may or may not be one his finest works but it is undoubtedly very good and one of the most Dickensian in its flourishes and plotting. Coincidences, a Dickens staple, abound and people who seemed to be unconnected suddenly discover that they are in fact related, even very closely.

Dickens also has a penchant for creating eccentric characters with strange names and here we find them in abundance. In this book alone are Jarndyce, Guppy, Turveydrop, Jellyby, Snagsby, Smallweed, Chadband, Pardiggle, Squod, Tulkinghorn, Clamb, and Grubble. You rarely find a Smith or a Jones or a Brown in a Dickens novel. Interestingly, Dickens’s own name was considered strange at that time, as one critic wrote, “Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.” This shows that names that we now consider as ordinary became so by virtue of familiarity. If Dickens had not become so famous, his name might still have been considered ‘queer’.
[Read more…]