PHOTOS BY EAMD & Evipro By David Taylor / Managing Editor The annual Día de los Muertos Fall Festival at the East Aldine District Town Center brought together ...
TORONTO – Canada’s psychologists, psychiatrists and PTSD specialists are all pretty confident they know what they’ll be covering with their patients this week. “Usually it’s a bit of a mystery,” said Dr. Monica McMichael. “Is it going to be a dream they had last night about their 3rd grade teacher, or something their Mom said […]
Shawinigan, Quebec – US President Donald Trump has responded to Ford’s anti-tariff commercial with his own anti-protestor commercial featuring previous Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien. “Looks like Canada’s leaders made mistakes too,” wrote Trump on Truth Social. “Not that Reagan ever made mistakes, because he never said tariffs were bad. But look at this John […]
On Wednesday, October 8, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott issued a directive against “political agendas on Texas roadways.” The move has been interpreted by many as an edict against rainbow crosswalks, which began in the U.S. in 2012 as a show of support for LGBTQ+ communities. Over the last few weeks, while some Texas cities have removed these crosswalks, others have protested the mandate.
The directive follows on the heels of a March 2025 U.S. Congress bill that ordered the removal of the Black Lives Matter mural from a street near the White House in Washington D.C. As reported by National Public Radio, that mural arose in June 2020, amid a nationwide outcry over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Rainbow crosswalks emerged in the early 2000s in support of urban gay communities, employing the color pattern of the common gay rights flag. The Houston Chronicle reported in 2017 that a rainbow crosswalk in the Montrose neighborhood was the first to be painted in Texas, to honor 21-year-old Alex Hill, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2016. Rainbow crosswalks have since become civic fixtures for gay pride groups in many cities throughout Texas and the U.S.
Governor Abbott’s directive contains a wide-ranging threat: “Any city that refuses to comply with the federal road standards will face consequences, including the withholding or denial of state and federal road funding and suspension of agreements with TxDOT [Texas Department of Transportation].”
Galveston moved quickly to remove a contested rainbow crosswalk in front of City Hall. The Galveston County Daily News reported that the crosswalk was removed on Thursday, October 9, with City Manager Brian Maxwell saying the city already had plans in place to remove the privately-funded, temporary feature.
Other Texas cities have had varying reactions to the order, with some protesting or seeking exemptions or ways to thwart the Governor’s directive.
In Houston, protestors gathered on Sunday, October 19, in an effort to protect rainbow crosswalks recently reinstalled in the Montrose neighborhood following a road construction project. As reported by Houston Public Media, protestors were cleared by police in the early morning hours of Monday, October 20, and demolition of the crosswalks was completed that day.
A rendering of the Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas, with rainbow additions. Image courtesy of Oak Lawn United Methodist Church
In Dallas, a church located at the site of a rainbow crosswalk that was removed painted its steps in protest. The Oak Lawn United Methodist Church, which identifies itself as “radically inclusive” and a practitioner of “sacred resistance,” will consecrate the steps in a public ceremony on Sunday, November 2. In a social media post, the church wrote that the steps are “a visible symbol of God’s inclusive love for all people.”
In San Antonio after the directive was issued, Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones — the city’s first openly gay mayor — repeatedly announced that she would seek an exemption to the directive. However, during a “Unity in the Community” rally on Thursday, October 30, Mayor Ortiz Jones was ambiguous about what direction she would take. As reported by KENS-5, the mayor did not sign a resolution drawn up by Pride San Antonio and other advocacy organizations calling on the City of San Antonio “to challenge any effort to remove or destroy the crosswalk using any means allowed by law.”
Painted crosswalks in Kerrville honor the nearby Guadalupe River. Photo courtesy of Creative Crosswalks
In Kerrville, an hour northwest of San Antonio, Abbott’s directive has resulted in plans to remove a set of blue crosswalks painted in 2023 as a tribute to the nearby Guadalupe River. The river-themed crosswalks were a privately funded Creative Crosswalks project of the Kerrville Urban Trail System, “with intent to improve pedestrian health and safety, neighborhood identity and ‘quality of place,’ and accessibility.” The project originally envisioned eight additional Creative Crosswalks. However, the Kerr County Lead reported that the city has 30 days from receiving a Friday, October 17, TxDOT letter to submit a mitigation plan, with Assistant City Manager Michael Hornes quoted saying the city is unlikely to be granted an exception.
In complying with a TxDOT letter sent on Wednesday, October 8, and the SAFE ROADS (Safe Arterials for Everyone through Reliable Operations and Distraction-Reducing Strategies) Initiative first announced on Tuesday, July 1, by U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the City of Austin faces removal of 16 street murals and crosswalks.
An underlined paragraph in the letter states that “Pavement markings such as decorative crosswalks, murals, or markings conveying artwork or other messages are prohibited on travel lanes, shoulders, intersections, and crosswalks unless they serve a direct traffic control or safety function. This prohibition includes the use of symbols, flags, or other markings conveying any message or communications.”
A Friday, October 24, response to the encompassing edict, sent to the Mayor and City Council by Richard Mendoza, Director of Austin Transportation and Public Works, stipulates that among the 16 potentially affected sites are the University of Texas “TEXAS” street mural on Guadalupe Street, the “BLACK ARTISTS MATTER” mural on East 11th Street, a red brick-themed crosswalk on Pedernales Street, a river-themed crosswalk on Lake Austin Boulevard, and decorated traffic circles in several locations, in addition to multiple rainbow crosswalks.
Corpus Christi faces removal of three decorated crosswalks and 25 painted traffic signal boxes, confirmed by KIII-TV as non-compliant with TxDOT orders. In El Paso, a rainbow crosswalk painted in Pride Square in 2022 also faces removal.
TORONTO – With Daylight Savings rolling clocks back an hour the same night as the Blue Jays face off against the L.A. Dodgers in a climactic World Series Game 7, Canadian baseball fans are confident that, win or lose, that extra hour of sleep is going to be “super necessary”. “If they win, I’m gonna […]
TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers caused mass confusion across North America today as they each dressed up as the other team for today’s World Series game that coincides with Halloween. Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Blue Jays announced the move in a joint press […]
The order will expire two days after an appeals court issues a more permanent ruling on the funding while the Trump administration will continue with partial SNAP payments.
A denial of service vulnerability report was filed against a program, let’s call it Notepad. The actual text of the report was very hard to understand because the grammar was all messed up. I’ll give the finder the benefit of the doubt on the assumption that they are not a native English speaker. Here’s a cleaned-up version:
If you open multiple documents, one very large document and several small documents, and then try to exit all of them at once, the program will take a very long time saving the large document, resulting in a denial of service against the small documents.
I’m not sure what the point is here. The program does eventually finish saving the large document, so everything works out in the end. Are they suggesting that the program should save the smallest documents first? But then wouldn’t that be a denial of service against the large document if you had lots of small documents?
But wait, let’s ask the standard questions.
Who is the attacker?
I guess the attacker is the person who opened the very large document.
Who is the victim?
The victim is the person who is unable to save their small documents because the large document is hogging the program.
What has the attacker gained?
The attacker has annoyed the victim temporarily.
But wait, the attacker and the victim are the same person!
It’s not a security vulnerability that you have the power to annoy yourself. Other ways include “Putting itching powder in your pants” and “Throwing your glasses in the trash.”
Furthermore, there is no impact on other users, or even to other apps by this user. The only person you’re denying service to is yourself.
If you’re concerned about the order in which files are saved on close, you could explicitly close them in the desired order, like, I dunno, most important files first? Removable drives first?
And really, it’s not clear what the finder was expecting here. You loaded a large file, and now you’re saving it. Why is it surprising that this takes a long time?
This was resolved as “Not a vulnerability” with the subcategory “By design.” But sometimes I wish there was subcategory “So what did you expect?”
A long time ago, somebody asked, “How did the new Windows 95 user interface get brought to the Windows NT code base? The development of Windows 95 lined up with the endgame of Windows NT 3.1, so how did the finished Windows 95 code get brought to the Windows NT code base for Windows NT 4.0? Did they reimplement it based on the existing specification? Was the code simply merged into the Windows NT code base?”
Members of the Windows 95 user interface team met regularly with members of the Windows NT user interface team to keep them aware of what was going on and even get their input on some ideas that the Windows 95 team were considering. The Windows NT user interface team were focused on shipping Windows NT, but they appreciated being kept in the loop.
During the late phases of the development of Windows 95, the Windows NT side of the house took a more active role in bringing the Windows 95 user interface to Windows NT. They started implementing the new window manager features that Windows 95 introduced, both in terms of new functions such as RegisterClassEx and SetScrollInfo, as well as new behaviors such as having a Close button in the upper right corner. The window managers on Windows NT and Windows 95 both had ancestry in the Windows 3.1 window manager, so a lot of the designs were the same, but the code had long since diverged significantly, so it wasn’t so much merging the code as it was using the Windows 95 code as a reference implementation when reimplementing the features on Windows NT. (For example, the algorithm for walking the dialog tree in the face of WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT remained the same, but the expression of the algorithm was different.)
The code for Explorer and other user-model components had an easier time. They were taken as-is into the Windows NT code base, warts and all, and the copy was then updated in-place to be more Windows NT-like. For example, the Windows 95 shell used CHAR as its base character, but Windows NT was Unicode-based, so the Windows NT folks had to replace CHAR to WCHAR, and they had to create Unicode variants of the existing shell interfaces, which is why we have IShellLinkA and IShellLinkW, for example. This in turn exposed other problems, such as code that used sizeof(stringBuffer) to calculate the size of a CHAR string buffer, that now had to be changed to sizeof(stringBuffer) / sizeof(stringBuffer[0]) so that it returned the number of elements in the buffer rather than the number of bytes.
Whereas the window manager changes were one-way ports (from Windows 95 into Windows NT), the Explorer and other user-mode changes were bidirectional. The Windows NT team merged their changes back into the Windows 95 code base, so that when they took the next drop of the Windows 95 code base, they wouldn’t have to go back and fix the things that they had already fixed.
Since the code went back to Windows 95, all of the Windows NT-side changes had to be arranged so that they would have no effect on the existing Windows 95 code. The Windows NT team didn’t want to introduce any bugs into the Windows 95 code as part of their port. Protecting the changes was done in a variety of ways.
One was to enclose all the new code inside #ifdef WINNT directives so that they weren’t compiled by Windows 95, or #ifdef…#else…#endif blocks if the Windows NT version had to diverge from the Windows 95 version. Another was to use macros and typedefs like TCHAR and LPCTSTR so that the same code could compile both as Windows 95 and Windows NT, but using different base characters.
In the case of sizeof directives, a change from sizeof(stringBuffer) to sizeof(stringBuffer) / sizeof(stringBuffer[0]) has no effect on Windows 95 because the sizeof(stringBuffer[0]) is 1, and dividing by 1 has no effect, so that change could be left without protection. But the Windows NT team had another problem: How would they know whether a particular sizeof was one that had already been vetted for Windows NT compatibility, as opposed to one that came from fresh code changes to Windows 95 that need to be inspected? Their solution was to define a synonym macro
#define SIZEOF sizeof
When the Windows NT team verified that a sizeof was correct, or when they fixed it to be correct, they changed the sizeof to SIZEOF. That way, they could search the code for lowercase sizeof to see what still had yet to be inspected. (The Windows 95 team were told to continue using sizeof in new code, so as not to mess up this convention.)
Now, all this happened decades ago when Microsoft used an internal source code system known as SLM, pronounced slime. Formally, it stood for Source Library Manager, but nobody knew that. We just called it SLM. SLM did not support branches, so moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.
Bonus chatter: The team responsible for porting the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT included Dave Plummer, host of the YouTube channel Dave’s Garage. They had custom business cards made which they used as calling cards. On one side was the email aliases of the team members, arranged in an attractive pattern. On the other side was the simple message: “You have been visited.”
The English idiom turn into a pumpkin comes from the fairy tale story of Cinderella, in which the protagonist’s ragged clothes are magically transformed into an elegant gown and a pumpkin is transformed into a carriage, allowing her to attend a royal ball. She is warned that the magic wears off at midnight, upon which her clothes and carriage return to their original forms.
In some fields, the idiom turn into a pumpkin means to regress to a previous level of performance after a period of marked (but perhaps inexplicable) improvement. “The widget install success rate has gone up from 90% to 95%, which is great, but we don’t have a good understanding of why this is happening, since we haven’t made any significant changes to widget installation. It won’t be surprising if this improvement turns into a pumpkin.” (In other words, if this improvement vanishes just as mysteriously as it appeared.)
At Microsoft, the phrase turn into a pumpkin also applies to expected reductions in performance: During the period between the United States Thanksgiving holiday (the end of November) and continuing through Christmas (December 25) to the end of the year, a large percentage of people take vacation, leaving teams running on what feels like a skeleton crew. In anticipation of this reduction, many engineering services scale back their capacity. For example, a minor branch might not get any builds at all, and the major branches might build only once a day instead of twice.
Now you know what somebody means when they say something like, “We should wrap this up before people turn into pumpkins at the end of the year.”
Bonus chatter: Other citations I’ve found
The installation will turn into a pumpkin at the end of the trial period.
In this case, this is saying that the installation will cease to function at the end of the trial period. It will lose its magical powers and become about as useful as a pumpkin.
We should ask Chris before he turns into a pumpkin.
This could mean “We should ask Chris before he goes on vacation.” I’ve also seen it used in online meetings when one participant is joining from a far-away time zone at what for them is an inconvenient time. In this case, it means “We should ask Chris before he falls asleep from exhaustion.”
Judge Indira Talwani acknowledged this will leave millions of people without assistance starting Saturday. Two dozen Democratic-led states had sued over the administration's decision to suspend SNAP.
LONDON—In a stunning reversal of fortune for the controversy-plagued younger brother of King Charles III, Buckingham Palace announced Friday that the former Prince Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has been stripped of his royal computer privileges. “Due to serious lapses in judgment by Mr. Mountbatten Windsor, His Majesty King Charles III has today initiated a formal process to revoke his unsupervised access to Crown Ethernet, as well as any and all palace desktop computers,” the royal family’s official statement read in part, confirming that the former prince would no longer be permitted to spend his typical average of six hours a day in online chat rooms or spend any more time in the royal computer lab with the door locked. “Should Mr. Mountbatten Windsor require internet access for emergency purposes, he will be allotted 10 minutes of chaperoned screen time per day. This is not an action His Majesty takes lightly. If Mr. Mountbatten Windsor finds himself bored, there are plenty of books in the palace library to occupy him, and the palace cleaning staff would certainly appreciate his help in the kitchen. Perhaps this might also serve as an opportunity for Mr. Mountbatten Windsor to sit and reflect on his actions and, if he so wishes, draft an apology note, which we would be more than happy to assist him with.” At press time, the former Prince Andrew was spending the night at the King of Spain’s palace to look at child porn on his computer.
Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau’s rumored romance has taken the internet by storm. The Onion sat down with the celebrity couple to discuss their fledgling relationship.
The Onion : So how did you two meet?
Perry: Lauren Sánchez paired us off as part of Jeff Bezos’ plan to breed a higher race of humans.
The Onion : Is navigating an international relationship difficult?
Trudeau: No, we usually just meet on an unaffiliated barge off the coast of Maine.
The Onion : What do you talk about?
Trudeau: Mostly ourselves.
The Onion : Are you worried all this media attention will disrupt your work?
Trudeau: Neither one of us has lifted a finger in years.
The Onion : Katy, what do you see in Justin?
Perry: A path to controlling the Arctic Circle.
The Onion : Favorite monumental Neolithic excavation in Upper Mesopotamia?
Perry and Trudeau: Göbekli Tepe!
The Onion : Do you think you’ll get married?
Perry: I hope so! I would love to meet that special someone one day.
The Onion : What do your kids think of your relationship?
Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia developed by his company xAI, as a direct competitor to Wikipedia, although users report many articles are seemingly adapted straight from Wikipedia. What do you think?
“It’s about time we had a right-wing take on episode summaries of Lost.”
Heather Yellen, Newspaper Bagger
“Grokipedia says it came out before Wikipedia.”
Ben Aniperu, Perfume Fermenter
“I always hated Wikipedia’s bias towards citations.”
INTERVIEWER: People usually use [the term “elevated horror”] to refer to A24’s movies, horror that’s very heavy on the metaphorical. Hereditary, Midsommar, movies like that.
I wanted 15 Thornhill Road to be perfect for us. We’ve put so much into this move, and I think that we wanted it to work so badly that we’re pretending nothing’s wrong. But the signs are all there.
The howls from the basement. The bloody child’s handprints on the bedsheets. The face that appears for a split second in the bathroom mirror and makes a deafening sound whenever we look up from washing our faces.
Honey. I don’t think our haunting is elevated.
Well, of course, the house is haunted! But after that down payment? In this market? If spirits are trying to communicate with us from beyond the veil, they should at least have something substantive to say.
Look. I’m not saying that the ghosts don’t work on any level. The little clown boy that pops out of the fridge startles the shit out of me every time I grab a handful of cold cuts. But he doesn’t make me think.
I just don’t understand how this happened. This is a good school district. We have Crate & Barrel furniture. But when I take out the garbage, why am I getting jump-scared by a cat I don’t own?
This morning alone, I have found six types of goo congealing in the breakfast nook and not a single metaphor for grief.
Every time I hear that theremin start up, I get a chill down my spine, because it’s like, ooooh—what kind of cliché shit am I going to witness next? A floating white sheet? A Ouija board? God, this is so embarrassing.
I have to tilt my own goddamn head if I want to see a Dutch angle. And the lighting? Not even bi-curious.
Don’t get me started on the dead-weight dead people.
Hey, I’m just saying: if a deceased Civil War general is going to squeak that rocking chair all night long, he could at least do so in a way that grapples with the legacy of American slavery.
Did you know that the Parks next door are being haunted in Korean? With subtitles??? How is Eva going to get into a good college if our ghosts are monolingual? I don’t think Clown Boy even learned to read.
I suppose “Boo!” is technically Latin.
I’m just going to come out and say it: is this because we’re a heterosexual white couple? I get it—we haven’t exactly cornered the market on intergenerational trauma. But, for the record, my parents divorced when I was nine, and I just think the ghosts could be doing more with that.
Wow. Well, sorry for not having a long-standing issue with substance abuse. I’ll get right on that.
You could be doing more, too, you know. Do you realize that, since we moved in, I haven’t seen you obsessively construct a single miniature? Not even an antique dollhouse. It’s really the least you could do.
No, no dolls! Those are pedestrian—just the house.
The only time I feel a sense of creeping dread is when your parents come over, and I’m just waiting for them to notice Eva pressing her face to the TV and talking to the static. They already think we give her too much screen time.
I feel like I’m in hell. Spectral children giggle for no reason and move the furniture. Self-proclaimed “mediums” show up with no context or credentials. When I cry, it never feels narratively earned. You literally never take your bra off, even when we go to bed. And I can’t even say the f-word about it! How are we supposed to feel something real when we’re constantly being censored?
Sure, visually, we’ve had some moments. I have to admit, the blood geyser shooting out of Eva’s bunk bed was quite something. But, when Mrs. Park is getting closure with her deceased Umma and forgiving her in their shared tongue that she never speaks with her own children, our little spookfest just seems, I don’t know, cheap and pointless?
I don’t mean to be bitter. It’s not a competition. But if a demon named Bugaboo runs over my head with a lawnmower, I just want it to mean something.
Oh great—now I’ve summoned him. Of course, saying his name aloud summons him. God forbid there be any ritual specificity.
Honey, it’s too late for me. Take Eva and run.
But, first, promise me something: Please put on a cheeky, yet haunting needle-drop before you go.
And, when you tell my story, make sure it’s in a twenty-minute YouTube video called “Demon Lawnmower Head Explosion Ending Explained.”
As of this moment, the National Guard is indefinitely prevented from deploying within the Chicagoland area. The court order was issued pending the Supreme Court’s decision to rule on the matter. And because this administration is a walking, talking clown show, the information that SCOTUS is getting on the matter is hilariously stratified depending on who they’re talking to.
President Donald Trump‘s administration has told the U.S. Supreme Court he needs to deploy National Guard troops to the Chicago area in part because local police have failed to respond to what the Justice Department described as mob violence by people protesting his aggressive immigration enforcement.
Those law enforcement agencies have given the nine justices a starkly different account of protests they called limited in scale, detailing in court filings how they have responded on specific dates and explaining how a unified command they set up to coordinate efforts dealt effectively with the demonstrations.
In other words, the Trump administration is pleading the court to let it send armed troops into the third largest city in the country to protect the very people who are essentially telling the court, “Meh, we’re fine.”
That won’t stop Trump, obviously, because this was never really about safety in cities or protecting federal agents. This is purely about pushing to see just how much this administration can get away with and, to go tinfoil hat on you for a moment, to begin putting the chess pieces on the right parts of the board come election time. Major city after major city will see the attempted deployment of armed forces. Trump recently stated that he will send “more than the National Guard” if needed. I’ve seen Independence Day. I know how this works.
So, what protects us from whatever Trump’s version of “checkmate” is? Multiple things, to be sure. Popular uprising. Overcoming whatever obstacles he constructs in the midterm elections. Organizational efforts to undermine his lawless activity wherever possible.
Two Illinois National Guard members told CBS News they would refuse to obey federal orders to deploy in Chicago as part of President Trump’s controversial immigration enforcement mission — a rare act of open defiance from within the military ranks.
“It’s disheartening to be forced to go against your community members and your neighbors,” said Staff Sgt. Demi Palecek, a Latina guardswoman and state legislative candidate from Illinois’s 13th District. “It feels illegal. This is not what we signed up to do.”
Both Palecek and Capt. Dylan Blaha, who is running for Congress in the same district, described growing unease among Guard members after the White House federalized 500 troops – including members of the Illinois and Texas National Guard – to secure federal immigration facilities and personnel in the Chicago area.
“I signed up to defend the American people and protect the Constitution,” Blaha said. “When we have somebody in power who’s actively dismantling our rights — free speech, due process, freedom of the press — it’s really hard to be a soldier right now.”
Some of this isn’t new. In other cities, we’ve had National Guard members displeased with their use as political pawns in mission-less deployments to patrol peaceful cities. But I’m unaware thus far of any instances of them actually refusing orders. Such a refusal, should the order be ultimately deemed lawful, would be grounds for discharge, imprisonment, and so on. It’s a big freaking deal and would generate a ton of attention.
Which is precisely why it needs to happen.
Asked if she would refuse a direct order to deploy to Chicago, Palecek didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. I would definitely say no,” she said. “I’m not going to go against my community members, my family and my culture. I believe this is the time to be on the right side of history.”
“Look at 1930s, 1940s Germany,” Blaha said. “There is a point where if you didn’t stand up to the Gestapo, are you just actively one of them now?”
It’s worse than that. Nazi Germany didn’t have social media, cell phone cameras, or the internet by which all of this chaos can be shared in real time. Whatever sins the German people committed by failing to stop Hitler’s party when they could, and they very much did commit those sins, it’s still true that the average German wasn’t nearly as informed as to what the Nazis were doing compared with the access to information that the American people have today. No soldier can claim ignorance. If they participate, they are knowingly complicit, full stop.
The scary part is how unfortunately rare this sort of bravery is in the military. In fact, it seems many in the military are fully embracing Trump’s fascistic tendencies.
Both Blaha and Palecek said they’ve faced retaliation for speaking publicly. Blaha disclosed that his security clearance was suspended by the Defense Department after posting a viral video urging soldiers to disobey unlawful orders. “They twisted my words,” he said. “I have about 30 days in order to provide them with a written response.”
Retribution, Palecek added, is “real.” She’s received death threats since denouncing the deployments and launching her political campaign. “It weighs on you mentally after a while,” she said.
Still, both say silence is not an option. “We were trained to stand up for what we believe in and stand up for the American people,” Blaha said.
And stand up for the Constitution, too.
Look, it must be very difficult to be a good person in the National Guard right now. You just never know when you’re going to be asked to do battle with your fellow Americans. But an oath is an oath and we should all expect, not just hope, our soldiers to behave like patriots.
It was just last month that Brett Kavanaugh gave his explanation for why it was perfectly okay for Homeland Security goons to profile brown people and detain them based on nothing more than the color of their skin. While his cowardly colleagues in the majority on that shadow docket decision refused to explain their thinking, Kavanaugh actually wrote a concurrence that was so out of touch with reality as to be embarrassing. But at least it was an explanation.
The key bit from him that has stood out is this:
Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status.If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.
It’s this weird, privileged, out-of-touch statement that if ICE or CBP stop you for being brown, they’ll let you go as soon as you show them that you’re an American citizen. Of course, we knew at the time that wasn’t true. Hell, there were details that Kavanaugh ignored in that very lawsuit, which Justice Sotomayor called out in her dissent. But literally in this very lawsuit was the documentation of how it wasn’t so simple:
To give just one example,Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angelesand identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].”The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.”The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?” Gavidia again explained that he did not know which hospital and said “East L.A.”He then told the agents he could show them his Real ID. The agents took Gavidia’s ID and his phone and kept his phone for 20 minutes. They never returned his ID.
Drexel law professor Anil Kalhan quickly dubbed these bullshit pretextual stops of US citizens as “Kavanaugh stops” and the name has stuck.
While there is an effort to challenge these further in court, for now the goon squad known as ICE is unleashed even more than usual. We now know that there are at least 170 US citizens who have been held by immigration officials, and there are probably even more not yet accounted for.
It feels like every day we hear about another few:
ICE violently detain father & son walking to school—teenage boy had to be rushed to hospital."I was just going to school," kid cries out. "I'm underage!"The 16-year-old star athlete is a U.S. citizen—agents sent him to the hospital with severe injuries to his back & neck.Houston, Texas.
These Kavanaugh stops are a stain on the American concept of civil liberties and due process, and they should be a stain on Brett Kavanaugh’s legacy. Legal journalist Chris Geidner just ran a piece on 50 days of Kavanaugh stops, and what a shameful moment this is of American bigotry.
Geidner has directly submitted questions to Kavanaugh to see how he feels about all of these Kavanaugh stops that show his claim of “brief encounters” with law enforcement were bullshit:
I asked Justice Kavanaugh on October 14, “Do you have any comment on the ICE stop of Maria Greeley, a U.S. citizen, who was reportedly stopped, ziptied, and told she didn’t ‘look like’ a ‘Greeley’ despite being a U.S. citizen?“
On both occasions, I also asked Kavanaugh whether he still thinks he was correct when he wrote that these stops are “typically brief” and that all of this is fine because “individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
Finally, I asked Kavanaugh if he was aware of the “Kavanaugh stop” terminology and whether he had any comment on it.
[….]
So, I asked Justice Kavanaugh on October 16, “Do you have any comment on the Pro Publica report that found ‘more than 50 Americans who were held after [immigration] agents questioned their citizenship’ during 2025. ‘They were almost all Latino,’ per the report.“
In addition to the other questions previously raised, I also asked Kavanaugh whether “the possibility of after-the-fact ‘excessive force’ claims” is “a sufficient answer to this ongoing, regularly occurring problem?”
Did you guess what happened? Of course you did!
I have not received a response from him or his chambers.
You can already see the horrific legacy that is forming around the concept of Kavanaugh stops. This is a legacy that doesn’t go away easily. It’s like the Dred Scott decision, the Korematsu decision, or Buck v. Bell. Supreme Court decisions that nearly everyone now looks back on in horror.
These are all horrible, hateful decisions by out-of-touch bigots, who can’t even fathom a world in which those less fortunate themselves even matter, and thus their rights and dignity are barely given a second thought.
The Supreme Court still has a chance to fix this, since Kavanaugh stops were only defined by Justice Kavanaugh in a shadow docket concurrence. While those other cases all took decades for everyone to realize how fucked up they were, this one we can see in real time what a stain it is for anyone who believes that America respects basic civil liberties like due process and concepts like probable cause.
But, for now at least, that stain should stick to Brett Kavanaugh. He’s justified this. He’s insisted these kinds of stops are no big deal, even as there was evidence then, and even with more mounting evidence now, that immigration officials don’t give a shit if you are an American citizen. If you’re darker skinned, they can treat you like shit, lock you up, beat you up, ignore your protestations and even evidence of American citizenship.
It is a deep, dark stain on America as a supposed land of freedom, and it should be tied up with Brett Kavanaugh’s legacy forever.
In brief: Melissa has become post-tropical as it races toward Newfoundland, where it will deliver modest impacts tonight. The toll of devastation in Jamaica is just starting to come into focus. Details on that, and a link to yesterday’s Substack Live with Dr. Kristen Panthagani today.
Hurricane Melissa is now officially a post-tropical cyclone, meaning it’s still a very big storm but it just does not have tropical characteristics to call it a hurricane.
Melissa has lost most of its definition and is now considered a post-tropical storm. (Tropical Tidbits)
Anyway, Melissa swung by Bermuda earlier this morning. Wind gusts as high as 98 mph were reported at a somewhat elevated station on the island (meaning winds at ground level probably were not quite that strong).
Melissa will pass just southeast of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland tonight. (Environment Canada)
From here, Melissa will race off to the northeast, passing by Newfoundland tonight after midnight local time. Melissa should only deliver moderate tropical storm force winds to Newfoundland, along with high surf and rough seas. Some locally heavy rain is possible in Newfoundland as Melissa passes by, though modeling suggests roughly 20 to 40 mm for the Avalon Peninsula. A somewhat broader low pressure system over northern New England and Quebec will produce somewhat higher precipitation totals, up to 50 mm or so, especially in the Adirondacks, Green Mountains, and Laurentians.
Total precipitation expected through Saturday night across New England and eastern Canada. (Tropical Tidbits)
Melissa exits stage right tomorrow, eventually settling just south of Iceland where it is absorbed into the semi-permanent Icelandic low.
Melissa’s recovery is just beginning still in the Caribbean. As expected, the death toll has risen, up to about 50 now, including 19 in Jamaica. We continue to get some pictures and accounts of the storm filtering out of Jamaica, and it was as bad as it seemed.
(dentona22 on Twitter/X)
What has been impressive to me are some of the before and after aerial views that show the physical devastation, yes, but also the natural devastation. These were relatively lush, green parts of Jamaica, and the natural landscape has been absolutely shredded, as is consistent with past storms of this intensity we’ve seen in other places. These storms have such immense power.
Here are a number of ways you can directly help out relief efforts, pulled in part from an Associated Press article on the topic.
Another interesting note today: Jamaica is a very forward-thinking country when it comes to disasters, and it will pay off for them in the wake of Melissa. A $150 million cat bond will probably be triggered as a result of the work they did in the years ahead of Melissa. While this will only cover a portion of the losses incurred from the storm, it can allow for a much faster restoration of basic services in the impacts areas in ways that they would otherwise not have been able. The cause of and solution to recovery in disasters remains multi-faceted and complex. But thinking ahead is a good play.
We will be taking the next day or two off and come back Monday to reset the weather situation. Hope everyone has a safe Halloween.
FirstTime
(@longtimehistory.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T20:14:38.989Z
