Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

[ti-amie]

I think the point is there IS no answer

I agree.

[dave g]

I think the point is there IS no answer, ponchi. Here was had a handful of people who drew their line in their own way and in accordance with their own compass. They agree on some things but disagree on others. Their juxtaposition from one another is precisely the same as any other bad country dealing with similar, highly complex, conflicting issues. The big difference between the people profiled here and, say, their counterparts in the U.S. would be that the people featured here (except perhaps for the very young transperson in the piece who speaks in unequivocal absolutes with zero doubt or room for negotiation, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt for this brain exercise of mine) would probably be able to sit around a table and discuss these complexities rationally and sensibly, at least for the most part, while their U.S. counterparts would ultimately end up vilifying one another for not going far enough or going too far.

Anyway, I keep coming back to the wise words of Hannah Rosin in the aftermath of the famous catcalling video from 2014: "Activism is never perfectly executed." And the reason is there is not, nor will there ever be, just one clear, easily identifiable path for everyone to take in response to the bad countries we live in.

And maybe that's okay? Maybe? Can anything of substance be accomplished by lateral forces working in sometimes competing or contrary directions?

Our "thumbs up" icon seems to have disappeared, so this is my version of the "thumbs up" icon.

[ti-amie]

https://home.army.mil/bavaria/about/shu ... 20Go%2DApp

[ti-amie]

For those of us who came of age back in the day he acted like an addict who, seeing someone OD, got the he** out of Dodge before the police and EMS arrived.

(So I've been told)

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

Congressional Budget Office believed to be hacked by foreign actor

The office makes economic projections for lawmakers and scores legislation for how much it would add or subtract from the national debt.
Updated
November 6, 2025 at 6:40 p.m. ESTtoday at 6:40 p.m. EST

By Jacob Bogage
and
Riley Beggin

The Congressional Budget Office, lawmakers’ nonpartisan bookkeeper, was hacked by a suspected foreign actor, according to an agency spokeswoman, potentially exposing the key financial research data Congress uses to craft legislation.

Officials discovered the incursion in recent days and now worry that communications between lawmakers’ offices and nonpartisan researchers could have been accessed by an adversary or one of its digital proxies, as well as internal email and office chat logs, according to four people familiar with the hack. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

CBO officials told lawmakers that they believe they detected the intrusion early, one of the people said.

Another of the people said some congressional offices have generally stopped corresponding with the CBO via email because of the cybersecurity risks.

“The Congressional Budget Office has identified the security incident, has taken immediate action to contain it, and has implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems going forward,” CBO spokeswoman Caitlin Emma said in a statement. “The incident is being investigated and work for the Congress continues. Like other government agencies and private sector entities, CBO occasionally faces threats to its network and continually monitors to address those threats.”

The CBO formulates economic projections for lawmakers, and every bill taken up in either chamber of Congress receives a CBO “score” of how much it would add to or subtract from the national debt.

The office’s analyses provide a counterweight to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers and Office of Management and Budget, giving Congress, as an equal branch of government, its own number-crunchers.

The CBO came under fire from congressional Republicans over the summer after it released its cost estimate for President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. The office’s determination that the legislation would add trillions to the national debt led the Senate GOP to rewrite some rules over how to apply the CBO’s scores.

Noah Robertson contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... s-foreign/

[ponchi101]

I wonder where the routers of the USGOV are manufactured...

[dryrunguy]

40 Venezuelan men interviewed by the NY Times recount their stories of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse while in detention at the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.

::

‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison
By Julie TurkewitzTibisay RomeroSheyla Urdaneta and Isayen HerreraPhotographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
Nov. 8, 2025

They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours.

One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.

They said they were told by officials that they would die in the Salvadoran prison, that the world had forgotten them.

When they could no longer take it, they said, they cut themselves, writing protest messages on sheets in blood.

“‘You are all terrorists,’” Edwin Meléndez, 30, recalled being told by officers who added: “‘Terrorists must be treated like this.’”

From the moment he took office, President Trump has seized on what he calls the threat posed by Venezuela and its autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, accusing the government and Venezuelan gangs of orchestrating an “invasion” of the United States.

In March and April, the Trump administration made the extraordinary decision to send 252 Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, saying they had infiltrated the United States in a form of “irregular warfare.”

Mr. Trump accused the men of being members of a dangerous gang, Tren de Aragua, working in lock step with the Venezuelan government. It was an early salvo in the administration’s standoff with Mr. Maduro, which has only intensified since then, with U.S. warships blowing up Venezuelan boats and Mr. Trump warning of potential military strikes on Venezuelan soil.

But the men received little to no due process before being expelled to the terrorism prison in El Salvador, and they were abruptly released in July, part of a larger diplomatic deal that included the release of 10 Americans and U.S. residents held in Venezuela.

Mr. Trump, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September, praised Salvadoran officials for “the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country.”

In interviews, however, the men sent to the prison described frequent, intense physical and psychological abuse. Beyond the beatings, tear gas and trips to the isolation room, the men said they were mocked or ignored by medical personnel, forced to spend 24 hours a day under harsh lights and made to drink from wells of fetid water.

The New York Times interviewed 40 of the former prisoners, many at their homes in cities and towns across Venezuela. We then asked a group of independent forensic experts who help investigate torture allegations to assess the credibility of the men’s testimony.

Several doctors from that team, known as the Independent Forensic Expert Group, said the men’s testimonies, along with photographs of what they described as their injuries, were consistent and credible, providing “compelling evidence” to support accusations of torture. The group’s assessments in other cases have been used in courts around the world.

Luis Chacón, 26, from the Venezuelan state of Táchira, was one of several men who said the constant abuse at the prison led him to contemplate suicide. A father of three, he said he had been working as a driver for Uber Eats in Milwaukee before being detained and expelled to the prison. His low point there came in June, he said, on the day of his oldest child’s seventh birthday.

“We had heard that if there was a person who died among us that they would let us all go,” he said. He thought maybe he should be that person: He climbed on a bunk bed, he said, and tried to hang himself with a sheet.

The other men, he said, pulled him down.

The forensic experts said that they were struck by how similar the men’s allegations were. The former prisoners, each interviewed separately, described the same timeline and methods of abuse, with many of the same details.

When such “identical methods of abuse” are described by multiple people, the experts wrote in their assessment, it “often indicates the existence of an institutional policy and practice of torture.”

Presented with the men’s accusations and the experts’ findings, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”

Ms. Jackson added that reporters should focus on American children who “have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens,” without providing details.

Representatives for President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration never released a complete list of the 252 Venezuelan men imprisoned in El Salvador or the crimes it claimed they had committed.

Using a leaked list of the names, The Times found that a relatively small share of the men — about 13 percent — seemed to have a serious criminal accusation or conviction in some part of the world. (The Times searched multiple public records databases, but the American government may have more information that it has not released.)

Of the 40 men interviewed for this article, The Times found criminal accusations, beyond immigration and traffic offenses, against three of them.

Victor Ortega, 25, who said he was shot in the head with a rubber bullet while in the Salvadoran prison, has “pending charges for discharge of a firearm and theft,” according to the Trump administration.

A second man we interviewed, Neiyerver Leon, 27, had a misdemeanor charge for possession of drug paraphernalia and was fined.

In addition, public records in the United States indicate that Mr. Chacón, the man who said he had contemplated suicide in prison, had been arrested in 2024 on a domestic violence charge, and was accused this year of retail theft at a Walmart. (The domestic violence case was dismissed, according to public records, and Mr. Chacón was sent to El Salvador before the theft case could play out.)

Many of the men say they still don’t know why they were put in a prison for terrorists.

“I migrated so that I could buy a house, give my daughter a better education, the one I didn’t have,” said Mervin Yamarte, 29. “And it all went wrong.”

‘Welcome to Hell’
A swarm of helicopters surrounded the airport. It was just after midnight on March 16, 2025. As the aircraft descended, the Venezuelan men said they saw a phalanx of officers in riot gear awaiting them.

A sign identified their landing place as El Salvador.

At detention facilities in the United States, U.S. officials had told them they were being deported back to Venezuela, the detainees recalled. On a stopover in Honduras, they had been given pizza. Now, a Salvadoran official was boarding the plane.

“You’re staying here,” Ysqueibel Peñaloza, 25, recalled the official saying.

Panic swept down the aisles, he said. The men tightened their seatbelts, Mr. Peñaloza said, in a feeble attempt to prevent removal. The harsh tactics of El Salvador’s president were well known. Some men began to shout, he recalled, demanding to see a U.N. representative, a lawyer or a diplomat from their country.

Then Salvadoran officials, in body armor and carrying batons, boarded the plane, several men recalled, and began to remove the group by force.

“They started hitting us all,” said Andry Hernández, 32, a makeup artist who had been in U.S. detention since crossing into the United States in 2024. “If you raised your head even a little they would knock it down with a blow. Many of our companions had broken noses, split lips, bruises on their bodies.”

Officers bent the handcuffed men at the waist, dragging them off the plane and pushing them onto buses, they said. Cameras rolled. Hours later, Mr. Bukele posted a video of the arrival, packaged with music and drone shots like an action film. Within three days it had been viewed nearly 39 million times.

“We continue advancing in the fight against organized crime,” Mr. Bukele wrote on X, when he posted the video. “But this time, we are also helping our allies.”

Inside the prison, the men said, they were told they were members of Tren de Aragua.

“‘Welcome to hell,’” Anyelo Sarabia, 20, recalled being told upon arrival. “‘From here you’ll leave only in a body bag.’”

To send the men to prison in El Salvador, Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping, rarely used 18th-century law that allows for the expulsion of people from an invading nation.

It wasn’t entirely clear at the time, but it was a first step in a larger case the Trump administration has been making: that Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s president, poses a major security threat to the United States by flooding it with migrants, crime and drugs.

Many of the men held in the Salvadoran prison said that, far from working with Mr. Maduro, they had been fleeing his government when they migrated north.

The autocrat has overseen a devastating economic crisis and held on for over a decade through brutal repression and vote rigging. His government retains its own torture centers, according to the United Nations and others, and often seeks to discredit political enemies by branding them as “terrorists.”

In fact, some of the men shipped to El Salvador had sought political asylum in the United States, claiming they would be persecuted for taking part in protests against Mr. Maduro, according to applications reviewed by The Times.

Life on the Inside
Cut off from the world, the men began to adjust to their new lives. Officials divided them into cells, usually 10 people in each, they said. Meals, three times a day, consisted mostly of rice, beans, spaghetti and tortillas.

They said they occasionally received special treatment, like better food and brief moments outdoors, but only when they had rare, official visitors, including Kristi Noem, head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The prisoners said they were never allowed visits from lawyers or relatives.

In one cell, they used soap to etch a calendar into a metal bed frame, recalled Carlos Cañizalez, 25. Some of the men began saving their tortillas and molding them into dominoes, playing games to distract themselves.

Desperation grew, they said. Tito Martínez, 26, began to feel sick and weak, until he could not get out of bed and other men had to feed him, several recalled. Eventually, Mr. Martínez was taken to an infirmary, where he said he was beaten in front of medical personnel.

There, he said, a woman who identified herself as a doctor told him: “‘Resign yourself. It’s time for you to die.’”

When he arrived at the prison, Aldo Colmenarez, a 41-year-old diabetic, according to a Venezuelan doctor’s report, asked officials for insulin, he said. It was five days before they gave it to him, he explained. After that, dosage and application were erratic, said several of the men, leading to episodes of hypoglycemia that left Mr. Colmenarez cold, sweaty and unconscious.

Punishment often felt random and disproportionate, the men said. Bathing was allowed only at 4 a.m. Men who splashed water on themselves to stay cool at other times were sent to the island, the former prisoners said, recounting a dark isolation room with just a pinhole of light in the ceiling, where they were beaten by several guards at a time.

Many of the men described being placed in a “crane” position, in which guards made them kneel with their hands cuffed behind their backs, then lifted them by the arms.

Tensions grew in April. After a few men asked one of the guards, an officer who used the alias Satan, to stop banging cell bars at night, the guards dragged them into a central area and released tear gas in their faces, said two men who were in a nearby cell, Andy Perozo, 30, and Maikel Moreno, 20.

Another of the inmates, Andrys Cedeño, 23, began to convulse.

“Boss,” he said he cried, “I’m asthmatic.”

What the guard did, he said, “was laugh.”

Mr. Cedeño then grew limp and unresponsive. The men who could see the attack said they thought that he had died.

Scared and angry, the prisoners threw soap bars and cups of water, they recalled. The next day, they resolved to stop eating, demanding better treatment.

Then they began to slice their bodies with the rough edges of metal bed ladders and plastic pipes, said several men, using blood to write messages on sheets they hung from the plumbing.

“We’re not criminals, we’re migrants,” said one message, according to several of the men, including Edicson Quintero, 28, who said he cut his abdomen to draw blood for a protest sign.

The hunger strike lasted four days, the men said. Afterward, Andry Hernández, the makeup artist, said officers sent him to the isolation room. There, guards in hoods forced him to crouch and perform oral sex, he said.

“They passed the baton over my parts,” he recalled, “they put the baton through my legs and raised it, they groped me, they touched me, and I just screamed.”

He later described the experience to several cellmates.

In May, a guard search of one of the cells turned violent, many of the prisoners recalled, and some of the men, enraged and desperate, began dislodging metal parts from their beds and using them to break the locks on cell doors.

Briefly, gates swung open.

Officers responded with guns and what the prisoners described as rubber bullets.

“When the first guy was hit we ran back into the cell,” recalled Edwuar Hernández, 23. “They began to shoot at us point blank, from the bars toward the inside.”

Mr. Ortega said he was hit with a projectile that ricocheted off his forehead, making him bleed profusely. Luis Rodríguez, 26, said a shot tore into his hand. José Carmona, 28, was hit in the thigh, he said.

After this attempt at a rebellion, officials forced many of the men to the island, including Mr. Chacón.

There, he said, “they put our heads inside a tank as if to drown us, and they took our heads out again and hit us on the ribs, on the legs, with whatever they could find.”

A Secret Deal
Far from the prison, diplomats from the United States and Venezuela were hashing out a deal that would determine the prisoners’ fates.

Mr. Maduro had spent the last year imprisoning U.S. citizens and permanent residents in an effort to gain leverage over Washington. In July, he agreed to release 10 of them, along with 80 Venezuelan political prisoners, in exchange for the 252 men imprisoned in El Salvador.

In the weeks before the release, the men said, some of the abuse subsided. Eventually, guards arrived with Head & Shoulders shampoo, Speed Stick deodorant and Colgate toothpaste, the men recalled, and they were shaved and their hair was cut.

Then the prison director appeared.

“You have 20 minutes to bathe,” he told them, according to Jerce Reyes, 36.

“We all started screaming and crying,” he said, “because we knew we were leaving.”

Mr. Maduro, who many Venezuelans blamed for their exile, now had the opportunity to portray himself as a champion for migrants rejected by Mr. Trump.

When they touched down in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, the men were met by the country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, who had become the face of the country’s surveillance and repression apparatus. They were held for several days, made to tell their stories on state television, and then sent home.

In some cases, officials from the country’s feared intelligence service escorted them to their doorsteps.

Of the 252 men, seven had serious criminal histories in Venezuela, Mr. Cabello claimed on television, saying his government had detained 20 who were “wanted” by the government, without explaining further.

In September, a U.S. federal appeals court blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants. But the ruling does not prevent the government from using other lawful means to remove people from the United States, meaning Mr. Trump could send more people to prison in El Salvador.

In the interviews, the freed prisoners reported ongoing physical and mental health problems, which they attributed to the beatings and other abuse: blurred vision; recurring migraines; trouble breathing; shoulder, back and knee pain some linked to the “crane” position; nightmares; insomnia. Some have seen doctors, but many said they could not afford to.

Mr. Cedeño, 23, the man with asthma, has been hospitalized twice since returning to Venezuela, he said, once after an asthma attack left him unconscious, and another after a heart attack, according to an October doctor’s report.

At night, he doesn’t sleep, he said, haunted by the rattle of handcuffs, the voices of Salvadoran officials and the clang of cell doors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/worl ... =url-share

[ponchi101]

Let's not forget. El Salvador was the site of one of the most savage civil wars in history. The atrocities committed there were of the unspeakable kind.

[ti-amie]

‪Akela Cooper‬
‪@akelacooper.bsky.social‬
· 1h
Found the tweet that Joyce Carol Oates bodied Elon Musk with and it's so beautiful in its eloquent, simple take down. So much so he's crashing out trying to prove he reads books now. Put this in the Louvre.

[ti-amie]

Catherine Rampell
‪@crampell.bsky.social‬
Tell me you don’t understand risk pools without telling me you don’t understand risk pools

[ponchi101]

‪Akela Cooper‬
‪@akelacooper.bsky.social‬
· 1h
Found the tweet that Joyce Carol Oates bodied Elon Musk with and it's so beautiful in its eloquent, simple take down. So much so he's crashing out trying to prove he reads books now. Put this in the Louvre.

You see? I would have never wondered about that. And it is such a profound reflection.
But let's also remember how many more like him there are. And I don't mean just republicans.

[ti-amie]

ChrisO_wiki‬
‪@chriso-wiki.bsky.social‬
· 1d
1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission.


2/ The Dutch newspaper reports that two memorial panels installed at the NAC were removed some time earlier this year. They commemorated African-American soldiers who helped liberate Europe from German occupation during World War II.

3/ One of the two panels described how a million African-Americans volunteered for service during World War II, but had to fight against both the enemy and racism on their own side, including segregation within the army itself that confined many to supporting roles.



5/ The site of the cemetery was established by Captain Joseph Shomon, the head of the 611th Graves Registration Company, while the task of digging it and burying the bodies was given to the 960th QMSC during September-November 1944.

6/ First Sergeant Jefferson Wiggins oversaw the work. He later recalled that when the men arrived, they were confronted with the sight of thousands of dead bodies lying on a tarp. There were no coffins, so the bodies had to be tied up in mattress covers where the men dug graves.


8/ Wiggins says that the gravedigging was so traumatising that no one talked during the day, except for the few who would pray over the graves and some who quietly cried.

9/ "So, there we were. A group of Black Americans confronted with all these dead white Americans… When they were alive, we couldn’t sit in the same room."

10/ A second panel was dedicated to telephone engineer George H. Pruitt, who died on June 10, 1945, while trying to save a comrade who had fallen into a river.
Dutch researchers and historians say that they are shocked and outraged by the move.

11/ Theo Bovens, the chairman of the Black Liberators in the Netherlands foundation and also leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal party, says that he intends to raise the removal with the new US Ambassador to the Netherlands, Joe Popolo.

12/ He calls the lack of attention paid to Black liberators "truly insufficient," and notes: "Approximately 12.5 percent of the American liberators were of African-American descent." His organisation had campaigned for their recognition, which had been lacking for decades.

13/ "Not only did they play a crucial role in the construction of the cemetery in Margraten, 172 of them also received their final resting place there."
8,000 Americans lie at Margraten, which also commemorates 1,700 still missing.

14/ Professor Kees Ribbens, senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, says that the removal appears to be the result of a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which is currently the focus of controversy over anti-Semitism

15/ He says: "In March, a complaint against the [American Battle Monuments Commission] appeared on the website of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think tank."

16/ "[The memorial] allegedly evaded Trump's executive order to halt policies promoting diversity and inclusion." /end

Sources:
www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...
blogs.loc.gov/folklife/201...
web.archive.org/web/20250720...

[ti-amie]

ChrisO_wiki
‪@chriso-wiki.bsky.social‬
Update here: bsky.app/profile/did:...
‪ChrisO_wiki‬
‪@chriso-wiki.bsky.social‬
· 13h
1/ Eleven Dutch parties across the political spectrum from socialist to conservative have issued a joint appeal to a provincial government to build a memorial to Black American soldiers who died in World War II, to replace one removed from the Netherlands American Cemetery.

2/ The Dutch newspaper NRC reported earlier that a memorial to African-American soldiers who had fought to liberate the Netherlands and built the cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg, had been removed following a complaint by the Heritage Foundation.
bsky.app/profile/chri...
‪ChrisO_wiki‬

3/ The removal was strongly criticised by local historians, researchers and politicians, who had campaigned for years for the US government to publicly recognise the contribution of black Americans to the liberation of the Netherlands in 1944-45.

4/ NRC reports that the provincial Labour Party (PvdA), People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), GreenLeft (GroenLinks), the Party for the Animals (PvdA), Democrats 66 (D66), Local Limburg (Local Limburg), Socialist Party (SP), Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Horizon,…

5/ …50PLUS, and JA21 (JA21) have joined forces to appeal to the Limburg provincial government to investigate whether it and the municipality of Eijsden-Margraten can erect a temporary memorial on Dutch-controlled land.

6/ In questions to the Provincial Executive, they say: "Removing the panels, which commemorate the sacrifices of Black American soldiers, does not do justice to history, is indecent, and unacceptable." They want the executive to press for them to be restored.

7/ The 64-acre plot of former farmland on which the cemetery is located has been loaned in perpetuity by the Netherlands to the United States and is managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission. The proposed new memorial would be located outside the grounds.

8/ The right-wing populist BBB, PVV and Forum for Democracy parties have declined to sign the appeal and the BBB has criticised NRC's reporting as inaccurate. The BBC says in a letter that the removed panels have merely been rotated to allow the memorial to tell multiple stories.

9/ An American Battle Memorial Commission spokesperson says that the panels are "currently not on display, but not out of circulation." There is, however, no indication of when – or if – they will return. /end

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/11/08/li ... s-a4912174
Sources:
www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...
www.limburger.nl/regio/eijsde...
www.limburger.nl/regio/eijsde...

[ti-amie]

‪Akela Cooper‬
‪@akelacooper.bsky.social‬
· 1h
Found the tweet that Joyce Carol Oates bodied Elon Musk with and it's so beautiful in its eloquent, simple take down. So much so he's crashing out trying to prove he reads books now. Put this in the Louvre.

Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis‬
‪@kendrawrites.com‬
· 4m
With alt text.

But also, I told you when used effectively shame works. The problem is Elon isn't shamed by normal things like the weight of being responsible for the deaths of 600,000 people, or being a white supremacist or whatever. Oates just landed on a pressure point.