Special Agent Dr. Aidnos, PhD

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Gonna take a moment to expand on a footnote on "a truly intellectually defensible definition of 'the West.'"

The tendency for historians has been to abandon the term as it is mostly used in indefensible ways to 'other' the Islamic world.

But I think 'what could this term do' is a useful exercise.

The thing to understand about the wave of transphobia plaguing our politics right now is that it does not nourish itself on the hatreds of ordinary voters. It nourishes on their indifference.

LOLing at the "without complaint." I can guarantee there are complaints, even if she's not hearing them.

As a biologist, It really is a great analogy. Also trees. It's like saying, "There are trees and grass, you have to be one or the other." Ok... where is the line that defines "is a tree?" what about bush-like grasses? Palm trees? NON-tree palms? What about horsetails and their tree-like ancestors?

Yes. Sermon at the local Episcopal church a few weeks ago stated something along the lines of since people are made in God's image, those who deny other people's humanity are denying the face of God.

This exactly! I'm trans and old enough to remember when the discriminatory laws of DADT and separate but "equal" civil unions were considered LGBTQ victories because the other side wanted to ban queer people from participating in civil life *entirely* and not just partially.

Candidates didn't used to run on anti-trans policies because basically most of society was transphobic so no one needed to run on it. Instead, they ran on anti-gay policies. Like, trans rights are being attacked *now* because we didn't used to have many rights to attack!

Add to this that "prior criminal record" could include e.g. smoking a joint, minor in possession of alcohol for drinking a beer when 19 years old, a single poor-judgement DUI from 20 years ago, etc. "Prior criminal record" does not mean "violent criminal."

It’s not just that they don’t have to turn off SNAP benefits — they’re not legally allowed to. They legally must use the contingency fund.

The admin is pretending they can’t use it even though their own guidance from a month ago (that they’ve since deleted) contradicts that.

I now have a lot of updated systems that suck a lot more than the old ones did (which is quite an accomplishment because the old systems sucked rather a lot). In one of them, they took away the search function making the updated system practically unusable for its purpose.

I can't speak to what HR in every agency does with USAJobs postings, but I've seen it before. And citizenship status gets asked on the OF306 and SF85/85P/86 and it's been an employment requirement for half a century. There's plenty of bizarre things about this posting but that bit isn't one of them.

Aside from it being horrible, this is also a weird-ass way of advertising a position that is the most deskiest of desk jobs.

Executive Order Search, browse and learn about the Federal Register. Federal Register 2.0 is the unofficial daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as e...

That's been a requirement of federal employment since 1976. Everything else about the job announcement is wacked but that bit is a long-existing statutory requirement.
www.federalregister.gov/executive-or...

As far as I'm aware, I-130 petition is still a path. That's always been the most common immigration pathway (but can take an outrageously long time depending on the petitioner's relationship to the petitionee, and the country of origin).

A picture of a page that says "D, all of the above"

Possible explanation is that ICE and CBP positions likely require a higher level background investigation (T3 or T5). Those often take a long time. They're probably hoping DoD civs who already have T3/T5s can fill the ICE/CBP positions for the 6-12 months while the BIs are carried out.

I'm nominating a dark horse: Black Sails. Bit of a rocky start but starts to hits its stride in mid-season 1 and just gets better from there, stays strong, and lands the series finale beautifully in a way that Game of Thrones utterly failed to do.

Guatemala has immigration laws. Like, if Guatemala didn't admit him, he can't just stay and also bring his wife there without that potentially becoming a problem.

Long time since my USCIS days, but I remember people coming to the office to get a document (I-94?) stamped when they had a pending I-90 and needed temporary documentation. And an ISA could have looked him up in CIS in literally 30 seconds and seen he was an LPR. ICE *must* have known.

16 years old, in my high school office making photocopies, and Ted Danson walks in. An adult offers to introduce me to him, but I was culturally illiterate at the time and had no idea who he was so I shrugged indifferently and returned to my photocopying. Teenagers, man.

Nonsense, we'd tie babies to eight-lane freeways. (trying to dark humor my way through the horrors here...)

(Disclosing that I'm very much not an immigration lawyer. I worked with immigration records for a brief time a very long time ago, so I picked up a little knowledge but definitely not an expert. Learned just enough to learn that US immigration law is a labyrinthian hellscape.)

The CRBA is filed by the US citizen parent with the State Department and not by the doctor. And also can be filed at any point before the child is 18. (Eligibility for CBRA vs N-600K has to do with the parent's physical presence in the US prior to living abroad.)

Seems like, but not necessarily N-600K paperwork. That's typically filed by expat Americans. Children born on military bases usually get a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA). The CRBA makes a person a citizen at birth, the N-600K does not. (e.g. John McCain situation vs Ted Cruz situation)

Not choose at 18 exactly, but children born abroad to US citizens have to file for US citizenship (N-600K form) before their 18th birthday in order to claim that citizenship. (And they can still keep citizenship of their birth country, becoming dual citizens.)

Yes, but that's because most Federal law enforcement have security clearances and part of having a security clearance is signing an NDA (technically an SF-312).

Feds from IRS agents to refugee officers are deploying to assist ICE conduct raids President Trump is tapping unusual parts of the government immigration enforcement, and offering unprecedented roles.

www.govexec.com/management/2...

The Federal government is perfectly capable of obtaining undercover license plates registered to a person and address that doesn't exist, so no license plate at all is a deliberate choice.

If you’re recreating at parks this weekend and through out the summer, you’ll likely run into one of these signs. They are part of out the Park Service is complying with EO 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”