With a few caveats and exceptions, we have every right to know exactly what our government is doing, while our government has no right to know what we're doing.
That's why we call it "Public Service", and we call ourselves "Private Citizens".
Sep 5, 2026
ICE Tortures People
There's no need to ask why MAGA would put up with this shit. They voted for the guy who told them he'd make "those people" suffer.
Just remember:
The boot you're licking
will eventually stomp your ass too.
Exclusive: court orders seen by Guardian show agency given approval to fit Texas detainee with tube without his consent
Federal immigration officials quietly received permission from a judge in recent weeks to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker inside a Texas detention center, including with the use of a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure, court records reveal.
The man is likely the 19th hunger striker in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention where the agency has had an application approved to conduct “involuntary medical procedures” since January 2025. The rising number of cases under the second Trump administration has alarmed advocates amid wide-ranging accusations of mistreatment inside facilities nationwide.
Court orders from the southern district of Texas federal court seen by the Guardian suggest ICE followed through with force-feeding via a nasal tube on the Cuban man in August, since agency officials successfully requested this week that the court order be extended. He is currently detained at the Montgomery ICE processing center, a privately-run detention facility near Houston.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, said on Thursday evening the man had “resumed eating and drinking again” and was not being force-fed. The DHS did not answer whether the man had broken his hunger strike this week after the latest court order, or how many times he had been force-fed prior.
The new order had given ICE permission to operate on him to fit a surgical feeding tube without his consent.
The Guardian is not naming the man because efforts to contact him have been unsuccessful. Like in all force-feeding cases, the majority of his court records are sealed, concealing many details from the public.
The secretive practice of force-feeding inside detention centers has been widely condemned by human rights organizations as torture. Involuntary medical procedures in response to hunger strikes in detention are often painful and traumatizing.
During a prolonged hunger strike, ICE will request permission from a federal judge to conduct force-feeding, forced hydration and other measures.
Typically, after a judge approves the request, detention center guards hold down a hunger striker while medical staff forcibly insert a tube through the person’s nose and down their throat, and pump nutritional liquid into their stomach.
But in this latest case in Texas, ICE also received permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker through a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube insertion. This is a surgery in which medical staff make an incision in a person’s abdomen, insert a tube that remains in place indefinitely until it is surgically removed again and pump liquid directly into the stomach. This procedure has not been previously identified in other force-feeding cases reviewed by the Guardian.
“The cruelty of the extreme tactics at ICE’s disposal to end lawful protest, including forcibly cutting into a protester’s body to insert a tube in their stomach, underscores the horrors happening outside our view in ICE detention centers,” said Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas. “ICE’s brutal use of involuntary medical procedures on hunger strikers demonstrates how degrading conditions have gotten in these hidden places, which is often exactly what hunger strikers are protesting in the first place.”
Last month, the Guardian published a series of stories about the extent of ICE’s force-feeding practices under the second Trump administration, with the agency getting the green light to perform involuntary medical procedures in 18 hunger strike cases – and the latest being the 19th.
“The high number of verified court orders since January 2025 raises serious concern,” said Eunice Cho, an immigrant and civil rights attorney who has extensively documented forced treatment on hunger strikers in ICE detention.
Cho added that the high number “suggests several possibilities, none of which are positive”, including that conditions are so bad that more people are hunger striking in protest, and that officials “are more frequently failing to attempt to resolve the issue in a less confrontational and dangerous manner, instead resorting to forced medical intervention”.
The Cuban man was arrested by ICE on 22 July and was declared a hunger striker three days later, court records show. The Montgomery facilityholding him is run by the private prison company GEO Group.
A GEO Group spokesperson referred all questions to ICE. The US attorney’s office in the southern district of Texas, which is representing ICE in the latest court proceedings, did not respond to a request for comment.
An ICE official and a doctor at the facility requested permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker in August, filings show.
On 19 August, federal judge Andrew Hanen gave permission for ICE to force-feed the hunger striker. And on 1 September, ICE requested the judge extend his order.
This Wednesday, Hanen extended the order, which is set to expire in mid-September. It includes the option for ICE touse the surgical tube insertion.
Like in many cases reviewed by the Guardian, the Cuban hunger striker does not have any current legal representation.
“The fact that this person lacks legal representation in a process where the government seeks to subject him to an invasive, involuntary medical procedure performed without consent is a tragedy, and a clear failure of our justice system,” Cho said. “The secretive nature of these cases, and the opacity of the legal process by which the government brings these motions, should concern us all.”
According to a DHS spokesperson, the Cuban hunger striker entered the US unlawfully in 1980 and was ordered deported in 2004. The DHS claims he was previously convicted of “aggravated assault with a weapon, aggravated battery, drug possession, and carrying a concealed firearm”. The spokesperson added that he “received due process and will remain in ICE custody until removed from the United States”.
The DHS also said facilities distribute proper food, hygiene, phone and other basic services, and that “during hunger strikes, ICE continues to provide three meals a day, delivered to the detained alien’s room”.
The Trump administration had previously refused to acknowledge the force-feeding of hunger strikers in ICE detention, until later into the Guardian’s investigation confirming the practice.
Sep 4, 2026
Overheard
Someone hacked into the Republican Convention website, and planted code that redirects visitors to the Epstein Files website.
Nerds, you magnificent bastards!
The Next Step
I've removed the gadget across the top of the blog - the one that was counting the days we had left to limit our slide into Clima-geddon - because we done fucked ourselves out of the chance. We let the Dirty Fuels Cartel buy up too many coin-operated politicians, and now we can only work to mitigate the damage that's all but inevitable.
Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says in report that maps path back below danger zone
In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. So now the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials say.
Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate accord because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a bleak first-of-its-kind report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme Wednesday.
Instead of giving up, scientists and U.N. officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it still will mean decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, extinctions and melting ice and glaciers.
"Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said.
After a period of over-the-limit warming, the new strategy envisions getting back below the limit by ending fossil fuel use and developing some kind of way to suck industries' carbon dioxide out of the air.
"It's a reality check. We have to live with this warmer world," said report co-author Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter. "But there's still a lot we can do to limit warming."
Passing the longtime warming threshold
After the Paris climate accord, the United Nations ordered its climate science arm to study different warming limits. A goal of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above mid-19th century temperatures became generally accepted after the scientists found dramatic impacts that affect people and the planet at 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) but not at 1.5 degrees.
The world is now at 1.4 C (2.5 F) above pre-industrial levels, some scientists have calculated. The measure is based on a 20-year average, rather than a single year's temperatures.
Despite experts saying there's no way to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, U.N. officials long maintained the 1.5 window was still open. Wednesday's report finally admitted that the world will cross the 1.5 threshold "in the next few years."
The report said the most optimistic scenario has warming peaking at 1.8 C (3.2 F) around mid-century if countries pursue ambitious climate goals, but that governments' current policies should push temperatures to 2.6 C (4.7 F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
So instead of preventing warming of 1.5 degrees, now the U.N. said it wants policymakers to "prepare for and navigate a future'' in which the globe crosses that limit and then corrects course and cools temperatures. The report envisions that global temperatures will pass 1.5 "within the next few years," follow a hump-shaped path of more warming, peak, then gradually cool to below the 1.5 mark, ideally by the end of the century. The report and experts call it "overshoot."
"Let's be very clear, 1.5 target is still the goal. But now we need to approach it differently from above," said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen.
The 1.5 limit is not "some magical climate cliff" where it's just game over, said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't part of the study. "Every tenth of a degree we avoid still means less damage."
Limiting how high temperatures go past threshold is key
It's most important to first limit the new peak temperature and then reduce the amount of time above 1.5 degrees, Andersen said.
But the world likely will be in that overshoot period for "many, many decades," Betts said.
Every five years of delay in reducing emissions adds at least a tenth of a degree to peak warming, said report co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
"If we act now we can limit overshoot," the report said. "Not a safe world, but safer than remaining above" 1.5 degrees for the long term.
"This is among the bleakest U.N. climate reports I have read. It carries the unmistakable tone of desperation, frustration and urgency — but not resignation," Weaver said.
Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."
Adapting to a deadlier, hungrier, thirstier world
Governments need to increase efforts to adapt to worsening warming, which hits the poor hardest, "because some impacts simply cannot be avoided," Andersen said.
The report calls this phase "coping and containment."
During this overshoot period, more people will die or get sick because of the worsening climate change and its extreme weather, the report said. Food production will drop, people will go hungry, water shortages will worsen, economies will be hurt and species like coral will go extinct, the report said.
Although the triggers behind the recent deadly Nepal flooding that came as part of a Himalayan glacier dislodging are complex, Betts said "unfortunately we do expect to see more of such things and this is exactly why we need to limit peak warming."
The report warns of "tipping points" with irreversible and cascading effects, including the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the loss of the Amazon rain forest and the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that keeps much of Europe warm.
"Some locations might become more or less uninsurable or even uninhabitable," the report said.
The last phase in overshoot is cooling the planet by removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it somewhere. The report said the traditional approach of this is planting more trees, but it says planting trees could, at most, shave a tenth of a degree off global temperatures. So the authors said more novel carbon removal approaches will be needed.
Other scientists called that unreliable and expensive.
"We were unable to stop the runaway train of global emissions to avoid 1.5 C of warming," said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who wasn't part of the report. "Now overshoot scenarios require us to stop the train quickly and to back it up. Is it our best hope? Absolutely. Is it likely? Absolutely not."
Hope we've all enjoyed the sweetness of the 60-day stretch of 95º days this summer, cuz we could be looking back on it as the good old days pretty soon. And BTW, isn't over just yet. We're a week into September, and the highs are still expected to be in the upper 80s to mid-90s for another couple of weeks.
And this is Colorado, where traditionally, the first snow was likely to come this month - as early as Labor Day.
But not any more - at least, it's pretty doubtful.
Maybe Super El Niño will work more or less "in our favor" and dump lots of snow this winter, giving us a moment's reprieve, when, of course, the naysayers will celebrate because, "See? It's all back to normal - you stupid hippies are just fear-mongering".
But we're still in store for continued drought here, and there's absolutely no guarantee that the "benefit" won't come in the form of catastrophic winter storms, followed by a spring melt that floods the fuck out of everything.
We've been behaving stupidly.
In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. So now the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials say.
Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate accord because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a bleak first-of-its-kind report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme Wednesday.
Instead of giving up, scientists and U.N. officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it still will mean decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, extinctions and melting ice and glaciers.
"Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said.
After a period of over-the-limit warming, the new strategy envisions getting back below the limit by ending fossil fuel use and developing some kind of way to suck industries' carbon dioxide out of the air.
"It's a reality check. We have to live with this warmer world," said report co-author Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter. "But there's still a lot we can do to limit warming."
Passing the longtime warming threshold
After the Paris climate accord, the United Nations ordered its climate science arm to study different warming limits. A goal of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above mid-19th century temperatures became generally accepted after the scientists found dramatic impacts that affect people and the planet at 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) but not at 1.5 degrees.
The world is now at 1.4 C (2.5 F) above pre-industrial levels, some scientists have calculated. The measure is based on a 20-year average, rather than a single year's temperatures.
Despite experts saying there's no way to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, U.N. officials long maintained the 1.5 window was still open. Wednesday's report finally admitted that the world will cross the 1.5 threshold "in the next few years."
The report said the most optimistic scenario has warming peaking at 1.8 C (3.2 F) around mid-century if countries pursue ambitious climate goals, but that governments' current policies should push temperatures to 2.6 C (4.7 F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
So instead of preventing warming of 1.5 degrees, now the U.N. said it wants policymakers to "prepare for and navigate a future'' in which the globe crosses that limit and then corrects course and cools temperatures. The report envisions that global temperatures will pass 1.5 "within the next few years," follow a hump-shaped path of more warming, peak, then gradually cool to below the 1.5 mark, ideally by the end of the century. The report and experts call it "overshoot."
"Let's be very clear, 1.5 target is still the goal. But now we need to approach it differently from above," said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen.
The 1.5 limit is not "some magical climate cliff" where it's just game over, said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't part of the study. "Every tenth of a degree we avoid still means less damage."
Limiting how high temperatures go past threshold is key
It's most important to first limit the new peak temperature and then reduce the amount of time above 1.5 degrees, Andersen said.
But the world likely will be in that overshoot period for "many, many decades," Betts said.
Every five years of delay in reducing emissions adds at least a tenth of a degree to peak warming, said report co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
"If we act now we can limit overshoot," the report said. "Not a safe world, but safer than remaining above" 1.5 degrees for the long term.
"This is among the bleakest U.N. climate reports I have read. It carries the unmistakable tone of desperation, frustration and urgency — but not resignation," Weaver said.
Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."
Adapting to a deadlier, hungrier, thirstier world
Governments need to increase efforts to adapt to worsening warming, which hits the poor hardest, "because some impacts simply cannot be avoided," Andersen said.
The report calls this phase "coping and containment."
During this overshoot period, more people will die or get sick because of the worsening climate change and its extreme weather, the report said. Food production will drop, people will go hungry, water shortages will worsen, economies will be hurt and species like coral will go extinct, the report said.
Although the triggers behind the recent deadly Nepal flooding that came as part of a Himalayan glacier dislodging are complex, Betts said "unfortunately we do expect to see more of such things and this is exactly why we need to limit peak warming."
The report warns of "tipping points" with irreversible and cascading effects, including the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the loss of the Amazon rain forest and the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that keeps much of Europe warm.
"Some locations might become more or less uninsurable or even uninhabitable," the report said.
The last phase in overshoot is cooling the planet by removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it somewhere. The report said the traditional approach of this is planting more trees, but it says planting trees could, at most, shave a tenth of a degree off global temperatures. So the authors said more novel carbon removal approaches will be needed.
Other scientists called that unreliable and expensive.
"We were unable to stop the runaway train of global emissions to avoid 1.5 C of warming," said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who wasn't part of the report. "Now overshoot scenarios require us to stop the train quickly and to back it up. Is it our best hope? Absolutely. Is it likely? Absolutely not."
Belle
It would be good if the Press Poodles could stop using GOP framing when reporting on the shenanigans in Congress.
Sep 3, 2026
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