The Weekly Sift

You know where a war begins, but you never know where it ends.

– Otto von Bismarck

This week’s featured posts are “The Court fails transgender youth” and “Questions to ask as a war begins“.

This week everybody was talking about war with Iran

That’s the subject of one featured post.

As an outside observer, it’s hard for me to assess how serious the division in MAGA-world is. Trump campaigned as an opponent of America’s recent wars, and painted Harris as the kind of hawk who might start another one. But then, Trump campaigned on a lot of things that are long forgotten now, like lowering the deficit and cutting prices. Tariffs were all going to be paid by foreigners and the millions of migrants he was going to deport were violent criminals. He wasn’t going to cut Medicaid.

All that is ancient history now, and the pattern has been that a few MAGAts say, “Wait, what?” for a day or two, but then they get back in line.

This flap seems a bit more serious, with folks like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking out against attacking Iran. There’s little love for Muslims in MAGA-world, so nobody is going to mourn dead Iranians any more than they mourn dead Gazans. But still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is Netanyahu’s war, and Trump has been manipulated into going along. If you’re already of the opinion that Jews secretly run the world — which is a more popular view in MAGA-world than anybody likes to admit — it all smells bad.

Will the exposure of Trump’s false promises make any difference this time? I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s worth watching.

and the Supreme Court

The other featured post examines one decision from this week: Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care can stand.

Another court, however, did something encouraging:

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from refusing to process and issue passport applications for transgender and nonbinary people in accordance with their gender identity.

And Mahmoud Khalil is free, after being detained for three months for supporting Palestine and criticizing Israel.

and you also might be interested in …

Jay Kuo describes what ICE might look like if the Big Beautiful Bill passes.

The regime is pushing three big initiatives designed to limit oversight, kneecap states that refuse to cooperate, and dramatically increase the number of ICE agents and detention facilities. … To understand this threat, we need to look carefully within the pages of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” budget. That bill contains a funding increase for ICE of $27 billion dollars, or 10,000 more ICE officers. Trump is planning to use these billions to recruit an army of masked, armed and largely unaccountable agents. This is a break-the-glass moment for our democracy, hiding within the line items of a single, massive bill.

But the bill doesn’t just add more agents. It also earmarks an eye-popping $45 billion for new ICE detention centers—enough to house 125,000 people.

It’s hard to look at that number and realize that it represents the same number of people of Japanese descent who were put inside of 10 internment camps during World War II.

Students of fascism also understand that, once such centers are built, they won’t just be used to house undocumented migrants subject to mass deportation. The regime, now caught in a horrific dance with private contractors like Erik Prince who will build and profit from these centers, will come to view them as convenient places to house and then disappear its political opponents, perhaps on their way to one of the many gulags it is now contracting with third countries to establish.

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Another provision of the Big Beautiful Bill forces the Post Office to sell off its electric vehicles and charging stations.

The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold.

The point seems to be to for Republicans in Congress to thumb their noses at people who care about climate change.

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Computer science was once the career of the future, but apparently no more.

But if the decline [in computer science majors] is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.

The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch comments:

Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life, economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming told me. “You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”

and let’s close with something nostalgic

Many fans of song parodies and humorous music in general no longer recognize the name of Dr. Demento, whose radio show popularized the genre. He’s shutting it down after 55 years. In the Doctor’s honor, here’s a song I wouldn’t know if not for him: The Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati.

If you are amused by that, YouTube has a Dr. Demento playlist.