Peter Leavitt 🇨🇦

From FT comments

kind of crazy that if you have enough money and don't like what you see in the media, you can just buy up every film studio, news station, and social media app and change it

Jayapal to Noem: "I want to introduce you to just four of the US citizens unlawfully detained by ICE ... they're in this room with us."

What's the Point of Kindness in the Face of Cruelty? It might feel like the wrong response when we're confronted with injustice and cruelty, but there are compelling psychological reasons to find ways to be kind no matter what others do.

If I'm being honest, I've found it harder to be kind lately. I feel a lot of anger about a lot of what's going on in the world. But I know that it's not helpful to give in to anger and despair, so I wrote a little bit about some practical, psychological reasons to be kind.

A reminder: The Attorney General of the United States should be the people's lawyer, not the president's personal attorney. The Department of Justice should act to protect the public, not the occupant of the Oval Office and his political allies.

Screen shot of a youtube video titled "AI.FILL Function Explained: 10X Productivity in Excel with AI" with the caption "Let ChatGPT fill your missing data"

Don't you f**king dare.

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

“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.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh

www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

It's not quite the most pressing issue at the moment, but the American people absolutely have a right to know the names of the federal officials who shot and killed a man peacefully protesting, who was on his knees, prone in the street when they shot him in the back.

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

Do you honestly think people in the civil rights movement and other nonviolent movements faced no violence themselves? They practiced nonviolence because it works, because the oppressor wants a shooting war, which is the war it will win

The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal Attacking an ally would be a perversion of everything the armed forces have been trained to do.

It is not up to the armed forces to put a stop to Trump’s ghastly ideas of war against NATO. The United States is not run by the military, nor should it be. Americans, and their elected representatives, must take this burden away from the armed forces—now.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If calling a state secret police agent a murderer for committing murder will lead to more murder by the state secret police, it sure seems like the problem is with the secret police

The message from the White House this morning is that, once again, it falls on ordinary American citizens to remain calm and professional when dealing with the heavily armed agents of the government because they are very emotional and might fly off into a murderous rage at the slightest insult.

Homan: "We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It's just ridiculous. It's gonna infuriate people more which means there's gonna be more incidents like this."

Project Implicit is facing an existential threat. After almost 30 years, 60 million visitors, and hundreds of published papers, funding for our work has disappeared.

We’ve never held a fundraising drive before, but we need your support to keep our site running. Please consider donating! 🙏

Here are two key frames of the video. (Changed language on the first notation.)

Although Machado ultimately said she was dedicating the award to Trump, her acceptance of the prize was an “ultimate sin,” said one of the people. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” this person said.

WH sources say Venezuela's opposition leader committed the "ultimate sin": She accepted the Nobel Peace prize.

“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said.

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

The Epstein Files Transparency Act is a law, passed by Congress on November 19 with an overwhelming vote. Complying with it was not optional. The Department of Justice did not comply.

I want to make sure this is very clear.

I remember when they were saying they were powerless to return a man they illegally sent to an El Salvador gulag because it would violate that country's national sovereignty.

finally, we're living through precedented times

Twitter thread in Spanish by José Mario de la Garza, a human rights lawyer in Mexico, translated using Google Translate: 1. Overthrowing a dictator sounds morally right. No one mourns a tyrant. But international law wasn't built to protect the good, but to restrain the powerful. That's why it prohibits force almost without exception: not because it ignores injustice, but because it knows that if each country decides whom to "liberate" by force, the world reverts to the law of the strongest. 2. The problem is not Maduro. The problem is the precedent. When military force is used to change governments without clear rules, sovereignty ceases to be a limit and becomes an obstacle. Today it is “overthrowing a dictator”; tomorrow it will be “correcting an election,” “protecting interests,” “restoring order.” The law does not absolve dictatorships, but neither does it legitimize unilateral crusades.

Cont’d: 3. The uncomfortable question is not whether a tyrant deserves to fall, but who decides when and how. Because history teaches something brutal: removing a dictator is easy; building justice afterward is not. And when legality is broken in the name of good, what almost always follows is not freedom, but chaos, violence, and new victims. The law exists to remind us of this, even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Maduro isn't the problem: he's the face of the problem. Removing him from power would be merely opening the door. Behind him is the machine: Rodríguez, Cabello, the military command, the operators of repression and plunder. If you only change the person at the top and leave the system intact, what follows isn't democracy: it's a reshuffling. And there's something even more difficult: Chavismo didn't just capture institutions, it captured daily life. Economy, media, bureaucracy, employment, fear, favors, blackmail. A country can't be "de-Chavistaized" by decree or by an electoral miracle. The real transition begins when that network is broken without setting the country ablaze. The challenge is enormous, and it's also a moral one: to unite without vengeance, but without impunity. Targeted justice for those most responsible, truth for the victims, guarantees that the rest will dismantle the system, and a plan for people to live again—not just survive. Because freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat.

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts.

Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

Remember how appalled we all were in 2022 when Russia completely unprovoked attacked Ukraine? That is what we’re doing tonight with Venezuela. We are the bad guys here. Everyone who supports this is supporting unprovoked murder. Fuck every last one of them

Can someone please respond to Stephen Miller with this message from Frank Sinatra?

"I know they killed him"

Lucía Pedro Juan was detained with her husband, Francisco Gaspar Cristóbal Andrés, on Sept. 1. She was held for almost 3 months in Camp East Montana. She was deported to Guatemala. Her husband died on Dec. 3.

I traveled to speak with her for the El Paso Times.

immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes