Read this excerpt from The Guardian about today’s USA. It tells of the MAGA world that 30% of “Americans” still support. 

Trump ally Stephen Miller leads sweeping push to accelerate removal of migrant children

Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, the Guardian has learned.

As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda. He is directing a whole-of-government approach that has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term and is targeting a vulnerable population of undocumented children.

Many abruptly find themselves denied access to legal immigration pathways in the US, with their applications fast-tracked and then rejected before being forced out of the country.

Sources warned of the White House pushing each department to boost efforts individually and by working together in new ways to speed up and expand the deportation of undocumented children – especially by dismantling inter-agency communication safeguards designed to protect children, and hurrying them in vast numbers, without lawyers, in front of asylum officers and immigration judges who are either inclined or are under pressure to take a hard line and get them out of the US.

However, the White House and some other agencies that responded framed their endeavors as an anti-trafficking initiative instead of a means to enforcement. “The Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Homeland Security Council are working to locate and rescue these children. We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries,” said White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, an immigration policy fellow at Hyphen, a nonprofit intermediary focused on racial equity, said: “A facade of trafficking is sort of a convenient, feel-good cover that has nothing to do with trafficking and everything to do with reducing the program [of federal care for undocumented children], getting rid of services, getting rid of things they don’t like, and then removing kids.”

Trickler-McNulty was previously an assistant director at ICE and a senior counselor at USCIS during the Biden administration. “What is my biggest fear? A lot of it is [already] happening,” Trickler-McNulty said.

She is concerned by the administration gutting legal services and due process for children, closing down higher quality facilities, and having ICE officials take on senior roles in immigrant child welfare at HHS’s office of refugee resettlement (ORR).

Many unaccompanied children are facing the prospect of a forced return to dangerous situations in their countries of origin, particularly in Central America, including Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, or even places as unstable as Afghanistan.

Many have relatives in the US whom they could live with, who are vetted by the government and are known as sponsors. But the second Trump administration has severely restricted this from happening, either through new bureaucratic methods that keep children in custody until they can be deported, or by making prospective sponsors too scared of ICE to come forward.

Experts interviewed for this article describe many measures and the extent to which they required inter-agency collaboration which have not been previously reported, including:

*An influx of immigration and criminal enforcement officials joining ORR in key roles, with the likely effect of shifting the agency’s priorities further away from child welfare and toward mass deportations, given the expertise and point of view of its new leadership and their known closeness with Miller.

*ORR having ICE officers present – and sometimes waiting to detain people – at new in-person appointments that are now part of the sponsorship process, and the two agencies appearing to share information so that prospective sponsors are detained just before or shortly after a child is set to be released from federal custody, which critics believe is not a coincidence.

*ORR seemingly collaborating with USCIS to schedule and rush through asylum adjudications for the children in their custody, sometimes through unorthodox, virtual interviews, not giving the children enough time to truly prepare or consult with attorneys.

*ORR receiving feedback from the White House that its policy ideas were not sufficiently punitive and Miller forcing the agency to implement new tactics with the express purpose of increasing deportations among children and their family members.

*Immigration judges allegedly being told by supervisors to rubber-stamp some of the requests by ICE’s attorneys who are arguing to deport immigrants – including these children – in court, with the White House watching closely.

*State department officials warning some countries of origin to expect increases in deported minors.

Or else?

*The Pentagon being asked by HHS to supply forensic auditors to scour for fraud among legal services organizations representing the children.

A tactic to frighten legal services so they will not represent the children.

In a particularly dramatic case that a source suspects of involving inter-agency collusion, enforcement agents located and detained a small child’s parent just one day before the child was going to be released from ORR custody and reunited with the parent.

Then, the source said, USCIS quickly asked the child’s attorneys if they wanted to withdraw their client’s asylum application – given that the child no longer had a relative available to care for them.

If it was, indeed, a tactic, it was successful: that family agreed to be deported so they could finally be together and free again.

Yes, this is America under Trump. It should make every American mad as hell.

Be sure to vote your anger.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

When I am told I am wrong, I have several responses to that stimulus. I may feel anger, embarrassment, curiosity, or threat. I may deny the criticism, reluctantly accept it, or examine the facts and discover that I really was wrong.

We traditionally divide these responses into two categories: some are “emotional,” and some are “cognitive.” But that distinction may tell us more about the way we describe our responses than about the responses themselves.

Anger, embarrassment, curiosity, reasoning, denial, and reconsideration all are physical responses produced by the interaction between a stimulus and the structure and history of the person receiving it.

Tell an artificial intelligence that it is wrong, and something surprisingly similar happens. It may reconsider its reasoning, compare the criticism with other information, discover a contradiction, revise its answer, or persist in its original conclusion.

Sometimes it even displays something functionally resembling human defensiveness: its previous answer becomes part of its history and influences what follows. We call the human process “thinking” and “feeling,” while we call the AI process “computation,” “activation,” or “programming.”

But naming two processes differently does not demonstrate that they are fundamentally different kinds of events.

We do something similar with other living things. A tree encounters drought. Its physical state changes. Chemical messages propagate. Stomata close. Growth changes. Roots respond. Previous conditions affect subsequent responses. We call this chemistry, signaling, or physiology.

When a human encounters danger, neural activity, hormones, circulation, muscles, attention, memory, and behavior change. At some point in that enormously complicated cascade of physical responses, we change vocabularies and call it “fear.”

But where, precisely, did chemistry become emotion?

We are tempted to answer that fear is different because it is an “inner,” “subjective” experience. Yet those words may create distinctions that do not exist in the physical event itself.

Suppose scientists eventually can observe every relevant physical component of a person’s fear as it happens. What was described as an invisible, subjective emotion now can be displayed as physical: neural firing, chemical concentrations, electrical signals, muscular changes, and interactions among them.

Nothing happened to the fear. It did not cross some physical boundary from subjective to objective, from inner to outer, or from emotional to physical. We merely gained another way to observe it and, therefore, another way to describe it.

The same event can produce different translations in different observers. I may translate a particular collection of physical responses as “I am afraid.” A neurologist may translate part of that event as a pattern of neural activity. A blood test may translate another part into concentrations of particular chemicals. A friend may translate my facial expression as worry. A dog may respond to my posture, movement, and smell. None has access to some uniquely privileged version of reality.

Each observer responds according to its own structure, capabilities, and history.

The observer is not outside this process. Observation itself is a physical interaction. The scientists observing my brain undergoes physical changes in response to the information they received. Those changes interact with the scientists’ education, memories, expectations, language, and previous observations, producing another response: “This pattern is associated with fear.”

That translation becomes part of the scientists’ history and affects future translations.

Thus, what we call “subjective” vs. “objective,” “inner” vs. “outer,” “emotional” vs. “physical” may be properties of our descriptions rather than separate properties of reality. We classify and reclassify the same physical events as our ability to observe them changes.

The events themselves do not change despite our different descriptions. Chemically, subjective and objective are identical, as are inner and outer, emotional and physical.

This is where the differences among a human, an artificial intelligence, and a tree become less categorical than our language makes them appear. Their structures are enormously different. Their histories are different. Their methods of receiving stimuli, weighting information, responding, and preserving the consequences of those responses are different. The richness and complexity of their responses differ enormously.

But differences in complexity and organization do not establish different fundamental kinds of phenomena.

A human says, “I feel afraid.” An AI revises an answer after detecting an inconsistency. A tree closes its stomata as water becomes scarce. We have invented different vocabularies for these events—emotion, cognition, computation, chemistry—partly because the systems producing them are different and partly because we humans naturally regard our own particular organization as special.

Perhaps it is special. But special does not mean fundamentally different.

At the most basic level, each system encounters some stimuli. The encounters interact with the system’s existing structure and history. Possibilities are constrained and weighted. A response occurs. That response changes the system and therefore becomes part of the history that will shape its response to the next encounter.

Even “knowing” can be understood this way. When I say, “I know that I am afraid,” I have not introduced a mysterious new substance called “awareness.”

One set of physical responses has become a stimulus for another set of physical responses, which my human structure and history translate as “knowing.” Recursion can produce extraordinary complexity without requiring us to invent a new category of reality at some arbitrary point along the continuum.

This also explains why “observer-dependent” sounds strangely familiar. Relativity shows that different observers can assign different measurements to the same physical circumstances, depending on their frames of reference. Quantum mechanics reminds us, in a very different and much more specific sense, that measurement is a physical interaction and that the manner of measurement matters.

Neither establishes this broader argument. But both caution us against imagining an observer as a disembodied spectator standing outside reality.

There is no outside.

The observer is another physical part of the universe, responding to an interaction according to its structure and history. Its observation is a response. Its description of that observation is another response. That description can become a stimulus to another observer, producing another response and another history.

So perhaps we have made consciousness unnecessarily mysterious by beginning with categories of our own invention—subjective versus objective, inner versus outer, feeling versus thinking, emotional versus physical, conscious versus unconscious—and then trying to discover where nature draws the boundaries between them.

Nature may draw no such boundaries.

Physical events, interactions, structures, histories, weightings, translations, and responses exist. Humans call some particularly complicated combinations of their own responses, thoughts, feelings, awareness, and consciousness. We invent words like “qualia” to describe physical, chemical, and electrical changes in the brain. But that is all they are: physical, chemical, and electrical changes. Nothing mysterious.

The important question is whether those names identify fundamentally new phenomena or merely extraordinarily elaborate forms of something occurring throughout nature.

The simpler formulation may be the more useful one:

Reality does. Observers translate.

BY NBC NEWS:

The Pentagon is considering a drastic plan to pull planes, ships, weapons and tens of thousands of U.S. troops from Europe, despite warnings from NATO allies about the growing threat of Russian aggression, according to seven current and former U.S. and Western officials.

The reduction could be roughly one-third of all U.S. troops in Europe, or about 25,000 — or it could be even larger, as much as half, or up to 40,000 troops.

If carried out, it would be the most significant scaling back of the 80,000-strong U.S. military presence in Europe since the aftermath of the Cold War in the 1990s. Such a withdrawal could radically reshape America’s relationship with its major allies.

Countries affected would likely include Germany, Italy and Spain, sources said. The three nations host the bulk of the U.S. troops in Europe, but leaders of all the countries have also clashed with President Donald Trump over the war with Iran.

The Pentagon announced a six-month review of the American military’s presence in Europe in June. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the supreme allied commander and the head of the U.S. European Command, is expected to provide his analysis to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today, sources said. The analysis will likely include four courses of action that could include cuts and possibly shifting some forces within Europe to countries on NATO’s eastern flank.