iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

This is really good. Felt it in my bones.

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Not true. I see you're a luxury watch dealer. I'm also interested in watches. Let me show you how free and easy migration has allowed you to earn a living. 🧵

Corey Wiley on Twitter writes: "You don’t get it.
Foundational immigration law is morally just and has been established over millennia. Disrespecting these rules and ideals is very offensive to folks who highly value civilized society"

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 09/06/2025

see, the thing *i’m* genuinely worried about is that RFK will effectively ban vaccines

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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 09/06/2025

Hell is empty, And all the devils are here.

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Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

We don’t need to back off the American Gestapo and we don’t need to respect its agents. People exercising state violence are not entitled to anonymity. Nor are the people directing the state violence.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Adults on Hulu is fun. Fun shows are nice. Like a Gen Z Seinfeld.

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Soren Spicknall @sorenspicknall.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

I need you all to see the hype video that this person made to sell their 1994 Geo Metro

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

I mean all of that is true. It’s just not an answer to your comment in any way.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 03/06/2025

Everything suffers and everyone dies, so why not strive to make our time here, together, as warm, as compassionate, as caring, as kind, as good as it possibly can be?

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

One of the problems we face is that there is a subset of Americans who already choose to believe their life is threatened in every interaction. It’s a delusion, but one they’ve made the core of their personality and worldview. They need it to be real and will work to make it real for all of us.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

They work pretty well in Phoenix, but: there is low pedestrian traffic in their operational area, and our roads are laid put in a nearly perfect, straight line grid. So 🤷‍♀️

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 31/05/2025

Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...

neal.fun

Internet Roadtrip

Let's take a streetview roadtrip

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

What do the other two look like?

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I have family who will swear on a bible that in 2020 Joe Biden locked every American in their homes and posted federal agents on every street to arrest people not wearing masks. With enough cajoling, they’ll admit this isn’t true, but it doesn’t last. It’s an article of faith. It’s flat earth.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Also struggled with usps on this recently. Ended up going to my local court’s clerks office. They had a separate online scheduling thing that was much better. Might be worth checking out in your area.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

I just can’t get past the extremely obvious con aspect. Like the literal pitch is to cocoon yourself in bullshit and give the worst people unlimited money and power. Why is this attractive to anyone?

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

That’s great! Lol. Rant worthy for sure. My wife bailed on Black Mirror seasons ago and that episode’s too-bleak schtick is basically why.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

That first episode was rough. Like everyone in it, but not what I was looking for. The rest of season is less THAT, thankfully.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Great 🧵. I’ve rushed my son to the ER for this exact treatment several times. It’s a simple, effective tool that’s a literal miracle for a panicked parent. It was built on generations of science funded by a caring public. To think we are losing that caring public is an unimaginable tragedy.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

This is wild. I read to my kids all the time. I read around them. I read in front of them, behind them. There are books in every corner of our home. I take books everywhere we go. Reading is one of the great joys of life. Raft a river, skydive out of a plane, read a book to your kids! Do it!

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Sinners is good good. Fun as hell. Worth seeing in the theaters.

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 25/04/2025

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

All of this is just so goddamn shameful

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Robert Maguire @robertmaguire.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

It's a high bar, but this from @radleybalko.bsky.social might be one of the most fucked up things I've read in the new Trump era. For context, this TX lawyer had just had an informal conversation with a family caught up in ICE raids. Seriously. Read this. radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-courag...

“A couple days later, on March 6, I was working from home at around 11:30 when I got a notice that my VPN had gone down,” he says. “I didn’t think much about it. It can cut out from time to time. About 10 minutes later, I got a knock at the door.”

Two men were outside Jackson’s door, dressed in slacks and polos. They were not wearing badges.

“I first thought they were going to try to sell me something. But as soon as I opened the door they said, ‘Are you Clayton Jackson?’ I think I shook my head or said ‘yeah,’ and then I heard, ‘We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.’”

Jackson says alarms went off in his head. “My first instinct was to want to know what this was about. That it must be a misunderstanding. So I started to tell them about how I’ve been involved in some pro bono work. Then this voice in my head kicked in and just said, you need to shut the fuck up — don’t say anything.”

The officers never identified themselves. They did ask if they could come inside.

“I said absolutely not,” Jackson says. “I asked for their names and badge numbers. They said they didn’t have to provide that information at this time. So I told them I’d be calling my lawyer and I shut the door behind me.”

Jackson says his mind started racing. “I needed to know who they were, what agency they were with. Then I remembered that I have the Ring camera. Maybe I could watch the video of the incident and figure out who they were from that.”

There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN had gone down. It wasn’t the VPN. Someone had shut off my Wifi.”

About 15 minutes after the interaction at his front door, Jackson’s Wifi was up and running again.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Our snowbird neighbors are selling the home they bought just last year. They’re packing it in for good.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

This whole order is important. Potentially historic. Read it.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Found a bit. Watched kids play baseball. Son had so much fun he doesn’t want to take his uniform off.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

*digging through detritus on the passenger seat floorboards* There’s hope around here somewhere.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I recently updated my drivers license and passport. Fees vary in the US, my license was around $30. Had to get a reissue of my birth certificate and other documentation to update the passport. All in around $300 in fees and about a month of travel and appointments at gov offices across my city.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Honest question. How much do you have to pay out of pocket for those documents?

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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 09/04/2025

Vast sin-concealing chaos

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emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Lots of people demanded shadow hearings from Dems. There's one ongoing on DOJ's attempt to undermine rule of law. www.youtube.com/live/CZ042e1...

youtube.com

Bicameral Spotlight Hearing on Trump’s Pro-Crime, Pro-Corruption Agenda

YouTube video by House Committee on the Judiciary

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

It’s very good. I’m halfway through. Savoring it over evening tea on my front porch.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

I feel these feelings. You probably do too. Worth a read.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

This is good. And right. And hopeful? In a way that I feel hope now. Grounded, yet fleeting. Thanks for this.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Jesus. I’m sorry. These people are a nightmare.

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

I'll be testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning at 10:15 ET on the "bipartisan problem of nationwide injunctions." (The other witnesses are Sam Bray and Jesse Panuccio.) Livestream link: www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-ac... My written testimony is in the attached images:

Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Durbin, and distinguished members of the Committee:

Thank you for the invitation to testify before the Committee once again. In my testimony, I’d like to make three points about how we got here, and offer four thoughts on the way forward.

First, any discussion about nationwide injunctions has to be put into the broader context of the unprecedented moment in which we find ourselves. Substantively, we have a President running roughshod over existing legal constraints to a degree we’ve simply never seen before. And procedurally, we have a Justice Department engaged in highly partisan and ethically dubious behavior in lower courts that we’ve never seen from lawyers working for the federal government.

Rather than respond to that behavior, we’ve seen unprecedented calls from Congress to impeach federal judges for nothing other than the substance of their rulings, and for the elimination of entire district courts. And even this Committee seems to be of the view that the central problem is the relief federal judges are imposing, not the lawlessness they’re imposing it against.

At the risk of bringing data to a mud-fight, the reality is not that a small handful of hand-picked judges appointed by Democratic presidents are using nationwide injunctions to thwart the executive branch. As of last Friday, the 46 cases in which district judges have blocked Trump policies have involved rulings by 39 different judges appointed by five different presidents and sitting in 11 different district courts across seven circuits. That includes nine cases before district judges appointed by Republican presidents, too. Many of those rulings have included nationwide relief. But not all of them.

Against that backdrop, it seems to me that this Committee should be especially careful to not have a knee-jerk reaction to underinformed calls from the President and his supporters—and to preserve the relationship between judicial independence and judicial accountability, rather than taking any rash steps that might undermine it.

Second, it’s worth underscoring that federal courts have long and routinely issued relief that benefits non-parties and/or has nationwide effect. As Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett pointed out last year, this is the inevitable effect of vertical stare decisis—where lower courts in other cases are bound to follow appellate rulings in the first case. Even Justice Gorsuch, the most visible critic of nationwide injunctions on the Supreme Court, has voted in favor of them at least 11 times since 2020.

More than that, any time that a court invalidates a law on its face (rather than as applied to the plaintiffs), it is necessarily providing relief to non-parties—since the law can no longer be enforced against anyone. That’s not only well settled; there’s no serious argument that it’s beyond the federal courts’ powers.

And even nationwide injunctions themselves have virtues that other forms of relief do not. Consider the pending cases challenging President Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship: Do we really think that parents should have to challenge that policy one child at a time? Would it make any sense at all for the scope of birthright citizenship to differ in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas simply because those three states fall into three different federal circuits? Of course, a nationwide class action could solve that problem, but it does not strike me as a coincidence that the rise in universal injunctions came shortly on the heels of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of nationwide class certification. Chairman Grassley’s bill alludes to class actions as a preferable vehicle, but, tellingly, does nothing to make them more broad…

Third, it is deeply myopic to talk about the rise of nationwide injunctions without talking about the other shifts in litigation behavior that have dramatically increased the impact of such rulings—including the ability of litigants, especially in some states, to file in a single-judge division in which they can literally hand-pick the specific federal judge to hear their case; the selective dilution, in the Fifth Circuit especially, of the standards for Article III standing (which have made it easier for more litigants to challenge more government policies); the increasing conflation by lower courts of the appropriate standards for preliminary and emergency relief; and so on.

Don’t take my word for it, though; in the last three Supreme Court terms, we’ve seen five rulings from the Supreme Court reversing nationwide injunctions issued by hand-picked judges in Texas and Louisiana and affirmed by the Fifth Circuit—because the plaintiffs in all five cases lacked Article III standing. There is no question that nationwide injunctions have been abused. But the abuses are not about the scope of the relief courts are issuing; they’re only exacerbated by it. And, critically, they would not go away even if nationwide injunctions were narrowed or eliminated. Meanwhile, the cost of eliminating nationwide injunctions would be less of an ability to restrain executive branch lawlessness—at a moment in American history in which that power has proven singularly vital.

What, then, is to be done?

First, if the Members’ real concern is that the President should have the authorities that courts are denying to him, it seems like they should consider legislation to provide those authorities, rather than legislation that would prevent courts from fully and effectively enforcing existing legal constraints.

Second, insofar as this Committee wants to focus on procedural reforms, it should focus on reducing the ability of individual parties to manipulate the judicial system (by limiting judge-shopping; requiring random assignments; tightening the standards for relief; etc.), not on limiting the ability of courts to hold the executive branch accountable—especially in an age in which Congress seems less willing and/or able to hold the executive branch accountable itself. In that respect, as I’ve suggested, prioritizing constraints on nationwide relief would be the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Third, even if this Committee is nevertheless intent on providing reforms for nationwide relief, specifically, it should focus on the standard of review in such cases—not on categorically eliminating its availability in all cases. If, like me, you believe federal courts do have the power to issue relief benefitting non-parties in at least some cases, the question should be why such relief is appropriate in particular cases—and not others. Again, the contrast between the birthright citizenship cases and the cases in which universal relief was predicated on overbroad (and subsequently rejected) interpretations of Article III standing is a useful starting point.

Finally, if the Committee’s true goal is to improve the functioning of the judicial system writ large, and not just to maximize short-term partisan political advantage now that a Republican is in the White House, the Committee could follow the model of other recent court-reform legislation—and have any reforms go into effect on or after January 20, 2029.

Otherwise, the message this Committee would be sending is that its goal is to insulate an unprecedented degree of lawless behavior by the executive branch from meaningful judicial review—a message I can’t imagine this Committee wants to send, and one that the separation of powers, to say nothing of the rule of law itself, simply can’t afford.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

I love that album. Discovered The Streets on MTVU in my college dorm. Listened to Original Pirate Material until I wore out the CD.

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Christopher Bird @mightygodking.com · 01/04/2025

Just so everybody understands, Booker has been speaking cogently about the issues the entire time and Strom Thurmond famously spent hours reading from the encyclopedia, because segregationists were and are dumbshits

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Corey Booker is reading Learned Hand on liberty. But what he is really doing is preaching. Preaching our American civic faith. Hell yeah. The characters that loom large in American history lived our civic faith. Fascist detest that faith. Preach!

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Ugh. The fucking sagebrush rebellion crap just will not die.

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Cactus Kewler @brawndo.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Americans regularly make up their own definitions of “legal” and “illegal” to fit whatever they want to be reality. I can’t count how often I’ve talked to someone about banning abortions when women are bleeding to death and heard “well THAT wouldn’t be illegal.” Cool. Tell the govt you support.

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Defector @defector.com · 28/03/2025

"If this country is to go on breaking, to go on becoming a darker, more repressive place than it was the day before, it will be shepherded in that direction by everyone who insists on equivocating."

defector.com

It Is What It Looks Like | Defector

On Tuesday night, a Tufts University graduate student named Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by agents from the Department Of Homeland Security while walking down the sidewalk outside an off-campus…

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