iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 01/09/2026

Wendell Berry was a poet who saw the world just a little more clearly and generously shared glimpses of it with the rest of us. May he rest in peace, enjoying good peaches forever. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/u...

A Meeting
By Wendell Berry

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: 'How you been?'
He grins and looks at me.
'I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.'

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 28/08/2025

We also spoke to a federal air marshal seconded from his usual job to work for ICE. He said staff often worked 24 to 30 hours on multi-stop flights, without much rest. He also raised concerns about evacuating chained detainees. “If we had a water landing, God forbid, they’re all going to drown.”

A graphic showing four examples of routes taken by long, multi-stop deportation flights. They range from 16 hours to 26 hours, not including the return journey, traveling to Nairobi, Kenya; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentine with 2-3 other stops between.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 28/08/2025

Avelo is the only passenger airline also operating for ICE, drawing significant public criticism and boycotts. We spoke to two former employees who raised concerns and say they were fired as a result. One flight attendant told us he feared for the safety of the chained detainees in an emergency.

A triptych with three images captured by an Avelo flight attendant on a 2022 deportation flight. The first shows a plane with purple "Avelo" text. The second shows two ICE staff counting sets of handcuffs and chains. The third shows two ICE staff escorting a chained detainee up the stairs into the plane.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 28/08/2025

CSI subcontracts flight operations to charter airlines like GlobalX. In it's most recent quarterly filing, GlobalX revealed that 58% of revenue comes from ICE flights, on 11 of its 19 planes. In an earnings call this month, its CFO said "We feel there’s demand for significantly more passengers.”

A chart titled "More than half of GlobalX's revenue now comes from ICE." It shows the company's global revenue by source, with the share of revenue from ICE gradually growing from 0% in Q1 2023 to 58% in Q2 2025, as total revenue grows from about $32mn to $61mn.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 28/08/2025

The founder and CEO of ICE's main contractor, CSI Aviation, spoke at a Trump rally in 2016 and hosted one at his hangar in 2024. CSI's president (& Weh's daughter), Deborah Maestas, signed docs as a "fake elector" in 2020. Both were appointed to Trump WH advisory committees last term.

Allen Weh frowns on stage as he concedes a race for New Mexico governor in 2010.

Deborah Weh Maestas poses for a selfie with Chris Christie at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 21/08/2025

Was about to post the same but you’ve beat me to it!

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 07/04/2025

Come hang out with our @journalismfestival.com panel on Saturday to chat about protests, eyewitness news, and shitposting on Bluesky!

Panel card for: “Breaking on Bluesky: live news in a post-Twitter era.” 15:00-15:50 on Saturday, 12/04/2025 at Sala dei Notari, Palazzo dei Priori. The three panelists are Peter Andringa, Fadah Jessem, Sarah Jeong, and Emily Liu.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 24/03/2025

Attorneys have just filed a declaration from a woman on one of the flights, who was sent to El Salvador and returned when its government only accepted the male deportees. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... She also says she was told they were headed to Venezuela: (highlights my own)

Screenshot of a court filing, which is linked in machine-readable form in the tweet. The following lines are highlighted in yellow:

"We were told we were being deported to Venezuela."
"I asked where we were going and we were told that we were going to Venezuela."
"We took off again and landed fairly quickly. I was then told we were in El Salvador."

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 24/03/2025

The US and Venezuela reached a deal to resume direct deportation flights yesterday, after the agreement broke down last weekend. Two planes met for a handover at Soto Cano air base in Honduras — the same place the three flights to El Salvador mysteriously stopped last week.

A screenshot from ADS-B Exchange, showing the flight path of a plane from El Paso to Honduras. The details pane on the left shows the it is a 1993 Boeing 767-300 with tail number N342AX, operated by a charter company called Omni Air International under the flight number OAE3154.

A screenshot from ADS-B Exchange, showing the flight path of a plane from Honduras to Venezuela. The details pane on the left shows the it is a Airbus A340 with tail number YV3554, operated by the Venezuelan flag carrier Conviasa under the flight number VCV9013.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 22/03/2025

For those following the court proceedings closely, we start to probe some of the details: When exactly did the flights leave? Why stop in Honduras? (And why would these details need to be a state secret?) @tomcartwright.bsky.social suggests some possibilities:

A screenshot of text from a Financial Times article. It reads:

Flight records show the three planes left Texas between 5.25pm and 7.36pm Eastern time for Soto Cano air base in Honduras, which is jointly operated by the US military. Cartwright said the stop raised questions.

“There’s really no reason for them to stop there, particularly for several hours,” he said. “These planes can easily fly directly to El Salvador, they don’t need to refuel.”

“One speculation is that there was to be a transfer to Venezuela . . . and for whatever reason, that fell apart, and the planes went on to El Salvador,” Cartwright said.

“Another explanation is that El Salvador needed more time: maybe the planes were rushed out of the US before the court hearing and they needed to be parked for a few hours while El Salvador readied their media and military apparatus.”

A Financial Times map showing three flight paths traveling from the United States to El Salvador. The annotations on the map read:

Harlingen, Texas
Flights depart 5.25pm, 5.44pm, 7.36pm

Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras
Flights arrive: 7.37pm, 8.10pm, 9.50pm
Flights depart: 11.39pm, 11.43pm, 12.39am

San Salvador, El Salvador
Flights arrive: 12.10am, 12.18am, 1.08am

Source: ADS-B exchange, Flightradar24 (All times Eastern)

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 18/11/2024

We built the greatest store of knowledge in human history, made all of it accessible in a few keystrokes… only to replace it with AI cartoons and summaries that read like 7th-grade book reports.

A Google search result for Gustav Holst, the English classical composer. The main image in the Google biography is an obviously AI-generated cartoon, which links to a blog that has summarized his Wikipedia page.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 15/08/2024

New: Kamala Harris has been on a digital spending (and fundraising) spree, doubling Trump’s YTD spend on FB + Google in just the last three weeks. (Trump’s campaign is also running far behind his 2020 spending pace.) www.ft.com/content/691e...

A line chart shows cumulative spending on Facebook and Google ads for the Trump, Biden, and Harris 2020 and 2024 campaigns. Two dotted lines (for the 2020 campaigns) arc up and to the right, while a red line (for Trump) is far below, nearly flat. The line for Biden and Harris is the highest, with a particularly pronounced jump in the last three weeks.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 09/06/2024

NEW: We found more evidence of just how unprepared Conservatives were for their own PM’s election announcement. Labour took advantage of a key spending loophole in the first week, while the Tories… did not. on.ft.com/45dxXU5

$Two side-by-side charts show daily ad spending on Meta platforms for Labour and the Conservatives. The Labour chart quickly ramps up to £250,000 per day in spending, before falling when the spending caps kick in on May 30. The Conservatives chart is much smaller by comparison, with only a fraction of Labour’s spending and much less spent on candidates.$

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 08/02/2024

NEW (yesterday): In our latest visual investigation, we dug into the Russian reconstruction of Mariupol, and discovered its latest Potemkin village: ➡️ ft.com/mariupol

Composite illustration of a tank in front of an image of a crumbling apartment block. In the background are faded maps and diagrams.

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Peter Andringa @peter.andringa.me · 19/08/2023

Today in accidental metaphors: the UK Supreme Court has stymied my research on technology law... because they forgot to renew their SSL certificate. (www.supremecourt.uk)

A pop-up from the Safari web browser which reads:

"This Connection Is Not Private: This website may be impersonating "www.supremecourt.uk" to steal your personal or financial information. You should go back to the previous page."

In a further detail section, it reads:

"Safari warns you when a website has an expired certificate. This may happen if the website is misconfigured, an attacker has compromised your connection, or your system clock is incorrect."

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