woop woop

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42997527

In the NJ Primary, 'Abolish ICE' Looks Like A Winning Message

Opinion - Michelle Goldberg Feb. 9, 2026

https://archive.ph/2tFLT

When Analilia Mejia, the former political director of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, held town halls during her recent congressional primary race in New Jersey, she’d invite people to stay afterward for a training on nonviolent resistance to ICE. Voters, she told me, are desperate “to understand how rising authoritarianism functions, how it’s moved in other countries, how we can best resist it through nonviolence, noncompliance and education.” Running in a special election to fill the seat formerly held by New Jersey’s new governor, Mikie Sherrill, Mejia was determined to do “more than just traditional politics,” she said.

Her rivals in last week’s crowded contest also criticized ICE. But Mejia, the daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants and a veteran of the progressive Working Families Party, was unique in the clarity of her opposition. She called for ICE to be abolished, not just reformed. And she tied the agency’s violent rampages — seen most starkly in Minnesota — to President Trump’s broader assault on American democracy, while seeking to imbue people with a sense that they could fight back.

Sims 3 got me interested

Four

Three

Two

One

Hey. I was wondering if anyone had a list of switch games that use the touch screen. I want to game more at night when the wife is asleep and the buttons tend to wake her up.

I really enjoyed playing Banner Saga on the switch for this reason. There’s a few that I had in mind, but most seem be cheaper to buy and play on the phone.

Currently playing Dungeons of Dreadrock which can be played with the touch screen.

“With the death toll from President Donald Trump’s boat bombings of alleged drug traffickers now at 130 after a Monday strike, a pair of progressive congresswomen on Tuesday called for ending the Monroe Doctrine and establishing a “New Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean.

“In 1823, then-President James Monroe “declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to powerful countries in Europe””

DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder's identity in 2023. [...] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:

By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger's URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.

Source

In a recent Guardian article about the Guthrie kidnapping (and probable murder) they indicated at the end of the article that efforts to identify the kidnappers had been stymied because her Ring camera subscription wasn't active:

They had said that one roadblock in the ensuing search for Guthrie was the fact that somebody had disconnected her doorbell camera when she disappeared. And because she was not actively subscribed to the doorbell camera service provider, they could not immediately get images, they said.

Only for Patal (as of course he would seeing he has no comprehension of opsec) to expose the fact that the FBI able to obtain recordings from Ring cameras, even when the owner is unsubscribed to the cloud storage service they provide:

The FBI director, Kash Patel, published the images as the search for Nancy Guthrie, 84, stretched into its second week, saying the images had been “previously inaccessible” but were subsequently obtained from “residual data located in back-end systems”.

Pretty horrifying for those who don't want their cameras reporting back. And yes yes i get that Ring has some pretty severe security breaches and problems and you shouldn't be using them but the idea that video is being stored for over a week in Ring's non-volatile storage systems, even when you're not paying for it, is pretty damn bad,

Apologies if this fact, breach of privacy, was already known and in the public domain. This is something i've just learnt about.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26671

The Pentagon is sending 200 troops to Nigeria in the coming weeks to train the country’s military to fight Islamist militants, US officials told media outlets on Tuesday, as President Trump continues to deepen US involvement in the country. A US official told The New York Times that the 200 troops will augment a small […]

From News From Antiwar.com via This RSS Feed.

A good continuation to my last post, specially the discussion with the panel and the questions part. There's a lot of academic self-crit, observations, and good debate.

Cool video. Her channel is rather small, so I thought it'd be nice to share it.

On January 14, 2026, global telnet traffic observed by GreyNoise sensors fell off a cliff. A 59% sustained reduction, eighteen ASNs going completely silent, five countries vanishing from our data entirely. Six days later, CVE-2026-24061 dropped. Coincidence is one explanation.

The pattern points toward one or more North American Tier 1 transit providers implementing port 23 filtering

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7595908

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25955

Earlier this week, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed Governor Kathy Hochul in her primary bid against Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who was running decidedly to her left and whose running mate, India Walton, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Mamdani justified the endorsement through an appeal to party unity, effective governance, and the need to maintain a cooperative relationship with Albany to deliver reforms.

In Mamdani’s framing, avoiding open confrontation with the governor is the price of “getting things done.” But that logic has consequences. It commits his administration to backing a governor who is currently using emergency executive powers to help hospitals staff around the nurses who are on strike in New York City with scab labor — subordinating a real working-class struggle to the demands of bosses who pay for the Democratic Party.

Mamdani is not alone in his endorsement and has been joined by the entire Democratic congressional delegation from New York. The bloc stretches from centrist Democrat Tom Suozzi — who has defended capitalism and has openly demanded Mamdani and other “socialists” leave the party — to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the city’s most prominent progressive figure, who declined to endorse Hochul in the 2022 primary.

These politicians are often described as representing different wings of the Democrats, but when it comes to maintaining the “unity” of the Party and its electoral viability, they are all united, even if it means betraying the workers’ struggle. What unity are we seeking with Democrats who repress our movements?

Mayor Mamdani has been openly supportive of the nurses’ strike and was greeted with cheers at the picket lines. While such gestures of solidarity may help consolidate an electoral base, they do nothing to shift the balance of forces in negotiations with Albany, which responds to material pressure from below — not simple symbolic alignment with workers. In a moment of open class struggle, the Democratic Party, directly or indirectly, is doing what it always does: closing ranks across its internal factions to, directly or indirectly, defend the authority of the capitalist state against workers who disrupt the interests of their donors.

In many ways, this situation mirrors the Democratic Party’s move to neutralize class struggle by crushing the rail strike in 2022. During that conflict, rail workers voted down a contract and prepared to strike. The Biden administration intervened at the direct request of the rail bosses, first delaying the strike through a Presidential Emergency Board and then pushing Congress to impose a contract workers had already rejected. Progressive Democrats did not break ranks. Figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman voted for legislation that stripped workers of their right to strike, urged rail workers to accept the outcome, and funneled anger toward a symbolic sick-days vote that leadership ensured would fail. The strike was stopped, the bosses got their contract, and workers were told there was no alternative.

The same logic is now at work in New York. Mamdani has gone to the nurses’ picket lines, shaken hands with dozens of striking nurses that consider his administration a friend, and spoken words of solidarity. At the same time, he has endorsed Hochul, who is actively intervening to break the strike.

This is not a contradiction in tone. Rather, it’s a political choice that has material consequences for the strike. In moments like a strike, when class lines are openly drawn, that choice matters. One action signals support for workers; the other strengthens the state and the bosses. And it is the second that carries real weight: hospitals can wait out the strike, nurses’ leverage is drained, and the balance of forces shifts back toward management.

This contradiction is sharper because Mamdani presents himself as a socialist and rose to office on the strength of a campaign that spoke that language. Socialism, at its core, means siding with workers when they confront capital and the state — especially in moments like a strike, when class lines are openly drawn. What’s being revealed here is not a personal inconsistency, but how quickly socialist language loses its meaning when it is tied to a strategy of working within a party that exists to maintain capitalism and step in against workers when their struggles threaten the status quo.

The Backlash Sharpens the Debate over Working Inside the Democratic Party

Much of the backlash to Mamdani’s endorsement has been pushed into informal channels like social media, group chats, and private conversations, precisely because no official space exists to debate it. Rank-and-file members have been writing openly online, trying to make sense of a decision that cut across ongoing strike support and organizing efforts. At the same time, there has been no clear space inside NYC-DSA to collectively process or debate the endorsement. At the organization’s October general body meeting,leadership made clear that criticism of Mamdani was out of bounds— reinforcing a pattern in which strategic disagreements involving elected officials are quietly foreclosed rather than confronted.

The controversy over the Chi Ossé endorsement vote also helps to explain why the current backlash feels familiar to many organizers. Ossé was not proposing an independent break from the Democratic Party — he was exploring a Democratic primary challenge to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and sought the backing of NYC-DSA**.** At that point, Zohran Mamdani stepped inpublicly to oppose the run. He argued at a DSA forum and in media interviews that such a challenge would be “divisive” and would make it harder for his administration to deliver policy wins — effectively urging the organization not to endorse Ossé. Shortly after NYC-DSA voted against endorsement, Ossé withdrew, under pressure from Mamdani to bow down to the Democrats.

What that episode revealed was not a disagreement over electoral tactics, but a pattern that is consistent with the strategy of the right wing of DSA: Mamdani intervening to shut down debate and independent challenges in order to protect Democratic Party leadership and unity. That memory is resurfacing now because the same dynamic is playing out at a larger scale. Tens of thousands of people joined DSA over the past few years — many radicalized through Palestine solidarity and opposition to Democratic governors and mayors, including Hochul, who presided over repression and criminalization of the movement. For those members, Mamdani’s role was understood as an expression of that rupture with the party of war, imperialism, policing, and strikebreaking. His endorsement of Hochul, like his intervention against Ossé, signals something else: that when pressure mounts, he is more willing to discipline the movement on behalf of Democratic Party stability than to break with it on behalf of the people who organized to elect him

Recent events have only intensified this tension. After the NYPD shooting of Jabez Chakraborty during a mental health crisis, Mamdani was criticized for avoiding to name police responsibility. On Mamdani’s watch, NYPD carried out arrests of anti-ICE protesters, like the repression during recent demonstrations at Columbia University and the protest at the Hilton Garden Inn. He also stood by as his NYPD arrested 13 striking nurses outside the headquarters of the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) on Thursday. All of this reveals well whose interests Mamdani’s administration really ends up protecting.

For many organizers, his decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner — a move that raised alarms before Mamdani took office and sparked debate within the DSA — makes the Hochul endorsement feel less like an isolated misstep and more like a pattern impossible to ignore.

Within this context, NYC-DSA leadership released a statement responding to Mamdani’s endorsement that avoided naming the endorsement itself or confronting its implications for the strike. The statement functioned less as a political reckoning than as damage control. It offered criticism without drawing lines and thus avoided intervening on a key debate involving working class and socialist politics at a moment when clarity was urgently needed.

Other responses on the Left have tried to smooth over the contradiction instead of confronting it. Figures like Eric Blanc have framed Mamdani’s endorsement mostly as a question of timing or leverage — that he should have waited, pushed harder for concessions, or played the endorsement more strategically. Writers associated with the Bread & Roses caucus go further, arguing that the endorsement itself was a mistake in the middle of an active class fight: backing a governor who is intervening to weaken an ongoing nurses’ strike doesn’t just send a bad message, it materially undercuts the pressure needed to win.

But for a lot of activists, even this framing stops one step short. The problem isn’t only that the endorsement came at the wrong moment, or even that it weakened a specific struggle. It’s that the same pattern keeps repeating whenever left figures try to govern inside the Democratic Party. Each time, the logic of governing pulls them away from confrontation and toward managing conflict, calming things down, and keeping institutions running — even when those institutions are being used against workers, migrants, and protesters. That’s why this contradiction no longer feels theoretical. People are living it, learning from it, and finding it harder and harder to ignore.

The Lesson Clear Is Clear: We Need a Party of Our Own

Again and again, movements are told that proximity to capitalist power can be turned into leverage — that staying inside the Democratic Party, avoiding open rupture, and maintaining relationships with party leadership will ultimately strengthen struggles from below. Yet each time class struggle sharpens, the opposite occurs. The party closes ranks. State power is deployed to contain disruption. And left-identified figures are pulled into legitimizing that process, whether through votes, endorsements, silence, or appeals for patience.

This is not a failure of individual judgment; it is the normal operation of a party that exists to govern capitalism. The nurses’ strike makes this impossible to ignore. Nurses aren’t debating strategy in the abstract. They’re standing in the cold, on an open-ended strike, trying to stop hospitals from grinding them down and replacing them. From that vantage point, an endorsement isn’t neutral. It doesn’t land as “we’ll work this out later.” It lands as a signal about whose side the state is on — and who is expected to absorb the cost. Whatever the intention, it weakens the fight that’s actually happening.

When people say “this is just how politics works,” they mean that this is where working-class power is supposed to stop. That strikes can pressure, but not disrupt too much. That movements can push, but not force a break. Anyone who’s actually been in these fights knows that’s false. We’ve seen what happens when workers self-organize, escalate together, and stop waiting for permission.

Minneapolis showed that. Not because it was clean or complete, but because it stripped things down. When people acted on their own terms — in workplaces, neighborhoods, and the streets — power became visible fast. Not institutional power. Collective power. The kind that doesn’t ask first.

Now, more militants are recognizing a pattern they’ve lived through repeatedly: you can’t build independent working-class power while remaining politically tied to a party whose job is to contain that power once it becomes disruptive.

The answer isn’t abstention or retreat from politics. It’s not “giving up on elections.” It’s the opposite: We need a political organization that answers to people in struggle — not to party leadership, donors, or the need to keep the system stable. A party that does not mediate class conflict, but takes sides in it. A party that uses elections not to contain movements, but to strengthen strikes, organize mass resistance, and prepare for confrontation with capital.

A party worthy of nurses on strike. Worthy of the tens of thousands of DSA members who keep organizing anyway. Worthy of the Zohran canvassers who knocked doors because they believed they were building something real and for the rank and file of DSA that is organic part of the struggles, from Minneapolis to California.

It’s a conclusion people are reaching by living through this again and again — watching how the Democratic Party pulls left figures into line as soon as struggle sharpens. The task now is to break the cycle by organizing toward a socialist, working-class party — independent of the Democrats and rooted in real struggles.

The post Why Is Zohran Mamdani Endorsing Strikebreaker Kathy Hochul? appeared first on Left Voice.

From Left Voice via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7608507

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26180

A Democrat running to pick up one of the party’s top target House seats recently worked for two defense contractors looking to help the federal government use artificial intelligence for border surveillance and military projects.

Cait Conley, a Special Operations combat veteran and former national security adviser under former President Joe Biden, is running in the crowded Democratic primary to challenge incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in New York’s 17th Congressional District. Her candidate financial disclosures show that she earned more than $80,000 between January 2024 and July 2025 from two companies, Primer AI and Hidden Level.

Both companies partner with far-right billionaire Peter Thiel’s surveillance tech firm Palantir to help government agencies use AI. Both are military contractors; Hidden Level holds an active contract with the Department of War, and Primer’s most recent one was paid out last year. Primer has also praised President Donald Trump’s AI policy and advertises on its website that it “helps” the Department of Homeland security with data and intelligence work and that “Primer AI platforms support DHS missions,” but it does not appear to have an active deal with the department in a federal contracting database.

“Cait believes AI can be both an opportunity and a risk to the middle class and is determined to shape AI policy so that it grows and strengthens middle-class New Yorkers, rather than being used to further enrich billionaires,” said Conley campaign manager Emily Goldson in a statement to The Intercept. “She’ll be a leader in Congress, ensuring working Americans are included in the growth created and aren’t left behind.”

Running in a swing district north of New York City, Conley has walked a fine line on matters of immigration and the national security apparatus, blasting Trump for deploying the military to U.S. cities and criticizing immigration agents for killing protesters. On her campaign website, she pledges to “stand strong on our national security priorities,” including “defending the homeland, fighting crime, and fixing our broken immigration system.”

Conley’s close ties to companies at the intersection of AI and national security policy aren’t a surprise given her military background. But her connections to the firms raise questions about how she might approach those policy sectors in Congress, said Albert Fox Cahn, a civil rights attorney who previously led the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and is a lifelong resident of New York’s 17th District.

“At a time when we see so many Silicon Valley companies having their technology weaponized against immigrant communities, these sorts of consulting roles raise questions about what exactly she did and what lines were drawn,” Cahn told The Intercept.

It’s unclear what exactly Conley did at the companies, according to her candidate disclosure filed with the House Clerk.She started consulting for Primer at some point after January 2024, when she left her previous job as an adviser for the Department of Homeland Security under Biden. In the period ending in July 2025, she earned $12,500 for her consulting work.

[

Related

Lawmakers Pave the Way to Billions in Handouts for Weapons Makers That the Pentagon Itself Opposed](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/12/pentagon-defense-contractors-budget-interest-payments/)

Touting the candidate’s military service, Goldson said that Conley “has worked with a range of private and public sector entities, either through her work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) or as a consultant, to help keep American families and American infrastructure, like stadiums and other public spaces and our energy grid, safe from terrorist attacks.” The campaign did not comment on The Intercept’s questions about whether Conely was still employed by either firm.

Between January 2024 and July 2025, Conley earned $68,000 from Hidden Level, which works in radio-frequency sensing and airspace security, including monitoring unauthorized drone activity. Hidden Level’s data is used in Palantir’s Maven platform, which Trump’s Pentagon awarded a $480 million contract in May. When Trump announced his plan to build a “golden dome” missile defense system  — described by one critic as “more of a political marketing scheme than a carefully thought-out defense program” — Hidden Level released a statement applauding his plan and saying it “stands ready to support this mission today.” Of a White House directive to cut waste in commercial technology in April, the company said the “policy shift doesn’t just validate the model Hidden Level was built on, it demands it.”

“I get nervous when people are quick to invoke the language of national security and counter-terrorism. It raises more questions than it answers.”

Both companies have received lucrative contracts from the federal government under previous administrations. Primer has won at least $7.2 million in contracts from the Department of Defense since 2021, according to federal spending records. Hidden Level earned just under $3 million in Pentagon contracts to monitor airspace and bolster the federal system that manages drone traffic between 2022 and 2024 under former President Joe Biden.

“We’ve seen just how brazenly people can manipulate the label ‘national security and counterterrorism’ and the ways it can mask government efforts aimed at people who never pose a threat to our country. As a civil rights lawyer and activist, I get very nervous when people are quick to invoke the language of national security and counter-terrorism,” said Cahn, the civil rights lawyer. “It raises more questions than it answers.”

The seat in suburban New York, which includes north Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties, is a top priority for Democrats. It was one of four New York House seats the party lost to Republicans amid a slew of upsets in the 2022 midterms. The winner of the June Democratic primary will take on Lawler, a Republican who flipped the seat that cycle after a combination of redistricting and Democratic infighting helped him beat former Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney.

Conley is one of six candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Other contenders include local official and tech founder Peter Chatzky, who has funded his own campaign with more than $10 million; Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson; lawyer and former television reporter Mike Sacks; nonprofit executive Effie Phillips-Staley; and Air Force veteran John Cappello.

Conley has campaigned on her military experience and highlighted the fact that the Russian government banned her from the country because of her work on Biden’s National Security Council. She said she hopes voters in the swing district will see her lack of traditional political experience as a positive. “We need people who take public service seriously, who are not politicians, who are actual leaders and problem solvers,” Conley told the New York Times in March.

Her campaign originally focused primarily on issues of affordability and improving Hudson Valley infrastructure, including criticizing Trump’s economic policies. As the campaign progressed, Conley has become more aggressive in criticizing Trump’s intensifying attacks on cities around the country and his nationwide crackdown on immigrants.

Goldson said that Conley believed in holding ICE accountable, investigating the officials responsible for the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “Congress must pass legislation ensuring ICE operates lawfully like local law enforcement, including banning masks and requiring judicial warrants for arrest, and sending CBP back to the border where it belongs,” she added.

Lawler, meanwhile, has urged immigration agents to “reassess their current tactics,” while refraining from criticizing Trump.

Conley has faced criticism throughout the campaign — much of it from Republicans — for not voting in recent midterm elections and registering as a Democrat just before she launched her campaign. Critics attacked her for moving to the district in January from Virginia, though she grew up in the Hudson Valley.

Her detractors have pointed out that many of her donors come from outside the district, several of them from the defense and tech industries.

Conley has received $10,000 in contributions from Matt and Kimberly Grimm, the former of whom is the co-founder of Anduril Industries. Anduril, which was heavily backed by Thiel, builds autonomous drones, systems to surveil the border, andsurveillance towers powered by AI.

“There’s a lot of questions to answer, and I think that this is true for candidates across the country who have worked for these companies in the past or who you know are receiving large donations from their employees,” Cahn said. “There’s a growing recognition that many of these tech firms are carrying out a mission that is fundamentally at odds with the values that Democrats hold and most Americans hold.”

Conley’s donors also include a vice president and other employees at the top Washington lobbying firm BGR group, which has represented the Saudi government – until it cut ties with the country in 2018 – and companies like defense giant Raytheon and the energy behemoth Chevron, as well as big pharmaceutical firms. BGR vice president Joel Bailey gave Conley’s campaign $500 in July, while BGR principals Syd Terry and Fred Turner each also gave Conley’s campaign $250. BGR senior director Hai Peng has given Conley’s campaign $5,500 to Conley’s campaign since May. None of the BGR donors listed residences in New York.

In a statement to The Intercept, Peng said he met Conley at Oklahoma’s Fort Sill close to two decades ago and made the contribution in his personal capacity. “I genuinely believe she is the kind of leader our country needs right now,” Peng said.

Conley has been endorsed by several political action committees including MD PAC, previously known as Majority Democrats PAC, which has given $90,900, VoteVets, Equality PAC, and Giffords PAC. She’s also endorsed by several local officials and political leaders, as well as Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y.

Cahn said he wasn’t sure who, if anyone, he would vote for in the primary. But he sees the race as an example of the opportunity voters have to hold Democrats to a higher standard of accountability than in the past, particularly when it comes to policy issues like technology, surveillance and artificial intelligence.

“We’re at a new moment of accountability within the tech sector more broadly, as we start to recognize that so many tech companies are part of the apparatus that is powering ICE’s attacks,” Cahn said. “This is especially notable for someone who’s running based off of their time in military defense roles.”

The post NY Democratic House Candidate Worked for Palantir Partners Pushing AI Border Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

In under a year Trump caused the U.S. reputation to drop from mid-pack, 30th out of 60, to near the bottom, 48th out of 60.

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