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Ian Sinclair

@imsinclair

appellate counsel || democracy, inequality, segregation, baked goods || former city planner and low-level bureaucrat || imsinclair.substack.com/

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Latest posts by Ian Sinclair @imsinclair

On March 8, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Six male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed. @DeptofWar #OpSouthernSpear
UNCLASSIFIED

On March 8, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Six male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed. @DeptofWar #OpSouthernSpear UNCLASSIFIED

We’re still murdering people in “drug boats” even as we start a new war in Iran. Six people today.

09.03.2026 00:21 👍 2751 🔁 1255 💬 99 📌 66
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FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

05.03.2026 07:15 👍 17193 🔁 5994 💬 515 📌 492

“Almost all the 165 people killed in the attack were girls aged between seven and 12, according to local officials. There were around 170 girls at the school in southern Iran’s Minab at the time.“

A double-tap strike on little girls at school.

05.03.2026 01:32 👍 1899 🔁 991 💬 38 📌 69
Preview
Trump Has Been Sued 198 Times for Withholding Funding. It Hasn’t Stopped Him. (Gift Article) Immigration demands for highway dollars, D.E.I. rules for homeless grants: how Trump has tried to wield spending to get his way.

An important piece showing that losses in court haven’t stopped Trump from seizing Congress’s spending power and targeting dissenters and “blue states.”

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

04.03.2026 11:30 👍 219 🔁 126 💬 5 📌 7
Preview
The least human thing you can do I read a story just now about a man in Chicago who saved a baby after its carriage had been blown into the harbor by heavy gusts of wind. Lio Cundiff – who is a trans man not that it should matter her...

Expecting us – with good reason based on history – to all thank them for their service. Fuck your service and fuck you.

Saving a life is brave. Being instructed to kill and saying no I will not do that is brave. But killing like this? It is the least human thing you can do.

28.02.2026 17:58 👍 1426 🔁 378 💬 12 📌 26

A reminder that Girl Scouting of America has welcomed trans and nonbinary girls from the first one that asked, has always had lesbian and bi members and adults, never declared bankruptcy to avoid paying for sexual assaults, and never poached the other side to recover from said bankruptcy.

27.02.2026 18:08 👍 2191 🔁 712 💬 27 📌 27

They found him. He died.

Another murder by our immigration goon squads

25.02.2026 20:29 👍 11835 🔁 5322 💬 387 📌 295

Please read this article to the end. Even before ICE got involved, this started because this *blind man who speaks no English and uses a curtain rod as a walking stick* got lost on a walk and some Karen called the police on him and they tasered and beat him bc he didn’t drop the rod. WTF

25.02.2026 20:41 👍 15488 🔁 8148 💬 851 📌 543

I once told a friend that congress is the writer, Supreme Court is the editor and the President is the Publisher/reader depending on the situation and order of events now congress doesn't write and the the Supreme Court uses an AI summary based on facebook memes to make their decision

24.02.2026 15:34 👍 13 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities
Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu & Anupam B. Jena
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Working Paper 34866
DOI 10.3386/w34866
Issue Date February 2026
Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study. One way to causally assess the impact of smartphones on road safety is to identify arbitrarily timed events during which smartphone-related distraction may exogenously increase – i.e., a situation that relies not on plausibly random variation in who uses smartphones while driving, but when smartphones are used. We investigated the impact of smartphones on road safety by examining traffic fatalities on days when smartphone use likely surges: the release of major music albums. Using event study analysis, we show that music streaming – an indicator for smartphone use, where streaming most often occurs – sharply increases, by nearly 40%, on dates of major music album releases, while U.S. traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15% on those same days. Mobile device use while driving is a known safety issue, but today’s smartphones present new and greater opportunities for driver distraction. Our study indicates how features of these phones may have important impacts on distracted driving and traffic fatalities.

Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu & Anupam B. Jena X LinkedIn Facebook Bluesky Threads Email Link Working Paper 34866 DOI 10.3386/w34866 Issue Date February 2026 Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study. One way to causally assess the impact of smartphones on road safety is to identify arbitrarily timed events during which smartphone-related distraction may exogenously increase – i.e., a situation that relies not on plausibly random variation in who uses smartphones while driving, but when smartphones are used. We investigated the impact of smartphones on road safety by examining traffic fatalities on days when smartphone use likely surges: the release of major music albums. Using event study analysis, we show that music streaming – an indicator for smartphone use, where streaming most often occurs – sharply increases, by nearly 40%, on dates of major music album releases, while U.S. traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15% on those same days. Mobile device use while driving is a known safety issue, but today’s smartphones present new and greater opportunities for driver distraction. Our study indicates how features of these phones may have important impacts on distracted driving and traffic fatalities.

On days when major albums are released, people use music streaming services on their smartphone 40% more, and U.S. traffic fatalities increase by 15% www.nber.org/papers/w3486...

24.02.2026 23:55 👍 119 🔁 53 💬 7 📌 1

Biden had a trifecta and got a shitload of legislation passed, that not resulting in any political rewards is a different conversation

22.02.2026 23:40 👍 182 🔁 13 💬 5 📌 0

You’ll really should read Schlesinger’s trilogy because he very clearly lays out why the new deal coalition came together, not because FDR was like:

22.02.2026 23:38 👍 132 🔁 11 💬 2 📌 0

The New Deal did not happen via executive fiat

22.02.2026 23:35 👍 638 🔁 66 💬 13 📌 0
Karen has no criminal record. She is a grandmother who spent eight years working as an admin assistant at a primary school before her retirement. “I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she says. “I am not a dangerous criminal. I didn’t enter the country illegally and I had everything I needed to be there.”

So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long? A possible answer began to emerge over the weeks she was incarcerated. As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,” Karen says.

Karen has no criminal record. She is a grandmother who spent eight years working as an admin assistant at a primary school before her retirement. “I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she says. “I am not a dangerous criminal. I didn’t enter the country illegally and I had everything I needed to be there.” So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long? A possible answer began to emerge over the weeks she was incarcerated. As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,” Karen says.

Border Patrol is operating as bounty hunters.

Agents are apparently getting paid for each person they put in detention. Even if those people are grandmothers traveling on valid tourist visas.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

22.02.2026 01:40 👍 687 🔁 320 💬 27 📌 19

Not used to a world in which Newsweek breaks anything

21.02.2026 09:21 👍 20 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 1

Next para: "A regime of secret policing has no place in our society. Here, the Government’s power is derived by the People, and the People must be able to identify the Government when it acts to infringe on their liberty."

21.02.2026 00:56 👍 2129 🔁 383 💬 4 📌 15

Page 34: "An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct."

21.02.2026 00:55 👍 2657 🔁 496 💬 2 📌 15

Page 29: "Absent genuine, particularized necessity, the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement prohibits government officers from executing a civil arrest while systematically concealing their identities in a manner that eliminates contemporaneous and subsequent accountability."

21.02.2026 00:52 👍 2199 🔁 293 💬 3 📌 8

Incredible opinion. It holds that the common ICE tactic of jumping out of an unidentified rental vehicle and seizing suspected noncitizens while masked violates the Fourth Amendment because the *manner* of the seizure is incompatible with a free society governed by the rule of law.

21.02.2026 00:51 👍 11815 🔁 3924 💬 107 📌 128

The thing about the press conference is that Trump didn't say he would ask Congress to override the Court's decision, which is what a strong president whose party controlled both houses of Congress would do.

20.02.2026 19:44 👍 93 🔁 14 💬 8 📌 1

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

19.02.2026 10:50 👍 11205 🔁 3142 💬 30 📌 139

In the concentration camp universe, this is what's known as a filtration camp. A government preemptively takes a whole class of people to interrogate and detain extrajudicially in order to inflict duress on them while arbitrarily assessing their (supposed) culpability.

19.02.2026 02:20 👍 5537 🔁 3034 💬 61 📌 55

We fought a revolution over this stuff, supposedly.

16.02.2026 20:05 👍 217 🔁 39 💬 1 📌 0

Lincoln 1851

"I am not a Know-Nothing. As a nation, we began by declaring "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics."

16.02.2026 04:47 👍 279 🔁 87 💬 3 📌 1
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No, ICE isn’t ‘retreating.’ It’s loading up to invade your town. | Will Bunch A much-hyped ICE pullback from Minneapolis is a blip in a looming nationwide surge of arrests, concentration camps.

Gift article. Philadelphia Inquirer is well worth subscribing to.

share.inquirer.com/wjEzal

15.02.2026 18:38 👍 95 🔁 47 💬 4 📌 4
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Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

14.02.2026 18:45 👍 13996 🔁 3731 💬 232 📌 133

"White people are becoming second class citizens in America because of the radical left agenda." Is it Jeremy Carl in 2026, or an Oregonian's white supremacist screed written in 1959 in opposition to a proposed Civil Rights bill?

15.02.2026 00:31 👍 411 🔁 160 💬 15 📌 9

I've repeatedly used the Roosevelt HS case because it's so unexplainable.

Like, imagine the MPD was chasing a suspect and the chase took them through a high school at dismissal...

And then somehow they ended up getting into multiple scrums with students and arresting two teachers? What???

14.02.2026 08:03 👍 314 🔁 22 💬 1 📌 1

Some people automatically go into this “Well, what’s the other side of the story?” pose. But the answer is that there is no other side. They’re 100% doing the things we accuse them of, and then lying, despite voluminous evidence.

14.02.2026 08:00 👍 678 🔁 66 💬 4 📌 1

One of the terrible things about the ICE occupation of Minneapolis is that they’ve been doing stuff that is so crazy that people assume it’s some kind of exaggeration, despite being widely documented on video. Following observers home! Lurking outside elementary schools! Black-bagging citizens!

14.02.2026 07:54 👍 1134 🔁 221 💬 12 📌 6