First of all: ignore that added menu above! I am reworking the drop-down menus on sfadb.com, and using this site to test. It will be removed in a day or two.
- ICE now has a budget bigger than all but 15 countries’ military budgets;
- Why has funding for ICE has ballooned, compared to previous presidents?;
- Trump says he wants to deport bad people born in the US, too;
- Trump wants to host a UFC Fight on White House grounds;
- Robert Charles Wilson on the current times, and how science fiction might respond to them; how “change is inevitable” and how decency is more likely to build a sustainable human civilization.
Conservatives in America.
The New Republic, 3 Jul 2025: Congress Gives ICE More Money Than It Could Have Ever Imagined, subtitled “It’s impossible to overstate how much power ICE just got from Trump’s budget.”
Note last line here:
Donald Trump’s budget bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature, will balloon immigration and border enforcement spending astonishingly—so much so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget will overshadow every single federal law enforcement agency, and U.S. spending on immigration enforcement will surpass all but 15 countries’ military budgets.
Because the US has been infiltrated by so many evil people? Well no (remember immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-borns), it’s because there are so many people the would-be reigning white-supremacy hates.
The bill allocates about $150 billion to immigration enforcement through 2029. ICE will receive $45 billion from that total sum, more funding than any other agency in the federal government, according to the American Immigration Council, or AIC.
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Washington Post, 4 Jul 2025: ICE prepares detention blitz with historic $45 billion in funding, subtitled “Much of the new allocation from Congress — larger than detention spending by the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined — will go to private prison contractors tasked with doubling the nation’s capacity to lock up migrants.”
There’s the private contractors angle again. Can we imagine how much *$45 billion* is? No we cannot.
Once again: explain the difference, without recourse to conservative xenophobia and paranoia.
Via JMG. At this link, note the X post by Aaron Rupar, in which is quotes Trump:
Trump calls for deporting US citizens: “We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time … many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that’ll be the next job.”
What could that possibly mean? Trump wants to send all criminals to, say, South Sudan? Surely not the criminals he’s been pardoning. What could the missing ingredient be…?
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Trump, classy all the way.
JMG, 4 Jul 2025: Trump: I Will Host A “UFC Fight” On WH Grounds
Conservatives love… fights.
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A somber post from FB friend and science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson, this morning.
We’re living through a time when it seems as if everything decent and good—empathy, curiosity, human rights, science, public education, racial and gender equality, individual liberty, democracy—is either under attack or dying from neglect. The storm clouds gather, the ship is holed below the waterline, the clock ticks toward midnight: pick your metaphor. The possibility or probability that worse is to come hangs unspoken over casual conversation, social media posts, scholarly studies, analogies from history. We count ourselves fortunate if we can scroll away from images of children dying under bombed buildings or taken from their parents by armed men: these are not (or not yet) our children, though the struggle to maintain that distance is more difficult every day.
And we live with the eerie inertia of normality. A prison is constructed in the Everglades or at Dachau, but there’s a new talkie at the Gloria-Palast or a fresh Marvel series on Disney+. The news treads lightly around certain subjects, but it’s bracketed by ads for Adidas shoes or Opel automobiles. You walk down the street and think: Well, not much has changed. But everything has changed, and you know that too.
Well some of us do. I think the MAGAites are happy about the current situation.
And then reflects on how the current situation applies to science fiction.
And for most of my life the genre in which I worked was lively, entertaining, thought-provoking, occasionally profound. I would argue that modern science fiction is one of the gems of postwar Anglo-American culture, rich and strange and potent enough that writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin are still read for their insight into the questions we’re so desperately wrestling with today.
… I don’t know whether science fiction as we know it can survive the decline of literacy, the defunding and demonization of science, the metastasis of pseudoscience, or the inevitable chill that follows when media entities like Paramount are pressured into paying millions of dollars in tribute for the crime of having interviewed an unsuccessful presidential candidate. I do know that our genre has traditionally thrived on intellectual curiosity and a disdain for the burners of books, past and future. I hope those values have an audience today. But I don’t know.
I take consolation from the simple truth all science fiction is built on: change is inevitable. There is a horizon beyond this horizon, and a horizon beyond that. The good guys don’t always win, but neither do the bad guys. If “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice” means anything, it means that decency has a slight statistical edge over brutality—if only because it’s more likely to build a stable and sustainable human civilization.
First of course: change is inevitable. And conservatives resist and resent change, for the sake of stability (and arguably humanity’s survival). But then this: decency is more likely build a stable and sustainable human civilization. Here again is the dichotomy between the tribal mindset and mindset capable of acknowledging that different people are human too, that diversity is a strength. That humanity will not survive divided into endless struggles between tribes with allegiances to contradictory supernatural beliefs.
