Week ending May 22, 2026
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.
Table of Contents
California Isn't Liberal, Y'all
Finite
Disappointment
Alligator Alcatraz is Still Open and the Damage It's Caused Will Continue Long After It Closes
I spent much of the week interviewing religious leaders on Florida's "West Coast" and editing said interviews about the prayer vigils outside of the so-called Alligator Alcatraz. I also took requests from two major news entities to use my photos and videos from the prayer vigils, though those stories have yet to appear.
I also interviewed Betty Osceola and some of her friends to gain a better understanding of the indigenous perspective of the abomination.
Whether it is the impact on individuals who are or were detained in the facility, the human impacts from the environmental damage, the reality that the facility is yet another betrayal of a promise made by the American government to Native Americans, or the draining of Florida's natural disaster fund to operate the facility leaving the cupboards bear as hurricane season officially starts next week, the scars from this disaster of an idea will remain for a long time.
Still, the thing most on my mind about the South Florida Detention Facility, better known by its racist nickname, Alligator Alcatraz, was the health and well being of my friend's father. Arianne Betancourt's father, Justo Betancourt, was released from the facility just over a week ago. He's spent most of his freedom in the hospital–the electronic tracking device on his ankle preventing him from receiving some of the urgent care he needs.
The Guardian's Richard Luscombe's piece today covers that better than I can.
Richard Luscombe
Freedom of Religion is a Human Right–and that means no violence in sanctuaries!
Something that hit me particularly hard about this week's violence in San Diego in a masjid (mosque) was the way the place has been described: "The Islamic Center’s website says its mission is to not only serve the Muslim population but also to “work with the larger community to serve the less fortunate, to educate, and to better our nation.” Five daily prayers are held there, and the mosque works with other organizations and people of all faiths on social causes," from the Associated Press.
This could be the description of Masjid Al Ansar here in Miami. I have friends who worship and pray at that masjid.
The AP story goes on to talk about the Islamic Center's imam's reaction: “'All the places of worship in our beautiful city should always be protected,” he said.
He added that the center focused on interfaith relations and community building, and that a group of non-Muslims had been touring the mosque earlier Monday to learn about Islam.'
I've toured Masjid Al Ansar here in Miami as a non-Muslim learning about Islam. I've been greeted by the children who attend the school there–there's a school at the Islamic Center in San Diego that was attacked.
I have friends at Masjid Al Ansar. I do interfaith social justice work with them, the kind of work the Islamic Center in San Diego does.
Yet, that's not really the point, is it? The point is what the mosque’s director, Imam Taha Hassane, said, it is “extremely outrageous to target a place of worship.”
It doesn't matter if I'd get along with the people inside or not. It doesn't matter if I agree with them on any thing other than this: they have a right to worship in peace.
إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ
Transliteration: Inna lillāhi wa inna ilayhi rāji‘ūn
Meaning: “Indeed, to Allah (God) we belong and to Him we will return.”
AI is worse than you think
While opponents or critics of Artificial Intelligence tend to attack the size, power consumption, water consumption, environmental impacts, and intellectual property theft it relies on there's yet another way the Artificial Intelligence craze is impacting me: It's driving up the cost of computer memory.
A quick note, the same way everything started being called "HD" once high definition televisions became common, "AI" is getting slapped on everything. AI means many, sometimes contradictory things. What I'm talking about here is the Generative Artificial Intelligence you find in things like Grok, ChatGPT and Claude. General Super AI, that is, a computer becoming sentient, is still science fiction. Large Language Models trained to say, spot cancer, is a very narrow application that is less related to things like ChapGPT than you'd think, in no small part because Sam Altman likes to claim they are the same when they are not.
Even recording in "just" High Definition, that is 1920x1080, which requires 1/4 the storage space of 4K, gobbles up enormous amounts of space on hard drives. My less than a year old MacBook Pro came with a 1TB drive. I consumed double that, 2TB, of hard drive space for video alone in 2025. This year I'm on pace to consume 4TB of data.
There's a solution–buy external hard drives. Last year a SanDisk 2TB solid state drive cost $169.99 at Costco. If you've followed computers for any length of time at all you know that historically, the cost of memory goes down over time.
That same hard drive now costs $240. Why? Because the chipset inside of the drive is harder to get because the company that makes it is selling most of their chipsets to AI companies.
Also, if you didn't know, Elon Musk and Sam Altman are both jackasses, incompetent to an astonishing level, and you shouldn't believe a word that comes out of their mouths.
Florida
Gonna Florida
Ana Maria Soler
California
isn't liberal, y'all
It's time for another edition of California Isn't Liberal, Y'all, thanks, once again, to my hometown of Sacramento. A new report from ACLU Northern California finds egregious amounts of racial profiling in policing motor vehicles in California's capital city. "Black drivers had the lowest rate of citations despite being stopped and searched more than all other racial groups by the Sacramento Police Department," the report concludes after a damning series of data showing the bias from the Sacramento Police Department.
These findings are damning and paint a clear picture that the Sacramento Police Department is using minor traffic violations as pretext to stop and search Black and Latino drivers. Sacramento should adopt a policy that prohibits its police department from conducting many of the above-listed stops and searches due to their demonstrated use as a pretext to stop and search Black and Brown drivers for reasons unrelated to the stop and provide little to no traffic safety benefits.
These disparate traffic stops result in disparate searches that have very little likelihood of finding contraband and low levels resulting action (e.g. citation or arrest). This pattern and practice of racially disproportionate stops and searches by SPD is a violation of civil rights laws and the core constitutional principle of equal protection under the law. It is also a wasteful use of City resources and police officers’ time. These biased traffic stops and searches do not directly improve traffic safety and continue the shameful legacy of racial profiling and its deadly consequences in the United States.
The Sacramento Police Department is not to be confused with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, which in 2023 was shown to be "sharing license plate reader data with anti-abortion states."
While this may seem like the America's most diverse city has a police problem let's not forget that Governor Gavin Newsom's two passions appear to be trolling President Trump, a liberal past time, to be sure, and forcing remote workers back into the office in an attempt to boost his "moderate" bonafides, by pushing a conservative hot button. What's more, California seems particularly hostile towards electing a female governor. The stories about hostility towards women governors, racial profiling by police and the governor's fixation on forcing workers back into the office for no real reason are all from the last two weeks.
California isn't liberal, y'all, which isn't to say its particularly conservative either. The fact that California–a state that is not liberal–lives rent free in the minds of some conservative Floridians elected officials is telling.
Historic
Interlude
Historians have a saying, history doesn't repeat but it echoes. While the President of the United States is planning an Triumph Arch that appears to honor the traitor Robert E. Lee, historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us why Memorial Day exists at all and how Robert E. Lee's house–where thousands of the men killed during the Civil War were buried after Lee defaulted on his taxes during the war–was the site of the first official Memorial Day. It's worth a full read.
Heather Cox Richardson
Infinite
Hope
Most of this week's newsletter practically wrote itself. As I start this section, it is the last one I wrote this week as I just have a hard time knowing what to put in it.
I saw and very much enjoyed The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is very low hanging fruit that isn't really what this section is supposed to be about.
That said, while the conversation topic of prayer vigils at the so-called Alligator Alcatraz was at times heartbreaking and emotional, I very much found hope in my conversations with Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, and the Reverends Tony Fisher and Arthur Jones of the Unitarian Universalist Congregations of Greater Naples and Ft. Myers respectively.
I have rough cuts of those interviews but they aren't ready for sharing. I will say though that the theme that came out of them was that the weekly Sunday gatherings across from the so-called Alligator Alcatraz have given us all something to look forward to and to put at least some hope in.
I hope to see you there today at 4 PM at mile marker 48 along US 41.
Bear
The History Hound Finds
The Real Reason Democrats Lost in 2024
It's the economy (specifically inflation), stupid
Here's a sample from the must read piece below:
"In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her. Given Biden’s approval rating in June (deeply underwater, in the high 30s) and two straight years of the worst consumer sentiment readings outside of a recession, the Democratic nominee was on track to lose the popular vote by 4 points. She lost by 1.5...
"If you only read the DNC report, you’d think 2024 was a uniquely American failure of Democratic messaging, organizing, and candidate definition. And maybe you don’t buy my “fundamentals” regression of election outcomes. Well, to that person I’d emphasize that 2024 wasn’t just bad for Democrats; it was bad for incumbent parties all across the globe.
"As data journalist John Burn-Murdoch documented in the Financial Times, every single governing party in a developed democracy that faced voters in 2024 lost vote share."
G. Elliott Morris
America's most endangered historic places
Darlene Superville
The Liberal Establishment Doesn't Take Repression Seriously
Alec Karakatsanis
On America's history as a Christian nation
Heather Cox Richardson
Blaming Others for Your Own Failings
shoshana.gordonpropublica.org
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