Week ending January 9, 2026
I started writing this post for December 19, 2025. Then family came to visit, then we boarded a plane and flew to California for a week to visit family, then we boarded a plane and flew to Miami and, well, I never finished the December 19th post. But it had some good stuff, I think, that I worked a long time on, so this is a hybrid of that post (especially in the historic interlude) and stuff from the first weeks in 2026.
Table of Contents
Finite
Disappointment
Housing in Florida
The Abomination on US 41 known as "Alligator Alcatraz"
The Miami Herald piece above was from mid-December. But the protesters are still out there many days of the week and the weekly Sunday prayer vigils hit their 23rd consecutive week on Sunday, with at least 120 in attendance on January 4 (I counted) and reportedly 180 there the previous week (I was in California, so I'm relying on someone else's account).
A man speaks about his experience in Poland during World War II and how it compares to Alligator Alcatraz. From the 23rd weekly Sunday prayer vigil across from Alligator Alcatraz.
Philip Cardella
Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis, in the wake of the attack on Venezuela, doubled down on deporting people after detaining them in these state sponsored immigration detention centers, including Venezuelans.
He's opening a third state run immigrant detention center to go with "Deportation Depot" and "Alligator Alcatraz.
While Florida's teachers are the worst paid in the country, the cost of living is skyrocketing ("In Florida, 60% of all renters pay more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities," the highest in the nation), and Miami-Dade County may soon be under water, literally, hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars are going to arresting and detaining people, 72% of whom have been convicted of no felony crime ("unlawful presence" is not a crime according to US law, and crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor, not a felony, confirmed by the Supreme Court, and yes, about 25% of those detained do have pending charges, but "innocent until proven guilty" is the bedrock of our government) and some actually being US citizens.
It might be worth mentioning that a recent study showed that "undocumented immigrants" contributed $1,800,000,000 to Florida's economy a year.
It seems a debate about the costs and benefits of the state fixating on immigration is warranted– this not some "open borders" argument we here at TWIFL are making, by the way. It's more of an observation that a discussion about how tax payer dollars are being used seems important. Unfortunately, that's not happening much here right now.
But wait! It gets worse!
The Big Cypress National Preserve was created as a response to the Miccosukee successfully suing to stop the building of what would have become the world's largest airport at the time.
This is the site where the so called Alligator Alcatraz now sits.
In fact, this created the entire National Preserve system for the United States, allowing the Miccosukee to continue to exist in the historic Everglades, where they've been for centuries, and to exert some control over Federal lands.
It is a weird set up though, so when the Federal Government wanted to sell the Miccosukee their land back, it needed an act of Congress, which it got with near unanimous support, including support of the Republican House members in South Florida and the Republican Senators.
What we're talking about is 30 acres (or by the NPR account, 9.4 acres), by the way.
Oh, not up on your acre to square mile conversion. There's 640 acres in a square mile. So we're talking about literally 4% of a square mile. The Miccosukee need the land back to repair it and help prevent flooding from an "Indian Village," which is basically a neighborhood.
Trump vetoed it. Why? Because the Miccosukee tried to protect the land they successfully protected from becoming an airport in the 1960s from becoming an immigrant detention center.
In a statement, Trump explained that the tribe “actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected,” after the tribe’s July lawsuit challenging the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigration detention center in the Everglades. --from the link below.
Miacel Spotted Elk
Given near unanimous support for the bill in the first place you'd think that Congress would simply override the veto, one of Trumps only vetoes while in office.
Not a chance.
But wait, there's more that's awful!
The headline speaks for itself but the article is worth your time.
Oliver Milman
Philip Cardella
Florida
Gonna Florida
Venezuela
How do you solve a problem like Maduro?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maduro?
A flibbertigibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A murderous clown!
Maduro, like Hugo Chavez before and the Chavismo movement Chavez used to turn a democracy into a dictatorship has been a major problem for decades. No one knows this more than Venezuelans whether they are still living under the murderous dictatorship there or they fled to places like Florida to seek asylum.
I only know a few things about Venezuela that I feel comfortable writing down. Not because of some fear of reprisal or something, but because it is an extremely complex subject and I'm not even a novice about it much less an expert.
Let me start by reiterating, Maduro is a murderous clown who took a bad situation handed to him by the murderous asshole Hugo Chavez and made it worse in pretty much every way possible. Venezuelans in Miami cheered at his capture and understandably so.
Brookings Institution Press
An important and illuminating book about Chavez, the Chavistas and Maduro.
Again, it's complicated though, even for Venezuelans–and I'll link below to a far better take on that from an actual Venezuelan American.
Next thing I'll say, for my non-South Florida readers, something you should know: almost half the Venezuela-born residents of the United States live in Florida and about half of those live more or less within a short bike ride of my house. Doral, a suburb of Miami (and where Trump International Doral Miami sits), was for a time recently the fourth fastest growing city in America, in large part due to the massive influx of Venezuelan refugees fleeing first Chavez, then Maduro. The city has a nickname: Doralzuela.
To say that Miami-Dade County is paying attention to the situation in Venezuela would be an understatement.
Indeed, I've observed over the last four years that no news source in the world covers Venezuela better, in my opinion, than the Miami Herald. In fact, the Sacramento Bee, a fellow McClatchy paper with the Herald (and my hometown paper), posted several news stories that were written for the Herald about Venezuela. I think I saw four in the Bee and three were written by and for the Herald.
Tim Padgett
The second best source is likely Miami's NPR affiliate, WLRN, particularly their Americas editor, Tim Padgett.
The Miami New Times isn't asleep at the wheel either.
B. Scott McLendon
Finally, I'll let an actual Venezuelan who happens to be a lifelong Democrat and fierce critic of Trump have the last word. Spoiler alert because not enough readers click:
So my ask is simple. Do not erase Venezuelans with slogans. If you want to stand for democracy, stand with Venezuelans.
Historic
Interlude
December 19, 2025 Fearing Soviet nuclear bombs being dropped from unassailable heights, the United States poured what would today be billions of dollars. Peaking at nearly 4.5% of total US government spending in 1966 (today it's 0.36% of total spending), Americans heavily invested in the space race. 65 years ago this week they got their first major win when the unmanned Mercury space capsule, strapped to a Redstone missile, a descendant of the German V2 rocket, notably, with its warhead removed and replaced with the Mercury space capsule, sans astronauts.
Just under six months later Alan Shepard, one of the Mercury 7 in the photo in the newspaper, would brave the first American flight into space on May 5, 1961 from the same launch site. In February of 1962 John Glenn would be the first American to orbit the Earth, once again launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
While it was largely ignored, perhaps because it focused too heavily on just one of Neil Armstrong's characteristics (his battle with depression) First Man (2018) features a hyper realistic launch of Gemini 8 (You thought I was going to say Apollo 11, which is the topic of the movie!). I saw it in the theater and it freaked me out. These guys basically strapped a Volkswagen Beetle to the top of a missile and off they went. The launch was insane and in the more advanced, Gemini mission.
Long, boring, epic and must watch, The Right Stuff (1983) also captures how insane these early missions were and why, generally speaking, astronauts aren't crazy about private space flight.
Lenee Mcbrayer
And for those of us that like math and recognize how incredible it is there's Hidden Figures (2016), which is all about the women, many of whom happened to be Black (especially the key ones), who played essential roles to these programs. Fun fact, without Katherine Johnson functionally inventing a new form of mathematics John Glenn never orbits the planet. She went on to play one of the most important roles in space history for decades at NASA.
So did other women, by the way, like Margaret Hamilton.
This last film also captures some of the fears of Soviet bombs that drove the American space program better than the other films.
Infinite
Hope
Weird, nice community event: King Mango Strut
"What this city needs right now is a good laugh," legendary Miami Herald columnist Bea L. Hines wrote of the proposed King Mango Strut in 1982. The column's headline was apropos, "Mango Strut is a silly idea–so, let's do it!"
The papers called in the Orange Bowl Committee's worst nightmare, "weird, nice" and "Wackos on Parade" in 1982.
It's only gotten weirder, nicer.
America is at her best when she's weird and expressive and its hard to find a weirder or more expressive or more local thing than the King Mango Strut. With a mix of political commentary, satire and humanitarianism and environmental consciousness presented in as silly a way as possible (while staying PG, at least) the parade participants delighted a crowd of thousands.
I did a dive into the history and posted a bunch of pictures and videos from the event this week. Check it out if you missed it!
I look forward to attending this fun community event next year.
Philip Cardella
Looking to the skies for hope
Longtime readers know that I often seek the Everglades for an escape from the madness that is life among South Florida's most dangerous animals, humans. I got excited to move here to explore the abundance of natural beauty in the many state and National Parks within an hour of my home here.
One thing I've spent years looking forward to seeing but never saw until Sunday, in an ironic place, is the roseate spoonbill.
While I was talking to a couple from Boston about their first trip into the Everglades to attend one of the weekly Sunday prayer vigils, one of them pointed up and said, "look a roseatte spoonbill!" and sure enough, there this one was. I snapped off several pictures and despite some lighting challenges they turned out ok, I think.
National Parks: USA a documentary series available on Disney+'s second episode is about Everglades National Park. The main character, if you will, of the episode is a baby spoonbill that falls out of its nest too early. Spoiler alert: this has a happy ending for the bird.
Some of the footage in this documentary from 2024 is from my favorite documentary of all time, Path of the Panther, which came out in 2022.
walshs101-811-970114
Both of these films feature Betty Osceola, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida member who has been helping welcome folks to the weekly Sunday prayer vigils since Alligator Alcatraz opened on the edge of Everglades National Park, on Miccosukee land inside Big Cypress National Preserve.
Bear
The History Hound Finds
Bear thought I should share this...
At the Trump Library meeting at Miami-Dade College a couple of weeks ago one of the Board of Trustees members went on a (long) rant about how everyone is using social media too much. He's not wrong. But I wanted to look into it a little deeper and found that social media usage is split almost evenly among political parties, while independents use it less.
John Johnson
This one was written by one of my professors at FIU– one of my favorite professors even!
Here's a great piece on America at 250 and Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
Lindsay M. Chervinsky
Book recommendation: Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned by ICE Air (published in 2024)
In 2017 a group of 90 Somali men and 2 Somali women, bound by chains made by a company that got its start making shackles for enslaved people, literally, and in those chains by edict of the Obama Administration, sat on a tarmac for dozens of hours in inhumane conditions (literally wallowing in their own excrement) when the Trump Administration resumed deportation proceedings to the war torn country of Somalia. The book Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air by Miami professor Rebecca A. Sharpless and published in 2024 tells this history.
Bear reminded me of it when he bulldozed through the library section of the house. I hadn't read it yet so I read it this week. Highly recommended.
By the way, a reminder that the "Deporter in Chief" was President Obama, who deported 2.2 million people "without a hearing before an immigration judge." That's out of a total of at least 3 million he deported. The man literally ordered immigrants being deported be chained hand and foot while on ICE Air–a change in US policy from his predecessor, which is really a thing.
No elected Democrats are in favor of open borders, claims to the contrary are literally a Republican attack with no substance other than the fact that the Democrats have no real immigration policy they agree on. Seriously. As Snopes points out, the reason why this attack works is because the Democrats lack a cohesive, clear policy regarding immigration. This is exasperated by the calls by a handful of liberal intellectuals for open borders, but these are not elected officials.
Like the treatment of Veterans in the United States both parties have an inexcusable track record on human decency. I'm not a big "both sides" guy in most cases, and yes, somethings are worse than others. For example, Obama would not deport people in chains to Somalia because it was war torn but he would deport people in chains to most other countries. President Trump did deport people in chains to Somalia despite it being war torn. This is demonstrably worse and it matters but it feels like arguing which way to steal a jacket from an unhoused person is worse. You're still stealing from a person who needs the jacket.
Both administrations deployed ICE Air to deport men and women bound hand and foot in chains made by a company that got its start in the human slave trade. One tried to obscure it, the other has gleefully posted on social media about it. Enforcing the border is one thing. Enforcing the border inhumanely is another and both of these presidents chose to make it inhumane.
Check the book out.
University of California Press
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