Mitch's Blog

ICE agents are hanging around schools, threatening children. Reg Chapman of CBS News in Minnesota reported today that ICE has detained a five-year-old preschooler after using him as bait to get someone in his house to open their door. Then ICE transferred him and his father from Minnesota to detention in Texas. His family has an active asylum case and it does not have an order of deportation, meaning they are in the U.S. legally.

Video footage from Minneapolis also shows a federal agent spraying chemical irritants directly into the face of a man agents had pinned and held to the ground. Other video shows Customs and Border Protection leader Greg Bovino throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters.

—Heather Cox Richardson, January 21, 2026

Yesterday Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, police chief Mark Bruley told reporters that the police were getting repeated complaints about violations of civil rights by ICE and that ICE agents were stopping off-duty police officers of color. He recounted that ICE agents had stopped an off-duty police officer, demanded her paperwork—she is a U.S. citizen—and then held her at gunpoint. When she tried to film the interaction, they knocked the phone out of her hand. Finally, when she identified herself as a police officer, they got in their vehicles and left.

“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers,” Bruley said, but because “our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted, and that’s what they were. If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think [of] how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”

— Heather Cox Richardson, January 21, 2026

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this morning, a visibly exhausted president of the United States of America rambled in angry free association in a speech before the world’s leaders. At one point, speaking of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) dignitaries, he told the audience: “Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy, right, last time. Very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’”

He meant Greenland.

The president of the United States went on to give a virulently racist, insulting, rambling speech in which he complained that people call him a dictator but that “sometimes you need a dictator.” More than anything, though, the speech demonstrated his mental unfitness for his position.

— Heather Cox Richardson, January 21, 2026

What Is the Scale of the Resistance in Minnesota? Kottke: “The Trump regime’s secret police force has invaded the Twin Cities to kidnap, torture, terrorize, and murder its residents — and Minnesotans aren’t having it. They’re pushing back with all they have.”

This deal will get the US nothing new, at the expense of burning down 80 years of relations with our strongest allies and trading partners and weakening the US with respect to China and Russia. Nonetheless, MAGA will applaud the deal as a triumph. The Trump family will get hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit gains.

I have zero details about the deal. But that’s how things work in the Trump White House.

Also, the Epstein files were, by law, supposed to have been released Dec. 19.

Now I can reveal what I was working on much of the last six months — this massively researched Fierce Network report on the role of telcos in the emerging AI economy: Risk, reward, and revenue: Defining the telco role in the AI economy

Artificial intelligence is reshaping network requirements and creating new revenue opportunities for service providers. As AI adoption accelerates, telcos must define how they will participate in this shift - whether as infrastructure providers, enablers of AI service ecosystems, or builders of their own AI-driven solutions.

This report explores how carriers can leverage existing strengths, including resilient networks, edge assets, and deep enterprise relationships, to compete and grow in the AI economy.

The report draws on industry perspectives and a recent survey of 500 telco leaders worldwide — yes, that’s five hundred — along with 11 in-depth interviews with executives at global telcos and cloud providers, including AT&T, Bell, Zayo Group, C Spire, MetTel, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Oracle, Cisco and more. The report highlights where the strongest opportunities are emerging, the barriers that could limit progress, and how collaboration across the ecosystem can help unlock long-term value.

Download the report to gain timely insights into the changing role of telcos in the AI era and what it means for future growth.

I preordered the Clicks Power Keyboard. It’s a slide-out thumb keyboard that attaches to your phone with MagSafe. $79 early-bird pricing, delivers in the spring. I’d love to be able to do more things on my phone that now require me to be on my MacBook.

If I hate it, there’s a one-month refund policy. Hopefully that’s a month from when it’s delivered, not a month from now ha ha.

Sometimes Trek anticipates the future, but only by three to five years

The original series: Cold War. Klingons are Russians, Romulans are Chinese.

“The Next Generation:” America ascendant. The lone superpower. The Enterprise is an embassy, bringing diplomacy and classical music to other nations.

“Enterprise” became paranoid post-9/11.

“Strange New Worlds” is nostalgic for the good ol' 20th Century, when things were simple (or at least that’s how we remember it).

“Starfleet Academy” anticipates the post-Trump world, when the US has to rebuild on the ruins of what MAGA destroyed. In the second episode, the Betazoids come to the Federation and say why should we trust you now when you betrayed us before?

We just had our fourth visit from refrigerator repair people since the fridge broke the day after Thanksgiving, and I guess he got tired of visiting us because he fixed the refrigerator this time.

We watched “Fallout” (violent, profane, cynical) and “All Creatures Great and Small” (wholesome, uplifting, optimistic family entertainment) on two consecutive nights and my brain can’t handle the disconnect.

This morning, I saw two squirrels chasing each other up and down the big palm tree in the backyard. Minnie was straining at the leash to get at them. So I let her off the leash to circle around the tree and jump for a while. Whether this was kind or cruel of me depends on whether you view things from the perspective of the dog or the squirrels. 

After washing up for bed I put on my sleep T-shirt and then I realized I had absentmindedly put on my exercise T-shirt, so I took it off and put on my sleep T-shirt, but then I realized I had absentmindedly put on my everyday T-shirt and I took that off and put on my sleep T-shirt.

Then I thought of a recent post by John Scalzi in a similar situation where he talked about needing to sit his brain down and have a conversation about how T-shirts work.

I thought for a minute about attending World of Coffee SanDiego in April, but if I’m reading the website right, even a one-day Sunday pass would cost me $105, which is a lot.

The Rest is History is doing a multi-part series on the Iranian Revolution. I have listened to the first episode, covering the fall of the Shah and the US’s complete failure even to anticipate the revolution. Literally days before the fall, Jimmy Carter went to Tehran for a celebration, and he gave a speech proclaiming that the Shah was a stable presence, an advocate for human rights (which the Shah most decidedly was not), and that the Shah would rule for decades. This was also the consensus behind the scenes in American diplomatic and spy circles. Nobody saw the Iranian revolution coming, right up until the moment it was happening.

I look at that, and I look at similar failures with the fall of the USSR and 9/11, and I’m tempted to think, well, the CIA and State Department are bumbling clowns — completely useless!

But what I’m not seeing is occasions when diplomats and spies headed off catastrophe, and did so deftly enough that it never even made the news.

Nobody remembers the planes that don’t crash.

Anti-vaxxers look around and say we don’t have tuberculosis or measles or polio anymore, so those vaccines are useless! Even dangerous! But what anti-vaxxers don’t see is that vaccines are the reason we don’t have those diseases.

For the people who still support Trump today, no revelation or action will cause them to give up on him.

Based on what we know so far, it seems likely that Trump engaged in vile, depraved sexual practices. His business was a massive money-laundering operation. He openly and nakedly accepts bribes in staggering volumes. He falls asleep in meetings and demonstrates mental incompetence.

And yet Trump’s approval rating stands at 40%. Two fifths of America voters look at Trump and think that he’s their boy!

If the Republicans are soundly defeated this year — and pray that happens! — the people who support Trump today will continue supporting him for decades and believe that he was betrayed.

The game now is to activate the apathetic voters, the people who believe that Democrats are no better than Trump, and that there’s nothing we can do to make things better. That’s the Democrats' job, and the Democrats have been shit at it so far (which a few exceptions — hi, Zohran Mamdani!).

An important update on my earlier “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” take: I am informed by car-guy friends that Citroëns were sold in the United States until 1975, so it is perfectly plausible that Giles would have been driving a decrepit Citroën 25 years later.