(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

When the damage done by this administration* is toted up, assuming there will be somebody left to count the cost, the unleashing of Border Patrol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, and the subsequent depredations thereof, are going to rank right at the top of the list. If you want to see real fascism in action, look at what these people have been up to. Somebody leaves water in the desert for undocumented immigrants, and the Border Patrol pours it all out and then arrests the guy, according to The Washington Post:

What received wider attention, however, was a video that the Tucson-based aid group, No More Deaths, also distributed with its report. The footage, taken between 2010 and 2017, showed Border Patrol agents kicking over water jugs that had been left in the desert. In one clip, a male agent sneers at the person filming him, demanding to know whom the water is for, as he empties a gallon bottle of water onto the ground. Now the aid group is calling the arrest of one its volunteers suspicious. On Wednesday, Border Patrol agents arrested Scott Warren, 35, in the desert near Ajo, Ariz., about eight hours after the No More Deaths report and video were released.

Warren, a longtime volunteer with the group and a faculty associate at Arizona State University, was detained on preliminary felony charges of alien smuggling; he appeared in court Thursday and was released on his own recognizance, the group said in a statement. Border Patrol agents also arrested two people who were with Warren on Wednesday and “receiving humanitarian aid” at the time, according to No More Deaths. Those two people remain in custody, the group said.

It’s a felony to leave water for thirsty people? This is not America.

Getty Images

Meanwhile, ICE has run wild. They are busting parents while their kids are at school. They’re publicizing “sweeps” in cities like they’re chasing down Capone or someone. And there’s a very good possibility that, in the so-called “sanctuary cities,” we will see confrontations between ICE agents and local law enforcement. And now we have this latest insanity, whereby technology will be handed to an agency sliding swiftly toward a very dangerous point. From The Verge:

The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians. The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.

Of course not. What could I possibly be thinking?

This is not America.

Housekeeping: This week, we ran a post regarding the incredible coincidence through which Paul Ryan’s campaign apparatus received $500,000 from the Koch brothers in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the tax bill. The credit for this revelation should go to Alex Kotch of the International Business Times.



And apologies to Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun for calling him Joshua in a post about the ongoing Baltimore police corruption trial. Thanks to the self-correcting blogosphere for pointing this one out.

We got the Oscar nominees and the newest Baseball Hall of Fame class in the same week—a confluence of pointless, if fervent, arguments that may well end the Intertoobz as we know them. As for the former, I am very happy to see the Motherland well-represented. Saoirse Ronan is going to be a formidable force in the movies for a very long time, the way Daniel Day-Lewis has been, and Martin McDonagh is criminally overdue, for In Bruges, if for nothing else. Cartoon Saloon from Kilkenny is back for another try with The Breadwinner. And, if you’re not rooting for Allison Janney, you have no soul and, hell, Jed, I don’t even want to know you.

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As for the Hall, I am overjoyed that Vladimir Guerrero made it. He was the most fun to watch at the plate, almost a Pedro with a bat. He would swing at anything and, before his knees gave out, he had a cannon from the outfield. He always reminded me of the scene in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four in which the hapless Seattle Pilots pitching staff was discussing the formidable Minnesota Twins lineup, especially Tony Oliva, where every suggested strategy is met with, “No, he’ll kill that,” and the consensus finally comes down to pitching around him. (And, it turns out, around the first six hitters in the Minnesota batting order.) As somebody commented on the electric Twitter machine, Vlad probably batted .280 lifetime against ball four.

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My baseball buddies are really happy for Jim Thome, so I am, too. But I continue to be fascinated by the fact that the electorate still doesn’t seem to know how to handle designated-hitters (Hang in there, Edgar) or, really, closers. Trevor Hoffman certainly has the credentials, but so do people like Lee Smith and Billy Wagner. And I would like very much to gather in one room every member of that one percent who voted for Roger Clemens and not Barry Bonds. I really would like to hear an explanation for that.

My pal Alex Wolff was picked by the Library of America to put together its collection of basketball writing. It’s out very soon and everybody’s in there, including Dr. James Naismith his own self. There’s John McPhee on Bill Bradley, of course, and Jimmy Breslin on Al McGuire, of sainted memory. Jack McCallum has a great piece about the original Dream Team’s legendary intrasquad game that took place in Monaco. (McCallum has a tape. I’m hiring burglars immediately.) There’s also a piece from Esquire about Larry Bird written by some local Boston mucksavage.



Coming Attractions: Back in 2008, when The Who was honored at the Kennedy Center, Bettye LaVette brought down the house with her powerful reworking of “Love, Reign O’er Me,” the finale from Quadrophenia. Now Rolling Stone tells me that LaVette is taking on The Master’s songbook. From the preview—the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed”—this sounds like somebody had a really fine idea. Tom Waits would be familiar with the territory into which she takes this song. Bob would, too.

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For two days now, I’ve had “Roadrunner,” Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ epic tribute to the geography of the Commonwealth (God save it!) stuck in my head. For this, I blame Ryan Walsh, a local musician and journalist who was kind enough to send along a reader’s copy of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, his saga of Boston at high tide of the counterculture. Richman is in there as one of the earliest acolytes of the Velvet Underground, who were woodshedding at the time at the legendary Boston Tea Party club. The book is rich with details on what was then an incredibly fertile time for the arts—from the merchandizing disaster that was the “Bosstown Sound” to the filming of the original Thomas Crown Affair. We hear about how the Boston Strangler entered popular culture, and a deep study of the Fort Hill Community, Mel Lyman’s temple-ish group in Roxbury.

But the star of the book, as you can tell from the title, is Van Morrison. He was an exile in Cambridge in those days. He’d lost his record contract and then his record company. He was dropping into the overnight shift at fledgling WBCN to play R&B music with a Wildman DJ named Peter Wolf. But Morrison also was writing incredibly personal, incredibly deep music which, apparently, he would play for anyone at the drop of a hat. (I have a friend who wandered into the Plough and Stars on Mass. Ave one night, only to have Morrison play the whole Astral Weeks album for him right in the booth. He then asked my friend to be his agent. He was at seriously loose ends.) Walsh was drawn to write this book because he was so moved, as is anyone with a soul, by what became Morrison’s masterpiece. He honors that art with his own.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Go To Mardi Gras” (The Absolute Monster Gentlemen): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s the 1965 world tobogganing championship from Davos. Yes, I, too, would pay cash money to see the assembled plutocrats there take a crack at this. I think sheer inertial momentum would cause our president* not to stop until he got to the Balkans. History is so cool.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Newsweek? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

The newly described specimen helps scientists understand this important genus even better. For example, we now know that the animals lived over a span of at least a million years, which is longer than we previously understood. Furthermore, by studying the characteristics of this oldest specimen and comparing them with other specimens, paleontologists can understand the variety in the physical appearance of Archaeopteryx. Notably, the teeth differed significantly between some of the different members of the genus.

That we never may finish learning about dinosaurs is the most conclusive evidence that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee was worried this week that the news was so damned grim that finding a Top Commenter of the Week would be a slog through the shebeen’s collective neuroses, which are many and varied. We were saved, however, by Top Commenter Mary Campbell, who contributed some deft literary criticism to our discussion about Howard Kurtz’s new book.

I'd rather read "An Ode to a Small Lump of Putty I Found in My Armpit One Morning"

Who wouldn’t, says I. Well said, madam, and here are 91.89 Beckhams for your dining and dancing pleasure.

I’ll be back on Monday, when we will wonder who’s putting the finishing touches on the president*'s first State of the Union address. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, because it’s getting a little, well, Stormy out there.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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