I believe the increasing popularity of prediction markets will cause a gambling addiction scourge the likes of which we’ve never seen. I’m so sure of it, I might go to one of the prediction markets and lay down a bet. Because these days, you can bet on anything. “Prediction markets entice enterprising nerds to make and lose fortunes by wagering on everything from politics to the weather. Here’s why they’re unstoppable—and only getting more powerful.” Zoë Bernard in Vanity Fair: The CEOs of Kalshi and Polymarket Are Betting On the Most Hated Experiment in Business. (Alt link.) At a happy hour for one of the leading platforms, Kalshi, a group of mostly young men, in their 20s, were swapping tips and stories about their experiences in “a marketplace that, until recently, had existed in a legal gray zone. Many were making thousands a week speculating on highly specific fixations: whether the temperature would tick up by a single degree in Colorado next weekend, who would win the Coney Island hot dog eating contest, the gender of celebrity babies.” ... Yet only one person there mentioned the dirty word that everyone else had so carefully avoided ... ‘You’re writing about this, but you have no idea what this meeting is, do you?’ ‘What is it?’ I asked, leaning back to avoid his spittle. ‘This,’ he said, taking in the barroom of traders, ‘is just the latest Gamblers Anonymous meeting.’” 2Citizen CanWe’ve all been pretty disappointed at the lack of pushback on corruption and lawlessness from political officials and what we thought were our strongest institutions. But from the streets of Minneapolis to the courtrooms of Washington, we may be finally finding out who will save us: Citizens. NYT (Gift Article): Grand Jury Rebuffs Justice Dept. Attempt to Indict 6 Democrats in Congress. “It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s — authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies. But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.” This gives new meaning to Jury Duty. 3You’re On Candid Camera“When Nancy Guthrie went missing, officials said she had a doorbell camera, but that it had been forcibly removed, and she did not have a subscription. This meant there were no videos stored in the cloud. Ten days later, the FBI released footage from the camera, which was revealed to be a Nest Doorbell, clearly showing the masked suspect. This is a huge break in the case and highlights the value of security cameras in solving crimes, even if their deterrent effect remains largely unproven. But it raises privacy concerns around how this supposedly ‘lost’ footage was recovered.” Why ‘deleted’ doesn’t mean gone: How police recovered Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell footage. This is like so many of today’s surveillance-related stories. It’s really good that Google was able to track down images that could help solve a crime. It’s really scary that everything we do is being recorded to that great hard drive in the sky, whether we opt in or not. 4It’ll All Come Out in the Wash“Powered by encrypted messaging apps, anonymized platforms and a growing pool of people willing to move money for a cut, the system is agile, scalable and disturbingly hard to shut down. What began a decade ago as a fringe trend on dark-web bazaars is fast evolving into a sprawling global ecosystem of freelance money movers. Even the biggest criminal groups, long reliant on in-house laundering, are starting to tap it.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Drug Cartels Are Shifting Their Money Laundering to Crypto. Cops Can’t Keep Up. (I keep reading examples of how crypto is good for bad stuff, but what good is it for good stuff?) 5Extra, ExtraB.C. Mass Shooting: “Nine people were killed and 27 more were injured after a mass shooting in the community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C.” Here’s the latest on the tragedy from CBC. 6Bottom of the News“More than 5,000 Stanford students have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 undergraduates ... The growth, fans say, reflects a reality about many college kids: They’re intimidated by real-life courtship and overwhelmed by the endless scroll of dating apps. Entrepreneurial students have found huge demand for alternate matchmaking tools.” A Stanford Experiment to Pair 5,000 Singles Has Taken Over Campus. “A student built a matchmaking algorithm that has consumed the school—and highlighted the challenges of finding love for high achievers.” (High achievers? Wait, I thought this was a story about Stanford, not Cal...)
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Wednesday, February 11, 2026
'Dict Picks
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick On Why Detention Centers Are So Central To Trump's Mass Deportation Strategy
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick On Why Detention Centers Are So Central To Trump's Mass Deportation StrategyGet to this interview when you can. I promise you will learn a lot.....
Greetings all. I sat down late yesterday afternoon with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council. Aaron is one of our most thoughtful commentators about immigration and border security, and I am pleased to be able to bring our conversation to you. A video recording is above and a rough transcript is here. I asked Aaron to come by after reading his excellent Bluesky thread detailing what we are now learning about ICE’s dramatic expansion of his detention centers.
Aaron takes us through what he knows today about the Trump regime’s mass deportation strategy and why a planned expansion of these detention centers is so central to this dark plan. In our discussion he references a new report he co-authored with a wealth of data and historical perspective, Immigration Detention Expansion in Trump’s Second Term. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to do a deeper dive in this detention center complex the regime is trying to build. Here’s the conclusion to the report’s Executive Summary:
This interview will help you come to a better understanding of why “detention” is so central to the regime’s mass deportation strategy and its terror regime, and why they are moving so ferociously now to dramatically expand these centers in the months ahead. Here’s a recap of that the polling data we discuss throughout the piece showing how little appetite there is for mass deportation in the US today:
We got this new data this morning from Democratic polling firm GBAO:
Our discussion will also confirm why we need to be working so hard to rein in ICE; stop the violence and the lawlessness; to force DHS to focus on criminals and leave the rest of us alone; and to block the expansion of these inhumane and dangerous detention centers. Keep working hard all. We are having the big fight about ICE we all wanted to have. Now, we need to win it, together - Simon Bio - Aaron Reichlin-MelnickAaron Reichlin-Melnick is a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council. He previously worked as a Staff Attorney at the Council, working on impact litigation, Freedom of Information Act litigations, and practice advisories. Prior to joining the Council, he was an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow placed as a Staff Attorney at the Immigration Law Unit of The Legal Aid Society in New York City, representing immigrants placed in removal proceedings because of a prior criminal conviction. Aaron holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in Politics and East Asian Studies from Brandeis University.
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