u/AnyNegotiation9973

Most people arguing about whether online slots are rigged are arguing about the wrong thing.

The random number generator is almost certainly fine. It's tested by independent labs that run millions of simulated rounds against statistical benchmarks. The operator can't reach into a spinning game and change the result. On that narrow question, the industry is telling the truth.

Here's what they're not saying loudly.

The return to player figure on a slot is not baked into the game. It's a configuration the operator selects. Providers ship the same title in multiple certified builds. Pragmatic Play's Gates of Olympus exists at 96.50%, 95.51%, 94.50%, and as low as 91%. Sweet Bonanza and Sugar Rush ship in roughly three versions each. Play'n GO offers up to five settings per title. Some Microgaming builds run at 92%. Same graphics. Same features. Same animations. Same sounds. Different math. The casino chooses which one runs on their site. You don't. And unless you go looking, you'll never know which one you're playing. None of this is illegal or hidden, exactly. It's disclosed. It's disclosed in the paytable, behind an information icon, which is a place most players never open.

If you have any questions I'll be glad to answer them.

Sixty-four sacks. That is where you have to start with the 2026 Raiders, because that is where the 2025 Raiders ended. Nobody in football gave up more. They also finished dead last in rushing yards and dead last in yards per carry, which is hard to do in the same season unless the guys up front are getting beat on every snap. Pete Carroll lasted one year. He was never the problem.

So they spent where the bleeding was. Tyler Linderbaum got three years and $81 million, the richest center deal ever signed. Spencer Burford came from San Francisco already knowing Klint Kubiak's system. Understand what Linderbaum is, though. He graded 19th in run blocking last season out of 199 qualifying linemen and 121st in pass protection. Las Vegas bought a run-game anchor and a voice in the room. That is what Kubiak's offense wants. It is not a pass-protection fix, and anybody selling it that way is not watching the same tape.

Now look at what that line is blocking for, because this is the actual story of the season.

Ashton Jeanty ran for just under a thousand yards as a rookie behind the worst run-blocking unit in football. Sit with that number. He was the sixth pick in 2025 and he spent the year meeting linebackers in the backfield, and he still got there. He came back this summer with his diet overhauled and a chip he earned honestly. Give a back like that even average blocking and the number does not creep up, it jumps. Fourteen hundred is not a reach. It is what the tape says happens when the hole exists.

And Fernando Mendoza is the reason the hole will exist. 16-0 at Indiana, a national championship, a Heisman, 41 touchdowns against six interceptions, 27 red-zone scores and none the other way. Six-five, 225. The knock before the draft was that he wins with timing and accuracy instead of arm talent, and the comps ran toward a faster Jared Goff. Fine. Goff went to a Super Bowl handing off to a real run game.

That is the fit. Kubiak's offense is built on the run and play action, which means the two of them make each other. Every carry Jeanty takes for six yards pulls a safety down. Every safety that comes down opens the exact throw Mendoza has been surgical on his whole career, the intermediate ball off a hard fake to a receiver nobody covered because eleven guys were watching the back. Then the defense stays honest and Jeanty gets a lighter box. That loop is the whole offense. It does not need Mendoza to be Mahomes. It needs him to read it right and put it on time, and that is the one thing scouts never questioned about him.

Mike Washington Jr., taken with a pick from Atlanta, called himself and Jeanty thunder and lightning. He is not wrong, but he has the pairing off by one. The thunder is Jeanty. The lightning is a rookie quarterback who has never lost a college game he finished.

The waiting is the part fans will hate. Kubiak has said he would rather open with Kirk Cousins if the situation allows, and the right tackle job is still unsettled between D.J. Glaze and Charles Grant. Camp opened July 29 in Henderson with all 90 reporting. Maxx Crosby is full go after knee surgery. The corner reps are a mess in the way early camp corner reps usually are.

And the division does not care about any of it. Denver went 14-3 and took the one seed. The Chargers went 11-6. Kansas City went 6-11 and is still Kansas City. Six games inside that, and a roster can get meaningfully better while the record barely moves.

So watch the two of them instead. If Jeanty hits 1,400 and Mendoza is starting by Thanksgiving, this was a good year no matter what the standings say. Then 2027 shows up with both of them on rookie deals and the line already paid for.

​

Federal judges are now writing, in published opinions, that the United States government is violating the constitutional rights of the people — citizens included. This is what they said, what the documents show, and what it means that nobody but the courts is left to say it.

By Richard Garcia · Central California Awakening · June 2026

There is a kind of sentence a federal judge almost never writes.

Judicial prose is built to be cool. It cites, it distinguishes, it qualifies. When a judge abandons that register, it is because the facts in front of him have exhausted it — because careful procedural language would itself be a kind of lie. In February, in a courtroom in Charleston, West Virginia, a United States District Judge named Joseph Goodwin reached that point.

The case in front of him was small by the standards of this era. A 21-year-old man named Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos was pulled over — for a plastic cover on a license plate, by his account; he was never cited or charged with any traffic violation — and taken by masked agents in an unmarked vehicle to a regional jail. No judicial warrant. No exigency. No name on a badge to write down.

Goodwin ordered him released. But it is the opinion, not the order, that belongs to history. He refused, he wrote, to pretend "through careful procedural language" that the question before him was technical. The absence of prior case law on warrantless, anonymous, non-exigent civil seizures in the American interior, he wrote, did not mean the Constitution permits them — it meant the practice was "new enough, and brazen enough, that no court has yet been required to state the obvious."

This court is now required to say it.

And then he said it. The systematic character of the practice, and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force, he wrote, "is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids."

That is not an activist's press release. It is not a senator's floor speech. It is a finding of fact and law by an Article III judge of the United States, in a published opinion, about the conduct of the United States government. And he is not alone. In courtrooms in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Charleston, and beyond, federal judges have spent this winter and spring doing the work that the political branches have formally declined to do: stating, one ruling at a time, that the constitutional rights of people in this country — American citizens among them — are being violated.

This piece is the record of what they have found. I will tell you what has been ruled, what has been alleged but not yet adjudicated, and where the government has won — because the Constitution deserves better than a one-sided brief, and so do you.

I. The fifty-two words

Start with the text, because the text is the whole case.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fifty-two words. Note the subject: "the people." Not "the citizens." The Supreme Court has held for generations that the Fourth Amendment protects persons within the United States — which is precisely why its erosion for any group is an erosion for every group. A power claimed against the deportable is a power held against you, contingent only on an agent's guess about which one you are. The databases that inform that guess, as we will see, are wrong often enough that the guess has already fallen on Americans by the hundreds.

The Amendment's machinery turns on a single safeguard: a neutral arbiter. A judicial warrant exists because the framers refused to let the searcher judge his own cause. John E. Jones III — a federal judge for nearly two decades, appointed by George W. Bush, confirmed unanimously — explained the distinction this spring in terms any reader can carry: an administrative warrant, the kind ICE issues to itself, is reviewed by no judge at all. It is, in his description, little more than a self-serving piece of paper, free of any neutral review of what it asserts.

Hold that distinction. Everything that follows is a fight over those two pieces of paper — one signed by a judge, one signed by the agency to itself.

II. The memo: this was a decision

The constitutional crisis of this winter did not bubble up from rogue field offices. It was issued in writing, from the top.

In January, a whistleblower surfaced an internal memo from ICE's acting director instructing officers that they were permitted to enter homes to conduct immigration arrests without judicial authorization. The Brennan Center for Justice, analyzing the document, called it what it was: a departure not only from longstanding Department of Homeland Security policy but from core Fourth Amendment rights that protect citizens and noncitizens alike. Reporting on the memo described it as a sharp reversal of guidance that had existed precisely to respect constitutional limits on government searches.

Understand what that means evidentially. When a violation is an excess, you discipline the agent. When a violation is a memo, the agent who breaks down the door without a warrant is not defying his agency — he is complying with it. Every ruling described below is, at bottom, a court colliding with that memo.

The collision came fast. In late January, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan ruled in Minneapolis that ICE agents violated the Fourth Amendment when they forcibly entered a Minnesota man's home without a judicial warrant — a direct judicial rejection of the administrative-warrant theory, in the same city where, that same month, agents pulled a man into the street in his underwear and a blanket in the January cold, and where two American citizens had just been shot dead by federal officers.

In Los Angeles, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a restraining order against ICE's enforcement sweep after reviewing declarations from arrestees and from ICE's own insiders. The court found merit in claims that agents conducted suspicionless stops based on perceived Latino ethnicity, accents, or occupation — day laborers at Home Depot lots among the named targets — and held that being stopped for "looking Mexican" or speaking Spanish is not reasonable suspicion of anything. The men in those declarations are not abstractions to this publication's readership. They stand in parking lots the Central Valley knows by heart — the same lots, the same trades, the same morning shift. The constitutional question in that case lives here.

Honesty requires the next sentence: the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, later stayed aspects of the district court's order, allowing the patrols to continue while the appeal proceeds. The highest court has not blessed the practice — a stay is not a ruling on the merits — but it has, so far, declined to stop it. That is the live battlefield, and no honest account can report the district court victories without it.

And the precedent that should have settled the citizen question was on the books before this administration began. In Gonzalez v. ICE, the Ninth Circuit reviewed the agency's detainer system after ICE flagged an American citizen for deportation based on faulty database information and tried to hold him without probable cause. The court ruled that the Fourth Amendment requires a neutral decisionmaker — there is that phrase again — before anyone is held on an ICE detainer, and Judge Milan Smith put the principle in one line: the broad congressional power over immigration cannot diminish the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens mistaken for noncitizens.

Cannot diminish. The court said it. The databases kept making the mistake anyway.

III. The citizens

How often does the mistake fall on Americans? Often enough that Congress started counting.

By last October, the House Oversight Committee's Democratic members had launched a formal investigation and a misconduct tracker after reports that at least 170 U.S. citizens had been unlawfully detained by DHS. Two months earlier, fifty members of Congress had demanded investigations into what their letter described plainly: citizens — including children, cancer patients, and members of Native American and Latino communities — swept up in raids and held for days or weeks, some assaulted, some deported alongside undocumented family members, while agents ignored their assertions of citizenship and made no effort to verify status even after it was claimed. ICE's own policy explicitly prohibits detaining U.S. citizens. The reports describe an agency that did it anyway, at scale, and would not check.

Then there are the two citizens this publication has already named, and will keep naming. Renee Good, mother of three, shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on January 7. Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA, shot ten times by masked federal agents on January 24 as he lay on the ground, already pepper-sprayed. ProPublica identified the two agents from government records after the administration withheld their names — withheld them not just from the public, but from Congress and from state and local law enforcement, a departure from standard protocol so stark that lawmakers, state attorneys general, and former federal officials said so on the record. In a Marquette Law School national survey, 62 percent of Americans said the shooting of Renee Good was not justified. The criminal and civil questions remain open; no court has yet ruled on either killing, and this publication will not pretend otherwise. But the structural fact requires no verdict: the government deployed officers whose faces were masked and whose names it would not give to the Congress of the United States. Judge Goodwin told us what the elimination of every feature of accountability is. He published it.

The scale beneath the individual cases is itself documented, in the government's own data. Since the start of the second term, ICE has booked people into detention roughly 444,900 times, opening 152 new facilities across 39 states. The number of detainees with no criminal record arrested by ICE surged 2,500 percent in a year — from 945 people in late January 2025 to 24,644 by this January. During the winter enforcement peak, two out of every three street arrests were of people with no criminal record at all. The detained population passed 70,000 for the first time in the agency's history. And by one count built from ICE's own press releases, people are dying in that custody in 2026 at a rate of one every six days — most of them, by every compiled dataset, in for-profit facilities. The Fourth Amendment question and the detention-conditions question are the same question at different altitudes: what happens to people when the structures of accountability are removed.

IV. The finding beneath the findings

A rights violation that a court corrects is, in a grim way, the system functioning. The Constitution anticipates violations; that is why it builds courts. The finding that should keep every reader of every politics awake is the one issued by the Chief Judge of the District of Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, in a published opinion this winter: that ICE violated more judicial orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.

Sit with the structure of that sentence. Not "more than usual." Not "a troubling number." More court orders defied in one month than entire agencies have defied in their institutional lifetimes. The Fourth Amendment's machinery — neutral arbiter, reviewable order, accountable officer — only functions if the executive obeys the arbiter. An agency that ignores the rulings has not lost the constitutional argument. It has exited the constitutional conversation. That is the precise condition Judge Goodwin named, from a different courtroom, in a different state, in the same season: the substitution of raw force for constitutional authority. Two judges, independently, describing the same animal.

V. The abdication

Now place this beside what Congress did, because the two stories are one story.

Every practice condemned in the rulings above — the warrantless home entries, the masks, the anonymous seizures — was the subject of proposed statutory reform during the 76-day Homeland Security standoff this winter. Judicial warrants for home entries. A prohibition on masks. Body cameras, a reform with bipartisan public support that has been ordinary in local policing for a decade. Congress declined all of it, then passed $70 billion through reconciliation — no warrant requirement, no mask ban, no cameras, no new oversight funding — structured to forbid itself a checkpoint until 2029. The Speaker of the House described the design in celebratory terms on the day it passed: the funding can no longer be cut, blocked, or conditioned for the remainder of the term.

So map the constitutional terrain as it actually stands in June 2026. The executive issued a memo instructing agents to bypass the Fourth Amendment's central safeguard. The legislature, offered the chance to restore it by statute, declined — and then funded the agency at the largest level in its history while removing its own power of review. That leaves one branch. The judiciary is now performing constitutional enforcement retail — plaintiff by plaintiff, ruling by ruling — against an agency that a chief federal judge has found to be defying court orders at a historic rate, while the Supreme Court's emergency docket lets contested practices continue in the meantime.

Honesty compels the full ledger. In one en banc appellate case, a majority of thirteen judges found no Fourth Amendment violation on the facts before them, splitting five to five on the administrative-warrant question itself. The doctrine is genuinely unsettled in places. The government wins some of these cases, and the Supreme Court may yet ratify more of this enforcement model than any district judge quoted here would countenance. If that day comes, this publication will report it. But do not mistake unsettled doctrine for an unsettled question. The district courts closest to the facts — the judges who read the declarations, who saw the man taken in his underwear, who counted the defied orders — have been unusually, almost violently clear. When the judiciary starts writing sentences like Goodwin's, it is telling the country that the other safeguards have failed and it knows it.

VI. The oath

Every officer in those rulings — every agent behind every mask — swore the same oath when he took the job. Not to a man. Not to a party. To support and defend the Constitution of the United States. So did every member of Congress who voted to fund the agency while declining to require a warrant. So did every judge quoted in this piece. The oath is the one thing all of them have in common, and the record this piece documents is, at bottom, a ledger of who has kept it.

The judges have. That is the plain meaning of this winter's opinions: men and women bound by the same words as everyone else in this story, concluding that careful procedural language had become a form of complicity, and writing the sentences instead. The Constitution is not violated in the abstract. It is violated on a particular street, against a particular person — a nurse on the ground, a man in a blanket in the cold, a citizen flagged deportable by a database, a 21-year-old taken by men with no faces and no names. And it is defended the same way: by a particular plaintiff who files, a particular whistleblower who copies a memo, a particular judge who decides the obvious must finally be stated.

The courts are required to state the obvious because everyone else with the power to state it has chosen not to. The least the rest of us can do — the press, the counties, the readers, the people the Fourth Amendment names as its owners — is refuse to let the obvious go unstated in our own jurisdictions. That is what this publication is for. The Constitution's first three words assign the maintenance contract, and it has never been the government's name on it.

It is ours.

Sources and documentation

Opinion of U.S. District Judge Joseph E. Goodwin, S.D. W.Va., February 19, 2026 (reported by the West Virginia Record/Legal Newsline, March 2026, and VisaVerge, February 2026); ruling of U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan, D. Minn., January 2026 (reported January 26, 2026); opinion of Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, D. Minn. (via CourtListener, reported in The Conversation, April 2, 2026); temporary restraining order of U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, C.D. Cal., and subsequent Supreme Court stay; Gonzalez v. ICE, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (analysis: American Immigration Council); ICE acting director's internal memo via whistleblower report, January 21, 2026 (analysis: Brennan Center for Justice/Just Security, February 2, 2026; Fourth Amendment primer: interview with former U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, The Conversation, April 9, 2026); en banc appellate split: Brennan Center, February 2026; U.S. citizens detained: House Oversight Committee Democrats statement and misconduct tracker, October 22, 2025 (at least 170 citizens); letter of 50 members of Congress led by Rep. Goldman and Sens. Warren, Padilla, Kelly, Correa, August 8, 2025; agent identification and withholding: ProPublica, February 1, 2026; Minneapolis killings and protests: AP, CNN, CBS Minnesota, Time, Al Jazeera, January 2026; detention and arrest data: Vera Institute ICE Detention Trends Dashboard (April 10, 2026), American Immigration Council (February 4 and April 17, 2026), CBS News (January 16, 2026), TRAC Immigration, Austin Kocher PhD (April 18, 2026); polling on the Good shooting: Marquette Law School Poll, January 21–28, 2026; legislative record: see "The Checkpoint They Removed," Central California Awakening, June 2026, and sources therein.