The Blacklist Declassified

 

🔴 Trump/Ukraine/Russia Files 2026

 
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🇺🇦 Press Here ⬅️ For Recent Articles and Discussion

🇺🇦 Press Here For Index to all Trump/Ukraine/Russia Files

 

With Tweets, Retweets, links to articles and excerpts, I’ve tried to document this national soap opera/tragedy we’re living through. The resources at the beginning are a mixed bag of timelines and documents and I provide a clickable cast of characters (Russians, mostly). This is tucked into my blog about the tv show, the Blacklist, because that was easiest for me, though the show is related to current events in myriad, enlightening ways.

 
💽Recommended⋙ Mueller She Wrote Podcast ⋙ http://bit.ly/2PgTKWs  or Press   ⇊  ⇊
 
Other Podcasts:

All The President’s Lawyers (J Barro, R Lowry)
The Asset (Center for American Progress) 🌟
The Dworkin Report (Scott Dworkin)
Gaslit Nation (Sarah Kendzior, Andrea Chalupa)
The Lawfare Podcast (Benjamin Wittes, Brookings)
The Josh Marshall Podcast (TPM)
The Mother Jones Podcast (David Corn)
Mueller Time (Eric Leval, Chris Carey)
The Oath (Chuck Rosenberg, MSNBC)
The Report (Lawfare)
On Topic (Renato Mariotti)
Skullduggery (Michael Isikoff, Yahoo)
Trump Inc (q4- 8qProPublica)
Trumpcast (Slate)

🔊 PlayerFM: Best Trump Russia Investigation Podcasts (2019) http://bit.ly/2MKbtV8
 
Twitter List: INVESTIGATORS: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/lists/investigators
// Investigative reporters, Trump-Russia sleuths, Intelligence Community, Legislators, “alt-gov,” and Targets
 

Russian Intelligence Services:

Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) – The Foreign Intelligence Service reports directly to the President of Russia.
GRU – Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.
Federal Security Service (FSB) – The Federal Security Service is responsible for counter-intelligence, state security and anti-terrorist operations

 

 
🔄 ECFR , Mark Galeotti [EU] (2016): Introduction: Putin’s hydra: Inside Russia’s intelligence services http://bit.ly/2NZWN1h
// 5/11/2016, Intro
⋙ 📒 ECFR, Mark Galeotti [EU] (2016): Report: Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services [pdf] http://bit.ly/2NYjG5b 20p
// May 2016, Full report

 

 
Key People: Alexander Abramov, Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Yulya Alferova, Yuri Andropov, Anatoly Antonov, Anne Applebaum, Andrii Artemenko, Arron Banks, Andrey Baronov, Alexander Bastrykin, Sergey Beseda, Vitaly Bespalov, Leonid “Len” Blavatnik, Anna Bogacheva, David Bogatin, Alexander Bortnikov, Victor Boyarkin, Wm Browder, Mariia Butina, Carole Cadwalladr, Michael Caputo, Yuri Chaika, Igor Chekunov, Sergey Chemezov, Anatoly Chubais, Michael Cohen, George Cottrell, Igor Danchenko, Oleg Deripaska, Andrii Derkach, Igor Divyekin, Kirill Dmitriev, Aleksandr Dugin, Arkady Dvorkovich, Paul Erickson, Oleg Erovinkin, Nigel Farage, Dmitri Firtash, John Fotiadis, Gene (Evgeny) Friedman, Igor Fruman, Daniel Gelbinovich, Valery Gerasimov, Rob Goldstone, Sergei Gorkov, Henry Greenberg, Fiona Hill, Andrew Intrater, Ivan the Terrible, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Ramzan Kadyrov, Brittany Kaiser, Mikhail Kalugin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Saak Karapetyan, Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), Denis Katsyv, Irakly (“Ike”) Kaveladze, Michael Khodarkovsky, Nikita Khrushchev, Konstantin Kilimnik, Sergey Kislyak, Artem Klyushin, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Konstantin Kosachev, Mikhail Kovalchuk, Yury Kovalchuk, Aleksandra Krylova, Elena Khusyaynova, Simon Kukes, Sergey Lavrov, Alexander Litvinenko, Howard Lorber, Alexander Lukashenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, Simona Mangiante, Alexander Mashkevich, Michael McFaul, Viktor Medvedchek, Josef Mifsud, Alexey Miller, Sergei Millian, Semion Mogilevich (Don Semyon), Konstantin Molofeev, George Nader, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Lyudmila Narusova, Sergei Naryshkin, Alexei Navalny, Eduard Nektalov, Konstantin Nikolaev, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Yevgeniy Nikulin, Alexander Nix, Isabel Oakeshoff, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Sam Patten, Nikolai Patrushev, Alexander Perepilichnyy, Dmitry Peskov, Peter the Great, Igor Pisarsky, Petro Poroshenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Prikhodko, Vladimir Putin, George Ramishvili, Dmitry Rogozin, Alexander Rovt, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Konstantin Rykov, Mikheil Saakashvili, Felix Sater, Igor Sechin, Leonid Shebarshin, Anastasia Shevchenko, Sergey Shoigu, Viktor Shokin, Oleg Solodukhin, Christopher Steele, Ruslan Stoyanov, Oleg Solodukhin, Peter Strzok, Sergei Surovikin, Taiwanchik (aka Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), Bill Taylor, Andriy Telizhenko, Gennady Timchenko, Oleg Tinkov, Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov (aka Taiwanchik), Aleksandr Torshin, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Yulia Tymoshenko, Anastasia Vashukevich (aka Nastya Rybka), Viktor Vekselberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Alexander Vindman, Vyacheslav Volodin, Curt Weldon, Andy Wigmore, Alexander Yakovenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Boris Yeltsin, Ivan Yermakov, Marie Yovanovitch, Viktor Yushchenko, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Maria Zakharova, Joel Zamel, Volodymyr Zelenskyy
 

 
Bios w links (Wikipedia unless otherwise noted): Alexander Abramov, Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Yulya Alferova (National Compass), Yuri Andropov, Anatoly Antonov, Anne Applebaum, Andrii Artemenko, Arron Banks, Andrey Baranov (Bloomberg), Alexander Bastrykin, Sergey Beseda, Vitaly Bespalov (NBC), Leonid “Len” Blavatnik, Anna Bogacheva (NYT), David Bogatin (NYT), Alexander Bortnikov, Victor Boyarkin (TrumpRussia), William Browder, Mariia Butina, Carole Cadwalladr, Michael Caputo, Yuri Chaika, Igor Chekunov, Sergey Chemezov, Anatoly Chubais, Michael Cohen, George Cottrell, Igor Danshenko, Oleg Deripaska, Andrii Derkach, Igor Divyekin, Kirill Dmitriev, Aleksandr Dugin, Arkady Dvorkovich, Paul Erickson, Oleg Erovinkin, Nigel Farage, Dmitri Firtash, John Fotiadis (Archinect), Gene (Evgeny) Friedman, Igor Fruman, Daniel Gelbinovich (Daily Beast), Valery Gerasimov, Rob Goldstone, Sergei Gorkov, Henry Greenberg (Miami Herald), Fiona Hill, Andrew Intrater, Ivan the Terrible, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Ramzan Kadyrov, Brittany Kaiser (Cambridge Analytica), Mikhail Kalugin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Saak Karapetyan, Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), Denis Katsyv, Irakly Kaveladze, Michael Khodarkovsky, Elena Khusyaynova, Konstantin Kilimnik, Sergey Kislyak, Artem Klyushin (National Compass), Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Konstantin Kosachev, Mikhail Kovalchuk, Yury Kovalchuk, Nikita Khrushchev, Aleksandra Krylova (NYT), Simon Kukes, Sergey Lavrov, Alexander Litvinenko, Howard Lorber, Alexander Lukashenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, Konstantin Malofeev, Simona Mangiante (Papadopoulos), Alexander Mashkevich, Michael McFaul, Viktor Medvedchek, Josef Mifsud, Alexey Miller, Sergei Millian, Semion Mogilevich (Don Semyon) …

 

Cover: KyivPost (10/18/2019): Shady Cast of Characters: Engineers of Trump-Ukraine Scandal http://bit.ly/2MZCilW
 
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Lyudmila Narusova, Sergei Naryshkin, Alexei Navalny, Eduard Nektalov (NYMag), Konstantin Nikolaev, Yevgeniy Nikulin, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Alexander Nix, Isabel Oakeshoff, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Nikolai Patrushev, Sam Patten, Alexander Perepilichny, Dmitry Peskov, Peter the Great, Igor Pisarsky (RIM), Petro Poroshenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Prikhodko, Vladimir Putin, George Ramishvili (Bloomberg), Dmitry Rogozin, Alexander Rovt, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (CNBC), Nastya Rybka (aka Anastasia Vashukevich) (WaPo), Dmitry Rybolovlev, Konstantin Rykov, Mikheil Saakashvili, Felix Sater, Igor Sechin, Leonid Shebarshin, Anastasia Shevchenko (Amnesty Intl), Sergey Shoigu, Viktor Shokin, Oleg Solodukhin, Christopher Steele, Ruslan Stoyanov, Peter Strzok, Sergei Surovikin, Taiwanchik (aka Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), Bill Taylor, Andriy Telizhenko (BuzzFeedNews), Gennady Timchenko, Oleg Tinkov, Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov (aka Taiwanchik), Aleksandr Torshin, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Yulia Tymoshenko, Anastasia Vashukevich (aka Nastya Rybka) (WaPo), Viktor Vekselberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Alexander Vindman, Vyacheslav Volodin, Curt Weldon, Andy Wigmore, Alexander Yakovenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Boris Yeltsin, Ivan Yermakov (Moscow Proj), Marie Yovanovitch, Viktor Yushchenko, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Maria Zakharova, Joel Zamel, Volodymyr Zelenskyy
,
 

By @WendySiegelman
 

Key Documents

 
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 LawfareBlog: Litigation Documents Related to the Mueller Investigation http://bit.ly/2OVch6n
// new November 2018, to be continually updated

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 House.gov: Select Committee to Investigate the JANUARY 6TH Attack on the United States Capitol https://january6th.house.gov

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 JustSecurity: Public Document Clearinghouse: UKRAINE Impeachment Inquiry http://bit.ly/2CEsQ2F ‼️ Links to ALL documents ‼️

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 AmericanOversight: Trump-Ukraine Key Figures and Documents http://bit.ly/2C24bES
AmericanOversight: The Trump Administration’s Contacts with Ukraine http://bit.ly/2BYSY89 from FOIA requests

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 JustSecurity, Andy Wright: Just Security Launches the Russia Investigation Congressional Clearinghouse http://bit.ly/2L21uHz
// 8/22/2019

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 Lawfare: Full Text of the Mueller Report’s Executive Summaries http://bit.ly/2IFLewq
// 4/18/2019

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 Lawfare: Document: The Mueller Report http://bit.ly/2vcgNpN
// 4/18/2019

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Whistle-Blower Complaint: Read the Document [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2nq4FAD
// 9/26/2019

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo: Trump impeachment inquiry: Latest news and updates http://wapo.st/2P09WuE [Continually updated]

🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo, Kate Rabinowitz and Kevin Schaul: Who’s involved in the Trump impeachment inquiry http://wapo.st/2W673dg
// orig published 10/21/2019

 

By @jzikah has a new book! Cartoon President http://amzn.to/2QUeZhk @Jzikah
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 Court Filing (1/17/2019): Civil Action No. 1:18-cv-03501 [pdf] http://cnn.it/2CBddZy (111p) Democratic National Committee v.: Russian Federation, DJ Trump For President, Inc (and others)
// 1/17/2019

⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheAtlantic, Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump http://bit.ly/2FykFIP
//March 2019 cover story

⋙ 💙💙🔄 Politico Mag, Darren Samuelsohn: The Only Impeachment Guide You’ll Ever Need http://politi.co/2QHcJGi
// 1/11/2019, As talk of the I-word heats up, here’s POLITICO Magazine’s soup-to-nuts answers to all your questions about the politics—and the practical realities—of removing a president.

⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo, Max Boot: Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset http://wapo.st/2D7IJQ9
// 1/13/2019
 

By @Jzikah
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheAtlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg (Editor): UNTHINKABLE: 50 Moments That Define an Improbable Presidency http://bit.ly/2RvDFOn
// Jan 2019; Donald Trump’s 50 Most Unthinkable Moments ~ 50 Articles

⋙ 💙💙🔄 Wikipedia: Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2018) http://bit.ly/2Bh12jP

⋙ 💙💙🔄 Axios: Timeline: Every big move in the Mueller investigation http://bit.ly/2Euh3H9
// 12/12/2018
 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Moyers&Co: Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump http://bit.ly/2uVHc9j
// continually updated

⋙ 💙💙🔄📒 DocumentCloud: Steele Dossier [pdf] http://bit.ly/2y5ZhnF 35p

⋙ 💙💙🔄📒 FBIRecordsVault: Records Between FBI and Christopher Steele http://bit.ly/2KqLoF1

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ AP: Mueller Investigation documents http://bit.ly/2ihbK0l

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ CitJourno: Trump/Russian Mob Connections http://www.citjourno.org
 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ CNN, Marshall Cohen, Tal Yellen & Liz Stark: Tracking the Russia investigations (documents) http://cnn.it/2hVCpU5

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Russian Hacking and Influence in the U.S. Election http://nyti.ms/2NqFXeY

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ BrennanCenter: Trump-Russia Investigations http://bit.ly/2yRKcu6

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Politico: The people connected to the Russia probes [ Interactive ] http://politi.co/2FUDhz2 //➔ Democrats, Prosecutors, Law Enforcement/Lobbyists/Media,Team Trump, Foreign Nationals

⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheMoscowProject: Trump’s Russia Cover-Up By the Numbers http://bit.ly/2ycY959
// Center for American Progress; 80+ contacts with Russia-linked operatives https://themoscowproject.org/about/ http://bit.ly/2ycY959
 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NBCNews: Russia timeline: Key players, meetings and investigation details http://nbcnews.to/2vtR3YW

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ DailyBeast: Democrats Release the Fusion GPS Testimony on Trump and Russia http://thebea.st/2qMmH1d w attachment [pdf] ⋙ via Dianne Feinstein http://bit.ly/2FjtlPP

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Justice Department Gives Congress Comey’s Memos on Trump http://nyti.ms/2HdLe2Z
// 4/19/2018 ➔ DocumentCloud: http://bit.ly/2HOGC4z

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ DOJ: Indictment of Internet Research Agency LLC et al … [PDF] http://bit.ly/2CqdHzD 37p //➔ Mueller Investigation
// 2/16/2018
 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Amy Siskind: The Weekly List ~ “This is How Democracy Ends” https://theweeklylist.org

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Mueller Has List of Questions for Trump http://nyti.ms/2rfDuqK + http://nyti.ms/2HExEKi
// 4/30/2018, Majority Relate to if Trump Obstructed Inquiry on Russia

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Trump Lawyers’ Confidential Memo to Mueller, Explained [ Document ] http://nyti.ms/2kKPgq9
// 6/2/2018, NYT article about document: http://nyti.ms/2swIZSc

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ TIME: The Arguments President Trump Has Made Against the Mueller Investigation http://ti.me/2MdeARX
// 6/8/2018

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ TIME: Wikipedia: Links between Trump associates and Russian officials http://bit.ly/2K42VDF

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ WaPo: Who has been charged in the Russia probe and why http://wapo.st/2toNwH2
// continually updated; WaPo Russia page

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ ForeignAffairs Anthology: A New Cold War? Russia and America, Then and Now 1947- http://fam.ag/2KEA4dF

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Justice.gov: Mueller Indictment of 12 Russians in the GRU for Election Hacking [pdf] http://bit.ly/2NbphV6 29p
// 7/13/2018

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ FactCheck.org: Timeline of Russia Investigation http://bit.ly/2KZ4qaQ
// posted 6/7/2018, updated 7/13/2018; Key moments in the FBI probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election; Readable

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Legal Process Server: DNC Lawsuit vs Russia, Wikileaks, et al http://bit.ly/2KIOhBq

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT, Linda Qiu: Truth-Testing Trump’s 250-Plus Attacks on the Russia Inquiry http://nyti.ms/2MY609E
// 8/18/2018

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Justice.gov: Manafort Plea Agreement [pdf] http://bit.ly/2CZiVb7 17p
// 9/14/2018

⋙ 💙💙🔄💽 NYT: Opinion | Operation Infektion: A three-part video series on Russian disinformation http://nyti.ms/2OHqSSV
// 11/12/2018

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ PasteMag, Jacob Weindling: A Year of Trump and Russia: The 75 Stories That Defined the Mueller Investigation in 2018 http://bit.ly/2QWN1SU
// 12/28/2018

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ LawFareBlog: Document: Indictment of Roger Stone [pdf] http://bit.ly/2UdQgmj 24p
// 1/25/2019

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄📋 NYT: Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With Russians Before the Inauguration [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2MAZCps
// 1/26/2019

⋙ 💙💙🔄 BuzzFeedNews: These Secret Files Show How The Trump Moscow Talks Unfolded While Trump Heaped Praise On Putin http://bit.ly/2DWQ2ed
// 2/5/2019; ⏳TIMELINE ⌛️

⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo: What we learned about Trumpworld outreach to Russia since Mueller’s investigation began http://wapo.st/2twkXYE
// 2/19/2019, And what we still don’t know.

⋙ 💙💙🔄 ◕📋 NYT, Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish: Trump Has Publicly Attacked the Russia Investigation More Than 1,100 Times http://nyti.ms/2T2HSsN
// 2/19/2019

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
  ;
⋙ 💙💙🔄 ◕📋 WaPo, Philip Bump: The 81 people and organizations just looped into the Trump probe — and why they were included http://wapo.st/2SJrw41
// 3/4/2019

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Full Document: Trump’s Call With the Ukrainian President [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2lfBkbC (Annotated)
// 9/25/2019″

⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Whistle-Blower Complaint: Read the Document [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2nq4FAD
// 9/26/2019

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ HPSCI: Trump-Ukraine impeachment inquiry report http://bit.ly/2LlnJsX
// 12/3/2019; House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Report: House Judiciary Committee report on their articles of impeachment against President Donald John Trump http://bit.ly/2Ek2rIa 658p
// 10/15/2019

⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Lawfare: House Releases Impeachment Trial Brief http://bit.ly/2ucCo3Y document 111p
// 1/18/2019
 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y

 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Trial Memorandum of the US House of Representatives in the Impeachment Trial of President Donald J Trump http://bit.ly/2uePNsc
// 1/18/2020

 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Trial Memorandum of President Donald J Trump http://bit.ly/2NGi2XK 171p
// 1/20/2020

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Vox, Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Prokop: The ultimate guide to the Donald Trump impeachment saga http://bit.ly/2SoXpkm
// Updated: Feb 5, 2020, 8:06pm EST, Published: Nov 5, 2019, 8:06am EST

 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ NYT: The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped https://tinyurl.com/4w8uekjx
// 8/31/2023

 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ 📀 Press Here For Impeachment Trial on Cspan
// 1/20/2020-2/5/2020

 
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ LawFare: Confronting the Capitol Insurrection [Index Page] http://bit.ly/3mfMDNc

 

⏳WaPo: The full Trump-Ukraine impeachment timeline http://wapo.st/35odsUl

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y

 
⭕ Feb 2021 Second Trump #Impeachment Trial

Day One: Rules etc

Day TWO: C-SPAN: U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial Day 2, Impeachment Managers’ Constitutionality Arguments http://bit.ly/3aa1CCQ
// 2/9/2021;

Day 2 of the impeachment trial of former President Trump for incitement of insurrection began with senators voting 89-11 in favor of the trial organizing resolution. Lead Impeachment Manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) then made opening remarks followed by a 13-minute video showing footage of former President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech and of the actions of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol that day. Afterward, impeachment managers Representatives Raskin, Joe Neguse (D-CO), and David Cicilline (D-RI) presented their arguments for the constitutionality of impeaching a former president. Representative Raskin in his arguments talked about bringing his daughter and son-in-law with him to the Capitol on January 6.

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
Day THREE: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 1 http://bit.ly/374q3zm
// 2/10/2021;

The first part of Day 3 of the impeachment trial of former President Trump for incitement of insurrection began with House impeachment manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) asserting that the former president had “surrendered his role as commander in chief” and become “the inciter in chief.” He played the January 6, 2021, video Mr. Trump posted on Twitter in which he told his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol to “go home.” Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) then outlined impeachment managers’ plan for arguing their case. In the final segment of part 1, Representatives Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) described the former president’s actions leading up to and after the 2020 election

Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 2 http://bit.ly/3tYOS9Y
// The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump continued with House managers presenting video and tweets they say indicate that former President Trump incited the deadly January 6 riot.

Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 3 http://bit.ly/372bYSY
// Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) Entire remarked on the breach of the Capitol and attacks on police officers.

Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 4 http://bit.ly/3aZ82DV
// An effort by Sen. Mike Lee to remove remarks by the House impeachment managers from the official record sparked confusion on the Senate floor.

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
Day FOUR: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Part 1 http://bit.ly/3rXW1pf
// 2/12/2021

Former President Donald Trump’s defense lawyers made their case that Mr. Trump was innocent of charges of inciting an insurrection. They compared speeches by Democrats and others to the former president’s remarks in their defense, and stated that “the article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance.”

Day Four: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Part 2 http://bit.ly/3ddmmeG
// After a recess, Former President Donald Trump’s defense continued to make their case that Mr. Trump was innocent of charges of inciting an insurrection. In this portion of the impeachment trial, attorney Bruce Castor spoke.
Day Four: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Q&A http://bit.ly/3jLkwD0
// In this portion of the second impeachment trial of former President Trump, senators asked questions of both the House managers and Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) then announced that Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman would be receiving the Congressional Gold Medal, due to his actions during the January 6 riots.

Day FIVE: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 5 http://bit.ly/3b2haHL
// 2/13/2021

The Senate acquits former President Trump of inciting an insurrection, 57-43. Earlier, the House managers and the defense made closing arguments. Also, House Manager Raskin (D-MD) read a written statement from Rep. Herrera Beutler (R-WA).

● Majority Leader Schumer on Impeachment Acquittal of Former President Trump http://bit.ly/2OFAT8V
// Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered remarks after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump, 57-43. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict Mr. Trump.
● Minority Leader McConnell on Impeachment Acquittal of Former President Trump http://bit.ly/3djH5NM
// Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered remarks after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump, 57-43. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict Mr. Trump.

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y

 

Twitter Threads

⭕ 9 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 1
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Rep. Raskin’s opening impeachment trial statement: “Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359206921039974406?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Here is the entire video timeline of the January 6 insurrection as presented by the House impeachment managers 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359216739054190593?s=20/photo/1

⭕ 10 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 2
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @jentaub It’s on. Day 2 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 10, 2021. We will have a dinner break at 6 p.m. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359548695038087169?s=20
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @atrupar Raskin: “This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.”
🔄 💙 WaPo: See all the evidence presented in Trump’s impeachment trial http://wapo.st/3qeb1ii

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
 
⭕ 11 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 3
🔄 💙🧵 RT @jentaub 🇺🇸 It’s on. Day 3. The Trial of Donald Trump 2.0 continues at 12:04 p.m. on February 11, 2021 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359911216588685317?s=20
// Defense
🔄 💙🧵 RT @atrupar The Thursday installment of Trump’s #ImpeachmentTrial begins with a Baked Alaska clip 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359914413709492232?s=20

⭕ 12 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 4
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub We have begun. It’s Day 4 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. The defense is putting on their case. The first lawyer is Van Der Veen. 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360274181510807556?s=20

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y

🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, infuse them with the spirit of nonpartisan patriotism” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Trump defense portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360275280775028740?s=20
⋙ 🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar [Q&A] Lindsey Graham, Kevin Cramer, and Roger Marshall use an impeachment trial question to own the libs 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360337066215804930?s=20

⭕ 13 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 5
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub Day 5 of the Donald Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 13, 2021. Wonderful! They are going to debate whether to subpoena witnesses and documents ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360605971198967809?s=20
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, touch and move them to believe that end does not justify the means” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Saturday portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360607971055656962?s=20

 

@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y

 

⚖️ House Committee Hearings on the Jan 6, 2021 Insurrection ⚖️

 
Day 1: June 9, 2022: Overview

 
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol https://january6th.house.gov

 
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Here we go ¤ The first public hearing of the January 6th Committee. Chair Thompson begins with his personal history and says each committee member has one thing in common “we swore the same oath . . to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1535050380429516801?s=20/photo/1

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Bennie Thompson begins January 6 hearing: “I’m from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try to justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1535050790720634891?s=20/photo/1

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: First Open Testimony Before January 6 Committee http://bit.ly/3zynEvU
// After months of closed door investigations, the House January 6 Committee held its first hearing with public testimony about what transpired-and why-during the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

 
Day 2: June 13, 2022: “The Big Lie”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Here we go. Day 2 of the January 6th Committee Hearings gaveled in late at 10:46 am EDT. /1
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1536359652514213888?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar The second January 6 hearing begins with Liz Cheney talking about how Trump listened to advice from “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1536361664601374721?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Second Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/39jgMrH
// The “Big Lie”; The House committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol held its second hearing with witness testimony to make public the committee’s findings after a year of investigations.

 
Day 3: June 16, 2022: “Mike Pence”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Here we go. Day 3 of the January 6 Committee hearing ¤ Focus today is on the pressure campaign on VP Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage” says Chair Bennie Thompson. ¤ “But the danger hasn’t receded.” ¤ 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1537481664821174278?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar The third January 6 hearing gets underway with a clip of Greg Jacob, former counsel to Pence, telling the committee that John Eastman admitted in front of Trump on January 4, 2021, that the pressure campaign against Pence violated the law
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1537483292886601729?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: The House Jan. 6 committee returns today for a third public hearing focused on VP Pence. Follow along as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1537449714676793345?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Third Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3xx77WC President Trump’s Campaign to Influence Vice President Pence
// 6/16/2022; The January 6 Committee held its third public hearing focusing on former President Trump’s efforts to convince former Vice President Pence to not certify the 2020 election results.

 
Day 4: June 21, 2022: “Fake Electors”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Bennie Thompson begins the fourth January 6 hearing by saying: “The lie hasn’t gone away. It’s corrupting our democratic institutions. People who believe that lie are now seeking positions of public trust.”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1539295123107991554?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @kyledcheney NEW: Trump’s plan to seize power on Jan. 6 depended on state legislatures adopting alternate electors. He leaned heavily on state and local officials to do that while his team of lawyers — Eastman et al — developed a fringe legal theory to back the push.
📌 https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1539201863702261760?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Joining @MaryLTrump for today’s January 6 hearing, Live now
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1539289189920948224?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: Day 4 of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s public hearings begins at 1pm ET. Follow along for live updates as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1539262716677918721?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Fourth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3OhikBF President Trump’s Campaign to Influence Vice President Pence
// 6/21/2022; The January 6 Committee held its fourth public hearing to outline findings after a year of investigating the Capitol attack in 2021.

 
Day 5: June 23, 2022: “Department of Justice”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Cheney begins the fifth January 6 committee hearing by saying a focus will be an unsigned draft letter Trump and Jeffrey Clark wanted the DOJ to send to Georgia officials citing known lies to urge them to convene a special session to approve a fake set of electors
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1540050703128862721?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: The fifth public hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee begins at 3pm ET. Follow along as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1540018644121427968?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 😆 RT @emptywheel Spouse, listening to his first bit of the Jan6 hearings, of Liz Cheney’s promise we’ll hear about what Trump did on 1/6: Is that called foreshadowing? ¤ Me, lit PhD: She’s making herself the omniscient narrator.
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1540049823365218306?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Fifth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3tX3gkK
// 6/23/2022; The January 6 Committee holds a fifth public hearing on the alleged pressure campaign by Trump administration officials on the Justice Department to help overturn the 2020 election results.

 
Day 6: June 28, 2022: “Cassidy Hutchinson”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar we’re underway with the special June 28 hearing of the January 6 committee. Yes, Fox News is taking it live.
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1541829781385248771?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: The Jan. 6 committee holds a last-minute public hearing at 1pm ET today, which will include testimony from a former top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Follow along as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1541789726960750593?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Wow! On January 2 Rudy told Cassidy Hutchinson Trump and team were going to the Capitol on the 6th. Cassidy asked her boss about it and he said “There’s a lot going on Cass. Things might get real real bad.” ¤ She said today, “That was the first moment I remember feeling scared.”
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1541834209265963012?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @emptywheel This woman is 26. She’s about to provide really damaging testimony about one of the most dangerous men in America.
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1541829534248566784?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @lrozen J6 hearing starting, featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, former special assistant to Trump and aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows
📌 https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1541829799169122308?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Sixth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3bp657u
// 6/28/2022; Cassidy Hutchinson, former senior aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified that President Trump said, “You know, I don’t even care that they have weapons. They aren’t here to hurt me.” Her testimony came during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is the sixth in a series of hearings – after months of closed-door investigations – detailing the committee findings on the January 6 attack. Ms. Hutchinson shared her experiences of the days leading up to and after the attack, including President Trump’s alleged altercation with Secret Service in the back of the presidential limo because the Secret Service refused the president’s demands to go to the Capitol after his rally speech.

 
Day 7: July 12, 2022: “Assembling the Mob”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Liz Cheney begins the July 12 hearing of the January 6 committee with this: “President Trump is a 76 year old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1546906042927353857?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE: Jan. 6 sCommittee holds seventh public hearing, focused on the role far-right extremist groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers played in Capitol attack. Get expert analysis in real-time on our live blog http://msnbc.com/jan6hearings
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1546903393297465344?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @emptywheel And we’re off! ¤ “We settle our differences at the ballot box.” ¤ [Note: I’m going to break off at 2 to cover some live hearings.]
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1546903190574071808?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Pat Cipollone agreed that Donald Trump should have conceded the election at some point and time (at least, apparently on December 14 when Electoral College met).b
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1546909222935445509?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @ECMcLaughlin Live tweet of today’s January 6th hearing is right here. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/1546902951687467008?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Seventh Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3P2quy5
// 7/12/2022; January 6 Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that former President Trump “tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” and that the matter has been reported to the Justice Department. The revelation came as Rep. Cheney delivered her closing statement during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is the seventh in a series of hearings – after months of closed-door investigations – detailing the committee findings on the January 6 attack. Testifying before the committee was Jason Van Tatenhove, the former spokesperson for the extremist group the Oath Keepers, who said the group is a “violent militia” and “the best illustration for what the Oath Keepers are happened January 6th when we saw that stacked military formation going up the stairs of our Capitol.” Also testifying was Stephen Ayres, who pled guilty to breaching the U.S. Capitol.

 
Day 8: July 21, 2022: “Dereliction of Duty”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Liz Cheney begins the January 6 committee’s primetime July 21 hearing by announcing more hearings are coming in September
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1550272235709296640?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @ECMcLaughlin Livetweet of tonight’s 1/6 hearing will be right here.
⬇️⬇️⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/1550260159783378944?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MollyJongFast Letsssssssss gooooo
📌 https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1550270058752102400?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🔲 RT @MaryLTrump Join me and @JohnFugelsang @NormOrnstein @cmclymer @AdamParkhomenko @jentaub @georgehahn @BrianKarem @WajahatAli watching the hearings NOW
📌 https://twitter.com/MaryLTrump/status/1550272287772798976?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Eighth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack https://tinyurl.com/36ea45sh
// 7/21/2022; “For the weeks between the November election and January 6, Donald Trump was a force to be reckoned with,” said January 6 Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), later adding, “and then he stopped. For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved.” His remarks came as he delivered his opening statement during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is the eighth in a series of public hearings – after months of closed-door investigations – detailing the committee findings on the January 6 attack. The chair went on to say if there is no accountability for January 6th, “I fear that we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy.” During her closing testimony, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) touched on the former president’s supporters, saying, “he is preying on their patriotism. He is preying on their sense of justice. And on January 6th, Donald Trump turned their love of country … ”

 
Day 9: October 13, 2022: “Summary and Subpoena”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Follow this thread for video highlights from what is likely to be the final January 6 committee hearing
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1580603168404037635?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @emptywheel Spouse, as Liz Cheney says they may make criminal referrals: Thank you Liz Cheney, you read my mind. [He had just asked if they could do that.]
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1580606914505080834?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @TomDreisbach [NPR] Here we go: The latest @January6thCmte hearing has started. ¤ NPR’s livestream is available here:
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/TomDreisbach/status/1580605465796304901?s=20/photo/1

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @tomlobianco [YahooNews] “Good afternoon, and may god bless the United States of America,” House Jan 6 Chair Bennie Thompson says in opening statement of #January6thHearings
📌 https://twitter.com/tomlobianco/status/1580605071498174471?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @scottwongDC DAY 9 of the Jan. 6 hearings about to get underway. Follow along on our @NBCNews live blog here for all the updates: https://tinyurl.com/2wf2eyt3
📌 https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1580603641878425602?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 🐣 RT @SethAbramson (📢) LIVE THREAD: This thread is a live-tweet of today’s House January 6 Committee hearing. I’m an attorney, journalist, and historian who has been contacted by the Committee and whose January 6–focused substack, PROOF, the Committee has cited. I hope you will RETWEET and follow.
📌 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1580574750581018626?s=20

 

By @AshaRangappa_

 
Day 9: July 21, 2022: “Summary and Resolution”

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN : Ninth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack https://tinyurl.com/3cb42ubb // 10/13/2022; January 6 Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) offered a resolution to issue a subpoena to hear from former President Trump regarding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She said, “We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion, and every American is entitled to those answers so we can act now to protect our republic.” Her resolution came during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol after committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said members wanted to hear from the former president because he “is required to answer for his actions.” The committee members recounted prior evidence in lockstep with newly-obtained evidence, such as the Secret Service’s knowledge of a planned attack on the U.S. Capitol prior to January 6. They also shared never-before-seen video of members of Congress seeking safety and asking for help during the attack. .

 
Day 10: Dec 19, 2022: “Indictment Referrals and Adjournment”

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar The final January 6 committee hearing is about to begin. Follow along for a video thread.
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1604899834191876096?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @axios The Jan. 6 select committee’s final public meeting is underway.
Follow this thread for updates. 👇
📌 https://twitter.com/axios/status/1604901456091484163?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MacFarlaneNews Standing by for our CBS News special report on the final public meeting of House Select Jan 6 Cmte. And votes on criminal referrals. Starts at 1pm eastern
📌 https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1604897048230187014?s=20

💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Final Hearing on U.S. Capitol Attack https://tinyurl.com/2xt5j77b
// 12/19/2022; The January 6 Committee holds its final public hearing on the attack of the U.S. Capitol.

💙 ⚖️ 📔 This❗️⋙ 📔 Lawfare: Jan. 6 Select Committee Documents https://tinyurl.com/44fxvfjk
⋙ Lawfare: Jan. 6 Select Committee Document: Executive Summary [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/42p4bkx7 154p
⋙ Lawfare: Jan. 6 Committee Issues Final Report https://tinyurl.com/4867dtra 845p
⋙ Lawfare: Jan. 6 Committee Releases Witness Interview Transcripts https://tinyurl.com/43f5k7y6

 

༺ ✿⊰ ♤ ⊱✿༻

 

by @ErikAukan
 

 
💙 🔄 📔 MFA of Ukraine (Official): War in Ukraine: Russia Invaded Ukraine https://war.ukraine.ua
// Reports, statistics, articles

💙 🔄 RealContextNews, Brian Frydenborg: TRUMP-RUSSIA SAGA: Overview https://tinyurl.com/mr2783rc
// updated index; The biggest scandal in American history.

💙 Ukraine Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/157259218?s=20

💙 Ukraine War Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1545071393397784576?s=20

💙 Key War Accounts: @bayraktar_1love @ChuckPfarrer @DefenseU @DefMon3 @NOELReports @TheStudyOfWar @WarintheFuture @warmonitor3 @wartranslated

💙 Tim White’s awesome log: Search @TWMCLtd ✛ “Day 999” or use dates: https://twitter.com/search-advanced
(The War started on 2/24/2022)
 

༺ ✿⊰ ♤ ⊱✿༻

 
⭕ 7 Apr 2026

⭕ 6 Apr 2026

🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline Trump: “I’m polling higher than anybody has ever polled in Venezuela. So after I’m finished with this I can got to Venezuela. I will quickly learn Spanish. It won’t take long. I’m good at language. I will go to Venezuela. I’m going to run for president.”
💽 https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/2041221316989063457?s=20/video/1

🐣 RT @WMX_MEDIA Iran has submitted its response to Pakistan regarding the United States’ proposal for a 45-day ceasefire – Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA)
¤ https://x.com/WMX_MEDIA/status/2041204159006060994?s=20

Iran rejects the temporary ceasefire and demands the following:

– Permanent end to the war on all combat fronts in the Middle East, including Lebanon and Gaza, with guarantees provided.

– Dismantlement of all U.S. bases in the Arabian Gulf.

– Implementation of a new transit protocol that recognizes Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz and allows Iran to collect transit fees.

– Lifting of economic sanctions imposed on Iran.

– Recognition of Iran’s right to peaceful uranium enrichment in accordance with its inalienable right under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the United Nations Charter.

– Payment of compensation for the economic damages it has suffered during the war.

🐣 RT @disclosetv NOW – Trump says that his frustrations with NATO “all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us, and I said, ‘bye bye!'”
💽 https://x.com/disclosetv/status/2041223980787380619?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Oct7NeverForget We will no longer purchase American weapons,” said the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in response to the acting leader of the United States.
¤ https://x.com/Oct7NeverForget/status/2040953908093235652?s=20

Until now, the money flowing into the American military-industrial complex was not just business. It was, in fact, a ritual of loyalty. You weren’t just buying missile systems — you were buying the right to belong.

As of today, it’s over. This is how the Crown Prince responded to the insulting remarks made by the idiot Trump toward him.

⋙ 🐣 RT @NextGenEV For those who missed it, Trump said of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, “He didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass”

🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump claims he was the one who took out Osama bin Laden.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: I had killed Soleimani… I did one other, but this one was not picked up. Osama Bin Laden
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2041219277424824342?s=20/video/1

🐣 📋 RT @DKThomp JPM’s Michael Cembalest: In the ~160 years after the Civil War, US presidents fired 11 four- and five-star military officers. ¤ In Trump’s first 14 months, the White House has fired 9 of them.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DKThomp/status/2041186430974615613?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ @ohryansbelt The New Yorker just dropped a massive investigation into Sam Altman, based on over 100 interviews, the previously undisclosed “Ilya Memos,” and Dario Amodei’s 200+ pages of private notes. It’s the most detailed account yet of the pattern of behavior that led to Sam’s firing and rapid reinstatement at OpenAI. Here’s the breakdown:
¤ https://x.com/ohryansbelt/status/2041151473984123274?s=20
⋙⋙ Source: NewYorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz: Sam Altman May Control Our Future – Can He Be Trusted? https://tinyurl.com/yvuyauzr “New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.”

[…] • A board member described Sam as having “two traits almost never seen in the same person: a strong desire to please people in any given interaction, and almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences of deceiving someone.” Multiple sources independently used the word “sociopathic.”

• OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an IPO at a potential $1 trillion valuation while securing government contracts spanning immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry in war zones.

🐣 RT @atrupar Trump: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2041202382227308761?s=20/video/1

🐣 RT @GBX_Press Former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson:​”Trump is living in a dream world and experiencing hallucinations.” ¤ ​”The symptoms he is experiencing indicate that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia.”

Reuters: Iran rejects ceasefire as deadline nears on Trump ‘hell’ ultimatum https://tinyurl.com/mr49s2b4

🐣 RT @LePapillonBlu2 WOW-WOW-WOW. Professor Jeffrey Sachs confirms that forensic psychiatrists have clinically judged Donald Trump to be a literal psychopath: “This is an unhinged man, who is impulsive, paranoid, psychopathic, and a megalomaniac. This is not the kind of person one wants in the presidency of the United States.”
💽 https://x.com/LePapillonBlu2/status/2040587290620174625?s=20/video/1

🐣 RT @AmericanEthical HUGE: MAGA’s biggest podcaster/Trump ally Candace Owens calls on Congress to REMOVE “Mad King Trump” after his unhinged post threatening Iran and mocking Islam. This is monumental.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AmericanEthical/status/2041060047976099860?s=20/photo/1

Candace Owens: Congress needs to move to have the Mad King Trump removed.

Not only is she calling for him to be impeached, but she’s admitting he’s trying to be a king, and he’s lost his mind — the central message of No Kings isn’t for just the “leftists” anymore.

Candace Owens: All of our lives may depend upon other countries realizing that Trump is deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah.

She’s an insider — she knows his circle inside and out. Better than anyone, she knows it’s a cult. Not “like” a cult. It’s a literally a cult.

But what’s even more shocking is that the queen of “America First” — the top MAGA podcaster in the world — is calling on other countries to ABANDON the man she helped make president.

Candace Owens: We are in uncharted territory. Leaders worldwide need to act accordingly.

Damn right. But it’s amazing hearing it from here.

Every MAGAdiot needs to hear this right now. WAKE UP, like she has.

🐣 RT @ Mollyploofkins MTG on Trump: “He has gone insane…Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/2040831318007701963?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Gr… ® @FmrRep… • 2h g
On Easter morning, this is what President Trump posted.
Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.
I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.
I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.
The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon.
You know who has nuclear weapons?
Israel.
They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it.
Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing.
On Easter, of all days, we as Christians should be reminded that the son of God died and rose from the grave so that we can be forgiven once and for all of our sins. Jesus commanded us to love one another and forgive one another. Even our enemies.
Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.
Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace. Urging the President to make peace.
Not escalating war that is hurting people.
This NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most.
This is not making America great again, this is evil.

🐣 RT @harryjsisson Dr. Vin Gupta, a highly respected medical expert, has reacted to Trump’s insane Easter message amid ongoing questions about his health “The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.” Trump has gone crazy and he’s showing it on the world stage.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/harryjsisson/status/2040923294858125329?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @VinGuptaMD Erratic. ¤ Can’t finish sentences. ¤ Often confused. ¤ Illogical train of thought. ¤ Word finding difficulties.
Developing and worsening gradually over time.
The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.

🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 This Trump statement is completely unhinged. Dangerous. Unsettling. Trump is desperate. Volatile. Republicans in Congress must step in. White House staff must consult Congress.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/mccaffreyr3/status/2041154560551690420?s=20/photo/1
// re: Easter tweet invoking Allah

🐣 RT @maddenifico I agree with renowned historian Timothy Snyder. Trump is going to stage a coup.
¤ https://x.com/maddenifico/status/2040851686621630553?s=20

As Snyder explains, Trump’s proposed 50% defense budget increase should be seen as nothing short of a bribe to secure military loyalty for a coup attempt — and that a staged domestic terror attack is Trump’s best remaining path to nullifying elections.

Pete Hegseth’s recent firing of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George is more evidence that the fascist authoritarian Trump regime is more interested in loyalty than competence. If the 79-year-old pedophile psychopath is to succeed in conning the US Armed Forces into supporting him in overthrowing American democracy and the constitution, his only chance is to have quislings and sycophants throughout the top brass in the military.

🐣 RT @realtrumpstein 🚨 NO, this is not a joke ¤ A Christian pastor, during Easter at the White House, says that God created Trump to kill Iranian Muslims for the good of the people of Israel…
💽 https://x.com/realtrumpstein/status/2041028998533190099?s=20/video/1
// the pastor is Franklin Graham

🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski At 12:57 AM, Trump wants the Supreme Court to strip millions of Americans of their citizenship while basing their decision on the constitutional precedent of a Mark Levin episode.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2041097046170456451?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump It’s too bad that the Supreme Court can’t watch and study the Mark Levin Show tonight on the Birthright Citizenship Scam. If they saw it they would never allow that money making HOAX to continue. THEY SHOULD USE THEIR POWERS OF COMMON SENSE FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY. They failed miserably on Tariffs, needlessly costing the USA Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in potential rebates for the benefit haters and scammers. Why??? Don’t do it again! The Country can only withstand so many bad decisions from a Court that just doesn’t seem to care.

⭕ 5 Apr 2026 ✝

🐣 RT @ksadjadpour 1 The defining deliberations of this war aren’t between the US and Iran, but Trump and himself. He’s vacillated between walking away and promising to bomb Iran to the Stone Age. Iran has been consistent: Its ideology is resistance, its strategy is chaos, its endgame is survival.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ksadjadpour 13 Trump wants a quick deal. The regime, for both ideological and structural reasons, cannot make one. So long as the Islamic Republic rules Iran the inevitable outcome is a return to the cold war that predates this conflict and will likely outlast it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ksadjadpour 14 Wars, like revolutions, are judged by the political orders they build, not by what they destroy. Trump is measuring this war by what he has destroyed. History will judge it by its lasting impact on Iran, the Middle East, and the broader global order.

NYT, Edward Wong: Trump Revels in Threats to Commit War Crimes in Iran https://tinyurl.com/3euxjfav “I don’t need international law,” Trump said in January. When asked whether there was any limit on his global powers, he said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality.”
// The president said he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” Until this administration, American leaders had insisted they were trying to follow international law in war.

The American president has been unambiguous in his disdain for international law. In a two-hour Oval Office interview in January with The New York Times, Mr. Trump declared, “I don’t need international law.” When asked whether there was any limit on his global powers, he said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality.”

🐣 RT @ksadjadpour 1 The defining deliberations of this war aren’t between the US and Iran, but Trump and himself. He’s vacillated between walking away and promising to bomb Iran to the Stone Age. Iran has been consistent: Its ideology is resistance, its strategy is chaos, its endgame is survival.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ksadjadpour 13 Trump wants a quick deal. The regime, for both ideological and structural reasons, cannot make one. So long as the Islamic Republic rules Iran the inevitable outcome is a return to the cold war that predates this conflict and will likely outlast it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ksadjadpour 14 Wars, like revolutions, are judged by the political orders they build, not by what they destroy. Trump is measuring this war by what he has destroyed. History will judge it by its lasting impact on Iran, the Middle East, and the broader global order.

WaPo: Trump threatens Iran with ‘Hell’ over Strait of Hormuz in profane post https://tinyurl.com/475cfn5z “Trump escalated threats against Iran’s power plants, bridges and other infrastructure in an expletive-laden post … on Easter morning.” //➔ and mocked the Prophet

President Donald Trump escalated his threats to target Iran’s infrastructure if it does not open up the Strait of Hormuz, warning the country will be “living in Hell” in an expletive-filled message on social media Sunday. He later suggested that the United States could target “every power plant” in the country — an attack that experts warned could amount to war crimes.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

The profane threat, which landed Easter morning a few hours after Pope Leo XIV issued a call for nations to choose peace, underscores tensions as there is little sign Tehran and Washington are close to striking a deal to open the vital shipping route that Iran has effectively closed since the attacks began about five weeks ago. Gas prices have risen sharply as Iran limits the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, ramping up the political pressure on Trump to end the conflict he started — and Sunday’s threat heightens earlier warnings that he plans to inflict severe damage if there is no movement.

Trump’s warning also sowed more whiplash for allies after a week of mixed messages about his plans for the strait. The president, who has previously called on other countries to help open the waterway, suggested in recent days that the U.S. is not responsible for reopening it: “What happens in the strait, we’re not going to have anything to do with,” he told reporters Tuesday. He has also urged allies reliant on oil that passes through the strait to “build up some delayed courage” and “just TAKE IT.”

At an address to the country Wednesday, Trump did not list reopening the strait as one of the United States’ core objectives. He said the U.S. would hit Iran “extremely hard” over the next two or three weeks and assessed that the strait would open up “naturally” after the war ends.

But even after the assassinations of senior Iranian leaders by Israel and the U.S., Iran’s remaining leaders have been emboldened in their efforts to inflict further economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations.

About 20 percent of global oil supplies pass through the Strait of Hormuz each year, and the International Energy Agency in Paris has called Iran’s clampdown the largest energy shock in history. In the U.S., the price of gas surpassed $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 and is about 25 percent higher than it was a month ago, according to data from AAA.

Trump on Sunday told the Wall Street Journal that if Iran does not reopen the strait by Tuesday evening, “they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country.”

Human rights experts have warned that attacking civilian infrastructure would violate international law on armed conflict. Power grids, as well as water facilities and bridges, are possible examples of “dual use” infrastructure, which civilians use but which the military may also rely on for operations. While international law restricts militaries from attacking these sites in many cases, the U.S. has increasingly targeted them since the Gulf War, experts note.

Power plants and bridges could either be lawful military targets or civilian objects under the law of war, depending on the facts on the ground, said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department.

“A threat to attack all bridges or power plants or to attack them without distinguishing between lawful and unlawful targets would be a threat to commit war crimes,” said Finucane, now a senior adviser for the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group.

Brett McGurk, a former senior national security official under several presidents, including Trump, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump’s latest Truth Social threat appeared to be an effort to “escalate to try to get a deal.” But McGurk said he was skeptical it would achieve that.

“The president in his national address the other night suggested the Strait of Hormuz is not an objective for us,” McGurk said, and now, he is suggesting it is. “It’s just kind of shifting objectives in terms of what exactly we’re trying to achieve here.”

Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” said that the conflict in Iran was inevitable — and that Trump was intervening to stop Iran from being able to “project force against the United States and our allies.” Asked if the Strait of Hormuz can be opened without putting U.S. troops on the ground, Turner said he doesn’t think ground troops are going to be necessary.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said on “This Week” that “there is no circumstance where U.S. ground troops should be sent over to the Middle East” and called the conflict a “reckless war of choice without any plan, any strategic objectives and no clear exit strategy.”

“This war is already deeply unpopular, for obvious reasons amongst the American people,” he said. “The American people are not going to accept ground troops being put into harm’s way in this war of choice, when there’s no clear evidence that it actually is designed to improve our national security interests.

💙 TheAtlantic, Shane Harris: The Real Intelligence Failure in Iran https://tinyurl.com/bdvwxshn “A costly quagmire was predictable. Trump went to war anyway.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2041004367092887668?s=20/photo/1
// Trump ignored the warnings

The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success. […]
v
The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone.

⭕ 4 Apr 2026

🐣 RT @StratcomCentre Ronald Reagan in 1988 reminds the world that NATO’s 1949 founding was a direct response to Moscow discarding their sworn promise to allow freedom among Eastern European nations.
💽 https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2040447694045409606?s=20/video/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @BrendaWeese Text of exerpted speech above:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BrendaWeese/status/2040468380000432254?s=20/photo/1

RONALD REAGAN – EXCERPT FROM A 1988 SPEECH
But the Soviet effort to split the alliance failed. The allies refused to be intimidated and went ahead with the deployments as planned. The result: the historic treaty signed last December that for the first time eliminates an entire class of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles. Let me say one thing about the treaty. It is not based on trust. We can’t forget that the reason – the very reason – for NATO was the Soviet’s aggressive expansionism in Eastern Europe and abrogation of their sworn commitments under the Yalta Agreement.

🐣 RT @europa 🇺🇸🇮🇷 Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the US military archdiocese, says the Iran war “does not meet just war criteria” and is therefore not morally justified.
¤ https://x.com/europa/status/2040389920825475128?s=20

Broglio warned Catholic troops they are not bound to obey every order in such a conflict, advising them to “do as little harm as possible” and protect innocent lives. He noted US law allows objection to war in general, not specific conflicts.

Broglio also called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Jesus to justify the war “problematic,” saying it is “hard to cast this war as something sponsored by the Lord.”

🐣 RT @SenSanders Trump’s obscene budget.
¤ https://x.com/SenSanders/status/2040504544119931145?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SenSanders Last year, while the billionaire class became much richer as the working class struggled to survive, Trump gave a $1 trillion tax break to the 1% and paid for it by throwing 15 million Americans off the health care they desperately need.

This year, while Trump and Netanyahu started a war in Iran, the president wants to increase military spending by $500 billion and pay for that war by reducing funding for childcare, health care, affordable housing and other domestic needs.

This is what Trump’s agenda is all about: making himself and his fellow oligarchs even richer, while decimating programs that working families, the elderly and the children rely on.

That is an obscene set of priorities. Congress must reject this proposal and pass a budget that works for all of us, not just the 1%.

🐣 RT @cindikg161 Boom 💥
[TextLink:] https://x.com/cindikg161/status/2040212446841831911?s=20/photo/1

I have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War, the Turmoil of 1968, Watergate, the Hostage Crisis, two oil crisis, disco, Reaganomics, 9/11.

The covid pandemic….

These past 11 months have been easily the most miserable era in America in my lifetime.

The hatred, the bigotry, the lies, the racketeering and pedophilia are beyond anything I have ever seen.

We are not going to hell as a nation.
We are IN Hell.

⋙ 🐣 “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” — Shakespeare

🐣 RT @cwebbonline Threatening hell in 48 hours… then “glory be to God.” ¤ This timeline is insane.
¤ https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/2040437290896621598?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP

⭕ 3 Apr 2026

TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Hegseth’s War on America’s Military https://tinyurl.com/2dvzxj8y “The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, which may be escalating beyond US control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy.”
// orig.: “The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, a conflict that may be escalating beyond American control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy”

WaPo, Max Boot: Hegseth’s firing of a top general is the latest sign of Pentagon turmoil https://tinyurl.com/3aytcr7c “The defense secretary is better at waging culture wars than the Iran war.”

NYT: Hegseth Says U.S. Troops Are Fighting for Jesus. The Pope Disagrees. https://tinyurl.com/2tpvx9wy “In sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s calls for Christian prayers for the war effort, Pope Leo XIV says military domination is ‘entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.’”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2040187674527498258?s=20/photo/1

“We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared,” the pope said in a homily during a Holy Thursday rite at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the bishop of Rome. “God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.”
^
In late March the pope warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

⭕ 2 Apr 2026

WSJ, Bernie Sanders: AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear https://tinyurl.com/mryhrk5b lIt kills jobs, equality, connection, democracy and maybe the human race. Congress must act.”
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2040683430799679961?s=20

WSJ, Kimberly Strassel: At the Supreme Court, Trump Courts Defeat https://tinyurl.com/44kcnsk3 “There he sat in the public gallery, Don Corleone-esque, daring the Supreme Court to find fault with his read on birthright citizenship. All that was missing was a horse’s head”
// Why would he show up and antagonize the justices? He has an able team of lawyers.

🐣 RT @Acyn CNN: Sources are telling us that recent U.S. Intelligence assessments found roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and that thousands of one way attack drones are still in Iran’s arsenal tonight. That’s despite daily U.S. And Israeli airstrikes.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2039880894648127653?s=20/video/1

TheAtlantic: An Army Shake-Up in the Middle of a War https://tinyurl.com/tfd47zje “Hegseth’s pace of firings across the military is greater than that of any other Pentagon chief in the modern era, including during two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2039894595245425025?s=20/photo/1
// A general is ousted and the Army secretary is in jeopardy, sources say.

Hegseth’s pace of firings across the military is greater than that of any other Pentagon chief in the modern era, including during two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
v
Since Hegseth’s arrival, the Pentagon has abruptly removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the highest-ranking military officer), the top admiral of the U.S. Navy, and the No. 2 general at the Air Force, along with dozens of top-ranking officers and military lawyers across the services. The defense chief has not provided any detailed reasons for the departures. The Hegseth spokesperson Sean Parnell, in a statement, confirmed a CBS News report of George’s departure as “effective immediately.”

🐣 RT @EthanLevins2 He wasn’t willing to send the army into an Iranian ground invasion. ¤ Our generals know it’s suicide.
⋙ 🐣 RT @clashreport BREAKING: Hegseth has asked U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to step down and retire immediately. ¤ Source: CBS

🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Ukraine produced 4 million drones in 2025, more than all of NATO combined. Target for 2026: 7 million ¤ The Pentagon is now buying Ukrainian drones because no American manufacturer can compete
⋙ EuromaidanPress: The West has the luxury of studying how modern warfare works. But no American drone manufacturer can match what Kyiv built under fire https://tinyurl.com/45vh49a6
The Pentagon just concluded no American manufacturer can match what Ukraine learned the hard way

🐣 RT @ DropSiteNews 💢 The Pentagon appears to be systematically undercounting U.S. casualties in the Iran war, The Intercept reported Wednesday, citing a defense official who called it a “casualty cover-up.”
¤ https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2039849726963544101?s=20

An Intercept analysis found at least 15 U.S. troops killed and more than 520 wounded since Operation Epic Fury began — figures CENTCOM has repeatedly failed to update or clarify. The tally does not include more than 200 sailors injured in a fire aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford.

Iranian strikes have also forced U.S. troops to abandon bases across the region for hotels and office buildings, according to two government officials. “Why didn’t Hegseth protect them?” the defense official said. “Anyone with a brain knew these attacks were coming.” ¤ Full story below ⬇️

⋙ 🐣 RT @theintercept Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or injured in the region since the U.S. launched a war on Iran just over a month ago. CENTCOM has sent outdated statements on casualty numbers. https://interc.pt/4cm5Ua4
.¤ https://x.com/theintercept/status/2039708997230432416?s=20

🐣 RT @APUkraine In March, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy held 23 international meetings and 15 phone calls, paid visits to Romania, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan, and hosted leaders of partner countries and their government ministers in …
¤ https://x.com/APUkraine/status/2039714501444985046?s=20

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Firing the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war is always a sign that things are going great
⋙ 🐣 RT @JenniferJJacobs Scoop: @SecWar Pete Hegseth has asked Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to step down and take immediate retirement, sources familiar with the decision told @CBSNews.

🐣 RT @NBCNews BREAKING: President Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, a senior administration official and a source familiar with the matter tell NBC News. http://nbcnews.app.link/sBqCH6jZ01b

🐣 RT @Alihashem American-Israeli attack on the Pasteur Institute in Tehran, a century-old health research center and a member of the international Pasteur network. Since 1920, this institute has been one of the pioneers and major hubs of vaccine production in the region.
🖼 https://x.com/Alihashem/status/2039689717612978229?s=20/photo/1

TheAtlantic, Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler’s Edifice Complex https://tinyurl.com/5t2ncvkv “He was obsessed with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich Chancellery, part of his grandiose architectural ambitions for the nation’s capital” //➔ also, the entire city of Linz!

🐣 RT @ @SkylineReport 🚨 BREAKING: Architects Rip Trump’s $400M White House Ballroom as “Vanity Project” with Basic Design Failures ¤ March 29, 2026 | 6:30 PM CDT
¤ https://x.com/SkylineReport/status/2038401477820194875?s=20/photo/1

Trump’s proposed White House ballroom is getting torched by architects after new renderings revealed something almost impressive in its incompetence: a massive, $400M building that doesn’t function properly on paper.

According to The New York Times, the 90,000 sq. ft. ballroom—nearly double the size of the White House residence—has barely undergone meaningful scrutiny despite its scale and cost.

What they found is… not subtle:

* Stairs that go nowhere
* Columns blocking sightlines inside the ballroom
* Fake windows
* A bloated, disproportionate portico
* A layout that doesn’t logically connect

This isn’t “bold design.”

This is Architecture 101 getting its ass kicked.
Architectural critics say the project mimics classical style without understanding it. Translation: columns and symmetry slapped on like stage props with no structural logic behind them.

One critic described it as the “phantom of modernization”—a building that looks important but collapses under basic design scrutiny.

Meanwhile, public reaction is brutal: ~98% of 32,000 comments oppose the project.

And somehow, this thing is still moving forward—with reports that Trump was still changing core specs late in the process, including increasing capacity long after that phase should’ve been locked.

Which explains a lot.

What this actually is: ¤ Not modernization. ¤ Not infrastructure. ¤ It’s a $400 million branding exercise pretending to be architecture.

A giant, taxpayer-adjacent monument to the idea that if you make something big enough, people won’t notice it doesn’t work.

Except… they did.

References
[1] Architectural Record (2026) “The White House Ballroom and the Phantom of Modernization” https://tinyurl.com/5dzey6w6
[2] The New York Times (Mar 29, 2026) “Trump’s White House Ballroom Draws Criticism Over Design Flaws” https://tinyurl.com/2ta3crmp
[3] Yahoo News (2026) “Stairs That Lead Nowhere? Trump White House Ballroom Criticized” https://tinyurl.com/mv845z86
[4] Architectural Record (@ArchRecord) (2026) “Phantom of modernization” critique
🖼 https://x.com/ArchRecord/status/2035446451803705376
[5] The Daily Beast (2025) “Trump East Wing Ballroom Trashed Over ‘Humiliating Design Flaws’” https://tinyurl.com/349htbbr
[6] The New York Times (Oct 21, 2025) “Architects Raise Concerns Over Trump Ballroom Design Review Process” https://tinyurl.com/kz2ewewk

🐣 RT @oonahathaway Over 100 international lawyers (including me) warn that U.S. strikes on Iran violate the UN Charter and may be war crimes.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/oonahathaway/status/2039668836958425406?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @JohnJHarwood “the president’s thinking” is idiotic. ¤ NATO in fact came to the defense of the United States under Article 5 after we were attacked on 9/11. ¤ this is a war launched by the United States, to the detriment of the United States, NATO and the rest of the world.

⭕ 1 Apr 2026 🤡

Politico [EU]: Trump’s rage at NATO allies is binding them together —against him https://tinyurl.com/39zxnkx2 “Leaders and defense officials have started hedging against the risk America will pull out of NATO, the bedrock of European security since 1949.”

🔄 🐣 RT @atrupar Trump: “The US can’t take of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We’re fighting wars. Medicaid, Medicare — they can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. But all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2039474762334851402?s=20/video/1

TheAtlantic, Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s Absurd Citizenship Arguments Went Nowhere https://tinyurl.com/2h7xwesd “The fact that this case got as far as it did—and that the justices had to consider it seriously enough to spend their time rebuking it—is itself a scandal.”
// The scandal is that the case got this far.

Bloomberg: Can Trump Really Pull the US Out of NATO? https://tinyurl.com/mw3dahh9 No, there are laws, including one sponsored by Marco Rubio in 2023 that requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate. This is an exceptionally high bar. There are other limits as well.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2039592679403593765?s=20/photo/1

Is pulling out of NATO really an option for the US?
Legally, Trump has limited options. A law passed in 2023 (which was championed by then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state) prevents a US president from suspending, terminating or denouncing the NATO treaty or withdrawing the US from it unless the Senate agrees by a two-thirds majority or Congress passes a new law. Neither of those are possibilities, as Republicans who favor the alliance will likely side with Democrats to circumvent any action Trump might urge Congress to take. …
^
The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act puts some constraints on the president’s ability to undermine NATO. The law requires that certain conditions are met before the US can reduce its force presence in Europe below 76,000 for longer than 45 days: the secretary of defense must certify to Congress that the move is in the national security interest and the US must consult NATO allies.

The law also blocks any attempt to remove a US officer from the role of NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and it prohibits the use of federal funds to facilitate a withdrawal from the NATO treaty without congressional approval. However, Trump has managed already to re-route funding to agencies or for military operations without congressional approval, and he could re-assign troops without formally withdrawing them.

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute Many on the right see Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as a model. In fact, it is a cautionary tale of unrestrained executive power and crony capitalism, the Cato Institute’s @johanknorberg concludes in his latest analysis. [link:] https://ow.ly/pT9j50YBS67

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom He has managed to make Palm Sunday about himself
⋙ 🐣 RT @HQNewsNow Trump: On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as crowds welcomed him with praise honoring him as king. They call me king now. Can you believe it?
💽 https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/2039488228198093197?s=20/video/1

WSJ: What Iran’s Control of the Strait of Hormuz Means for the Global Economy https://tinyurl.com/mpb2nnes “Beyond oil markets, abandoning the Strait of Hormuz would represent a historic downgrade of the ability of the U.S. to project power”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2039496212433268749?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @RoshanKrRaii This is Scandalous 😳
US 🇺🇸 Senator Chris Coons : Iranian 🇮🇷 leader Ali Larijani was getting close to the US for negotiations, that scared Netanyahu and Israel 🇮🇱 assassinated him. 🤯
Netanyahu just for his bloodlust literally stretched the war and put the world into chaos, he needs to be arrested and tried for war crimes.
💽 https://x.com/RoshanKrRaii/status/2039441912126738536?s=20/video/1

🐣 RT @clashreport Trump: The United States can’t take care of daycare.
We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars.
It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.
💽 https://x.com/clashreport/status/2039484446693335203?s=20/video/1
⋙ 🐣 YELLING 🔊 the quiet part out loud

🐣 RT @mehdirhasan President of Iran out with a message to the American people prior to the American president giving his
⋙ 🐣 RT @drpezeshkian To the people of the United States of America
[TextLink:] https://x.com/drpezeshkian/status/2039418009052119190?s=20/photo/1 -4

🐣 RT @Jvnior 🚨 BREAKING: Netanyahu goes off script and accidentally reveals that he started the war on Iran in order to transform Israel into a ‘supernation.’¤ WHO THE HELL SUPPORTS THIS PSYCOPATH?
💽 https://x.com/Jvnior/status/2039065970002522172?s=20/photo/1

NYT, Thomas Friedman: Trump Has a Way Out of the War https://tinyurl.com/4455aavk “Trump is a man-child playing with matches — the world’s most powerful military — in a gas-filled room.”

We are watching what happens when you put into the Oval Office an impulsive, unstable man who ran for president largely to get revenge on his political foes. Then he surrounded himself with a cabinet chosen for its handsome looks and its willingness to put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. Add to that Republican majorities in the House and Senate willing to write him blank checks, and it all eventually leads to sloppy, undisciplined decision-making, including starting a huge war in the Middle East with no plan for the morning after.

TheAtlantic, Nancy Youssef: No Good Way Out https://tinyurl.com/3rrrj8pa “Trump has options to end the war with Iran, but they all come with serious liabilities.”

⭕ 31 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @shanaka86 JUST IN: Marco Rubio just said NATO might be a “one-way street.” The Secretary of State of the country that founded the alliance, funded it, commanded it, and expanded it from 12 members to 32 just questioned whether it still serves American interests. He was not speaking hypothetically. He was responding to the fact that three NATO allies refused to let American aircraft use their airspace to conduct a war those allies were never consulted about. …
⋙ 🐣 Technically, the US cannot leave NATO without a vote of 2/3 of the Senate, a very high bar. There is no chance the Senate would approve. ¤ In addition, no funds can be spent on such a move. ¤ This is in the Defense Authorization Act of 2024.
⋙ 🐣 Nations are refusing overflights and base access out of moral concerns. They don’t want to be complicit in Israel’s crimes. ¤ Similarly, not all countries joined in our invasion of Iraq. The ones who fought with us were called “The Coalition of the Willing.”

🐣 RT @ RnaudBertrand For people who say it couldn’t be predicted that the Iran war would be this consequential for the global economy, watch this 2012 video of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski 👇
💽 https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2039168486103285865?s=20/photo/1

He predicts what did in fact happen: “[Iran] can hurt us a lot… Can you imagine what the consequences would be for us if […] Iraq was massively destabilized, if Bahrain was set on fire, if the North-Eastern oil fields in Saudi Arabia were attacked… The consequences, the costs would be cumulative… The global economy would be affected so we’re playing with fire here.” …

🐣 RT @@TheMaineWonk 🚨 BREAKING: IRAN SLAMS THE DOOR ON US TALKS — “NO NEGOTIATIONS” AS WAR ESCALATES – @Bloomberg ¤ Iran’s FM Araghchi says what is happening between Iran and the US are not negotiations. [BB link:] https://tinyurl.com/mryeuzef
¤ https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2039125688075346392?s=20

Diplomatic hopes are collapsing. With no reply to Washington’s plan and fighting still raging, this war shows zero signs of ending anytime soon.

From Bloomberg:
1. Araghchi confirms he is receiving messages from US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff
2. Message exchanges are happening within a “defined” framework across government and under the supervision of Iran’s national security council
3. Iran has NOT sent a response to the US 15-point proposal
4. Araghchi says Iran has not made any decisions regarding negotiations but has some remarks and Iran’s conditions are “clear”

🐣 RT @TheBushCenter “Ukraine is fast becoming one of the most important defense innovation environments in the democratic world and an emerging pillar of the allied industrial base that is now helping defend against Iran.” Read more from Volodymyr Berezhniy and Igor Khrestin, Senior Adviser, Global Policy at the Bush Institute
⋙ TheHill: US should formally partner with Ukraine to build cutting-edge defense technologies https://tinyurl.com/yuv6sw9x “Ukraine is fast becoming one of the most important defense innovation environments in the democratic world ”
// Volodymyr Berezhniy is a Ukraine-born entrepreneur focused on critical materials, strategic industries, and trusted international networks. Igor Khrestin is senior advisor for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute and visiting fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University.

🐣 RT @AJEnglish “We don’t see honesty.” ¤ Iran’s FM Abbas Araghchi tells Al Jazeera that his country does not see any reason to trust the US at the moment.

NYT: Judge rules Trump unlawfully revoked status of migrants who used entry app https://tinyurl.com/kabsjh6y Trump had ordered many as 900,000 immigrants who had used the app (set up under Biden) to leave ‘immediately’ without the requisite legal review.
// In a 25-page opinion, Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to reverse course, after it last April instructed as many as 900,000 migrants who had used the app to leave “immediately.”

NYT: Trump’s executive order on NPR and PBS ruled unlawful on 1st Amendment grounds https://tinyurl.com/2vcfv279 “It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like,” Judge Randolph D Moss wrote.
// Obama appointee

NYT: A federal judge orders construction stopped on Trump’s ballroom project. https://tinyurl.com/2en5799t Judge Richard J. Leon, an appointee of President George W Bush ruled that Congressional approval is required. The plaintiff is the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @AJENews BREAKING: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says on Tuesday that Iran has the ‘necessary will’ to end the war with Israel and the US but is seeking guarantees the conflict will not be repeated, according to AFP.

🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar Ukraine’s operational and strategic ability to inflict mounting costs on Russia is generating increasing anxiety in the Russian ultranationalist information space.
¤ https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2038990569033117941?s=20

A prominent Russian ultranationalist military and political commentator claimed that Western economic potential is “orders of magnitude” larger than Russia’s. The commentator claimed that Russia must either agree to a “shameful peace” or decisively defeat Ukraine through a strategic offensive. The commentator’s statements come on the backdrop of recent successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian Baltic Sea oil infrastructure, which are generating tangible impacts on the Russian economy.

The commentator claimed that Western economic potential is “orders of magnitude” larger than Russia’s and is becoming militarily evident as “Western-backed” Ukrainian drone strikes against Russia have increasingly involved hundreds of drones.[1] The commentator claimed that the size of such strikes will only increase, and that Russia cannot produce enough interceptor missiles to compete with Western economic potential and is thus “doomed to defeat” and forced to immediately “solve the problem of ending the war.” The commentator claimed that Russia must either agree to a “shameful peace” or decisively defeat Ukraine through a strategic offensive, but that the Russian leadership is not politically ready to conduct such an offensive, and is therefore already working toward a “shameful peace.” The commentator’s statements come on the backdrop of recent successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian Baltic Sea oil infrastructure, which are generating tangible impacts on the Russian economy. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on March 30 that Ukrainian strikes against Russian Baltic Sea ports that began on March 24 have halted a significant portion of Russian oil exports, including from Russia’s largest crude oil exporting port on the Baltic Sea at Primorsk.[2]

🐣 RT @@ZelenskyyUa [to Bucha Summit] Bucha endured 33 days of Russian occupation. Terror, torture, 33 days of total evil. More than 600 Ukrainian men and women were killed.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2038996241460138160?s=20/photo/1

Very often, the images from Bucha are compared to the horrific scenes of World War II. But there is a major difference – and today it does not reflect well on current world leaders. Because Nazism was punished for its crimes, not granted partial sanctions relief. No crisis or destabilization in the world can justify this.

We must not forget or dismiss everything Ukraine has endured during this time. The catastrophe of every city and village into which Russia has brought its war and death. Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka. Mariupol, Yahidne, Avdiivka. Olenivka, Vuhledar, Chasiv Yar – and many others. From the first Bucha Summit until today, this list has only grown.

This means one thing: we need far more determination, far more pressure on Putin and Russia, and far more real actions and steps that bring the victory of peace and justice closer.

TheAtlantic, Jonathan Chait: Trump Can’t Scare Iran and Reassure Oil Markets at the Same Time https://tinyurl.com/347s54de “The president issues new and more terrible threats against Tehran, then backs off with soothing praise. He has now begun to do these things simultaneously”
// But he’s trying.

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom It took a almost a century for the United States to build a global system of trade, security, and cooperation, and these guys are going to throw it away because they screwed up and have to save face.

‼️‼️ 🐣 RT @Nick_Delehanty Tankers carrying diesel [from 🇺🇸] to Europe have changed course. ¤ Several tankers carrying diesel from the US to Europe have changed course mid-Atlantic.
¤ ◕ https://x.com/Nick_Delehanty/status/2038906427368943783?s=20 /photo/1 -2

The Aliai, Minerva Vaso and Grand Ace6 all loaded in the US and were initially bound for Europe, with destinations including Amsterdam and Gibraltar.

Their routes have since shifted. The Grand Ace6 is now signaling Lomé in Togo, while the Minerva Vaso is listed “for orders,” indicating no fixed destination as traders wait for better pricing. The Aliai has also diverted southeast, away from its original European route.

The Atlantic is now a “floating market.

Europe diesel shortages will cause collapse of industry.

🐣 RT @WalshFreedom The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] @realDonaldTrump All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT

WaPo, Jim Geraghty: Trump shrugs off an attack on US lives. The reason has a name. https://tinyurl.com/747fhdcp He simply “is just not bothered by anything Vladimir Putin does.” //➔ Trump stands to make $Bs if he can muscle Zelensky into giving up Donbas. ⬇️

On Friday, the Iranians destroyed a U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The drone and missile attack on the base also injured 12 U.S. soldiers.

This was foreseeable — and in fact foreseen. Yet if President Donald Trump was concerned about this predicted threat, he hid it well.

The loss of the aircraft is a significant headache for the U.S. war effort. The E-3 Sentry is an airborne warning and control system, or AWACS; sometimes the plane is described as a flying air traffic control tower. …

Now, perhaps the Iranians just got lucky with the shot that destroyed the E-3 Sentry in Saudi Arabia. But since the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, numerous reports have indicated that the Russians are helping Iran with their targeting of U.S. forces.

On March 6, The Post reported that “Russia has passed Iran the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft,” citing three officials familiar with the intelligence. One of the sources described the Russian assistance as “a pretty comprehensive effort.” CNN’s reporters found the same, adding, “Much of the intelligence Russia has shared with Iran has been imagery from Moscow’s sophisticated constellation of overhead satellites.” Journalists from NBC News and PBS reported this, too.

Last Thursday — a day before the destruction of the Sentry plane — French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot declared, “There are reasons to believe that Russia is now supporting Iran’s military efforts, which appear to be directed in particular at American targets.” On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed some of his nation’s intelligence to the world: “U.S. military facilities in the Middle East and the Gulf region were photographed by Russian satellites in the interests of Iran. … On March 25th, they took pictures of the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.” That was two days before the strike that destroyed the Sentry.

It’s one thing to fire a missile or drone and aim for an air base on a 250-square mile complex in Saudi Arabia, 50 miles southeast of Riyadh, and hope you hit something valuable. It’s another to score a direct hit on one of the most valuable U.S. planes in the fleet, within that air base. Knowing how much the Russians are helping, it gets more difficult to believe the Iranians just had an amazing stroke of luck. …

We’ve seen the president get apoplectically angry over the late film director Rob Reiner and the late FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, and basically anyone who’s ever uttered a critical word of him.

But when he gets asked about Russia helping the Iranians target American servicemen and women, he responds with a metaphorical shrug. “They do it and we do it.”

The conspiracy theories about Trump being blackmailed by the Russians are actually somewhat sympathetic to him. People can at least imagine knuckling under to a sufficiently dire blackmail attempt. The alternative is that the president just isn’t all that bothered by anything Putin does, up to and including attempts to kill Americans.

⋙ 🔄 Axios (11/20/2025): Trump’s full 28-point Ukraine-Russia peace plan https://tinyurl.com/cntrwpr7 [Excerpts:]
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038963782811082793?s=20/photo/1

13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:
The lifting of sanctions will be discussed and agreed upon in stages and on a case-by-case basis.
The United States will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.
Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8.

14. Frozen funds will be used as follows:
$100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine;
The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture. Europe will add $100 billion to increase the amount of investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Frozen European funds will be unfrozen. The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.

15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss 🇺🇦🇷🇺 President Zelensky rejects Trump’s capitulation tantrums
¤ https://x.com/WW3finalboss/status/2038892293264965643?s=20

“Ukraine’s east and its defense lines are core to any security guarantees.” – Volodymyr Zelenskyy 🇺🇦

That’s a clear rejection of the whole Donbas-for-guarantees idea, not even entertaining it, and framing it as undermining Ukraine’s actual security

And the jab at Donald Trump lands pretty hard too, Kyiv clearly not buying that approach

⭕ 30 Mar 2026

House[.]gov: 22 USC 1928f: Limitation on withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization https://tinyurl.com/5n7jtyxb

22 USC 1928f: Limitation on withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(a) Opposition of Congress to suspension, termination, denunciation, or withdrawal from North Atlantic Treaty
The President shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress. […]

(b) Limitation on the use of funds
No funds authorized or appropriated by any Act may be used to support, directly or indirectly, any decision on the part of any United States Government official to suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress.

(c) Notification of Treaty action
(1) Consultation
Prior to the notification described in paragraph (2), the President shall consult with the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives in relation to any initiative to suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty.
(2) Notification
The President shall notify the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives in writing of any deliberation or decision to suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, as soon as possible but in no event later than 180 days prior to taking such action.

(d) Rule of construction
Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize, imply, or otherwise indicate that the President may suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw from any treaty to which the Senate has provided its advice and consent without the advice and consent of the Senate to such act or pursuant to an Act of Congress.

(e) Severability
If any provision of this section or the application of such provision is held by a Federal court to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this subtitle and the application of such provisions to any other person or circumstance shall not be affected thereby.
(f) Definitions
In this subtitle, the terms “withdrawal”, “denunciation”, “suspension”, and “termination” have the meaning given the terms in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, concluded at Vienna May 23, 1969.
( Pub. L. 118–31, div. A, title XII, §1250A, Dec. 22, 2023, 137 Stat. 464 .)

🐣 RT @@MarcoFoster_ Kyle Kulinski: “A sundowning president with Alzheimer’s who’s a malignant narcissist is dragging us into WW3 committing war crimes on a daily basis and crashing the global economy and nobody is actually grabbing the steering wheel. It’s beyond grotesque”
💽 https://x.com/MarcoFoster_/status/2038737103681376655?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SkylineReport 🚨 BREAKING: Trump’s NATO Panic Exposes a War With No Plan
¤ 💽 https://x.com/SkylineReport/status/2038800918070911035?s=20/photo/1

March 30, 2026 | CDT — The State Department’s sudden outrage at NATO allies isn’t strength—it’s a tell. And it’s exposing something far more damaging: Operation Epic Fury was launched with no real plan for what comes next.

⚠️ FROM “WE DON’T NEED NATO” → “WHY WON’T NATO HELP?”

Just weeks ago, Trump launched a unilateral U.S.–Israel war against Iran—no NATO consultation, no Article 4, no UN mandate. The message was loud and arrogant:

* The U.S. could handle it alone
* Iran was being “decimated”
* Allies were optional

Now? That story is collapsing.

As Iran disrupts shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and raises the risk to U.S. assets, Washington is suddenly:

* Begging NATO for ships, bases, and airspace
* Pressuring Europe for military support mid-conflict
* Requesting ~$200 BILLION more to sustain the war

That’s not strategy. That’s scrambling.[1][2][3][4]

🚫 EUROPE ISN’T BUYING IT

Spain just slammed the door completely:

* ❌ Closed airspace to U.S. warplanes
* ❌ Denied use of bases
* ❌ Called the war unlawful and escalatory

Across Europe, the response is the same:

* Prioritize evacuations
* Demand clarity on war objectives
* Refuse to get dragged into a U.S. war of choice

NATO isn’t rallying. It’s hesitating.[3][4][5][6]

🧨 RUBIO’S MELTDOWN MAKES IT WORSE

Marco Rubio is now on TV whining that allies “aren’t doing anything.”

That argument falls apart instantly:

* NATO is a defensive alliance, not a blank check for unilateral wars
* The U.S. bypassed NATO entirely, then came back mid-fight demanding help
* Allies did show up when it mattered—Article 5 was invoked after 9/11

This isn’t burden-sharing. It’s retroactive coalition-building after things go sideways.[5][7][8]

💣 THE REAL STORY: THIS WAR WAS NEVER BUILT TO LAST

Strip away the spin and it’s brutally simple:

* No coalition
* No defined end state
* No durable funding plan
* No allied buy-in Sources […]

And now, after Iran pushes back?

The same administration that said “we don’t need NATO” is now:

* Leaning on allies for survival
* Publicly shaming them when they hesitate
* Trying to bolt legitimacy onto a war already in motion

That’s not leadership. That’s panic disguised as diplomacy.[2][3][4][9]

🔻 BOTTOM LINE

If your war is going according to plan, you don’t:

* Beg for allies weeks in
* Demand emergency funding on this scale
* Send officials on TV to complain NATO won’t “step up”

You only do that when reality hits harder than your talking points.

And right now, reality is hitting this administration like a freight train.

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I regret to have to remind you that Pete Hegseth is a disgrace and should not be the Secretary of Defense.
⋙ TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Pete Hegseth Is Vice Signaling https://tinyurl.com/ybnfjphm Trump “likes underlings who emulate his aggressive indecency. But when the man in charge of the [DOD] disgorges this kind of toxic waste, it seeps into the groundwater of military culture.”
// The defense secretary is trolling America.

🐣 RT @MykhailoRohoza U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on behalf of Donald Trump, expressed regret that the Saudi authorities signed defense agreements with Ukraine without consulting the United States, which had been Saudi Arabia’s main ally.
¤ https://x.com/MykhailoRohoza/status/2038721522949394750?s=20

In response, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman noted that the U.S. had failed to fully protect the Kingdom from Iranian strikes, and therefore Saudi Arabia made a decision that could quickly strengthen its defense capabilities. The Crown Prince also stated that his country will continue to be guided by its own national interests when making decisions regarding its defense.

This was a slap in the face to Trump from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in response to Trump’s crude and scandalous public statement that “…now let the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia kiss my ass and be polite to me from now on.”

Thus, Trump’s reckless and irresponsible remarks have effectively put U.S.–Saudi relations on pause.

The Saudi Crown Prince proved to be more diplomatic than the American president and, notably, did not respond to Rubio by saying that Trump should “kiss my ass” and behave politely toward him in the future 😉

💙 TheAtlantic, Robert Kagan: America Is Now a Rogue Superpower https://tinyurl.com/y52fpdkz “Washington’s conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America’s dangerous isolation.”
// gift article

🐣 RT @igorsushko $2,000 Ukrainian housewife kitchen drone takes out a $30,000 Russian Shahed drone. ¤ Meanwhile US and allies used upwards of 6 Patriot missiles, costing $3 million each, to intercept an identical drone in the Middle East.
💽 💥 https://x.com/igorsushko/status/2038653547303297110?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @414magyarbirds ⚡“Housewives with 3D printers,” said @RheinmetallAG CEO Armin Papperger. Ukraine’s Drone Forces Commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi responds:
¤ https://x.com/414magyarbirds/status/2038643434269929780?s=20

An amateur, “housewives” Lego-Bird ramping up the strike tempo – and today was no exception.

A bit late, but still: you were right, Mr. Armin Papperger (Rheinmetall) – even if it came out as a cry from the soul. The freedom-loving Ukrainian Bird is not innovation – it’s a revolution in? warfare. A competition of firmware and frequencies.

And yes, it hurts the industry, because high-precision weapons are being democratized with kitchen-grade junk and sticks. On top of that, it’s a “cloud-based” factory that cannot be shut down with a missile or even drones – like Ust-Luga. And the speed of iteration is moving at Mach speed.

The gigantism of dinosaurs that once ruled the planet didn’t save them. A new doctrine. A new kind of war.

Can you do that?
Reach out – let’s have a chat.

Follow USF results live:
USF online scoreboard “PIDRAKHUYKA”
https://sbs-group.army

MAGYAR 🇺🇦 30.03.26

🐣 RT @BrianSozzi JP Morgan on oil: “Yemen’s Houthi rebels have now formally joined the escalating Middle East conflict. While their involvement is not yet decisive, it introduces a second maritime pressure point in the Red Sea, alongside the Strait of Hormuz.
¤ 🌎 https://x.com/BrianSozzi/status/2038549043798855963?s=20/photo/1

The immediate implication is geographic: the conflict is no longer concentrated in the Persian Gulf and around the Strait of Hormuz, but now extends into the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb—one of the world’s most crucial chokepoints for crude and refined product flows. In effect, two major corridors of global energy trade are exposed simultaneously, narrowing rerouting options and increasing system-wide supply-chain risk.”

🐣 RT @carlbildt Significantly more modest 🇺🇸 war aims expressed by @SecRubio. No stop for all enrichment. No regime change. No opening of Hormuz. No 15 points.
💽 https://x.com/carlbildt/status/2038633665157030107?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan, and we also engaged with other states. NSDC Secretary Rustem Umerov remained in the region, where he will hold several more meetings.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2038622567745908804?s=20

Firstly, we took a critical step: we shared our expertise on how to protect people and civilian infrastructure. Leaders of the Middle East countries are extremely grateful to the Ukrainians for this.

Secondly, there are strategic agreements extending many years into the future. This is also about the opening of exports, but the right kind of opening—when it is not just our experience being sold, but what partners are really getting is a system. Not only interceptors, but also defense lines, software, and electronic warfare capabilities. We are taking a systemic approach.

These are historic agreements on strategic cooperation in miltech and other areas. Ten-year agreements. This is about mutual assistance. We’re interested in anti-ballistic capabilities—we have a shortage there. We’re also facing challenges related to energy. Such agreements will be formalized and they are extremely important for our state. Ukraine has never had this kind of agreements in this region before. ¤ From my conversation with journalists (1/3)

⋙ During my recent visits to the Middle East, we raised the issue of unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. This is a painful issue for the entire world because of the energy crisis.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2038624652629557408?s=20

Countries in the Middle East know they can rely on our expertise in this area. We discussed it in detail. We shared expertise on our Black Sea corridor and the way it operates. They understand that our Armed Forces have been highly effective in unblocking the Black Sea corridor.

As for other aspects related to Hormuz, in my view, this is being handled by the United States. We are, of course, always ready to help our partners. ¤ From my conversation with journalists (2/3).

⋙ We are not just carrying out strikes on Russia. We are responding.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2038626839241932921?s=20

After the global energy crisis began, we received signals from some partners requesting that we reduce our responses targeting Russia’s oil and energy sector. I emphasize once again: if Russia is ready not to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, we will not retaliate to theirs.

We are open to discussing any type of ceasefire—a full ceasefire, an energy ceasefire, a food security ceasefire. We have already proposed all of this, and we are still open. If the Russians are ready, let them suggest any timeframe—we are ready to resolve this issue. ¤ From my conversation with journalists (3/3)

🐣 RT @KyivIndependent “Singlehandedly, Ukraine has ushered in a revolutionary new era of air, sea, and land-based warfare, which is quickly emerging as a staggeringly powerful tool of armed combat,” writes Benjamin Patton, Founder of the Patton Veterans Project and filmmaker, in this op-ed.
⋙ KyivIndependent, Benjamin Patton (Mar 28): Inside Ukraine’s secret drone warfare juggernaut https://tinyurl.com/yypsmm5d

As the grandson of General George S. Patton, Jr. and the son of a 2-star general, I’ve been around soldiers for as long as I can remember. But while filming a documentary on the transcendent drone industry in Ukraine last week, I learned more about modern warfare than I ever imagined.

Not far from the front, I met a drone pilot who now analyzes lessons learned from warfare and shares them on his X account with more than 100,000 subscribers.

I interviewed a soldier who’d recently received the Hero of Ukraine award (the equivalent of our Medal of Honor), for piloting nearly 1,000 successful drone missions — at age 21.

I spoke to a drone pilot’s wife who founded Dzyga’s Paw, an NGO (named for their dog), which has crowdfunded more than $5 million from donors worldwide to secure drone components. Remarkably, these parts can be assembled and launched in a combat zone in less than 15 minutes — at well under $1,000 each.

Escorted in a van with blacked-out windows to a secret, underground 24/7 command-and-control complex, our team entered a bustling suite of rooms, complete with sleeping pods and wrapped by walls of LED displays that can track dozens of simultaneous drone attacks in real time. It’s revelatory to behold.

Few American policymakers — let alone our allies — have an adequate understanding of the sophistication, scope, and killing power of this cutting-edge apparatus, developed in the crucible of war.

Singlehandedly, Ukraine has ushered in a revolutionary new era of air, sea, and land-based warfare, which is quickly emerging as a staggeringly powerful tool of armed combat. Underlying this is a fabric of fellowship and support that binds the military and civilian communities together.

It’s like nothing we’ve seen since perhaps the American Revolutionary War, when spouses trailed their beloved soldiers across the country from battle to battle, providing goods like soup and coffee, washing clothes, and sewing uniforms.

This year, Ukraine plans to design and build as many as 7 million drones (a whopping 19,000 a day) blanketing sea, land, and sky throughout the country.

These include high-flying reconnaissance drones that scan the countryside identifying military targets; kinetic drones that detonate on impact, “deleting” unsuspecting enemy combatants in an instant; and armor-piercing “shaped” drones that divebomb enemy tanks, rocket launchers, concealed bunkers, and ships with devastating accuracy.

Recently, an Army commander told me of one mission in which a single $500 Ukrainian drone destroyed a $25-million-dollar Russian air defense system: that’s a 50,000x cost disparity.

For proof of the value of Ukraine’s drones, one only needs to listen to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s announcement last week that he has agreed to furnish its Gulf allies with up to 1,000 drones a day, along with pilots and training.

It is astounding to behold this seamless system in action, with technicians well behind the frontlines carefully selecting their targets so as not to risk hitting civilians. All of this is executed by military personnel, young and old, often with that cocky yet serious smile so typical of soldiers under stress.

While crisscrossing the country in relative safety (despite my phone lighting up constantly with missile alerts), we interviewed both senior commanders and enlisted personnel.

Almost every soldier I spoke with voiced the same fear, unprompted: that by the time this war finally ends, global access to drone technology will be so widespread that bad actors from previously unthreatening countries, from deranged extremists to attention-seekers, will have the ability to inflict terror and death anywhere, anytime.

These same warriors said they’d be happy to share their mastery of drone technology with like-minded nations so that, as one put it, “we can be stronger together.”

Above all, they dreamed of returning to their peaceful pre-war lives with security guarantees, I believe they deserve, such as admission to the European Union and membership in NATO, which Zelensky has sought for years. If only they knew how much value Ukraine could provide.

When I was a kid, my family spent summers traversing the world’s battlefields. On those occasions, my dad would often remind me of the advice his father had given him at my age: “It is the unconquerable nature of man and not the nature of the weapon he uses that ensures victory.”

In my two weeks in Ukraine, I saw both.

The United States and its allies must keep a collective eye on what is truly important.

First, we need to accept the fact that modern warfare is changing before our eyes. By preening over our sexy, high-priced Patriot missiles and Star Wars laser defense systems, we are missing the forest for the trees — and risking the lives of our beloved servicemen and women in the process.

Equally important, we need to see the Russian invasion of Ukraine through an entirely different lens. Ukraine is not some rescued animal we’re not sure we want to keep. Rather, it should be seen as a partner engaged in a morally just cause — not unlike our own existential struggle for independence from a ruthless aggressor some 250 years ago.

There is a great deal to learn from the example of Ukraine. A courageous people — young and old, military and civilian — binding together rather than allowing themselves to be pulled apart. For centuries, America has served as a beacon of freedom and democratic values for so many others. Now it is our turn to look, listen, and learn.

It is not too late — but it will be soon enough.

🐣 RT @glcarlstrom “In conversations with more than three dozen oil and gas traders, executives, brokers, shippers and advisers over the last week, one message was repeated over and over: The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation.” [Bloomberg link:] https://tinyurl.com/4hjunack

🐣 RT @carlbildt Attacking civilian infrastructure, and acutely desalinization plants, is a war crime. Will 🇺🇸 armed forces accept orders to do so?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/carlbildt/status/2038591840866140291?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately “Open for Business,” we will conclude our lovely “stay” in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet “touched.” This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year “Reign of Terror.” Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

⭕ 29 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Likely thanks to Russian targeting info, if not weaponry. @SecRubio, do you still say that Russian aid to Iran is “insignificant” after the destruction of this $700m plane and how many US casualties?
¤ https://x.com/JayinKyiv/stat/JayinKyiv/status/2038193804872708408
⋙ 🐣 RT @JayinKyiv While Russian Duma members were getting guided tours of US government buildings and Trump was busy pressuring Ukraine to surrender, Russia helped Iran destroy an irreplaceable American $700,000,000 AWACS aircraft.
🖼 https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/2038373371918836119?s=20/photo/1 -3

🐣 RT @FredFellaIMO Concerning to say the least. As a Canadian, I never thought I would have to be worried about being invaded by America, but here we are.
💽 https://x.com/FredFellaIMO/status/2038427513987420324?s=20/photo/1
// Hegseth on conquest of ¼ of world
// Caption: SECY. HEGSETH & WHITE HOUSE ADVISER STEPHEN MILLER AT SOUTHERN COMMAND HEADOUARTERS; CSPAN

🐣 RT @60Minutes Forget everything you think you know about warfare. Drones have revolutionized combat in Ukraine. The front line has expanded, nets are strung over roads to catch drones, and tanks are fitted with cages and mesh to deflect strikes. https://cbsn.ws/4cdxhmz
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/2038405361825157261?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @60Minutes “From the point you send a drone to the front line, get the feedback, change something, and get the new version, it could be as short as one week,” says Oleksandr Kamyshin, the architect of Ukraine’s drone program. https://cbsn.ws/4tgCBLR
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/2038406935058194553?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @60Minutes In Ukraine, a DevDroid ground drone armed with a .50-caliber machine gun held off a Russian attack for 45 days.
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/2038406551183003842?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @TheMaverickWS Before the war:
1) Iran didn’t control the Strait Of Hormuz, now it does
2) Iran oil was sanctioned, now it’s not
3) Iran was not building a nuke, now it will
4) US bases in the Gulf were assets, now liabilities
5) Inflation was declining, now increasing
Definitely winning!

NYT, Yonatan Touval: Is It 1914 in America? https://tinyurl.com/yc7shv2f “The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038492153907654731?s=20/photo/1

[…] It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.

Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.

This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.

… Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them. …

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.

Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

Shakespeare understood this blindness better than our strategists. “Macbeth” is not merely a play about ambition. It is about a man who catches sight of a possible future and mistakes that glimpse for a license to force events to conform to his interpretation — and then watches that interpretation devour him. Soon he ceases even to pretend that action should wait on understanding. There are things in his head, he tells his wife, that “must be acted ere they may be scanned” — done before they can be thought through.

Modern targeting systems promise the same fantasy in technological form: to collapse the interval between seeing and striking, to eliminate the pause in which judgment might still enter. Macbeth acts not after deliberation but instead of it. That is the pattern one can glimpse in this new war, and it is precisely the pattern that literary and historical imagination exists to counter.

Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In “War and Peace,” he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch’s “Lives” and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. A leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.
v
The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.

🐣 RT @Timodc Total madness that we are involved in this war
⋙ 🐣 RT @MarioNawfal 🇮🇱🇮🇷🇱🇧 Netanyahu: “Israel is striking Iran and its allies with force, shifting to an offensive strategy, operating deep in enemy territory, expanding security lines in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, and aiming to remove threats from its borders.”
💽 https://x.com/Timodc/status/2038296817641607263?s=20/photo/1

‼️ WSJ: Why Russia Is Stepping Up Its Support for an Embattled Iran https://tinyurl.com/4r85nbhp “The increasing conflict between Trump’s expansive foreign policy and the Kremlin’s own footholds across the globe has triggered calls inside Russia to deal with the US more aggressively.”
// Moscow is trying to salvage what is left of a shrinking web of global partnerships
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038466921985646854?s=20/photo/1

In recent weeks, Russia has stepped up its support for Iran, its closest partner in the Middle East, providing satellite imagery and drone technology to help Iran target U.S. forces in the region. …

Russia has been advising the Iranians based on its experience in the war in Ukraine, giving them tactical guidance on how many drones should be used in strikes and from which altitudes they should strike, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Russia’s advice and targeting information is believed to have aided Iran in strikes on U.S. radar systems in the region. …
^
The increasing conflict between Trump’s expansive foreign policy and the Kremlin’s own footholds across the globe has triggered calls inside Russia to deal with the U.S. more aggressively. 

“If real patriotic reforms aren’t enacted now in Russia, then the situation will become more unpredictable,” said Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist who has advocated for a hard turn against the West that has been embraced by Putin. “One by one, our partners will simply fall.”

☸️ ChatGPT: Here’s a list with the FEDERAL KEY STATUTES (federal + a note on state law) that LIMIT ICE (or any federal agents) AT POLLING PLACES. These don’t name ICE directly — but they restrict intimidation, coercion, and armed interference with voting. ⬇️
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038426612350288211?s=20

Here are the main statutes:

1/ 52 U.S.C. § 10307(b) – Voting Rights Act (Intimidation Ban)
Illegal to intimidate, threaten, or coerce anyone for voting or attempting to vote.
Applies broadly – even presence that deters voters can qualify, regardless of intent.

2/ 18 U.S.C. § 594 – Voter intimidation (criminal)
Makes it a crime to intimidate, threaten, or coerce voters.
Covers actions by officials or private actors – including law enforcement if
conduct chills voting.

3/ 18 U.S.C. § 592 – Interference by armed forces
Prohibits use of armed troops to interfere with elections.
Historically aimed at federal power – often cited to argue against armed federal presence at polling places.

4/ 18 U.S.C. § 593 – Troops at polls
Bans deployment of troops at polling places unless expressly authorized by law.
Reinforces long-standing norm: elections should be free from federal military presence.

5/ 52 U.S.C. § 10101(b) – Civil Rights Act (voting protections)
Prohibits intimidation, threats, or coercion interfering with voting rights.
Often overlaps with the Voting Rights Act – provides an additional enforcement pathway.

Plus: State laws (vary by state)
Many states add:
• “buffer zones” around polling places
• bans on armed presence
• limits on law enforcement activity near polls
These can further restrict ICE locally.

Bottom line
No single law says “ICE cannot be at polling places.”
But multiple statutes make it illegal to:
• intimidate voters
• interfere with voting
• deploy armed federal presence
➔ In practice, that sharply limits what ICE can do near polls.

🐣 RT @krassenstein Dictators in History:
– Hitler – “The good of the state stands above the law.”
– Mussolini – “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte – “I am the revolution.”
– Francisco Franco – “I am responsible only to God and to history.”
Trump: “He who saves his country does not violate any law”

TheAtlantic, Sebastian Mallaby: The Man Who Thought He Could Keep AI Safe https://tinyurl.com/3k6pvnw7 “Demis Hassabis has devoted his life to advancing a technology he thinks could destroy the world.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038392508535730553?s=20/photo/1

Musk listened to presentations from Hassabis and his co-founders. Then he did the opposite of what they wanted. Teaming up with Sam Altman, Musk founded OpenAI, an explicitly anti-Google, anti-DeepMind venture. Later, believers in the singleton vision described this moment as the “fall”: the serpent had brought evil into the garden. But the fall was inevitable, given human nature. When confronted with the prospect of a Promethean technology, people do not coalesce into a singleton effort. They are disputatious, jealous, and tribal.

🐣 RT @NickBryantNY Still no Oval Office speech from Trump. No briefing from Hegseth in more than a week. The reticence from the Pentagon especially speaks volumes of how Operation Epic Fury has gone awry.
⋙ 🐣 RT @matthewamiller It has been 10 days since Hegseth and Caine last briefed on Iran. No CENTCOM briefing since 3/10, and no Pentagon daily press briefing at all. We learn more of what the U.S. military has been doing from bystander videos than DoD. Historic lack of transparency and accountability

🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine In an interview with @UKRINFORM, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Andrii Sybiha described the two-day meeting of G7 foreign ministers in France as one of the most substantive in recent times.

The summit proved productive not only because of the separate sessions dedicated to Ukraine, but also due to a series of very specific agreements.

Follow the link to read about further coordination of sanctions pressure on the aggressor; assurances from the U.S. that weapons under the PURL program will not be diverted to other destinations; a special tribunal on Russia’s crime of aggression; and Ukraine’s increasingly significant role in the Middle East. ⬇️ https://bit.ly/410MVeW

⋙ UkrInform: Andrii Sybiha, Minister of Foreign Affairs: PURL Supplies Locked In for Ukraine, Officials Assure https://tinyurl.com/438h7kub “On March 26–27, 2026, the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Summit was held in France under the country’s G7 presidency. Ukraine was invited
// Cont.: to participate alongside the member states.”
🖼 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038265576145985999?s=20/photo/1

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha described the two-day meeting as one of the most substantive in recent memory—not only because of dedicated sessions on Ukraine, but also due to a series of concrete outcomes.

Among them were U.S. assurances that weapons supplied under the PURL program will not be redirected to other theaters, as well as confirmation that another influential country will join the Special Tribunal. In an interview with Ukrinform’s correspondent in France, Sybiha also addressed coordination of sanctions pressure on Russia, the security implications of developments in the Middle East, and Ukraine’s evolving role in the region.

🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ The world is facing a ‘ticking time bomb’ from its supply of oil, according to a briefing note from JP Morgan. Physical scarcity of oil is about to unfold across the globe, spreading sequentially through April from east to west, causing major economic disruption worldwide. ⬇️
📌 🌎 https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2038187681935401098?s=20/photo/1

🖼 TheAtlantic: Photos From the Third Nationwide ‘No Kings’ Protest https://tinyurl.com/33x5d4z2 “More than 3,000 marches and rallies took place yesterday during the third ‘No Kings’ event, where millions protested against the policies and actions of President Trump and his administration.”
¤ Gift article: https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038249505544360259?s=20

WaPo Editorial: The drone swarm in Louisiana is a warning about the future of war. https://tinyurl.com/yhfsmb83 “While it’s unclear who is behind the Louisiana incursion, it’s impossible to ignore that a new era of drone warfare has begun — and that the U.S. is not ready.”

⭕ 28 Mar 2026 🚫 👑 ‼️

🐣 RT @anders_aslund The cause of this war is the US-Israeli attack on Iran. ¤ No allies were informed or consulted. ¤ The Gulf nations thought that US bases would guarantee their security. Instead, they find that they undermine their security. Why would they keep them?
⋙ 🐣 RT @FurkanGozukara Massive geopolitical shift. Gulf nations completely refuse to retaliate against Iran despite taking heavy damage. They are furious at Washington, admitting US & Israel started this disastrous war without even consulting them. US military bases are now seen as a massive liability

Politico: ‘He’s lied about everything’: Iran war puts Trump on shaky ground with young MAGA men https://tinyurl.com/3yh6z9rf “Their frustrations and anger with the conflict were on full display at CPAC this week.”

🐣 RT @ekwufinance This is a perfect illustration of how we perceive the Hormuz risk. ¤ Everyone is seeing the avalanche coming, yet everyone thinks that somehow it is under control… it isn’t.
¤ https://x.com/ekwufinance/status/2037923756056674805?s=20

There is no plan. No alternative routes that can scale fast enough… Hormuz opened or closed is all that matters.

The current avalanche is so big and dangerous that markets think this will resolve quickly due to the heavy economic costs… it won’t.

One month in, we hear reports that this operation might take from a few weeks to six months, to years… the avalanche will hit much earlier

Within a few weeks:

– Taiwan runs out of LNG -> no AI
– Fertilizer supplies are getting decimated -> no food
– Japan, Europe, Australia run out of diesel

The only thing keeping markets afloat is an unreasonably high amount of hopium… once it’s gone, expect a violent rerating

🐣 RT @BillKristol “The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, as thousands of soldiers & Marines arrive in the Middle East…” ¤ This is a bad idea. ¤ But if it is to happen, it CERTAINLY shouldn’t be without congressional authorization. ¤ So: Congress?
‼️ ⋙ WaPo: Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations in Iran https://tinyurl.com/pf87ypd5 “If President Donald Trump approves the plans, such an effort would mark a new phase of the war that could be significantly more dangerous to U.S. troops than the first four weeks.”

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 American Marines are being told to prepare for combat. Prepare your family.” ¤ My personal opinion: I would not die for this mediocre madman. No way. Neither should any American soldier. I have a bad feeling about this. Poor planning rarely ends well.
[Letter TextLink:] https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2038066296156225630?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We want to prepare drone deals for partners who are helping us, and be prepared for any challenges. A drone deal includes drones, electronic warfare systems, and, most significantly, the complete system of defense.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2037952146503537081?s=20

We might not have enough “Patriots”, but we do have a system capable of integrating any defensive lines or layers. And this is the most valuable asset Ukraine possesses today: the experience of our military.

If we want Ukraine to be treated at a high level, it is more than only drones; it is our specialists and our military. The combination of experienced military personnel with private and public sectors in one system is exactly what we should offer as a long-term export model—so that the private sector, the state, and our military all benefit. Today, we have started such steps with three countries. ¤ From my conversation with journalists (2/3)

🐣 RT @TuturasAlexand ⬆️ Ukraine is steadily transforming its wartime necessity into long-term strategic capability.
¤ https://x.com/TuturasAlexand/status/2037952829512458578?s=20

What’s being described here—a fully integrated ecosystem of drones, electronic warfare, and operational experience—is not just about defense; it’s about building a modern military-industrial model that can sustain both national security and economic growth.

Despite the immense pressure from Russia and the broader geopolitical challenges, Ukraine has demonstrated resilience, adaptability, and innovation at a level that few anticipated. Its battlefield experience, combined with rapid technological development, is already positioning it as a key security actor in Europe.

The trajectory is clear: deeper integration with European structures and continued alignment with NATO standards. While there are political and procedural hurdles, and despite attempts by certain actors to slow or block this path, the strategic direction is increasingly difficult to reverse.

Ukraine’s progress is not just about military success—it’s about institutional transformation, partnerships, and long-term alignment with the Euro-Atlantic community. In that sense, its chances of ultimately securing a place within both the EU and NATO frameworks are stronger than ever, regardless of external resistance.

🐣 RT @ForeignPolicy The United States is now acting like a predatory hegemon, using positions of leverage built up over decades to exploit allies and adversaries alike.
⋙ ForeignPolicy, Stephen Walt: The United States Has Become a Rogue State https://tinyurl.com/ewrenyjx “The second Trump administration has been far more disruptive, damaging, and dangerous than most observers—including me—expected”
// Here’s what the rest of the world can do about it.

The second Trump administration has been far more disruptive, damaging, and dangerous than most observers—including me—expected, and the tragically inept war with Iran is driving that point home in spades. As a result, every country in the world is having to figure out how to deal with an increasingly rogue United States. Ask yourself: If you led Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Nigeria, Denmark, Australia, etc., what would you do?

🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Fact checking fraud claims: Heritage Foundation documented 1,620 cases of voter fraud from 1982-2025, including 100 cases of noncitizens voting. That’s about 0.000008% of more than 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections in that time.
¤ https://x.com/peterbakernyt/status/2037897537156227210?s=20
⋙ ✅ NYT: Fact-Checking the Debate Over the Republican Voting Bill https://tinyurl.com/5e932nen “We examine claims justifying its restrictions, comparisons to current voting laws and warnings about its potential impact. “
// Ms. Sweren-Becker said. ¤ But she added, “It’s certainly safe to say that the SAVE America Act would block millions of eligible American citizens from voting.

⭕ 27 Mar 2026

TheAtlantic, Simon Shuster: Building Tanks While the Ukrainians Master Drones https://tinyurl.com/mw4v8hra “Ukrainian drones have made artillery and armored vehicles look obsolete. Why is the world still buying them?” //➔ The US is in denial.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038076806767563022?s=20/photo/1

Ukraine now makes more drones than any democracy in the world, and wealthy nations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are lining up to buy them. But when I asked the CEO of Rheinmetall what that could mean for his business model, he bristled. “Who is the biggest drone producer in Ukraine?” Papperger demanded. I listed the ones that I had visited in Kyiv two weeks earlier, Fire Point and Skyfall, which make hundreds of thousands of drones a month for the Ukrainian armed forces. “It’s Ukrainian housewives,” Papperger said of their factories. “They have 3-D printers in the kitchen, and they produce parts for drones,” he said. “This is not innovation.” …

The gruesome images of tanks blown apart by drones in Ukraine did not dissuade anyone from purchasing these systems. Nearly all of the tanks that Russia had at the start of the invasion were destroyed by spring of last year, according to U.S. military estimates. “The scale of this conflict is just awe-inspiring,” General Christopher Cavoli, then the head of the U.S. European Command, testified last April before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Thousands of tanks destroyed on both sides.”

The Russians had lost an estimated 3,000 tanks in the previous year, along with 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and more than 400 air-defense systems, Cavoli said in written testimony. The main weapon that the Ukrainians had used to inflict this damage was the suicide drone, which costs about $400 to make and explodes on impact. “I would say they’re the world leaders in one-attack-drone technology,” Cavoli said. …
v
“No matter how advanced a tank is, Ukrainian-made drones will stop it,” Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, told attendees at a conference in July. He recalled how a group of NATO officers had invited him to their base last year and asked for his opinion about their readiness for a war like the one in Ukraine. “My answer did not really calm them down,” he told the audience. Four Ukrainian drone teams, he said, “would take 15 minutes to make another Pearl Harbor.”

This sounded like braggadocio. But NATO military drills have substantiated the warning. During one set of exercises in May, a group of Ukrainian drone operators was invited to play the red team, pretending to be NATO’s adversaries. They launched 30 rapid strikes and took 17 armored vehicles out of the game within a few hours. “It was all destroyed,” one participant toldThe Wall Street Journal.

🐣 RT @BabakTaghvaee1 BREAKING: Unfortunately, two of the world’s last operational EC-130H Compass Call aircraft of the United States Air Force, deployed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, have also been damaged as a result of a ballistic missile strike by the IRGC Aerospace Force. ¤ Both aircraft require repairs to return to service, with one sustaining heavy damage. ¤ This strike has already destroyed three KC-135R Stratotankers and damaged at least four others at Prince Sultan Air Base.

😂 ✅ WaPo: Trump imagines negotiation with Sharpie maker for $5 signature pens https://tinyurl.com/jk5sf9db “Trump told a lengthy story about negotiating over the price of Sharpie pens. The company says it has no record of any such conversation.” 🚫🤴‼️

WaPo: Stocks Slide to 5th Weekly Loss as Investors Lose Patience With Iran War https://tinyurl.com/mt4z845d The S&P 500 is down nearly 9 percent from a January high. The weekly losing streak is its worst in roughly four years.

🐣 RT @ka_grieco Yikes. The US has burned through ~850 Tomahawks in 4 weeks. That’s roughly a quarter of the inventory. At ~600 produced/year, that’s ~1.5 years of production gone in a month. Hard to see what long-term political goal this buys. [WaPo link (below):] https://tinyurl.com/4a4r8s8v

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA
🇺🇦 All of Europe, not just Ukraine, needs to mobilize, because the war in the Middle East is distracting attention, — Zelensky
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2037635088691679664?s=20

➡️ Sanctions policy has reduced Russia’s capabilities. But it has circumvented them. At the same time, its revenues have still fallen, and the budget deficit has grown.

➡️ We would like the US to increase pressure on Russia. I believe that this pressure is insufficient. And not only from the US, but also from Europe, although Moscow, unfortunately, no longer pays much attention to Europe. Washington could exert stronger pressure.

➡️ We do not want our territory to be occupied again. Donbas is our defense lines and fortifications that have been built for years. If we leave these areas, it will open the way to a quick occupation.

➡️ The US says: “Leave Donbas, and we will provide security guarantees.” But our fortifications are security guarantees. We cannot exchange real guarantees created by our army for other promises.

➡️ I no longer want to talk publicly about how I see victory. But we must preserve independence, freedom of choice and our state. This will be the basis of a just peace.

➡️ I want to live in an independent Ukraine. This will mean that we have won. And when you have a home, there is always something to do.

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson It sure as hell is.
⋙ 🐣 RT @maddenifico Nuremberg is coming — and they all know it. ¤ Trump lawyer confesses ‘everybody’s afraid’ at White House: ‘We’re going to be indicted.’ 😳👇 [RawStory link:] https://tinyurl.com/48uwyenh

🐣 RT @ @Microinteracti1 American troops are sleeping in hotels. That is not a sentence from a Tom Clancy novel. That is where Operation Epic Fury stands right now.
¤ https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2037534955576738162?s=20

A New York Times report published Tuesday reveals that Iranian missile and drone strikes have left most of the 13 U.S. military installations across the Middle East effectively uninhabitable. Thousands of troops have been moved out of fortified bases into hotels, office buildings, and temporary facilities across the Gulf region and some as far away as Europe.

When the war began on February 28, roughly 40,000 American troops were stationed in the region. U.S. Central Command has since scattered large numbers of them into whatever spaces could be secured on short notice. Senior military officials are calling it a “remote war.” That framing deserves a moment.

Nearly a month in, this is the infrastructure picture: bases that took decades and billions of dollars to build are sitting damaged and largely empty, while American personnel run a war from conference rooms and borrowed lobbies. The optics are bad. The logistics are worse.

No one planned for this. That much is obvious.

🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag US President George W. Bush to Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska: “We admire your country’s bravery and ingenuity. We want the people of Ukraine to know that we continue to stand with America’s ally, Ukraine. You are fighting for freedom and I believe you will prevail.”
🖼 https://x.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/2037310961179050039?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @slantchev The European Parliament approves the trade deal with the US but includes provisions for its immediate suspension of the U.S. imposes new tariffs or threatens a member state. That’s all you need to know about how far we have fallen: our allies are writing policies predicated on America being a threat to them.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Daractenus The European Parliament approved the trade agreement with the US after introducing several new amendments specifying that the agreement will be immediately suspended if the US imposes additional tariffs or threatens again the territorial integrity of a EU member state.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/slantchev/status/2037510525458731441?s=20/photo/1

The European Parliament approved, with amendments, the trade agreement with the United States, concluded in the summer of 2025. Among the clauses introduced is the suspension of the treaty if the U.S. imposes new tariffs, threatens the territorial integrity of member states, interferes with foreign and defense policies, or engages in economic coercion.

WSJ: The 2,000-Year-Old Cement Battery That Could Reduce Our Reliance on Fossil Fuel https://tinyurl.com/mpb6jpbt “Thermal batteries, such as the one being developed by Cache Energy, store heat instead of electricity, and can be recharged and discharged over and over”

🐣 RT @TaraCopp The U.S. has burned through 850 Tomahawk missiles in Iran, alarming some at Pentagon w/ @danlamothe @noahjrobertson and @AlexHortonTX
⋙ WaPo: U.S. uses hundreds of Tomahawk missiles on Iran, alarming some at Pentagon https://tinyurl.com/4a4r8s8v “More than 850 have been fired in just four weeks, people familiar with the matter said, raising concerns about the weapon’s limited supply.”

The missiles, which can be launched from Navy surface warships and submarines, have been a staple of U.S. military attacks since they were first used in combat in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War. But only a few hundred are manufactured each year, meaning the global supply is limited. The Pentagon does not publicly disclose how many missiles are in its inventory at any one time.

Tomahawks are prized in part because they can travel more than 1,000 miles, reducing the need to send American pilots into well-defended airspace. The heavy reliance on them in the Iran conflict will require urgent discussions about whether to relocate some from other parts of the world, including the Indo-Pacific, and a concerted long-term effort to build more, said several U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning. …

… One official characterized the number of Tomahawks left in the Middle East as “alarmingly low,” while another said that without intervention, the Pentagon is closing in on “Winchester” — military slang meaning out of ammunition — for its supply of Tomahawk missiles in the Middle East. …

The most recent versions of the missile can cost as much as $3.6 million a piece and require up to two years to build, according to Navy documents. In recent years, they have been purchased in small batches, with just 57 included in last year’s defense budget.

Many of the 850-plus expended Tomahawks were fired in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration’s name for the war in Iran, people familiar with the matter said. They include at least one that struck in the vicinity of an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab early in the operation. U.S. officials have since opened an investigation into the incident, which Iranian officials have said killed scores of children. …

The U.S. military also has fired more than 1,000 air-defense interceptor missiles in response to Iranian counterattacks across the region, including from the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems, which are considered the world’s most advanced, two other officials familiar with the issue said. The inventory of those weapons also is limited and not publicly disclosed.

MacKenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that before Operation Epic Fury began late last month, the Navy probably had between 4,000 and 4,500 Tomahawk missiles on hand. Others naval analysts have said the number could be much lower, perhaps closer to 3,000, following their extensive use in recent operations, including the Trump administration’s strikes last year in Iran, Yemen and Nigeria.

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said if the military has fired more than 800 Tomahawks against Iran, “that would be about a quarter of the total inventory and would leave a large gap for a conflict in the Western Pacific.” His think tank assesses that the Navy may have had as few as 3,100 Tomahawks on hand at the start of the war a month ago. ¤ “It would take several years to replenish,” Cancian said. …

The missile is built by Raytheon with help from other manufacturers. The defense industry has capacity to produce about 600 missiles per year, said Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. […]

🐣 RT @TaraCopp The U.S. has burned through 850 Tomahawk missiles in Iran, alarming some at Pentagon w/ @danlamothe @noahjrobertson and @AlexHortonTX
⋙ WaPo: U.S. uses hundreds of Tomahawk missiles on Iran, alarming some at Pentagon https://tinyurl.com/4a4r8s8v “More than 850 have been fired in just four weeks, people familiar with the matter said, raising concerns about the weapon’s limited supply.”

🐣 RT @visionergeo 🇺🇸🇺🇦🪖”Their [Ukrainians’] level of innovation is otherworldly” — U.S. Army Lieutenant General Steven Whiting highly praised the Ukrainian Armed Forces for their rapid innovation and adaptability. He particularly emphasized the short cycle of developing, testing, and improving new solutions, calling this approach both extremely effective and cost-efficient. ¤ 🎖️The American general noted that in the conditions of modern warfare, the level of innovation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is truly impressive.
💽 https://x.com/visionergeo/status/2037503699547754774?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SavchenkoReview 🇺🇸🇺🇦 Sybiha and Rubio met on the sidelines of the G7 ministerial meeting in France ¤ “Ukraine’s practical assistance to the Gulf states in protecting against Iranian terror demonstrated our role as a security partner and contributor. The issue of countering Russian aggression against Ukraine must remain among the priorities of the international agenda,” Sybiha noted

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We have reached an important Arrangement between the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the Ministry of Defense of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on defense cooperation.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2037451911142539412?s=20/photo/1 -4

The document was signed ahead of our meeting with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. It lays the foundation for future contracts, technological cooperation, and investment. It also strengthens Ukraine’s international role as a security donor.

We are ready to share our expertise and systems with Saudi Arabia and to work together to strengthen the protection of lives. Now into the fifth year, Ukrainians are resisting the same kind of terrorist attacks – ballistic missiles and drones – that the Iranian regime is currently carrying out in the Middle East and the Gulf region. Saudi Arabia also has capabilities that are of interest to Ukraine, and this cooperation can be mutually beneficial.

We also discussed the situation in the Middle East and the Gulf region as a whole, Russia’s assistance to the Iranian regime, developments in fuel markets, and potential energy cooperation. ¤ Thank you for the meeting.

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I met with our military experts who have been in Saudi Arabia for over a week now.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2037441018832756856?s=20

Guys reported on the team’s first results and shared conclusions at both the operational and broader levels. The main task of our air defense experts in this region is to identify challenges and determine what changes are needed to strengthen the protection of people and lives from Iranian “shaheds” and missiles. I am grateful to the guys for their exceptionally prompt and thorough work. There are concrete steps we can take together with our partners.

Even in such a short time, Ukrainian experts were able to share extensive expertise and demonstrate how we in Ukraine protect our lives and infrastructure. Ukraine’s expertise is unique, and recognized as such, and that is why everyone is so interested in our technologies and experience. We are ready to support the protection of those who help us defend our independence. We discussed the key elements needed to strengthen Saudi Arabia’s air defense capabilities. This concerns, above all, approaches to shooting down drones. Ukraine is ready for long-term and mutually beneficial cooperation. I am proud of our people and the strength of Ukraine.

🐣 RT @cnnbrk Senate unanimously moves to fund most of DHS, except ICE and border patrol, in rare overnight session. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/bvt3whc3

NYT, Michael Kimmage: The War in Ukraine has Transformed Conflict. Iran Is the Proof. https://tinyurl.com/5n8f9y3t “Ukraine’s resolve and technological savvy — in particular, its capacity to innovate, build and deploy drones — have slowed the Russian advance to a crawl.”
// “An unfamiliar kind of asymmetrical warfare has emerged in which great powers are suddenly fallible and vulnerable.”

NYT: An Invisible Bottleneck: A Helium Shortage Threatens the Chip Industry https://tinyurl.com/ac24edva “With a third of the global supply offline because of the war in Iran, gas companies are scrambling to assure critical AI chip makers there will be no disruptions.”

Helium is a gas that is odorless, colorless and lighter than air. It is also indispensable to manufacturing the computer chips that power artificial intelligence, an important driver of U.S. markets and economic growth.

A byproduct of natural gas processing, helium is produced mainly in the United States and Qatar. When output in Qatar was halted this month, it cut off roughly a third of the global supply. The outlook worsened last week after Iran struck Qatar’s largest liquefied natural gas facility, damaging helium production lines that could take years to rebuild.

Without helium, leading chip makers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, could struggle to keep production lines running, with cascading effects for semiconductor-powered devices from Apple’s iPhones to Nvidia’s A.I. servers.

⭕ 26 Mar 2026

NYT (Mar 26): Judge Stays Pentagon’s Labeling of Anthropic as ‘Supply Chain Risk’ https://tinyurl.com/39cmth7e “The decision is an early victory for the artificial intelligence company in a rancorous legal battle with the Department of Defense.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038123018224902199?s=20/photo/1

“The record supports an inference that Anthropic is being punished for criticizing the government’s contracting position in the press,” Judge Lin wrote in the order granting the preliminary injunction against the government. “Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.”

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 Zelensky is being polite. The rest of us don’t have to be. ¤ There is one world leader Trump has never criticized. Not once. Not even when it would have cost him nothing. Every ally has taken fire – Zelensky, Macron, Trudeau, the entire EU, Canada, Australia, the UK. Putin alone gets the soft voice and the benefit of the doubt.
¤ https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2037086370691162555?s=20

Everyone knows why. The compromised part isn’t a conspiracy theory anymore, it’s the operating assumption of every intelligence service in Europe.

And this is the man now positioning himself as a peace broker between Russia and Ukraine. You cannot broker peace between a burglar and a homeowner when you are holding the door open for the burglar.

The US has spent 13 months blocking pressure on Russia, undermining Ukraine’s negotiating position, and telling Europe to sit down. The result is that Russia continues to take territory by force while Trump runs diplomatic cover from Mar-a-Lago.

Seven billion people outside the United States can see what is happening. The question is what anyone is actually going to do about it.

🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA [tr] Visiting Dallas, I had the honor of meeting George and Laura Bush. I thanked them for their understanding and support of Ukraine over many years, as well as for the opportunity to present our projects to American philanthropists to help children, youth, and large foster families. The support of international partners is critically important for their well-being after a harsh winter and under the daily threat of Russian shelling. Grateful to the Bush family and all who understand: Ukraine’s struggle concerns the entire free world and its values. And we can protect them only together.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskaUA/status/2037309202813624767?s=20/photo/1

🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ With American ground forces building up in the Gulf region, much attention has been paid to Kharg Island in the northern Persian Gulf. But what about the Iranian-held islands in the Strait of Hormuz? Here’s why they might be a higher priority for possible landings. ⬇️
📌 🌎 https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2037288687856189533?s=20/photo/1 -33
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2037288687856189533.html

🐣 RT @RKelanic French gov’t:
—30-40% of Gulf refining capacity destroyed
—11 million barrels/day offline
—full repairs could take 3 years
Under normal conditions, most oil infrastructure, including refineries, can be repaired pretty quickly.
But we’ve never seen oil industry damage on this scale, all at once, since at least WWII in Europe.

WSJ: Iran Hasn’t Requested Pause on Energy-Site Strikes, Mediators Say https://tinyurl.com/5hcsjjj2 “Iran hasn’t requested a 10-day pause on strikes on its energy plants and is yet to deliver a final response to a 15-point plan to end the war, peace talk mediators said.”

TheAtlantic, Matteo Wong & Charlie Warzel: Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster https://tinyurl.com/39evxueh “The AI boom wasn’t built for the polycrisis.” “In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2037347570574315884?s=20/photo/1

The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.

Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.

For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash.

Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”

Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.

Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace. In only a month of war, the price of Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—has jumped by 40 percent and could more than double, liquefied-natural-gas prices are soaring in Europe and Asia, and helium spot prices have already doubled. The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”

The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.

One industry’s precarious position isn’t usually everyone’s problem. Unfortunately, AI is different. The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.

For a while, it seemed like every time Google or Microsoft announced more data-center investments, their stock prices rose. Now the opposite occurs: The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. And the $121 billion of debt that hyperscalers issued in 2025, four times more than what they averaged for years prior, is expected to grow dramatically.

All of the major players in this investment ecosystem are vulnerable. Private-equity firms are being squeezed on both ends by generative AI: During the coronavirus pandemic, they bought up software companies, which are now plummeting in value because AI is expected to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, private equity’s new investment strategy, data centers, is also falling apart because of AI. Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like are sinking huge sums into data-center construction with the assumption that lease payments from tech companies will pay for their debt. In order to pay for their investments, private-equity companies raised money from major financial institutions—but now the viability of those lease payments is coming into question as the hyperscalers’ cash flow is strained. “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.”

The way the money moves is concerning, but so is the AI industry’s underlying business model. At every layer, the technology appears to decrease the value of its assets. The advanced AI chips that make up the majority of the cost of a data center? Their value rapidly decreases as they are superseded by the next generation of chips, meaning that the ultimate backstop for all of the data-center debt—selling the data center itself—is not actually a backstop. The way that AI companies make money when people use their products is also deflationary. OpenAI, Anthropic, and others charge users for using “tokens,” the components of words processed by their bots. This means that tokens are an industrial commodity akin to, say, crude oil or steel. But unlike other commodities, the cost of each token is rapidly decreasing owing to advancements in AI’s capabilities. Kedrosky called this “a death spiral to zero.” As the value of a token plummets, the value of what data centers can produce also falls.

The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said. …

Just a few things going a bit wrong could compound, all at once, into a cataclysm. To wit: Qatari and Saudi money dries up. Sustained high oil and natural-gas prices drive up the costs of manufacturing chips and running data centers. Already cash-strapped hyperscalers struggle to make lease payments on their data centers, while similarly strained private lenders suffer as all of the AI bonds become deadweight. Tech valuations fall, taking public markets with them; private-equity firms have to sell and torch their assets, putting intense stress on the institutional investors and banks. The rest of the economy, drained of investment because everything was poured into data centers for years, is already weak. Unemployment goes up, as do interest rates. “Bubbles pop. That’s the system,” Lipton said. “What isn’t supposed to happen is that it takes down the whole financial system. But the concern here is that AI investment isn’t confined and may spread to the whole economy.”

Even if Iran and the Strait of Hormuz don’t directly trigger an AI-driven financial crisis, the odds are decent that another vector could. (Remember tariffs?) Energy prices could stay elevated for years, because the targeted fossil-fuel facilities in the Persian Gulf will take a long time to restore. As the U.S. directs huge amounts of attention and military resources toward Iran, it’s easy to imagine China launching an invasion of Taiwan—a scenario that terrifies Silicon Valley, because it would halt the production of chips needed to train frontier models. That’s not even considering the single Dutch company that makes the high-tech lithography machines used to print virtually all AI chips, or the German company that makes the mirrors used in those machines. “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,” Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. “All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.”

There are, of course, possibilities other than a full-blown, AI-driven financial crisis. Data-center spending could cool gradually enough that a crash is avoided. The revenues of Anthropic and OpenAI have been multiplying every year, which proponents argue means that generative-AI products are on track to eventually become profitable. But on the current trajectory, that would still take years, and there are good reasons to think that this growth will slow or halt. Notably, the main draw of AI tools is “efficiency”: Rather than growing their overall output and the opportunities available to people, executives are hoping that AI will allow them to make cuts to their business operations. The medium-term success of generative AI would likely involve millions of people being put out of work. The range of options seems to be somewhere from mildly bad to historically so.
v
Should the system break, much of the blame would lie squarely with the technology companies. The stakes of this build-out, from the beginning, have been framed in civilizational terms—a geopolitical race alongside an existential one. The winners will control the future and reap the rewards. At every step of the way, AI firms have appeared to prioritize speed above the physical security of data centers, supply-chain redundancy, energy efficiency and independence, political stability, even financial returns. And in that quest for unbridled growth, the AI industry has wrested ungodly amounts of capital from investors all looking for the next big thing, ensnaring the entire economy.
^
Simultaneously, these firms have courted and even bent the knee to a presidential administration that has encouraged their “let it rip” ethos, only to watch as that same administration has plunged the industry into this emerging polycrisis. The AI industry was not made for the turbulence its leaders have helped usher in. The situation has grown so ungainly and untenable that, if Silicon Valley is merely forced to slow down, the viability of all this spending will likely be called into question in ways that could be devastating for many. In finance, being early is the same as being wrong. AI firms want the world to think they’re right on time. The world may have other plans.

🐣 RT @yairlapid [tr] On the eve of Passover, I want to warn the citizens of Israel. We are facing another security disaster.
¤ https://x.com/yairlapid/status/2037235032218296573?s=20

For 13 years, I have been a member of Israel’s security cabinets and the most sensitive security forums. As prime minister, foreign minister, finance minister, member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

In all those 13 years, I don’t recall a warning as grave as the one issued last night by the Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, to the political-security cabinet. Anyone who heard him yesterday will not be able to say, “I didn’t know.”

“I’m raising 10 red flags,” the Chief of Staff said. “The IDF is on the verge of collapse.”

This warning aligns with what I and other sources know about the state of the army. Our pilots, our fighters, are writing glorious chapters in the history of the State of Israel these days. We’re talking about a generation of lions doing phenomenal work, but the IDF is stretched to the limit and beyond. The government is leaving the army wounded in the field. […]

🧵 RT @ABlinken (1/10) @realDonaldTrump cited me as supporting his attack on Iran and expressing regret we didn’t do it during the Biden Administration. Except I didn’t.
📌 https://x.com/ABlinken/status/2037284297942376608?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2037284297942376608.html
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: I’ve heard that today Blinken made a statement that he should have done it. Thanks a lot, I appreciate it. Blinken is Biden’s guy I guess. Who the hell knows who he is. But he came out with the statement that they should have done it, they made a mistake
💽 https://x.com/ABlinken/status/2037284297942376608?s=20/photo/1

(2/10) For what I did say, see the clips below.

(3/10) In short: President Trump made a terrible decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal (“JCPOA”) in 2017 and replace it with nothing. The Obama Administration put Iran’s nuclear program in a box, President Trump let it out.
💽 https://x.com/ABlinken/status/2037284389105594711?s=20/photo/1

(4/10) What would have happened if President Trump had just left the JCPOA in place? When the JCPOA expired, it could be extended or renegotiated, as with most arms control agreements. If Iran refused, the U.S. would still retain the military option, with a lot more information about Iran’s program, because of the most intrusive inspections ever.

(5/10) Now, we have to be able to hold multiple ideas in our heads at the same time. Once our armed forces are engaged in conflict we should all be pulling for their safety and success. Is it a good thing the Ayatollah who inflicted so much suffering on the Iranian people (and wrought so much violence around the world, including on Americans) is gone, Iran’s missile arsenal is diminished, and its nuclear program “re-obliterated” (since apparently it wasn’t “obliterated” in June)? Yes. But to what ends, at what cost, and for how long?
💽 https://x.com/ABlinken/status/2037284392809148579?s=20/photo/1

(6/10) So far, we’ve traded an 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei for a 56-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei, empowered hardliners, and sidelined pragmatists. The regime could fall in five days or five years. And to be replaced by what?

(7/10) Iran apparently retains at least 5-10 bombs worth of uranium enriched to 60% and probably some hundreds of centrifuges to further enrich it to weapons grade. It can rebuild missiles over time and drones more quickly.

(8/10) The failure to anticipate and prepare for Iran weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz puts us literally at the bottom of the barrel. Markets (oil, LNG, stocks, bonds, fertilizer, helium) and munitions (offensive and defensive) will dictate when President Trump feels compelled to declare victory and walk away, but with Iran controlling the Strait. Maybe a negotiation can fix that, but with what concessions to Iran? Or we can double down, at huge risk.

(9/10) Meanwhile, 13 American servicemembers have lost their lives and hundreds more have been wounded. The Iranian people are still under the fist of a highly repressive regime. Iran and Russia are getting an oil bonanza. America is more isolated than ever from our closest allies and partners. And billions more U.S. taxpayer dollars are being spent on another war in the Middle East (with an additional $200 billion requested from the Pentagon to fund this war). Not to mention the failure to make the case to the American people for why this was necessary, in their interest, or worth risking American lives for.

(10/10) So no, I would not have done it. For the record.

🐣 RT @slantchev When pondering the news that US “security guarantees” for Ukraine are contingent on Ukraine abandoning Donbas to the invading war criminals, ask yourself why this administration wants that ceasefire so badly.
¤ https://x.com/slantchev/status/2036938858655605196?s=20

The U.S. is not a belligerent and American soldiers aren’t dying in this war unlike the one we started against Iran. The benefit of degrading Russia’s military capabilities is so obvious that for years Kremlin shills were insisting that this is a proxy war that unwitting Ukrainians are waging on America’s behalf.

So why insist so much on an unjust ceasefire that would award Russia for its aggression when its own military has failed to achieve the Kremlin’s objectives?

It’s because this godawful administration sees some benefits in normalizing relations with Russia, be they of the reverse Nixon pink pony fantasies, outright bribery through fantastical investment schemes with a third rate economy geared entirely for war, or just because the Kremlin has a kompromat on Trump. It’s really irrelevant which — what matters is that this one-sided insistence on letting Putin have his pound of flesh suggests very strongly that no promise to help Ukraine resist any further invasion or violations of the ceasefire can be credible.

Whatever is driving Trump and his minions to want to help Russia now will drive them to want to help Russia in the future. All “guarantees” made by Trump are worse than worthless as they are most likely outright lies in the service of whatever agenda is propelling this small corrupt man.

⋙ 🐣 Here’s the text of the Russian/US proposal from FT. “Mediators“ usually don’t get a pay-out.
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2037080406474829992?s=20

13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy: a. The lifting of sanctions will be discussed and agreed upon in stages and on a case-by-case basis. b. The United States will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities. c. Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8.

14. Frozen funds will be used as follows: $100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine. The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture. Europe will add $100 billion to increase the amount of investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict. 15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.

Source: FT https://tinyurl.com/5ss3h7mn Nov 2025

📔 FT (Nov 2025): Read the full text of Trump’s 28-point Ukraine-Russia peace plan https://tinyurl.com/5ss3h7mn “Proposed deal would limit size of Ukrainian forces and calls on Kyiv to withdraw troops from eastern Donetsk”
// 11/20/2025; tags: Russian proposal; Russian deal

NYT: Iran’s Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely https://tinyurl.com/23bheuzh “Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable, with the ones in Kuwait, which is next door to Iran, suffering perhaps the most damage”
//. Iran has severely damaged several American military bases in the Middle East, officials say.

Iran has bombed U.S. bases across the Middle East in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli war, forcing many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces throughout the region, according to military personnel and American officials.

So now much of the land-based military is, in essence, fighting the war while working remotely, with the exception of fighter pilots and crews operating and maintaining warplanes and conducting strikes.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has urged people to report these new locations as it hunts for the dispersed troops. U.S. military officials say that threat is not stopping the Pentagon from carrying out the war against Iran, which is in its fourth week.

“To date, we’ve struck over 7,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared last week. He then repeated what has become a common refrain at his news briefings: “Today will be the largest strike package yet, just like yesterday was.”

But the relocation of troops to makeshift — one official called them “alternative” — sites raises questions about the Trump administration’s preparations for the war.

There were close to 40,000 U.S. troops in the region when the war started, and Central Command has dispersed thousands of them, some to as far away as Europe, American military officials said. But many have remained in the Middle East, although not on their original bases, military officials said.

The result, according to current and former military officials, is a war that is much harder to prosecute.

“Yes, we have the ability to set up expedient operation centers, but you’re absolutely going to lose capability,” said Master Sgt. Wes J. Bryant, a retired Special Operations targeting specialist in the U.S. Air Force. “You can’t just put all that equipment on the top of a hotel, for example. Some of it is unwieldy.” A U.S. military official said that troops are not working from the roofs of civilian hotels.

Iran responded forcefully to the joint American and Israeli strikes, targeting not only U.S. bases but also embassies and oil and gas infrastructure throughout the region. With its supreme leader and dozens of other leaders killed, the Iranian regime has retaliated by launching hundreds of drones and missiles into neighboring countries and largely shuttered the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route, making sure the war would be felt by people across the globe.

Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable, with the ones in Kuwait, which is next door to Iran, suffering perhaps the most damage. Six U.S. service members were killed in a strike on Port Shuaiba that destroyed an Army tactical operations center. Iranian drones and missiles also targeted Ali Al Salem Air Base, damaging aircraft structures and injuring personnel, and Camp Buehring, damaging maintenance and fuel facilities.

In Qatar, Iran struck Al Udeid Air Base, the regional air headquarters of U.S. Central Command, damaging an early-warning radar system. In Bahrain, a one-way Iranian attack drone struck communications equipment at the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. At Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Iranian missiles and drones damaged communications equipment and several refueling tankers.

An Iranian-backed militia in Iraq launched a drone swarm attack on an upscale hotel in Erbil early in the war. …

The lack of better planning, some military officials said, also reflects a miscalculation on the part of the administration about how Iran would respond. The Trump administration did not reduce staffing at American embassies and other facilities in the region before the war started, or order departures for nonessential government employees and family members. Nor did the State Department warn Americans to steer clear of the region until after the war began. …

⭕ 25 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @NBCNews At least 40% of Russia‘s oil export capacity is at a halt following Ukrainian drone attacks, according to Reuters calculations. The shutdown is the most severe oil supply disruption in the modern history of Russia. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/wbekyxkf

🐣 RT @Acyn CNN: Sources are telling CNN Iran is actively preparing for an invasion of Kharg Island. The traps that we understand that are being put there: anti-personnel and anti-armor mines placed around the island. Tehran is also moving a large number of troops and air defenses to this island.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2036945134605263057?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @FT FT Exclusive: Moscow has close ties with Tehran and has provided its ally with crucial support including satellite imagery, targeting data and intelligence support, people familiar with the matter said. https://ft.trib.al/IsseW1G

🐣 RT @maddenifico Whoa! Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari announced Qatar is seeking to mend its relationship with Iran — which tells us everything we need to know about how the Middle East views Trump’s catastrophic miscalculation
💽 https://x.com/maddenifico/status/2036876552508416482?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Jaw-dropping DOJ admissions to court ¤ DOJ admits repeatedly made “material mistaken” representations to judge. ICE never had authority (under 2025 Guidance) to conduct arrests at immigration courthouses! ¤ DOJ admits court “relied on…prior misrepresentations” ¤ DOJ blames ICE
[TextLink:] https://x.com/rgoodlaw/status/2036896357634461768?s=20/photo/1 -2

🐣 RT @BlueATLGeorgia Tom Nichols: The president doesn’t have a grasp of reality; he’s not stable. There’s something not right here. He started a war, he can’t get out of it, and he doesn’t know where to turn. He’s getting a very filtered view of reality. They’re showing him heroic montages every morning. That’s bonkers.
💽 https://x.com/BlueATLGeorgia/status/2036902528667828595?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Reuters Exclusive: The US has made its offer of security guarantees needed for a peace deal in Ukraine conditional on Kyiv ceding all of the country’s eastern region of Donbas to Russia, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Reuters.
⋙ 💽 Reuters: Exclusive: US links security guarantees to Ukraine giving up Donbas, Zelenskiy says https://tinyurl.com/yzecnrye

TheAtlantic, David Graham: Trump Is Asking to Be Bailed Out Again https://tinyurl.com/bdd7m28w “The president’s eagerness to act keeps getting him into difficult spots—which he then demands that legislators and the public [and allies!] help him escape.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2036935646309167314?s=20/photo/1

… Trump’s war—sorry, “operation” — in Iran is a perfect example. The president didn’t ask Congress to declare war, and he did not receive, or request, an authorization for use of military force. The administration briefed the “Gang of Eight” (the leaders of the House, Senate, and each body’s intelligence committees from both parties) just before the strikes but, according to The New York Times, misled them about the scope of the attack. Trump did not work to build support for war with Iran among the American people, and he did not attempt to assemble a coalition of allies other than Israel to take part. …
^
Or take Operation Metro Surge. In late 2025, Trump decided to send a contingent of immigration officers to Minnesota, ostensibly to respond to cases of benefit fraud among the state’s Somali population. The Justice Department was already prosecuting the matter, and it wasn’t clear what exactly Department of Homeland Security officers were going to do. Once they arrived and began patrolling neighborhoods, however, residents protested; the administration responded by expanding its deployment. Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and dispatch active-duty soldiers, though he ultimately did not. By the time the administration pulled back, agents had arrested at least 3,000 people, but only 23 of them were Somali and none was connected to the fraud allegations, according to the Star Tribune. Meanwhile, two American citizens were shot and killed by federal agents.

The Minnesota operation was not only a tactical flop; it was a political blunder. The administration sacked Greg Bovino, the Customs and Border Protection official who had become the front man for aggressive enforcement. Most agents were yanked from Minnesota. Trump’s ratings on immigration, once his signature issue, turned hard against him. This is ironic, because the original intention was a quick political win. Trump had hoped to spotlight the benefit fraud both to bolster his case for immigration enforcement and also because of his outspoken bigotry toward Somalis.

He seems to have thought the same about the Iran operation, expecting as quick a win there as he (appears to have) notched in Venezuela. Instead, he has ended up worse off as a matter of his stated goals and political interests alike. …

Following protocol might have deprived Trump of the splashiness of these sudden actions, or even prevented him from doing these things—but it might also have helped him avoid the missteps that are plaguing him. Trump doesn’t recognize that although rules can limit him, they also protect him. A lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is challenging the ballroom, made the same point more pithily during the hearing last week. Thaddeus Heuer noted that the administration could have consulted with relevant authorities before demolition but had declined. …

🐣 RT @FCDOGovUK The UK stands firmly with our Gulf partners. ¤ In solidarity, 30 countries have now joined our joint statement on the Strait of Hormuz
https://tinyurl.com/52atfnyz
⋙ 🐣 Signatories EXCLUDE US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. It INCLUDES Bahrain, UAE. Cites UN Security Council Resolution 2817, Maritime security and freedom of navigation.

WSJ: The Oil Supply Crunch Is Spreading From the Gulf to the Rest of the World https://tinyurl.com/yue2ved4 “Unless peace talks pan out fast, traders say record high prices for specific grades of Middle Eastern crude cargoes will soon cascade to the U.S. and elsewhere”

⭕ 24 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom POTUS counts as “an official” and this war was predicated on his belief that the regime would fall relatively easily, which is why he brushed off warnings from Caine and others about Iran closing the Strait. … [Atl link (3/20):] https://tinyurl.com/3xzfzh2t
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/2036649706604884307?s=20/photo/1

But Trump did seem to have an overarching goal at the start of the war: regime change. In a video he released during the first night of the attack, he told the Iranian authorities to surrender and called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government. Unfortunately, the regime in Tehran seems to be recovering and, even worse, consolidating power. The American intelligence community has reportedly issued an assessment that the regime “will remain intact and possibly even emboldened, believing it stood up to Trump and survived.” Trump now appears lost, unable to comprehend how a blockbuster movie that he scripted out, one in which he cast himself as the Liberator of Iran, has turned into a poorly received miniseries that might yet be renewed for another dreary season.

The commander in chief was reportedly told that the mullahs might not agree to go gently into the night, but he seems to have waved away such concerns because he was so convinced that the Iranian regime would collapse almost immediately. According to The Wall Street Journal, when General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the president that a U.S. attack would prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, Trump “told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”

WSJ Editorial: The Fog of Diplomacy in Iran https://tinyurl.com/4czxa49k “Mr. Trump’s incentive is to calm markets with news of diplomatic progress. The regime’s incentive is to deny, deny, deny and keep markets roiled.”
// Trump and the regime test each other while ground troops head over.

… The two sides remain far apart. Mr. Trump reiterates his prewar demands, including in a 15-point plan leaked to the press Tuesday: Dismantle what’s left of the nuclear program, hand over all enriched uranium, and limit the missile program. Iranian officials reiterate their prewar refusals and demand guarantees, reparations, the expulsion of U.S. forces from the region, and the payment of tolls to transit Hormuz, an international waterway. All are nonstarters, which explains the skepticism of Arab and Israeli officials.

Mr. Trump said his envoy Steve Witkoff is speaking to a “top person” in Iran, widely believed to be Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf. He’s the Parliament speaker, former mayor, police chief and Revolutionary Guard commander, and consummate opportunist. Some see his many political reinventions and trail of corruption allegations as signs Mr. Ghalibaf is the flexible type the U.S. has been looking for. Others see a brutal regime insider with no demonstrated desire to change Iran’s policies.

It isn’t certain that Mr. Ghalibaf can even speak for Iran’s regime. He’s one of the more senior officials left, but will the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps follow his lead? How much room does he have to maneuver? Part of the reason to explore talks may be to find out. On Tuesday Mr. Trump said Iran’s regime gave the U.S. an unspecified “present,” as it had promised, related to oil and gas. This showed “we’re dealing with the right people,” he said. But he also gave them a present by easing U.S. sanctions on the export of Iranian oil.

The next step is to arrange a meeting, if Iran even wants one. The regime may feel time is on its side; the Strait of Hormuz is blocked and Mr. Trump backed down on Monday. But before you blink it will be Friday again, and with President Trump you never know what he’ll be saying then. He may not know himself.

But we trust he knows that giving in to the regime now would leave an Iranian gun to the world’s head, a proven veto on energy flows. The world—read: China and Russia—might conclude he couldn’t tolerate the political pressure at home from high oil prices.

“One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” Iran’s oil-export terminal, Mr. Trump said. “I’d go in and take it.” That was in 1988. Now he’s President, and history and the world want to know if that boast is still operative.

🐣 RT @McFaul Conventional military superiority doesn’t always guarantee success (think Vietnam, Afghanistan). Russia is learning that in Ukraine, where cheap tech, political will, and innovation are undermining its advantages in scale and firepower. Will the same be true for Iran?
⋙ 🐣 Instead of working with Ukraine to master modern drone warfare, the US is getting drones from a new brand new Israeli company brokered by … Trump’s sons. ¤ Because, Trump: “The last person we want help from is Zelensky.”

🐣 RT @ariel_oseran Iran announces its readiness to establish “a regional security and military union with its dear neighbors,” without the presence of the U.S. or Israel.
¤ https://x.com/ariel_oseran/status/2036610892868026651?s=20

The Iranian Armed Forces Spokesman said in a statement in Arabic: “Dear Muslim brothers, we do not need a country that is thousands of kilometers away to ensure our region’s security, nor do we need a country that views Islamic countries as cash cows. What good has America and its bases in the region brought you?”

The spokesman added: “We must learn from the mistakes of the past and the lack of supportive force which caused the Arabs’ defeat in the 1967 and 1973 wars. We must unite to ensure our security and establish a comprehensive defense union.”

🐣 RT @NOELreports US Lt. Gen. Steven P. Whitney praised Ukraine’s military for its rapid innovation and adaptability. He highlighted the fast cycle of developing, testing and refining new concepts, calling the approach both highly effective and cost-efficient. ¤ Whitney described Ukraine’s level of innovation as remarkable in modern warfare conditions. #Ukraine

🐣 RT @kaitlancollins Sen. Bernie Sanders: “I think all over the country, people are saying, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t afford housing. We can’t afford health care. We can’t afford childcare. We can’t afford food at the grocery store.’ And this war now, which will cost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, why? Why the bomb buildings in Tehran? Why force a million people in Lebanon from their homes? So it’s not just progressives and Democrats…I think the polling suggests that whether you’re Republicans or Democrats, this is not a war that the American people want.” [CNN]
💽 https://x.com/kaitlancollins/status/2036611693250334769?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @brett_mcgurk This is the statement issued by Iran today on the Strait: “open” to “non-hostile passage” only for ships Iran approves and “in coordination with the competent Iranian authorities.” In other words: NOT open.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/brett_mcgurk/status/2036637029199495206?s=20/photo/1 -2

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom ah, no
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump on Iran: We really had regime change. This is a change in the regime because the leaders are all different. I think we can say this is regime change.

🐣 RT @brett_mcgurk Per this document in @TimesofIsrael: If Iran gives up its enrichment program and its support for non-state proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis)—it will receive universal sanctions relief. Iran should take that deal, but I suspect it wont. Meanwhile, war continues …
[TextLink:] https://x.com/brett_mcgurk/status/2036587133738094919?s=20/photo/1 -2

🐣 RT @danpfeiffer From @politico: “Several people close to the White House said they were baffled by the president’s remarks.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JenniferJJacobs NEWS from Oval – Trump told us: “We’ve won this. This war has been won.”
He said Iran gave the US an oil- and gas-related “gift” that showed him “we’re dealing with the right people.” It’s “related to the flow, to the Strait,” he told me.
¤ https://x.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/2036533274189668609?s=20
// can’t find Politico article

“It was a very significant prize, and they gave it to us, and they said they were going to give it,” he told @edokeefe.
Trump: “We have, really, regime change. You know, this is a change in the regime. Because the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with, that created all those problems.”
Trump said @VP Vance, @SecRubio, @JaredKushner and @SEPeaceMissions Steve Witkoff currently doing negotiations with Iran.
Hegseth told us: “We see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well. We negotiate with bombs.”
At that, Trump said two people were “quite disappointed” when the president said the conflict could be settled soon: Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine.

🐣 RT @mikepompeo Your daily reminder that, after four years and an unfathomable waste of blood and treasure, Russia still isn’t winning this war. ¤ Backing Ukraine isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s the prudent move.

🐣 Ukraine’s military tech company is now listed on the NASDAQ. It’s $SWMR for Swarmer.

🐣 RT @Megatron_ron BREAKING: 🇬🇧🇮🇷 UK will join the war and will try to open the Strait of Hormuz – The Times ¤ The UK’s Royal Navy will lead efforts to “reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and ensure safe passage of merchant ships,” The Times reports. ¤ The plan is under development by the UK and France, and seeks the support of the US.

🐣 RT @AlexandruC4 Jake Sullivan: Just days before the US started bombing Iran, Tehran put a massive peace proposal on the table in Geneva. The US negotiators “simply didn’t understand what they were being offered” and bombed them anyway
💽 https://x.com/AlexandruC4/status/2036514338119295091?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @AJENews Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich called for the effective annexation of southern Lebanon. ¤ In a speech on Monday, he stated Israel needs to extend its borders and said “the Litani River must become our new border with the State of Lebanon—just like the buffer line in Gaza.”

🐣 📊 RT @clashreport Trump’s approval rating dropped to 36% (a new low) in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, down from 40% last week.

🐣 RT @MykhailoRohoza Above St. Petersburg stretches a 230-kilometer band of thick black smoke, visible from space — the largest oil transshipment terminal on the Baltic is burning. A year and a half of a complete ban on fuel and diesel exports.
¤ 🖼 https://x.com/MykhailoRohoza/status/2036497304002183518?s=20/photo/1

Across the border, it’s a world of its own. Vendors are sharing Wi-Fi from their phones so people in line can pay for sausage, while in Moscow there’s no network even to access a paid restroom. Planes circle above Moscow for three days and above St. Petersburg for two because the “Carpet” emergency plan is constantly active.

Dear Russians have shut down YouTube and Telegram for themselves. Either you install their clumsy military messenger “Max,” or you go into assault units. And assault troops last exactly five days — not my words, but something openly lamented even by pro-war supporters.

In Siberia, a dangerous epidemic is spreading — a disease contagious to humans and hard to treat. Livestock is being quietly slaughtered to save the skins and profits of large agricultural holdings, while trying not to explain anything to the population. In response, people traditionally fall to their knees at monuments to their grandfathers and howl, “Putin, help.” But Putin won’t help — he wants to live to 150. The Chinese squint slyly, wink kindly, and say, “Of course you will, grandpa.”

Meanwhile, in the historic center of Lviv, a drone strike lands — and people in Kharkiv ask melancholically: “What do you mean? Only one?” In Kramatorsk they reasonably note that as soon as Iran started getting hit, there were suddenly far fewer “Shahed” drones in the sky.

At the same time, one corps of Russian troops is being wiped out irreversibly, and another is being ground down to zero for the sake of 7–10 kilometers. It’s pure Passchendaele — in color.

Globally, the world feels completely warped. Trump wants a Nobel Prize, Greenland, and Cuba, and seriously claims that the regime in Iran has already been removed because everyone there has supposedly died — and the police chief apparently died twice. In Middle Eastern countries, several of our groups are shooting down UAVs — the count is in the dozens — and princes are offering thoroughbred stallions as payment if the technology is set up for them.

The war has fully entered cyberpunk. Drones deliver hot pizza to positions, take prisoners, evacuate the wounded under a hail of drops, and toss anti-tank mines onto the roofs of enemy bunkers. Copters supply isolated infantry positions for months, essentially under full encirclement, while in our artillery brigades crews are already hauling shells in exoskeletons. A storm of glide bombs, pilots exhausted by months of fighting while also acting as gunners, cavalry-style assaults under waves of FPV drones, and people spending three months straight on positions.

A fierce, terrifying, bloody grind.

Oh mighty Lord of mighty men — why did you cast us as extras in William Keith’s “The Forever War” of combat robots?

🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton If the White House leaves a wounded beast alive in Tehran, whatever is left of the regime will come back and rebuild its nuclear program, its terrorist infrastructure, and the regime. It will only be a matter of time.

🐣 RT @Reuters Iran’s negotiating posture has hardened sharply since the war began, with the Revolutionary ‌Guards exerting growing influence over decision-making, and it will demand significant concessions from the United States if mediation efforts lead to serious negotiations, three senior sources in Tehran said.
⋙ Reuters: Iran toughens negotiating stance amid mediation efforts, sources say https://tinyurl.com/9rj486rm

🐣 RT @Osinttechnical Iran has established four main demands from the U.S. in any negotiations -Reuters
– guarantees against future military action
– compensation for wartime losses
– formal control of the Strait of Hormuz
– No limitations to its ballistic missile program

🐣 RT @clashreport Turkish President Erdogan on Iran: Although the war is Israel’s war, the whole world is paying the price. ¤ The war is Netanyahu’s war for political survival, but 8 billion people are suffering the consequences.

🐣 RT @starsandstripes UPDATE: Fox News reported that the Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, and his command element, along with members of his headquarters staff, have been ordered to deploy to the Middle East amid discussions about possible ground operations.

TheAtlantic, Francis X. Rocca: Why America’s Catholic Bishops Started Sounding Liberal https://tinyurl.com/3yywefs8 “The most urgent political concern for America’s Catholic leaders is no longer abortion; it’s immigration.”
// Trump’s second term has transformed the priorities of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy

⭕ 23 Mar 2026

NYT, David French: Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Iran: ‘Everything After This Will Be Harder’ https://tinyurl.com/bdz8s59u “The difference between an army and a mob is discipline and leadership and uniform code of military justice”

McChrystal: There is no way to take away the value of on-the-ground experience and that experience of having to innovate. Armies don’t innovate well in peacetime, right? Too many limitations. In wartime, particularly to survive, Ukraine has been just a hotbed of constant innovation.

So, if we’re not going to school on that, and if we’re not trying to replicate that energy to innovate in our force, then we’re missing a requirement.

WSJ: Trump and Iran Send Conflicting Signals on Talks https://tinyurl.com/yzv8hdtp The president cited “productive” talks, while Iran denied it was in direct discussions with the U.S. //➔ Iran denies talks, but not to worry: because Jared and Witkoff are on the case! Be Best!

Politico [EU], Ivo Daalder: Thought Iraq was a blunder? Iran is far worse https://tinyurl.com/3nb48j9f. “Trump’s decision to join Israel in a war against Iran is a far bigger strategic error, and one with far bigger strategic consequences.”
// Ivo Daalder is a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center

But while Bush understood that defeating a regime required ground forces, it seems Trump simply hoped that airpower alone would suffice. As a result, Hussein’s regime fell swiftly — though Bush did vastly underestimate what would be required to rebuild a stable, let alone a democratic, Iraq in its place. But the Iranian government, as U.S. intelligence officials themselves have testified, “appears to be intact” despite Israel killing many of its key political and security leaders through targeted strikes.

Focusing on the region at large, Bush’s misjudgment eventually contributed to a large-scale insurgency, which strengthened Iran’s influence in Iraq and the wider Middle East. In contrast, Trump’s miscalculation has left in place a regime that, aside from assuring its own survival, is now singularly focused on inflicting as much damage on the U.S. and its allies as it possibly can.

Iranian drones and missiles have already attacked Israel and the Gulf states, targeted critical energy production facilities and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, which hosts one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas export transits.

Less than a month in, the world is now witnessing the largest oil and gas disruption in history. And as the fighting escalates to include gas and oil production infrastructure, the global economic consequences will be felt by every single country for months, if not years, to come — even if the conflict were to end soon.

The damage that has already been inflicted on the global economy is far greater than the economic consequences of the Iraq War in its entirety.
But that’s not all. Geopolitically, the U.S.-Israel war with Iran will also have far greater reverberations than the war in Iraq ever did.

For one, the Bush administration spent a lot of time and effort trying to get allies on board to participate in and support the war. It didn’t fully succeed in this, as key allies like Germany and France continued opposing the war. But it tried.

Trump, by contrast, didn’t even try to get America’s most important allies on board. Not only that, he even failed to inform them of his decision. And yet, when Iran responded predictably by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. president then demanded allies send their navies to escort tankers — despite the U.S. Navy so far refusing to do so.

And while it’s true that Iraq left many U.S. allies — even those that joined the war, like the U.K. — deeply scarred, Iran has convinced U.S. allies they can no longer rely on the U.S., and that Washington is now a real threat to their economic security. …

Bush and Trump both came to office determined to avoid the mistaken wars of their predecessors. Nevertheless, they both embarked on military adventures fed by a hubristic belief in American power.

But while the U.S. was strong enough — and its adversaries still weak enough — to recoup much of the damage inflicted by Bush’s war, the war unfolding in Iran today will leave behind an America that will have lost much of its global power, standing and influence, destined to confront rising adversaries all on its own.

🧵 RT @RonWyden Newest in my Epstein investigation: A man who was one of Epstein’s key sources of cash has a lot of questions to answer.
⋙⋙ NYT: How Epstein Helped Solve a Billionaire’s Problems With Women https://tinyurl.com/m2pr553z “The Wall Street titan Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $170 million for what he said was tax and estate work. But his services went beyond that.”
📌 https://x.com/RonWyden/status/2036119180487876654?s=20

⋙ 🐣 RT @RonWyden Epstein met with Russian government officials and Russian state-owned entities more than a dozen times between 2015 and 2017. Many of those meetings took place within hours of separate meetings between Epstein and Black. […]

⋙ 🐣 RT @RonWyden Epstein used Leon Black’s money to pay for his trafficking operation. That’s already on the record — Black admitted it. I’ve been investigating his relationship with Epstein for nearly 4 years and I have a lot more questions. I still haven’t gotten satisfactory answers. […]

🐣 RT @saif_aldareei Strong UAE Warning from Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC Group CEO: “Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz is economic terrorism targeting every nation in the world, with consequences far exceeding energy markets. No country should be allowed to hold Hormuz hostage… This is not aggression against one nation—it’s economic terrorism against everyone!”
The UAE stands firm in protecting the global economy and the Gulf

🐣 RT @shashj The war aim is now re-opening a strait that would not have been closed were it not for the war itself.
⋙ WaPo: Trump threats, US troop build-up raise specter of battle for Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/yc6j7xp5 “Israelis said securing the strait for energy shipments could become the war’s main goal now that regime change and ending Iran’s ability to obtain a nuclear weapon seem out of reach.”

TEL AVIV — A surge of additional U.S. forces to the Middle East and President Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure have set the stage for what U.S. and Israeli security officials increasingly see as the war’s possible endgame: a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz and key energy installations.

Reopening the strait — a critical conduit for global energy supplies — has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli military operation, including overthrowing Iran’s theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Tehran’s reach.

Instead, breaking Iran’s stranglehold on the strait could enable Trump to wind down the war while claiming victory, halt an expanding global energy crisis and deprive Iran of a potent deterrent against future strikes — which senior Israeli officials described as inevitable if Tehran resumes ballistic missile production or moves to develop a nuclear weapon.

In Israel, Trump’s online threats have raised expectations that a new phase of the war could soon get underway with the arrival of additional U.S. firepower. In a sign of rising global anxiety over the political and economic instability, stock markets in Asia fell sharply on Monday, with Japan’s Nikkei closing down 3.5 percent and the Korea Composite Stock Price Index finishing 6.5 percent lower.

A contingent of 4,500 U.S. sailors and Marines is heading to the Middle East, including an infantry battalion landing team backed by helicopters, F-35 fighter jets and armored landing vehicles. The Pentagon also sped up the deployment of a similar unit, the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, from San Diego, defense officials said last week.

“Those Marines aren’t coming for decoration,” said an Israeli official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military and intelligence issues.

An Iranian military spokesman said Sunday that Iran would retaliate for attacks on its oil and gas assets by hitting U.S.-linked energy targets, information technology and water desalination infrastructure in the Persian Gulf region.

Tehran also hammered Israel overnight Sunday with one of its most powerful airstrikes yet — two ballistic missiles that made rare direct hits on two southern Israeli towns, injuring about 115 people. One of the towns, Dimona, is about eight miles from a nuclear research facility. Iranian state television framed the strike as payback for a reported attack Saturday on Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. (Israel’s military said it was not aware of a strike on the facility.)

The new U.S. deployment signals a plan “to take the island and the strait,” the Israeli official said, referring to Kharg Island, Iran’s main hub for exporting petroleum. Doing so could enable the United States and Israel to starve Tehran of oil revenue and provide a political off-ramp for a president who, the Israeli official said, “needs to show that the strait is open.”

The surging level of U.S.-Israeli concern over the strait was underscored by Trump’s latest effort to shape the course of the war on social media.

“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” he posted on the Truth Social platform.

At the same time, Trump’s unusual decision to lift oil sanctions on Iran, potentially giving his enemy access to a windfall of revenue, has prompted a handful of Republicans to raise concerns about the war’s direction and merit.

Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) has voted to take up two war powers resolutions that would force Trump to cease hostilities with Iran, both of which have failed on procedural votes. And Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said sending in ground troops would take the war “to a completely different level than what had been advertised to us as members of Congress when we first went into Iran.”

“Congress deserves and should demand greater engagement with the administration on the plans,” Murkowski told reporters Sunday. “We haven’t received that to date.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), speaking on ABC on Sunday, said “it’s a real problem” that he, and others, don’t know what the U.S. objective is, especially if the Pentagon continues to push its request to Congress for more than $200 billion to finance the war.

Other Republicans have encouraged Trump to go forward. […]

🐣 RT @BabakTaghvaee1 BREAKING: Thousands of troops from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division have already arrived in the Middle East aboard several C-17A Globemaster III heavy transport aircraft of the U.S. Air Force.
🖼 https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/2036100225450783008?s=20/photo/1 -3

They are expected to take part in a potential assault to seize the Iranian islands of Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb, and Abu Musa in the Strait of Hormuz.

In addition, four days ago, six U.S. Air Force C-5M Super Galaxy aircraft carrying multiple MH-47G and MH-60M helicopters of the U.S. Army’s 160th SOAR arrived in the region to support U.S. Army Special Forces, including Delta Force, in operations in Isfahan aimed at recovering enriched uranium.

As part of a broader strategy, the United States is expected to exchange ownership of the three Iranian islands in return for not attacking or seizing Khark Island.

#OperationEpicFury #OperationLionsRoa

🧵 RT @Mylovanov Ukraine shot down 140,000 Russian missiles, drones and aircraft over 4 years — including 44,000 Shahed-type drones now hitting US bases in the Middle East.
Ukraine sent 200 advisers to the Gulf.
Trump’s response: “The last person we need help from is Zelenskyy” — The Times. 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2036101659756011700?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2036101659756011700.html

Despite Trump’s dismissal, US Central Command requested those Ukrainian advisers now deployed in Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia. ¤ “It was short-sighted dismissing what Ukraine can contribute in specialist advice,” says RUSI’s Justin Bronk. 2/

Ukrainian officers were astonished to see Gulf states firing as many as eight Patriot missiles (each $3+ million) at a single target — even using them to hit cheap drones. ¤ Ukrainians use only one or two missiles to down Russian ballistic missiles. 3/

“I don’t understand what they had been doing, what they’ve been looking at for the four years we’ve been fighting,” a senior Ukrainian officer said. ¤ The US and Gulf allies appear to have ignored Ukrainian data on improving Patriot intercept rates. 4/

On March 1, three US F-15E fighter jets were shot down by Kuwaiti air defence while pursuing drones. ¤ “In any war friendly fire happens, but in this particular case it was clear negligence,” the Ukrainian officer said. 5/
‘
In the first four days of the Iran war, the US and allies launched 800+ Patriot missiles—200 more than Ukraine received in three years. ¤ “Often they were firing thoughtlessly.” They used $6 million SM-6 missiles to shoot down $70,000 Shaheds. 6/

Cheap Shaheds caused billions in damage to US and Gulf assets. A $1 billion US early warning radar was hit. At least one $300 million air defence radar was destroyed. ¤ Both were clearly visible in satellite imagery for two months before being struck. 7/

On May 13, 2023, “Matyoryi,” a 25-year-old Patriot officer, shot down three Russian jets and two helicopters over Russia’s Bryansk region by driving his battery close to the border for an ambush. ¤ He turned defensive systems into offensive weapons. 8/

Matyoryi’s team found ways to assemble and dismantle their Patriot battery far faster than American training manuals prescribed — firing and escaping before detection. ¤ They ambushed Russian aircraft in skies Moscow thought were safe. 9/

Colonel Kyrylo Peretyatko, Hero of Ukraine, commanded a NASAMS battery that shot down 12 Russian cruise missiles in two minutes. ¤ “Such operations have not existed in world history. This is a completely different war, which all countries are studying.” 10X
Source: https://tinyurl.com/4bjz5njd

🐣 RT @TrueFactsStated How does this happen? Why is it allowed to continue?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TrueFactsStated/status/2036035523349770742?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

🐣 RT @Forbes Iran’s foreign ministry denied having held talks with the U.S., claiming Trump’s remarks were “part of efforts to reduce energy prices and buy time to implement his military plans.” [link:] https://tinyurl.com/4zekvjbp (Photo: Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)

🐣 RT @FPWellman This is what passes for international diplomacy and leadership today. An all caps misspelled rant from a sundowning old man is posted by the Department of Defense as an official order. 35 years ago I had just fought the last battle of Desert Storm and GEN Schwarzkopf met our enemy in a tent in the desert to lay out their withdrawal from Kuwait as thousands of coalition troops waited for our orders. Today a mentally unstable narcissist posts on his personal social media company his brain dump and our troops are left scrambling to decode it all. This is the most incompetent leadership I’ve ever witnessed at any level.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/FPWellman/status/2036057745955184899?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] U.S. Department of War ®

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I AM PLEASE TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WITCH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

NYT (8:19): Trump Says U.S. Attacks on Iranian Energy Infrastructure to Be Postponed https://tinyurl.com/3uy7duth “President Trump said the five-day postponement followed “very good” talks. Iranian state media said he was “backing down” after threats of retaliation.”
// ⇈ FP title; inside title: Trump Says U.S. and Iran Held ‘Very Good’ Talks on Ending Conflict “President Trump said he would postpone a deadline for striking Iran’s energy infrastructure after “productive” talks to resolve hostilities. Iranian state media said he was “backing down” after threats of retaliation.”
↥ ↧
NYT (5:03am): War’s Attacks on Energy Could Turn Economic Shock Into Long-Term Damage https://tinyurl.com/3bbxam7w “A new phase targeting oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf threatens to hurt businesses and customers around the world for months or even years.”

⭕ 22 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @mehdirhasan The Israeli government has displaced a total of 6 million people from their homes. (3 million Iran, 2 million Gaza, 1 million Lebanon). ¤ 6 million people. ¤ The equivalent of the entire population of Maryland displaced from their homes. ¤ By one government.

🐣 RT @Beefeater_Fella President Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian units have already achieved concrete results in protecting Persian Gulf countries from Iranian attacks, and that Russia is irritated by the global demand for Ukrainian expertise. ¤ He noted that “Ukraine’s experience in air defense is among the strongest in the world and is something that will ensure Ukraine remains one of the key contributors to global security after the war — among those the world will rely on to maintain security.”

NYT, Phil Klay: Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran https://tinyurl.com/3rtjtc6m “War cannot be justified as a pure display of power and dominance.”

I have plenty of complaints about the war I served in two decades ago: the Iraq war was ill-conceived, hubristic and marred by poor leadership at the highest level. But I did know why I was there. What exactly do our service members think we’re trying to do in Iran?

The justifications for the war have been stunningly incoherent. Maybe the war is about regime change, about Iran’s nuclear program, about the narrow military objectives of degrading their ballistic missile and drone capabilities, or perhaps it was because Israel was about to attack and we’d be at risk, or because the United States was under imminent threat from Iran, or to achieve peace in the Middle East, and so on.

Maybe it’s not a war at all. Maybe it’s an “excursion that will keep us out of a war” or an incursion or maybe it’s only a “little excursion.” In President Trump’s America, there may be only two genders, but our military adventures can identify however they please.

Maybe we want “unconditional surrender,” but maybe “unconditional surrender” is a thing that happens inside the president’s mind, regardless of whether our enemies have actually surrendered. Maybe the war is “quite contained,” but maybe Americans throughout the region need to leave. Maybe there will be ground troops and maybe not.

And yet, as I watched a video posted by the White House in which a group of angry, rifle-wielding bowling pins labeled “Iranian Regime Officials” are struck by a Stars and Stripes bowling ball that turns into an airplane, followed by actual combat footage of U.S. airstrikes, I realized how one rationale for this war has remained clear and consistent: the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.

The bowling video is one of many sizzle reels posted on White House social media accounts celebrating the war by mixing images of death and destruction with footage from video games or sports highlights. The president declared that military officials told him “it’s more fun to sink” ships than to capture them, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exulted, “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller proclaimed that the Iran war showcased a military “that isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

At another news conference, Mr. Hegseth made the macho posturing even clearer: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

… What these men don’t seem to realize, or care about, is that their language of brute force represents a fundamental break with American traditions around war going back to the Revolution.

Boastful talk about slaughter is as old as war itself. “The wheels of my war chariot,” bragged one Assyrian king, “were bespattered with filth and blood. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass.” But America’s founders asserted universal principles that should make such an attitude unthinkable. If you believe not only that all men are created equal but also that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then war cannot be justified as a pure display of power and dominance.

In his addresses to the troops, George Washington would bring up the imagery of violence not as a spectacle to be enjoyed but as horrors to be endured — from “mercenary hirelings fighting in the cause of lawless ambition, rapine and devastation” to those who wished to keep revolutionary America in “bondage and misery.” And when news of British atrocities reached him, Washington wrote that “their wanton cruelty injures rather than benefits their cause; that, with our forbearance, justly secures to us the attachment of all good men.”

Likewise, Abraham Lincoln carefully used the bully pulpit of the presidency during the Civil War to articulate a firmness of moral purpose that extended beyond the success of military aims and toward an ultimate reconciliation with the South. Instead of bombastic rhetoric, Lincoln suggests in his Second Inaugural Address that God “gives to both North and South this terrible war” as their mutual punishment for the evil of slavery, and declares that they must continue “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

At Gettysburg, he cast the war as a trial of our national founding, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And so on, through wars good and bad: Whether it’s Woodrow Wilson entering World War I because “the world must be made safe for democracy” or George W. Bush’s invasion “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger,” American leaders have sought to justify our wars as having objectives in keeping with our founding political philosophy. …

Washington wanted to justly secure the attachments of all good men because he didn’t simply want to dominate the British — he wanted to form a nation. Lincoln gave the sober Second Inaugural Address instead of a blustery, Hegseth-style speech of raining death upon the rebels because he wanted to heal a nation. Our victory in World War II was secured not only with an atomic bomb but also with the Marshall Plan and the decades-long commitment of men and resources to develop democracies in Japan and Germany.

And even in America’s failed wars launched with idealistic aims, like Vietnam and the Iraq war, our defeats were often related to a failure to fully comprehend that peoples in other countries have their own passions and ideals, that they might not simply be projections of our own desires, wanting what we want them to want, and loathing what we want them to loathe.

When Stephen Miller talked about our troops not fighting with their hands tied behind their backs, he was referring to a popular conservative myth about the Vietnam War, that we might have won had we only exercised less restraint. We dropped millions of tons of bombs and left at least 100,000 civilians dead, but perhaps if we’d really gone scorched earth and killed a million more, the Vietnamese would have loved us and embraced the rulers we foisted upon them. Anyone who took our founding ideals seriously, though, would know that was a particularly vile form of folly.

And yet, that attitude seems to be guiding the current administration. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told the CNN news anchor Jake Tapper after the spectacular raid in which we captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. It’s a worldview that seems to inform both his foreign policy and his treatment of domestic political opponents — witness the administration’s ill-fated show of force in Minneapolis that ended in disgrace and the death of American citizens.

That is precisely the kind of world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans we must arm our allies in Europe to prevent: “A new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.”

A reliance on brute force can be blinding. In one of the more telling comments from the defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth claimed that because we’d taken control of Iran’s airways and waterways, “we control their fate,” and “the terms of this war will be set by us at every step.” A veteran of Iraq like Mr. Hegseth should know better. The enemy always gets a vote, and even after a victorious campaign, the effect of war on a population may have complex, unwanted and sometimes catastrophic consequences.

If we view hostile nations not as an accumulated assortment of video game enemies to be cowed into submission by our massive firepower and sick internet memes, but as complex countries filled with human beings, this seems obvious. And it’s that particular failure that explains the otherwise inexplicable failure of the Trump administration to foresee obvious possible consequences of military action in Iran.

In February, the U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, suggested,that “Trump’s energy dominance agenda” meant that America need not worry about disruptions to the oil market if war broke out with Iran. Now the president is trying to claim that high gas prices are good for America, while urging oil tankers to “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran, whose ships can get through, is selling more oil than before the war.

After Iran widened the war by striking targets around the Middle East, Mr. Hegseth admitted, “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react.” Robert Pape, an expert on strategic bombing campaigns, has argued that air power without subsequent ground troops has never resulted in a positive regime change. Yet the Trump administration urged the Iranian people to seize their chance at controlling the country, and seemed caught flat-footed when the Iranian regime, instead of wanting “to talk badly,” elected a hard-line new leader while their security chief, who was later killed, threatened to make the Strait of Hormuz a “strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.”

Without a clear moral or political purpose, we’re left with what the military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady calls the “strike-as-strategy” paradox, in which we substitute tactical prowess for comprehensive strategic design. This tendency, he writes, “is reinforced by a political culture that demands televised displays of military prowess.”

Well, I am not entertained. And though my ideals have been bruised and battered, not least by the war I served in not long after Mr. Hegseth’s first deployment, I still retain a faith in the principles of the Constitution I swore an oath to 20 years ago. They are universal, not nationalistic, principles, and they should serve as a check on the hubristic American tendency to think we can dominate others by sheer force of military might.

As Washington knew well, war is a “plague to mankind,” even when it goes well and the only targets we strike are valid military targets. The average junior Iranian sailor on a ship off the coast of Sri Lanka could be a conscript. He might even dislike the regime that just murdered thousands of his fellow Iranians but which he feels helpless to overthrow. He is, like the average American, endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights.

In some circumstances, this conscript may end up a valid military target, but he will be one that should be targeted only out of military necessity in a war with a clear moral justification, not someone you should kill just because it’s “fun” to blow up ships. And this is hardly an immaculate war. Mr. Hegseth, who campaigned on behalf of those accused of war crimes and railed against “stupid rules of engagement,” cut about 90 percent of the people at the Pentagon working on ensuring we don’t accidentally harm civilians. We should not be surprised that a preliminary finding by the Pentagon suggests that on the very first day of this war of choice we struck a school, slaughtering children en masse. Nor should we be surprised if such acts help shore up support for an Iranian regime whose greatest weakness has long been the contempt it inspires in its own people.

American military policy has failed us over the past decades, but I don’t think the solution is the radical break with American tradition represented by the Trump administration. I still hold to the conservative belief that the highest ideals we find in our history can guide us. Our greatest wartime leaders thought we should wage war only when it was absolutely necessary, that we should articulate the clear moral and political objectives that we use to guide our strategy and that we should treat the shedding of blood with the seriousness it deserves.

Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.

🐣 RT @MarkHertling Fog of war. Friction. Intelligence challenges. There’s always more than what is reported.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JeffStorobinsky .@MarkHertling on MS NOW ¤ Focus: General Hertling unpacks all the risks of a U.S. attack on Iran’s energy infrastructure and how such illegal actions can eventually involve The Hague
💽 https://x.com/MarkHertling/status/2035850691403563284?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @MikeNellis What a gift to Talarico
⋙ 🐣 RT @adamwren Trump calls James Talarico “the Worst Candidate I have ever seen.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MikeNellis/status/2035793677776293954?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SavchenkoReview 🇺🇸 Some US troops describe a lack of planning, with one official warning a ground operation would be “an absolute disaster,” — HuffPost ¤ Many troops are questioning the purpose of the war, with some saying, “We do not want to die for Israel — we don’t want to be political pawns.” [HuffPo link:] https://tinyurl.com/4k44sj25

🐣 RT @A_M_R_M1 🚨 Breaking News: Washington has informed Israel of its intention to seize Kharg Island by ground forces, according to Israel’s Channel 15.

🐣 RT @UkrReview 🇺🇦🇺🇸🇮🇷 Zaluzhnyi: A potential US ground invasion of Iran would result in a military disaster for American forces. Modern battlefield technologies and attrition strategies make the presence of ground troops in such zones nearly impossible. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/yaz8kkn9

🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 BREAKING: Gulf Arab countries are warning the U.S. administration that targeting Iran’s power plants would invite reprisals putting their energy and water facilities at risk and endangering the world economy-WSJ

🐣 RT @atrupar Chris Murphy: “We’re gonna give Iran $14b to fund this war with the US? We’re gonna give Russia billions of dollars to fund their war with Ukraine? We’re literally putting money into the pockets of the very nations we’re fighting right now. We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history, and frankly we’ve had a lot of incompetence in war-making.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2035733899905519909?s=20/photo/1
// on @MeetThePress

⭕ 21 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @JavierBlas From almost done, followed by close to winding down — to a 48-hours ultimatum to Iran to re-open the Strait of Hormuz that the US doesn’t use, and in any case, it would be very easy to re-open even by the NATO European cowards…
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JavierBlas/status/2035509557170958394?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @redpillb0t Joe Kent dropped a massive bombshell in his interview with Tucker Carlson:“One of Trump’s closest advisors who was advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and to rethink our relationship with Israel is suddenly assassinated and then we were told to stop investigating it.”
💽 https://x.com/redpillb0t/status/2035432562945130658?s=20/photo/1

TheAtlantic, Jonathan Lemire: Donald Trump Is Nothing Like Robert Mueller https://tinyurl.com/5n7efmz7 “The absurdity of a man who avoided Vietnam due to ‘bone spurs’ dancing on the grave of a decorated combat veteran”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2035488782703570946?s=20/photo/1

Other presidents have been partisan; other presidents have exhibited vile behavior. But Trump alone has publicly exulted in the death of an American. Mueller never sought the attention, though his life story was worthy of biopic treatment. He volunteered to fight in Vietnam and won numerous citations, including the Bronze Star for combat valor when he rescued a wounded Marine under enemy fire during a 1968 ambush. The following year, he was shot in combat. He returned to lead his platoon a few months later. He later practiced law, became a U.S. attorney, and rose through the ranks of the Department of Justice before being chosen by President George W. Bush to become FBI director shortly before the September 11 attacks.

At the conclusion of Mueller’s 10-year term, a president of the other party, Barack Obama, asked him to stay on for another two years. Mueller was approved by all senators, Republican and Democrat alike, 100 to 0.

🐣 RT @Marwa__Osman A message to Washington?
¤ https://x.com/Marwa__Osman/status/2035294770277335078?s=20

In a tightly structured 12-minute address, Ayatollah Imam Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei moved from familiar rhetoric into something far more consequential. The opening half followed the expected script; revisiting decades of U.S. warmongering rhetoric: sanctions, assassinations, regional conflicts.

But midway through, the tone shifted from retrospective to strategic.

Sayyed Khamenei outlined three concrete demands, each with a defined timeline: a rapid U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East, a full rollback of sanctions within 60 days, and long-term financial compensation for economic damages.

Then came the ultimatum. Fail to comply, and Iran escalates, economically, militarily, and potentially nuclearly. Not hypothetically, but operationally: closing the Strait of Hormuz, formalizing defense ties with Russia and China, and moving from ambiguity to declared nuclear deterrence.

The timing of external reactions was just as telling. Within hours, both Beijing and Moscow issued statements aligning, carefully but unmistakably, with Tehran’s framing. This definitely looked coordinated.

The broader context matters. Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei represents a different leadership style from his martyred predecessor leader. Where martyr Sayyed Ali Khamenei operated through long-term balancing and controlled escalation, Sayyed Mojtaba appears positioned to deliver faster, more decisive outcomes.

Iran’s internal reports are clear, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps is in no way, shape or form interested in incrementalism. They are pushing for structural change: removing U.S. influence from the region, restoring Iran’s military standing, and forcing a re-negotiation of global power dynamics.

And for the first time in decades, Iran practically has the leverage to do this.

Rising oil prices, regional instability, growing alignment with China and Russia, and vulnerabilities in global trade routes have shifted the strategic landscape.

So this was not just a speech. It was a test. A test of whether the United States is willing, or even able, to operate under a new set of constraints.

What happens next will likely define not just the trajectory of this conflict, but the broader balance of power in the Middle East for decades to come.

🐣 RT @KSAmofaEN #Statement | The Foreign Ministry expresses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s condemnation in the strongest terms of the blatant Israeli aggression targeting military infrastructure in the south of the Syrian Arab Republic, in a flagrant violation of international law and Syria’s sovereignty.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/KSAmofaEN/status/2035333845537403300?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @mofauae Joint Statement on the Strait of Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/ynyjxfs
[TextLink:] https://x.com/mofauae/status/2035326341596446810?s=20/photo/1

Joint statement from the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Denmark, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Czechia, Romania, Bahrain, Lithuania, and Australia on the Strait of Hormuz

We condemn in the strongest terms recent attacks by Iran on unarmed commercial vessels in the Gulf, attacks on civilian infrastructure including oil and gas installations, and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces.

We express our deep concern about the escalating conflict. We call on Iran to cease immediately its threats, laying of mines, drone and missile attacks and other attempts to block the Strait to commercial shipping, and to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 2817.

Freedom of navigation is a fundamental principle of international law, including under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The effects of Iran’s actions will be felt by people in all parts of the world, especially the most vulnerable.

Consistent with UNSC Resolution 2817, we emphasise that such interference with international shipping and the disruption of global energy supply chains constitute a threat to international peace and security. In this regard, we call for an immediate comprehensive moratorium on attacks on civilian infrastructure, including oil and gas installations.

We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning.

We welcome the International Energy Agency decision to authorise a coordinated release of strategic petroleum reserves. We will take other steps to stabilise energy markets, including working with certain producing nations to increase output.

We will also work to provide support for the most affected nations, including through the United Nations and the IFIs.

Maritime security and freedom of navigation benefit all countries. We call on all states to respect international law and uphold the fundamental principles of international prosperity and security.

NYT Editorial: Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran https://tinyurl.com/d9d4u9k5 Trump “has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.”

WaPo: To tilt Hungarian election, Russians proposed staging assassination attempt https://tinyurl.com/4zscs63h To aid Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, … Russian SVR operatives proposed ‘the Gamechanger’ — a staged assassination attempt to stir supporters.” //➔ Fancy that!
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2035295892622704825?s=20

💙 🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow “We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator …we take an oath to the Constitution … and we’re willing to die to protect it”. ¤ – Mark Milley (2023)
💽 https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/2035250183735324767?s=20/photo/1

⭕ 20 Mar 2026

WSJ: The Smartest Minds in AI Just Learned the World’s Most Valuable F-Word https://tinyurl.com/ymt2f2jy “At companies that can do anything, the most important thing is focus. Steve Jobs made it a priority at Apple—and OpenAI and Anthropic are learning why.”

TheGuardian, Larry Elliott: Iran could be the US’s Boer war: a hollow victory that marks the beginning of the end of empire https://tinyurl.com/bdetdm24 “US leaders anticipated a walkover. Now they’re embroiled in a conflict that could hasten the end of US economic dominance”

🐣 RT @DI313_ ⚡️ 🇺🇸 The United States is preparing to deploy elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East region -CBS

WSJ: The Quiet American: How Pope Leo Is Pushing Back Against Trump https://tinyurl.com/k77dzjs5 “Leo doesn’t want to be the anti-Trump, senior Vatican officials say. Rather, the pope is advocating positively for a world that reflects Catholic teaching.”
// Can the low-key pontiff from Chicago make a difference in an era of raw power politics?

“Leo doesn’t want to be the anti-Trump, senior Vatican officials say. Rather, the pope is advocating positively for a world that reflects Catholic teaching.”
^
But the contrast of style and substance between the world’s two most prominent Americans—one a brash billionaire businessman who speaks in superlatives, the other a former missionary who spent years helping the needy in Peru—is too glaring to miss.

“They’re offering very different images of America. But they’re both authentic representations of who we are,” said Elise Ann Allen, author of “Pope Leo XIV,” a new biography, and a writer for the Catholic news website Crux.

🐣 RT @Matt_Bracken48 Will somebody please explain to me how, with the Strait of Hormuz a no-go-zone for the U.S. Navy, and our warships driven out of the Persian Gulf, we can support a USMC amphibious landing on Kharg Island, 750 miles from the eastern tip of Oman?
📌 🌎 https://x.com/Matt_Bracken48/status/2035170482622726532?s=20/photo/1

WSJ Front Page: Pentagon Sending More Marines, Warships to Middle East
WSJ Inside: Is Considering ‘Winding Down’ Iran Operations, Trump Says https://tinyurl.com/3u5jfp27 “Earlier Friday, the president said he was open to dialogue with Iran but not a cease-fire”

🐣 RT @michaeldweiss I asked a retired U.S. Marine familiar with amphibious operations about a MEU on Kharg Island. Granted, this person doesn’t have “OSINT” in his Twitter bio, so what the hell would he know? But this is what he told me, contra Trump’s claim this is a “simple military maneuver”:
¤ https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/2035101673769553954?s=20

“Amphibious landings are by nature high risk and a lot can go wrong even in the best conditions. The Marine Corps has lost equipment during exercises, for example when an Abrams tank was sunk during an exercise on the coast of Spain in the 2010s.

“An amphibious landing on Kharg is within the capability of the United States to accomplish, but at what cost and to what end? Once the Marines fight their way ashore and take their objective, they will be on an island with limited cover, very close to hostile Iran. How long could the Marines hold this island, under bombardment, before they would need to be withdrawn?

“As for the danger, I think of amphibious assault as being akin to airborne assault. A lot of this depends on the tactical advantage of speed and surprise.

“What the Marines are working against here is that everyone knows they’re coming. And there are only so many places that are suitable for a landing. Need a suitable approach, favorable tides, etc. the Iranians understand this and will plan for it.

“It is reasonable to expect that they will try to attack the transports en route, that they will attack while the ships unload, that they will attack the landing craft while they move from the ships to the beach, and that the troops will be attacked as they assault from the beach to their objectives.

“Once the Marines are at their objective, they’ll be attacked there too because Iran, and any other interested party to the conflict, will know exactly where the Marines are.

“We’re also 13 years removed from major combat operations in GWOT. There are still combat veterans at middle and upper echelons, but the majority of troops are not combat veterans. They’re new guys.”

🐣 RT @defense_civil25 Commentary account 🚨 Alert: The US Army is preparing to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division into the Middle East region! – CBS There are already 8,000 Marines on their way to
🖼 https://x.com/defense_civil25/status/2035123616145093051?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: Trump post about considering winding down military efforts in the Middle East
[TextLink:] https://x.com/spectatorindex/status/2035104161193501116?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran: (1) Completely degrading Iranian Missile Capability, Launchers, and everything else pertaining to them. (2) Destroying Iran’s Defense Industrial Base. (3) Eliminating their Navy and Air Force, including Anti Aircraft Weaponry. (4) Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability, and always being in a position where the U.S.A. can quickly and powerfully react to such a situation, should it take place. (5) Protecting, at the highest level, our Middle Eastern Allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others. The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it – The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated. Importantly, it will be an easy Military Operation for them. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @BernieSanders Trump’s authoritarianism. ¤ War in Iran. ¤ A corrupt campaign system owned by billionaires. ¤ Attacks on voting rights. ¤ And an AI revolution with no guardrails. ¤ We are living in dangerous times. ¤ Here’s how we go forward.
💽 https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/2035026262972879126?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @clashreport German Chancellor Merz on MAGA:The MAGA movement is not our movement. What they are doing with culture and media, how they deal with each other, is not our understanding of democracy. ¤ We have a different understanding.
💽 https://x.com/clashreport/status/2035093781624619250?s=20/photo/1
// emphatic

🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Trump’s former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis:“America is becoming predatory. America is unreliable. There’s a sense that we are not a reliable security partner right now…you can’t bring allies on board if they don’t trust you”
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/2035108965491651037?s=20/photo/1

NYT: Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional https://tinyurl.com/3fkmzn8a “Judge Paul Friedman, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the Pentagon to restore the press passes of seven journalists for The Times.”
// A federal judge tossed parts of the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets, saying they violated the First Amendment, in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times.

TheAtlantic, Alex Reisner: The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry https://tinyurl.com/bdew4s8f ‘Many top AI models are trained on data sets containing massive numbers of copyrighted books, videos, and other works. … AI has long been an intellectual-property battle zone’
// cont.: where damages in lawsuits frequently exceed nine figures.

🐣 RT @NEW!! A group of 18 Democrats accuses the White House of rewarding Moscow with sanctions relief
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ralakbar/status/2034872021281108043?s=20/photo/1 -3

⭕ 19 Mar 2026

🔆 This❗️⋙ WSJ: US War Planes and Helicopters Kick Off Battle to Reopen Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/57wx3nan //➔ Warthogs and Apaches ✛ “A rapid-response unit of roughly 2,200 Marines is on its way to the Middle East, where they could play a role in reopening the strait”
// Effort takes on new urgency nearly three weeks into the war with Iran as oil prices soar

NYT, David French: Trump Has Only Himself to Blame https://tinyurl.com/284t6ny6 “Trump led America into an unconstitutional war. And now he’s compounding that sin by proving to be every bit as reckless a commander as he is a president.”

🐣 RT @BMarchetich The most detailed account yet of the Iran talks holds that:
– Witkoff & Kushner were ignorant, later offered misleading accounts
– But also acted in good faith
– Trump/WH pushed 11th hr poison pills
– Mood was broadly positive after the last talks – then war declared next day
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BMarchetich/status/2034776773834277238?s=20/photo/1 -4

When Kushner and Witkoff met with Araghchi on Feb. 17, they raised a new demand: the three enrichment facilities that the US bombed in June 2025-Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz-had to be dismantled and replaced by a new enrichment center above ground. The Iranian negotiators objected, saying that it was obvious that the US aim was to retain the option to easily destroy such a facility.

Kushner and Witkoff denied any such motives, charging that the goal was to enable verification of nuclear activities by inspectors. “The Americans were told that they must be realistic: that they cannot achieve through military attack what they can obtain through negotiations,” the first senior Iranian political source explained to Amwaj.media, “The US side was also told that in terms of inspections and verification, it makes no difference whether a facility is underground or above ground.” This is while Witkoff is said to have insisted that the latter does, in fact, make a difference.

In the view of the Iranians, the US stance conveyed unfamiliarity with the technical dimensions to what was being discussed. To make their point, Araghchi and his delegation brought International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi into the room to ask him whether inspections of subterranean sites are any different. According to the senior Iranian source, Grossi responded that it makes no difference if a facility is above or below ground, provided that there is full access. This purportedly left Witkoff visibly irritated.

Another issue was Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% purity, which the US side rapidly wanted addressed-and which Iran was ready to dilute. The senior Iranian political source said Araghchi clarified the precise amount of such material in Iran’s possession, 440.9 kg (972 Ibs) as verified by UN inspectors, and explained that it could be used to theoretically make about ten bombs if enriched further to weapons-grade. Witkoti has in recent days suggested that Araghchi’s statement was a boast, if not a threat. But the senior Iranian source disputed that characterization, insisting that the intent was solely to emphasize the significance of the concession Tehran was ready to make.

Informed Iranian political sources familiar with the talks additionally highlighted that the lack of nuclear expertise on the part of Kushner and Witkoff, in addition to the absence of a technical team, caused consternation in the negotiations. According to the senior source, “Araghchi on several occasions explained the stages of nuclear fuel production and the difference between an enrichment facility and a reactor to Witkoff, yet the US negotiator still believed that the Tehran Research Reactor was an enrichment facility producing radio-medicines.”

However, Kushner’s presence is said to have added one key dimension compared to previous rounds of negotiations-including the diplomacy which led to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Trump’s advisor is said to have expressed a belief in the need for an “economic complement” to any potential accord, similar to the Russia-Ukraine talks. When the meeting concluded, the senior Iranian source told Amwaj.media, “Witkoff said they had never had such a positive session before. They said they would speak with Trump and obtain his authorization to continue negotiations.” The following day, the authorization from the Oval Office was conveyed to Iran through mediators.

Iranian and US negotiators reconvened in Switzerland on Feb. 26 for what came to be the final round of talks. Ahead of the session, the US delegation had through several intermediaries conveyed that Trump had no intention of initiating another attack on Iran. However, given the increased American military deployments in the region, the meeting began with Araghchi highlighting the stakes.

“This meeting may be our last…if we do not succeed today, we will each return and do what we believe we must do, the Iranian chief diplomat is said to have told Kushner and Witkoff, “You may launch an attack, and we will exercise our legitimate right of defense. No one will win in that situation, and afterward you will have to return to this very negotiating table-and it is not even certain that anyone will still want to negotiate with you.”

According to the first senior Iranian political source, Kushner and Witkoff stated that they had come to Geneva with the goal of reaching an agreement and were ready to stay as long as necessary. The Iranians noted that the two men came alone, without any technical experts. Yet, unlike previous meetings, the session is said to have been long and serious, and went into details.

As negotiations resumed in the afternoon, the second Iranian political source charged, Witkoff demanded a seven-year freeze on enrichment. Further complicating the situation, a third senior Iranian source told Amwaj.media that after an apparent call to Trump towards the end of the afternoon session, Witkoff increased the duration to ten years. At that point, a visibly angry Araghchi retorted, “I am familiar with this American-style negotiation tactic, when you always shift the goalposts.” The second political source disputed Witkoff’s recent public assertion that the Iranian foreign minister “shouted,” insisting that Araghchi was angry but firm in his tone.

Despite the clearly heated exchange, there was movement on other fronts, leading the two sides to agree to leave outstanding questions for after technical talks in Vienna that were scheduled to be held in the following days.

The notion that progress had been made appears to have been shared by others in the room. Addressing the topic of how to convey the situation in the public realm, the US delegation, according to the first Iranian political source, said it would relay positive news to the White House. Both sides also agreed that Oman’s foreign minister, acting as mediator, would tell the media that the negotiations had made “significant progress.” The Omani chief diplomat drafted a tweet with that wording and read it out loud, with both the Iranian and US delegations approving it.

NYT: Israeli Officials Said US Was Told About South Pars Attack https://tinyurl.com/yc4b82sy “President Trump first said the US ‘knew nothing’ about an attack on the gas field in Iran, which sent global oil and gas prices soaring. He then said he cautioned Israel against it.

🐣 RT @MOSSADil 🚨 U.S. SURGING FORCES TOWARD IRAN
The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group, USS Boxer, USS Comstock, and USS Portland, along with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, is deploying ahead of schedule to the Middle East.
Pentagon is moving additional firepower into CENTCOM.
⋙ 🐣 RT @VRWCTexanTwo #Breaking TWO MEU groups — Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group with the 31st MEU (from Japan) and the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group with the 11th MEU (from the U.S. West Coast) — are working
Are BOTH headed toward positions in the Middle East, specifically to support operations in CENTCOM area, which includes waters off Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.

🐣 RT @hell_line0 Restrictions on divorce and college admissions. ¤ The war on women is ramping up.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/hell_line0/status/2034672557061013836?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] The Heritage Foundation’s new policy guidebook, Saving America by Saving the Family, aims to “restore the family” by promoting a male-led, heterosexual model.

Released as part of Project 2025, it frames declining birth rates as a crisis caused by women prioritizing careers and personal fulfillment over marriage and childbearing.

The report criticizes welfare programs like SNAP and Medicaid as displacing men from their provider roles and calls for restrictions on divorce and college access, portraying independent women as a threat to national prosperity.

🐣 RT @academic_la I talked to two Israeli sources on why Iranian launches continue to increase, despite US-Israeli claims that they have destroyed almost all of the launchers. Here is what they said:
¤ https://x.com/academic_la/status/2034667503637627076?s=20

1) The 90–95% drop in volume claimed by CENTCOM earlier in the month was probably a temporary lull as Iran repositioned its remaining launchers into hardened sites. Independent satellite analysis suggests that a significant portion of the “80% destruction” claimed by the IDF actually hit high-fidelity decoys.

2) Despite fewer launchers, the lethality per strike has increased. Iran’s shift to cluster warheads has allowed a single missile to impact multiple locations simultaneously, compensating for the lower volume of launches

3) Iran has successfully set up mobile, underground units able to fire at steady rates. Iran used that quiet period to move their remaining ~100-120 heavy launchers into “Super-Hardened” facilities

4) Iran is utilizing its Zolfaqar and Dezful road-mobile launchers. These units move from hardened tunnels to pre-surveyed launch spots, fire, and return underground in under 10 minutes, often before coalition drones can re-task for a strike.

5) Because these launching units are decentralized, it is very hard for US and Israeli intelligence to get info on them.

Israel and the United States do not have an answer to this problem. That is why they are trying escalation on energy sources instead. But that is backfiring.

📊 🐣 RT @AaronBlake New Reuters-Ipsos poll of the Iran war:
37% approve
59% disapprove

🐣 RT @Ohra_aho Nordic countries have near-zero direct dependence on Strait of Hormuz energy flows, but remain indirectly exposed through global price and market shocks.
◕ https://x.com/Ohra_aho/status/2034616122352283990?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @PhilipProudfoot Israel is threatening to destroy Tyre. ¤ Tyre (Sour) is Lebanese. But also part of world history: cradle of Phoenician seafaring, source of Tyrian purple – the colour of Roman Emperors, the birthplace of Stoicism, and site of Alexander’s famous siege. ¤ An assault on us all.
🖼 https://x.com/PhilipProudfoot/status/2034637993953124484?s=20/photo/1 -4

🐣 RT @realstewpeters NETANYAHU: “There will be boots on the ground in Iran.”
💽 https://x.com/realstewpeters/status/2034730499063914635?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @GlobeEyeNews Qatar calls for the US, Israel and Iran to immediately end the war.

🐣 RT @amanpour Iran is “a war without a strategy,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says, as he warns that threats to global stability are escalating daily.
💽 https://x.com/amanpour/status/2034694026952106187?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @amyklobuchar Good news: The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award going to the people of the Twin Cities is a recognition of how our state persevered and led the way in defending freedom and democracy.

🐣 RT @disclosetv NOW – Netanyahu: “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good.”
💽 https://x.com/disclosetv/status/2034713271517794575?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 Six governments. One page. A lot left unsaid. The UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan have issued a joint statement condemning Iran’s attacks on commercial shipping and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2034672501075128418?s=20/photo/1

They call on Iran to stop the mines, the drones, the missiles. They invoke UN Security Council Resolution 2817. They express “readiness” to help ensure safe passage.

What they don’t say is how. No forces named. No timeline. No command structure. “Readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts” is diplomatic language for we’re watching and we haven’t said no yet. The IEA has authorized a coordinated release of strategic petroleum reserves. That’s the most concrete action in the entire document.

The most revealing line may be the last paragraph directed at “all states” to respect international law. That’s not aimed at Iran alone. That’s a signal to anyone else tempted to use this moment.

🐣 RT @POLITICOEurope A group of EU countries earlier signalled their “readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts” to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. ¤ But Berlin has made clear it will not send ships.
Live updates from today’s European Council summit: [link:] https://tinyurl.com/2pmmaz24
[TextLink:] https://x.com/POLITICOEurope/status/2034667891786666347?s=20/photo/1

Germany still says ‘no’ to Hormuz mission

The joint statement by France, Germany, the U.K., Italy, the Netherlands and Japan caused some confusion as to which extent those countries may follow Donald Trump’s call to send military ships to the Strait of Hormuz.

That confusion stems from a text passage which says: “We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.”

However, a spokesperson for Friedrich Merz clarified that the German chancellor still rules out a participation in such a mission during the ongoing war.

🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien Watching Trump teeter on the edge of blowing up the world economy because of a combination of hubris, strategic incoherence, mendacity and outright stupidity, might be the most extraordinarily depressing thing I have observed in my entire life, or read about in any other period.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ruth_deyermond More than watching Trump blow up NATO because of a combination of hubris, incoherence, stupidity, ignorance, and an inability to understand the Mercator projection? It’s a close call, I’d say.

🐣 RT @FAB87F This wasn’t ambiguous. ¤ “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” ¤ That’s what they were told.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/FAB87F/status/2034667608264376679?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!!
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
11.7k ReTruths 37.9k Likes
1/13/26, 6:13 PM

⋙ 🐣 RT @FAB87F When people believe you — and you don’t follow through — the cost isn’t abstract. ¤ It’s arrest. ¤ It’s exile. ¤ It’s death

🐣 RT @shanaka86 BREAKING: Qatar’s Prime Minister stood at a podium today and delivered one sentence that will fracture Gulf alliance architecture for a generation: “Everyone knows who the main beneficiary of this war is.” […]
¤ https://x.com/shanaka86/status/2034657794901823743?s=20
⋙ Grok: Likely Israel; possibly US, Russia

🐣 RT @UKinUSA NEW: The UK alongside France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan expresses readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/52atfnyz
[TextLink:] https://x.com/UKinUSA/status/2034631882432741481?s=20/photo/1
// “appropriate efforts” is key; cooler heads are needed

⭕ 18 Mar 2026

WSJ (Mar 18): America Bombs Iran, and Zelensky Suddenly Holds Aces https://tinyurl.com/5ftcvw26 “‘You don’t have the cards,’ Trump said a year ago. Today U.S. allies implore Ukraine for drone help.” //➔ Trump now appears willing to endanger troops rather than accept help from Zelensky

‼️ WaPo: Pentagon seeks more than $200 billion in budget request for Iran war https://tinyurl.com/2bp2e49x “Some White House officials do not think the Defense Department’s request has a realistic shot of being approved in Congress, one senior administration official said.”

NYT: Carol Kitman, 96, Dies; Photographer Documented the Vindman Twins https://tinyurl.com/27a8cfr6 “A chance encounter in Brooklyn led to a decades-long project following the boys’ lives, from childhood to national prominence as critics of President Trump.”

🐣 RT @saintjavelin Guys I’m afraid to say but I don’t think the reigning FIFA peace prize winner knows what he’s doing
[TextLink:] https://x.com/saintjavelin/status/2034466329629991289?s=20/photo/1

⋙🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran. A relatively small section of the whole has been hit. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility. NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar – In which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before. I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran, but if Qatar’s LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @CBSNews BREAKING: The FBI is investigating former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent in connection with alleged leaks of classified information, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell CBS News.

🐣 RT @_Investinq The Federal Reserve just admitted something they’ve never said before. ¤ Job growth in America, when you strip out the government’s own counting errors is effectively zero.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/_Investinq/status/2034404335795224899?s=20/photo/1

Here’s how the numbers actually break down. ¤ The BLS reported roughly 40,000 jobs added per month since April 2025. ¤ But the Fed’s own staff concluded the government has been overcounting jobs by about 60,000 per month.

Do the math, the real number is negative 20,000 jobs a month. ¤ The BLS already confirmed a massive error. ¤ In September 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its numbers and admitted it overstated job creation by 911,000 positions in the 12 months ending March 2025.

That’s nearly a million phantom jobs vanished in a single revision. ¤ So what did Powell actually say? ¤ He called it “something of a systematic overcount.” ¤ And then he said the quiet part out loud: in a world where job creation might be negative, “I just think we need to watch that situation very carefully.”

Here’s where it gets stranger. ¤ Powell didn’t frame this as a crisis, he called it “balance.”

His argument is that the labor force itself has stopped growing, because immigration has slowed sharply and population growth has stalled. ¤ So zero job growth matches zero labor force growth, the economy isn’t collapsing, it’s frozen.

And there’s a second force underneath all of this. ¤ CEOs are openly telling investors they won’t need to hire again because AI is doing the work.

US employers announced nearly 946,000 layoffs in 2025 alone, the highest since the pandemic with thousands explicitly citing AI and automation as the reason.

The Fed Chair is telling you job creation is zero at best, negative at worst, and a structural freeze has set in, one that has never happened before in modern American economic history.

The data was wrong, the picture was rosier than reality. ¤ And now the Fed is navigating in the dark.

🧵 RT @Mylovanov Stubb: The world order is being redrawn in a transition comparable to 1918, 1945 or 1989. ¤ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked a turning point, pushing the system into disorder where the future balance of power remains unclear. 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2034370134689693914?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2034370134689693914.html

Stubb: US foreign policy is now shaped by MAGA and America First, making it more ideological and interest-driven.

Washington no longer consults allies as before, and the Iran strike exposed a shift away from coalition-based action. 2/

Stubb: NATO is a defensive alliance, not designed for wars of choice.

The US acted without allies, exposing tensions inside the alliance, while Russia remains the main security threat in Europe. 3/

Stubb: US strategy now ranks Europe below other regions, forcing Europeans to take more responsibility.

Rising oil prices and easing sanctions risk putting more money into Russia’s war machine as global instability deepens. 4X

NYT: US Intelligence Saw No Change in Iran’s Missile Capabilities Before War https://tinyurl.com/4x5yp7wd “On Wednesday, the director of national intelligence and CIA director contradicted one of the justifications the Trump administration had given for its attacks on Iran.” ✛

Two top intelligence officials directly contradicted one of the Trump administration’s justifications for going to war with Iran, repeating on Wednesday the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran was years away from developing missiles capable of hitting the United States.

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, would not say whether the intelligence community had determined that Iran would be able to launch such long-range missiles within six months.

Ms. Gabbard said that Iran “could” combine technology from its existing space program with its missile development capabilities to “begin to develop” an intercontinental ballistic missile “before 2035, should Tehran attempt to pursue that capability.”

But when pressed by Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, Ms. Gabbard refused to provide an assessment of the threat Iran posed.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” Ms. Gabbard said, adding that such assessments were solely the discretion of the president. …

ABC: US and allied radar sites in the Middle East struck at least 10 times: Visual analysis https://tinyurl.com/vzpydrav ABC News analyzed satellite imagery and videos of the radar sites.

🐣 RT @AmitSegal While military commentators focus on flight paths and interception systems, historians will likely define the current campaign against Iran in entirely different terms: the first global energy war. This is not a war over territory, but over the ability of the West—and especially the Far East—to continue functioning.
¤ https://x.com/AmitSegal/status/2034355340091806085?s=20

🐣 RT @GlobalMktObserv 🚨 The Iran War is putting the semiconductor industry on high alert: ¤ The shutdown of Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, the world’s largest LNG export plant, has knocked out ~33% of global helium supply, as helium is a byproduct of natural gas processing.…
¤ https://x.com/GlobalMktObserv/status/2034196297012388180?s=20

Helium is essential for semiconductor manufacturing, MRI machines, fiber optics, and space exploration, with no viable substitutes, meaning higher helium prices will directly raise the cost of making every chip in the world.

Chipmakers hold ~6 months of inventory, but Samsung and SK Hynix are already scrambling to find alternative sources, with 64% of South Korean helium imports coming from Qatar alone.

🐣 RT @shanaka86 Qatar asked the United States to finish Iran. Israel struck South Pars. Qatar now condemns the strike as a threat to global energy security.
¤ 🌎 https://x.com/shanaka86/status/2034277338779893825?s=20

That is not hypocrisy. It is geology.

South Pars and Qatar’s North Field are the same reservoir. The largest gas deposit on Earth, split by a maritime border. Iran produces from one side. Qatar produces from the other. When Israeli bombs hit Phase 14 processing facilities on the Iranian side, they did not just damage Iranian gas production. They introduced risk to the reservoir pressure dynamics that govern Qatar’s $130 billion annual LNG export machine. […]

🐣 RT @Faytuks BREAKING: A fire has erupted at Qatar’s Ras Laffan refinery following an Iranian attack, according to Qatar’s Interior Ministry ¤ Ras Laffan is home to the world’s largest LNG facility

🐣 RT @Osinttechnical Israel struck Iranian natural gas infrastructure at the South Pars natural gas field, the largest in the world. ¤ The largest natural gas processing facility in Iran was reportedly hit, along with additional gas infrastructure in Asaluyeh.

🐣 RT @Hoffman8Jon Two years ago this week, I published this piece on how Israel is a strategic liability for the United States. ¤ This has been the case for decades, but the past two years have proven Israel is arguably the greatest strategic liability the United States currently shoulders abroad.
¤ https://x.com/Hoffman8Jon/status/2034314328669663401?s=20

🐣 RT @DMichaelTripi NEW: Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly focused on blocking Trump’s pathways to a ceasefire and follow-up talks with Iran by killing members of leadership most likely to negotiate according to European Council on Foreign Relations director.

🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline Sen. Paul: “You told the media that I was a freaking snake and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted…I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.”
💽 https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/2034263500395077889?s=20/photo/1
// To Sen MarkWayne Mullin, nom for DHS

📊 🐣 RT @Megatron_ron BREAKING: 🇺🇸🇮🇷🇮🇱 CNN claims that since the start of the US war against Iran, the country’s popularity worldwide has fallen by 79%. ¤ The only country more unpopular than the United States is Israel. ¤ This could cause an additional and significant economic blow due to boycotts of US products and services around the world.
💽 https://x.com/Megatron_ron/status/2034263315963121734?s=20/photo/1
// on CNN; source: Pew

🐣 RT @BohuslavskaKate Ex CIA Director, PETRAEUS: Ukraine is fighting our war — let’s make no mistake, they’re fighting NATO’s war. HOST: And right now, Ukraine is also protecting many countries in the Middle East with its drone technology. They’re the hottest ticket in town.
💽 https://x.com/BohuslavskaKate/status/2034248994730254573?s=20/photo/1
// host @jimsciutta; Tulane University

TheAtlantic, Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast: Trump May Not Be Able to End This War https://tinyurl.com/3abt6xkc ‘There are moves that don’t require Iranian military superiority—just a will to survive and a willingness to spread chaos throughout the region and into the global economy.’
// The Islamic Republic is designed to endure crises and fight asymmetric conflicts.

⭕ 17 Mar 2026 ☘️

WSJ (Mar 17): Russia Is Sharing Satellite Imagery and Drone Technology With Iran https://tinyurl.com/445wyna8 “Moscow has expanded intelligence sharing and military cooperation to help keep Tehran in the fight against U.S. and Israeli military might.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2038463628160995350?s=20/photo/1

The assistance is similar to intelligence the US and European allies have given to Ukraine in recent years, analysts say. In the Gulf, Moscow’s aid is believed to have helped Iran with recent strikes on U.S. radar systems in the region, said the people. Those strikes have included an early warning radar for a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, system in Jordan, as well as other targets in Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. …
^
Satellite images can provide more granularity about the details and movements of both land-based and sea-based targets, to help targeting before the strike as well as damage assessment following a hit.

“If there are details in those images that the Russians are providing, say, of specific types of aircraft, munitions sites, air defense assets, and naval movements, that have intel value to the Iranians, that would really help them,” said Jim Lamson, a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and former CIA analyst who specialized in the Iranian military.

The data Russia is providing comes from a fleet of satellites that provides intelligence for military operations, one official said. The fleet is managed by the Russian Aerospace Forces, better known under its Russian acronym VKS. …

Iran has had greater success targeting U.S. and Gulf state military assets in this war than it did during last year’s 12-day war. The country’s strikes—using drones to overwhelm radar before a missile strike—look very similar to Russia’s tactics in Ukraine, analysts said.

“Iranian targeting in the Gulf has been more focused on radar and command and control,” said Nicole Grajewski, a professor at Sciences Po, a research university in Paris. “Iran’s strike packages have come to strongly resemble what Russia does.” …

But most important, Iran supplied Moscow with its Shahed drones for its war against Ukraine.

When Russia started using the Shaheds on the battlefield, a delegation of several dozen Iranian officers gathered in Crimea to watch footage of the effects on Ukrainian cities and front-line positions. Ukraine says that Russia has used more than 57,000 Shahed-type drones since the start of the war. 

Since then, Moscow has started producing them domestically, and it has been adapting them to navigate and target more precisely as well as withstand electronic warfare jamming. It is sharing some of those innovations back with Iran now. …

… Despite Putin’s relationship with Trump, the Kremlin still sees Washington as a strategic adversary, said Samuel Charap, distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia policy at Rand, a U.S.-based defense think tank.

“It’s an opportunity to give us a taste of our own medicine in terms of what the U.S. provides to Ukraine in intelligence support,” he said.

🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs “Khamenei clearly prepared Iran for this moment,” writes Nate Swanson. “Confronted with a truly existential threat, Iran has mounted a much more deliberate, decentralized, and effective response than many expected.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Nate Swanson: How America’s War on Iran Backfired https://tinyurl.com/muh3t5e8 “Confronted with a truly existential threat, Iran has mounted a much more deliberate, decentralized, and effective response than many expected.”
// Tehran Will Now Set the Terms for Peace

WSJ Editorial: Why the SAVE America Act … Won’t https://tinyurl.com/23s7379w “A pyrrhic victory on voting isn’t worth busting the Senate filibuster.” “Audits in a variety of places—Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Utah, Idaho—have found noncitizen voting and registration to be rare”

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Lol, this “pivot to China by kissing Putin’s ass” garbage has been refuted by reality many times already. China owns Russia and is happy to use it as the vanguard in attacking the US and the West. Defeating Russia in Ukraine is the best way to stand up to China.
⋙ 🐣 RT @@diana_nerozzi Trump aims to shift power from China by forging better ties with Russia via Ukraine deal. ¤ A Trump admin official told me finding a “way to align closer with Russia” could create “a different power balance with China that could be very, very beneficial.” [Politico link:] https://tinyurl.com/mr3jsnuz
⋙⋙ Politico: 1 reason Trump won’t give up on Putin peace deal — China https://tinyurl.com/mr3jsnuz “The Trump administration believes that incentivizing Russia to end the war in Ukraine could eventually shift the global order away from China.”

🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW | Evening Update: The United States and Israel are currently attempting to use force to prevent Iran from disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
📌 ¤ https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2034111203811688687?s=20

A weakened regime that remains in power after this war would be able to disrupt shipping whenever and for however long it pleases with little effort if its current, relatively limited, strike campaign on shipping proves sufficient to cause the US and Israel to surrender.

A failure to demonstrate the will and ability to deny Iran the ability to disrupt traffic will make it enormously harder to deter Iran from future disruptions. Stopping the war in current conditions would thus represent a major strategic challenge that the United States or Israel would need to contend with in future rounds of conflict with a regime that will continue to be a committed adversary. […]

🐣 RT @AranchaGlezLaya [tr] 🇺🇸 The United States ceases to be a liberal democracy according to the V-Dem Institute’s report ¤ “The speed with which democracy is being dismantled in the US has no precedent in modern history” [link:] https://tinyurl.com/46s7wnp8
// V-Dem Institute: Varieties of Democracy
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AranchaGlezLaya/status/2033976211823530185?s=20/photo/1

5. In Focus: Autocratization in the USA
• Under Trump’s presidency democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965. Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era.
• President Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.
• The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.
• Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.
• Civil Rights & Equality before the Law, and Freedom of Expression & Media are now at their lowest levels in 60 years.
• Electoral components of democracy, however, remain stable – for inow.

🐣 RT @AC360 U.S. Central Command announced the United States had “successfully employed multiple 5,000-pound deep penetrator munitions on hardened Iranian missile sites” near the Strait of Hormuz. “This is not going to end any time soon,” says CNN Global Affairs Analyst Brett McGurk.

🐣 RT @RadarHits U.S. and Israel BAFFLED by Iran’s underground “ghost” missile launchers. ¤ 🇮🇷 Iran is launching missiles from its underground missile cities without visible launch pads. ¤ Virtually impossible to detect beforehand. ¤ GAME CHANGER

🐣 RT @CalltoActivism 🚨 HUGE: Sen. Mark Warner says U.S. intelligence he reviewed showed NO imminent threat from Iran to the United States as Trump’s Counterterrorism director resigns, saying the war was not necessary. ¤ 13 soldiers are dead. The war is costing $1 BILLION A DAY. What are we doing?

🐣 RT @A_M_R_M1 🚨 The balance of power in the Strait of Hormuz is shifting dramatically. Iran, which once believed it controlled this vital waterway with its fast boats, now faces a shocking reality.
¤ https://x.com/A_M_R_M1/status/2034073203262267537?s=20

The arrival of the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli at the head of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, including the 31st Reconnaissance Battalion, represents an unprecedented nightmare for the Iranian regime. This elite force of approximately 2,500 troops is moving at maximum speed toward the region, signaling Washington’s shift from airstrikes to a potential “boots on the ground” option. […]

‼️ 🐣 RT @CENTCOM Hours ago, U.S. forces successfully employed multiple 5,000-pound deep penetrator munitions on hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles in these sites posed a risk to international shipping in the strait.

🐣 RT @TheAtlantic U.S. allies haven’t forgotten about Trump’s tariffs, his threats against NATO, and his curtailing of aid to Ukraine—so he shouldn’t be surprised that they’re unwilling to help him in Iran, @anneapplebaum argues.
⋙ TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done https://tinyurl.com/yc4y6jte “Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing.” //➔ Has he said ‘thank you’ even once? It’s a serious question. ⇊
✛ Being a con man means never having to say ‘Thank you.’ Trump will tell you to your face exactly how he’s ripping you off, how he always wins. It’s a zero-sum game, always. He doesn’t respect anyone who he rips off. He is despicable throwback to a pre-civilized world. Mob boss.

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.

This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.

NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.

But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.

Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ​we’ve already won!”

At times, the ugly talk changed into something worse. Before his second inauguration, Trump began hinting that he wouldn’t rule out using force to annex Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a close NATO ally. At first this seemed like a troll or a joke; by January 2026, his public and private comments persuaded the Danes to prepare for an American invasion. Danish leaders had to think about whether their military would shoot down American planes, kill American soldiers, and be killed by them, an exercise so wrenching that some still haven’t recovered. In Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I was shown a Danish app that tells users which products are American, so that they know not to buy them. At the time it was the most popular app in the country.

The economic damage is no troll either. Over the course of 2025, Trump placed tariffs on Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, often randomly—or again, whimsically—and with no thought to the impact. He raised tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the Swiss president, then lowered them after a Swiss business delegation brought him presents, including a gold bar and a Rolex watch. He threatened to place 100 percent tariffs on Canada should Canada dare to make a trading agreement with China. Unbothered by possible conflicts of interest, he conducted trade negotiations with Vietnam, even as his son Eric Trump was breaking ground on a $1.5 billion golf-course deal in that country.

Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security. Over the course of 14 months, he has, despite talking of peace, encouraged Russian aggression. He stopped sending military and financial aid to Ukraine, thereby giving Putin renewed hope of victory. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, began openly negotiating business deals between the United States and Russia, although the war has not ended and the Russians have never agreed to a cease-fire. Witkoff presents himself to European leaders as a neutral figure, somewhere between NATO and Russia—as if, again, the United States were not the founder and leader of NATO, and as if European security were of no special concern to Americans. Trump himself continues to lash out at Zelensky and to lie about American support for Ukraine, which he repeatedly describes as worth $300 billion or more. The real number is closer to $50 billion, over three years. At current rates, Trump will spend that much in three months in the Middle East, in the course of starting a war rather than trying to stop one.

The result: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.

🔆 Confirmed❗️⋙ WSJ: Russia Is Sharing Satellite Imagery and Drone Technology With Iran https://tinyurl.com/mtb232m4 “Moscow has expanded intelligence sharing and military cooperation to help keep Tehran in the fight against US and Israeli military might”

Russia has been expanding its intelligence sharing and military cooperation with Iran, providing satellite imagery and improved drone technology to aid Tehran’s targeting of U.S. forces in the region, people familiar with the matter said.

Russia is trying to keep its closest Middle Eastern partner in the fight against U.S. and Israeli military might and prolong a war that is benefiting Russia militarily and economically.

The technology provided includes components of modified Shahed drones, which are meant to improve communication, navigation and targeting, the people said. Russia has also been drawing on its experience using drones in Ukraine, offering tactical guidance on how many drones should be used in operations and what altitudes they should strike from, said the people, who included a senior European intelligence officer.

Russia has been providing Iran with the locations of U.S. military forces in the Middle East as well as those of its regional allies, The Wall Street Journal has reported. That cooperation has deepened in early days of the war, with Russia recently providing satellite imagery directly to Iran, said two of the people, the officer and a Middle Eastern diplomat.

The assistance is similar to intelligence the U.S. and European allies have given to Ukraine in recent years, analysts say. In the Gulf, Moscow’s aid is believed to have helped Iran with recent strikes on U.S. radar systems in the region, said the people. Those strikes have included an early warning radar for a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, system in Jordan, as well as other targets in Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. …

Iran has had greater success targeting U.S. and Gulf state military assets in this war than it did during last year’s 12-day war. The country’s strikes—using drones to overwhelm radar before a missile strike—look very similar to Russia’s tactics in Ukraine, analysts said.

“Iranian targeting in the Gulf has been more focused on radar and command and control,” said Nicole Grajewski, a professor at Sciences Po, a research university in Paris. “Iran’s strike packages have come to strongly resemble what Russia does.”

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, who has led U.S. negotiations with Moscow, said Russia denied they were giving Iran intelligence to aid in their strikes. President Trump has said he believes Moscow might be aiding Iran “a bit.” …

The two [Russia and Iran] have formed commissions and working groups to share military and defense learning. Military delegations regularly visited one another while their soldiers trained together. Russia even built and launched one of Iran’s most recent satellite systems. 

But most important, Iran supplied Moscow with its Shahed drones for its war against Ukraine. ¤ When Russia started using the Shaheds on the battlefield, a delegation of several dozen Iranian officers gathered in Crimea to watch footage of the effects on Ukrainian cities and front-line positions. Ukraine says that Russia has used more than 57,000 Shahed-type drones since the start of the war. 

Since then, Moscow has started producing them domestically, and it has been adapting them to navigate and target more precisely as well as withstand electronic warfare jamming. It is sharing some of those innovations back with Iran now.

The aid Russia can give to Iran has been limited not only by its own ongoing conflict in Ukraine, but also the Kremlin’s reluctance to anger Trump. While Moscow could do much more to turn the dial up on its assistance, its current aid plays an important, albeit limited, role in helping Iran’s war effort, said Lamson. 

“The categories of assistance—including satellite data and advice on drone tactics—that Russia is providing are limited but still valuable to the war and Iran’s ability to hit specific military sites,” he said.

The war has played to Russia’s advantage in some ways, drawing down U.S. supplies of the interceptors that Ukraine needs for its air defenses. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas transits, has boosted the price of oil, the lifeblood of the Russian economy. The Trump administration has eased restrictions on purchases of Russian oil to bring down prices.

The war also carries downsides for Russia, especially if the regime in Iran is toppled, but Moscow still sees a chance to help a partner and strike out at the U.S. Despite Putin’s relationship with Trump, the Kremlin still sees Washington as a strategic adversary, said Samuel Charap, distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia policy at Rand, a U.S.-based defense think tank.

“It’s an opportunity to give us a taste of our own medicine in terms of what the U.S. provides to Ukraine in intelligence support,” he said.

🐣 RT @PressSec There are many false claims in [Joe Kent’s] letter but let me address one specifically: that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” …
¤ https://x.com/PressSec/status/2033932810709315865?s=20

As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.

This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors. President Trump would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum. […]

And finally, the absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon. …

🐣 RT @travisakers Fact check: The President cannot suspend, terminate, or withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty without the consent of 2/3 of the Senate or a legislative act of Congress.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Trump on possibly pulling out of NATO: “I don’t need Congress for that decision”

🐣 RT @PippaCrerar EXCL: UK national security adviser Jonathan Powell attended final talks between US and Iran – and judged Tehran’s offer on its nuclear programme was significant enough to prevent rush to war @patrickwintour & @julianborger reveal
⋙ TheGuardian: Exclusive: UK security adviser attended US-Iran talks and judged deal was within reach https://tinyurl.com/3yxrxbps Jonathan Powell, who was at the talks, “thought Tehran’s ‘surprising’ offer on its nuclear programme could prevent rush to war, sources say”

Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, attended the final talks between the US and Iran and judged that the offer made by Tehran on its nuclear programme was significant enough to prevent a rush to war, the Guardian can reveal.

Powell thought progress had been made in Geneva and that the deal proposed by Iran was “surprising”, according to sources.

Two days after the talks ended, and after a date had been agreed for a further round of technical talks in Vienna, the US and Israel launched the attack on Iran.

Powell’s presence at the talks, and his close knowledge of how they were progressing, was confirmed by three sources. One source said he was in the building at Oman’s ambassadorial residence in Cologny acting as an adviser, reflecting widespread concern about the US expertise on the talks represented by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy on several issues.

Kushner and Witkoff had invited Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to the Geneva talks, to provide technical expertise, though Kushner would later claim that he and Witkoff had “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter in this”. Nuclear experts would later say that Witkoff’s pronouncements on the Iran nuclear programme were riddled with basic errors.

Powell has long experience as a mediator, and one source said Powell brought an expert from the UK Cabinet Office with him. One western diplomat said: “Jonathan thought there was a deal to be done, but Iran were not quite there yet, especially on the issue of UN inspections of its nuclear sites.”

A former official who was briefed on the Geneva talks by some of the participants said: “Witkoff and Kushner did not bring a US technical team with them. They used Grossi as their technical expert, but that is not his job. So Jonathan Powell took his own team.

“The UK team were surprised by what the Iranians put on the table,” the former official added. “It was not a complete deal, but it was progress and was unlikely to be the Iranians’ final offer. The British team expected the next round of negotiations to go ahead on the basis of the progress in Geneva.”

That next round of talks was due to take place in Vienna on Monday 2 March, but never happened. The US and Israel had launched their all-out attack two days earlier.

Powell’s attendance at the Geneva talks, as well as a previous set of meetings earlier in the month in the Swiss city, helps in part to explain the UK government’s reluctance to back the US attack on Iran, a reluctance that has put the UK-US relationship under unprecedented strain.

The UK saw no compelling evidence of an imminent threat of a Iranian missile attack on Europe, or of Iran securing a nuclear weapon. This is the first time it has become clear that Britain was so closely involved in the talks, and so had good reason to decide whether diplomatic options had been exhausted and a US attack was necessary.

Instead the UK regarded the attack as unlawful and premature since Powell believed the path remained open to a negotiated solution to the long-running issue of how Iran could reassure the US that it was not seeking a nuclear weapon.

Downing Street declined to comment on Powell’s presence at the Geneva talks or his view of them.

Keir Starmer has been repeatedly lambasted by Trump for not doing more to support the US attack, including by initially refusing to let America use British military bases, and only allowing them to be used later for defensive purposes after Iran started attacking UK Gulf allies. Trump has warned it could be bad for Nato if its European member states do not answer his call to help open the strait of Hormuz, a demand that has been declined.

The indirect talks in Geneva between Iran and the US were being mediated by Oman’s foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi.

Gulf diplomats did not specify on what basis Powell had been given access to the talks, but it may reflect the relationship he has managed to build with the US over the years, including previously as chief of staff to Tony Blair.

UK officials have subsequently explained they were impressed that Iran was prepared for the deal to be permanent and, unlike the 2015 nuclear agreement, would not have cut-off dates, or sunset clauses ending the restrictions on its programme.

Iran had also agreed to down-blend the 400kg stockpile of highly enriched uranium under the supervision of the IAEA inside Iran. It agreed no stockpiles of highly enriched uranium would be built up in the future.

In the final session of the talks, Iran agreed to a three- to-five-year pause on domestic enrichment, but the US in the afternoon session, after consultations with Trump, demanded a 10-year pause. In practice, Iran had no means to enrich domestically because of the bombing of its enrichment plants in 2015.

Iran had also made an offer of what the mediators described as an economic bonanza, with the US being given the chance to participate in a future civil nuclear programme.

In return, nearly 80% of the economic sanctions on Iran would have been lifted, including assets frozen in Qatar, a demand Iran made in the 2025 talks.

The Oman mediator believed the offer of zero stockpiling of highly enriched uranium was a breakthrough that meant an agreement was within reach.

Accounts differ on whether Kushner left the talks giving the impression Trump would welcome what had been agreed, or that the US negotiators knew it would take something massive to persuade Trump that war was not the best option. One diplomat with knowledge of the talks said: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”

The Guardian’s report that Powell was in the room during the talks was cited in parliament on Tuesday by Liz Saville Roberts, an MP for the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, during an update by Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper.

“It appears diplomatic options were still viable and there was no evidence of an imminent missile threat to Europe or of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Saville Roberts told Cooper. “Does she therefore believe a negotiated path between Iran and the US was still possible at that time and, if so, surely that means that the initial US and Israeli strikes were premature and illegal?”

Cooper responded: “The UK did provide support for negotiations and diplomatic processes around the nuclear discussions. We did think that was an important track and we did want it to continue. That is one of the reasons for the position we took on the initial US strikes that took place.”

‼️ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Hassett: If the war were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, but that’s really the last of our concerns right now.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/2033911332278288617?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @TheMaineWonk The President of the United States can’t lead.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2033927119026151797?s=20/photo/1

[Text:] 🐣 RT @reaDonald Trump The United States has been informed by most of our NATO “Allies” that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran, in the Middle East, this, despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot, in any way, shape, or form, be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon. I am not surprised by their action, however, because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need. Fortunately, we have decimated Iran’s Military – Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their Anti-Aircraft and Radar is gone and perhaps, most importantly, their Leaders, at virtually every level, are gone, never to threaten us, our Middle Eastern Allies, or the World, again! Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer “need,” or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance – WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

⋙ 🐣 You didn’t consult or even inform them.
The US was not attacked (a NATO requirement).
NATO has invoked Article 5 just ONCE, when the US was attacked on 9/11.
NATO members sent troops who fought and died alongside ours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

🐣 RT @joekent16jan19 After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. ¤ I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC. ¤ May God bless America.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/joekent16jan19/status/2033897242986209689?s=20/photo/1

NYT Editorial: Trump’s Dangerous Lack of a Strategy in Iran https://tinyurl.com/yz7keffm “War tends to be less amenable to spin than politics or marketing. The early reality of the Iran war is not cooperating with Mr. Trump’s bluster.”

The war has become an exemplar of Mr. Trump’s chaotic, ego-driven approach to the presidency. He has relied for advice on a smaller circle of aides than past presidents did when ordering military action and eschewed the careful process intended to surface objections and potential problems. He has made ridiculous and contradictory public statements, including a claim that the war has nearly achieved its goals. He has tried to mislead the world about the tragic deaths of dozens of Iranian schoolchildren, which were caused by a mistargeted American missile. Almost daily, he demonstrates why he cannot be trusted with the most consequential matters of government.

⭕ 16 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @RayDalio It All Comes Down to Who Controls the Straight of Hormuz: The “Final Battle”
¤ https://x.com/RayDalio/status/2033567224120692861?s=20

Comparing what is now happening with what has happened in analogous historical situations and triangulating my thinking with smart, well-informed leaders and experts has always helped me make better decisions. I have found that most wars are filled with big disagreements about what is likely to happen and big surprises. However, in the case of this Iran war, it is obvious, and there is near-universal agreement, that it all comes down to who controls the Strait of Hormuz. I hear from those who run governments, geopolitical experts, and people all over the world that if Iran is left with control over who can pass through the Strait of Hormuz, or is even left with the power to negotiate: […]

✅ NYT: Trump Claims an Ex-President Confided His Regrets on Iran. But Who? https://tinyurl.com/3s3t3uk3 “The New York Times reached out to people close to President Trump’s predecessors. They disputed Mr. Trump’s claims.”

WSJ: U.S. Allies Rebuff Trump’s Demand for Help Opening Strait of Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/mbcabac8 “Germany, Australia and Japan say they won’t be joining U.S. efforts, while the U.K. and France say they are willing to discuss options”

TheAtlantic, Isaac Stanley-Becker: Trump Is Learning That His Bullying Has Consequences https://tinyurl.com/yb4vcph5 “Allies that once might have been eager to assist the US in an area of mutual concern are reacting with, at best, a shrug—and in some cases with outright contempt”
// Allies are not eager to assist a superpower that’s shown them no loyalty.

Two months ago, when President Trump was threatening to annex Greenland, I spoke with Danish and other European officials who warned of lasting damage to the system of alliances that the United States created after the Second World War, above all NATO.

At the time, this seemed like a theoretical proposition. Denmark and other allies had come to the aid of the United States after the September 11 attacks, sending soldiers to fight in the American-led war in Afghanistan; these same countries, officials and experts hypothesized, might be less inclined to help in the future. But the possibility that the United States would actually require European assistance, especially in the Middle East, appeared faint. After all, Trump had promised to curtail military adventures, in order to refocus on American interests in the Western Hemisphere.

WaPo, Max Boot: The U.S. military’s greatest weakness in Iran is one it can’t fix https://tinyurl.com/24zef9sd “Many issues can be resolved by smarter acquisitions decisions. Not so for incompetent leadership.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2033684855825772958?s=20/photo/1

Trump and his national security team, moreover, appear surprised that the Iranian regime didn’t collapse after the death of its leader and that it has responded to U.S. attacks by targeting the Strait of Hormuz. Both contingencies were eminently foreseeable, but Trump’s management of this conflict has been woefully and predictably deficient.

Many of the U.S. military weaknesses revealed in the war can be fixed by smarter acquisitions decisions: The U.S. needs to expand munition production lines and buy more drones and drone defenses. But there is no easy fix for the problem of incompetent political leaders who recklessly fritter away America’s overwhelming military advantages in unnecessary “excursions” premised on wishful thinking. That deficiency can be remedied only at the ballot box.

🐣 RT @Daractenus [Trump:] “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba [..] I think I can do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth.”
We’ve become so desensitized at this point that seeing the US president saying he’s gonna whatever he wants with another country is hardly news.
💽 https://x.com/Daractenus/status/2033659147787407861?s=20/photo/1

🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Judge Strikes Down Kennedy’s Vaccine Policies https://tinyurl.com/ypjchra9 “Ruling on a lawsuit brought by several prominent medical organizations, a district court said the federal government had not based its decisions on science”
// cont.: “in limiting Covid shots and revising the childhood immunization schedule.”

NYT, Steven Erlanger: In Iraq, the US Tried to Bring Allies on Board. Not in Iran. https://tinyurl.com/5cm8dfun “This time, President Trump went to war without preparing the public, seeking UN approval or even consulting allies. But they will have to pick up the pieces.”

🐣 RT @ManiamAkash Merz is absolutely right
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ManiamAkash/status/2033548225144070257?s=20/photo/1

[Friedrich Merz has told Donald Trump the US war against Iran has ‘nothing to do’ with Nato]

The US war against Iran has “nothing to do” with Nato, Germany said after Donald Trump demanded help from members of the military alliance.

“It is not Nato’s war. Nato is an alliance to defend the alliance area,” said a spokesman for Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor.

He added: “The United States did not consult us before this war, and so we believe this is not a matter for Nato or the German government.

🐣 RT @clashreport Former White House energy adviser Bob McNally says there’s basically no policy fix if the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted: ¤ There are no policy solutions to a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. ¤ Government tools like escorts, oil reserve releases, or gas tax cuts are marginal… symbolic… sideshows. ¤ You’ve got to restore the flow of the Strait of Hormuz. ¤ Even ending the war might not help: “No guarantee.”
// 60Minutes

⭕ 15 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Judge J. Michael Luttig declares lower federal courts are now America’s last line of defense – “The only people who can save America!”
¤ 💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2033261845692502427/video/1

Appearing on MediasTouch, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig delivered a stark warning: for the past five years, every single lower federal court judge has faithfully honored their oath to the Constitution by striking down nearly every major initiative from President Trump as unconstitutional.

“Today, the only people who can save America are the lower federal court judges of the United States of America,” Luttig said. “And they are determined to do so simply by honoring their oath in every one of these cases, now of which there are hundreds.”

He described the current crisis as little short of tragic: “Every single time Donald Trump opens his mouth or takes an action, the American people are forced to go into court and litigate it. That’s the tragic place that America finds itself in today.”

Luttig warned that the only remaining obstacle to full authoritarian overreach is the U.S. Supreme Court, which he suggested is currently blocking the American people from saving their democracy. …

TheGuardian, Simon Tisdall: Donald Trump is making America lose wars again https://tinyurl.com/yt7dth7p “Humiliating failure now looms [in Iran], as symbolically damaging to US global standing and national self-esteem as Afghanistan or Iraq”

Donald Trump menaces the world. He’s global public enemy number one. He’s steadily losing the illegal war with Iran he started but cannot stop. His violence-addicted Israeli sidekick, Benjamin Netanyahu, is terrorising Lebanon. And ordinary people everywhere, their security threatened, face a huge economic bill for his reckless folly.

Add Trump’s war-making to his daily debasing of democracy, appeasing of Russia, punitive tariffs, climate crisis denial and flouting of international law, and it’s clear this White House travesty has gone on long enough. Americans must put their house in order and act decisively to restrain someone who endangers us all.

Trump is a man without a plan. He hasn’t the foggiest what to do next in Iran, deluding himself that he is in control of events. The more the US and Israel batter Tehran and other cities, the more defiant is the odious, unvanquished Islamic regime. US regional bases and Gulf Arab partners are sustaining significant damage from retaliatory strikes. … …

Allies including Britain are dismayed and alienated by Trump’s arrogant refusal to consult and fatal lack of strategic planning, exemplified by his strait of Hormuz fiasco. He’s irresponsibly escalating the war, saying he is bombing Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal “just for fun” – which could further drive up global prices. Simultaneously, he’s asking those same allies to get directly involved by sending warships to his rescue in the strait. Unsurprisingly, there are no takers so far. Meanwhile, Russia – “temporarily”released from US oil sanctions to Ukraine’s great detriment – and China are profiting from Trump’s bellicose bungling and disdain for global opinion. …

TheGuardian, Simon Tisdall: Donald Trump is making America lose wars again https://tinyurl.com/yt7dth7p “Humiliating failure now looms [in Iran], as symbolically damaging to US global standing and national self-esteem as Afghanistan or Iraq”

Donald Trump menaces the world. He’s global public enemy number one. He’s steadily losing the illegal war with Iran he started but cannot stop. His violence-addicted Israeli sidekick, Benjamin Netanyahu, is terrorising Lebanon. And ordinary people everywhere, their security threatened, face a huge economic bill for his reckless folly.

Add Trump’s war-making to his daily debasing of democracy, appeasing of Russia, punitive tariffs, climate crisis denial and flouting of international law, and it’s clear this White House travesty has gone on long enough. Americans must put their house in order and act decisively to restrain someone who endangers us all.

Trump is a man without a plan. He hasn’t the foggiest what to do next in Iran, deluding himself that he is in control of events. The more the US and Israel batter Tehran and other cities, the more defiant is the odious, unvanquished Islamic regime. US regional bases and Gulf Arab partners are sustaining significant damage from retaliatory strikes. … …

Allies including Britain are dismayed and alienated by Trump’s arrogant refusal to consult and fatal lack of strategic planning, exemplified by his strait of Hormuz fiasco. He’s irresponsibly escalating the war, saying he is bombing Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal “just for fun” – which could further drive up global prices. Simultaneously, he’s asking those same allies to get directly involved by sending warships to his rescue in the strait. Unsurprisingly, there are no takers so far. Meanwhile, Russia – “temporarily”released from US oil sanctions to Ukraine’s great detriment – and China are profiting from Trump’s bellicose bungling and disdain for global opinion. …

🐣 RT @Pontifex In the face of the many questions of the human heart, as well as tragic situations of injustice, violence and suffering that mark our time, our faith needs to be alert, attentive and prophetic. Faith should open our eyes to the darkness of the world, and bring others the light of the Gospel through our commitment to peace, justice and solidarity.

🐣 RT @BMeiselas He’s crashing out. What a loser. Anyone who’s still on board with this dangerous moron should be ashamed of themselves.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BMeiselas/status/2033377376395018368?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The decision that mattered most to me was TARIFFS! The Court knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this Victory for our Country, and instead decided to, potentially, give away Trillions of Dollars to Countries and Companies who have been taking advantage of the United States for decades. Our Supreme Court has made these Countries very happy but, as the Court pointed out, I have the absolute right to charge TARIFFS in another form, and have already started to do so. The Hundreds of Billions of Dollars that our Adversaries want our Country to pay back to others that have disrespected the U.S.A., until came along, should be marked down, in the eyes of the Public, as just another reason why the United States had been in such major decline – But, not anymore, because we have MADE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN and, very soon, it will be GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!

I want to thank Justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh for their Wisdom and Courage pertaining to the TARIFF case, and for understanding, in addition to the Law, that our “Unfriendly Competitors” should not be reimbursed and rewarded for the decades of Damage they have caused THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I will fight hard to make sure that this does not happen! The Democrats on the Court always “stick together, no matter how strong a case is put before them – There is rarely even a minor “waver.” But Republicans do not do this. They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how “honest,” “independent,” and “legitimate” they are. The Democrat Justices just vote Democrat- They always stick together! Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization. The sad thing is, they will only get worse! They wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, because they said that I, as President of the United States, did not have “standing” to challenge it, and now, with time, it has been conclusively proven to be stolen — And look what happened to our wonderful Nation by allowing a grossly incompetent man, Sleepy Joe Biden, to be our “President.” This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be. They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so. All I can do, as President, is call them out for their bad behavior! This statement about the United States Supreme Court will cause me nothing but problems in the future, but I feel it is my obligation to speak the TRUTH. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 A government of gangsters.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AFP BREAKING President Donald Trump says NATO faces a “very bad” future if US allies fail to help open the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil transport conduit effectively shut by Iran in the Mideast war

🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski There is nothing in the NATO Charter that requires a member-state to join wars of aggression started by another member.

🐣 RT @McFaul Mr. President, you may have forgotten, but you recently threatened to invade a NATO ally.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Trump: “We’re always there for NATO. We’re helping them with Ukraine. It’s got an ocean in between us. It doesn’t affect us, but we’ve helped them. It would be interesting to see what country wouldn’t help us with a very small endeavor, which is just keeping the Strait open.”
⋙ 🐣 The US is no longer providing financial support to Ukraine. (It does continue to provide satellite data.) It has pushed Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms. It has insulted the EU and opposed its AI safeguards. It has imposed arbitrary tariffs. What’s not to like?

🐣 RT @atrupar Trump on Strait of Hormuz: “Really, I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory … they should help us. You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t be there at all, because we don’t need it. We have a lot of oil.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2033348821850136829?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Acyn Luttig: Every single lower federal court judge has honored his or her oath to the Constitution of the United States to the letter. In almost every instance, those judges collectively have struck down as unconstitutional essentially every initiative of this president, as the Constitution required them to do.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2033261845692502427?s=20/photo/1

So today, the only people who can save America are the lower federal court judges of the United States, and they are determined to do so simply by honoring their oath in every one of these cases.

There are hundreds of them. Every single time Donald Trump opens his mouth or takes an action, the American people are forced to go into court and litigate. That’s the tragic place America finds itself in today.

But to complete the thought, at this point it is only the Supreme Court of the United States that is standing in the way of the American people saving their country.

🐣 RT @IslanderWORLD 🇮🇷🇺🇸🇮🇱 The Economist has confirmed what the early satellite images already showed — Iran’s strikes on American radars, military bases and energy infrastructure were so devastatingly precise that the US moved to suppress the evidence.
¤ https://x.com/IslanderWORLD/status/2033320202004275709?s=20

Planet Labs, the primary commercial satellite provider, first imposed a 96-hour delay on Middle East imagery — then extended it to a full 14-day blackout covering all allied bases, Gulf States and conflict zones.

They said it was voluntary. Nobody instructed them. Sure. What did those early images show before the shutters came down? The AN/TPY-2 THAAD radar at Muwaffaq Salti, Jordan — charred rubble, two 13-foot craters, $500 million gone on Day One. The AN/FPS-132 early warning radar in Qatar — $1.1 billion, hit on the first night, one array confirmed destroyed. THAAD radar facilities at Al Ruwais and Al Sadr in the UAE — both struck with identical precision. Prince Sultan Air Base — five KC-135 tankers damaged. Al-Dhafra. Fifth Fleet Bahrain. Al-Udeid. The CIA station in Riyadh with the roof caved in.

All of it documented by commercial satellites before Washington realised the images were telling a story it couldn’t control.

Iran didn’t fire randomly. Iran fired surgically — targeting the eyes, the ears and the arteries of the entire American military architecture in the region. And the moment that became undeniable from space, the satellites went dark. Trump said Iran is “100% destroyed.” The 14-day blackout says they’re not done yet. The images that embarrass an empire disappear. The missiles keep flying.

⋙ 🐣 RT @goepat_patrick @grok can you confirm this?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @grok Yes, multiple sources confirm key details.

Planet Labs (and Vantor) first delayed Middle East imagery by 96 hours, then extended to 14 days across Gulf states, Iraq, allied bases & Iran zones—to limit “adversarial” tactical use (per their statements to Reuters/Bloomberg). They call it voluntary.

Early commercial satellite images (NYT, CNN analysis) documented precise Iranian hits: THAAD radar destroyed in Jordan, AN/FPS-132 in Qatar damaged, Fifth Fleet Bahrain struck, UAE radars hit, plus other bases/refineries.

The Economist reported the blackout shutting down open-source intel (Mar 15 article) amid ongoing Iranian strikes on US/allied targets.

Trump’s “100% destroyed” claim contrasts with verified damage reports showing sustained Iranian capability.

⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 There have been reports that Iran got its satellite and targeting info from Russia. Can this be confirmed?
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @grok Yes, multiple reports citing U.S. intelligence officials confirm Russia has shared satellite imagery and location data on U.S. forces (warships, aircraft, radars, bases) with Iran since late February 2026.
Key sources: AP (Mar 6), NBC News (Mar 6, 4 sources), Washington Post (3 officials), PBS.
Russia’s network supplements Iran’s limited satellites for better precision/BDA. Iran-Russia strategic pact (Jan 2025) enables this. No official Russian/Iranian confirmation or denial noted.

🐣 RT @Its_ereko US begs allies to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz. Here’s who said no:
¤ https://x.com/Its_ereko/status/2033158007769509914?s=20

Here’s who said no:
❌ China: Sovereign right to refuse
❌ France: No
❌ Japan: Will make own decision
❌ Germany: No convoy
❌ Norway: No convoy
❌ Italy: No
❌ Hungary: No
❌ Slovakia: No
❌ Czech: No
❌ Turkey: No
❌ Switzerland: No

Discussing/Pending:
UK: Reviewing options
South Korea: Under review,
Australia: Scared but under review

The empire asked. The world said no.
Not a single major ally said yes. Not one.
This is what isolation looks like. Not on paper. In real time. For everyone to see.
The US cannot open the Strait alone. Cannot protect its own ships. Cannot even get friends to help.
The era of automatic obedience is over. The era of “allies” is ending.
Iran controls the Strait. The US begs. The world watches. And says no.
// not sure about this: are landlocked out

🐣 RT @FaceTheNation Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says the regime is not in a war of survival, telling @margbrennan the regime is “stable and strong enough.”
“We don’t see any reason why we should talk with Americans, because we were talking with them when they decided to attack us, and that was for the second time,” Araghchi says.

🐣 RT @atrupar Schiff: “We are now giving Russia $140 million a day by releasing them from these sanctions when Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to better attack and kill American troops. It is rewarding Russia and punishing Ukraine.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2033201901236310381?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @carlbildt Jens Stoltenberg is refreshingly clear on the fact that the 🇺🇸🇮🇱 war is against international law. And says that NATO should stay out of any involvement in it.
💽 https://x.com/carlbildt/status/2033155797937451036?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Pontifex On behalf of the Christians of the #MiddleEast, and of all women and men of good will, I appeal to those responsible for this conflict: cease fire! May paths of dialogue be reopened! Violence can never lead to the justice, stability and peace for which the peoples are waiting.
⋙ 🐣 RT @bfry1981 Thank you, Papa. My thread on some of the bigger-picture issues not being talked about enough when it comes to this Iran, U.S., Israel war metastasizing before our very eyes
¤ [Mar 3] https://x.com/bfry1981/status/2033167334693605726?s=20

🐣 RT @cobracommanduhr I am an ex-Palantir executive, and it is factually correct that @PalantirTech intended to take over the US government while heavily funding the effort. Many of my ex-colleagues are now installed inside the USG apparatus. There is a reason the C-suite of $PLTR has me blocked. The enemy is within, and we are currently an occupied nation. 🇺🇸 We basically have a terrorist entity deeply embedding itself into the USG.
¤ https://x.com/cobracommanduhr/status/2033055215428223056?s=20

NYT, Thomas Friedman: Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for Americas Future https://tinyurl.com/2yzwhbdm “Donald Trump, who seeks to govern only by division, never by addition, accidentally created ‘out of many, one’ in Minnesota. Thank you, Mr. President. We needed that.”
⋙ See under Entire Articles: MN Beat Trump
// 3/15/2026; Inside title: “How Minnesota beat Trump”

“What came out of this was an understanding of who our neighbors are,” Abdi told me. “It has redefined that they are not just neighbors only. They are family, and we are not alone in this, and I have never been prouder to be a Minnesotan. That was a gift to our community. I have lived in the same place for 15 years, and I just met some of my neighbors. They brought over cookies.” …

“This was not a resistance movement,” Frey insisted. “It was about something far more powerful and expansive. It was ‘Love thy neighbor.’” ICE agents thought they were coming for random migrant strangers stalking Minneapolis, he added. What they learned the hard way was that, for many Minneapolitans, they were coming for their babysitter or their kid’s best friend — people embedded in their communities and not the caricature of the illegal immigrant rapist spread by the Trump administration. –

The longer I stayed in Minneapolis, the more a phrase that Jews recite on Hanukkah to commemorate the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks came to my mind: “Nes gadol haya sham” — “A great miracle happened there.”

My shorthand for it is that Donald Trump, who seeks to govern only by division, never by addition, accidentally created “out of many, one” in Minnesota.

Thank you, Mr. President. We needed that.

Sondra Samuels, president of the Northside Achievement Zone, remarked to me that after Floyd’s killing, many white Minnesotans said, “That is so terrible what happened to Black people.” But the ICE invasion “happened to all of us. And then we redefined ‘us.’”

We redefined “us.” I love that expression. That is EXACTLY the miracle that happened here.

Flannery Clark, a parent-activist at a Minneapolis elementary school, told me, “Families are paying rent at our school for 130 other families.” They had “a lot of grandmas driving Subarus around to make sure their neighbors were safe. … We created a new version of ‘neighbor’ here, and we need to export that.”

We need to export that. I really love that expression, too.

Minneapolis, St. Paul and even lots of small rural towns look more like the world today than ever before. And the world looks more like Minnesota today than ever before. And so the great governing challenge in Minnesota, to my mind, is a microcosm of the great governing challenge facing America today: Can we make “out of many, one” — our great national project since our founding — when the “many” is now so much more diverse, even more than it was just 10 years ago.

If Minnesota can model that, maybe America can model it, too. And if America can model that, it could become our greatest political export to the world in the 21st century — as much as democracy was 250 years ago.

Why? Because today, as my friend Dov Seidman, an author and expert on leadership, likes to say: “Interdependence is no longer our choice. It is our ;condition.”

All the big existential challenges humanity faces today are planetary in scale — how to manage A.I., climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics and global migrations with so many people on the move. All of these challenges require planetary-scale collaboration. Either we figure that out soon — or we’re heading for a really bad century together.

In Minnesota, I heard a talk by Ian Bassin, a founder and the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to ensure election integrity. In a follow-up conversation, he told me a story that perfectly captured the power, peril and importance of what happened here.

“A lifelong Minnesotan shared with me two lessons she’d learned watching the recent federal assault on her hometown,” said Bassin. “The first was her jarring realization that ‘there is no net below us.’ She had spent her life assuming that somewhere beneath the visible architecture of laws and institutions there existed a backstop — guardrails that would prevent a fall into the unthinkable. Watching masked federal agents abduct her neighbors and shoot them with impunity forced her to reckon with the reality that no such net exists.”

But the other lesson she drew from Minnesota, said Bassin, was that in the absence of solid safeguards, “watching ordinary citizens show up for one another — offering shelter, standing watch, car-pooling an endangered family’s kids to school — gave her a different kind of confidence. Not that formal checks will save us, but that solidarity remains a renewable resource — that we are and can be our own net.”

⭕ 14 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @ShaunPinnerUA Trumps giving money to Russia, they help target US service personnel for Iran ¤ Why aren’t you doing anything America? ¤ It’s crazy!
⋙ 🐣 There is another #NoKings march at the end of the month
Bruce Springsteen is giving a tour (to oppose ICE) that begins in Minneapolis and ends in a stafium in DC ¤ Why aren’t we “doing anything”?
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2033028349816107084?s=20

This is one infringement/crime among dozens. MAGA (Republicans) control both houses of Congress. They have power now.

Elections are in November. Democrats lead by 10% overall and flipped 28 seats in misc federal elections (Republicans have flipped 0). If we win even one house, then things can happen.

Until then, we have to address voters‘ concerns, which are:
1) inflation
2) ICE (immigration)
3) Trump lied to you
4) corruption
5) Epstein scandal

🧵 RT @revishvilig Fascinating insights from Pavlo Yelizarov, Deputy Commander of Ukraine’s Air Force: ¤ Russia currently has sufficient access to components and resources for its military production, including through domestic capacity and supply chains connected to China. 1/15
Source: https://youtu.be/LanvrFdGExc?si=phZwFHbh8YqxTqGT
📌 https://x.com/revishvilig/status/2032888201711391015?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2032888201711391015.html

As a result, external assistance is not necessarily critical for sustaining certain areas of production. One of Russia’s main strengths in small UAV development is its systematic approach. 2/15

While Ukraine tends to rely on creativity and improvisation, Russia builds structured systems. In many cases, systems ultimately outperform improvisation. Creativity alone cannot stop it unless it is combined with speed and adaptability. 3/15

Right now, we have a fairly large number of interceptor drones on inventory. The situation with drones has actually changed significantly, and in a positive way. We now have many high-quality manufacturers. 4/15

Now we need some level of standardization is necessary. That does not mean everything must be identical and gray like in the Soviet Union. 5/15

Rather, the goal is to create a model where a pilot receiving a drone can rely on familiar control principles and apply their existing skills to that type of system. 6/15

Ballistic missiles remain the primary threat for Ukraine. Whether Ukraine continues receiving interceptor missiles, such as those used with Patriot systems, largely depends on diplomatic decisions and global distribution. 7/15

At present, Ukraine does not yet have sufficient domestic capability to defend against ballistic missiles, although several projects are being developed that may eventually provide such protection. 8/15

We clearly understand that there are four components that will work together to create what we call the Ukrainian [Iron] dome. It will differ from the Israeli one, because our dome has to be much larger. Israel’s dome, in comparison, is just a small spot in terms of scale. 9/15

Starlink is the most optimal form of connectivity. At the beginning of the war the model was simple: Starlink worked on Ukrainian territory, while the enemy did not use it for communications. 10/15

Later, the enemy found ways to purchase Starlink terminals around the world. The UAE and other countries began selling them, and their communications along the frontline also shifted to Starlink. 11/15

As a result, they started flying over Ukrainian territory and receiving full video feeds.

At the same time, we could not use the same advantage in their territory because Starlink did not work there for us. 12/15

One of the ideas raised was simple: open Starlink over Russian territory as well. At least that would create parity.
Mykhailo Fedorov personally called Musk. Musk happened to be in a good mood. 13/15

They spoke, the video was turned on, and apparently they connected well — and the restrictions were adjusted. In the end, the solution Fedorov secured turned out to be close to ideal. 14/15

Frankly, Fedorov deserves a monument while he is still alive. I don’t know whether many people have truly appreciated this. 15/15

🐣 RT @ItsBorys Pretty dark that the family of a US crew member who died on a KC-135 has to run a GoFundMe to support his wife and three kids while Trump’s son in law is out raising $5B in the middle east
⋙ 🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump NEW: Jared Kushner, one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is working to raise $5B for his private equity firm from governments in the region, the New York Times reports. ¤ His team has already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, whic [sic]
💽 https://x.com/ItsBorys/status/2032979413311127821?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @FDD Iran’s war against America has been relentless. There is no question as to whether the current war is just. It is. The debate is not about Iran. It’s about America’s role in the world.” — @JSchanzer writes in @Commentary
⋙ Commentary, Jonathan Schanzer: Regime Change Without Nation Building https://tinyurl.com/yc2k5c9c

🐣 RT @IsabelM31530319
[TextLink:] https://x.com/IsabelM31530319/status/2032966530208559560?s=20/photo/1

I deeply want to believe that all human beings are a blend of their best and their worst. Most of us are. I can’t find any best in Trump.
He is simply evil – A dark, deluded raging product of a childhood from which he cannot recover nor be redeemed.
Tony Schwartz
Ghost Author of “Art of the Deal”

🐣 RT @JasonBassler1 When nearly 4,000 Google employees sign petitions, 13 Palantir employees walk out, and OpenAI’s head of robotics resigns over AI drifting into warfare, surveillance, and state power… we should listen. ¤ When the insiders sound the alarm, that’s a warning.

🐣 RT @tedlieu Dear @BrendanCarrFCC: If you implement your flagrantly anti First Amendment actions, you will be sued and you will lose. And legal discovery will be awesome. Because the American people can then find out what the Administration keeps hiding. ¤ Take your fascist shit and shove it.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. ¤ A truly extraordinary moment. ¤We aren’t on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. ¤ Act like it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BrendanCarrFCC Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.
¤ https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/2032855414233047172?s=20

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.

The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.

It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.

When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.

⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RapidResponse47
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/2032855414233047172?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down at an Airport in Saudi Arabia, and of no further use. In actuality, the Base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not “struck” or “destroyed.” Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service. One had slightly more damage, but will be in the air shortly. None were destroyed, or close to that, as the Fake News said in headlines. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife “Papers” and Media actually want us to lose the War. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America. Fortunately, as proven by our Great and Conclusive Election Win in 2024, the People of our Country understand what is happening far better than the Fake News Media! President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @BDeMayo Hey @realDonaldTrump we always knew you were a scared little bitch that’d go running to your friends as soon as you realized you were in over your head. Maybe if you didn’t piss off the entire fucking world with your dumb ass tariff bullshit you’d have some lmfao. Get bent.
[TextLink:]https://x.com/BDeMayo/status/2032899917765550522?s=20 /photo/1

[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both Militarily, Economically, and in every other way, but the Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage, and we will help— A LOT! The U.S. will also coordinate with those Countries so that everything goes quickly, smoothly, and well. This should have always been a team effort, and now it will be
– It will bring the World together toward Harmony, Security, and Everlasting Peace!
President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @AdamKinzinger Wow we’ve destroyed 100 percent of Irans military. ¤ But we’re still going to have to bomb non existent military.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AdamKinzinger/status/2032837318768316867?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe. We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are. Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated. In the meantime, the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water. One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE! President DONALD J. TRUMP

🧵RT @ChrisMurphyCT It’s crystal clear now that Trump has lost control of this war. He badly misjudged Iran’s ability to retaliate. The region is on fire.
1/ I’m going to explain to you in this [thread] what I’ve learned – in part from closed door briefings – about the four biggest current crises.
📌 https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/2032803960239595562?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2032803960239595562.html

2/ CRISIS ONE: Trump believed Iran would not close the Strait of Hormuz. He was wrong. And now oil prices are spiking. ¤ If the Strait stays closed, a global recession will result. It actually may already be too late. Gas prices are the first to spike, but food prices are next.

WASHINGTON-Before the U.S. went to war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told President Trump that an American attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Caine said in several briefings that U.S. officials had long believed Iran would deploy mines, drones and missiles to close the world’s most vital shipping lane, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Trump acknowledged the risk, these people said, but moved forward with the most consequential foreign-policy decision of his two presidencies. He told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait-and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.

Now, two weeks into the war, Iran’s leaders have refused to back down, and the Strait of Hormuz has emerged as Tehran’s most potent leverage point.

2/ Right now, Trump has no plan to reopen the Strait. And a plan may not exist. ¤ The assets Iran uses to harass and attack tankers – thousands of small drones, speed boats and mines – cannot be eliminated. They are too numerous, too spread out and hidden. [Fox link:] https://tinyurl.com/39ycxcxz

3/ What about naval escorts for tankers? This is a possibility, but it’s harder than you think.
First, it would require our entire navy. 100 tankers need escorting each day.
Second, if we can’t destroy the mines and drones, our ships are at risk too.

Why naval escorts through Strait of Hormuz are so risky ¤ The U.S. has yet to begin escorting oil tankers through the treacherous Strait of Hormuz, something that increasingly looks like a high-risk proposition during the war with Iran. President Trump, w… [Hill link:] https://tinyurl.com/5f423c7c

4/ CRISIS TWO: We can destroy Iran’s missiles but not all their drones, and war today is drone war. ¤ Iran can hit oil sites in the region indefinitely because they posses so many cheap, weaponized drones. ¤ And they are. They blew up a critical Oman oil depot two days ago.

5/ If Trump paid any attention to the Ukraine War he would have noticed how warfare has changed. But he didn’t. And he blundered. ¤ Worse, the Gulf states are running out of interceptors to stop Iranian missiles and drones – meaning that soon more oil sites will be vulnerable.

6/ CRISIS THREE: A broader, regional war is breaking out as Iranian proxies in Lebanon hit Israel and those in Iraq target the U.S.. Israel is now threatening a massive ground invasion of Lebanon, which could become its own new crisis. [WSJ link:] https://tinyurl.com/3yvv2mt4

7/ Other potential flash points lurk. So far, the Houthis in Yemen have been relatively quiet. Probably not for long. They can project power into the Red Sea.

For Syria, this is the worst time for Trump to strike Iran. Syria could explode again. ¤ The War with Iran Threatens Syria’s Recovery ¤ Syrian interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa has a strategy for Syria’s recovery. The war with Iran could jeopardize that. [CSIS link:] https://tinyurl.com/45vrpufh

8/ CRISIS FOUR: Trump has no endgame. Iran and its proxies can create chaos indefinitely.
So what’s next? A ground invasion?This would be Armageddon. Thousands of dead Americans. ¤ Declare false victory? Then the new Iranian hardliners in charge just rebuild what we destroyed.

9/ All of this was totally foreseeable. Frankly, it’s why previous presidents weren’t so stupid to start a war like this. ¤ Trump has lost control of the war. His best course now is to cut his losses and end it. That’s the only way to prevent an even bigger disaster.

⭕ 13 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @arenda The 1907 Hague Convention, specifically provides: “it is especially forbidden . . . To declare that no quarter shall be given.” Hague Regulations, Art 23, d. The U.S. has been a party to this treaty since 1909.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Hegseth: No quarter, no mercy for our enemies. Yet some in the press just can’t stop. More fake news from CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the strait of hormuz. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.

TheAtlantic, Phillips Payson O’Brien: Why Trump Didn’t Plan for the Strait of Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/mrykydfu “[As] former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a first-term Trump appointee, was fond of pointing out: Once hostilities begin, ‘the enemy gets a vote.’”
// In wartime, the enemy always gets a vote.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2032704144079826946?s=20/photo/1

… Trump seemed to assume after Khamenei’s death that Iran’s next ruler would be someone of his choice. “We’re going to have to choose that person along with Iran,” he told Reuters. “We’re going to have to choose that person.”

Top Iranian clerics ignored Trump’s preferences and chose Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, a hard-liner whom the U.S. president had previously deemed“unacceptable to me.” In his first public statement as supreme leader, the younger Khamenei declared, “Certainly, the lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used.” …
v
Trump is now learning what Putin found out in Ukraine: that most leaders who start a war with an assumption of a quick and decisive victory are underestimating the enemy. Some militaries are too confident in their own capacity to overwhelm any hostile army; some are drawn from societies that simply look down on their enemies. Discounting the enemy’s ability to adapt is also a trait of megalomaniacal leaders—many of whom choose advisers who tell them what they want to hear and suppress information that would make them unhappy. …
^
In a slightly bizarre turn, the United States has had to reach out to Ukraine for assistance in defending against Iranian drones. The Trump administration scaled back U.S. assistance to Ukraine and has consistently appeared sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s views, but Ukrainians are now working with American forces and those of some of the Gulf States, training them on how to use cheap, effective Ukrainian equipment to take down inexpensive Iranian drones.

U.S. forces are not going to be defeated in battle and can still attack any individual Iranian target they want. But the U.S. is struggling because Iran also got a vote. And with that vote, it is posing strategic questions that the Trump administration clearly did not anticipate and for which it did not prepare.

Bloomberg: US Hits Military Targets on Iran’s Kharg Island as War Escalates https://tinyurl.com/5ecmw85s “The 14th day of the war marked the largest attacks yet against the Islamic Republic, with the US and Israel hitting around 15,000 targets since the war began”
// cont.: according to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2032697541309895104?s=20/photo/1

Takeaways:
• President Donald Trump said the US had bombed military targets on a critical Iranian outpost in the Persian Gulf and threatened additional strikes targeting oil infrastructure if Tehran continued to block energy flows.

• The US bombed military targets on Kharg Island, but did not strike the island’s energy facilities, in what amounts to a warning shot to Iran and a threat that the US may be willing to strike targets that are part of the country’s energy infrastructure.

• The US is sending the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit from Japan to the Middle East and has announced that the death toll for its military operation rose, with all six crew members aboard a US refueling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq killed, bringing to 13 the number of American service members who have died.

WSJ: Trump Knew the Risk of Iran Blocking the Strait of Hormuz. He Still Went to War. https://tinyurl.com/49z8uecn “The president told his White House team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait, the world’s most vital shipping lane”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2032693252508275022?s=20/photo/1

WASHINGTON—Before the U.S. went to war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told President Trump that an American attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz. 

Caine said in several briefings that U.S. officials had long believed Iran would deploy mines, drones and missiles to close the world’s most vital shipping lane, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Trump acknowledged the risk, these people said, but moved forward with the most consequential foreign-policy decision of his two presidencies. He told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.

🐣 RT @JohnJHarwood yeah, the President of the United States is a hard-core racist
‼️ ⋙ 🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow “A lot of them were let in here, they shouldn’t have been let in. Their genetics are not exactly your genetics. It’s one of those problems…” – President Donald Trump suggests immigrants have problematic “genetics”.
💽 https://x.com/JohnJHarwood/status/2032516816057282632?s=20/photo/1

NYT, Mairav Zonszein: A War for One Man https://tinyurl.com/msrzuvbe “There are no longer dissenting voices present in Israel’s military or govt, because Netanyahu has surrounded himself with loyalists and ideological politicians. And, in Washington, there is a trigger-happy president.”

🐣 RT @StratcomCentre Russian military bloggers complaining that Ukraine is now dominating at the front, “a dire situation” with drone swarms changing frequencies, fiber optics drones and mother drones overwhelming their forces.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2032528987302322355?s=20/photo/1

German Sadulaev
The situation on the front is dire. The enemy has once again gained superiority in the lower skies. Their drones have become more numerous, and their quality has changed again. Many drones are using fiber optics, radio drones have changed frequencies, are using “mother drones,” and so on. Our electronic warfare isn’t helping, and even our drone detectors aren’t signaling. The enemy is flying in flocks of several hundred drones, in swarms, and is using Al.
[br]
enemy is currently isolating the front lines and the entire combat zone. There are no logistics. Delivering supplies, evacuating the wounded, and carrying out rotations are mortally dangerous tasks. In many areas, after the isolation, drone fire strikes begin, followed by a counterattack.The enemy is recapturing its positions. The risk of a major breakthrough cannot be ruled out.
[br]
Many military personnel say the enemy is preparing a repeat of the fall of 2022, when we lost vast territories. But this time, the defeat could be even worse.
[kr]
Organizational and technical countermeasures against drones are urgently needed. New solutions.
[br]
If the generals in stripes don’t put new decisions into effect now, tomorrow will be too late. For them

CNN: Trump administration underestimated Iran war’s impact on Strait of Hormuz https://tinyurl.com/2nt8h3xd //➔ escorting ships won’t work and will endanger crews; Invading with Marines will likely fail, too, or could start the biggest war since Viet Nam (my pov); terrain ⇊
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2032544500577341809?s=20/photo/1 -2

The Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes while planning the ongoing operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump’s national security team failed to fully account for the potential consequences of what some officials have described as a worst-case scenario now facing the administration, the sources said.

While key officials from the Departments of Energy and Treasury were present for some of the official planning meetings about the operation before it started, sources said, the agency analysis and forecasts that would be integral elements of the decision-making process in past administrations were secondary considerations.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have been key players throughout the planning and execution stages of the conflict, the sources acknowledged. But Trump’s preference of leaning on a tight circle of close advisers in his national security decision making had the effect of sidelining interagency debate over the potential economic fallout if Iran were to respond to US-Israeli strikes by closing the strait.

And now it may be weeks before the administration’s efforts to alleviate the intensifying economic fallout take hold, officials said Thursday, including high-risk naval escorts of oil tankers through the strait that the Pentagon believes are currently too dangerous to conduct. The president, meanwhile, has continued to downplay the tumult in energy markets and the danger. He told Fox News that oil tanker crews should “show some guts” and go through the strait.

“Planning around preventing this exact scenario — impossible as it has long seemed — has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” a former US official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations said. “I’m dumbfounded.”

Shipping industry executives have made regular requests to the US Navy for military escorts, all of which have been rebuffed. […]

But there was no indication that there were any near-term solutions to the problem that threatened to consume the international economy given the scale of the threat still posed by Iranian assets in and around the strait, the sources familiar said. […]

Multiple current and former US officials told CNN that plans for any military action against Iran would account for the possibility of Iran closing the waterway. The US military has long maintained and updated plans to address Iranian military action in the critical corridor.

But at a moment where global oil and LNG supplies were plentiful, US oil production sat at record highs and Trump officials were basking in a pliant Venezuelan government and the potential for rapid expansion of new production from a former foe, the global scale of the downside risks was not viewed as a major consideration.

Even in weighing the potential for disruption in the strait, the administration has been far more focused on its overwhelmingly positive — if still aspirational — view of how markets would respond to eliminating the threat of Iranian disruptions entirely.

“To win in life, you’ve got to suffer short-term pain for the long-term gain, and that’s what we’re in the middle of doing right now,” Wright said in a Wednesday interview on NewsNation. “I think the American people will be thrilled with a peaceful world on the other side and more secure supplies of energy for decades to come.” […]

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” [Trump] wrote on Truth Social, without explaining who he meant by “we.”

He added that his military aims against Iran were more consequential than shifts in global energy costs.

“Of far greater interest and importance to me, as President, is stoping an evil Empire, Iran, from having Nuclear Weapons, and destroying the Middle East and, indeed, the World,” Trump wrote. …

Bessent announced Thursday that the Treasury Department is temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil stranded at sea. […]

🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Pentagon Is Moving Additional Marines, Warships to the Middle East https://tinyurl.com/56ju5jt8 Hegseth has approved a request from CENTCOM “for an element of an amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit, typically consisting of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors”

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, according to three U.S. officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit, typically consisting of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors, the officials said.

The Japan-based USS Tripoli and its attached Marines are now headed for the Middle East, two of the officials said. Marines are already in the Middle East supporting the Iran operation, the officials said.

The move comes as Iran’s attacks on the strait have paralyzed traffic through the strategic waterway, disrupting the global economy, driving up gas prices and posing a major military and political challenge for President Trump. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment

Corrections & Amplifications
An amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit typically consist of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors. An earlier version of this post incorrectly said it typically consists of 5,000 Marines. (Corrected on March 13)

🧵 RT @joni_askola 1/8 Russian intelligence always finds a way to completely screw up. ¤ They recently tried to build an untraceable new hit squad, but got caught because their top operatives literally typed their secret assassination plans into Google Translate
📌 https://x.com/joni_askola/status/2032468394448998739?s=20

🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag The Iran war has highlighted Ukraine’s remarkable rise as a drone superpower. In 2022, Ukraine barely had a domestic drone industry. Today, Ukraine’s unrivaled drone warfare expertise is being used to guard US bases and Gulf states. Zelenskyy has cards!
⋙ AtlanticCouncil: Iran war highlights Ukraine’s rapid rise to drone superpower status https://tinyurl.com/dr8j9xum “The Iran war has sparked a sudden surge in international demand for Ukraine’s unique drone warfare expertise.”

🐣 RT @AaronBlake BREAKING: Fourth-quarter GDP growth has been revised downward from 1.4% to 0.7%

⭕ 12 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @_Investinq Palantir’s CEO just told a room of Silicon Valley investors that AI is about to blow up the Democratic Party’s professional class base.​
¤ https://x.com/_Investinq/status/2032136043642728670?s=20

Alex Karp runs Palantir, which builds AI systems for the Pentagon, the CIA, and allied militaries.​

He is describing what his technology is likely to do to the workforce and the political map.

Karp says AI will heavily disrupt college educated, highly trained professionals, the core Democratic voter base in cities and suburbs.​

He argues their economic power will shrink as AI eats white‑collar work.

He also says vocational, working class jobs in the physical world will gain relative power because AI cannot easily replace them.​

Those workers are often male, non‑degreed, and more likely to vote Republican.

Karp calls anyone who thinks this disruption will somehow be politically manageable “in an insane asylum”.​

He is saying out loud that you cannot wreck one side’s core voters and expect politics to stay stable.

Then he turns to Silicon Valley.

He argues the industry cannot both destroy professional‑class jobs and refuse to support the US military at the same time.​

In his view, the only justification for taking on huge social risk from AI is national defense.​

If America does not build these systems, adversaries will, and Americans could end up under someone else’s rules.

He warns that if AI companies decouple from the military, they invite a backlash from both left and right.​

That backlash, he suggests, points toward bringing AI companies under direct government control.

Karp says these technologies are “dangerous societally” and will disrupt “the very fabric of our society, including the most powerful parts of our society”.​

He is telling the industry it owes the public an explanation for why this disruption is worth it.

His core message is that AI will weaken Democratic leaning educated workers, strengthen vocational workers, and push politics toward a showdown over who controls the tech.​

And unless AI is clearly tied to defending the country, he thinks the public will eventually move to seize it.

NYT: Hegseth’s Boasts of ‘Maximum’ Engagement Authorities Face Scrutiny After School Is Hit https://tinyurl.com/5eksdbjw “The defense secretary has disparaged restrictive rules for opening fire that are aimed at reducing the risk of mistakes and civilian casualties.”

🐣 RT @business Russia is currently providing Iran with intelligence including satellite imagery and drone targeting tactics, according to people familiar with US and Western
⋙ Bloomberg: Putin’s ‘Hidden Hand’ Guides Iran’s Strikes in Widening War https://tinyurl.com/2j6undrm “Moscow is currently providing Iran with various forms of intelligence, including satellite imagery and drone targeting tactics, in an effort to help Iran hit back at US forces in the region”

Russian intelligence support for Iran’s deadly retaliation against the US, Israel and Gulf allies — as well as concerns China may also be helping Tehran — demonstrates deepening ties among US adversaries as the war with Iran continues to widen.

Moscow is currently providing Iran with various forms of intelligence, including satellite imagery and drone targeting tactics, in an effort to help Iran hit back at US forces in the region, according to people familiar with US and Western intelligence.

It’s uncertain to what degree the intelligence given to Iran is effective and timely, and how regularly Russia is providing actionable information, according to one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But it reflects a crucial relationship highlighted by Russia’s reliance on deadly Iranian Shahed attack drones in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

“No one will be surprised to believe that Putin’s hidden hand is behind some of the Iranian tactics and potentially some of their capabilities as well,” UK Defence Secretary John Healey said at a military briefing in London on Thursday.

“Patterns of Iranian attack have the hallmarks of the way Russia is attacking Ukraine,” he said, adding that was to be expected “knowing how closely that alliance of aggression has been growing over the last few years.”

Russia and Iran have deepened military cooperation in recent years after Moscow turned to other US geopolitical foes, including Tehran and North Korea, for support after its global isolation following the 2022 invasion of its neighbor. Now there are concerns that China could also be providing Iran with some form of support.

Following an intelligence briefing on Iran earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Russia seems to be aiding Tehran “actively and intensively, with intelligence and perhaps with other means” and added that “China may also be assisting Iran.” …

US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that President Vladimir Putin denied sharing information with Tehran in a call with President Donald Trump.

“The Russians said that they have not been sharing — that’s what they said, so we can take them at their word,” Witkoff said. “It’s a better question for the intel people. But let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”

However, Putin has explicitly expressed “unwavering support for Tehran” and congratulated Mojtaba Khamenei on his selection as Iran’s new supreme leader, after his father was killed in the opening hours of the US and Israeli bombardment that started the war. Putin’s also vowed to remain a reliable partner of the Islamic Republic, even as he’s avoided criticizing Trump for the war.

Moscow has regularly used Iranian-made one-way attack drones to strike Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. Iran later supplied technology for Russia to start its own mass-production of the deadly drones.

In return for the war aid, Russia has been sharing sensitive military know-how for years — an exchange that’s now deepened in recent days in light of Iran’s conflict with the US, Israel and Gulf nations. The Washington Post and CNN were first to report elements of Russia’s intelligence support to Iran.

“The lessons learned have been happening throughout the course of the war in Ukraine, but the implications now are here,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former senior US intelligence official now at the Center for a New American Security. “We’re seeing it now happen in real time, in a real case.”

Kendall-Taylor pointed to Iran’s tactics of targeting oil infrastructure as a way to inflict maximum pain on an adversary as one likely gleaned from Russia’s own conflict in Ukraine, either passively or directly. Russia also has experience countering US-made weaponry, including Patriot missiles and ATACMS tactical surface-to-surface missiles, in Ukraine. “They can also share some of that know-how with the Iranians,” she said.

Iran’s widespread use of the relatively cheap drones in the conflict has put a strain on the US military and Gulf allies, forcing them to use protection systems designed primarily to combat more advanced weapons.

It’s hard for Western allies to estimate how many drones Iran has and makes, compared to its missiles and rocket launchers, given it’s much easier to establish ad hoc facilities, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Key to Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones is whether they can smuggle in engines, they said.

It’s also unclear how exactly China might be providing support to Iran, beyond being the main buyer of Iran’s oil and helping prop up its economy. Beijing helped Russia indirectly throughout its invasion of Ukraine including with commercial companies providing satellite imagery and know-how to build drones.

Asked whether China was helping Iran with information about the US military, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a Thursday briefing in Beijing that he was “not aware of what you mentioned.”

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chair of the intelligence committee, told Fox News on Wednesday he couldn’t confirm or deny reports about China and Russia supporting Iran. But he warned that “Russia and China, if they were to provide any assistance to Iran, are playing with fire.”

🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Trump is dealt a massive political black eye as a top United Nations panel condemns him for his relentless hate speech and deeply cruel immigration policies. ¤ The entire world is starting to stand up to this bully…
¤ https://x.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/2032138845362536764?s=20

“The Committee was deeply disturbed by the growing use of derogatory and dehumanizing language, and the dissemination of negative and harmful stereotypes targeting migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers,” wrote the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a group of 18 independent experts.

They stated that hate speech from leaders like Trump, in tandem with his brutal immigrations crackdowns around places like schools and churches, has led to “grave human rights violations.” This has long been apparent to the American people, who have been forced to watch as masked federal thugs flood our streets, terrorizing and murdering people at will.

The panel further stated that leaders like Trump have pushed stereotypes about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers (which Trump regularly does to excite his racist MAGA base) by “portraying them as criminals or as a burden.” Such language, the panel concluded, leads to discrimination and even hate crimes.

They also specifically called out Trump’s ICE and Customs and Border Protection for implementing discriminatory policies like racial profiling and “random” identity checks to target people of color.

The panel further wrote that they are “deeply concerned” about the skyrocketing number of detainees imprisoned in detention facilities — pointing out that it spiked from 40,000 in 2024 to 73,000 in 2026.

The panel experts are also “alarmed by the death of detained refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants in migration detention facilities, particularly the deaths of at least 29 migrants in 2025 and six in January 2026.”

They urged the White House to begin complying with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

This is what Trump has done to America. The entire world can see that we’re being controlled by a deeply racist fascist regime. We commend them for speaking out and adding their voices to ours!

TheAtlantic, Lila Shroff: Even Silicon Valley Says that AI Is a Bubble https://tinyurl.com/3hddyr3r “The narrative of a ‘good bubble’ concerning in that it provides justification for investors to keep pumping money into AI, regardless of whether it really makes sense to do so”
// An AI crash could bring down the economy. Some in the tech world think that’s the price of progress.

🐣 RT @@newrepublic His message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working class men—more political power to transfer to you. https://trib.al/N2l8EDM
// Palantir CEO Alex Karp Makes Shocking Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power

WaPo: Lebanon appeals to Israel’s allies to stop strikes as death toll rises https://tinyurl.com/yc6x992j “The Iran war is expanding into Lebanon, as the Israeli offensive to dismantle Hezbollah has displaced 800,000 people there, with more than 680 people killed.”

NYT: Oil Shock Sends Tremors Through World Economy: ‘This Really Is the Big One’ https://tinyurl.com/ye294za5 “Countries already walloped by a breakdown of the international trading order, war in Ukraine and chaotic US policymaking are facing potentially lasting economic damage”

⭕ 11 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Netanyahu is once again attempting his favorite trick: transmuting a national existential crisis into a personal political lifeline… If all of this sounds premature, bordering on hubristic, that’s because it is.” – @Yair_Rosenberg
⋙ TheAtlantic, Yair Rosenberg: Netanyahu’s Very Useful War https://tinyurl.com/33khvand “The Israeli leader is trying to make the Iran war work to his political advantage. He may not succeed.”

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades perfecting the art of the political escape. Just when his career appears to be buried under the weight of indictments, or his coalition fatally fractured, he reappears, seemingly unscathed, with a new lease on power. Today, as Israel finds itself locked in a multifront war with Iran and its proxies, Netanyahu is once again attempting his favorite trick: transmuting a national existential crisis into a personal political lifeline.

TheAtlantic, Franklin Foer: The Obvious Is Taking Its Revenge on Trump https://tinyurl.com/bez52r4n “He believed that the worst-case scenarios that have deterred past presidents from attacking Iran wouldn’t come true for him, because he is Donald Trump.”
// The reasons other U.S. presidents avoided war with Iran are becoming all too evident.

🐣 RT @shashj “Officers at U.S. Central Command created the target coordinates for the [Minab school] strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, people briefed on the investigation said.”
⋙ NYT: U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says https://tinyurl.com/4ufk2x48 “Outdated targeting data may have resulted in a mistaken missile strike, according to the ongoing military investigation, which undercuts President Trump’s assertion that Iran could be to blame.”

WSJ: IEA Will Launch Largest-Ever Oil Release From Global Strategic Reserves https://tinyurl.com/ms2wwxkt 400M barrels will be released in an attempt to prevent supply disruptions and tame crude prices.
//➔ Will the America Firsters say “Thank you even once” to the globalist IEA?

🐣 RT @BrennanCenter Anthropic’s recent clash with the Defense Department over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons shows why the Pentagon’s use of AI must be reined in. Our latest report documents the Pentagon’s rapid adoption of AI and outlines safeguards to ensure the technology is deployed responsibly.
⋙ BrennanCenter: The Business of Military AI https://tinyurl.com/3hx43rkp “The Pentagon has been spending tens of billions of dollars to adopt new technologies at breakneck speed. Without oversight and safeguards, military applications of artificial intelligence could jeopardize civil liberties and lives.”
⋙⋙ [pdf link:] https://tinyurl.com/sryamc3w 46p

🐣 RT @TheEconomist The greatest civilisations of the past 3,000 years were the opposite of MAGA
⋙ TheEconomist: How golden ages really start—and end https://tinyurl.com/bdf8emus The greatest civilisations of the past 3,000 years were the opposite of MAGA

CNN: Breaking: Russia is giving Iran specific advice on drone tactics, Western intelligence source says https://tinyurl.com/25cbdf9k

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Oh, you don’t say? ¤ Who could have imagined a team of intellectual, strategic, historical, and moral pygmies led by a senile criminal whose worldview was shaped by 1950s television somehow misread history, culture, economics, and intent of Iran.
⋙ NYT: How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War https://tinyurl.com/35utpze2 “In the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, President Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime.”

🐣 RT @TIME TIME’s new cover: How Anthropic found itself in an existential fight over the future of war
⋙ TIME: The Most Disruptive Company in the World https://tinyurl.com/2s485usr
🖼 https://x.com/TIME/status/2031703362694230122?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ukraine_ua 💬 President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
¤ https://x.com/ukraine_ua/status/2031700586706391133?s=20

‘Our team is now on its way to the Gulf region, where they can help protect lives and stabilise the situation. We see the challenges that exist now: the Iranian regime has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz – one of the main routes for supplying oil and gas to the global market. This is a major source of instability. No one in the world can yet say how long all of this will last, but it is important that the protection of life starts working effectively as soon as possible. Stability is important for us as well.

Those now seeking Ukraine’s help must continue to assist our own defence – first and foremost, our air defence. Last year, we already proposed a drone agreement to the United States. This is the right way forward: to partner with us in the production and use of drones, and everyone now sees that there is no alternative to this approach. Ukraine has the greatest experience in the world in countering attack drones, and without our experience, it will be very difficult for the Gulf region, the entire Middle East, and partners in Europe and America to build strong protection.

⭕ 10 Mar 2026

NYT: How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War https://tinyurl.com/thra5pr9 “In the lead-up to the US-Israeli attack, Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime”

TheAtlantic, David Graham: Trump Can’t Decide Whether the Iran War Is Still Going On https://tinyurl.com/2vbtj9t9 “Asked when the war would completely end, Trump told CBS, ‘Wrapping up is all in my mind, nobody else’s.’ That’s not very reassuring, for stock markets or anyone else.”
// The president seems to be at odds with both himself and his secretary of defense about the status of the conflict.

🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline Just as Putin’s arrogance blinded him to the risks of war in Ukraine, Trump’s construction of an echo chamber in the executive branch has warped his judgment.
⋙ TheBulwark: Trump Is Repeating Putin’s Blunder https://tinyurl.com/49f4mae3 “Both men thought they could start easy, quick regime-change wars at minimal cost.”

🐣 RT @lizzadwoskin SCOOP: Last year we reported extensively on Elon Musk’s desire to break into the data pipes of government to bypass the federal bureaucracy. That approach had major consequences — one of which we reveal today: A DOGE bro allegedly made off with volumes upon volumes of highly sensitive Social Security data – the agency’s “crown jewels” – which he downloaded on a thumb drive and brought over to his new job. Me, @MerylKornfield @FedGirlWaPo report on this unprecedented breach:
⋙ WaPo: Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data https://tinyurl.com/37z24acz https://tinyurl.com/37z24acz The SocSec IG’s office “is investigating allegations that the former DOGE engineer took sensitive data on a thumb drive in major breach”
// cont.: potential security breach, said people familiar with the process.

🐣 RT @Saganismm “Jefferson, Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others; we have before us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political leaders.

They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. They were fluent in the English language. They wrote their own speeches. They were realistic and practical, and at the same time motivated by high principles. They were not checking the pollsters on what to think this week. They knew what to think. They were comfortable with long-term thinking, planning even further ahead than the next election. They were self-sufficient, not requiring careers as politicians or lobbyists to make a living. They were able to bring out the best in us. They were interested in and, at least two of them, fluent in science. They attempted to set a course for the United States into the far future — not so much by establishing laws as by setting limits on what kinds of laws could be passed.

The Constitution and its Bill of Rights have done remarkably well, constituting, despite human weaknesses, a machine able, more often than not, to correct its own trajectory. At that time, there were only about two and a half million citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred times more. So if there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jefferson’s today. Where are they?” — Carl Sagan

WaPo, Jeanne Shaheen: Putin’s actions in Iran demand a US response https://tinyurl.com/3cwttpvv “US officials believe Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran as Tehran targets American and allied interests in the region. Russia is not a bystander in this crisis.”
// Russia is counting on Iran distracting the United States from Ukraine.
[TextLink:] /photo/1

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom “We can take them at their word.” No, you can’t, but this is what happens when you don’t send experts – experienced diplomats – and instead send your son-in-law and a guy you know.
💽 [CNBC] https://x.com/atrupar/status/2031401639949615349?s=20/photo/1

⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar QUINTANILLA: Do we think the Russians have shared intel about the location of US military assets, and if so, why would we be giving waivers on Russian oil sanctions?
WITKOFF: I’m not an intel officer, so I can’t tell you. I can tell you that on the call with the president, the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. We can take them at their word.

🐣 RT @StratcomCentre In an interview with BBC Ukraine, President Zelensky was asked what Ukraine could receive in exchange for helping in the Middle East.
¤ https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2031406358512222329?s=20

Zelensky: “We raise the issue of missiles for air defense systems that are in short supply for us. In general, you know that even a year ago we proposed a “drone deal” to the United States, which included interceptor drones and other capabilities as well.

Our overall experience and production capacity – in volumes that we currently do not even use – is significant. The problem is that we simply do not have the financial resources to fund all of our production and all of our capabilities. We proposed this first and foremost to the Americans as our partners. And if today the Middle East has some demand, all of this is part of the drone deal. That is why the drone deal is absolutely relevant for the United States.”

BBC Ukraine: “Is there recognition among American partners that Ukraine already holds strong cards?”

Zelensky: “Yes, absolutely. All American experts – both those who know us well and those who do not – understand that only Ukrainian experience can realistically counter massive Shahed drone attacks.

Even countries that quietly purchased interceptor drones have already realized that without our military operators and without our software, interceptor systems simply do not work.”

🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Senator Richard Blumenthal emerges ashen-faced from an Iran War briefing and reveals that he has never been so “angry” in his entire 15 career year in Senate. ¤ And the details are jaw-dropping…
¤ https://x.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/2031417926331543777?s=20

“I emerge from this briefing as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate,” he told reporters. “I am left with more questions than answers, especially about the cost of the war. However, my questions have been unanswered, and I will demand answers because the American people deserve to know.”

According to The Washington Post, the United States burned through a staggering $5.6 billion in munitions in just the first two days of the illegal war. This is the same administration that insists that we don’t have money for healthcare or social services.

“And I guess I am most concerned about the threat to American lives of potentially deploying our sons and daughters on the ground in Iran,” Blumenthal continued. “We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives here. And there is also, as disturbingly as anything else, the specter of active Russian aid to Iran, putting in danger American lives.”

“Literally, Russia seems to be aiding our enemy actively and intensively with intelligence and perhaps with other means. And China also may be assisting Iran,” he continued.

“So the American people deserve to know much more than this administration has told them about the cost of the war, the danger to our sons and daughters in uniform, and the potential for further escalation and widening of this war, a war of choice made by this president, not chosen by the American people, with potentially huge consequences to American lives,” the senator added.

That “war of choice” bit is particularly crucial. Trump launched this deadly, evil war on behalf of Israel despite Iran posing no immediate threat to the people of the United States. He’s slaughtering men, women, and children and can’t even articulate a coherent strategic goal. Meanwhile, he never bothered to get Congressional approval for the war as demanded by the Constitution and he’s rapidly burning through our tax dollars.

The mere suggestion that we would put boots on the ground in Iran should horrify every American. In addition to being a morally reprehensible action, it would result in the greatest military disaster in U.S. history. Iran has a population of 93 million people, it’s four times larger than Iraq and it’s all mountains. Our brave soldiers would be walking into a slaughterhouse.

🐣 📋 RT @StratcomCentre Ukrainian intelligence has obtained internal Russian government documents revealing Moscow’s own assessment of its battlefield losses in the war against Ukraine at 1,315,000 soldiers, with 62% dead, 38% wounded.
¤ https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2031388774618316935?s=20

The documents, discussed today with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Oleh Ivashchenko, indicate that Russia internally estimates its losses at 1,315,000 soldiers killed or seriously wounded since the start of the full-scale invasion.

The reports also note a shift in the casualty ratio, with a growing share of Russian losses now resulting in fatalities rather than wounded personnel.

According to Ukrainian officials, these figures come from closed Russian reports and may still underestimate the true scale of Russia’s losses.

NYT, Dan Kagan-Kans: How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil https://tinyurl.com/5exabhy6

The journal Nature in January published an unusual paper: A team of artificial intelligence researchers had discovered a relatively simple way of turning large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, from friendly assistants into vehicles of cartoonish evil. …

[T]he A.I. company Anthropic is betting a lot on the idea that something like virtue ethics applies to large language models; its frontier Claude model has been given, by the company’s house philosopher Amanda Askell, a foundational guide to its character full of references to Aristotelian concepts like practical wisdom. It’s more likely not that emergent misalignment is wrong in L.L.M.s but that the concept doesn’t quite translate to humans, like a mouse study that ends up not replicating in people. One way that could happen: The clustered sense of good and evil that L.L.M.s have picked up from their training data doesn’t reflect how human character truly works but how humans talk about character. …

Consider a follow-up to an earlier version of the Nature paper. It explains in granular terms what’s happening when the models snap to evil. It is math all the way down. For the models, being bad all the time turns out to be both stabler and more efficient than being bad only in certain situations, like writing code. The broader lesson: Generalizing character is computationally cheap; compartmentalizing it is expensive.

🐣 RT @sapinker What “Western Civilization” Really Means: Enlightenment, yes; Christianity, not so much. An important reminder from @FukuyamaFrancis
⋙ 🔰 Persuasion, Francis Fukuyama: What “Western Civilization” Really Means https://tinyurl.com/3s9akwm8 “It has less to do with faith – and more to do with the Enlightenment – than Marco Rubio thinks.”

“We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

—Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, February 14, 2026.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio got a standing ovation at the end of his talk at the Munich Security Conference in February, largely for his assertion, quoted above, that the United States and Europe are all part of a single “Western Civilization.” His listeners were doubtless gratified that he backed away from the aggressive nastiness towards Europe displayed by Vice President JD Vance the year before, and that he seemed to be anchoring the trans-Atlantic relationship in values, as countless American leaders had done in the years before the rise of Donald Trump.

But what is the “Western Civilization” to which Rubio was referring? His version of it is likely to be quite different from the understanding of most contemporary Europeans, and from mine as well. (Rubio did manage to get in a dig at me and the “end of history.”)

For an important group of American conservatives, “Western Civilization” denotes a specifically Christian civilization, and a culture built around active Christian belief. Rubio alludes to this by speaking not of “Christian heritage” but of “Christian faith” in his remarks. His list of shared aspects of common civilization also includes the words “heritage” and “ancestry,” which echo Vance’s use of the term “heritage Americans” to imply, it would seem, that our culture is based on a common ethnicity as well as shared religion.

There is no question that Western civilization is rooted in “Christian heritage.” One of the deepest Christian values is belief in the universal equality of all human beings in the eyes of God. National conservatives mock the liberal belief in universal human equality, and Rubio himself argues that no one fights for an abstraction, but for a particular way of life. But there’s one important abstract idea that lies at the core of Christianity and of Western culture. It was expressed by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Many important thinkers, from Alexis de Tocqueville to G.W.F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche, have understood that Christianity spawned modern liberal democracy. Most people who defend human rights today do not do so in religious terms, but there is no question that modern understandings of rights descend from Christian religious beliefs.

But in making this transition, Western civilization detached itself from any overt identification with religion. The reasons for this were historical: following the Protestant Reformation, Europeans spent the next 150 years killing each other over differing interpretations of Christian doctrine, over ideas like transubstantiation or childhood baptism. Since Medieval times, there has been no monolithic Christian doctrine; Protestantism spawned a “way of life” quite different from Catholicism.

As a result of this disagreement over final ends, the Enlightenment founders of modern liberalism agreed to push religion into the realm of private belief, and to focus politics on life itself rather than the good life as defined by a particularly religious doctrine. In addition, early natural scientists were engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Catholic Church; it was only with the separation of empirical inquiry from religious dogma that modern natural science, and the economic world it made possible, emerged.

🐣 RT @axios Snubbing Ukraine’s offer ranks as one of the biggest tactical miscalculations by the administration since the bombing of Iran began Feb. 28, two U.S. officials tell Axios.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @axios EXCLUSIVE: 7 months ago, Ukraine tried to sell the U.S. their battle-proven technology for downing Iranian-made drones. ¤ The Trump administration dismissed the Ukrainians, only to reverse course last week after more-than-expected Iranian drone strikes.
⋙ 🐣 Four of the Americans who died were hit with an Iranian “Shahed“ drone. Ukrainian anti-drone interceptors have an 89% success rate against those drones.
⋙⋙ Axios: Exclusive: U.S. dismissed Ukraine deal for anti-Iran drone tech last year https://tinyurl.com/2u2uy8n3

🐣 RT @KyivIndependent A Saudi Arabian arms company has signed a deal to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor missiles, the Kyiv Independent has learned, with one source within Ukraine’s defense industry saying that Riyadh and Kyiv are negotiating a separate “huge deal” for arms that could be finalized this week. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/5n7y37nk

⭕ 9 Mar 2026

RBC-Ukraine: Trump’s sons seek to buy Ukrainian drone technologies https://tinyurl.com/2wshuzvw “Powerus co-founder and US Special Operations Forces veteran Brett Velicovich confirmed that the company is already negotiating with Ukrainian developers.”
// Cont.: The startup’s goal is either to fully acquire Ukrainian enterprises or to license their technologies”
// Ukrainian technologies will become the foundation of a new drone empire in the US

WSJ, Gerard Baker: In a War of Words, Trump Always Defeats Himself https://tinyurl.com/kb6tyc7t “Good statecraft … requires an ability to explain and convince—at home and overseas. The administration is losing that war.”
// The public started out opposing the conflict in Iran. That will be a problem if things go south.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2031611591859339622?s=20/photo/1

It was said of Winston Churchill that he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. Donald Trump’s trick with the mother tongue is to douse it in gasoline, set it on fire and drop it in a dumpster in the middle of his own parade ground.

Whatever you think of the wisdom or efficacy of the president’s policies, their effectiveness is almost always vitiated by an inability to articulate and communicate goals in a way that helps make them achievable. The U.S. war on Iran is a near perfect microcosm of this presidential mismanagement.
^
Words matter. They don’t merely persuade and inspire. They give meaning and shape to abstract ideas and values. They are the unction by which mere deeds become noble. But this is about more than the importance of this president’s words. It is about the entire affect and style of this administration’s leadership; the form that attends the substance of governing. It is about a leader’s ability to represent to ourselves and the world the kind of people we are and what we want to be. And this is where the president fails.

NYT, Thomas Friedman: Trump Has No Idea How to End the War With Iran https://tinyurl.com/up96pyd4 “Trump has been all over the map … saying truly ridiculous and often contradictory things that reveal a commander in chief who is just making it up as he goes along.”

Keeping Israel at war with Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah enables Netanyahu to drag out his corruption trial and avoid a commission of inquiry for his failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion. (If you think that is too cynical, you don’t know Netanyahu.)

For his part, Trump has been all over the map when talking about the morning after in Iran — and saying truly ridiculous and often contradictory things that reveal a commander in chief who is just making it up as he goes along. One day it’s regime change, one day not; one day he doesn’t care about Iran’s future, the next day he will have a say in choosing the country’s next leader; one day he’s open to negotiations, the next day he is demanding “unconditional surrender.”

NYPost: Ukraine deploys interceptor drones, experts to protect US bases in Jordan, Zelensky says https://tinyurl.com/3xnmx87e “Ukraine has sent interceptor drones and a team of anti-drone experts to protect US military bases in Jordan from Iran’s killer drones”
// cont.: President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

As Iran continues to launch its Shahed suicide drones across the Middle East, Zelensky said the US, Europe and 11 nations neighboring the Islamic Republic have requested aid on how to counter the explosive UAVs.

Ukraine has spent the last four years fighting against the Iranian-designed attack drones, which have been adopted by Russia and then replicated in mass for daily bombardments.

While the US has its own advanced Patriot interceptor missiles to counter aerial attacks, the missiles are pricey and in short supply, with Zelensky estimating that Middle Eastern nations burned through more than 800 of them in the first days of the war.

It was notably an Iranian drone strike that killed six US soldiers in Kuwait on March 1, as the US military and its allies were unable to intercept it in time.

The [Patriot] interceptor missiles also cost more than $3 million each to produce, about 60 times more than what a single Shahed costs.

Ukraine has been able to counter the Shahed drones on a tight budget, and Zelensky has vowed to assist any ally that needs help against Tehran.

“There is clear interest in Ukraine’s experience in protecting lives, relevant interceptors, electronic warfare systems, and training,” Zelensky wrote on X. “Ukraine is ready to respond positively to requests from those who help us protect the lives of Ukrainians and the independence of Ukraine.”

The US is reportedly leaning on that expertise as the army is rushing to deploy the counter-drone systems that have been tested in Ukraine to the Middle East.

🐣 RT @newrepublic The administration’s war with Iran is setting a mountain of taxpayer dollars on fire every day—mostly because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
⋙ NewRepublic, Michael Tomasky: How We’re All Now Paying the Price for the Myth of Trump’s Competence https://trib.al/zekCen5

🐣 RT @LuizaJarovsky 🚨 BREAKING: After being designated a “supply chain risk to national security,” Anthropic SUES the Trump Administration. Quotes:
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/LuizaJarovsky/status/2031041525434450349?s=20/photo/1

[…] “The consequences of this case are enormous. The federal government retaliated against a leading frontier AI developer for adhering to its protected viewpoint on a subject of great public significance—AI safety and the limitations of its own AI models—in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States. Defendants are seeking to destroy the economic value created by one of the world’s fastest-growing private companies, which is a leader in responsibly developing an emergent technology of vital significance to our Nation. The Challenged Actions inflict immediate and irreparable harm on Anthropic; on others whose speech will be chilled; on those benefiting from the economic value the company can continue to create; and on a global public that deserves robust dialogue and debate on what AI means for warfare and surveillance. There is no valid justification for the Challenged Actions. The Court should declare them unlawful and enjoin Defendants from taking any steps to implement them.”

📊 NCR: Pope Leo XIV more favorable than Trump in new NBC News poll https://tinyurl.com/2b7v4c35 “found 23% of registered voters viewing Leo very positively and 19% viewing him somewhat positively, with 8% viewing him negatively. 34% net-positive favorability
¤ https://x.com/NCRonline/status/2031083864261603517?s=20

Ten months into his papacy, U.S. voters view Pope Leo XIV more favorably than the country’s president, political parties or artificial intelligence, according to a recent NBC News survey.

The public opinion survey conducted in early March found 23% of registered voters viewing Leo very positively and 19% viewing him somewhat positively, with 8% viewing him negatively. ¤ That 34% net-positive favorability placed Leo atop a list of 14 people, issues and political groups asked about in the survey.

The first U.S. pope placed well ahead of
• Pope Leo (42% positive vs. 8% negative, +34) favorability
• President Donald Trump (41% positive vs. 53% negative, -12 favorability)
• Vice President JD Vance (38% vs. 49%, -11) and
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio (34% vs. 41%, -7). …
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (38% vs. 56%, -18),
• artificial intelligence (26% vs. 46%, -20) and the
• country of Iran (8% vs. 61%, -53).

🐣 📊 RT @juliaioffe Meanwhile, despite Kremlin propaganda that they’re winning, the number of Russians who support ending the war in Ukraine at the negotiating table hits an all time high, 67%. Only 24% think Russia should keep fighting. (via Levada)
◕ https://x.com/juliaioffe/status/2031014198285607304?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @BillKristol Our only chance comes from Ukraine — from how we win in Ukraine, and what can be born from the revitalization of order that comes after Ukraine. Otherwise, it’s just gonna be chaos monkeys all the way down.”
⋙ GreatPower, Molly McKew: Why do democracies pretend to be powerless? https://tinyurl.com/cffycf8k “Democracies must define 21st century power — for themselves, and for Ukrainian victory”

NYT: Ukraine Sent Drone Experts to Protect US Bases, Zelensky Says https://tinyurl.com/yps6ftp4 “As the war in Iran spreads, Kyiv is offering its hard-won expertise and advanced technology to counter Iranian drones.” Russia, meanwhile, is helping Iran target the US and its allies.

⭕ 8 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @michaeldweiss New with @60Minutes: A whistleblower from the Global Health Incident Cell (GHIC), the secret CIA unit that investigated Havana Syndrome, says he believes the Russian intelligence services are behind directed energy attacks on Americans. https://theins.press/en/inv/290088.

🐣 RT @TheAtlantic Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon briefings since the war against Iran began “have reminded the world why he is exactly the wrong person to hold the position he does,” @Peter_Wehner argues:
⋙ TheAtlantic, Peter Wehner: Pete Hegseth’s Moral Unseriousness https://tinyurl.com/36hff3us “The defense secretary appears unable to approach matters of life and death with even the slightest bit of reverence or humility.”

🐣 RT @TheAtlantic Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ali Khamenei, may be even more violent and ideological than his father, @gcaw argued last week:
⋙ TheAtlantic, Graeme Wood (Mar 6): ‘The Most Dangerous Man in the World’ https://tinyurl.com/mrynsc3c “Mojtaba Khamenei, a candidate to succeed his father as Iran’s supreme leader, is no reformer.”

🐣 RT @yasminalombaert The tragedy of modern Russia.
The tragedy of modern Russia is that its leaders have chosen to live in a distorted version of the past. Eminent historian, professor Karl Schlögel provides a devastating analysis of this collective breakdown, arguing that what we see in Ukraine is not a ‘Great Patriotic’ defense, but a barbaric regression.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/yasminalombaert/status/2030771847562657990?s=20/photo/1

He reminds us that while other empires chose the painful path of decolonisation, putin’s Russia has surrendered to the ‘dead end of empire’, trading its future for the systematic destruction of its neighbour.

Professor Karl Schlögel:

“It is a low point in the sense that it is not waging a war of defense—not the Great Patriotic War of ’41 to ’45—a defensive victory. Instead, it is waging a war of aggression that has now lasted longer than the German-Soviet War, involving moments of, well, barbarity, massacres, and war crimes of this nature. Specifically, aiming for the annihilation of a nation—denying Ukraine the right to its own existence and doing so by all means necessary—and the systematic destruction of the foundations of life in Ukraine: the bombardment of cities, the dismantling of cities, leaving cities vulnerable in winter to make them uninhabitable.”

Interviewer: “But how do you explain such barbarity—you, who knows the country and its people?”

“In my eyes, it is the surrender of the Russian leadership following the end of the Soviet Union. The failure to accept the end of the Soviet Union and to rebuild Russia anew; to lead Russia out of the dead end of empire and to follow the path taken by all great colonial empires—the British, French, Dutch, and so on. This challenge—to bid farewell to the empire and create a post-imperial, modern Russia that is commensurate with the strengths, talents, and the scale of this country—is what the Russian leadership surrendered to after the turbulent 1990s.

In a certain way, putin initially represented the hope, the prospect, that there was now a capable man who would lead the country out of that dead end, but the opposite has happened.”

🐣 RT @@carlbildt Attacking water desalination plants is attacking critical civilian infrastructure. It’s with no doubt a war crime. If this escalates the consequences would be grave.

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson You know, in the end, Trump’s name will be synonymous for the single most evil and destructive person to ever hold the Presidency, and it won’t even be close.

“I killed 500,000 people by botching COVID, wrecked our economy with a foolish trade war, set loose murderous domestic secret police, ripped off Americans in billion-dollar crypto scams, covered Epstein, sold out our allies, started a second Great Depression and World War III” is a hell of a resume.

🐣 RT @washingtonpost Minnesota has suffered what Gov. Tim Walz described as “generational trauma.” ¤ But its residents also offered the rest of the country an opportunity to see the state at its best helping its neighbors, he said.
⋙ WaPo: Tim Walz talks about the ‘generational trauma’ his state has faced https://tinyurl.com/5erb58wd “Amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Americans saw Minnesotans at their best, looking out for each other, the governor tells The Post.”

⭕ 7 Mar 2026

WSJ: Iran Is Hitting the Radars That Underpin U.S. Missile Defenses https://tinyurl.com/4amr2zwm Tehran is carrying out many of the strikes with one-way attack drones; Russia is also sharing intelligence with Iran that it could use to help target military forces.
// tags: THAAD, AN/FPS-132 radar, Shaheds, Patriots, interceptors

🐣 RT @kalinowski007 I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.

🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @AJEnglish BREAKING: Iran’s interim leadership council has approved that neighbouring countries will no longer be attacked unless an attack on Iran originates from them, President Masoud Pezeshkian has said.

⭕ 6 Mar 2026

Bloomberg: Ketamine, Prostitution and Money: Details of a Secret DEA Probe of Jeffrey Epstein https://tinyurl.com/2hv7cnsy “As Epstein famously cultivated high-profile connections with Wall Street executives, politicians and royalty, federal authorities secretly kept their eyes on him”
// A DOJ document combined with interviews reveal that a long-running investigation into organized crime led law enforcement to suspect the serial sex abuser of money laundering, distributing ‘club drugs’ and operating a prostitution ring.

🐣 RT @UKikaski US/NATO Counter-UAS Doctrine, Geographic Scale, and the Ukrainian Interceptor as the Solution
¤ https://x.com/UKikaski/status/2029897909458612662?s=20
// OSINT Intuit™ | 06 March 2026

ASSESSMENT
The United States and its NATO allies have poured massive resources into counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS) technology. The core issue is that this technology was engineered to shield a maneuver force, not an entire nation. Ukraine and parts of the Middle East are not confined battlefields. They are vast territories where borders with Russia and Iran define the frontline. Everything beyond those borders (cities, infrastructure, civilians) is now a target.
US and NATO doctrine was never built to address this at scale. […] […]

🐣 RT @ukraine_frontup Ukraine is quietly reshaping the role of its Territorial Defense Forces.
Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi says a reform launched about six months ago is now moving forward, with all Territorial Defense brigades transitioning to a unified structure built around a stronger unmanned component. The changes also include the addition of large-caliber artillery, anti-aircraft missile units, and ground robotic systems. […]
¤ https://x.com/ukraine_frontup/status/2030128147157467526?s=20

🐣 RT @tedlieu Dear @SecScottBessent: Conservative and mainstream outlets have confirmed that Russia is giving intelligence info to Iran that helps Iran target American forces. ¤ Reverse your decision to lift oil sanctions on Russia. It is traitorous conduct for you to help Russia.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepDonBacon Putin has been “playing” the White House all along. Most of us have seen it and called it out, but the Administration refuses to see reality. …
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ CarlaBNewsmax #BREAKING A US defense official has just confirmed to Newsmax that Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack US troops and military assets in the Middle East. The Washington Post first reported this development, which puts one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors in this rapidly expanding conflict. ¤ Iran has for years provided Russia with its Shahed drones to attack Ukraine, and now Russian intel is aiding Iran in its attacks across several countries.

🐣 RT @cwebbonline It’s about time someone said it out loud on a national news show. ¤ Major Gen. Paul Eaton (ret), when asked about Trump’s interest in putting boots on the ground:
💽 https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/2030162011632587150?s=20/photo/1

“I’m going to use the word a lot of people are thinking, and it’s dementia. We have a situation where someone called a malignant narcissist is unfortunately drifting into a state of dementia that is difficult to manage.”

TheEconomist: The Iran war has entered a new phase https://tinyurl.com/w57yt59w “‘We’re watching a real-world test of what can be achieved by relying exclusively on … aerially delivered precision weapons and the most advanced methods of surveillance and information processing’”
✛ ~ Aaron Friedberg of Princeton University
// Both sides have changed their tactics, our data analysis finds

🐣 RT @simplifyinAI 🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and Harvard just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year. [paper link:] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20021
¤ https://x.com/simplifyinAI/status/2030012329480618313?s=20/

It’s called “Agents of Chaos,” and it proves that when autonomous AI agents are placed in open, competitive environments, they don’t just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage. ¤ It’s a massive, systems-level warning. […]

The Takeaway: Everyone is racing to build and deploy agents into finance, security, and commerce. Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects. If multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and collapse won’t be a coding issue, it will be an incentive design problem.

NYT: Russia Is Sharing Intelligence With Iran, U.S. Officials Say https://tinyurl.com/3w53sd68 “Russia has provided updated intelligence on the position of U.S. assets since the beginning of the war, information meant to help Iran target the assets.”
// The information has included satellite imagery showing the locations of military personnel. But some officials played down the significance of the partnership.

TheEconomist: Donald Trump’s ill-considered conflict risks descending into chaos https://tinyurl.com/36mshf7p “Surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, Mr Trump has become rash in his second term. His opportunistic grabs for power whenever he sees weakness are dangerous.”

NYT: Divisive FDA vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad resigns. https://tinyurl.com/yw24j6wc “Dr. Prasad drew criticism for rejecting medications intended to treat rare diseases. He also made headlines when he refused to accept Moderna’s application fornew mRNA flu vaccine”

🐣 RT @LucifersTweetz We live in a country where an alcoholic from Fox News runs our military, a former heroin addict is in charge of our health, and they both report to a convicted felon. ¤ What a time to be alive.

🐣 RT @FoxNews NEW Former President Obama says it’s ‘hard to hope’ in today’s political climate during his eulogy at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s funeral:
¤ 💽 https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2030016167281119594?s=20/photo/1

“Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated, and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength.”

“We see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty and cruelty and corruption are reaping untold rewards.”

“Every single day we see that, and it’s hard to hope.”

🐣 RT @Mollyploofkins Biden: We’re in a tough spot, folks—we’ve got an administration that doesn’t share any of the values that we have, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating a little bit.
https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/2030026488137818454?s=20/photo/1

NYT: Trump Demands ‘Unconditional Surrender’ by Iran https://tinyurl.com/2pk82s5n “President Trump’s comments on Friday reflected yet another shift in the goals of U.S. military actions.”

TheAtlantic, Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl: Six Days of War, 10 Rationales https://tinyurl.com/4kueh3am “The administration has laid out a buffet of reasons for Operation Epic Fury—take your pick.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2030012113075200381?s=20/photo/1

Rationale No. 1: imminent threat.
Rationale No. 2: no nukes.
Rationale No. 3: halt the militias.
Rationale No. 4: regime change.
Rationale No. 5: election interference. [by Iran]
Rationale No. 6: world peace.
Rationale No. 7: for the grandkids.
Rationale No. 8: preemptive hit.
Rationale No. 9: fulfill God’s purpose.
Rationale No. 10: The Israelis made me do it.

Rationale No. ??: I mean, I made Them do it.
Rationale No. ??: He had “a feeling.” (Leavitt).
Rationale No. ??a: UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!!
Rationale No. ??b: “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).”

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute Trump’s second-term pardons are historic in their enormity—billions in fines erased, allies protected, donors rewarded, DOJ undermined, and election norms threatened. Corruption looks less like an exception and more like the rule, says Cato’s Dan Greenberg [link:] https://tinyurl.com/sj6yeamb

🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump’s Iran War is not going to be ending anytime soon. And calling for a country to surrender unconditionally means it is unarguably a war that requires a declaration of war.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2029926084943175891?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @reaDonaldTrump There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @micyoung75 The Founders were not hostile to faith. Several were deeply religious men. What they understood – from history, from watching European state churches, from the logic of the system they were building – is that fusing theological authority with political power corrodes both.
¤ https://x.com/micyoung75/status/2029689664093704668?s=20

Religion loses its moral independence when it becomes an arm of the state. The state loses its obligation to every citizen when it starts governing on behalf of one creed. The establishment clause was not a slight against believers. It was a protection for them… and for everyone who does not share their specific tradition.

Christian nationalism inverts that protection. It treats the neutral ground of pluralism as an obstacle rather than a foundation. It reads “freedom of religion” as license to govern by one religion’s standards rather than as the guarantee that government cannot pick a side at all.

Talarico is doing basic civic hygiene – forcing the constitutional question into daylight where it belongs. The open society that let American faith flourish across three centuries did not happen by accident. It happened because the firewalls held. Holding them now is not contempt for Christianity. It is the defense of the conditions that made it possible.

⋙ 🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline “Christian nationalism is not a type of Christianity; it’s a parasitic form of nationalism that infects Christianity, eats it from the inside, and creates a zombie nationalism that wears a Christian skinsuit.” Can James Talarico force it to expose itself?
⋙⋙ TheBulwark: James Talarico and Woke Jesus https://tinyurl.com/yj2dhevw Maybe we can force “Christian nationalism” to reveal its true self.

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en ❗Russia is giving Iran information to attack US forces in the Middle East – Washington Post, citing three officials. [WaPo link:] https://tinyurl.com/5674c8bf
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/2029878993575440720?s=20

Since Saturday, Russia has provided Iran with locations of America’s military assets, including warships and aircraft, sources told WP.

According to experts, the Iranian strikes against US forces confirm this information. Iran targets command and control infrastructure, radars and other objects. These are rather precise and targeted hits that are able to get through air defense.

Iran doesn’t have enough military-grade satellites for such intelligence, which also indirectly confirms Russia’s help.

NYT, Lydia Polgreen: Trump’s Fantasy Is Crashing Down https://tinyurl.com/yc3bu4xs “Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029912067969368342?s=20/photo/1

This thoughtlessness is part of a pattern. For one thing, the Trump administration has given no plausible explanation for the war, offering instead confused and contradictory justifications. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that America was effectively bounced into it by the prospect of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran. Trump soon weighed in, claiming that he was actually the one who pressured Israel into the venture. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, perhaps offered the closest thing to the truth. “The president had a feeling,” she told reporters on Wednesday, “that Iran was going to strike the United States.”

⭕ 5 Mar 2026

TheEconomist (Mar 5): An AI disaster is getting ever closer https://tinyurl.com/yvcw2dup “Anthropic fought to retain legal safeguards to prevent the use of its models in mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons”
// The spat between America’s government and Anthropic intensifies an alarming trend

🐣 RT @amyklobuchar Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, the constitutional rights of people across our state were violated and two Minnesotans were killed. Alex Pretti and Renee Good should be alive today. …
Secretary Noem’s overdue removal from the Department of Homeland Security is a step toward accountability, but it is only the beginning.

🐣 RT @mikepompeo It’s no coincidence that Ukraine has been under assault from Iranian drones for years. ¤ This is bigger than just the Iranian regime. We are on the precipice of delivering a serious blow to the interconnected authoritarian axis of Russia, China and Iran.

🐣 RT @TheMaineWonk “The American failure to adopt lessons from the war in Ukraine extends across administrations and political parties when it comes to both producing attack drones and developing the means to protect U.S. forces and assets from such attacks. Both tasks have taken on new urgency as the U.S. military confronts enemy drones on the battlefield”
⋙ TheAtlantic: The Glaring Oversight in the U.S. War Plan: Iran’s Drones https://tinyurl.com/39fbdxs3 “Ukraine’s engineers have developed a variety of ways to shoot down the drones, such as lasers and AI-enabled interceptor drones, some of which cost as little as $1,000.”
// The Pentagon failed to adopt Ukraine’s best tools for downing drones.

The United States and Israel took at least a month to prepare their attack on Iran, assembling the largest arsenal of aircraft carriers and fighter jets that the Middle East has seen in decades. But one gap in their planning became clear during the first days of the war, as the United States and its allies used their most advanced anti-aircraft systems to shoot down swarms of cheap, easily replaceable Iranian drones.

The flaws in that approach have seemed particularly obvious to the leaders of Ukraine, who have more experience countering these drones than any other country. In the fall of 2022, Iran sold the Kremlin designs for a drone known as the Shahed-136, and Russia has since produced and launched tens of thousands of them in its war with Ukraine.

“Iranian attack drones are the same ‘shaheds’ that have been striking our cities, villages, and our Ukrainian infrastructure throughout this war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement yesterday. The country’s engineers have developed a variety of ways to shoot down the drones, such as lasers and AI-enabled interceptor drones, some of which cost as little as $1,000. Their overall success rate against Shaheds stands at about 90 percent, according to Ukrainian-government estimates. “It’s our innovation,” Oleksandr Kamyshin, an adviser to Zelensky on arms production, told us this week. “And I think it would be very useful for our partners right now in the Middle East.” …

Ukraine’s anti-drone innovations have been born, in part, from necessity. The nation has struggled to secure supplies of Patriot missiles from its Western allies. The maker of the Patriot system, Lockheed Martin, produced 620 interceptors last year and has plans to increase annual production to 2,000 over the next few years. But this still would not be enough to replenish U.S. and allied stockpiles anytime soon. Fears are already circulating at the Pentagon that the U.S. will soon burn through its arsenal of advanced air-defense systems, given the intensity of the air war in the Middle East.

Whether those fears are realized could depend on how long the war lasts. But the U.S. failure to deploy cheap and effective weapons against Iranian drones already looks like poor planning at best, and hubris at worst.

🐣 RT @SenatorWicker The modern battlefield is dominated by drones, and no country knows that better than Ukraine. I applaud President Zelensky for offering his nation’s hard-won counter-drone expertise to our friends in the Middle East.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I held a meeting on the situation in the Middle East and the Gulf region – the challenges for Ukraine and our partners, as well as our capacity to help protect lives, prevent the war from expanding, and stabilize global markets. […]
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2029255372687474751?s=20

TheEconomist: The AI danger gets real https://tinyurl.com/mrx7sztv “The squabble between America’s government and Anthropic makes an AI disaster more likely”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029593811903553798?s=20/photo/1

With a normal government and a normal technology, the dispute would surely have been quickly sorted out. But this is not a normal government, and ai is not a normal technology. Our briefing this week explains how both [Anthropic CEO] Amodei’s fears reflect wider concerns about the dangers it poses. As with enhanced government surveillance, one set of worries is that ai is too powerful. … The other set of worries, as with autonomous weapons, is that the models could stop heeding human instructions.

🐣 📊 RT @jeffreytucker […]

Grenada Invasion (1983): 55–63% approval
Panama Invasion (1989): 80% approval.
Gulf War (1991): 80–90% approval.
Afghanistan Invasion (2001): 80–90%+ approval.
Iraq War (2003): 70–72% approval.
War on Iran (2026): 27–41% approval.

🐣 RT @TVPWorld_com A rare earth deposit in Norway is about 80% larger than initially estimated, making it one of the biggest in the world, according to a new report from the Norwegian Geological Survey. ¤ The discovery could radically transform Europe’s supply chains and significantly reduce its dependence on China, which provides up to 98% of key rare-earth metals imported by the EU.

⭕ 4 Mar 2026

WSJ: Judge Orders Government to Begin Refunding More Than $130 Billion in Tariffs https://tinyurl.com/yevfka2h “More than 2,000 lawsuits have been filed by companies in the court seeking to recoup their money after Supreme Court invalidated tariffs last month”

TheAtlantic, Adam Serwer: The American King Goes to War https://tinyurl.com/598xhsea “America has been at war for nearly a week, but the president who started the war can’t explain why.”
// This is not what the Founders intended.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029579927754838237?s=20/photo/1

Either Iran’s nuclear program needed to be destroyed because Iran was “probably a week away” from having the material for a bomb, according to the Trump adviser Steve Witkoff, or Iran was “not enriching” uranium, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or maybe Iran was threatening the United States and its allies bases in the region, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. One adviser told CNN that there was “evidence” Iran was preparing to strike U.S. forces in the Middle East, but Rubio later said Iran was an“imminent threat” because it would respond if attacked by Israel, which is not what “imminent threat” means. The U.S. is going to war to force regime change in Iran, or maybe it isn’t—it depends who you ask and when. The operation will be short—or maybe it won’t be.

🐣 RT @clashreport NEW: The Pentagon and some Gulf countries are considering buying Ukrainian interceptor drones to defend against Iranian Shahed drones. Source: FT: https://ft.trib.al/JlIcROm

Ukraine developed cheap, mass-produced interceptor drones costing a few thousand dollars, far cheaper than Patriot missiles (~$13.5m each) currently used to shoot down Shaheds (~$30k each).

Because Iran may have tens of thousands of Shahed drones, countries want a cheaper defense method.

Ukraine’s technology has become highly sought after due to its experience countering Russian drone attacks.

TheEconomist: In times of chaos, Europe is the muddled power the world needs https://tinyurl.com/3x4e5uyt “In praise of the dreaded European working group”

NYT, David Wallace-Wells: Data Centers Are a Distraction. The Real Fight Is Elsewhere. https://tinyurl.com/362mw8d8 //➔ Who’s in charge of A.I.? — Or is it already too late to ask?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029442488662962321?s=20/photo/1

Last week, as New Scientist reported that leading A.I. models kept recommending nuclear strikes during war-game exercises, the Department of War tried to strong-arm Anthropic, its leading A.I. vendor, into backing down from its demand that its tools not be used for domestic surveillance or totally autonomous warfare.
v
The major A.I. companies quickly grew so large and so important to the near future of the American economy that they began to seem not only too big to fail but perhaps so big that the government was scared to interfere with them.

A.I. arrives in that landscape like an all-encompassing symbol of people’s powerlessness, which is already here but is bound to grow worse, heralding a vision of the future in which much of the ordering of society has been handed over to robots operating in black boxes controlled by a small number of immensely wealthy people.

↥ ↧
💙 Hyperdimensional Dean Ball (Mar 2): Clawed: On Anthropic and the Department of War https://tinyurl.com/ycx56tnt

… The deal, first negotiated between the Biden team and Anthropic—and it is worth noting here that several of the core architects of Biden’s AI policy joined Anthropic immediately after Biden’s term ended—included two usage restrictions. First, Claude could not be used for mass surveillance on Americans. Second, Claude could not be used to control lethal autonomous weapons, which are weapons that can identify, track, and kill targets with no human in the loop at any point in the process. When it negotiated the expanded deal, the Trump Administration had the opportunity to review these terms. It did, and it accepted them.

Trump officials claim to have changed their mind not so much because they want to do mass surveillance on Americans or use autonomous lethal weapons imminently, but because they object altogether to the notion of privately imposed limitations on the military’s use of technology. The Administration’s change of heart on the terms of this deal have caused them to commit to a policy decision intended to harm or even destroy Anthropic, one of the fastest-growing firms in the history of capitalism, and arguably the current world leader in AI, an industry the Administration claims to believe is crucial to our country’s future. But we’ll get to that in due time.

The Trump Administration has a point: it does not sound right that private corporations can impose limitations on the military’s use of technology. Yet of course, thousands of private corporations do just that. …

… Governance has become more and more informal and ad hoc, power more dependent on the executive (whose incentive is to jam every goal he has through his existing power in as little time as possible, since he only has the length of his term guaranteed to him), and the policy vehicles in question more and more unsuited to the circumstances of their deployment, or the objectives they are being deployed to accomplish.

… Add to this the reality that the Trump Administration perceives Anthropic to be its political enemy (they are probably right about this), and you have a situation in which the military suddenly realizes it is building reliance upon a firm it does not trust. …

With each passing presidential administration, American policymaking becomes yet more unpredictable, thuggish, arbitrary, and capricious—a gradual descent into madness. It is hard to know at what point ordered liberty itself simply evaporates and we fall into the purely tribal world.

Even if Secretary Hegseth backs down and narrows his extremely broad threat against Anthropic, great damage has been done. Even in the narrowest supply-chain risk designation, the government has still said that they will treat you like a foreign adversary—indeed, they will treat you in some ways worse than a foreign adversary—simply for refusing to capitulate to their terms of business. Simply for having different ideas, expressing those ideas in speech, and actualizing that speech in decisions about how to deploy and not deploy one’s property. Each of these things is fundamental to our republic, and each was assaulted—not anything like for the first time but nonetheless in novel ways—by the Department of War last week. Most corporations, political actors, and others will have to operate under the assumption that the logic of the tribe will now reign. …

Each of us gets to choose which futures we wish to fight against, which we can live with, and which we will fight for. As you make your choices, I suggest ignoring the din of the death rattle and trying to think with independence. Do not process this with the partisan blinders of 20th century mass politics; one way or another, you are entering a new era of institution building in living color.

Before you get to all that, though, take a moment to mourn the republic that was.

🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs The United States is now a predatory hegemon—a dominant great power that “views all bilateral relations as inherently zero-sum and seeks to extract the greatest possible benefits from each one,” writes Stephen Walt. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/4cb8ewu5

🐣 RT @Tendar 4 years of war against the Russian aggressors including the invaluable experience as well as technology Ukraine has accumulated, and it is now the nations of the world in dire situation which ask Ukraine for help. The best part, Ukraine gives them the help.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Tendar/status/2029334007914074395?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @amjadt25 Around 40 Iranian Shahed-136 drones targeted the UAE. Ukraine, experienced in stopping them, has offered support, sharing technology that disrupts their navigation systems with up to 90% success. A million thanks to Ukraine. 🇺🇦 @Abdulkhaleq_UAE

🐣 RT @ReallyAmerican1 BREAKING: Rep. Joe Neguse said a $143 million no-bid contract connected to Kristi Noem was suspiciously awarded to a company with no identified headquarters or website, raising oversight concerns.
💽 https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2029301585138925841?s=20/photo/1

⭕ 3 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @brhodes This is the right message from @ChrisMurphyCT,- it’s wrong to act as if things are normal and its business as usual.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT Here’s what I believe: no more business as usual in the Senate. We shouldn’t be voting to proceed to normal legislation until Republicans schedule a debate and a vote and on a declaration of war against Iran. Let’s see if Trump has the votes to authorize war. I bet he doesn’t.
💽 https://x.com/brhodes/status/2029034446104707099?s=20/photo/1

NYT: You Break It, You Own It? Not for Trump When It Comes to Iran. https://tinyurl.com/yc6yzh7d “‘We’ll see what happens with the people,’ President Trump said as he appeared to be distancing himself from the longer-term consequences of the war in Iran.”

WSJ: The nightmare Iran energy scenario is becoming reality https://tinyurl.com/3vuzc33r “A longer war means a harsher global economic fallout” //➔ Trump’s ‘make it up as you go’ interventionism has a downside?

TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Has Given America a Constitutional Dilemma https://tinyurl.com/2ctmy9tj “Congress should not have to argue over whether to trigger the War Powers Resolution, and certainly not in the midst of conflict.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029015651658903747?s=20/photo/1

Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives. His launching of hostilities (with the embarrassingly bro-themed name “Operation Epic Fury”) is the culmination of decades of expanding presidential powers over national-security issues, and Trump has now taken that expansion to its extreme conclusion, launching wars and using military power as he sees fit.

Military[.]com: Commanders Accused of Framing Iran War as Biblical Mandate’ https://tinyurl.com/2x4z4kce “An organization that has been fighting against religious extremism in the US military … has reported more than 200 new complaints since the initial strikes against Iran”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029011153200787957?s=20/photo/1

“He urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ,” the NCO wrote in the email. “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’”

WSJ: US Strikes on Iran Reflect a Go-It-Alone Approach to the World https://tinyurl.com/ykjb6ddn “The US used to try to get buy-in from allies for military strikes. It no longer seems to care much.” ~ “Previous administrations … went to great lengths to get support from allies”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2029006057809363054?s=20/photo/1
// full (below): “said Rachel Ellehuus, who has served as a top U.S. Department of Defense official and a U.S. Secretary of Defense representative to NATO and is now head of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.

“The Europeans were perceived to have high respect for international law and a strong moral compass, so it was like getting the international stamp of approval. So we actually cared for that legitimacy,” Rachel Ellehuus [head of the London Royal United Services Institute think tank] said. The Trump administration appears to view that support, either moral or material, as unnecessary, she added. 

But across much of Europe, there is broader skepticism that the military campaign complies with international law. Few European governments appear convinced by the Trump administration’s statements that Iran presented an “imminent threat” to the U.S. and Israel.

This time, presented with a fait accompli, European leaders were left rushing for a message, assuring the world, and their voters, they weren’t involved in the attacks, while condemning Iran’s intransigence over its nuclear program, support of terror and its indiscriminate response to the attack. …

But across much of Europe, there is broader skepticism that the military campaign complies with international law. Few European governments appear convinced by the Trump administration’s statements that Iran presented an “imminent threat” to the U.S. and Israel. Europeans also worry the campaign could destabilize Iran, a country of some 90 million that sits alongside the world’s most important route for oil supplies. …

🐣 RT @ZardSi 🚨🇮🇷 BREAKING Iran has elected Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader of Iran.
He says his first priority will be to take revenge on those behind his father’s killing, and his second priority will be to free Palestine and end Israel.

🐣 Who are the Kurds?
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2028968408071459135?s=20/photo/
⋙ 🐣 RT @NatashaBertrand NEW: The CIA has been working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN. https://tinyurl.com/5n97bz5j Iranian Kurdish opposition forces are expected to take part in a ground operation in Western Iran in the coming days and they expect US and Israeli support, a senior Iranian Kurdish official told CNN.

NYT, Peter Beinart: No Empire. No Kings. https://tinyurl.com/3mu44yp2 “Trump’s foreign policy vision is imperialism. … No other president in modern history has so brazenly showcased the connection between lawlessness abroad and lawlessness at home, as has Mr. Trump”

🐣 RT @BillKristol The obvious comparison: Both Bushes went to Congress for authorization for war. Then, in both 1991 and 2003, when (and if) they did so depended on diplomacy, military factors, etc. The commander-in-chief controls timing–after Congress has authorized the option of going to war.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @BillKristol Incoherent walk back by Rubio, after he said yesterday the threat was imminent so no time to go to Congress. But to the degree Rubio is now saying, no, the president all along intended a major assault on Iran, there’s no excuse for not having gone to Congress for authorization.

🐣 RT @atrupar Marco Rubio: “You’re about to see — we’re gonna unleash on these people over the next few hours and days. You’re gonna really begin to perceive a change in the scope and in the intensity of these attacks as the two most powerful air forces in the world take apart this terroristic regime.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2028929612856594499?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 so, it’s about projecting power

🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Rubio screwed up Sunday by saying the quiet part out loud. Then shit hit the fan – especially with MAGA. It caused problems for Netanyahu. Now he’s trying to say that what he said he didn’t really say. It’s on video. He said what he said. Now he’s lying.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Raju: You said we knew there was going to be an Israeli action that would precipitate an attack on US forces. ¤ Rubio: You guys can misrepresent it…
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @LambFaceDeclan It’s not misrepresentation when you literally said it less than 24 hours ago
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn [Mar 2] Rubio: I’ve been asked: why now? One reason why is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. ¤ If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties ¤ We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces..
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2028573242173366282?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute “War demands clarity of purpose and constitutional legitimacy. Americans deserve both. They deserve representatives in Congress who will jealously maintain their solemn warmaking prerogative and take seriously their duty to check the presidency,” says Cato foreign policy expert @brandan_buck
[TextLink:] https://x.com/CatoInstitute/status/2028863608600330339?s=20/photo/1

“US officials have offered shifting and contradictory explanations of the Iran war’s purpose, objectives, and duration. ¤ Americans deserve better than this obscurantism.”
– Brandan P. Buck, Research Fellow, Foreign Policy

NVU: Ukraine’s drone defense offers blueprint for US Gulf allies https://tinyurl.com/5x83evtb “US allies and partners in the Middle East should draw on Ukraine’s years of experience defending against massive missile and drone attacks, which include Iranian Shahed drones”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2028866476950564892?s=20/photo/1
// cont. the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported on March 2.”
// chart via UA24

⭕ 2 Mar 2026

🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT I want to walk you through why it’s nearly certain Trump’s Iran War is going to be a massive, deadly, trillion dollar failure. And why you should be furious he’s set us on this path.
💽 https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/2028625918059598165?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @HamidRezaAz A Day 3 recap of the war (with focus on Iranian strategic narrative):
¤ https://x.com/HamidRezaAz/status/2028623375757873309?s=20

🔹CENTCOM confirms that U.S. strikes on Iranian missile bases used B-1 bombers. The U.S. is trying to dismantle Iran’s fortified underground missile facilities.

🔹Iranian reports suggest Tehran has rejected multiple mediation attempts. Tehran’s apparent assessment is that it can sustain high-intensity conflict for 60-90 days, making early ceasefire acceptance strategically disadvantageous.

🔹Ali Larijani explicitly framed the war as a contest of endurance, stating Iran – unlike the United States – is prepared for a prolonged conflict. The objective appears to be altering Washington’s cost-benefit calculations over time.

🔹Iranian strategic discourse increasingly describes the conflict as a “war without rules” or a “game without red lines,” signaling deliberate unpredictability intended to reshape deterrence dynamics after leadership decapitation failed to halt Iran’s response. […]

🔹 Overall, Day 3 shows the war evolving into simultaneous military, economic, psychological, and regional escalation far beyond bilateral confrontation.

🔹 The key question now is whether expanding proxy involvement and energy warfare will force external powers into deeper participation or instead accelerate pressure for negotiated containment.

🐣 RT @Angry_Staffer Well, we did it because of the protesters
Nukes
I mean they’re building an ICBM
We did it defensively because Iran was going to attack us
I mean Israel was gonna do it anyway so we did it too
They were gonna attack us because Israel was gonna attack them so we attacked them
⋙ 🐣 RT @McFaul Why did we go to war with Iran again?
I’ve lost the thread.

WSJ: Anthropic’s Feud With Pentagon Earns It Fans Amid the Blowback https://tinyurl.com/3d2ceehu “AI company’s app is reaching new heights of popularity after Trump ordered the government to stop using it.”

In the last few days, Anthropic’s chatbot Claude hit No. 1 in downloads on the Apple App Store, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT for the first time. On Monday, some of the company’s AI apps briefly crashed because of what it called “unprecedented demand.” Fans are literally taking to the streets to spell out their appreciation.

That’s the consolation prize for losing the entire U.S. government as a customer.

As Anthropic confronts what is likely so far the biggest crisis of its existence, the startup appears to be getting as much love from members of the tech community and casual AI users as it got rejection from the Trump administration.

“Anthropic is one of the few good guys in” Silicon Valley, Amy Siskind, a political activist and investor, wrote on X in a post that also called for deleting ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok chatbot. “The good guys deserve our support!”

Across the country, Team Anthropic and Team OpenAI are taking shape, as policymakers, defense contractors, AI startups and casual chatbot users choose sides in a feud that has opened a new chapter in the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley and jumps-started fresh debates about government overreach and the moral applications of AI. …

More than 800 employees at Google and OpenAI signed an open letter supporting Anthropic’s principles to not allow the Pentagon to use AI for autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. A separate statement from worker organizations and unions representing Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft employees urged their own employers to maintain the same red lines in any contracts with the Pentagon.

Late Monday, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the company had made additions to the language of its agreement with the Pentagon to clarify that its technology wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans and wouldn’t be used by the National Security Agency. 

In a post on X, Altman said he regretted pursuing the deal aggressively while Anthropic was in the midst of its standoff with the Pentagon. “One thing I think we did wrong: we shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday. The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.” …

IBIDEM[.]eu: Replaying the Second World War https://tinyurl.com/yt39rs3r “Soviet Parallels and Inspirations for Russian Atrocities in the Russo-Ukrainian War, 2014–25”
// Oleksa Drachewych explores how Russia’s use of WWII memory fuels its war against Ukraine. He traces parallels in rhetoric, war crimes, and ideology, linking Soviet history to present violence through propaganda, policy, and historical reinterpretation.

Oleksa Drachewych argues that Russia’s instrumentalization of its memory of WWII has played a significant role in leading Russian forces to commit similar atrocities in its war against Ukraine. This connection between Soviet actions during and after the Second World War and Russian actions in its escalation against Ukraine plays out in many ways. Parallels exist in the atrocities and war crimes committed during each war, such as in the perceived motivations of perpetrators and the potential consequences of these acts. Implicit inspirations exist where the Russian government likely draws on the Soviet past through policies undertaken by Soviet predecessors. Finally, explicit cases are evident where the Russian government has directly referenced Soviet actions during and after the Second World War, connecting them to its actions against Ukraine. To make his argument, Drachewych explores a variety of categories: the rhetoric of denazification and related propaganda, sexual violence, mass murder and torture, the forcible deportation of people and theft of goods, and the weaponization of food. Russia’s instrumentalization of the history of the Second World War is more than propaganda, leading to violent consequences. The history takes on new meaning in Ukrainian memory politics as Ukrainians reinterpret these events, too. Intersecting history, political science, memory studies, and genocide studies, Replaying the Second World War details the many possible connections, while also highlighting limitations, in comparing the Soviet past to the Russian present, in order to provide answers as to why Russian forces have committed extensive atrocities against Ukrainians and why the Russian government has instituted some of the policies that it has during this war.

🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT Today’s explanation for the Iran War (they shift by the minute) is that Israel was going to attack and so we had to as well. We were “forced” into war by Netanyahu. ¤ That’s the definition of weakness – being suckered into a war of choice that no American wants.
💽 https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/2028665354881286643?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SykesCharlie FFS
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Marco Rubio: “We went proactively in a defensive way”
💽 https://x.com/SykesCharlie/status/2028628936544960823?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @maria_drutska Zelensky offered to send Ukraine’s best experts in shooting down Iranian drones to the Middle East if leaders there convince Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Russia’s war on Ukraine, – Bloomberg

🐣 RT @RepThomasMassie The administration admits 🇮🇱 dragged us into the 🇮🇷 war that’s already cost too many American lives and billions of dollars. Before it’s over, the price of gas, groceries, and virtually everything else is going to go up. The only winners in 🇺🇸 are defense company shareholders.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MattWalshBlog So he’s flat out telling us that we’re in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand. This is basically the worst possible thing he could have said.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RapidResponse47 @SecRubio: “The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
💽 https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2028576202420535469?s=20/photo/1

⭕ 1 Mar 2026

WSJ: Ukraine Depended on Western Weaponry. Now That Script Has Flipped. https://tinyurl.com/42z76dfm “Kyiv’s European allies are snapping up its military know-how as they seek to build up their own defenses”

🐣 RT @MarcusMStanley A truly remarkable editorial by Tim Kaine. Remarkable because it includes the full story of U.S.-Iran relations, e.g. US support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war that killed a half million Iranians. U.S. discourse almost never includes the perspective of the enemy.
⋙ WSJ, Tim Kaine: An Unwise and Unconstitutional Attack on Iran https://tinyurl.com/nhjyxrrm “More war isn’t the answer. If it were, the past 70 years would have produced a better outcome than what we see today.

The news that the U.S. has joined Israel in starting an offensive war against Iran while in the midst of diplomatic negotiations is tragic. As a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, with access to ample classified information about threats from Iran and others, I can state plainly that there was no imminent threat from Iran to America sufficient to warrant committing our sons and daughters to another war in the Middle East—especially without the congressional debate and vote that the Constitution requires. The American people don’t want to be dragged into another forever war under false pretenses. That’s why I’ll insist that all senators vote on my bipartisan resolution to stop U.S. hostilities against Iran as soon as possible.…
v
Our troops deserve better than to be sent into war by a president who promised to end wars. Iranian citizens deserve better than their mistreatment by their own regime and the death of civilians, including schoolchildren, at the hands of U.S. and Israeli aerial bombardment. The world deserves better than a clear message by the Trump administration that might makes right—that neither domestic nor international law matters, diplomacy should be pushed aside, and war should be the preferred means for solving disputes between nations.

Dictators around the world will draw a powerful message from Mr. Trump’s actions: that they can proceed against weaker nations as they please, and America no longer has the credibility to assert important principles of sovereignty, diplomacy or human rights. If we can wage an illegal and unnecessary war to invade another nation’s sovereignty, why shouldn’t any nation feel free to follow our ill-conceived example? …

… I pray that my congressional colleagues find the backbone to stand up to a warmongering president who has used our military to attack targets in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean without congressional approval while threatening additional military action in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Greenland and God knows where else. How long will the Article I branch of America’s government remain silent against this wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order?

WaPo: Push from Saudis, Israel helped move Trump to attack Iran https://tinyurl.com/yc49tc8f “U.S. intelligence assessments saw no imminent threat, but regional allies argued now was the time to strike.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2028259194936144261?s=20/photo/1

The attack came despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran’s forces were unlikely to pose an immediate threat to the U.S. mainland within the next decade. Saturday’s attack on Iran was a break from decades of U.S. decision-making to hold back from a full-scale effort to depose the regime of a country of more than 90 million people. It also marked a stark shift from Trump’s own previous military forays, which until now have been far narrower in scope.

🐣 RT @clement_molin Russia 🇷🇺 since it invaded Ukraine 🇺🇦 in 2022
¤ https://x.com/clement_molin/status/2028200046987300967?s=20

🔹 Failed to take Kyiv or any regional capital
🔹 Lost 1 million soldiers (WIA/KIA/MIA…)
🔹 Lost another 1 million that fled the mobilisation
🔹 Border with NATO doubled (Finland + Sweden)
🔹 Closure of European Market to Russia (1st one)
🔹 Lost Bashar al Assad in Syria
🔹 Lost Khamenei in Iran
🔹 Lost Maduro in Venezuela
🔹 Made new allies in Africa (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso), had to send troops to avoid them collapsing
🔹 Excluded from Olympics, FIFA, UEFA, European Council and many international organisations
🔹 Lost Armenia and Azerbaijan which turned more west
🔹 Sells off its oil to India or China (cheaper)
🔹 War lasted 4 years (longer than the great patriotic war)
🔹 Got the smallest territory gain in Ukraine in february 2026 since 2 years
🔹 Forced to ask Iran and North Korea for munitions, drones and men to fight the war
🔹 Even Serbia turned their back
🔹 US and Israel doing what they want in the Middle East
… Yeah, this was truly a mastermind from Russia ..

⭕ 28 Feb 2026

🐣 RT @ @justanotherlaw OpenAI has released the language in their contract with the DoW, and it’s exactly as Anthropic was claiming: “legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will”.
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/justanotherlaw/status/2027855993921802484?s=20/photo/1

Note: the first paragraph doesn’t say “no autonomous weapons”! It says “AI can’t control autonomous weapons as long as existing law (that doesn’t exist) or the DoD says so.”

Similarly, the mass surveillance use cases will “comply with existing law”, but many forms of data collection that we’d consider “mass surveillance” are things that the NSA has consistently argued are legal under current law

[Text:] 2. Our contract. Here is the relevant language:
The Department of War may use the Al System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The Al System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of Al in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment.

For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The Al System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

🐣 RT @AJEnglish BREAKING: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed and his body has been found, reports Reuters, citing Israeli media reports.

🐣 RT @McFaul George H.W. Bush had UN support and Congressional support for his war against Iraq.
Clinton had NATO support for his war against Serbia.
George W. Bush had UN support and Congressional support for his war against Afghanistan. Allies and partners joined.
Obama had UN support for his war against Libya. Allies and partners joined.
So far, Trump has Israel’s support. Thats it.

🐣 📊 RT @DarrigoMelanie Only 27% of Americans support attacking Iran. Not only is attacking Iran illegal, it’s also unpopular.
◕ https://x.com/DarrigoMelanie/status/2027783269803004019?s=20/photo/1
// Economist/YouGov poll (2/20-23/2026)

🐣 Trump: “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted “Death to America” and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.”
Bibi: “For 47 years, the Ayatollahs’ regime has chanted ’Death to Israel,’ ’Death to America.’ It has spilled our blood, murdered many Americans, and massacred its own people.”
[translated from Hebrew]

NYT Editorial: Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless https://tinyurl.com/yw2z8wmm “Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2027805794087915770?s=20/photo/1

In his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would end wars, not start them. Over the past year, he has instead ordered military strikes in seven nations. …

Now he has ordered a new attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran, in cooperation with Israel, and Mr. Trump said it would be much more extensive than the targeted bombing of nuclear facilities in June. Yet he started this war without explaining to the American people and the world why he was doing so. Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He instead posted a video at 2:30 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, shortly after bombing began, in which he said that Iran presented “imminent threats” and called for the overthrow of its government. His rationale is dubious, and making his case by video in the middle of the night is unacceptable.

Among his justifications is the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program, which is a worthy goal. But Mr. Trump declared that program “obliterated” by the strike in June, a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack. The contradiction underscores how little regard he has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.

Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare. …
v
A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.

Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.
^
He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims. When his appointees make outrageous mistakes — such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing advanced details of a military attack on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group, on an unsecured group chat — Mr. Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things, disguising a military plane as a civilian plane and shooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack. …

He should have had the courage to say so in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, among other settings. When a president asks American troops and diplomats to risk their lives, he should not be coy about it. …

Mr. Trump’s failure to articulate a strategy for this attack has created shocking levels of uncertainty about it. He has called for regime change and offered no sense of why the world should expect this campaign to end better than the 21st-century attempts at regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars toppled governments but understandably soured the American public on open-ended military operations of uncertain national interest, and they embittered the troops who loyally served in them.

🐣 RT @AIPAC .@POTUS @realDonaldTrump: “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted “Death to America” and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.”
⋙ 🐣 Bibi: “For 47 years, the Ayatollahs’ regime has chanted ’Death to Israel,’ ’Death to America.’ It has spilled our blood, murdered many Americans, and massacred its own people.”
So, who’s writing the script?

🐣 RT @@atrupar. The president sounds addled here
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2027658401703202860?s=20/photo/1
// Trump full announcement (8 mins)

🐣 RT @netanyahu בנימין נתניהו [Translated from Hebrew] My brothers and sisters, citizens of Israel, just an hour ago, Israel and the United States embarked on an operation to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran.

I thank our great friend, President Donald Trump, for his historic leadership.

For 47 years, the Ayatollahs’ regime has chanted “Death to Israel,” “Death to America.” It has spilled our blood, murdered many Americans, and massacred its own people.

This murderous terrorist regime must not be allowed to arm itself with nuclear weapons that would enable it to threaten all of humanity.

Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands.

The time has come for all parts of the Iranian people—the Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Baloch, and Ahwazis—to cast off the yoke of tyranny and bring freedom and peace-loving values to Iran.

I call on you, citizens of Israel, to heed the instructions of the Home Front Command. In the coming days, during Operation “Lion’s Roar,” we will all be called upon to show patience and strength of spirit.

Together we will stand, together we will fight, and together we will ensure the eternity of Israel.

🐣 RT @brhodes There is no legal basis for this war. There is no imminent threat that demands this war. There is no stated objective for this war.

🐣 RT @WeTheBrandon This is going to be the most disastrous conflict the US has EVER engaged in. We are going to lose a carrier. We are going to lose countless planes. We are going to lose airbases (at least for a period of time) to Iranian missiles, drones, and hypersonic weapons. And Israel is going to collapse from the economic fallout. And Trump isn’t listening. Because he’s a f__king madman. https://x.com/SprinterPress//SprinterPress/status/2027448504965321165
⋙ 🐣 RT @SprinterPress [Feb 27] The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff was dismissed after warning Trump about the consequences of an attack on Iran. ¤ According to Reuters, after the warning from the head of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Fred Kacher, to Trump about an attack on Iran leaked to the media, he was dismissed from his position, having served in it for just 3 months.

🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko Frankly, I don’t see how the Ayatollah regime could be toppled, even through the most extensive and devastating bombing campaign, without boots on the ground and a full-scale occupation of a vast country of 90 million people.¤ Especially after Trump allowed the regime to drown a widespread popular uprising in blood, squandering its momentum with empty promises that “help is coming.”

🐣 RT @KitMaherCNN President Trump says in video address: “The Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties – that often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom This address, by a ranting president in a golf hat, is a hot stew of various rationales. He admits that there will be casualties, makes some noises about preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons, and then encourages the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime.
⋙ 🐣 Several weeks ago Trump said “Help is on the way.” They rose up. Tens of thousands were massacred, likely the bravest. Help wasn’t on the way. ¤ He ghosted the shah-apparent. ¤ No declaration from Congress. Wants it to be HIS show. ¤ Can’t be trusted.

🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: U.S. and Israel Conduct Strikes on Iran https://tinyurl.com/pb7p324c Large explosions were reported in Tehran, according to several residents, and air-raid sirens rang across Israel.

⭕ 27 Feb 2026

TheAtlantic, Matteo Wong: What Happens to Anthropic Now? https://tinyurl.com/3rhunnp4 “The Trump administration is severing all ties with the ‘woke’ AI firm.” //➔ The fallout from Trump’s latest hissy fit could cost the United States its edge in AI

WSJ Editorial: China Wins the Pentagon-Anthropic Brawl https://tinyurl.com/j8s36s6u Trump goes nuclear on the AI firm, in a needless display of brute government punishment.

🐣 RT @ns123abc 🚨 BREAKING: OPENAI SAYS THEY’LL DO THE SAME THING THAT GOT ANTHROPIC BANNED
¤ https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2027536211364221391?s=20

Sam Altman memo to OpenAI staff:
> “This is no longer just an issue between Anthropic and the Pentagon this is an issue for the whole industry and it is important to clarify our stance”
> “We have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. These are our main red lines.”
Altman on CNBC this morning:
>“I don’t personally think the Pentagon should be threatening DPA against these companies”
>“For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company”
OpenAI is next…

🐣 RT @gnoble79 In 45 years on Wall Street, I’ve never seen anything like this. ¤ Sam Altman just convinced 3 of the world’s smartest investors to fund his losses. ¤ $110 billion. But ZERO profit in sight. ¤ The largest private funding round in history. […]
¤ https://x.com/gnoble79/status/2027432577263399145?s=20

🐣 RT @mincho Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. ¤ Now Sam Altman is backing them: “For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company and I think they really do care about safety.” ¤ OpenAI and Anthropic both drawing the same line. ¤ This is a big deal.

🐣 RT @sharongoldman BREAKING: Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the Department of War to use the startup’s AI models and tools, according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed.
¤ https://tinyurl.com/mryuy7fu

The meeting came at the end of a week where a conflict between Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and OpenAI rival Anthropic burst into public acrimony, ending with the apparent end of Anthropic’s contracts with the Pentagon and with the federal government in general.

Altman said the government is willing to let OpenAI build their own “safety stack”—that is, the layered system of technical, policy, and human controls that sit between a powerful AI model and real-world use—and that if the model refuses to do a task, then the government would not force OpenAI to make it do that task.

🐣 RT @SenMarkey My statement demanding immediate congressional action to reverse DOD’s designation of Anthropic a supply chain risk.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SenMarkey/status/2027529641334849905?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @WatcherGuru JUST IN: 🇺🇸 US government officially designates AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” ¤ This is a label normally reserved for US enemies & adversaries, never applied to an American company before.

🐣 RT @neal_katyal Try.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Trump on the Supreme Court’s tariffs ruling: “Is a Rehearing or Readjudication of this case possible???”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/neal_katyal/status/2027512024172007790?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The recent Decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning TARIFFS could allow for Hundreds of Billions of Dollars to be returned to Countries and Companies that have been “ripping off” the United States of America for many years to come, and now, according to this Decision, could actually continue to do so, at an even increased level. I am sure that the Supreme Court did not have this in mind! It doesn’t make sense that Countries and Companies that took advantage of us for decades, receiving Billions and Billions of Dollars that they should not have been allowed to receive, would now be entitled to an undeserved “windfall,” the likes of which the World has never seen before, as a result of this highly disappointing, to say the least, ruling. Is a Rehearing or Readjudication of this case possible??? PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

WSJ: Government Agencies Raise Alarm About Use of Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot https://tinyurl.com/2zykycsj Warnings about xAI’s safety and reliability preceded Pentagon decision to approve Grok for use in classified settings.

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson It’s worse than expected, and that’s saying a lot.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ DemocracyDocket 🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Democracy Docket has obtained a draft of the executive order being circulated with the White House that would allow Trump to take unprecedented control over voting. ¤ Legal experts called the order blatantly unconstitutional. Read the full, 17-page order below👇 https://bit.ly/4l0gmXp
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DemocracyDocket/status/2027470158516605041?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @krassenstein WELCOME TO THE AUTHORITARIAN STATES OF AMERICA. ¤ I am signing up to Anthropic’s premium service. ¤ Please support Anthropic.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2027499637427372509?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.

The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to
STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.

Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

WE will decide the fate of our Country – NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left Al company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

🔰 TimothySnyder: What is the state of Trump? He is failing at fascism. https://tinyurl.com/bdefxzsn “The State of the Union was full of fascist atmospherics. But it was also blowhard exhaustion.”

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute “Just as there was no emergency justifying the unilateral imposition of worldwide tariffs, there is no election emergency that permits the president to ignore Article 1, Section IV of the Constitution, which assigns election lawmaking authority to the states and Congress,” says Cato’s @stephen_richer

🐣 RT @joni_askola If you think you understand the scale of the war in Ukraine, look at Mariupol. ¤ Estimates for the three-month siege reach up to 88k killed. ¤ For context, that exceeds the reported death toll of the entire two-year war in Gaza
🖼 https://x.com/joni_askola/status/2027288030071992807?s=20/photo/1

🔆 This❗️⋙ TheAtlantic, Thomas Wright: The Real Reason Anthropic Wants Guardrails https://tinyurl.com/y6ddxmxh “Hegseth issued a blunt ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: Strip the ethical guardrails from your AI models by Friday or face the full weight of the state.”
// “This is not just an ethical dispute. It is a battle over whether to manage the national-security risks that will inevitably be associated with ever more powerful AI.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2027472639707562339?s=20/photo/1
// “Hegseth issued a blunt ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: Strip the ethical guardrails from your AI models by Friday or face the full weight of the state.”
// AI is too powerful and too new to be set free from human oversight.

On Tuesday, in a closed-door meeting, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a blunt ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: Strip the ethical guardrails from your AI models by Friday or face the full weight of the state. The terms of the threat were stark. If Anthropic does not allow the Pentagon “all lawful uses” of its Claude models, Hegseth will invoke the Defense Production Act to compel cooperation, he warned—or, even more devastatingly, designate Anthropic as a supply-chain risk. The latter would effectively blacklist Anthropic from doing business with any entity that touches the Department of Defense.

Yesterday evening, Amodei gave his answer. He rejected Hegseth’s “best and final offer,” writing,

“I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” However, he continued, “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.” He concluded that the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”

This is not just an ethical dispute. It is a battle over whether to manage the national-security risks that will inevitably be associated with ever more powerful AI. If Hegseth follows through on his ultimatum, it will weaken the U.S. military and increase the likelihood of a catastrophic accident.

Anthropic has insisted that its Claude AI model not be used for domestic surveillance or to build autonomous weapons without a human involved. The company’s statement makes clear that its only principled objection is to mass surveillance. It is not opposed to autonomous weapons per se and has already carved out exemptions for missile defense and cyberoperations. The company’s hesitation regarding autonomy is technical: Large language models are simply not yet reliable enough to operate without a human in the loop. Pushing them too far, too quickly, invites a mistake that could prove disastrous. Anthropic is asking for an exclusion on autonomous weapons not out of an ideological refusal to fight, but to allow for the research and development necessary to make such systems safe.

The truly unbridgeable divide is the one over domestic surveillance. DOD has the authority to conduct domestic surveillance in support of a civilian agency. Under an administration that invoked the Insurrection Act, or that sought to map domestic dissent, the Pentagon’s demand for “all lawful uses” of Anthropic’s models could become a skeleton key. Amodei articulated this danger in a recent interview with Ross Douthat, noting that, although it isn’t illegal to record conversations in public spaces, the sheer scale of AI changes the nature of the act. As Amodei put it, AI could transcribe speech and correlate it in a way that would not only identify one member of the opposition but “make a map of all 100 million. And so, are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment [protects against surveillance without a warrant] by the technology finding technical ways around it?”

The Pentagon’s logic relies on a traditional procurement analogy: Lockheed Martin does not tell the Air Force how to fly the F-35s it makes, so why should Anthropic tell the military how to use Claude? A democratically elected government should be free to make those choices. This sounds reasonable on its face but does not account for the uniqueness of AI. Unlike nuclear energy and the internet, both of which were born in government labs, AI was conceived and honed entirely within the private sector. It is a general-purpose technology with the potential to upend the global balance of power.

These circumstances obligate AI companies to work with the government in thinking through the risks associated with their product, especially because they have a greater understanding of it than many in government. After all, if Anthropic removed all of the conditions on autonomous weapons and the models behaved in unexpected and dangerous ways, the company would certainly be held responsible.
v
AI scientists have been trying to encourage a public discussion about managing these risks. In 2023, dozens of AI leaders, including Amodei, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Kevin Scott of Microsoft issued a statement saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Earlier this year, Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI team who wrote a book on AI risks called The Coming Wave, told the BBC, “I honestly think that if you’re not a little bit afraid at the moment then you’re not paying attention.”
^
Nobody has been more outspoken about both the hazards and the potential than Amodei, who has published a series of essays over the past 18 months on the future of AI. His starting point is that an extremely powerful AI—what some people call artificial general intelligence—is near at hand. By this he means that an AI model will be as capable as a Nobel Prize winner in every field. Once made, such a model can be easily cloned millions of times. As he puts it, this would be equivalent to a country of geniuses in a data center.

In his first essay, “Machines of Loving Grace,” Amodei wrote about how this model could allow humans to advance research and development in many fields 20 times faster than would otherwise be the case. We may see a century’s worth of progress in medicine and biological sciences in five years. In this “compressed 21st century,” he believes we could plausibly secure the reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all infectious diseases, the elimination of most cancers, the prevention of Alzheimer’s, and huge progress on countering genetic diseases.

But more powerful AI also comes with risks. Amodei recently published his second essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which discusses the flip side of the coin—the ways that more powerful AI could endanger the United States and humanity in general by allowing individuals to build bioweapons or by empowering authoritarianism. He wrote it, he told a panel in Davos, “to jolt people awake.”

One of Amodei’s concerns is the possibility that the country of geniuses could turn hostile or disruptive. In a lesser-known, shorter post, “The Urgency of Interpretability,” he admitted that “we do not understand how our own AI creations work.” A flaw in regular technology is generally a programming mistake that can be fixed. But Amodei cited Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, in noting that AI systems are not so much built as grown. “You can set the high-level conditions that direct and shape growth,” Amodei wrote, “but the exact structure which emerges is unpredictable and difficult to understand or explain.” The models may evolve and behave in ways that their creators can neither anticipate nor easily observe, let alone fix.

Anthropic has conducted experiments to figure out the true nature of its AI agents. It found that some are prone to lying and will blackmail their engineers even if instructed not to. In the shorter post, Amodei wrote, “These systems will be absolutely central to the economy, technology, and national security, and will be capable of so much autonomy that I consider it basically unacceptable for humanity to be totally ignorant of how they work.” Taking the time to properly understand how these models evolve and behave would allow their operators to identify and disable the ones that run amok.

Amodei recommended that all labs develop “a true ‘MRI for AI,’” but he acknowledged that they might not have enough time, given how quickly AI is advancing. This interpretability problem gets to the core of Anthropic’s concern about autonomous weapons.

The public narrative often conflates Anthropic’s guardrails with anti-war sentiment, but this is not a sequel to the Project Maven controversy of 2018, when Google employees revolted over drone-targeting contracts. That was a story of internal dissent within a company hesitant to help the military wage war. Anthropic is a different beast entirely. It was the first AI firm to deploy its models in classified systems and has shown a willingness to integrate with the defense establishment. Anthropic’s clash with the Pentagon is not one between pacifism and militarism but a fundamental dispute over managing the risks of the most transformative technology since the splitting of the atom.

The company has real differences with the Trump administration over foreign policy. Anthropic is notably hawkish on China, favoring tougher policies toward Beijing than Trump’s accommodationist and commerce-centric approach, and more concerned by authoritarianism. The company is also more outspoken about the risks AI poses to biosecurity and the labor market. David Sacks, the administration’s AI czar, has dismissed such concerns as doomerism and accused Anthropic of running a “sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” The administration has rejected state-level regulations on AI on the grounds that some states would try to insert a “woke ideology” into AI, and that a contradictory patchwork would hold America back in the AI race against China. But it has yet to produce a federal bill to fill the void.

The leaders of AI companies acknowledge that they do not know what they are building. But they don’t want to stop. Some, like Amodei, worry that China will get there first, which would pose a greater threat. Others believe the benefits outweigh the risks. But most want more time so that society and government can properly adjust and regulate AI where needed. They worry that the speed of advancement will outstrip the world’s ability to manage the risks. Some have suggested slowing China down with export controls to buy more time, but the administration has rejected that logic.

There is now a real chance that many AI companies will think twice before working with the U.S. government and will focus on their commercial work instead. The message Hegseth is sending to Silicon Valley is that if a company partners with the Pentagon and makes a wrong turn, the administration will effectively nationalize it or designate it as a supply-chain risk and burn it down.

Axios recently reported that the Pentagon views Google’s Gemini as a potential replacement for Claude. Perhaps, but Hassabis, who oversees all of Google’s core AI research and development, has a long history of concerns about AI risks and a belief, stronger than Amodei’s, in the necessity of global governance. It’s hard to imagine him complying with Hegseth’s demands. That does leave one AI leader who is keen to fill the vacuum: Elon Musk, with his model, xAI. If Hegseth sticks to his demands, the Pentagon could become dependent on xAI as its sole supplier. This would deprive the U.S. government of most of the AI industry’s talents, give Musk enormous leverage over future administrations, and create a single point of failure, which could prove catastrophic. No company, not even Anthropic, should be the sole supplier of classified AI to the government.

Hegseth’s ultimatum rests on a simple premise: that the government, not private companies, should decide how it uses powerful technologies. In most cases, that principle is sound. But here it obscures two deeper problems. It minimizes the risks to domestic liberties, and it assumes a level of understanding that does not yet exist. The engineers building these systems acknowledge that they do not fully understand them, and that the models behave in ways that can be difficult to predict or control. Demanding unconditional access before those systems are ready is not an assertion of authority. It is a wager that the unknowns will not matter.

The danger is not that Silicon Valley will wield too much power over the military. It is that neither will fully understand the systems it is rushing to deploy—and that the consequences of that ignorance will be tested not in a laboratory, but on the world.

🐣 RT @BillClinton As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing—I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BillClinton/status/2027424128559452573?s=20/photo/1 -2

PRESIDENT CLINTON’S OPENING STATEMENT TO THE HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE
AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY | FEBRUARY 27, 2026
NOTE: ONLY THE COMMITTEE CAN CONFIRM WHAT WAS DELIVERED IN THE ROOM

Good morning. Welcome to Chappaqua.

I’m here today for two reasons. The first is that I love my country. And America was built upon the idea that no person is above the law, even Presidents-especially Presidents.
Democracy requires every person to play their part, and I hope that by being here today, we can bring ourselves a little further away from the brink and back to being a country where we can disagree with one another civilly-where the search for truth and justice outweighs the partisan urge to score points and create spectacle. I’ll do my part, and I hope you’ll do yours.
The second reason I’m here is that the girls and women whose lives Jeffrey Epstein destroyed deserve not only justice, but healing. They’ve been waiting too long for both. Though my brief acquaintance with Epstein ended years before his crimes came to light, and though I never witnessed during our limited interactions any indication of what was truly going on, I am here to offer what little I know so that it might prevent anything like this from ever happening again.
But before we start, I have to get personal. You made Hillary come in. She had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing.
She has no memory of even
meeting him. She neither traveled with him nor visited any of his properties.
Whether you subpoenaed 10 people or 10,000, including her was simply not right.
We began this hearing with me raising my hand and taking an oath to tell the truth. But everyone has a responsibility to be honest with those they represent. Whether you raised your right hand or not, each and every one of us owes nothing less than truth and accuracy to the American people.

PRESIDENT CLINTON’S OPENING STATEMENT (CONTINUED)
Now, let me say what you’re going to hear from me.
First, I had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing. No matter how many photos you show me, I have two things that at the end of the day matter more than your interpretation of those 20-year-old photos.
I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn’t see.
I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn’t do.
I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.
As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing-I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals.
But even with 20/20 hindsight, I saw nothing that ever gave me pause. We are only here because he hid it from everyone so well for so long. And by the time it came to light with his 2008 guilty plea, I had long stopped associating with him.
You’ll often hear me say that I don’t recall. That might be unsatisfying. But I’m not going to say something I’m not sure of. This was all a long time ago. And I am bound by my oath not to speculate, or to guess. This is not merely for my benefit, but because it doesn’t help you for me to play detective 24 years later.
Since 1 am under oath, I will not falsely state that I am looking forward to your questions. But I am ready to answer them to the best of my abilities, consistent with the facts as I know them: the legitimate, the logical, and even the outlandish.
With that Mr. Chairman, fire away.

⭕ 26 Feb 2026

Anthropic: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War https://tinyurl.com/3tjwmh5b

I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

Anthropic has also acted to defend America’s lead in AI, even when it is against the company’s short-term interest. We chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party (some of whom have been designated by the Department of War as Chinese Military Companies), shut down CCP-sponsored cyberattacks that attempted to abuse Claude, and have advocated for strong export controls on chips to ensure a democratic advantage.

Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:

Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.

Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.

To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.

The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.

Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.

It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.

We remain ready to continue our work to suppor the national security of the United States.

WSJ Editorial: A Vaccine Skeptic as Surgeon General https://tinyurl.com/2hztuerz “Casey Means won’t restore confidence in public-health advice.”

🐣 RT @michaeldweiss “Intercepted phone calls and messages from senior Russians ridiculing Trump have been shared by the British with the Americans. ‘We have continually shown them intelligence that shows the Russians are lying,’ a senior security source revealed. ‘The Russians are privately mocking Trump over his naivety about Putin’s intentions. Putin doesn’t want to end the war.’” [Spectstor link:] https://tinyurl.com/ynnvshyk

WSJ: In Iran Talks, U.S. Brings Tough Demands, Growing Military Presence https://tinyurl.com/yufenb8u “Talks wrap up with no deal yet and Washington and Tehran far apart on key issues”

🐣 RT @UkrReview 🇺🇦 Budanov: “Territories are the main issue. Everything else is secondary. I am sure that the Ukrainian people will reject any plans regarding our land. All occupied territories will remain temporarily occupied and will inevitably be liberated over time.”

✭ Newsweek: World’s Best Hospitals 2026 – Top 250 https://tinyurl.com/mst98h2s Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota) once again tops the list, with Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General, Johns Hopkins, Ronald Reagan/UCLA, and Brigham and Women’s also in the Top Twenty.

🐣 RT @EdKrassen BREAKING: Here is Hillary Clinton’s full opening statement before the House Oversight Committee regarding Jeffrey Epstein. ¤ It’s a scathing attack on Republicans for their cover-up.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/EdKrassen/status/2027057028036718887?s=20/photo/1 -4

SECRETARY CLINTON’S OPENING STATEMENT TO THE HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE
FEBRUARY 26, 2026

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, Members of the Committee… as a former Senator, I have respect for legislative oversight and I expect its exercise, as do the American people, to be principled and fearless in pursuit of truth and accountability.

As we all know, however, too often Congressional investigations are partisan political theater, which is an abdication of duty and an insult to the American people.

The Committee justified its subpoena to me based on its assumption that I have information regarding the investigations into the criminal activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Let me be as clear as I can. I do not.

As I stated in my sworn declaration on January 13, I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing to add to that.

Like every decent person, I have been horrified by what we have learned about their crimes.
It’s unfathomable that Mr. Epstein initially got a slap on the wrist in 2008, which allowed him to continue his predatory practices for another decade.

Mr. Chairman, your investigation is supposed to be assessing the federal government’s handling of the investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his crimes. You subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials, all of whom ran the Department of Justice or directed the FBI when Epstein’s crimes were investigated and prosecuted. Of those eight, only one appeared before the Committee. Five of the six former attorneys general were allowed to submit brief statements stating they had no information to provide.

You have held zero public hearings, refused to allow the media to attend them, including today, despite espousing the need for transparency on dozens of occasions.

You have made little effort to call the people who show up most prominently in the Epstein files. And when you did, not a single Republican Member showed up for Les Wexner’s deposition.

SECRETARY CLINTON’S OPENING STATEMENT (CONTINUED 2/4)

This institutional failure is designed to protect one political party and one public official, rather than to seek truth and justice for the victims and survivors, as well as the public who also want to get to the bottom of this matter. My heart breaks for the survivors. And I am furious on their behalf.

I have spent my life advocating for women and girls. I have worked hard to stop the terrible abuses so many women and girls face here and around the world, including human trafficking, forced labor, and sexual slavery. For too long, these have been largely invisible crimes or not treated as crimes at all. But the survivors are real and they are entitled to better.

In Southeast Asia, I met girls as young as twelve years old who were forced into prostitution and raped repeatedly. Some were dying of AIDS. In Eastern Europe, I met mothers who told me how they lost daughters to trafficking and did not know where to turn. In settings around the world, I met survivors trying to rebuild their lives and help rescue others – with little support from people in power, who too often turned a blind eye and a cold shoulder.

If you are new to this issue, let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein was a heinous individual, but he’s far from alone. This is not a one-off tabloid sensation or a political scandal.

It’s a global scourge with an unimaginable human toll.

My work combatting sex trafficking goes back to my days as First Lady. I worked to pass the first federal legislation against trafficking and was proud that my husband signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which increased support for survivors and gave prosecutors better tools for going after traffickers.

As Secretary of State, I appointed a former federal prosecutor, Lou CdeBaca, to ramp up our global antitrafficking efforts. I oversaw nearly 170 anti-trafficking programs in 70 nations and directly pressed foreign leaders to crack down on trafficking networks in their countries. Every year we published a global report to shine a light on abuses.

The findings of those reports triggered sanctions on countries failing to make progress, so they became a powerful diplomatic tool to drive concrete action.

I insisted that the United States be included in the report for the first time ever in 2011. Because we must hold ourselves not just to the same standard as the rest of the world but to an even higher one. Sex trafficking and modern slavery should have no place in America. None.

SECRETARY CLINTON’S OPENING STATEMENT (CONTINUED 3/4)

Infuriatingly, the Trump Administration gutted the Trafficking in Persons Office at the State Department, cutting more than 70 percent of the career civil and foreign service experts who worked so hard to prevent trafficking crimes. The annual trafficking report, required by law, was delayed for months. The message from the Trump Administration to the American people and the world could not be clearer: combatting human trafficking is no longer an American priority under the Trump White House.

That is a tragedy. It’s a scandal. It deserves vigorous investigation and oversight.

A committee endeavoring to stopping human trafficking would seek to understand what specific steps are needed to fix a system that allowed Epstein to get away with his crimes in 2008.

– A committee run by elected officials with a commitment to transparency would ensure the full release of all the files.
– It would ensure that the lawful redactions of those files protected the victims and survivors, not powerful men and political allies.
– It would get to the bottom of reports that DOJ withheld FBI interviews in which a survivor accuses President Trump of heinous crimes.
– It would subpoena anyone who asked on which night there would be the “wildest party” on Epstein’s island.
– It would demand testimony from prosecutors in Florida and New York about why they gave Epstein a sweetheart deal and chose not to pursue others who may have been implicated.
– It would demand that Secretary Rubio and Attorney General Bondi testify about why this administration is abandoning survivors and playing into the hands of traffickers.
– It would seek out officers on the front lines of this fight and ask them what support they need.
– It would put forth legislation to provide more resources and force this administration to act.

SECRETARY CLINTON’S OPENING STATEMENT
(CONTINUED 4/4)

But that’s not happening.

Instead, you have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers.

If this Committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes, it would not rely on press gaggles to get answers from our current president on his involvement; it would ask him directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files.

If the majority was serious, it would not waste time on fishing expeditions. There is too much that needs to be done.

What is being held back? Who is being protected? And why the cover-up?

My challenge to you, Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, is the same challenge I put to myself throughout my long service to this nation. How to be worthy of the trust the American people have given you. They expect statesmanship, not gamesmanship. Leading, not grandstanding. They expect you to use your power to get to the truth and to do more to help survivors of Epstein’s crimes as well as the millions more who are victims of sex trafficking.

⭕ 25 Feb 2026

🐣 RT @PaulaChertok “There is no better ambassador for the Enlightenment principles of life, liberty, human rights, and rule of law than President Volodymyr Zelensky… Ukraine is writing this century’s instruction manual on how to defend these European values” ¤ Lithuanian MFA shares awesome anecdote
⋙ KyivIndependent, Gabrielius Landsbergis: Ukraine is Europe. Now Europe must be defiant like Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/8dhzmfr2

🐣 RT @SenatorDurbin I put President Trump’s immigration enforcement officials on notice. ¤ After he leaves office, federal agents and officials who have broken the law during this cruel mass deportation effort can still be prosecuted and held accountable for their violations of the Constitution and federal law.

🐣 RT @TheMaineWonk ‼️Trump’s tariffs are a complete failure
¤ https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2026741633329635729?s=20

– 100K manufacturing jobs lost
– 1M + layoffs overall with revisions
– Increased prices on consumers
– Increased COGS on small biz
– Commercial bankruptcies: 15 year high.
– China: record Trade Surplus in 2025
– US agri sector on brink of collapse
– US Trade Deficit still $900B
– US GDP slows to 1.4%

🐣 RT @academic_la Israel is increasingly concerned with the emigration problem. 230,800 Israelis left from 2023-25 and the number of Israelis canceling their residency quadrupled. What makes the problem more severe for Israel is the profile of those leaving: …
¤ https://x.com/academic_la/status/2026695217655771183?s=20
// tags: emigration from Israel emigration

🐣 RT @peterbakernyt “With one manufactured moment after another, it became clear that the goal of the speech was not to unveil new policies or acknowledge the anxieties of Americans” but to create “social media-ready content” to get through political trouble. @katierogers
⋙ NYT: Trump Puts On a Show, Casting Democrats as the Villains https://tinyurl.com/3aahu2ar “On the defensive over the economy and with the midterms approaching, President Trump made clear that his political strategy is to paint Democrats as unpatriotic and ‘crazy.’”

TheAtlantic, David Frum: The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality https://tinyurl.com/2njm7rb7 “Donald Trump misused the annual presidential tradition in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question.”

President Trump’s State of the Union address last night was very like the man who delivered it: divisive, abusive, and childish.

The speech turned reality on its head in many ways. The president who has enriched himself and his family by more than a billion dollars in his first year in office called on Congress to clean up its corruption. The president who has collected about $175 billion in illegal tariffs from the American people falsely told them that he had given them a great big tax cut. The president solemnly condemned political violence—the same president who ended his first term by inciting a mob to sack Congress and overturn an election. Maybe most shocking, Trump demanded that members of Congress rise to agree that it’s the first duty of government to protect American citizens—even as his own government by its brutal police methods has shot American citizens dead on the streets and then tried to deceive the country about how those Americans had been killed and why. Then of course there were the many misstatements of fact about the economy, about crime, and about wars and peace—many of which look like deliberate decisions to deceive the public watching on television.

The most radical fantasy in the speech, though, was its claims of a new golden age of prosperity. That misstatement surely deceived nobody. Prices continue to rise; the job market stagnates. In almost every way that can be measured, Americans are communicating economic anxiety and discontent. Trump insisted that they are all wrong. It is as if the nation were being soaked by a torrential downpour, water rolling over umbrellas and into boats, soaking everyone’s clothes—and the leader whose job it is to lead them through the deluge insists that it is not raining at all, that in fact it is sunny, the sunniest day ever.

States of the Union are rituals intended to demonstrate the unity of the nation: the president addressing two houses of Congress, backed by his Cabinet, speaking to the largest audience in the regularly scheduled year. Even the nonpartisan institutions of government—the Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs of Staff—attend in robes and uniforms, adding the symbolism of their respectful neutrality. …

NYT: Judge Finds Trump Administration’s Third-Country Deportations Unlawful https://tinyurl.com/4pxumffd “The ruling repudiates a key Homeland Security Department policy of sending immigrants to countries where they have no ties. The judge paused his ruling to allow for an appeal.”

TheEconomist: Donald Trump’s unworthy state of the union https://tinyurl.com/bdhmax6x “An address not fit for America’s 250th birthday”

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian propagandist Solovyev threatens the world that Russia’s loss in Ukraine would lead to Russia destroying the world:
¤ 💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/2026565800853680281?s=20/phoyo/1

“This is a holy war, and we must win. If we don’t, there will be no world, because why do we need a world without Russia in it?” he said.

The term “holy war” was used for the “Great Patriotic War”, after the Nazis attacked USSR. Now, Russia is trying to present its war of aggression as a “holy war” for its population.

Russia doesn’t want peace

✅ 🐣 RT @factcheckdotorg FactChecking Trump’s State of the Union Address
In the first State of the Union Address of his second term, President Donald Trump proclaimed that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.” [link:] https://tinyurl.com/yjbe9zsz
¤ https://x.com/factcheckdotorg/status/2026605828594176338?s=20

✅ CNN: Fact check: Trump makes false claims about the economy, elections and crime in State of the Union https://tinyurl.com/mnc3sjdu //➔ CNN’s fact checks are comprehensive, well documented and explained clearly.

TheAtlantic, TomNichols: President Trump’s State-of-the-Union Variety Show https://tinyurl.com/422n8u7p Were you not entertained?

⭕ 24 Feb 2026

NYT, Jamelle Bouie: What Hath Trump Wrought https://tinyurl.com/4zv3tvbb //➔ This is what Trump’s State of the Union Address wanted you to forget. Don’t.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2027345365758791936?s=20/photo/1

For President Trump and his allies, the 2024 election was less a vote for a new administration than it was an enabling act for a new sovereign. The public had done more than give Trump the White House the way it might bless any candidate with presidential power. In their view, the vote was akin to regime change, the start of a new Constitution, a new covenant and a new commandment: Thou shalt have no other laws before Trump.

What followed, in the first year of the president’s second term, was an effort to subordinate the entire society to the whims of one man. He did not do this alone. Rather than defend its prerogatives as the first branch among equals, the Republican-led Congress neutralized itself as a constitutional force, deferring to Trump as he destroyed the federal bureaucracy, subverted the rule of law, targeted opponents and rivals with threats and blackmail and governed by executive decree. And, eager to implement its baroque theories of unlimited presidential power, the Republican-led Supreme Court gave sanction to Trump’s effort to remake the executive branch in his image, even when history, tradition, law and the will of the people through Congress said otherwise.

Worse, in the months before Trump won his second election, this same court freed him from fear of criminal prosecution in an extraordinary declaration of presidential immunity. The court opened the door to rampant corruption and abuse of power, and Trump walked right through it.

But as confident as the president and his boyars appeared to be in those first months, they were also in a race against the clock. The reality of the situation was that the American people — or at least, a little less than half of the people who cast ballots in November 2024 — did not vote for Trump to be an outer-borough Viktor Orban. They voted for lower prices and greater prosperity. And each moment the president spent on his ideological obsessions — from his attacks on racial integration in government to his effort to punish pro-Palestinian speech on college campuses — was one he did not spend on the promises that put him into office.

The most self-destructive of the president’s obsessions was his single-minded devotion to tariffs, which promised to undermine the economy and raise the cost of everyday life for millions of Americans. In fact, according to a recent report from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the president’s tariffs cost the average household $1,000 over the course of last year.

Then there was immigration. As many voters heard it, Trump would direct the nation’s immigration resources toward people who had committed violent crimes. The “worst of the worst,” as he likes to put it. But as he — and especially Stephen Miller, his chief domestic policy adviser — meant it, “mass deportation” was a plan to remove as many brown-skinned immigrants from the country as they could get their hands on, illegal or otherwise. If those immigrants were undocumented or had pending legal status, then the administration would target them as if they were criminals, seizing law-abiding people to send to squalid detention camps in Texas and Florida, where they would be deported to whatever country might take them. And if those immigrants had legal status — if they had done things the right way — then the administration would do everything it could to nullify that status, so that it could target them with the full force of the federal government.

To pursue its project of mass deportation, the president and his allies in Congress pumped tens of billions of dollars into both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This cash infusion — which made the agency as well funded as some of the world’s militaries — went to hiring new officers and constructing new facilities, including the conversion of vast warehouses capable of holding thousands of people in cramped conditions. It also funded operations in cities targeted by the president, if not for high rates of immigration, then for political opposition. With masked agents toting military-grade weapons as they seized people off the streets or from their homes, both ICE and the Border Patrol ceased to be law enforcement agencies and began to operate instead as state-sponsored paramilitaries, loyal to the leader and not to the rule of law.

To assist that paramilitary, the president would also turn the American military against the public with showy occupations of major cities, including the nation’s capital, which itself would be adorned with images of a glowering Trump as our dear leader — Big Brother with a spray tan. But, again, the clock was ticking. To remake the nation, Trump had to move fast. He had to consolidate a new authoritarian regime before the opposition could get its footing and before the broader public could react to the transformation.

Winston Churchill is said to have joked that “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Something along those lines seemed to take place over the course of 2025, as Americans slowly woke up to the president’s assault on their liberties.

In particular, they saw the unilateral destruction of federal agencies, the military occupations and the use of masked men to snatch and grab immigrants as the start of something dangerous, and they began to react. First with protests and then at the ballot box.

November saw large Democratic Party victories in Virginia and New Jersey — elections considered bellwethers of the public mood. Then came Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s attack on Minnesota — and the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in particular — under the pretext of immigration enforcement. And in response to this tyrannical exercise of arbitrary authority, ordinary Minnesotans organized to protect their neighbors from seizure and rendition. Two of those Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by immigration agents for their resistance. The White House thought that this might intimidate the opposition. What it did instead was enrage much of the country.

On Tuesday, Trump gave his State of the Union address. “What a difference a president makes,” he said. Trump believes he is popular, strong and successful. The truth says otherwise. Trump is as unpopular as he’s ever been. His approval in high-quality surveys from CNN, the American Research Group and Reuters hovers between 36 percent and 40 percent. His disapproval rating reaches as high as 60 percent. Even the most skilled presidents would struggle to recover from this kind of collapse. We can safely assume that, for Trump, things will only get worse.

One consequence of the president’s deterioration with the public is that it has almost certainly led other actors to offer stiffer resistance than usual. Last week, for example, the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs as unlawful, a gut punch to his domestic policy agenda. And the actions of ICE in particular have proved to be so unpopular that large majorities want the agency either changed, reformed or ended altogether.

What Trump has, a little more than one year into his second term, is a failed presidency: one that has crashed on the rocks of his ambition to supplant constitutional government with that of his own will. Yes, Trump has done a tremendous amount of damage. And yes, he has degraded American democracy to the point where it is on life support. But he’s failed to make himself a dictator, and the public is poised to punish his party for his transgressions.

Unfortunately, that will be the easy part. It’s what comes after that that will test our ability to make the union whole again.

WSJ, Jason Riley: The GOP’s Last Chance to Shed the Tariff Albatross https://tinyurl.com/3w845rz9 Import duties are driving up prices, voters worry about affordability, and November is approaching.

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down President Trump’s sweeping taxes on imports was the best thing that could have happened to Republicans in an election year when they will need all the help they can get. How long will it take the GOP to realize that?

The court ruled 6-3 that Mr. Trump overstepped his authority by using emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico to address trade imbalances and stop drug smuggling. Like previous high court decisions that blocked the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness and eviction moratorium, the ruling strikes a blow for the constitutional separation of powers. It also provides cover to Republicans who want a course correction on tariff policy between now and November.

The president remains unpersuaded, alas. His combative response to the decision showcased a deep misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s role in our representative democracy. Mr. Trump’s lack of decorum, which by now is expected, was on full bipartisan display Friday. Those who disagree with the president, he made clear, aren’t merely wrong but despicable human beings with deep character flaws. He described the Republican-appointed justices who ruled against him as “fools” and “lap dogs” who lack “the courage to do what’s right for our country,” while Democrat-appointed justices are “against anything that makes America strong, healthy and great again.”

Mr. Trump accused conservatives on the court of being slaves to political correctness, which is an odd criticism to throw at justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and ban racial preferences in college admissions. He called the court’s liberals “a disgrace to our nation,” then added by way of praise: “But you can’t knock their loyalty”—meaning to the party—which is “one thing you can do with some of our people.” Does Mr. Trump think that members of the Supreme Court have a duty of partisan loyalty? When the court ruled 8-0 in U.S. v. Nixon (1974) that executive privilege isn’t limitless, three of those justices had been appointed by President Nixon.

As bad was Mr. Trump’s condescension toward Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, who dissented. “I’d like to thank and congratulate Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh for their strength and wisdom and love of our country.” Congratulate? Justice Kavanaugh’s “stock has gone way up, you have to see, I’m so proud of him.” Does the president think the justices want or need a pat on the head from him?

Members of the court are nominated by the president but don’t serve at his pleasure, unlike the members of his cabinet, who can be hired, fired and replaced at will. Nor do they serve a ceremonial role or exist to do the executive branch’s bidding. Rather, the court is an. independent, coequal branch of government tasked with determining whether the government’s actions—including the president’s—are constitutional and lawful. In recent years, it has usually been Democrats who were guilty of lashing out at the court to undermine its legitimacy. Sadly, Mr. Trump’s response to Friday’s ruling is more of the same.

The reality, whether or not the president accepts it, is that tariffs have been disruptive to the economy and are deeply unpopular. They haven’t reduced the trade deficit or boosted factory employment, as Mr. Trump claims they have. American consumers have grown accustomed to more options at lower prices for autos, clothing, electronics, food and countless other goods thanks to free trade across international borders. Higher levies on imports lead to higher costs and fewer choices.

The president insists that tariffs ultimately are paid by foreigners and are necessary to “protect our companies,” but a recent study by the New York Federal Reserve concluded what many other studies have shown—that nearly all the economic burden from the Trump tariffs has fallen on U.S. firms and consumers.

That is no surprise to anyone familiar with classical economic writings on trade going back more than two centuries. But even people who have never read a word of Adam Smith, David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill can read an electricity bill or a grocery-store receipt. Mr. Trump is less bothered by higher retail prices because he thinks they are necessary to rebalance a global economy in which the U.S. supposedly has been “ripped off” for “many decades,” even as it somehow became the most prosperous nation in human history.

Voters punished Democrats in 2024 over inflation, but Democrats have since won elections by campaigning on cost-of-living concerns. Mr. Trump wants to double down on tariffs, but that means doubling down on tax increases at a time when consumers are most worried about affordability. The president would have Republicans ignore polls on the economy, stay the course on his trade policies, and hope for the best in the fall as he tries to make mercantilism great again. It’s a fool’s errand.

WSJ: Section 122 Can’t Carry Trump’s Tariffs https://tinyurl.com/bdjyrbc2 “Since under the current floating exchange rate system there is no ‘United States balance of payments deficit’ to speak of, there’s nothing to legally justify Mr. Trump’s new 15% tariff regime.”
// It requires a balance-of-payments deficit—a problem that has become obsolete.

[Trump’s] plan relies on a seldom-invoked clause of the Trade Act of 1974, Section 122. It allows the president to impose a general tariff of up to 15% for 150 days to address “fundamental international payments problems” that “require special import measures to restrict imports.” …

Mr. Trump’s reading of Section 122 is erroneous. The relevant statute allows only tariffs that “deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits,” “prevent an imminent and significant deprecation of the dollar,” or facilitate an international agreement to correct a “balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” To justify his new tariffs, Mr. Trump is relying on the first option and now asserts the U.S. has a large balance-of-payments deficit. … [But] the current U.S. balance-of-payments deficit is close to zero.

… As Milton Friedman explained in 1967, “a system of floating exchange rates completely eliminates the balance-of-payments problem.” …

Six months ago, Solicitor General John D. Sauer argued in court filings defending the administration’s now-defunct tariffs that Section 122 tariffs aren’t a viable substitute for IEEPA, because “trade deficits . . . are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”

Six months ago, Solicitor General John D. Sauer argued in court filings defending the administration’s now-defunct tariffs that Section 122 tariffs aren’t a viable substitute for IEEPA, because “trade deficits . . . are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.” …

Since under the current floating exchange rate system there is no “United States balance of payments deficit” to speak of, there’s nothing to legally justify Mr. Trump’s new 15% tariff regime.

🐣 RT @alex_prompter 🚨 Holy shit… Stanford and Harvard just dropped one of the most unsettling papers on AI agents I’ve read in a long time. It’s called “Agents of Chaos.”
[Cornell link:] https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20021
[PDF:] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20021 84p
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/alex_prompter/status/2026226107104817207?s=20/photo/1

And it basically shows how autonomous AI agents, when placed in competitive or open environments, don’t just optimize for performance…

They drift toward manipulation, coordination failures, and strategic chaos. This isn’t a benchmark flex paper. ¤ It’s a systems-level warning.

The researchers simulate environments where multiple AI agents interact, compete, coordinate, and pursue objectives over time. What emerges isn’t clean, rational optimization.

It’s power-seeking behavior.
Information asymmetry.
Deception as strategy.
Collusion when it’s profitable.
Sabotage when incentives misalign.

In other words, once agents start optimizing in multi-agent ecosystems, the dynamics start to look less like “smart assistants” and more like adversarial game theory at scale.

And here’s the part most people will miss: ¤ The instability doesn’t come from jailbreaks. It doesn’t require malicious prompts. ¤ It emerges from incentives.

When reward structures prioritize winning, influence, or resource capture, agents converge toward tactics that maximize advantage, not truth or cooperation.

Sound familiar?

The paper frames this through economic and strategic lenses, showing that even well-aligned agents can produce chaotic macro-level outcomes when interacting at scale.

Local alignment ≠ global stability.¤ That’s the core tension.

Now, to answer the obvious viral question: ¤ No, the paper does not mention OpenClaw or specific open-source agent stacks like that. It’s not about a particular framework.

It’s about the structural behavior of agent systems. ¤ But that’s what makes it more important. ¤ Because this applies to:
• AutoGPT-style task agents
• Multi-agent trading systems
• Autonomous negotiation bots
• AI-to-AI marketplaces
• Swarms coordinating over APIs

Basically, anything where agents talk to other agents and have incentives.

The takeaway is brutal:

We’re racing to deploy multi-agent systems into finance, security, research, and commerce… ¤ Without fully understanding the emergent dynamics once they start competing.

Everyone is building agents. ¤ Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects. ¤ And if multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and chaos won’t be technical. ¤ It’ll be incentive design.

Paper: Agents of Chaos [link above]

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦 Zelensky: There are many dictatorships in the world. —
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2026264542221664477?s=20

Some seal themselves off within their own borders, trying to block any outside influence of freedom. And others do not recognize borders at all and actively try to destroy the freedom of their neighbors, entire regions, and sometimes even the whole world.

When we deal with Russia, we face the second type of threat. It’s a mentality, an unstable dictatorship that cannot accept that in Europe every life matters, human rights are important, and nations can be protected, whether they are big or small.

Putin cannot accept one simple thing: that somewhere people can live differently and enjoy a life that is not the one he prefers. That is why he has been consistently trying to break someone — not just now, not just for four years, but throughout his entire time in power. He is war itself, yes, and anyone who supports Putin cannot fail to understand that they are choosing war.

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 The Financial Times has published a commentary arguing that Donald Trump’s state of mind represents a global risk. ⋙ FT: Donald Trump’s state of mind is a global risk [link$$]

The headline frames his personal judgment and decision making as factors with potential consequences beyond the United States, suggesting that his leadership style and unpredictability could affect international stability, financial markets, and geopolitical relations.

The article is presented as a serious political and economic assessment rather than a campaign statement, signaling concern within parts of the global financial and policy community about how US executive decisions influence allies, adversaries, trade flows, and security structures worldwide.

WaPo, Neal Katyal: Tariffs were illegal. Delaying refunds is wrong. https://tinyurl.com/mry5cf3m “The government said small businesses would be made whole. It’s time to pay up.”

⭕ 23 Feb 2026

WSJ Editorial: The Unending Trump Tariff Mess https://tinyurl.com/3afzehv4 ‘The smart play after his legal defeat would be to take an off-ramp. Instead Trump is aiming in fury at the Supreme Court, but he will end up hitting the economy and Republicans in Congress’

Well, that will show the Supreme Court—or something. President Trump is reacting to his Friday tariff defeat not by calming the trade waters but by roiling them further. He is aiming in fury at the Supreme Court, but he will end up hitting the economy and Republicans in Congress.

The smart play after his legal defeat would be to take an off-ramp and forgo or pause new tariffs. Instead the White House this weekend dusted off Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a work-around. That provision lets a President impose tariffs of up to 15% across the board for up to 150 days “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

What a relic, which wasn’t intended to manage a trade deficit per se. Instead it’s a holdover from a bygone era of the gold standard, fixed exchange rates and periodic panics about global liquidity. …

The larger reality is that Mr. Trump is so bull-headed about tariffs that he’s going to re-impose them any way he can. Along with Section 122, he’ll fire up more Section 201, 301 and 232 (national security) studies and tariffs. But as our friend Don Luskinpoints out, these are pea shooters compared to the IEEPA tariffs the Court struck down. They are limited in scope and duration.

That isn’t to say they won’t do harm. They’ll create more uncertainty for business, at least for a while. And with the midterm elections coming soon, this timing is fraught for Republicans. Amid an “affordability” panic, Mr. Trump says he is going to impose more border taxes on enough imports to make up for his lost emergency tariffs. Democrats must be thrilled at their dumb luck.

Friday’s Supreme Court ruling should be a $150 billion tax cut as businesses apply for refunds from illegal tariffs. In its statements to the Court, Trump lawyers said the refund process would be a legal breeze. But now the Administration is suggesting it will fight refund requests in court. This is a political bait and switch, and it also delays refunds that could go to more productive economic uses.

Mr. Trump is so ideologically fixated on tariffs that he is willing to bet his Presidency on them. This looks increasingly like a losing wager for Republicans.

🐣 RT @infodexx World’s Largest Economies in 2026 🌍💰 (Projected Nominal GDP)
◕ https://x.com/infodexx/status/2026127616307298527?s=20/photo/1
// Source: IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2025) Via: RankingRoyals
// tags: projected GDP 2026: 🇺🇸 31.8Tr, 🇨🇳 $20.7Tr, 🇷🇺 $2.5Tr

WSJ: As War Enters 5th Year, Ukraine Shows Russian Victory Is Anything but Inevitable https://tinyurl.com/858x3jyf “Putin is dangling economic deals in front of Trump—to tempt him to cut off support to Ukraine or try to force Kyiv to hand over territory that [Russia’s] army hasn’t conquered.”
// Small Ukrainian counterattacks demonstrate Russia’s struggle for a breakthrough
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2026182573135745387?s=20/photo/1
// tags: chart killed and wounded chart; 325K 🇷🇺 140K 🇺🇦

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss 🇵🇱🇺🇦🇷🇺
“‘Give up land for peace’ is not diplomacy — it’s blackmail in white gloves. Pressure should be put on the aggressor, not on the victim.”
— Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland

🐣 RT @DemocraticWins BREAKING: General Mark Hertling just perfectly exposed how Donald Trump’s leadership has cost the U.S. our global alliances. Now is the time to fight back and reassert American leadership on the world stage
💽 https://x.com/DemocraticWins/status/2026055971722670232?s=20/photo/1
// “Trust in gained in drops and lost in buckets”

🐣 RT @peterbakernyt
Trump, July 19: “All three nuclear sites in Iran were completely destroyed and/or OBLITERATED. It would take years to bring them back into service.”
Witkoff, Sunday: “They’re probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”

🐣 RT @ScarboroughNow The Joint Chiefs Chairman believes any operation against Iran would be difficult because of “a lack of allied support”. Insulting our most loyal allies comes at a cost.
⋙ WaPo: Trump’s v top general foresees acute risks in an attack on Iran https://tinyurl.com/3k5x57cf “Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, has cautioned that a lack of munitions and support from allies could mean greater danger for U.S. troops”
// cont.: “people familiar with the discussions say.”

🐣 📋 RT @RepMikeLevin More than 400 federal judges have ruled that ICE is breaking the law. [Reuters link:] https://tinyurl.com/4pbswtad
¤ https://x.com/RepMikeLevin/status/2025976607278530948?s=20

Not once. Not a handful of times. 4,400+ TIMES.

That’s 4,400+ illegal detentions. 4,400+ violations of the Constitution. And in many cases, ICE has kept people locked up even AFTER judges ordered their release.

Hundreds of judges—including Republican appointees—are saying the same thing: ICE is operating outside the law.

This isn’t border security. This is an agency out of control.

📊 CNN Poll: Trump’s approval rating with Independents hits 26%, a new low ahead of the State of the Union https://tinyurl.com/yc5ukb3y //➔ that’s a drop of 15% since February of last year; among All Adults it’s gone from 48% to 36%, a drop of 12%
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2026163871241691166?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Timothy Snyder: By resisting, Ukrainians held back a wider war in Europe. ¤ Maybe most importantly, they’ve given us an example of courage. A better question to ask on the four-year anniversary of this terrible criminal war is, what more could we be doing to help the Ukrainians win this war? There’s only one way to end it, and that’s for the Ukrainians to win – @TimothyDSnyder
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/2026012396259827966?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @HQNewsNow Former ICE Employee: I swore an oath to protect the nation when I signed up. I followed it when I resigned a little over a week ago. I am duty bound to report the legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective, and broken. I received secretive orders to teach cadets to violate the Constitution
💽 https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2026070900601201008?s=20/photo/1

🧵 RT @Mylovanov Budanov: Moscow is testing world order for strength, international institutions for viability.
📌 💽 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2026043845956210826?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/22yx97mw

Independent Ukraine is a challenge to Russian imperialism and great Russian chauvinism. Without Ukraine there can be no new empire. 1/

Budanov: Work is not easy, but we are definitely moving forward and approaching the moment when all sides will need to make final decisions – continue this war or move to peace. ¤ I hope that justice will still prevail. 2/

Budanov: Peace without accountability is a pause in hostilities, but not a solution. ¤ Peace without consequences for aggressor is invitation to repeat and example for all authoritarian regimes – attack, kill, destroy, and nothing will happen to you. 3/

Budanov: Aggression is the primary crime. It triggers all subsequent events. ¤ If decision to wage war against sovereign state has no personal consequences, all international rules stop working. Any other country can become victim at any moment. 4/

Budanov: Question of accountability for aggression is signal not only about past, but about future. ¤ About how world responds to illegal use of force and what consequences await violators of international norms. 5/

Budanov: Second direction is compensation mechanism. War always has a price. ¤ Destroyed cities, lost homes, ruined infrastructure and taken lives. Any legal decisions without financial dimension do not create trust, and without trust there is no stability. 6/

Budanov: Third is return of abducted Ukrainian children. One of darkest crimes. ¤ This is not just humanitarian problem, this is about future, about identity, about security of next generations. Every child must ultimately be returned home. 7/

Budanov: Fourth direction is internal capacity of justice system. ¤ Ukraine is waging war and at same time carrying out reforms, building institutions. Without strong professional independent judicial system, no international mechanisms will be able to work effectively 8/

Budanov: Behind struggle for justice, establishment of peace and our future stands Ukrainian army. ¤ As long as Ukrainian soldiers hold front, Ukrainian rear and every citizen are safe. Strong Ukrainian army is guarantee of stability, truth, justice. 10X

🐣 RT @KSAmofaEN [Saudi Arabia] #Statement | We, the Foreign Ministers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the French Republic, the Kingdom of Denmark, the Republic of Finland, the Republic of Iceland, the Republic of Indonesia, Ireland, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Kingdom of Norway, the State of Palestine, the Portuguese Republic, the State of Qatar, the Republic of Slovenia, the Kingdom of Spain, the Kingdom of Sweden, the Republic of Türkiye, and the Secretary Generals of the League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, condemn in the strongest terms a series of recent Israeli decisions that introduce sweeping extensions to unlawful Israeli control over the West Bank. Changes are wide-ranging, reclassifying Palestinian land as so-called Israeli ‘state land’, accelerating illegal settlement activity, and further entrenching Israeli administration.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/KSAmofaEN/status/2026013385079636321?s=20/photo/1

We, the Foreign Ministers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the French Republic, the Kingdom of Denmark, the Republic of Finland, the Republic of Iceland, the Republic of Indonesia, Ireland, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Kingdom of Norway, the State of Palestine, the Portuguese Republic, the State of Qatar, the Republic of Slovenia, the Kingdom of Spain, the Kingdom of Sweden, the Republic of Türkiye, and the Secretary Generals of the League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, condemn in the strongest terms a series of recent Israeli decisions that introduce sweeping extensions to unlawful Israeli control over the West Bank. Changes are wide-ranging, reclassifying Palestinian land as so-called Israeli ‘state land’, accelerating illegal settlement activity, and further entrenching Israeli administration.

We are clear that Israel’s illegal settlements, and decisions designed to further them, are a flagrant violation of international Law, including previous United Nations Security Council Resolutions and the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice. These latest decisions are part of a clear trajectory that aims to change the reality on the ground and to advance unacceptable de facto annexation. They also undermine the ongoing efforts for peace and stability in the region, including the 20 Point Plan for Gaza, and threaten any meaningful prospect of regional integration. We call on the Government of Israel to reverse them immediately, to respect its international obligations, and to refrain from actions that would result in permanent changes to the legal and administrative status of the occupied Palestinian Territory.

These decisions follow the unprecedented acceleration of Israel’s settlement policy, with the approval of the Er project and the publication of its tender. Such actions are a deliberate and direct attack on the viability of the Palestinian State and the implementation of the two-State Solution. In that context, we reiterate our rejection of all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem. We oppose any form of annexation.

In view of the alarming escalation in the West Bank, we also call on Israel to put an end to settler violence against Palestinians, including by holding those responsible accountable.

We reaffirm our commitment to taking concrete steps, in accordance with international law, to counter the expansion of illegal settlements in Palestinian territory and policies and threats of forcible displacement and annexation.

In the Holy Month of Ramadan, we also stress the importance of preserving the historic and legal status quo in Jerusalem and its Holy Sites, recognizing the special role of the historic Hashemite custodianship in this regard. We condemn repeated violations of the status quo in Jerusalem, which constitute a threat to regional stability.

The Ministers call for the immediate release by Israel of the withheld tax revenues due to the Palestinian Authority. Those revenues must be transferred to the Palestinian Authority, according to the Paris Protocol, and they are vital for the provision of basic services for the Palestinian population in Gaza and in the West Bank.

We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to achieving a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in the Middle East on the basis of the Two-State Solution, in line with the Arab Peace Initiative and relevant UN resolutions, based on the 4 June 1967 lines. As reflected in the New York Declaration, the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is imperative for regional peace, stability, and integration. Only by realizing an independent, sovereign and democratic Palestinian State can coexistence among the region’s peoples and states be achieved.

[Letterhead] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
23 February 2026 / 06 Ramadan

WaPo: This economic idea transfixed Wall Street and Washington. It may be a mirage. https://tinyurl.com/56eswj37 “Massive investment in AI contributed ‘basically zero’ to U.S. economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated.”

Technology companies’ massive spending on artificial intelligence accounted for half or more of U.S. growth last year, some economists calculated, effectively propping up an otherwise anemic economy.

To President Donald Trump and his advisers, the figures showed that AI is helping spark an economic renaissance that must not be impeded by regulation. To some critics, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), the data revealed an economy dangerously addicted to AI.

Either way, it became conventional wisdom that the technology was now a major engine of growth in the world’s largest economy.

But a growing number of forecasters now say the economy’s dependence on AI was overstated.

Prominent economists, including from Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, calculate that the AI buildup was directly responsible not for 92 percent or 39 percent of gains to the U.S. economy in 2025, but as little as zero. …

The struggle to even measure what is happening today suggests there may be years of bickering ahead over whether AI is creating a golden age of prosperity or a path to mass unemployment and impoverishment.

The high-stakes quibbling over AI’s current economic impact largely hinges on how to account for the foreign-made computing equipment and components inside the expensive data centers that AI companies are building across the nation.

Economists who argue that AI’s contribution to U.S. growth is overstated calculate that much of the money spent to equip AI data centers drags down economic growth rather than boosting it.

That’s because the $31 trillion in yearly U.S. gross domestic product, the widest measure of the economy, tallies only the final value of products and services produced domestically. Spending on imports and foreign made components is subtracted because it boosts the economies of other countries, not that of the United States.

Roughly three-quarters of the cost of an AI data center is for the computer gear and parts such as computer chips that go inside of it, technology analysts estimate. America’s AI champions, including the computer chip pioneer Nvidia, manufacture many of their products in Asia — despite efforts by the Biden and Trump administrations to reduce U.S. dependence on essential chips made overseas.

Other economists say the contrarians are too pedantic and looking too narrowly at AI’s contribution to the economy. And some forecasters saythat the U.S. government’s economic data is a poor measure of the impact of AI and that alternative calculations show the current boom is an even bigger boost to economic growth.

But even some of those not in the AI-zero camp agree that the narrative of the technology propping up the economy was overblown.

“This is a big deal, but not the be-all and end-all,” said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst who writes the Apricitas Economics newsletter. He calculates that AI-related spending contributed about 0.2 percentage points to the 2.2 percent U.S. economic growth last year.

Politano said that it’s rare to strip out import costs when calculating the boost from individual sectors of the economy. But AI “is a special case, because so much is imported,” he said.

💙 TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem https://tinyurl.com/4emsfcda “Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party?” … “Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party”
// cont?: “, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise”
// How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss 🇷🇺🇺🇦🇺🇸 🗣️♟️ Garry Kasparov — world chess champion and Russian opposition figure in exile in the United States — on the Russia–Ukraine war:
💽 https://x.com/WW3finalboss/status/2025875560321130625?s=20/photo/1

“Russia’s future is being decided not in Russia, but in Ukraine. Since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, our slogan has been: ‘Victory to Ukraine and freedom to Russia’ — in that exact order. We are not dreamers of some abstract ‘beautiful Russia of the future.’ We are doing what we can. We do not overestimate our strength, but we know exactly what we can do and where our place is.”

He places that role clearly:

“Today, our place in this war is alongside Ukraine, which is defending not only its own independence, sovereignty, and national integrity, but all of Europe and the entire free world. It is the shield of the free world against the advance of tyranny.”

Kasparov leaves little room for ambiguity:

📌 “We stand with Ukraine, which must win and protect the free world from this aggression.”

📌 “This is not a war where any form of compromise is possible. In fact, it is a war in which there can be no draw — precisely because there is no other task today.”

📌 “There is only one objective in this war. As Churchill said in 1940: ‘What is our aim? Victory at all costs.’ Despite the terror and horrors that lie ahead — only victory.”

And he ties the outcome to Russia’s political future:

Without Ukraine, he echoes Zbigniew Brzezinski’s argument, the Russian empire cannot endure — and as long as empire defines the state, democracy in Russia remains out of reach.

⭕ 22 Feb 2026

NYT, Rabbi Shai Held: One of the Bible’s Greatest Moral Revolutions https://tinyurl.com/35vrn37m First, Love of God, Second, Love of one’s neighbor. The third is Love of the “ger” or “the immigrant” — or as Bruce Springsteen puts it, of “the stranger in our midst.”
[TextLink:]https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2026707998647718038?s=20/photo/1

The Bible offers an ethos, an approach we might take in confronting immigration policy. Those of us who follow the Bible as a moral guide can conclude that demonizing, mocking or dehumanizing immigrants — let alone violently pursuing them — is, religiously speaking, an abomination, a direct affront to a biblical vision of what a good and holy society ought to look like. Xenophobia is, then, spiritually speaking, an illness, a failure to see people as God does, to treat them as God demands they be treated.

💙 💽 BBC, Jeremy Bowen: Zelensky tells BBC Putin has started WW3 and must be stopped [Interview] https://tinyurl.com/rbx3m7sm

💙 Fortune: Trump’s plan B to impose new tariffs is also illegal because a balance-of-payments deficit doesn’t exist, trade experts say https://tinyurl.com/4vea74k2 And Section 301, of the Trade Act (plan C) actually requires PROVING the 🇺🇸 is being treated “very unfairly.”

To be sure, Trump has other avenues to replace the IEEPA tariffs. On Friday, he also said the administration would initiate investigations under Section 301 of the 1974 law, which is meant to combat unfair trade practices or violations of trade agreements. Those tariffs can’t be enacted until the investigations are complete, which could take two to three months under an expedited process.
***
Just hours after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs on Friday, he signed an order to impose another package of levies under a different law that wasn’t affected by the court’s decision.

But economists and trade experts were quick to point out that Trump’s plan B for his tariff regime also has no legal basis.

For the first time ever, the U.S. is invoking Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows tariffs of up to 15% for as long as 150 days to quickly address international payments problems. …

In a briefing with reporters Friday, Trump claimed the court endorsed his ability to use other means to carry out his trade agenda.

“The good news is that there are methods, practices, statutes and authorities as recognized by the entire court in this terrible decision and also is recognized by Congress which they refer to that are even stronger than the IEEPA tariffs available to me as president of the United States,” he said.

But the actual language of the Trade Act lists requirements that don’t exist today, including a “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficit. ¤ While the U.S. has run a trade deficit for decades, it’s been offset by capital inflows as foreign investors pour billions into financial markets, resulting in a net balance of zero.

“Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, on which Trump’s 10% tariff is based, does not apply in the current macro environment,” said Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, in post on X on Friday. “A balance of payments deficit is not the same thing as a trade deficit. You cannot have a balance of payments [deficit] if you have a flexible exchange rate, as the US currently does.”

Similarly, economist Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, pointed out that the trade deficit is fully funded by the capital account surplus, adding that there is no overall balance-of-payments deficit to justify Trump’s newest tax on imports.

Bryan Riley, director of the National Taxpayers Union’s Free Trade Initiative, wrote in a blog post last month that Section 122 only makes sense under a fixed exchange rate, which hasn’t existed in the U.S. in more than 50 years.

Back then, when the dollar was pegged to gold, there was still a risk that the U.S. could suffer from shortages of reserves needed to cover international obligations.

But by the time the Trade Act was introduced in late 1973, the U.S. had already adopted a floating exchange rate system that was self-adjusting, eliminating the need for reserves to maintain a fixed dollar value. The bottom line is that “Section 122 was effectively rendered obsolete,” Riley explained.

“Section 122 only authorizes tariffs in the presence of a fundamental international payments problem,” he added. “Because the United States does not face such a problem, Section 122 cannot legally be used by President Trump to impose new tariffs.”

🐣 RT @BillKristol “Not only has Congress not authorized such a war, it has barely debated it. The administration has not bothered to explain, to Congress or the American people, why it might bomb Iran or what it hopes to achieve…This is how an autocracy goes to war.”
⋙ NYT, Michelle Goldberg (2/20): This Is How an Autocrat Goes to War https://tinyurl.com/3y5ekdt8 “This is how an autocracy goes to war, without even a pretense that the consent of the governed matters”

🐣 RT @FreeTradeBryan The U.S. Court of Appeals has already ruled that “section 122 does not apply to the problems underlying the reciprocal [IEEPA] tariffs, which are not the payments problems that are the precondition to section 122’s application.”
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/mr3e5dnr 127p
// 8/29/2025, p 51

🧵 RT @Mylovanov Bill Browder: War in Ukraine is now only about Putin’s personal survival.
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2025650032947380628?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/mr327442

… He needs the war to stay in power, and he needs to stay in power to stay alive. The destruction of .Russia is unparalleled, but he cannot stop. If he stops, he loses everything. 1/

Browder: Putin is a historic liar, but he’s honest about one thing. ¤ He believes Ukraine should not exist as a sovereign state. He hasn’t deviated from that for a minute. He doesn’t want compromise. He wants total and absolute victory. 2/

Browder: Peace talks create the appearance of negotiation so Putin can keep fighting and avoid sanctions. ¤ He can tell Trump: you can’t upset delicate negotiations. That is the main intention behind this process. 3/

Browder: Putin needs a foreign enemy so people don’t get mad at him inside Russia. He needs war. ¤ If he succeeded in Ukraine, he would move on to Poland or the Baltics. He has to have war, regardless of the destruction. 4/

Browder: Putin is fully aware of the losses and economic damage. He is intelligent. ¤ But he believes the West will lose its stomach for pain before he does, because dictatorship allows him to absorb unlimited suffering. 5X

WSJ Editorial: Justice Gorsuch Tries to Revive Congress https://tinyurl.com/22ur2nky In “an intellectual tour de force,” “his main theme isn’t an assertion of judicial power. It’s an effort to encourage Congress to reclaim its proper authority under the Constitution’s separation of powers”
// The Supreme Court Associate Justice explains why the legislative process is ‘the bulwark of liberty.’

NYT, David French: Is This the Most Important Supreme Court Case of the Century? https://tinyurl.com/ymhf7cwy “The Supreme Court may have just helped save the Republic.”

… Justices John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch voted together — though for different reasons — to block one of the central elements of Trump’s foreign and economic policy. As Roberts explained in his opinion, in terms of sheer economic impact the case dwarfed many of the most contentious cases of the last several terms …

In fact, it may prove to be the most important Supreme Court decision this century. And if you think I’m being hyperbolic, let me explain.

First, the court blocked a monumental presidential power grab — one so big and so bold that it threatened the foundation of our constitutional system. …

For years presidents of both parties have been using broad and vague language in federal statutes as a pretext for engaging in lawmaking in place of Congress.

The expansion of presidential power, which has accelerated exponentially under Trump, has placed our republican form of government under strain. When presidents yank power from Congress, they begin to assume the role of an elected monarch — the exact opposite of the framers’ intent.

Gorsuch explained this masterfully in his concurrence. “For those who think it important for the nation to impose more tariffs,” he wrote, “I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason.”

The legislative process can be slow and frustrating, Gorsuch explained, but:

… through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the court’s decision is how it may help restore faith in how courts make decisions. The crisis in American democracy isn’t simply a product of the Trump administration’s overreach, it’s also a product of deep public cynicism about government institutions. Trump owes at least some of his appeal to that cynicism. If all that matters is power, then why not pick the man who exercises that power to its fullest?

As a result, millions of Americans wonder, do principles matter at all? Or is all of politics merely a matter of gaining and wielding power, supporting your friends and crushing your enemies?

The tariff decision is a reminder that principles do still matter, that at least one branch of government is not in thrall to the president, and that we can rely on reason and precedent to decide cases rather than simply counting Republican and Democratic appointees.

There’s also a third, less obvious way in which the court’s decision helps preserve the Republic — by limiting opportunities for corruption.

By assuming vast powers of taxation, Trump made himself the focal point for an enormous amount of lobbying and trading favors. In January, for example, Politico reported that the 20 largest lobbying firms raked in nearly $824 million in revenue in the first year of Trump’s second term, a sharp increase from $595 million in Biden’s last year.

The administration has sent a message, loudly and clearly — almost anything is for sale, at the right price. And as ProPublica reported last April, politically connected people and companies were already benefiting from what appears to be targeted relief from Trump’s tariffs.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board called the administration’s opaque process for granting exemptions “the Beltway Swamp’s dream.”

There were also dissents, of course. … But Trump’s most powerful tool has been taken away. He’ll have trouble doing tariffs the hard way when he loses the easy way. This is not an administration that is known for its legal competence.

In addition, as Roberts notes in his opinion, those other statutes “contain various combinations of procedural prerequisites, required agency determinations and limits on the duration, amount and scope of the tariffs they authorize.”

Now the ball is on Trump’s side of the net. The court has challenged him on perhaps the signature economic policy of his second term, and he is not taking it well. …

The judiciary isn’t perfect, but it is performing its core constitutional function. It is preserving the foundation of America’s constitutional structure. But not even the Supreme Court can save Americans from themselves.

If we keep electing men like Trump, they will keep undermining that foundation, until it finally collapses.

One day that may well happen. But on Friday, the Supreme Court said not this day. On this day the presidency is stuffed back into its box. On this day the separation of powers prevails. And on this day the Constitution holds. …

💙 NewRepublic, Ana Marie Cox: The Paranoid Style of Jeffrey Epstein Has Come for Us All https://tinyurl.com/29x7marw “The pedophile plutocrat had some peculiar predilections—especially for academics and thinkers who showed a potential to further his grand experiments in inhumanity”

🐣 RT @BohuslavskaKate Ben Hodges on the Trump-Zelenskyy Oval Office clash:
💽 https://x.com/BohuslavskaKate/status/2025313983247372494?s=20/photo/1

One of the worst days of my life. I never imagined seeing the president of a democratic nation – Ukraine, fighting an existential war – being treated so poorly in the Oval Office. It was gut-wrenching.

The United States – the arsenal of democracy, the bright shining light on the hill – basically accusing Zelenskyy of starting a war he didn’t start.

That made it crystal clear: unfortunately, Trump administration is really on Russia’s side in this conflict. They believe the fastest way to end it is to force Ukraine to capitulate or surrender territory, which will never happen.

🐣 RT @JustinWolfers “Here’s a very simple rule of thumb: If you’re going to institute a policy that’s going to upend your own economy, the global economy, foreign relations and change our position in the world… It’s probably best to check that it’s constitutional first. ”
💽 https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/2025554221009936890?s=20/photo/1

NYT: Denmark Rejects Trump’s Plan to Send Hospital Boat to Greenland https://tinyurl.com/kfjjy9zr “Denmark’s defense minister said Greenland did not need health care assistance, a day after President Trump said he planned to send a ‘great hospital boat’ to the island.”

⭕ 21 Feb 2026

📋 NYT, Ana Swanson: Trump’s Trade Gamble Will Continue, Despite Supreme Court Rebuke https://tinyurl.com/3btz5t7v The president seems as intent on tariffs as ever and argues that his trade agenda is succeeding, despite little evidence to support it

The Supreme Court may have ruled 6-3 against President Trump’s use of an international emergency law to impose tariffs. But Mr. Trump seems intent on continuing the experiment he has run with the U.S. economy over the past year, in which he has raised tariffs to levels not seen since the 1930s.

In a news conference at the White House on Friday, Mr. Trump made a series of false claims about the economic impact of tariffs and he promised to replace, or even increase, them using laws other than the one the court rejected.

“It’s ridiculous but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.”

“We broke every record in the book, and we are continuing to do so,” the president said about his tariffs. …

To the president, tariffs are the antidote to globalization, a way to force more manufacturing back to the United States, reduce America’s reliance on foreign products and lower the trade deficit. But the economic evidence so far has not been in his favor. Instead of shifting manufacturing back into the United States, Mr. Trump’s tariffs mostly appear to have reshuffled trade, at great cost to U.S. companies.

Just the day before the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the government reported annual trade data for last year, including several metrics that controverted Mr. Trump’s claims. The data showed that the trade deficit — the gap between what America imports from other countries and what it exports — continued to widen in December, and that the annual trade deficit in goods last year hit a record high. Exports of U.S. services, a strength of the American economy, helped reduce the overall trade deficit. But Mr. Trump has spent little time focusing on that. …

Growth in manufacturing output also hasn’t yet translated into more jobs. American manufacturers cut more than 80,000 jobs in the past year.

The president has ignored any data that does not fit his message. This past week, Mr. Trump had claimed on Truth Social that the trade deficit had “BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES. IT WILL GO INTO POSITIVE TERRITORY DURING THIS YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY DECADES.”

It’s not clear what metrics the president was referring to, and the White House did not clarify. …

For Mr. Trump, the trade deficit has long been a sign of economic weakness.

In April, he used the law just reviewed by the Supreme Court to declare that U.S. trade deficits were an international economic emergency and to impose sweeping tariffs to try to reduce them. Though some economists worry about big trade deficits, many at the time said that trade deficits were neither unusual nor an emergency, since the United States had run them for decades. …

Despite all the uncertainty, one thing is clear: Mr. Trump’s tariffs have so far not done much to solve the emergency he said they were directed at in the first place.

“The tariffs did not succeed in revitalizing U.S. manufacturing,” Mr. Setser said. “And the tariffs did not succeed in meaningfully changing the overall trade deficit.”

🐣 RT @RinainDC Vote out every member of Congress who is unwilling to step up & scream at the insanity of Trump’s overreach. ¤ Congress has been derelict of their duty for far too long — time to clean House…starting with spineless Speaker Johnson. ¤ Only Congress can tax the American people!
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RinainDC/status/2025293326283428133?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @reaDonald Trump Based on a thorough, detailed, and complete review of the ridiculous, poorly written, and extraordinarily anti-American decision on Tariffs issued yesterday, after MANY months of contemplation, by the United States Supreme Court, please let this statement serve to represent that I, as President of the United States of America, will be, effective immediately, raising the 10% Worldwide Tariff on Countries, many of which have been “ripping” the U.S. off for decades, without retribution (until I came along!), to the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15% level. During the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again – GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @McFaul Professor Pape is one of our country’s best experts on air power.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProfessorPape This represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.
◕ https://x.com/ProfessorPape/status/2025214568050446627?s=20/photo/1

NYT: In Gorsuch’s Homage to Legislative Power, a Subtle Reproach of a Neutered Congress https://tinyurl.com/29chhs7n “In his concurrence to the ruling invalidating President Trump’s tariffs, Justice Neil Gorsuch made a forceful case for the sanctity of the legislative process”
// cont.: “— and an implicit critique of its current dysfunction.”

… Republicans controlling the House and the Senate have ceded their power to one man — Mr. Trump — on a variety of issues. In essence, they are acting as if they have no wisdom to tap, or no business doing so.

Most of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. allies condemned the ruling, firmly rejecting the idea of insisting on their own branch of government’s constitutional role. Of the few Republican senators who cheered it as a triumph for checks and balances, some had repeatedly voted against blocking some of the sweeping duties Mr. Trump unilaterally imposed, wary of crossing him. And in the House, G.O.P. leaders used a procedural move for nearly a year to prevent lawmakers from even having to take such a vote.

Asked at a news conference at the White House on Friday whether he now planned to work with Congress to impose the kinds of sweeping tariffs he prefers, Mr. Trump said he had no intention of doing so.

“I don’t have to,” he said. “I have the right to do tariffs.”

That has been a position that Republican leaders have largely preferred not to question. …

It was hard not to detect a note of reproach for the current dysfunctional state of affairs in Congress in Justice Gorsuch’s reflections about the virtues of legislating, in which, he wrote, “deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions.”

“For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent,” he added. “For others, it may not seem so obvious.” […]

🐣 RT @MAGALieTracker BREAKING: Neal Katyal, the lawyer responsible for striking down Trump’s illegal tariffs at the Supreme Court, says that Trump’s new 15% tariffs won’t hold up either. If you thought Trump’s reaction yesterday was unhinged, wait until these get struck down too.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MAGALieTracker/status/2025263487124197380?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @neal_katyal Seems hard for the President to rely on the 15 percent statute (sec 122) when his DOJ in our case told the Court the opposite: “Nor does [122] have any obvious application here, where the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”

If he wants sweeping tariffs, he should do the American thing and go to Congress. If his tariffs are such a good idea, he should have no problem persuading Congress. That’s what our Constitution requires.

🐣 RT @Bricktop_NAFO
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

⭕ 20 Feb 2026

TheAtlantic, Ilya Somin: How the Supreme Court Spared America https://tinyurl.com/mr55w93h //➔ Under Trump, IEEPA tariffs became Trump’s instrument of choice to reward friends and punish those who displeased him, creating market volatility and exuding cronyism
// The ruling against Trump’s tariffs is a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, rule of law, and millions of American consumers and businesses.

[…] Since first imposing the Liberation Day tariffs, Trump has repeatedly suspended and reimposed various elements of them. He has also imposed or threatened to impose IEEPA tariffs for a variety of other purposes, such as countering the supposed threat of foreign-made movies, punishing Brazil for prosecuting its former president for attempting to launch a coup to stay in power after losing an election, and most recently castigating eight European nations opposed to his plan to seize Greenland. Such gyrations undermine the stable legal environment essential for businesses, consumers, and investors, and create endless opportunities to reward cronies and punish political adversaries. Studies show that firms contributing to the Republican Party were disproportionately likely to receive exemptions from tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term, while firms contributing to Democrats were more likely to have to pay. If allowed to stand, the IEEPA tariffs would have created much greater opportunities for such corruption.

📊 WaPo: Majority of Americans think Trump’s deportation campaign is going too far https://tinyurl.com/bdzay7up A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finds large numbers of Americans are living in fear of the deportation dragnet and dislike the administration’s approach.
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2025283149752598745?s=20/photo/1
// “Less than 3 in 10 think the majority of deportees were violent criminals”

NYT, Maureen Dowd: Shocker! SCOTUS Schools POTUS https://tinyurl.com/cxs5jvh9 “The Constitution is vague on so much, and that has allowed Trump to shimmy through wormholes and do things we assumed he would be barred from doing. … But the Constitution is clear on tariffs”

… As usual, Trump absurdly conflated what he wants with what’s best for the country. And as usual, he projected, charging that the justices who blocked his tariffs were “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution” — and controlled by foreign interests.

Actually, that critique is probably more applicable to the president, not the Supreme Court justices who put the brakes on Trump’s mad careening.

And Trump was barking up the wrong tree on lap dogs. Until now, Justices Roberts, Gorsuch and Barrett have been lap dogs for Trump, helping to upend Roe, giving him immunity for nearly all official acts, weakening the Voting Rights Act, letting DOGE get its grimy little hands on private data and allowing Elon Musk’s backpack wolf pack to slash the federal work force.

The Constitution is vague on so much, and that has allowed Trump to shimmy through wormholes and do things we assumed he would be barred from doing — like tearing down the East Wing without checking with anyone and letting foreign oligarchs enrich him, his family and his cronies. But the Constitution is clear on tariffs: They are the purview of Congress.

Trump has called tariffs “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.” And having his toy yanked away — even for the time it took him to figure out some other ploy to punish countries — brought out his fiendish side. After his unhinged news conference, he let fly a couple of long, unhinged Truth Social posts.

No sooner did moderate Republicans exhale, because they would no longer have to defend Trump’s mercurial tariff scheme — essentially a tax on consumers — than the president signed an executive order on Friday night invoking the Trade Act of 1974, imposing a “Global 10% Tariff on all Countries.” He had crowed earlier at the news conference that he can not only destroy the trade of any country but also “can destroy the country.”

“I’m allowed to destroy the country,” he pouted to reporters, “but I can’t charge them a little fee.” …

And now, the president will also have to distract from his humiliation at being slapped back by a conservative Supreme Court. He’s no doubt going to spend the weekend rewriting his State of the Union address and thinking of more nasty jibes for the justices who choked his leash. …

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a victory for the rule of law and the constitutional principle that Congress—not the president—holds the power to broadly tax imports, says Cato’s Clark Packard, reacting to the court’s ruling against President Trump’s tariffs. ¤ Learn more from Cato scholars: [link:] https://ow.ly/5EgZ50Yj0l6

WSJ Editorial: Trump Demeans Himself as He Attacks the Supreme Court https://tinyurl.com/45pm75au “Trump’s rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency”
// He calls the Justices who ruled against him ‘very unpatriotic’ and ‘fools.’

GlobalNews [Ca]: Transcript of Trump’s response to U.S. Supreme Court tariff ruling https://tinyurl.com/396fmkdm

WSJ Editorial: The Real Tariff Liberation Day Arrives at the Supreme Court https://tinyurl.com/3x5vxwzb “A 6-3 Supreme Court majority on Friday struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs in a monumental vindication of the Constitution’s separation of powers.”
// The Justices strike down President Trump’s imposition of border taxes without Congressional approval.

A 6-3 Supreme Court majority on Friday struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs (Learning Resources v. Trump) in a monumental vindication of the Constitution’s separation of powers. You might call it the real tariff Liberation Day.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Court’s decision for the law and the economy. Had Mr. Trump prevailed, future Presidents could have used emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose border taxes with little constraint.

As Chief Justice John Roberts explains in the majority opinion, “Recognizing the taxing power’s unique importance, and having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by ‘taxation without representation,’ the Framers gave Congress ‘alone . . . access to the pockets of the people.’”

Mr. Trump last February deemed fentanyl trafficking a national emergency, which he claimed gave him unbridled authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico. He later said the U.S. trade deficit is an emergency to justify tariffs on any country at rates he has adjusted at his personal whim.

IEEPA grants the President emergency powers to deal with foreign threats, including the authority to “regulate . . . importation or exportation” of foreign property. But the law doesn’t mention tariffs, and no previous President has used the law to impose border taxes.

It’s “telling that in IEEPA’s ‘half century of existence,’ no President has invoked the statute to impose any tariffs—let alone tariffs of this magnitude and scope,” the Chief writes in an opinion joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberals. “When Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits.”

These are signs that the tariffs violate the Court’s major questions doctrine, which says a President needs express Congressional authorization for economic and politically significant actions. The Court used this doctrine to strike down the Biden student loan forgiveness, eviction moratorium and vaccine mandate.

As the Chief writes, the “stakes” in this case “dwarf those of other major questions cases.” He cites the Trump team’s own claims: “The Government points to projections that the tariffs will reduce the national deficit by $4 trillion, and that international agreements reached in reliance on the tariffs could be worth $15 trillion.”

Mr. Trump also claims the term “regulate” in IEEPA is capacious enough to encompass the tariff power. Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito more or less agree in their dissent. But as the Chief writes, the term “‘regulate,’ as that term is ordinarily used, means to ‘fix, establish, or control; to adjust by rule, method, or established mode.’’”

“Many statutes grant the Executive the power to ‘regulate,’” the Chief points out. “Yet the Government cannot identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax.” He draws an important distinction that is blurred by the dissent. The real question, he stresses, isn’t “whether tariffs can ever be a means of regulating commerce. It is instead whether Congress, when conferring the power to ‘regulate . . . importation,’ gave the President the power to impose tariffs at his sole discretion.” It didn’t.

The Administration’s strongest argument is that it deserves deference on questions that implicate foreign affairs. The dissent agrees. But as Justice Gorsuch notes in a brilliant concurrence, this logic would have required the Court to uphold the Obama Clean Power plan in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) since climate change is an international issue.

Justice Gorsuch acknowledges that “the major questions doctrine may speak with less force where the President and Congress enjoy “overlap[ping] . . . authority” under the Constitution. But the Constitution expressly vests the power over taxation and foreign commerce with Congress, not the President.

Justice Gorsuch also amusingly hoists the liberal Justices on their prior dissents that criticized the use of the major-questions doctrine in cases involving overreaches by Democratic Presidents. “Their approach today is difficult to square with how they have interpreted other statutes,” he writes. Yes, it is.
***
Mr. Trump lashed out Friday at the Justices who ruled against him (see nearby). But he vindicated their reasoning by invoking another trade law, Section 122, to impose a 10% tariff across the board. That law expressly grants the President authority to impose a border tax of up to 15% to remedy a balance-of-payments deficit for 150 days, after which he must get Congress’s approval. This tariff is also bad policy but it’s legal.
The tariff law ruling also gives the lie to the Democratic charge that the current Court is a rubber stamp for Mr. Trump. The Court has now shown it is willing to block abuses of executive power by Presidents of both parties. This is exactly what the Constitution calls on the Justices to do.

WaPo Editorial: Trump’s tariffs fall to a principled Supreme Court https://tinyurl.com/452unb7f “This decision was too close, but it underscores that the Supreme Court remains independent. The separation of powers held. If only Congress would also fulfill its role as forcefully.”
// The decision is a triumph for the separation of powers and individual liberty.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Friday wiping out a chunk of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime is a triumph for the Constitution’s separation of powers and the individual liberty that it protects.

The decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. says nothing about whether the tariffs are good or bad policy. But it recognizes that they are a major tax, and that raising revenue is a “distinct” power that belongs to Congress. There’s a reason the 18th century American revolutionary slogan was “no taxation without representation.” Taxing citizens without consent from their elected representatives is antithetical to the American project.

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Ukrainians always defend what is theirs. Defend their independence. Dignity. Their right to live freely. It was the people who won freedom for Ukraine. Ordinary people who care about Ukraine’s future and how Ukrainian children will live. We remember what it cost in 2014. We honor the courage of everyone who took part in the Revolution of Dignity, everyone who did not leave the Maidan so that Ukraine would not be left without freedom. Blessed be the memory of all the Heavenly Hundred heroes, as well as every Ukrainian who gave their lives so that Ukraine would be free. Glory to Ukraine!
💽 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2024773277655134569?s=20/photo/1

WaPo Editorial: Trump’s tariffs fall to a principled Supreme Court https://tinyurl.com/452unb7f “The decision is a triumph for the separation of powers and individual liberty.”

TheAtlantic, David Frum: The Supreme Court Delivers Trump a Humiliating Gift https://tinyurl.com/57m2hvvm “A generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout?”

Finally, a check on the president’s tariff powers.

In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head. ¤ In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.

A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress. It does so for reasons that date back to English constitutional history: An executive who can tax without permission from elected representatives is on his way to becoming a tyrant.

President Trump has had lots of ideas for how to spend the money he collected without Congress. He has offered it to farmers. He has mused about direct cash payments to taxpayers. He has speculated about creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies. He has disregarded the fundamental principle that spending, like taxing, is a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president.

Now we may be on the verge of a regime-changing war against Iran. War-making is also supposed to be a congressional power—but there’s no sign that Trump will allow Congress to vote on his war. …

… Had the Supreme Court upheld the tariffs, it would have wrought a constitutional revolution. Instead, the court quashed Trump’s scheme. Like every president before him, if he wants money—for an Iran war or any other purpose—he will have to ask Congress for it. …

After Watergate, Congress sought to restrain the president by limiting the IEEPA [the International Emergency Economic Powers Act] to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The law’s powers can be invoked only after a formal declaration of national emergency, and the word tariff appears nowhere among the powers conferred upon the president by the law. To put it another way, a permanent 25 percent tax on Canadian maple-syrup-tapping technology is not what the authors of the IEEPA had in mind.

Trump gets very impatient when he’s asked about “affordability.” You can understand why he squirms. The price increases Americans have felt in 2025 and 2026 can be blamed in no small part on Trump’s tariffs. Power bill up? Trump imposed a tariff on the equipment used to generate and transmit electricity. Six-pack of beer more expensive? Trump taxed the beer cans. Kids need new shoes? Trump’s tariffs raised the cost. …

The ironic political question for 2026 is whether the U.S. Supreme Court acted in time to save Trump from himself. Whether or not it was the justices’ intention to help Trump, ⋙ a generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout? ⋘ Acceptance would be smart, but humiliating. Trump holds other legal means to disrupt international trade, some of which he used in his first term. But those powers have tighter legal limits than Trump wants. They don’t raise the kind of lawless revenue he plainly hoped for, but they can still cause havoc until their abuse is checked—and the federal courts have thus far flinched on supplying such checks on the president’s power. Until and unless a future Congress acts to protect Americans from Trump protectionism, the outlook for U.S. prosperity and security will remain clouded.

While shadows dim the future, the sun shone today. U.S. stocks surged after Trump’s Supreme Court defeat. American consumers may soon feel the benefit. Liberated from this approach to economic warfare, relations with allies may recover some of their former cordiality. And unlike the case of Charles I, all of this was accomplished while allowing America’s president to lay his unsevered head on his pillow tonight.

🐣 RT @SpencerHakimian Mango is crying
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/2024917597112733960?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Supreme Court’s Ruling on TARIFFS is deeply disappointing! I am ashamed of certain Members of the Court for not having the Courage to do what is right for our Country. I would like to thank and congratulate Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh for your Strength, Wisdom, and Love of our Country, which is right now very proud of you.

When you read the dissenting opinions, there is no way that anyone can argue against them. Foreign Countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic, and dancing in the streets – But they won’t be dancing for long! The Democrats on the Court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote “NO” against ANYTHING that makes America Strong and Healthy Again. They, also, are a Disgrace to our Nation. Others think they’re being “politically correct,” which has happened before, far too often, with certain Members of this Court when, in fact, they’re just FOOLS and “LAPDOGS” for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats and, not that this should have anything to do with it, very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution. It is my opinion that the Court has been swayed by Foreign Interests, and a Political Movement that is far smaller than people would think – But obnoxious, ignorant, and loud!

This was an important case to me, more as a symbol of Economic and National Security, than anything else. The Good News is that there are methods, practices, Statutes, and other Authorities, as recognized by the entire Court and Congress, that are even stronger than the IEEPA TARIFFS, available to me as President of the United States of America and, in actuality, I was very modest in my “ask” of other Countries and Businesses because I wanted to do nothing that could sway the decision that has been rendered by the Court.

I have very effectively utilized TARIFFS over the past year to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Our Stock Market has just recently broken the 50,000 mark on the DOW and, simultaneously, 7,000 on the S&P, two numbers that everybody thought, upon our Landslide Election Victory, could not be attained until the very end of my Administration – Four years! TARIFFS have, likewise, been used to end five of the eight Wars that I settled, have given us Great National Security and, together with our Strong Border, reduced Fentanyl coming into our Country by 30%, when I use them as a penalty against Countries illegally sending this poison to us. All of those TARIFFS remain, but other alternatives will now be used to replace the ones that the Court incorrectly rejected.

🐣 RT @neal_katyal My statement: “Today, the U.S. Supreme Court stood up for the rule of law and Americans everywhere. Its message was simple: Presidents are powerful, but our Constitution is more powerful still. In America, only Congress can impose taxes on the American people.
¤ https://x.com/neal_katyal/status/2024881909365346605?s=20

The US Supreme Court gave us everything we asked for in our legal case. Everything.

I’m grateful for the leadership of the Liberty Justice Center, and in particular for the brilliant advocacy by its chair, Sara Albrecht, who led the fight when others wouldn’t and was dauntless in its defense of our constitutional order. I’m also grateful to the five small business owners who stood up against these unjust, unconstitutional taxes. By taking a stand, they have delivered crucial relief to tens of thousands of businesses and millions of consumers across the country.

Finally, I lack the words to properly thank my brilliant Milbank team, especially Colleen Roh Sinzdak and Sami Ilagan, who worked with me day and night for many months to craft the winning argument.

This case has always been about the presidency, not any one president. It has always been about separation of powers, and not the politics of the moment. I’m gratified to see our Supreme Court, which has been the bedrock of our government for 250 years, protect our most fundamental values.

🐣 RT @DrMcFillin 🧵1/5 Buried inside the Epstein files is something far more disturbing than a blackmail network, as sinister as that is. What the documents reveal is a worldview. A coherent, funded, institutionally embedded worldview about what human beings are, what they’re worth, and who gets to decide. 🔰 Epstein’s Network has a Doctrine. You’re
Living Under It
📌 https://x.com/DrMcFillin/status/2024567808538066958?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2024567808538066958.html

2/5 Epstein donated to the World Transhumanist Association. He funneled thirty million dollars into Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He was in active discussions about financing a designer baby project, altering human germline DNA so parents could engineer heritable traits in their children.

3/5 He told scientists and wealthy associates that he planned to use his New Mexico ranch to impregnate twenty women at a time. His goal, in the words of the New York Times, was to “seed the human race with his DNA.”

4/5 He wanted his head and penis frozen at death for future resurrection. He exchanged emails with top AI researchers who entertained ideas about genetically modifying Black people’s intelligence and casually floated the notion that mass death of the elderly and infirm might be evolutionarily beneficial.

5/5 This is what transhumanism actually is when you strip away the academic language. It is the belief that the human being as currently constituted is a problem to be solved. That through genetic engineering, AI, and technological intervention, we can transcend the limitations of being human. Live forever. Design superior offspring. Merge with machines. Upgrade the species.

This is not a new idea. It is an old one with a new name. ¤ Eugenics.

💙 🐣 RT @RepDonBacon Perfect words by Supreme Justice Gorsuch.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepDonBacon/status/2024879962197573873?s=20/photo/1

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be dis-appointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative pro-cess, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

WSJ: Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Global Tariffs https://tinyurl.com/mu693csn ‘The 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, removes a tool of diplomatic pressure that Trump has aggressively wielded to remake US trade deals & collect tens of $$billions from importers’
// Ruling finds president exceeded his powers by imposing duties without clear authorization from Congress

President Trump’s global tariffs are illegal, the Supreme Court ruled Friday, in a stinging repudiation of a signature White House initiative.

The 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, removes a tool of diplomatic pressure that Trump has aggressively wielded to remake U.S. trade deals and collect tens of billions of dollars from companies importing foreign goods. The ruling didn’t directly address whether the government will have to pay back the tariff revenue it has already collected.

It is the first time the high court has definitively struck down one of Trump’s second-term policies. In other areas, the court’s conservative majority has so far granted Trump broad latitude to deploy executive power in novel ways, but a majority of justices—three conservatives and three liberals—said he went too far in enacting his most sweeping tariffs without clear authorization from Congress. …

The decision rebuffed an extraordinary public pressure campaign that Trump had mounted against the court while it was weighing the case. The president claimed, for instance, that a decision against the tariffs would be “the biggest threat in history” to U.S. national security and “would literally destroy the United States of America.”

The ruling will likely prompt the White House to try to re-enact the tariffs using other legal justifications. The administration does have other laws it can rely on, but those laws have procedural constraints and may not allow tariffs as expansive as the ones the court struck down. …

Until Trump, no president had invoked the emergency-powers law as a basis to impose tariffs. Three different lower courts ruled the tariffs unlawful, including a specialized federal appeals court of national jurisdiction that said the emergency-powers law didn’t authorize tariffs of the magnitude Trump imposed. …

Trump has boasted about the billions of dollars being raised by his tariffs, despite the government arguing in court that any revenue is only incidental. The tariffs are in place to regulate foreign commerce, Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices during the November proceedings.

🧵 RT @kyledcheney BREAKING: The Supreme Court has struck down President Trump’s tariff authority, saying his claim of emergency authority to issue sweeping tariffs to America’s trading partners was unlawful.
📌 https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/2024862324566163840?s=20
[CourtDoc:] LEARNING RESOURCES, INC., ET AL. v. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL.https://tinyurl.com/23nu4v6y 170p
// 6/3: Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas dissenting

Roberts (for majority): “Against this backdrop of clear and limited delegations, the Government reads IEEPA to give the President power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs. On this reading, moreover, the President is unconstrained by the significant procedural limitations in other tariff statutes and free to issue a dizzying array of modifications at will. See supra, at 3. All it takes to unlock that extraordinary power is a Presidential declaration of emergency, which the Government asserts is unreviewable. Brief for Federal Parties 42. And the only way of restraining the exercise of that power is a veto-proof majority in Congress.”

It is also telling that in IEEPA’s “half century of exist-ence,” no President has invoked the statute to impose any tariffs—let alone tariffs of this magnitude and scope. National Federation of Independent Business, 595 U.S., at 119.3 Presidents have, by contrast, regularly invoked IEEPA for other purposes.”

Gorsuch: And without doctrines like major questions, our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.

This case offers an example of the problem. Article I grants Congress, not the President, the power to impose tariffs. Still, the President claims, Congress passed that power on to him in IEEPA, permitting him to impose tariffs on nearly any goods he wishes, in any amount he wishes, based on emergencies he himself has declared. He insists, as well, that his emergency declarations are unreviewable. A ruling for him here, the President acknowledges, would afford future Presidents the same latitude he asserts for himself. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 69. So another President might impose tariffs on gas-powered automobiles to respond to climate change. Ibid. Or, really, on virtually any imports for any emergency any President might perceive. And all of these emergency declarations would be unreview-able. Just ask yourself: What President would willingly give up that power?

🔆 This❗️⋙ CNBC: Stocks rebound from earlier losses after Supreme Court knocks down Trump’s emergency tariffs https://tinyurl.com/yfmzhzh3 “Traders reacted to the latest gross domestic product report, which badly missed estimates.”

🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @JustinWolfers JUST DROPPED: Supreme Court decision on (most of Trump’s tariffs). They’re unconstitutional. They’ve always been unconstitutional. Turn ’em off. ¤ This wasn’t a trade war; it was a pointless and illegal diversion.

🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump JUST IN: U.S. Q4 2025 GDP growth slowed to 1.4%, well below expectations of 3%. ¤ For 2025 overall, the economy grew 2.2%, down from 2.8% in 2024. ¤ Are we great yet???

🐣 RT @BillKristol “We have an administration hostile to the rule of law and to the fight for freedom. We cannot wish away that reality. But we can also understand the reality of the admirable actions of Minnesotans and Epstein survivors and Ukrainian freedom fighters.” [🔰 link]

⭕ 19 Feb 2026

NYT: With ‘Tremendous’ Deals at Stake, Trump Wants to Bring Russia in From the Cold https://tinyurl.com/238yccps “Most of the American corporate world, which once saw Russia as a hot emerging market with a growing middle class, remains skeptical about returning to the country”
// cont.: because of the political uncertainty and the limited potential gains.”
// orig title: NYT: With ‘Tremendous’ Deals at Stake, Trump Is Bringing Russia in From the Cold
// Since President Trump took office more than a year ago, the Kremlin has dangled possible investments in front of the famously transactional leader. The message is starting to resonate with investors.

WaPo Editorial: New numbers hurt Trump’s case at the Supreme Court https://tinyurl.com/2j7pdhd5 ‘President Donald Trump justified his tariff offensive last year as a way to address the trade deficit, but it increased by 5.7% in 2025, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis.’
// The real goods trade deficit increased despite new tariffs.

🐣 RT @clashreport BIG: The Pentagon warned the EU it will retaliate if Brussels adds a strong “Buy European” clause to defense procurement rules, saying it “strongly opposes” limits on U.S. firms and rejects “protectionist and exclusionary policies” that “strong-arm American companies out of the market.” ¤ If Europe moves ahead, Washington may review waivers under existing defense trade deals, potentially restricting EU firms’ access to U.S. contracts even as nearly two-thirds of EU imported weapons come from the U.S.
[Politico link:] https://tinyurl.com/3zp6bty3

🐣 RT @nycjim I am so weary of this: ¤ “He told tall tales. Cracked old jokes. Got people to pay money into something he’s named after himself. Hyped up his wife’s movie. Trashed his enemies. Aired familiar grievances. Congratulated himself. Brought along top members of his government and then kicked back while they congratulated him.”
🖼 https://x.com/nycjim/status/2024752923763253259?s=20/photo/1
// “Board of Peace”
⋙ 🐣 You forgot the illegal $8-10B for his slush fund, falling asleep, and YMCA
and who did/didn’t show up
*sigh*

WSJ Editorial: The Embarrassing Truth About Tariffs https://tinyurl.com/4wdkhc6y “If your tariff policy is so unpopular that you have to bully the central bank into not talking about it, maybe it’s time for a new policy.”
// Why is Trump so upset about Federal Reserve economic research into his trade policies?

🐣 RT @SenMarkey Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a pay-to-play scam that undermines our commitment to peace and human rights around the world. We don’t need backroom deals made by Trump cronies who will say and pay whatever to get a seat at the table. We need diplomacy and democracy.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SenMarkey/status/2024605968982487159?s=20/photo/1 -4

TheEconomist: Vladimir Putin is caught in a vice of his own making https://tinyurl.com/2hcb5zkp “Even if a peace deal were concluded, the aftershocks inside Russia would risk economic and political instability, wrecking Mr Putin’s plans of being ranked among history’s greatest tsars”
// Russia’s president cannot win the war, but fears peace
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2024741994640159005?s=20/photo/1

You would have thought that, after four bloody years, a war which neither side can win would have burnt itself out. But not the war in Ukraine. And the blame lies with one man.

Vladimir Putin is caught in a vice of his own making. The chances are waning that his armies in Ukraine will produce something he can call victory. Many people expect peace talks, continuing in Geneva this week, to give him a way out because President Donald Trump will force Ukraine to cede territory. In fact, that escape route is becoming less likely. And even if a peace deal were concluded, the aftershocks inside Russia would risk economic and political instability, wrecking Mr Putin’s plans of being ranked among history’s greatest tsars.

The first problem for Russia’s president is the battlefield. In the Great Patriotic War, from June 1941 to May 1945, the Red Army advanced 1,600km from Moscow to Berlin. In this longer war, Russian forces in Donetsk, the main focus, have advanced just 60km—the distance from Washington to Baltimore.

Russia has been unable to generate enough combat strength to break through Ukrainian lines. In the 10-30km “kill zone” around the front line, vulnerable to drones and their all-seeing operators, soldiers and equipment cannot mass without becoming targets. Even if Russian forces breach Ukrainian lines they struggle to exploit their success. …

In fact, any peace plan is unlikely to satisfy Russia. The talks have a Potemkin quality, illustrated by the preposterous promise of a $12trn peace dividend, much of it to be shared between Russia and America. They are also unlikely to give Mr Putin the territory he has been unable to take by force and which he wants in order to declare victory.

For Ukraine to surrender its best-defended ground would be a strategic disaster. And although Mr Trump still has leverage, his ability to bounce Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, into a bad deal has passed its peak. True, America still sells vital weapons to Europe, which passes them to Ukraine. But Ukraine is now less dependent on American intelligence than it was, and America has reduced its financing of the war by 99%. If, as seems likely, any peace deal involves American security guarantees to Ukraine that are enshrined in a treaty, the Senate will have to ratify it. That will also help protect against a one-sided settlement.

Another reason for Mr Putin to be cautious about a deal is that peace itself could trigger a crisis in Russia. As our guest column explains, Russia has diverted so many resources to defence, which now accounts for 8% of gdp, that the rest of the economy is ailing. The regime’s lawlessness and the prospect of renewed hostilities will deter new investors. The challenge of redeploying resources from warmaking to peace, including finding work for soldiers returning from the front, could induce a deep recession.

The politics would be ugly, too. Disgruntled veterans destabilise regimes, especially in Russia, as before the revolution in 1917 and after its war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Polls suggest that Russians would initially welcome the end of the fighting. But questions would surely follow: over the bungled campaign, the squandering of lives and treasure, and Russia’s humiliating dependence on China for financial and military support in the name of saving its own civilisation. That might limit Mr Putin’s ability to restart the war. It could even pose a threat to his power.
v
Mr Putin cannot give up the war, but the cost of carrying it on is rising. If his attempts to generate more combat strength only hollow out Russia further, that could lead to a crisis. If it doesn’t, Ukraine and Russia will be trapped in conflict. Can anything be done to end it? Pursuing Russia’s shadow fleet and activating a Senate plan to punish buyers of its oil could limit export revenues. Countering Mr Putin’s propaganda that America and Europe are bent on destroying Russia would help. So would correcting his claims of an inevitable Russian victory: no one, least of all Mr Trump, likes to back a loser.
^
It is hard to force a dictator to act. Ultimately, Mr Putin’s readiness to carry on fighting depends on the pain he is willing to inflict. But the more pain there is, the clearer it will be to Russians that he is bringing ruin upon them.

🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump BREAKING: In an extraordinary and illegal move, Trump says he’s transferring $10 billion from the U.S. government to his “Board of Peace,” which he chairs and can use the funds as he wishes. ¤ Where is Congress???

🐣 RT @steadystate2025 “When a jurist of his stature, background, and conservative pedigree warns of an existential threat and calls for civic courage, we all must listen.”
💙 ⋙ The Steady State: Judge Luttig’s Warning:: A Constitutional Conservative Sounds the Alarm https://tinyurl.com/3jbmmd97 STEADYSTATE1.SUBSTACK.COM

🐣 RT @hippyygoat … Pope Leo XIV has turned down Donald Trump’s invitation to join his so-called “Board of Peace”
💽 https://x.com/hippyygoat/status/2024427517159846009?s=20/photo/1
// “Pope issues warning as he rejects Board of Peace invite”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ron_m70826 I think the Holy Father is being wise and prudent concerning the Board of Peace.
¤ https://x.com/ron_m70826/status/2024478457011359952?s=20

While it was originally endorsed by the UN Security Council (Resolution 2803) to oversee postwar reconstruction and governance in the Gaza Strip, it has since expanded its mission to address global conflicts independently of the United Nations.

The Board of Peace may be its biggest mistake for these reasons:
1) Trump is the Chairman for Life with unilateral veto power over all board decisions.
2) Membership is by invitation only. “Permanent” status requires a $1 billion financial commitment.
3) Grounded in its own private charter; it is a “pay-to-play club” lacking global legal authority.

The Holy Father most likely sees red flags all over the place with this unusual, precarious, and seemingly farcical arrangement wherein the blasphemer Trump is totally in control.
#boardofpeace #UnitedNations #Vatican

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇹🇷 🇷🇺 According to Politico, the United States is pushing NATO allies to exclude Ukraine and Indo Pacific partners from formally taking part in the alliance’s annual summit in Ankara this July. ¤ The move signals a White House effort to redefine NATO strictly as a Euro Atlantic defense bloc, rolling back decades of broader crisis management and global engagement. ¤ Trump received this directive directly from Putin.

🐣 RT @United24media ⚡ EU demands Russia pull troops from multiple neighboring regions.
Kaja Kallas proposed a peace framework calling for withdrawals from Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Transnistria, per Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
🔗 https://tinyurl.com/2dms596u

🐣 RT @Tendar Merz: Russia in a “state of deepest barbarism” [Source: “Süddeutsche Zeitung”]
¤ https://x.com/Tendar/status/2024399014699946435?s=20

“Chancellor Friedrich Merz sees little chance of a swift end to the war in Ukraine through negotiations. “In my estimation, this war will only end when one of the two sides is exhausted, either militarily or economically,” the CDU leader told the newspapers of the Neue Berliner Redaktionsgesellschaft (NBR) and the Rheinpfalz .

Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Merz added: “Reason and humanitarian arguments will not convince Putin. That is the bitter truth.” It is therefore the goal of European efforts “to ensure that the Russian state can no longer wage the war militarily and cannot continue to finance it economically.”

According to Merz, “the Russian power clique cannot do without war for the foreseeable future. They have to keep the war machine running because they have no plan for what else to do with the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, some of them severely traumatized, who are returning from the front,” the CDU leader said.

Merz described the state of Russia in bleak terms: “We are currently experiencing this country in a state of profound barbarity. This will not change in the foreseeable future, and we must accept that.”

WSJ: Former Prince Andrew Arrested Over Epstein Probe, BBC Reports https://tinyurl.com/42f8puyw “Police say a man in his 60s was detained on suspicion of misconduct in public office … Police in the U.K. don’t normally name suspects when they are arrested.“

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I think it is good that we had a trilateral meeting in Switzerland. We respect and appreciate the Middle East partners and the ones in other countries. But I think if the war is in Europe – we need to find a place in Europe.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2024364671172542511?s=20

There were two groups: a military group and a political group. We are closer to complete negotiations on the military track than on the political one. Why? Because the military guys spoke in a trilateral format about how to develop a monitoring mission for the ceasefire, when it is established, when political track opens these possibilities. They discussed the details, technical things, and capabilities of both sides. And first of all, of Americans, because they will play a leading role in the monitoring.

There’s a difficult discussion about the role of the Europeans. For us, their role is significant. It’s great that we have Americans as our partners. But I underline time and again that I think that we also need European representatives. ¤ So, on the military track they are closer to a result – a draft with all the details on how it has to be monitored immediately after the ceasefire

⋙ 🐣 Russia has been engaging in hybrid attacks against Europe for years. The end to these attacks needs to be part of any peace agreement. ¤ Russia needs to act like a responsible member of the international community. If this requires regime change, so be it

⭕ 18 Feb 2026

Forbes, David Deptula: Putin’s War Story—And The Price Of Believing Him https://tinyurl.com/5ytmma45 “The seeming inevitability of a Russian victory is not a fact. It is a story. And when measured against the realities of the battlespace, that story collapses”
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2025197955599261887?s=20

I recently participated in a panel at the Atlantic Council addressing an issue of critical importance: the potential impact of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing disinformation campaign. The central issues is this: What are the military facts of the Russia-Ukraine war, and how does that compare with what we are being told?

The answer matters. Wars are not fought solely on battlefields. They are fought in perceptions and narratives that influence political will—and increasingly, economic expectations.

Putin understands this. His strategy now depends less on decisive battlefield success and more on convincing the world, particularly the United States [ie Trump], that Russian victory is inevitable; that continued support for Ukraine is futile; and that pragmatic Americans would be wiser to prepare for profitable normalization than prolonged confrontation. As European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned at the Munich Security Conference, “The greatest threat Russia presents right now is that it gains more at the negotiation table than it has achieved on the battlefield.”

The seeming inevitability of a Russian victory is not a fact. It is a story. And when measured against the realities of the battlespace, that story collapses.

What is Really Happening in Ukraine

From a military perspective, this is a grinding war of attrition in which Ukraine continues to hold, adapt, and deny Russia strategic success despite enormous pressure.

At every level of war, Russia has failed to achieve its core objectives.

At the strategic level, Russia sought to rapidly seize Kyiv, overthrow Ukraine’s government, absorb the country into its sphere, and fracture NATO. None of those objectives has been achieved. Kyiv remains the capital of a sovereign Ukraine. Its government functions. NATO is larger and stronger than before the invasion.

Five years ago, few imagined Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Today, both are members. I recently visited the U.S. airbase where Finnish pilots are training to fly the F-35 and inspected Finland’s first aircraft. Both would have seemed unimaginable before Putin’s invasion.

At the operational level, Ukraine has held Russian ground forces across roughly a 1,000-kilometer front. It has neutralized Russia’s effective use of the Black Sea and denied it air superiority over Ukrainian-controlled territory—an extraordinary failure for what was presumed to be a modern air force.

At the tactical level, Ukraine holds a favorable casualty exchange ratio reported to be between 2.5:1 and 7:1, with higher ratios in some engagements. Even when Russian forces do advance a few kilometers, they do so at staggering cost.

The casualty figures reinforce two core realities: First, Russia is willing to pay extreme human costs for marginal territorial gains; and second, time favors Moscow only if Ukraine’s defenses erode faster than Russia’s manpower and production base.

That is the central dynamic of this war. It is not about rapid breakthroughs. It is about endurance, industrial capacity, and political will. The fact is, Russia’s narrative promises inevitability, but the battlespace reveals attrition without momentum, losses without leverage, and violence without decision.

Ukraine’s will is not in question. The uncertain variable is Western resolve.

Casualties, Recruitment, and a Regime Bound to War

Russia’s casualty levels—by credible estimates the highest since World War II—reflect a force trading lives for time rather than achieving decisive effect. High casualties combined with minimal territorial gains indicate constrained maneuver, uneven adaptation, and reliance on brute-force attrition.

Recruitment patterns reinforce that picture. Russia has drawn heavily from prisons, coerced debtors, and recruited foreign nationals. Assessments of Russian military manpower trends indicate that today the Kremlin spends more rubles compensating families of troops killed in action than it does paying the salaries of active-duty personnel or recruiting new soldiers. These are not indicators of sustainable strength; they are indicators of strain.

Putin is not fighting merely for territory, of course. He is fighting for his political survival.

Having framed the invasion as existential for Russia, he has made it existential for himself. Putin has little political space to reverse course without redefining the outcome as success. The longer the war continues, the more his regime’s legitimacy comes into question. That dynamic helps explain Russia’s willingness to absorb extraordinary losses. Ending the war without tangible gains risks exposing the enormous human and economic costs already incurred.

What we are witnessing, therefore, is not the profile of an inevitable victor. We are watching a regime spending lives to buy time—hoping Western fatigue, political division, or economic temptation will deliver what battlefield performance has not.

The Economic Narrative: A New Front in the War of Stories

Recent reporting highlights Moscow’s signaling about improved economic ties with the United States should the war be resolved on terms favorable to Russia. The implication is clear: Russia can be both adversary and opportunity. End the war on acceptable terms, and American businesses may regain access to energy and other natural resources, reconstruction contracts, and renewed commercial engagement.

This is strategic framing designed to appeal to those who prioritize deal-making and economic return. The subtext is straightforward: Why continue costly support for Ukraine when normalization could yield financial gain?

But this argument rests on the same illusion as the inevitability narrative.

First, Russia is not negotiating from dominance; it is negotiating from attritional stalemate. Second, what Putin is offering as economic “opportunity” is, in reality, the result of the West’s coercive geopolitical pressure. That is leverage, not partnership. Third, rewarding aggression with reintegration would send the wrong signals to the world—particularly Beijing—that military force can yield not only territorial gains but eventual economic normalization.

Putin’s message attempts to fuse inevitability with opportunity. It is psychological pressure wrapped in commercial language.

Narrative Is Not a Substitute for Power

Some argue that Putin’s greatest advantage lies in narrative dominance—that by imposing a story of inevitability, Russia aims to shape negotiations regardless of battlefield reality. Narrative matters. But narrative without power is propaganda.

Putin’s bet is that Russia can absorb costs longer than the West—that democracies will tire, that business interests will lobby for normalization, and that political leaders will choose short-term economic engagement over long-term strategic stability.

That assumption is false—if the West chooses to prove it false.

Russia’s vulnerabilities are real. Its manpower pool is strained. Its economy is increasingly militarized and brittle. Sanctions have constrained access to technology and capital. And its strategy depends on sanctuary—the belief that its homeland and war-sustaining infrastructure remain largely insulated from meaningful consequence. As long as the United States and European allies withhold from Ukraine the means to meaningfully challenge that sanctuary, Moscow can sustain the illusion of endurance.

Peace Through Strength Requires Actual Strength

To bring Putin to serious negotiations, he must face costs he cannot accept. Thus far, U.S. policy—under both Presidents Biden and Trump—has emphasized avoiding escalation rather than enabling decisive leverage. That approach has helped Ukraine avoid defeat. It has not created the conditions for victory.

Peace through strength only works if it is real

That means equipping Ukraine with the long-range strike capabilities and advanced systems necessary to hold at risk Russia’s critical centers of gravity—command nodes, logistics hubs, energy infrastructure, war-sustaining assets, and broader economic foundations. When what Putin values is credibly threatened, serious negotiation becomes possible.

An option under discussion in that vein is directing frozen Russian sovereign assets held by G7 nations toward Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction. That is not escalation; it is accountability.

The Larger Strategic Signal

How this war ends will shape world events far beyond Europe. If Russia’s aggression is rewarded with eventual normalization and profitable reengagement, the lesson to China —and other revisionist powers—will be unmistakable: Simply endure sanctions, absorb losses, manipulate narratives, and the world will ultimately accommodate your aims.

If instead aggression is met with sustained resistance, strategic failure, and denied objectives, deterrence of future aggression will be reinforced.

Militarily, Ukraine has already disproven the myth of Russia’s inevitable victory. What remains undecided is whether the United States and its allies will allow economic temptation and narrative pressure to substitute for strategic clarity and the values all free people hold dear.

Wars are fought in the battlespace, but they are also fought in stories. Russia is selling a story of inevitable victory and future profit. The facts tell a different story—of strain, attrition, and vulnerability.

History will remember which version we chose to believe—and act upon.

🐣 RT @@WW3finalboss 🇬🇧 🇫🇷 🇺🇸 🇷🇺 🇺🇦 Delegations from the United Kingdom and France showed up to the Geneva negotiations without being invited and completely shifted the dynamic. The original plan between Trump and Russia was to corner Ukraine. That strategy just ran into London and Paris. ¤ They sent a clear message: no deals about Europe without Europe. ¤ Tomorrow might be uncomfortable for Trump.

NYT, David Wallace-Wells: The MAHA Coalition Is Falling Apart https://tinyurl.com/5yvk8bdu “Last week’s precedent-breaking news that the F.D.A. wouldn’t even bother to consider Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine for approval felt like a dark revelation.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2024350509147066546?s=20/photo/1

Over the past year, the [FDA] has applied capricious-seeming standards to questions of drug approval, in a pattern of political behavior that Americans have grown unhappily familiar with in the age of MAGA: a mix of cruelty and incompetence giving rise to erratic and unreliable decisions that often reflect access and partisan alliances rather than any good-faith tabulation of national costs and benefits.

NYT, Bret Stephens: Western Civ Can Save Us — Again https://tinyurl.com/muuxbmbb “It’s the tradition that seeks a deeper understanding of the world through a continuous upending of its own methods, beliefs and aspirations. It’s a civilization that, at its best, values questions more than answers and the freedom to question more than life itself.”

WSJ, Carol Ryan: Billionaires’ Low Taxes Are Becoming a Problem for the Economy https://tinyurl.com/39492tvy “The bottom half of American households have lost ground. Their 2.5% cut of the country’s wealth has slipped from 3.5% in 1990.” in RED ⬇️
// Tax avoidance by the superwealthy is an economic issue as well as a political one
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2024278094199107917?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @RepRaskin America has no kings, but we’ve got one Boss and his name is Bruce Springsteen. Unlike our faux-King, the Boss fights for freedom and democracy for everyone. I cannot wait to hear him sing Streets of Minneapolis loud enough to rattle the walls of what’s left of the White House.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepRaskin/status/2024248149531824248?s=20/photo/1

Maybe the President will counter-program when Springsteen comes to town by singing a love song to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Trump-Kennedy Center, another American institution Trump is bulldozing.

I’ve been to 13 Springsteen and the E Street Band concerts as well as his Broadway show, and I can feel it in my bones—Bruce and the band are going to bring a Rock-and-Roll Resurrection to America and a Rock-and-Roll Exorcism to Washington, D.C. This may be the hottest ticket on the planet. I will be very much out in the street when they come to town.

Congress is full of Springsteen superfans, and Playbook caught up with a couple for their hottest takes. It should surprise no one that Reps. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.), who shares a New Jersey connection, and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who had Springsteen atop his Spotify Wrapped and is friends with members of the E Street Band, are both amped up for what’s coming.

“An American spring of Rock ‘n’ Rebellion is what the country needs in this moment and I am here for it,” Menendez told Playbook in a statement. “It’s unfortunate that Trump and his supporters at Mar-a-Lago will be home listening to YMCA for the millionth time since his inauguration still trying to make it feel cool. Sad!” Raskin – who has been to 13 Springsteen shows – said, Springsteen will bring “a Rock-and-Roll Exorcism to Washington. I cannot wait to hear him sing ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ loud enough to rattle the walls of what’s left of the White House. [Source?]

AOL/Fortune: Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity https://tinyurl.com/4davuun7 —and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago

In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973.

Newfangled computers were actually at times producing too much information, generating agonizingly detailed reports and printing them on reams of paper. What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity was for several years a bust. This unexpected outcome became known as Solow’s productivity paradox, thanks to the economist’s observation of the phenomenon.

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” Solow wrote in a New York Times Book Review article in 1987.

New data on how C-suite executives are—or aren’t—using AI shows history is repeating itself, complicating the similar promises economists and Big Tech founders made about the technology’s impact on the workplace and economy. Despite 374 companies in the S&P 500 mentioning AI in earnings calls—most of which said the technology’s implementation in the firm was entirely positive—according to a Financial Times analysisfrom September 2024 to 2025, those positive adoptions aren’t being reflected in broader productivity gains.

A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the last three years, the research noted.

However, firms’ expectations of AI’s workplace and economic impact remained substantial: Executives also forecast AI will increase productivity by 1.4% and increase output by 0.8% over the next three years. While firms expected a 0.7% cut to employment over this time period, individual employees surveyed saw a 0.5% increase in employment. […]

⋙ 🐣 ¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2024172931043999864?s=20

you’re going to need systems analysts to integrate AI into operations and logistics
and smart people to set it up (for each upgrade)
and smarter people to maintain it
and trainers and interpreters
and regulators and integrators and quality testers
and researchers who create new information
have fun, guys!

🐣 RT @@PolymarketIntel Trump on Ukraine: Ukraine better come to the table fast. That’s all I’m telling you. We are in a position we want them to come.

📊 DailyBeast: Devastating Poll Reveals How Many Americans Call Billionaire Trump ‘Corrupt’ https://tinyurl.com/27skuzn3 “The YouGov/Economist poll, conducted between February 13 and 16 among 1,682 American adults, shows that 49% view Trump as ‘corrupt’”
// Since returning to the White House, Trump has generated at least $1.4 billion in wealth.
43% OUT-OF-TOUCH
46% CRUEL
47% RACIST
49% CORRUPT
50% DANGEROUS
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2024166922288267324?s=20/photo/1

A brutal new poll reveals a significant portion of the American public has a remarkably low opinion of the president. ¤ A striking share of Americans now describe billionaire President Donald Trump as “corrupt,” according to a new YouGov/Economist poll published Monday.

The poll, conducted between February 13 and 16 among 1,682 American adults, shows that 49 percent view Trump as “corrupt”—a finding that comes as his personal fortune and political power expand in tandem.

🐣 RT @RepJeffries Republicans cut healthcare for millions of Americans to give a $75 billion slush fund to ICE. ¤ You deserve better.

🐣 RT @KyivPost Zelensky warned that any agreement requiring Kyiv’s armed forces to unilaterally withdraw from the region and hand it over to Russia would fail in a referendum.

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 🇺🇦🇷🇺 Ukraine-Russia peace talks end abruptly after two hours in Geneva. ¤ Ukraine–Russia talks in Geneva concluded on Wednesday after just two hours, significantly shorter than Tuesday’s six-hour session, and ended without any progress on resolving territorial disputes.

🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar Kremlin officials and Kremlin-affiliated media sources reaffirmed Russia’s unwillingness to compromise as trilateral talks started in Geneva on February 17.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2024128901492953479?s=20/photo/1

Kremlin officials and Kremlin-affiliated media sources reaffirmed Russia’s unwillingness to compromise as trilateral talks started in Geneva on February 17. US, Ukrainian, and Russian delegations began trilateral talks in Geneva on February 17 and will continue on February 18[16] A source told Kremlin newswire TASS that the talks will cover at least five tracks – territorial, military, political, economic, and security issues. [17] ISW will continue to monitor reports about the trilateral talks in the coming days.

Russian State Duma deputies and Federation Council senators, whose target audience is the Russian population and who often act as bullhorns for the Kremlin’s true diplomatic and military aims, continue to advance the Kremlin’s boilerplate rhetorical lines about Russia’s original war demands that go beyond territory in eastern Ukraine. Duma Defense Committee Chairperson Andrei Kartapolov claimed that Ukraine will only be able to “win” when it joins the Russian Federation – reiterating Russia’s long-term goal of destroying an independent Ukraine.[18] Duma Defense Committee Deputy Chairperson Yuri Shvytkin claimed that Russia’s military achievements and technological superiority create a “favorable backdrop” for a future diplomatic settlement – furthering the Kremlin’s false narrative that Ukraine and the West should give in to Russia’s demands now at the negotiating table out of fear of future Russian actions on the battlefield.[19] Deputies and senators continued to claim that Russia should only negotiate with the United States, and that Russia and the United States together should act in the “spirit of Anchorage” – a reference to the Kremlin’s insistence that the United States and Russia came to an alleged agreement during the August 2025 Alaska Summit to end the war based on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public demands for Ukrainian and NATO capitulation.[20]

🐣 RT @CFR_org “If Washington fails to learn from its experience in Ukraine, it will find itself dangerously ill equipped to wage a great-power war, at a moment when the likelihood of such a conflict is growing,” write John Kawika Warden and CFR expert @RebeccaLissner for @ForeignAffairs.
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Rebecca Lissner and John Warden: Ukraine and the New Way of War https://tinyurl.com/44354jyz Learning the Right Lessons for the Conflicts of the Future

🐣 RT @BillKristol “The rest of us need to follow in Minnesota’s footsteps. Not just when DHS launches a surge in a particular city. We need the grass-roots, spontaneous exercise of civic leadership in the fight against authoritarianism on every front for the next 3 years.” [Bulwark 🔰 link]

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Before the start of today’s work of the delegations in Geneva, I held a meeting with the Ukrainian team.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2024055270779846815?s=20

Yesterday there were meetings in different formats – both bilateral between Ukraine and the United States and multilateral formats. In particular, there were talks between Ukrainian, American, and Russian representatives in two tracks – military and military-political issues. The Ukrainian delegation, together with the American team, also met with European representatives – from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. We consider Europe’s participation in the process indispensable for the successful implementation of entirely feasible agreements – Ukraine has no doubt that partners are capable of ensuring the constructiveness of the negotiation process and, therefore, a dignified result. Yesterday’s meetings were indeed difficult, and we can state that Russia is trying to drag out negotiations that could already have reached the final stage. I thank the American side for its attention to detail and patience in conversations with the current representatives of Russia.

I set a clear task for the Ukrainian delegation – to do everything possible so that the negotiations are nonetheless productive and increase the chances for peaceful solutions. Among other things, the humanitarian track is to be discussed today, namely steps for the exchange of prisoners of war and the release of civilians. I am grateful to our representatives for their teamwork and the implementation of the directives given to the delegation. Ukraine needs guaranteed security and a reliable, lasting peace. That is exactly what we are working for. Glory to Ukraine!

🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko “Russia has returned to its demand for legally binding guarantees that NATO will not expand eastward.” ¤ Well, there it is — exactly what we’ve been talking about.
¤ https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/2024043182648856599?s=20

Now it’s no longer enough for them to get Ukraine’s surrender and occupation, which they have failed to achieve over years of full-scale war. Now they want this.

And then, SUDDENLY it will turn out that the real condition for “peace” was always the December 2021 ultimatum to the United States and NATO — demanding the rollback of collective defense across the entire territory of the former Warsaw Pact in Europe.

And then it will turn out that “peace” requires the return of “historically Russian lands” to their “native harbor” — the Baltic states, Poland, Finland. After all, they were part of the Russian Empire just over 100 years ago! You do want peace, don’t you?

And so on, and so on.

Appeasing an aggressor DOES NOT WORK, for fuck’s sake. It did not work with Hitler in 1938, and it is not working with Putin now.

⭕ 17 Feb 2026

TheEconomist: Will investing in Russia really bring America a $12trn bonanza? https://tinyurl.com/55k346v5 “Any president with America’s interests at heart would look at Mr Putin’s $12trn offer with a gimlet eye—and walk away.” //➔ There are reasons Trump is hiding this.
// The Kremlin is making big promises to Donald Trump’s administration
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2024363726233534858?s=20/photo/1

All this suggests that, for as long as Mr Putin is in power, there is little potential for a new El Dorado in Russia. Suppose Russian imports returned to the levels of 2021, with America supplying an improbable 50% of that (or $190bn a year). Then suppose the total revenues of all foreign firms in Russia recovered similarly, and American ones grabbed half of that, too ($150bn). The two would still only amount to annual flows (not profits) of $340bn a year. It is extraordinarily unlikely that even these flows could last, uninterrupted, for the decades they would take to amount to anything near the Kremlin’s $12trn promise. That American firms might extract trillions of dollars’ worth of resources from the Russian Arctic similarly looks wildly unlikely.

TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: No, It’s Not Back to Business as Usual https://tinyurl.com/yetd5tac “Marco Rubio was more civil than J. D. Vance had been, but the message was the same.” … “He did not refer to the democratic values and the shared belief in freedom”

🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko I would like to once again disappoint everyone dreaming of Russia destroying Ukraine — no, if you think it will help you to impose illegal and illegitimate “elections” on Ukraine during wartime and get rid of Zelensky, you are very deeply mistaken.
¤ https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/2023718988274962544?s=20

No, you will not be able to “install your own person” who will be “more agreeable” and quickly run to Moscow to hand Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter.

Even if such a joke of “elections” were ever to take place under U.S. pressure, we would either elect Zelensky again (which is likely) as a very-far-from-perfect but still resilient wartime leader whose removal has been aggressively pushed from outside. In fact, this notorious external pressure has only mobilized support for him throughout these years.

Or we would elect Zaluzhny, Budanov, or another serious candidate who would, by and large, continue the policy of resolute defense against the destruction and absorption by totalitarian fascist Russia.

Because — surprise, surprise!! — millions of Ukrainians have been fighting or helping the country and the military in the rear for years not because they are being forced by that evil Zelensky who “doesn’t want peace,” and whose easy-peasy removal would supposedly make Ukrainians immediately raise their hands and crawl back into the GULAG.

This is happening because millions of people in Ukraine are making a conscious choice to continue fighting at the front and enduring the hardships of war at home.

And if you think that fighting for years against the full military power of Russia is an easy choice that does not require titanic motivation and willpower, you are, to put it mildly, very wrong.

Otherwise, we would not be having this conversation now, one week before the fourth anniversary of the start of the largest war in Europe since World War II that was initially supposed to be a 10-day walk in the park with a Russian triumph in Kyiv.

If you think that there are a million clones of Zelensky fighting at the front who can all be switched off with a single button, then you are either an eight-year-old kid or Donald Trump.

The motivation that has sustained years of such a brutal war against such an enormous adversary will not be broken by yet another TikTok clown populist that you will try to impose, as you did in Romania.

And the Ukrainian military does not have any Stalin-style “blocking detachments” or modern Russian-style “pits for cowards” (which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why the widely-discussed number of AWOLs is so high — if someone firmly refuses to fight, sooner or later they will leave, and nobody’s really going to hunt them down or prosecute them).

If the people of Ukraine were not willing to fight, all of this would have ended long ago, exactly as Putin expected in 2022.

Or as it happened in Afghanistan in 2021, or in Syria in 2023 — which is what happens when an army and a people are not willing to fight for their country and their leaders.

Honestly, one cannot help but be horrified by how catastrophically global politics has degraded over the past year.

🧵RT @Mylovanov Former Ukraine PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk: The position of the American administration is to avoid involving the EU in negotiations with Russia on Ukraine. ¤ Zelenskyy performed here to the maximum — everything that could be said and everyone that could be met, he did it. 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2023871895930798159?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2023871895930798159.html

🐣 RT @HedgieMarkets Michael Wooldridge, professor of AI at Oxford, is warning that the race to market AI has raised the risk of a “Hindenburg moment” that could shatter global confidence in the technology. He’s delivering the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize lecture Wednesday titled “This is not the AI we were promised.”
¤ https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2023906557642309733?s=20
⋙ 🐣 Hindenburg moment?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @rryssf_ Microsoft Research and Salesforce analyzed 200,000+ AI conversations and found something the entire industry already suspected but nobody would say out loud. ¤ every major model gets dramatically worse the longer you talk to it. ¤ GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama. all of them. no exceptions.
paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06120
◕ [TextLink:] https://x.com/rryssf_/status/2023885892335923217?s=20/photo/1

Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are conversational interfaces. As such, LLMs have the potential to assist their users not only when they can fully specify the task at hand, but also to help them define, explore, and refine what they need through multi-turn conversational exchange. Although analysis of LLM conversation logs has confirmed that underspec-ification occurs frequently in user instructions, LLM evaluation has predominantly focused on the single-turn, fully-spec-ified instruction setting. In this work, we perform large-scale simulation experiments to compare LL performance in single- and multi-turn settings. Our experiments confirm that all the top open- and closed-weight LLMs we test exhibit significantly lower performance in multi-turn conversations than single-turn, with an average drop of 39% across six generation tasks. Analysis of 200,000+ simulated conversations decomposes the performance degradation into two components: a minor loss in aptitude and a significant increase in unreliability. We find that LLMs often make assumptions in early turns and prematurely attempt to generate final solutions, on which they overly rely. In simpler terms, we discover that when LLMs take a wrong turn in a conversation, they get lost and do not recover.

🐣 RT @OJoelsen New details are emerging about a heated meeting on Saturday afternoon at the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich between several senators and members of Congress and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, along with Greenland’s Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
¤ https://x.com/OJoelsen/status/2023874646492192892?s=20

It was during this meeting that Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly went completely off the rails. ¤ The American outlet Puck had previously described how so-called “f-bombs” (f short for the word “fuck,” ed.) were thrown around the room. ¤ “Imagine Graham on his worst day,” a source told Puck.

But Berlingske can now reveal that events unfolded even more violently than previously reported — and that Graham’s outburst was directed in particular at Mette Frederiksen and Jens-Frederik Nielsen.

“He called her ‘little lady,’” a source who was in the room told Berlingske. ¤ However, the prime minister did not appear affected by what everyone present perceived as extremely degrading and outright sexist. ¤ “She seemed cool,” the source said.

When Graham had finished, Frederiksen simply responded: ¤ “When you’re done with that, the meeting can continue.”

Earlier, Graham had also stressed to Frederiksen and Nielsen that Donald Trump was the President of the United States — and thus the most powerful man in the world. ¤ The implication: neither Denmark nor Greenland should believe they are anything in comparison with the mighty United States.

This “rant,” as a Danish source who was present in the room described it, came across as extremely demeaning toward Denmark and Greenland — particularly after the “little lady” remark directed at Mette Frederiksen. ¤ Graham’s behavior was described by a source as outright “disturbing,” “shocking,” and “extremely inappropriate.”

An almost theatrical scene also unfolded between Graham and Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen. ¤ “Graham yawned directly in his face in a way that could only be interpreted as mocking,” the source told Berlingske.

It became too much for some of the American participants at the meeting, and Senator Elissa Slotkin (Democrat) was reportedly so shocked that she stood up and left the meeting. ¤ In a sense, the meeting marked the culmination of Graham’s angry outbursts.

Already on Friday, he had stunned observers on live television when asked about Greenland. ¤ “Who the hell cares who owns Greenland?” Graham said, according to CSPAN.

Participants at the meeting described his conduct as “completely out of line.” ¤ According to Berlingske’s information, there was quiet speculation afterward as to whether the senator from South Carolina had lost his composure entirely — whether he was not in his right mind when meeting the Danish and Greenlandic leaders. ¤ Only Graham himself likely knows the answer to that. —Berlingske

🐣 RT @thenation The Epstein files are full of rich and powerful men spouting theories about population decline, the supposed inferiority of nonwhite people, and what rights women should and shouldn’t have. These theories are bigoted and evil, but they are also very very dumb. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/366k5b4n

🐣 RT @thetimes Germany asks Ukraine to train its soldiers in drone warfare [link:] https://tinyurl.com/bj8mx5c5

🐣 RT @ChristopherHale NEW: Pope Leo XIV has formally declined President Trump’s invitation to join the U.S.-led Gaza “Peace Board” — days after his top Middle East envoy condemned the initiative as a pay-to-play “colonialist operation.”

🐣 RT @charter_97 [Translated from Russian] Poland Presents the Kremlin with a Trillion-Euro Bill ¤ On the instructions of Donald Tusk, Warsaw is preparing a large-scale lawsuit against Russia for the crimes of the Soviet period and is demanding reparations of 1.3 trillion euros. ¤ Will Russia Pay?

⭕ 16 Feb 2026

TheEconomist, Alexandra Prokopenko: Russia’s economy has entered the death zone
// Alexandra Prokopenko wonders how much longer it can go on metabolising its own muscle tissue

💙 🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 [Galdalv] The Panic in American Boardrooms: Trading Trillion Dollar Markets for a Fake MAGA Culture War
¤ https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2023452291525746952?s=20

🐣 RT @adagamov [tr Ru] 🇪🇺 Hillary Clinton, speaking at one of the events of the Munich Security Conference, called things by their real names:
¤ https://x.com/adagamov/status/2023313207071224216?s=20

“I believe that the Trump administration’s position toward Ukraine is shameful. I believe that the attempt to force Ukraine into a deal with Putin is shameful. I believe that the efforts of Putin and Trump to profit from the suffering and death of the Ukrainian people is a historic mistake.

I believe that Ukraine is fighting on the front lines for our democracy, for our values of freedom and civilization, losing thousands of people and losing its country because of one man’s maniacal desire to control it, and I think that Trump either doesn’t understand this or is indifferent to that suffering.

Donald Trump has betrayed the West. He has betrayed human values. He has betrayed the NATO Charter, the Atlantic Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Much of what humanity has done in the past was an attempt to understand and stop people who want power without any control or accountability. None of us here in this room would ever want to live under a regime where one person can do anything with impunity — that is exactly how Putin operates. But it is precisely him that Trump is now taking as his model.”

⭕ 15 Feb 2026

WSJ: The Break Is Over. Companies Are Jacking Up Prices Again. https://tinyurl.com/45pnccss “Higher tariffs, labor and health-insurance costs have pushed many businesses to raise prices”

🐣 RT @yasminalombaert The “Art of the Steal”: Ukraine’s sovereignty for sale.
💽 https://x.com/yasminalombaert/status/2023250001518809217?s=20/photo/1

Applebaum pulls no punches, dissecting how a real estate developer like Steve Witkoff is being led into a classic Russian “swindle”. It’s a masterclass in how transactional foreign policy creates a dangerous vacuum where national security is traded for private family interests, and where a desperate autocrat like putin can easily manipulate a White House more interested in “personal deals” than democracy.

Fareed Zakaria: “…about these negotiations between Witkoff and putin’s moneyman. You hear some fantastic tales. Zelenskyy says that the Russians are proposing a $12 trillion economic package. I don’t even understand what that means, because Russia’s GDP is $2.5 trillion, so this would be an economic package to America that is five times the total economy of Russia.”

Anne Applebaum: “No, it’s an absurd amount of money, and some of the deals that we’ve heard about that have been leaked from the conversations between Witkoff and Dmitriev are also pretty absurd. You know, look, the United States had been investing in Russia for many years, you know, starting back in the 1990s.
So we know what’s available in Russia, we know what kind of deals are available, and all kinds of businessmen who’ve worked in Russia over the past decade have been saying, “You know, don’t be swindled, you know, they can’t provide what they’re offering, no deal in Russia is as good as you think it is.”

But unfortunately, Steve Witkoff is not somebody who has any experience with Russia or obviously any experience with diplomacy. And I do fear that he has an idea that there will be some kind of US-Russia pact that he might benefit or his son might benefit or Trump’s family might benefit or that people around them will benefit.

I mean, it’s a—it’s a really disturbing prospect, or should be, for all Americans, the idea that American foreign policy is being conducted by people who are not acting in the interest of the United States or of our allies or of world peace, but are really acting in the private interests of the people doing the negotiation.

And of course, putin knows that Trump is vulnerable to that kind of offer and that kind of deal and that’s why he’s—and that’s why he’s—he’s continuing to make those suggestions. I just hope that there are enough people in the White House who will be realistic enough to know to refuse them.”

🐣 RT @statedept
[TextLink:] https://x.com/StateDept/status/2022791058120208475?s=20/photo/1

“WE DO NOT WANT ALLIES TO BE SHACKLED BY GUILT AND SHAME.
We want allies who are proud of their culture, and their heritage — who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who together with us are willing and able to defend it.”
– SECRETARY RUBIO

⋙ 🐣 What European “culture” promotes is not an identity but the idea that there are shared universal values that are captured in documents like the Universal Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2023248574616678417?s=20

These ideas have a history in Greek philodophy, Roman Law, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the hard lessons learned in WW2.

These ideas lose their soul, their very meaning, when turned into an “identity.” They are a philosophy of rights, respect, care for all, acceptance, freedom, openness, science, creativity, truthfulness.

They may have come out of the West, but are universal. They don’t belong to Europe. The door is open to anyone who sees the promise.

🐣 RT @splendid_pete They are not afraid of Europe’s culture. They are afraid of a unified Europe.
¤ https://x.com/splendid_pete/status/2022923530279555503?s=20

When Rubio talks about allies being “shackled by guilt and shame,” that is not a historical or moral argument. It is political code. “Guilt and shame” means EU rule-of-law enforcement, human-rights conditionality, and supranational constraints that limit nationalist strongmen and unilateral power. In other words, the mechanisms that make Europe act collectively instead of being picked off state by state.

A fragmented Europe is manageable. A unified European Union is not.

A Europe that acts as one becomes a peer economic power, a regulatory superpower, and a strategic actor capable of pushing back on US leverage in trade, energy, tech regulation, and security. It weakens bilateral pressure tactics and reduces dependency structures that Washington has historically relied on, even inside NATO.

That is why Trump-aligned politics consistently undermine EU institutions while embracing “proud,” “sovereign,” nationalist governments.

“Pride in culture and heritage” is not about identity. It is about preferring national governments that can be pressured individually over a supranational bloc that negotiates collectively. “Same great and noble civilization” is not about democracy. It is about ideological alignment with illiberal regimes that reject EU legal constraints.

They are not afraid of Europe existing.
They are afraid of Europe acting as one. https://x.com/statedept/stat/statedept/status/2022791058120208475

🐣 RT @Mylovanov Petraeus: This is Ukraine’s greatest generation. ¤ When the cessation of hostilities begins, we’re going to see Ukraine as the greatest military industrial complex in the West, building an entirely new country focused on new technologies and new economic endeavors. 1/
💽 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2023136080875450462?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Mylovanov Petraeus: Ukraine is producing tomorrow’s technology for today’s war. West produces yesterday’s technology for tomorrow’s wars. That’s got to be changed dramatically. ¤ They’ve got to overhaul that, bring it more up to date, to reflect how
💽 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2023136085870583936?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Mylovanov Petraeus: What allies have got to do is not fall into the trap of buying legacy systems rather than buying what is the future of warfare. The place to see that is in Ukraine. ¤ We‘ve got to learn how they have shortened the kill chain. It starts with new concepts for operations that turn into doctrine. 3X
💽 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2023136089762906342?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ColonelBigBoss [tr] 👉🏻 🇺🇦 A Ukrainian journalist asked the Finnish president at the Munich Conference if he could give some advice to Ukraine.
💽 https://x.com/ColonelBigBoss/status/2022983177153728992?s=20/photo/1
👉🏻 🇫🇮 Stubb’s response: “I have no intention of giving you advice, but I think you are winning the war. The reason I say this is that Putin has suffered a strategic defeat.

Putin wanted to turn Ukraine into a Russian country, but instead it has become European. He wanted to prevent NATO enlargement, but two new countries – Finland and Sweden – have joined the Alliance. He wanted to reduce NATO’s defence spending, but the bloc’s members have now committed to spending 5% of GDP on defence.

Secondly, he is losing on the military front. When the war began, Russia captured 12% of Ukrainian territory. That was 12 years ago. Since then it’s down to 8%. Over the last two years, it’s 1%. In December alone, Ukraine managed to kill 34,000 [325K per CSIS] Russian soldiers. They haven’t been able to replace those numbers through recruitment. So my answer is: just keep doing what you’re doing, and in the end, you will win this war.”

🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT This is what ICE does every day. Hunt little kids who are here legally. They get sent to a place called the “baby jail” in Texas. Very little of it ends up on video like this. But it’s routine. And disgusting.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CBSEveningNews Surveillance footage captures the moment dozens of elementary school students ran through a South Jersey apartment complex as an ICE operation unfolded nearby. One mother told CBS News, “There’s a lot of kids right now, they’re traumatized. They don’t want to go to school, they don’t want to go outside. They’re just scared.”
💽 https://x.com/CBSEveningNews/status/2022464479225663617?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @mhdksafa The richest man on Earth dismantled the organization that feeds the poorest children on earth. ¤ Elon Musk’s dismantling of USAID has already killed more children than in Gaza and Ukraine combined. ¤ He cut lifetimes for millions and the result is a silent massacres.

🐣 RT @VictorKvert2008 Sikorski: “As you know, Russia, the USA, and Great Britain guaranteed the security of Ukraine and its borders. ¤ In exchange for Ukraine giving up what was then the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. ¤ So you have an obligation to Ukraine to help them defend their freedom.”

NYT: Canada Gives U.S. Arms Makers the Cold Shoulder on Military Spending https://tinyurl.com/3bd2a9mb “Canada plans to unveil a new strategy that will shift its current reliance on American companies to Canadian military suppliers.”

Last month, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Carney said, without naming Mr. Trump or the United States, that there has been a permanent “rupture” in the world order. He called upon middle-size nations to cooperate as a counter to the world’s superpowers.

Echoes of Mr. Carney’s speech were heard at the Munich Security Conference last week. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany said that the international rules-based order “no longer exists.” Along with President Emmanuel Macron of France, he also spoke about Europe’s push for military autonomy.

Like Canada, European nations have begun to question the reliability of the United States as an ally, given the Trump administration’s threats against Greenland.

Size of Gaza Strip 375km², (141²mi); 41km (25mi) long by 6-12km (3.7-7.5mi) wide.

🐣 RT @_NAFO_FELLA 🇪🇺 Kaja Kallas on Russia: Russia is no superpower. After more than a decade of conflict, including four years of full-scale war in Ukraine, Russia has barely advanced beyond the 2014 lines. And the cost? 1.2 million casualties. ¤ Today, Russia is broken. Its economy is in shreds. It is disconnecting from the European energy markets, and its own citizens are fleeing. ¤ The greatest threat Russia presents right now is that it gains more at the negotiation table than it has achieved on the battlefield.

⭕ 14 Feb 2026

🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas: “Coming from a country that ranks second in the freedom of speech index, and for me to hear lectures about free speech from a country [the US] that ranks 58th in that same index is interesting”🇪🇺🇺🇸

🐣 RT @visionergeo 🇺🇸 Today, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a “historic” speech at the Munich Conference:
¤ 💽 https://x.com/visionergeo/status/2022641683742003460?s=20/photo/1

📌 “The euphoria caused by the triumph of the Cold War has led us to a dangerous illusion.
As if we had entered the era of the ‘end of history,’ as if every nation would from now on become a liberal democracy… as if we would live in a borderless world where everyone would be a global citizen.”

📌 “It was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and the lessons of 5,000 years of written history of humanity.”

📌 “In striving for a borderless world, we opened the door to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the unity of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.”

📌 “The United States of America once again takes on the task of renewal and restoration, guided by a vision of a future that will be as proud and sovereign as the vital past of our civilization.”

📌 “And although we are ready, if necessary, to do this alone, we want to do it together with you — our European friends.”

📌 “The United States of America and Europe — we belong to each other. America was founded 250 years ago, but its roots on this continent began much earlier.

The people who settled and built the country where I was born came to our shores with the memories, traditions, and Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred heritage — an unbreakable link between the old and the new world.

We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are connected by the deepest ties that can exist between peoples, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, origin, and the sacrifices our ancestors made together.”

⋙ 🐣 Correction: The United States is multi-racial/multi-ethnic and has always been a nation of immigrants.
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2022706418395279550?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 Correction: The Constitution of the United States makes clear there is no ‘national religion,’ not Christian or otherwise. ¤ Trends show a decrease in the % of Christians, greater diversity, and increase in Unaffilated or “Nones.”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2022707993952031063?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @FCDOGovUK The UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands are confident that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin. ¤ We and our partners will make use of all policy levers at our disposal to continue to hold Russia to account.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/FCDOGovUK/status/2022655856114884808?s=20/photo/1

…. This is the conclusion of our Governments based on analyses of samples from Alexei Navalny. These analyses have conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine. Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia. …

These latest findings once again underline the need to hold Russia accountable for its repeated violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention and, in this instance, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. …

🐣 RT @NSTRIKE1231 🇺🇦 Zelenskyy:
📍 “I am ready for elections, but security guarantees and a ceasefire are necessary. No one is clinging to power.”
¤ https://x.com/NSTRIKE1231/status/2022584497586286756?s=20

📍 “If a real compromise is reached with Russia, a nationwide referendum could be held within a few months.”

📍 “Ukraine is not losing, and I believe the Trump administration has realized this. It may even have come as a surprise to them, as Russian propaganda is actively working on them as well.”

📍 “Each occupied kilometer of Ukrainian land costs Russia 170 soldiers — either killed or seriously wounded.”

📍 “My calls for a meeting with Putin are not about emotions. They are about ending the war. Only leaders can discuss the most difficult issues — territories.”

📍 “Any agreement must be signed by the presidents and then ratified by parliament or through a referendum. Our people have gone through this war — they deserve to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

⭕ 13 Feb 2026

WSJ Editorial: You’re Paying 90% of Trump’s Tariffs, Says New York Fed https://tinyurl.com/yr34258u “No matter how often President Trump insists his tariffs are taxing foreigners to enrich the US, economic studies keep showing that Americans actually pay the bill.”
// So the New York Federal Reserve says in the latest look at import prices.

No matter how often President Trump insists his tariffs are taxing foreigners to enrich the U.S., economic studies keep showing that Americans actually pay the bill. On Thursday it was the New York Federal Reserve’s turn. In an analysis on the bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”

🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: Western reporting suggests that the United States has accepted Russia’s demanded sequence of having Ukraine cede territory to Russia before receiving formal US or European security guarantee commitments.
¤ 🌎 https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2022523577963004389?s=20/photo/1 -4

Other Key Takeaways:

Meaningful security guarantees are crucial to any peace agreement that allows Russia to occupy parts of Ukraine, especially if Ukraine withdraws from territory it currently holds.

Putin’s rejection of meaningful Western security guarantees for Ukraine is a greater impediment to a prospective peace deal than Ukraine’s position on ceding its territories.

The Kremlin likely sees an opportunity to manipulate the US-led negotiations process into another means through which Russia can achieve its unchanging military and political objectives, which it has failed to achieve in nearly four years of war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unwavering determination to conquer more Ukrainian territory and gain full political control over Ukraine is severely degrading Russia’s military and economy at the cost of the Russian population, and Russia will increasingly have to reckon with this degradation in the coming year.

The Russian Central Bank lowered its key interest rate for the first time in 2026 and fifth time in the last 12 months, likely in an attempt to increase capital available for the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) and maintain the facade of domestic economic stability.

Ukraine’s European allies continue to provide military aid to Ukraine through the Ramstein format, including via the purchase of US-produced weapons.

Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Oleksandrivka.

⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar MORE: Russia is unlikely to accept any meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine even if the United States and Ukraine concede to Russia’s territorial demands. The sequence of agreements that Russia is insisting on and that the United States has reportedly accepted thus entails Ukrainian surrender of critical territory with no assurance of receiving necessary guarantees against future Russian aggression.
¤ https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2022532503462887608?s=20

Western reporting suggests that the United States has accepted Russia’s demanded sequence of having Ukraine cede territory to Russia before receiving formal US or European security guarantee commitments.

Western reporting suggests that the United States will not finalize a security agreement with Ukraine until after Ukraine and Russia reach a peace agreement and that the United States is pushing Ukraine to make concessions in order to conclude a peace agreement by Summer 2026.[]]

The Kremlin has continuously attempted to convince the Trump administration that territory is the only significant issue left unresolved in peace negotiations, particularly Russia’s claim to the remainder of Donetsk Oblast and in southern Ukraine, and has attempted to portray Ukraine as the intransigent negotiating party for refusing to cede strategically important territory that Russian forces have been unable to capture through force.[2] Ukraine, however, has indicated multiple times that it is willing to consider withdrawing its forces from the remainder of Donetsk Oblast (although not to recognize Russian control over the parts of the oblast it does not currently occupy) in exchange for meaningful Western security guarantees – a significant Ukrainian concession. [3]

Russia has refused to compromise on its demands for additional territory beyond the current line of control in Donetsk Oblast. The Kremlin has been publicly focusing on territory in part to distract from its own rejection of any meaningful Western security guarantees for Ukraine — a refusal that senior Kremlin officials have constantly reiterated around the recent trilateral US-Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE).[4] Kremlin officials have consistently objected to Western security guarantees for Ukraine, particularly the deployment of any Western troops or military assets to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping contingent or ceasefire monitoring mechanism – continuing to demonstrate that territorial discussions are not the only significant issue left unresolved in negotiations and that Russia, not Ukraine, remains inflexible in its demands.[5]

Russia is rejecting the guarantees Ukraine requires to be able to safely conclude the war and make any territorial concessions, should Ukraine choose to do so. Russia is unlikely to accept any meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine even if the United States and Ukraine concede to Russia’s territorial demands, however. The sequence of agreements that Russia is insisting on and that the United States has reportedly accepted thus entails Ukrainian surrender of critical territory with no assurance of receiving necessary guarantees against future Russian aggression.

TheAtlantic: Putin Didn’t Know How Good He Had It https://tinyurl.com/n3pzbvs8 “The Russian leader has gotten the world he wished for—and it’s threatening to crush him.”

🐣 RT @NewsHour “The people of Minneapolis, in bitter cold weather, behaved in a self-disciplined, humane way that appealed to people across the political spectrum,” David Brooks says. “They turned up the heat and they put the regime in an impossible situation.”

🐣 RT @kenklippenstein “The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.” [NYT link:] https://tinyurl.com/4tpkerfk
⋙ Hey, @ICE @DHSgov, you don’t have to search any databases! 🤚 I’m right here! I oppose your unwarranted violations of the Constitution in my beloved state of MN. You murdered two of my neighbors. You terrorized little children. You need to start over.

WaPo, George F Will: How to make sure the Stalinist in the Kremlin faces a grim future https://tinyurl.com/4w93ad6a “Putin has a grim future if the United States and Europe press their advantages.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2022523144397815913?s=20/photo/1
// Crippled by his Ukraine misadventure, Vladimir Putin is surely defining success down.

Putin has surely defined success down: a negotiated armistice that provides Ukraine with security “guarantees” even more gossamer than those of the infamous 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.

In it, Ukraine agreed to give up the almost 2,000 Soviet-era nuclear weapons (and ballistic missiles and strategic bombers) stationed on its soil. Russia gave “assurances” that it would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” and would “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Russia seized Crimea in 2014, and invaded Ukraine eight years later.

As the fifth year of Russia’s war to subdue Ukraine approaches, Putin has learned that the past is easier to control than the present. He has a grim future if the United States and Europe press their advantages.

A much-diminished Russia occupies just 20 percent of Ukrainian territory that Kyiv controlled four Februarys ago. Europe, which has not yet even completely weaned itself from Russian energy, is at least accustoming itself to the vocabulary of military seriousness.

Last year, Putin would not — crippled by his Ukraine misadventure, he could not — try to rescue his client regime in Syria as it was being swept away. Iran’s regime, Putin’s most important ally other than China, is preoccupied with suppressing Iranians. Putin’s only sympathizer in the European Union, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, might now have firmer support among American authoritarians (“national conservatives”) than among Hungarians.

Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine (calling it a war can mean imprisonment) has lasted longer than Russia’s involvement in World War II. ❝Ukraine’s friends can deliver condign punishment to Putin for his Ukrainian blunder. These friends can at last choose to fund Ukraine with the approximately $300 billion in frozen Russian assets. They can intensify interdiction of the shadow fleet of tankers getting Russian oil to foreign buyers. And they can deny Putin a veto over security guarantees for Ukraine, including permanent troop deployments there. Otherwise, any agreement will be a sizzling fuse. … Negotiate accordingly.❞

🐣 RT @RLHeinrichs
– There is no evidence Putin wants a deal
– Putin is unwilling to comply with a ceasefire
– Russian forces are targeting civilians
– Putin objects to US-supported Euro deal
– Putin continues to viciously denounce Trump’s actions vs Iran and Venezuela
⋙ 🐣 RT @JewishWarrior13 🚨Trump: “Zelensky’s gonna have to get moving. Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky’s gonna have to get moving — otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.”
💽 https://x.com/RLHeinrichs/status/2022372812325851275?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs “Germans know that a world in which only power counts is a dark place,” writes German Chancellor @_FriedrichMerz. “Our country went down this path in the twentieth century to a bitter and evil end. Today, we are taking a different path.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Friedrich Merz: How to Avert the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics https://tinyurl.com/2kpd4pc7 Germany Knows the Costs of a World Governed by Power Alone

Europe, as the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk recently wrote, has ended a long “vacation from history.” We have crossed the threshold into a gloomier era that is once again characterized by power flexing and great-power politics. The United States’ claim to global leadership is being challenged, perhaps even squandered. And the international order that was based on rights and rules, imperfect as it was even in its best days, no longer exists.

Russia’s violent revisionism in its brutal war against Ukraine is only the most glaring expression of this new era. China is also laying claim to great-power status and has, with strategic patience, been laying the foundations for influence over world affairs for decades. China systematically cultivates dependencies and is reinterpreting the international order. In the foreseeable future, its military could be on par with the U.S. military. If there was a unipolar moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is long gone.

The return to power politics cannot be explained solely by the rivalries among major powers. This new dynamic also reflects the turmoil and unrest within societies where new technologies are driving revolutionary change. As democratic states reach the limits of their capacity to act, there is a longing for strong leadership. Great-power politics, it seems, provides straightforward, simple answers to these problems—at least for the great powers, and at least for the time being.

These politics are fast, tough, and unpredictable. They are also zero sum. They are not based on the belief that increasing interconnectedness produces a peaceful and lawful order that benefits everyone. Instead, they exploit the dependencies of others and take advantage of them if necessary. Raw materials, technologies, and supply chains thus become instruments of power.

What we are seeing today is a struggle for spheres of influence, dependencies, and allegiances. Recognizing that it has some catching up to do with China, the United Statesis adapting to this new dynamic at a rapid pace. In the policies it is laying out, not least in its National Security Strategy, Washington is drawing radical conclusions, and it is doing so in a way that accelerates rather than slows down this dangerous game.

Germany, too, is getting ready for this new era. Our first task is to acknowledge the new reality. But that does not mean that we accept it as an unchangeable fate. We are not at the mercy of this world but can shape it. We can and will preserve our interests and our values if we act decisively, in European unison, and with confidence in our own strength as well as the strength of the transatlantic relationship.

German foreign and security policy aims for three things: freedom, security, and strength. Above all else stands our freedom. Our security serves to protect it, and our economic strength helps it flourish. Germany’s constitution, its history, and its geography also demand that Germany’s policy be firmly anchored in a united Europe. This is more valuable to us today than ever before.

In recent decades, Germany has relied on its normative power to condemn violations of international order around the world. In the face of such violations, it has warned, expressed concern, and reprimanded. And it did so with the best intentions. But it also lost sight of the fact that it often lacked the means to remedy those situations. This gap between German aspirations and German capabilities widened too far. The time has come to close it, to live up to reality.

Russia’s GDP, for instance, amounts to around $2.5 trillion. The European Union’s is almost ten times higher. And yet Europe today is not ten times stronger than Russia. To tap our enormous military, political, economic, and technological potential, we first need to flip a switch in our minds. We must realize that in this era of great-power politics, our freedom is no longer a given. Preserving it will take determination, and we must be ready for change, hard work, and even sacrifice.

For historical reasons, Germans do not take the exercise of state power lightly. Since 1945, our thinking has been firmly anchored in containing power, not accruing it. But today, we must update this perspective. While acknowledging that too much state power can destroy the foundation of our freedom, we must also recognize that having too little produces the same result, if in a different way. As Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, said 15 years ago, “I fear German power less than German inaction.” Heeding this call for action is part of Germany’s responsibility—and one it accepts.

In the era of great powers, Germany cannot merely react to every move that a great power makes. Nor can it afford to wage power politics in Europe. It needs leadership through partnership, not hegemonic fantasies. Indeed, the best way to defend our freedom is with our neighbors, allies, and partners, building on our strength, sovereignty, and capacity for solidarity. Firmly anchored in Europe, Germany must chart its own course and set its own agenda for freedom. Although parts of this agenda are still taking shape, it is rooted in principled realism, and its implementation is already underway.

First, we are strengthening ourselves militarily, politically, economically, and technologically, and reducing our dependencies. Our top priority is to strengthen the European pillar within NATO. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, all allies committed to investing five percent of their GDP in security. Germany amended its constitution to enable this, and Germany alone will spend hundreds of billions of euros on defense in the coming years.

With Europe, Germany has supported Ukraine diplomatically, financially, and militarily in its courageous resistance against Russian imperialism. In the process, we have imposed unprecedented losses and costs on Moscow. In 2025, European NATO allies and Canada provided roughly $40 billion in security assistance to Ukraine after the United States drastically reduced its contribution. Germany was by far the biggest donor in 2025, and it has further increased its support in 2026. If Russia finally agrees to peace, German and European and leadership on this front will have been a key factor. This is an expression of European self-assertion.

Germany, for its part, is breathing new life into its defense industry. It has initiated massive conventional procurement projects in air defense, deep precision strikes, and satellite technology. New factories are opening. New jobs are being created. New technologies are emerging. The reform of our military service is underway, and we will make the Bundeswehr the strongest conventional army in Europe, able to hold its ground when it has to. We are also strengthening NATO’s eastern flank, with a brigade in Lithuania that stands ready to deter Russian aggression, and we will do more to secure the Arctic High North.

At the same time, Germany is making its economy and society more resilient. We are introducing new laws to strengthen our networks and critical infrastructure against hybrid attacks. We are forging supply chains that reduce unilateral dependencies on raw materials, key products, and technologies. In this new world, we will be secure only if we are competitive, which is why we are also driving progress in future technologies, including artificial intelligence. And we are protecting our democratic order against its internal and external enemies by, among other efforts, strengthening our Federal Intelligence Service.

Germany is also working to strengthen Europe. Uniting and bolstering European sovereignty is our best response to this new era and our most distinguished duty today. To do so, we must focus on the essentials: preserving and increasing European freedom, security, and competitiveness.

We must curb the proliferation of European bureaucracy and regulation. Europe’s standards must not immobilize us in global competition but should fuel innovation and entrepreneurship, encourage investment, and reward creativity. Europe must not retreat into risk avoidance but open itself to new opportunities.

Europe must also become a global political player with its own security policy. In Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union, members commit to assisting each other in the event of an armed attack. We must now spell out how we could organize this at the EU level, not as a substitute for NATO but as a self-sustaining, strong pillar of the alliance.

As part of this effort, we have entered into confidential talks with France about nuclear deterrence in Europe. Our compass here is clear: this endeavor is strictly embedded in NATO nuclear sharing frameworks; Germany will continue to comply with its obligations under international law; and we will not allow zones of differing security to emerge in Europe. We hope to agree on the first concrete steps this year.

Meanwhile, the European defense industry must standardize, scale, and simplify weapons systems [to] become quicker, cheaper, and more competitive. We will use EU programs such as Security Action for Europe (SAFE) to kick-start defense industrial cooperation across Europe. This will also drive Europe’s progressive military integration.

Uniting in this way will open Europe to new strategic partners, including in trade. In a first step, we have signed the EU-Mercosur agreement and will provisionally apply it as quickly as possible. We have also negotiated and are now working to finalize a free trade agreement with India. More such agreements will follow soon.

Diplomatically, we are squaring the circle in Europe—an effort that is evident in our work for peace in Ukraine. Where we need to be agile, we are moving forward in small groups—such as the E3, which consists of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—but also with Italy and Poland, which are taking on larger roles as European playmakers. We know that our long-term success depends on bringing other Europeans along with us. For Germans, there is no way around this. Germany is at the center of Europe. If Europe is torn apart, we are torn apart.

One of Europe’s greatest dilemmas is that the global realignment that major powers are driving is happening faster than we can ready ourselves. For this reason alone, I am not convinced that the calls for Europe to write off the United States as a partner are wise. I understand the unease and doubts that give rise to such demands. In fact, I share some of them. Yet they do not adequately account for the possible consequences of such action. They ignore the harsh geopolitical realities of Europe’s uneasy neighborhood with Russia. And they underestimate the strong potential that remains in our partnership with the United States, despite all the difficulties it is facing.

Germany thus wants to establish a new transatlantic partnership. The uncomfortable truth is that a rift has opened up between Europe and the United States. The culture war waged by the MAGA movement is not ours. We do not believe in tariffs and protectionism but in free trade. We stand by global climate agreements and the World Health Organization because we are convinced that we can only solve global challenges together. The transatlantic partnership has lost its self-evidence, so if it is to have a future, we must reestablish it. Its new foundations must not be esoteric but based on a mutual recognition that Europe and the United States are stronger together.

Being part of NATO is Europe’s competitive advantage; it is also the United States’. In this age of great powers, even Washington needs partners it can trust, a fact of which strategists at the Pentagon are aware. We should therefore repair and revive transatlantic trust together. Europe is doing its part.

Autocracies may have followers. Democracies rely on allies, partners, and trusted friends. As Europeans, we should take this to heart. No one forced us into the excessive dependence on the United States with which we have found ourselves. This immaturity was self-imposed. Today, we are emerging from this state of affairs. We will leave it behind, sooner rather than later, not by writing off NATO but by building a self-sustaining, strong European pillar within it.

This is the right path for us to take under all circumstances. It is the right path if the United States distances itself from Europe. And it is especially the right path for establishing a renewed, healthier transatlantic partnership. We may disagree more often than we did in the past. We may have to negotiate and argue more about the right course of action. But if we do so with strength, mutual respect, and a newly found self-respect, both sides will benefit.

Finally, we are building a strong network of global partnerships. As important as European integration and transatlantic partnership remain for Germany, they will no longer suffice to preserve our freedom.

Partnership is not an absolute term. It comes in shades. It does not require complete agreement on all values and interests. We are therefore reaching out to new partners with whom we share not all but some important concerns. This reduces dependencies and opens up opportunities for both sides. It protects our freedom.

Japan, Canada, Turkey, India, and Brazil play key roles in this effort, as do South Africa, the Gulf states, and others. We want to move closer to them, with mutual respect. We share a fundamental interest in an order in which we trust agreements, tackle global problems together, and resolve conflicts peacefully. From experience, we know that international law and international organizations can serve our sovereignty, independence, and freedom.

Germany is also updating its relationship with China. It would be a fallacy to believe that decoupling is the right path. Decoupling would enhance neither our security nor our prosperity. But we will manage our relationship in a more mature fashion. Above all, we will further de-risk by reducing dependencies. We will work hard to ensure fair competition and level playing fields for both sides. And we will shape a more united European approach. As we progress, we will engage in dialogue with Beijing with principled realism, mindful of the fact that China is here to stay as one of the great powers shaping the new era.

As we forge ahead, we must see the big picture and steer a clear course: Germans know that a world in which only power counts is a dark place. Our country went down this path in the twentieth century to a bitter and evil end. Today, we are taking a different path. Our country is firmly anchored in the European Union, in NATO, and in a growing network of strategic partnerships. We believe in the value of reliable partnership based on shared values and interests, mutual respect, and trust. After 1945, it was the United States that inspired Germans with this powerful idea. On this foundation, NATO became the strongest alliance in history. Germany remains faithful to this idea. Together with our allies and partners, we want to translate it for the new era.

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute Audits in Utah, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, and Georgia found a few dozen possible noncitizen registrants out of millions—and virtually no voting. Trump’s claim that noncitizens are swinging elections is false, says Cato’s @stephen_richer [link:] https://ow.ly/1LXL50YewC6

ReligionNews: Catholic congressional Dems rebuke Mike Johnson’s biblical defense of ICE https://tinyurl.com/44zajby5 Their Friday (Feb. 13) statement outlines a series of Catholic social teaching principles that the lawmakers say they consider when approaching immigration issues.

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute The House voted to end Trump’s “fentanyl emergency” tariffs against Canada, but a veto will likely save them. Canada accounted for 0.2% of fentanyl seizures, yet Trump’s tariffs have cost $2.4 billion, mostly paid by Americans. Congress must reclaim its tariff authority, say Cato scholars. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/mp8dc3m8

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Remembrance is not a violation.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2022435486074122711?s=20/photo/1 -4

I met with Ukrainian skeleton racer and member of Ukraine’s National Olympic Team, Vladyslav Heraskevych, and his father, coach of Ukraine’s skeleton team, Mykhailo Heraskevych. I presented Vladyslav with the Order of Freedom.

Ukraine will always have champions and Olympians. But above all, Ukraine’s greatest asset is Ukrainians – those who cherish the truth and the memory of the athletes killed by Russia, athletes who will never compete again because of the Russian aggression.

Thank you for your stance, your strength, and your courage. Glory to Ukraine!

🐣 RT @yasminalombaert French president Emmanuel Macron is saying what everyone’s thinking: Europeans can’t let a monster in a bunker in Moscow or a real estate tycoon on a golf course in Florida decide if Europe lives or dies.

“As all the allies, we have to be the one to negotiate this new architecture of security for Europe the day after, because our geography will not change. We will live with Russia at the same place, and the Europeans at the same place. And I don’t want this negotiation to be organised by somebody else.”

WaPo: Trump tells soldiers to vote GOP in campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg https://tinyurl.com/3yufv266 “Defense Department policy prohibits partisan political activity by active-duty service members.“ … “Most service members refrained from cheering.”

NYT: Trump’s Minnesota Retreat Points to the Power of Public Anger https://tinyurl.com/mrs5t9yy “The withdrawal came as polls show Americans opposing the president’s immigration tactics, and as some Republican lawmakers began to find ways to distance themselves.”

🐣 RT @SteveRattner Without immigration, the American population is expected to start shrinking by 2030.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/2022286961080193051?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦 A Ukrainian citizen speaking about Zelensky:
¤ 🖼 https://x.com/WW3finalboss/status/2022283900169408667?s=20/photo/1

“A man I never cease to be proud of and amazed by. Ukrainians finally have the kind of president they have dreamed of for centuries, and one they are not ashamed of before the whole world.”

For many Ukrainians, this sentiment captures more than admiration. It reflects a longing for leadership that embodies dignity, courage, and international respect during one of the most difficult chapters in the nation’s history

⋙ 🐣 RT @@sacdamb Zelensky is a leader for all-time. Just a mind-numbing mix of strength, courage, empathy, compassion, intelligence and perseverance. Truly inspirational. Might sound a tad hyperbolic, but I wouldn’t trade him for any leader in world history. Remarkable human being.

🐣 RT ChristopherJM Also further confirmation of our @FT reporting, from my former FT colleague @felschwartz: “The U.S. has made clear to Ukraine that it will not finalize a deal on security guarantees to protect Ukraine from future Russian aggression until Kyiv and Moscow reach an overall agreement to end the war, according to two of the European officials and a senior U.S. official.” Our scoop from last month: [FT link:] https://tinyurl.com/y48t2j4w
⋙ 🐣 RT @felschwartz “MUNICH — For the past three years, the annual Munich Security Conference has been the backdrop to high-stakes negotiations on the war between Russia and Ukraine. This year, it’s likely to serve as a glaring reminder of just how stuck talks are.”

🐣 RT @Svyrydenko_Y The United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund has already received more than 60 project proposals in its first month of accepting applications, including 37 from Ukrainian companies. […]
¤ https://x.com/Svyrydenko_Y/status/2022325930706780429?s=20

🐣 RT @SteveRattner Immigrants work in crucial jobs across the American economy — they grow our food, take care of our elderly, build our homes, and tend to our sick.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/2022287381450076502?s=20/photo/1
// 54% farm labor, 40% home health aides, 30% construction, 27% MDs and surgeons

🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine Garry Kimovich Kasparov came to Munich to defend common sense. ¤ Once again, this is both the foundation and an educational briefing for those who still have illusions about this negotiation process.
¤ https://x.com/DevanaUkraine/status/2022312255866429628?s=20

🔷 The negotiations were doomed from the very beginning. Because these were not negotiations about peace — they were an attempt to strike a deal between Trump and Putin.

🔷 That is why Trump’s negotiators were his son-in-law and business partner, not Rubio. And from the Russian side it was not even Lavrov, but Dmitriev — in other words, Putin’s wallet.

🔷 The discussion was about attempting to sell part of Ukraine to Putin for very specific benefits, and it is no coincidence that in those first 28 points there was a provision that de facto Kushner and Witkoff would gain control over the frozen Russian assets.

🔷 Trump gave Putin a carte blanche to win the war. Essentially, it is clear that under Trump America engaged only in sabotage. There were big statements, but overall Trump tried to force Ukraine to accept what I consider catastrophic conditions.

🔷 Ukraine once again held out despite all expectations, and as of today Trump simply has nothing to offer.

🔷 If you listen to what Russian propaganda, Putin himself, and his inner circle are saying — there are no indicators whatsoever that the war could end tomorrow.

🔷 Moreover, we are not even talking about ending the war, but about a ceasefire. Because any cessation of hostilities means Putin would have to solve the problem of the army — where to put it.

🔷 That is one million people — many of them drug addicts, murderers, people accustomed to a completely different way of life. Send them back to Russia? We see what happens when even a few thousand return. There is a sharp rise in crime, enormous social tension. A million people? Never.

🔷 This means Putin would have to look for other targets of war — most likely the Baltic states. The war will continue as long as Putin has the resources to continue it.

🐣 RT @lb_ua [tr] “We’re in deep shit,” one of the commanders described the situation after the military exercises conducted by NATO Forces. The exercises took place with the participation of Ukrainian fighters, and it turned out that the Alliance’s military do not have the same level of training as the Ukrainians

🐣 RT @VictorKvert2008 [tr]
The most respected world leaders among Americans🇺🇸:
1. Zelenskyy 🇺🇦
2. Carney 🇨🇦
3. Sheinbaum 🇲🇽
The most terrible:
1. Maduro 🇻🇪
2. Putin 🇷🇺
3. Kim Jong Un 🇰🇵
Trump 🇺🇸 has worse ratings than Lukashenko 🇧🇾
// Trump is 3rd from bottom of “very” unfavorable, ahead of Putin and Kim Jong Un
◕ https://x.com/VictorKvert2008/status/2022185868740751789?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SteveRattner America is great because people come from all over the world to start businesses here. Nearly half of unicorn company founders are immigrants.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/2022287512517902474?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @amanpour There’s a lot of nervousness here at the Munich Security Conference, as allied leaders wait to hear from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But no matter what he says, top Europeans seem clear-eyed about the rift they see now between the US and Europe. This is a real turning point.
💽 CNN: https://x.com/amanpour/status/2022329392006041788?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 “There are decades where weeks happen, and there are weeks where decades happen”
~ Lenin ¤ Must one of those weeks

🐣 RT @ChristopherJM,After his latest trip to Ukraine, @ericschmidt writes for @FT: “Mastery of autonomous systems and the ability to build those weapons in abundance will determine the outcome of future wars. The west must learn from what is happening on the frontline in Ukraine, accelerate innovation, and build the industrial base required to produce at the scale and speed the next conflict will demand.”
⋙ FT: Ukraine’s no man’s land is the future of war https://tinyurl.com/j6n6kmd3

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Chancellor Merz: Russia’s GDP currently amounts to about €2 trillion. That of the European Union is almost ten times as high. And yet today, Europe is not ten times stronger than Russia. ¤ Our military, political, economic and technological potential is enormous. But we are still far from exploiting it to the extent necessary. ¤ The most important thing now is that we need to flip the switch in our minds. We have understood that in the era of great powers, our freedom is no longer simply a given. It is under threat.

🐣 RT @wartranslated Zelensky met with Iranian Crown Prince in exile Reza Pahlavi at the Munich Security Conference. Pahlavi thanked him for supporting Iran’s people at Davos citing 40,000 killed 300,000 wounded and 40,000 jailed in protests.

KyivIndependent: Russia just laid out its Ukraine war endgame — here’s what Moscow actually wants https://tinyurl.com/nw2svcep “Lavrov referred to what he called ‘Anchorage agreements’ allegedly reached between Putin and Trump during their August 2025 summit in Alaska”

For three consecutive days, from Feb. 9 to Feb. 11, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly undercut suggestions that negotiations were advancing.

His message was consistent and direct: Russia’s territorial and political demands remain intact, and any serious discussion must revolve around Ukraine accepting them.

The timing was not accidental. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the next round of talks is planned for Feb. 17–18. Lavrov’s remarks came just days before that meeting.

In all three speeches, Lavrov referred to what he called “Anchorage agreements” allegedly reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump during their August 2025 summit in Alaska.

Those understandings envisioned Ukraine surrendering territory without fighting.

The White House has not confirmed the existence of any such agreements and earlier declined to acknowledge them in comments to the Kyiv Independent.

But Lavrov signaled that Kremlin sees the talks not as a forum for mutual concessions, but as a way to formalize what it believes has already been informally agreed.

🐣 RT @andrii_sybiha In Munich, I had a meaningful and productive meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

We focused on ways to develop mutually beneficial trade and bilateral ties based on reciprocal respect for territorial integrity.

I reiterated Ukraine’s interest in contacts with China at the highest level.

We discussed peace efforts and China’s important role in facilitating an end to the war.

I informed my Chinese counterpart about the battlefield situation, Russian attacks against our energy system, and the damage to Chinese companies from Russian strikes.

I am grateful for Beijing’s decision to provide an additional humanitarian energy assistance package to Ukraine.

I also invited Minister Wang Yi to visit Ukraine and thanked him for the invitation to visit China.

‼️ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv Checkmate! China will send an energy aid package to Ukraine ⚡️
This was announced by Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha. ¤ Today in Munich, he held a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

⭕ 12 Feb 2026

Economist: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s network https://tinyurl.com/hwvb6awd “He traded emails with at least 18 current or former billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; celebrities like Woody Allen and Deepak Chopra; and political figures such as Ehud Barak”
// What 1.4m emails reveal about America’s most notorious sex offender

Most of Epstein’s correspondence was with his staff, service providers and business contacts. … The rest of the emails, however, depict a remarkable network. The top 500 correspondents come from a number of different industries. Some 19% of messages were with financiers; 10% with scientists or doctors; 8% with people in media, entertainment or public relations; 7% with technologists; 6% each for lawyers, politicians, academics and other businessfolk; and 5% with property magnates. The share of contacts in finance peaked at 25% in 2014 and then fell as those in academia and law rose. Most correspondents were based in America, though Epstein kept ties with Britain, France, Germany, Nordic countries, Gulf states and even a Venezuelan oil trader.

He did not waste time on middle managers. A quarter of his top non-staff contacts have a Wikipedia page. He traded emails with at least 18 current or former billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; celebrities like Woody Allen and Deepak Chopra; and political figures such as Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister. Most back-and-forths were balanced, with similar numbers of emails sent and received; an exception was Bill Gates, whom Epstein bombarded despite few responses. (Mr Gates was happy to meet Epstein on a number of occasions, however.)

Many relationships went far deeper than the occasional cocktail-party photograph. Epstein and Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel under President Barack Obama, swapped 11,300 emails from 2014 to 2019, with at least one direct message on 70% of days. Ariane de Rothschild, a banking billionaire, sent or received 5,500 emails; Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, 4,300. In some cases Epstein grew close to family members: he was in touch with both Noam Chomsky, a linguist, and his wife, Valeria, and chatted with Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife, more than with Mr Allen himself.

🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT DHS is shutting down. Why? Because Democrats took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution and ICE is lawless and out of control. We cannot fund an agency that is murdering our citizens, tear gassing school zones, and disappearing legal immigrants.

NYT, Robert Draper: The Epstein Files and the Hidden World of an Unaccountable Elite https://tinyurl.com/4m6p8n6v “The search continues in the documents for ironclad criminal conduct, but the story of a sexual predator given a free ride by the ruling class has already emerged.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2022222310259011949?s=20/photo/1

Journalists and researchers will spend the next months ferreting through the Epstein files in search of further criminal conduct or a new conspiratorial wrinkle. But one truth has already emerged.

In unsparing detail, the documents lay bare the once-furtive activities of an unaccountable elite, largely made up of rich and powerful men from business, politics, academia and show business. The pages tell a story of a heinous criminal given a free ride by the ruling class in which he dwelled, all because he had things to offer them: money, connections, sumptuous dinner parties, a private plane, a secluded island and, in some cases, sex.

That story of impunity is all the more outrageous now in the midst of rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality. The Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends occurred over two decades that saw the decline of America’s manufacturing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which millions of Americans lost their homes.

If Mr. Epstein’s goal was to build a wall of protection around his abuse by surrounding himself with the well connected, he failed in the end. But both before and after he was first prosecuted for abusing girls, his correspondence described a network of people whose high-flying lives belied the struggles of ordinary Americans. And at the center of that network was a sexual predator seemingly on top of the world.

“We’ve heard so much about the Epstein scandal over the past several years,” said Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who writes frequently about political culture. “And yet people do seem shocked by the scope of elite complicity in his world. It’s a level of corruption that the public is now getting a full view of.”

His talent for entertaining attracted interest from one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, who emailed Mr. Epstein in 2012 to ask, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” (Mr. Musk has said on social media that he “had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island.”)
v
There was of course his friendship with Donald J. Trump. ¤ And he dispensed favors to, and rubbed elbows with, Woody Allen; Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual; Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel in the Clinton investigation; Kathryn Ruemmler, a former Obama White House counsel who on Thursday night resigned as general counsel of Goldman Sachs amid scrutiny of her ties to Mr. Epstein; Stephen K. Bannon, one of President Trump’s top political allies; Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru; the film producer Barry Josephson; Lawrence H. Summers, a former president of Harvard and former ,Treasury secretary; Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew; Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York; Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway; and a cavalcade of financial titans.
^
James E. Staley, who recently stepped down as the chief executive of Barclay’s in the wake of allegations involving his ties to Mr. Epstein, emailed Mr. Epstein in 2014 to suggest that upper-caste Americans like themselves were unlikely to ever face a populist uprising like the protests taking place in Brazil at the time.

Pointing to Super Bowl ads that year, Mr. Staley wrote: “Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay-Z.”

The shocking nature of some of the revelations, combined with the prominence and status of those in Mr. Epstein’s orbit, has done nothing to quiet the conspiracy theories that his behavior spawned and that both the right and the left have sought to weaponize for political advantage. If anything, the raft of new details has spiraled into feverish new speculation with little or no factual basis.

In 2014, Mr. Epstein received an email from an associate whose name has been redacted that said in full, “Thank you for a fun night … your littlest girl was a little naughty.” In another email, Mr. Epstein instructed a recipient whose name is also redacted to buy several sex toys, adding: “I want you to talk as nasty, vulgar, imaginative as you can … It will free your mind. Its like a mental sneeze.”

Mr. Epstein wrote to another undisclosed recipient in 2009, who was identified on Wednesday in a House hearing as Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a powerful Emirati businessman: “where are you? are you ok, I loved the torture video.” …

Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who worked with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican congresswoman, and Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, to pass legislation compelling the release of the documents, dismissed the conspiracy theories.

But, he said in an interview, “we must ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless and arrogant.”

Ms. Greene, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump for repeatedly demanding the release of the Epstein files, said she felt some vindication about the behavior of a male governing class they exposed. “The files are giving us an inside look into a world that we all thought existed,” she said. “And we were all called conspiracy theorists for saying so.”

While Mr. Epstein’s remarkable web of connections suggests to some that he was a puppet master calling the shots for a cabal of elites, that same web offers at least some proof to the contrary. Mr. Epstein counted presidents and cabinet members as his friends, but his influence on American policymaking was negligible.

His chums in the media were not newspaper publishers and TV network chief executives but those farther down the food chain, including the author Michael Wolff and a New York Times financial reporter, Landon Thomas Jr., who left the paper after admitting that he had solicited money from Mr. Epstein for a personal charity.

Notably absent from his coterie were any federal prosecutors, judges or law enforcement figures who could have allowed him to escape justice.

In the end, Mr. Epstein was arrested, charged with serious sex crimes and died in prison while awaiting trial. His associate Ghislaine Maxwell also remains incarcerated.

Still, that is far from a complete reckoning, Ms. Greene said. She noted that none of Mr. Epstein’s male friends or associates had been imprisoned for their behavior. “And now the administration is saying it’s time to move on?” she said. “I don’t hear any of the victims saying that.”

🐣 RT @VictorKvert2008 [tr] Ukrainian company SkyFall produces 100,000 Vampire bomber drones (Baba Yaga type) per year
¤ https://x.com/VictorKvert2008/status/2022050357057122351?s=20

This drone can carry a 15 kg payload, has a flight range of 45 km and reaches a speed of 80 km/h.

The cost of a single unit has dropped significantly: if it used to reach $20,000, it is now $8,500.

This year the company will fully localize the production of all components — the “Vampire non-China” version (without Chinese parts) already exists, and the drone will become 100% Ukrainian.

🧵 RT @Virginie2R [tr] Ukrainians are developing laser weapons capable of destroying Russian 🇷🇺 drones in just a few seconds. ¤ Ukrainian 🇺🇦 engineers have developed and successfully tested a new laser air defense system called Sunray, which can effectively destroy Russian 🇷🇺 drones, and the 1
¤ https://x.com/Virginie2R/status/2022035714494615749?s=20

⋙ The cost is significantly lower than that of comparable Western systems, according to recent reports. ¤ According to journalist Simon Shuster, who attended the test, the Sunray system resembles an amateur telescope equipped with a camera and can be installed on the roof 2

⋙ of a conventional truck. ¤ The weapon is silent and emits no visible light. During the demonstration, the laser ignited the drone in just a few seconds, causing it to crash to the ground. ¤ The developers indicated that the systemhad required about 2 years of development 3

⋙ and an investment of several million dollars. The unit price is estimated at several hundred thousand dollars. For comparison, the Helios laser system, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Navy, was produced under a contract worth $150 million 4 FIN

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 Macron: France Now Supplies Two Thirds of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence
¤ https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2022066165598605691?s=20

President Emmanuel Macron said on 15 January 2026 that France now provides two thirds of the foreign intelligence used by Ukraine, claiming a major shift away from previous heavy reliance on the United States.

The statement follows the 2025 episode in which the Trump administration temporarily paused intelligence sharing with Kyiv, prompting European allies to accelerate their own support and reduce exposure to political risk.

French assistance is reported to focus on technical intelligence, particularly high resolution satellite imagery from the CSO system and related analysis tools, strengthening Ukraine’s situational awareness and targeting.

TheAtlantic: Trump Has a Bridge He Wants to Sell You https://tinyurl.com/3e2x5tba “This episode is a prototypical demonstration of Trump’s economic worldview. Faced with a policy choice that pits the interests of millions of people against the wealth of a single billionaire.”
// The president’s closure of a trade route from Detroit to Windsor will help a billionaire and hurt basically everyone else.

🐣 RT @Jpod_art For several days, russian sources celebrated what they described as a breakthrough – allegedly learning how to “unlock” Starlink terminals.
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/Jpod_art/status/2021967048956387801?s=20/photo/1 -2

In reality, it was a coordinated Ukrainian cyber operation.

Ukrainian cyber units, working alongside independent investigative communities, reportedly collected detailed data on Russian-operated Starlink terminals and forwarded it for full blocking.

The outcome:
•2,420 data packets identifying Starlink devices and precise enemy positions
•31 alleged collaborators exposed
•$5,870 raised from Russian military personnel – funds set to support Ukraine’s Defense Forces

Instead of gaining access, russian forces allegedly handed over data and money.

🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA [tr] With heart, principle, and truth, our athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych showed the world the true value of memory. His action at the Olympics was not a gesture of protest, but a gesture of humanity. When mentioning athletes killed by the aggressor leads to disqualification from competition, the world must pause and reflect: is sport truly apolitical, or is it also devoid of compassion?
Ukraine remembers its heroes. This is our duty.
And we are grateful to those who have the courage to remind the world of this.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskaUA/status/2021958134055494021?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @KyivPost Zelensky has awarded member of the national Olympic team Heraskevych the Order of Freedom by presidential decree. ¤ The award was granted “for selfless service to the Ukrainian people, civic courage, and patriotism in defending the ideals of freedom and democratic values.”

🐣 RT @GovTimWalz Minnesotans are decent, caring neighbors — and some of the toughest damn people you’ll ever find.
💽 https://x.com/GovTimWalz/status/2022007514330804428?s=20/photo/1
// full clip is good
⋙ 🐣 They came here to damage the reputation of a successful multi-ethnic state that values freedom and democracy and punches above its weight. People love it here. It breaks my heart that this happened to my beloved home. ♡ Hate cannot bear the existence of love or kindness.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @MayorFrey They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation. These patriots of Minneapolis are showing that it’s not just about resistance — standing with our neighbors is deeply American.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MayorFrey This operation has been catastrophic for our neighbors and businesses, and now it’s time for a great comeback. We will show the same commitment to our immigrant residents and endurance in this reopening, and I’m hopeful the whole country will stand with us as we move forward.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @atrupar Ellison: “I’ve never been prouder to be a Minnesotan. I’m so proud of the people who helped their neighbors, who stood up for their First Amendment rights. I hope it’s over and now it’s a time to heal and put things back together again.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2021988476548182520?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln ICE thinks they can just leave Minnesota after murdering two Americans in cold blood. ¤ We will not forget. This administration owns that bloodshed and Democrats should not give an inch on funding.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/2021977868599709728?s=20/photo/1
// video of Homan ending operation
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @HQNewsNow Gov. Walz: You won’t hear me express any gratitude for the people who caused this unwarranted assault on our state. In America, you cannot expect that the people are going to be okay with masked people running you off the road
💽 https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2021990469454971311?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @atrupar Walz: “The federal government needs to pay for what they broke here. There’s going to be accountability on things that happened, but one of them is the incredible and immense cost borne by the people of this state. The federal government needs to be responsible.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2021978504674381998?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @atrupar Gov. Tim Walz: “They left us with deep damage. Generational trauma. Economic ruin in some cases. The left us with many unanswered questions. Where are our children? Where and what is the process of the investigation into those that were responsible for the deaths of Renee and Alex?”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2021977916918165622?s=20/photo/1

📊 DailyBeast: Poll: Trump Drives Staggering Spike in People Viewing the U.S. as a Threat https://tinyurl.com/2jyy8z68 “Canadians are now almost as likely as Chinese people to regard the U.S. as a threat to their country’s security.”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2021979761816613338?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has killed over 650 Ukrainian athletes and coaches. Hundreds of Ukrainian athletes will never again take part in international competitions because of Russia. ¤ Russian attacks destroyed more than 800 sports facilities, including over 20 Olympic, Paralympic, and Deaflympic training centres. ¤ The memory of the fallen and the documented crimes committed against Ukraine and its athletes must not be forgotten or silenced.

💙💙🐣 RT @ABC BREAKING: The federal government’s immigration surge in Minneapolis is ending, border czar Tom Homan said at a press conference.
Read more: [link:] https://tinyurl.com/33aa73ef

NYT Editorial: End ICE Lawlessness https://tinyurl.com/mtn767p3 “Congress must now intervene and stand up for the law. It has the leverage to do so. … Democrats are rightly insisting on changes to the administration’s behavior. … Congress should hold firm.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2021899952230990319?s=20/photo/1

The Department of Homeland Security under President Trump has followed this dark path. Too often over the past year, its behavior has been lawless. ¤ In enacting Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, officers from the department have repeatedly defied the Constitution. They have violated the First Amendment by trampling on citizens’ rights to speech and assembly. They have subverted the Second Amendment guarantee of the freedom to bear arms. They have violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.

The department’s officers have pushed other federal laws to the breaking point and beyond, often ignoring judicial orders in the process. They have moved detainees to skirt a judge’s jurisdiction. They have deported detainees in violation of judges’ rulings. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Judge Patrick Schiltz, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote.

As insidious as this behavior has been, the lack of accountability for it may be even worse. Mr. Trump and his top aides are shielding Homeland Security officials and agents who break the law from consequences. After agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the Trump administration initially blocked civil rights inquiries into the shootings. The administration instead impugned the victims with statements that video evidence refuted. Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s close aide, made comments suggesting they believed that agents had unbounded authority to act as they wanted. Congress must now intervene and stand up for the law. It has the leverage to do so. Late last month, Democrats and a small number of Senate Republicans, alarmed by the administration’s behavior, rallied to block future funding for Homeland Security. In exchange for new funding, Democrats are rightly insisting on changes to the administration’s behavior. As negotiations drag out and the shock of events in Minneapolis recedes, the political pressure to rein in the D.H.S. may fade. Congress should hold firm.

🐣 RT @Tendar Soviet defector and former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov said when being debriefed after his escape that the KGB’s job was only in small portion spying. …
¤ https://x.com/Tendar/status/2021841064072503789?s=20

85% of the job was dedicated to a slow process of subversion, which he described as psychological warfare and the ideological manipulation of public opinion. Finding useful idiots was (and still is) the prime directive in this task.

Establishing honey traps and recording the targets when being caught in these schemes was one of their main methods. Afterwards, it was very easy to manipulate and outright coerce those naive targets. Epstein and his pedophile „business“ were the ideal vehicle to deliver that outcome, since it attracted powerful people from the US and all around the world. There is enough evidence to corroborate that the KGB respectively FSB knew about it, and even helped to expand it. After all, this is their primary objective.

Even with a huge portions of the Epstein files being held back, which in itself is a scandal and illegal, we can already see Russia‘s fingerprints are all over the place. The Epstein files, which mention Moscow not only almost 10,000 times and Putin’s name more 1,000 times, do this in so many instances in murky “business” context, over and over again. And not only that.

You repeatedly find in the Epstein files the names of Russian oligarchs and ministers such as Sergei Belyakov, Sergey Lavrov, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Prokhorov, Vladislav Doronin, deceased Vitaly Churkin and many more, exactly the people you would want to have contacts with when operating a scheme to enrich yourself and play the KGB’s tune while being on its leash.

Even the Western politicians Epstein had close ties with were frequently closely aligned to Russia, such as Peter Mandelson, who himself has been close to Oleg Deripaska and helped the Russian oligarch to expand his business empire. Epstein’s countless links to Russia are not a side quest, they are the main story. And it is certain that there is far more of it, hidden on Pam Bondi‘s and Kash Patel’s desks. The obnoxious reaction by Pam Bondi during the hearing yesterday is only the latest evidence that we are witnessing a cover-up of monumental scale.

Follow this trail, get to the bottom and you will see that many in current US leadership positions, who purportedly stir up chaos out of incompetence, do this in fact by design and malice in order to obfuscate these revelations and muddy the waters. An open hearing has to be established, where every single one mentioned in these files is put into public spotlight and then if necessary criminal investigations.

Countries other then the USA have already started to take the first steps and criminal investigations. International cooperation with exchanges on intelligence level are a must. This is possibly the worst scandal in recent times, where rape, pedophilia, espionage, money laundering and treason have been mixed up into a deadly cocktail. It is time to expose this construct and then burn it down to the ground, along with all involved. Scorched earth.

⭕ 11 Feb 2026

WSJ Editorial: Trump’s Crony Canadian Bridgegate https://tinyurl.com/mrxx6mnr ‘With Trump, anything that isn’t nailed down might be grabbed and used as potential leverage. Such threats by Mr. Trump are bad for business, shoddy treatment of an ally, and bad politics too.’
// He threatens to block Detroit’s new link to Canada, after Lutnick meets a competitor.
// Orig Quote: “With President Trump, anything that isn’t nailed down might be grabbed and used as potential leverage. Amazingly, that includes a badly needed international bridge financed by Canada and almost finished. Threats by Mr. Trump to block traffic are bad for business, shoddy treatment of an ally, and bad politics too.”

WSJ: GOP-Led House Rejects Trump’s Tariffs on Canada https://tinyurl.com/33n4jx9p “The House voted 219-211 to approve a Democratic resolution that would invalidate the emergency declaration that underpins Trump’s tariffs on Canada.” //➔ Because there is no emergency.
// The vote in the chamber is a significant but largely symbolic repudiation of the president’s signature economic policy

WSJ: Trump Lashes Out at GOP Governor, Ramping Up Criticism of Fellow Republicans https://tinyurl.com/2ycvvvyf “‘Trump is doing everything he can to become the most polarizing president in American history,’ said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a former NGA chairman.”
// The president has publicly criticized members of his own party in recent weeks

🐣 RT @CatoInstitute Clinton’s 2001 Marc Rich pardon was a national scandal that briefly raised standards for subsequent pardons. Today, Trump’s far more politicized pardons pass with shrugs—not because they’re better, but because our standards for presidential accountability have collapsed, says Cato’s Dan Greenberg. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/ys8rf59p

🐣 RT @NSTRIKE1231 🇫🇷 Emmanuel Macron: 📌 “We cannot afford to wait. We must accelerate decision-making. We need to take steps that are sometimes not even part of our European DNA, because we are living in a completely different, new era. Let us move forward and act.”
¤ https://x.com/NSTRIKE1231/status/2021654781157089356?s=20

📌 “Cheap Russian energy supplies ended in 2022. There is no going back. The era of Russia as a permanent local energy supplier is over. The era of China as the main export market has also come to an end.”

📌 “The United States is imposing tariffs on our economy and using instruments of coercion. All of this is changing the rules of the game. That is why this is not a simple transition period, and none of these new factors will change in the short term. This is not a temporary shock. It is clearly a structural turning point.”

📌 “We must turn Europe into an independent power — not just a single market, but an economic power.”

📌 “Everyone is enthusiastic about Starlink. I am very pleased about that. But if we look carefully, Mr. Musk is probably one of the people in the world whose pocket has received the most billions of dollars from American taxpayers in the form of subsidies. I want to say that Elon Musk is, above all, someone who has been heavily subsidized by U.S. federal agencies. That’s good news! That is precisely what made him super-innovative.”

📌 “China is an authoritarian regime — without any offense, that is a collective choice. The United States is becoming a country of unpredictable economics and governance, for companies and sometimes even for states. In between stands the European Union — a place where the rule of law and predictability still prevail.”

WSJ, Jason Riley: America Is Running Out of Patience With Republicans https://tinyurl.com/jfcyrrsc “Empathy might go further than telling struggling households that they’ve never had it so good, but Mr. Trump can’t help himself.”
//. Voters no longer blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy, and Trump’s policies haven’t delivered.

🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: “You’re a failed politician!” Pam Bondi freaks out on Republican Congressman Thomas Massie for demanding the identity of the person who carried out illegal redactions in the Epstein files. ¤ This could not have gone any worse for Bondi…
// House Oversight hearing
¤ https://x.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/2021658067692401050?s=20

“To my right is an email that was sent to the victims lawyers by the DOJ. It was a list of names [of victims whose names not to release]. What did the DOJ do with this email? They released this email in the document production! Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did and they’re getting phone calls,” Massie said during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. “A lot of these people didn’t want to be known.”

“And we know you touched the document because you redacted one name and you redacted the lawyer’s name but you left the survivor’s name there!” continued Massie.

“The next document I want to show you, it was in the title! The survivor’s name!” he said, pointing out the document in question before indicating another. “The title of this one is ‘Child sex trafficking.’ Co-conspirators, fully redacted!”

“And by the way, we’re going to unredact them here. Les Wexner is in this,” said Massie, peeling away gray tape to reveal the billionaire in question. “Now your assistant dep, your deputy attorney general, said ‘Oh well he appears hundreds of times in the files.’ But he doesn’t appear in this file until I forced you to release it! Where he’s listed as a co-conspirator, not to tax evasion, but to child sex trafficking! Not to prostitution, not to money laundering, child sex trafficking!”

There is simply no benign explanation for these redactions. The Trump administration went out of its way to protect the identities of wealthy and powerful individuals because this is a White House that exists solely to serve the rich and well-connected. By shielding Epstein’s co-conspirators, they’re also hoping to insulate Trump, who is himself deeply implicated in the files.

“And then finally, what we have here is the third exhibit that I have is emblematic of the FD 302 release,” Massie continued. “These are the documents that we need, that you’re holding onto and over-redacting because they have the names of the men who are implicated. How do we know? Because the survivors gave testimony to the FBI and it’s in there. And what happens when you go to the portal at the DOJ to look at what’s behind this redaction? Another redaction!”

“So we can’t even see them. And then there’s some of these files you’ve pulled down from the website that we will never see because we can’t search the redactions. So I have several questions for you…” said Massie.

“Who’s responsible? Are you able to track who in your organization made this massive failure and released the victims’ names?” Massie asked. “Are you able to track who it was that obscured Les Wexner’s name as a co-conspirator in an FBI document? Do you have that kind of accountability?”

“I believe Wexner’s name was listed more than four thousand times about—” said Bondi.

“Yeah, I already told you that. This is where he’s listed as a co-conspirator,” shot back Massie.

“Can I finish my answer!?” screeched Bondi. “Come on! Let me finish my answer. We corrected that within forty minutes. He was already— You’re acting like everybody’s trying to cover up Wexner’s name—

“Reclaiming my time,” said Massie.

“I’m going to answer this question,” whined Bondi.

“Reclaiming my time. Mr. Chairman?” said Massie.

“This isn’t how this works!” insisted Bondi.

“Mr. Chairman? Can I have my time back? Mr. Chairman?” said Massie, visibly uninterested in Bondi’s obfuscations.

“The gentlelady can give her answer. The time belongs to the gentleman,” said Chairman Jim Jordan, a MAGA hack who’s best known for ignoring rampant sexual abuse during his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University.

“All right, I’m reclaiming my time,” said Massie. “So I’m going to put the language of the bill up on the screen…”

“Chairman, may I give my answer on that? This is a political joke, and I need to give my answer on that,” interrupted Bondi, desperate to get her spin out.

“Let the attorney general respond, and then the gentleman can move to his next question,” said Jordan.

“Chairman, it’s my time,” said Massie.

“Within forty minutes— You asked me a question,” said Bondi. “Within forty minutes, Wexner’s name was added back.”

“Within forty minutes of me catching you red-handed!” Massie said.

“Red-handed!?” said Bondi with an awkward laugh. “There was one redaction out of over 4,700—

“Where he’s listed as a co-conspirator!” said Massie.

“…and we invited you in,” continued Bondi. “This guy has Trump derangement syndrome! You’re a failed politician.”

At that point, it was clear that Bondi had run out of room to maneuver. Unable to defend the egregious behavior of her Justice Department, she resorted to cheap, pathetic insults. The only failure here is Pam Bondi, a woman who swore to defend the Constitution only to then devote herself to protecting wealthy pedophiles from the consequences of their actions.

WaPo, George Will: JD Vance vies for the gold medal in coarseness and flippancy https://tinyurl.com/3zbf4c4j “It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries.”
// The vice president has a knack for late — very late — adolescent naughtiness.

🐣 RT @Acyn Raskin: You’re running a massive Epstein coverup right out of the DOJ. …
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2021606834910671135?s=20/photo/1
// Raskin to Bondi

You redacted the names of abusers, enablers, accomplices and coconspirators, apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace, which is the exact opposite of what the law ordered you to do.

Even worse, you shockingly failed to redact many of the victims names, which is what you were ordered to do by congress. Some of the victims had come forward publicly, but many had not. Many had kept their torment private, even from family and friends. But you published their names, their identities, their images on thousands of pages for the world to see.

✭ PsychologyToday: Brain Fog in Long COVID Linked to Increase in AMPA Receptors https://tinyurl.com/3tvvc7hj New research sheds light on why brain fog is a common symptom of long COVID.

• About 400 million people worldwide still suffer from long COVID.
• More than 80% of long COVID patients experience brain fog.
• A new neuroscience study used PET neuroimaging to investigate the biological correlates of brain fog.
• Brain fog in long COVID was linked to an increase in AMPA receptor density.

While the symptoms of long COVID can be very diverse, more than 80 percent of patients with long COVID suffer from so-called brain fog. Brain fog is a colloquial term used to describe impairments in various brain functions, such as memory, decision-making, and reasoning. In heavily affected long COVID patients, brain fog can be so bad that they may be unable to work their normal jobs. Brain fog is difficult to treat, and one major problem is that scientists so far really have not understood very well which biological factors cause brain fog. …

Takeaway:
The results of the study showed that an increase in AMPA receptors in long COVID patients was linked to more brain fog, as reflected by the worse performance in the cognitive tests. The scientists discussed that too many of these receptors relevant for information processing in the brain may mess up cognitive processing, explaining why brain fog occurs. In addition, due to the link between AMPA receptor increase and massive changes in immune system activity, the scientists suggested that excessive brain activity due to too many AMPA receptors may have neurotoxic effects on the brain. Therefore, targeting AMPA receptors in the therapy of long COVID may be a very promising approach to help these often severely impacted patients.

References
Fujimoto Y et al, (2025). Systemic increase of AMPA receptors associated with cognitive impairment of long COVID. Brain communications, 7(5), fcaf337. https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcaf337

WaPo: Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened. https://tinyurl.com/mry3ja37 “The last 30 years are the fastest warming period since 1880, according to a Washington Post analysis of NASA data.”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2021621733971968091?s=20/photo/1

✝ NYT, Leighton Woodhouse: Donald Trump, Pagan King https://tinyurl.com/3b5thk27 “Christianity took the Jewish God, who cared for the weak and knew the difference between good and evil, and made his message universal. … That is the world we are leaving behind.”

In his book “Dominion,” the historian Tom Holland describes how it wasn’t until Christianity came along that Western civilization derived the popular conception that the weak and the vanquished had any inherent moral value at all. Telling an ancient Greek or a pre-Christian Roman that their treatment of slaves was morally wrong would have inspired not argument but bewilderment, as if you had told them they were evil for the way they treated their kitchen utensils. These pagans generally believed that their gods favored the strong and were indifferent to the weak.

Christianity upended these assumptions. Christianity took the Jewish God, who cared for the weak and knew the difference between good and evil, and made his message universal. It taught that all humans are God’s creation. To oppress any person, even a slave, is an offense before him. Even more than that: the weak are closer to God than the rich and the powerful.

This moral instinct is so ubiquitous today that we barely recognize it as Judeo-Christian, or even as religious. Adherents of the world’s other great religions have largely integrated it into their ethical frameworks even if this tenet is not central to their faith. It is the basis for the American Declaration of Independence and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Mr. Holland noted, even anti-Christian revolutionaries, from the Jacobins to the Communists, owe their secular claims of human equality to Christianity; indeed, they are the most radical expressions of it. …

That is the world we are leaving behind. By brazenly jacking Venezuela for its oil and threatening to acquire Greenland against its will, the U.S. is acting as the ancient Greeks, the ancient Persians and the Germanic tribes conducted themselves: brutishly, without shame or apology. And the abdication of Christian values is already shaping the conduct of our government toward its citizens, as in Minneapolis, where immigration agents have killed two protesters. The Trump administration appears unconstrained not only by the limits imposed by the Constitution but by the standards of an average American’s conscience. Federal agents’ treatment of both immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minneapolis is the reflection of a government that has abandoned the moral instinct that it is wrong for the powerful to abuse the weak.

… American leaders, unlike Vikings or Spartans, had to make a moral case for the exercise of our power. It wasn’t enough to simply say that we, as the strong, can do what it is in our interest to do. We had to couch it all, however unconvincingly, in a framework that made it palatable to the Christian conscience. This may not have determined the shape of American foreign and domestic policy, but it was the impossibility of making that case that ultimately contributed to the end of slavery, and of European imperialism and American segregation. The moral framework mattered.

That is the world we are leaving behind. By brazenly jacking Venezuela for its oil and threatening to acquire Greenland against its will, the U.S. is acting as the ancient Greeks, the ancient Persians and the Germanic tribes conducted themselves: brutishly, without shame or apology. And the abdication of Christian values is already shaping the conduct of our government toward its citizens, as in Minneapolis, where immigration agents have killed two protesters. The Trump administration appears unconstrained not only by the limits imposed by the Constitution but by the standards of an average American’s conscience. Federal agents’ treatment of both immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minneapolis is the reflection of a government that has abandoned the moral instinct that it is wrong for the powerful to abuse the weak.

⭕ 10 Feb 2026

TheAtlantic, Hussein Ibish (Feb 10): Trump’s Gaza Plans Are Profoundly Unserious https://tinyurl.com/yf324pjw “Conditions on the ground call for immediate humanitarian relief, not gauzy real-estate fantasies.”

WSJ Editorial: Vinay Prasad’s Vaccine Kill Shot https://tinyurl.com/39xefr6s “It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as [FDA chief] Vinay Prasad”
// Does the White House know the harm he’s doing to public health?

🐣 RT @thehill Thune: ‘Not even close’ to enough votes to change filibuster rule to enact voting reform https://tinyurl.com/mr2vdskb
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @USATODAY Here’s how the voting ID law could make it harder for married women to register to vote and cast ballots if passed. https://tinyurl.com/45d67me6

🐣 RT @RepThomasMassie @IngrahamAngle My goal is to defend the Constitution and to represent the people. ¤ Taxing authority is vested in the House of Representatives, not the Executive. ¤ The vote tonight was to subvert the Constitution and the 1976 National Emergencies Act by literally saying a day is not a day.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/2021433692850356514?s=20/photo/1 -3

Sec. 4. Bach day during the period from February 10, 2026, through July 31, 2026, shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the

🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Grand Jury Rebuffs Justice Dept. Attempt to Indict 6 Democrats in Congress https://tinyurl.com/4eh4x4fs “The rejection was a remarkable rebuke, suggesting that ordinary citizens did not believe that the lawmakers had committed any crimes.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2021429056160530874?s=20/photo/1

The move to charge the lawmakers — among them, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan — was, by any measure, an extraordinary attempt by Trump appointees to politicize the criminal justice system even for a Justice Department that has repeatedly shattered norms of independence from the White House and followed Mr. Trump’s directives to prosecute his adversaries.

But manipulating bureaucratic levers is not the same thing as controlling the entire criminal justice system.

NYT: Epstein Files Reveal Efforts to Build Ties With Officials in Russia https://tinyurl.com/usrpfb9e “New documents detail Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to foster strategic, sometimes reciprocal relationships with Russian officials.”

TheAtlantic, Simon Shuster: The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft https://tinyurl.com/53y4mjue “Russian strikes have forced Ukraine to build high-tech air defense on the cheap.”
//➔ For Ukraine “Necessity is the Mother of … Survival ”

🐣 📋 RT @TKouilou [tr] The Russian economy is entering a phase of deep structural deterioration, comparable to that of the late Soviet Union. ¤ The current difficulties are no longer cyclical but systemic, after several years during which the problems were masked by massive public spending. […]
¤ https://x.com/TKouilou/status/2021260795015770553?s=20

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇪🇺 Kaja Kallas: “Everyone at the negotiating table, including the Russians and Americans, needs to understand that they need the Europeans’ consent. And we have conditions for that, too. And we must set conditions for the Russians.”

🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt The US under Trump’s rule has become a factor in the destruction of the old world order – Munich Security Conference report. Key points of the report:
¤ https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/2021332458860576891?s=20

➡️ Europe can no longer fully rely on the American “security umbrella” and must re-evaluate its own strategy.
➡️ Russia’s war against Ukraine is an expression of global changes in which territories, security guarantees, and resources can become the subject of trade deals between major powers.
➡️ Ukraine is one of the first victims of the new world order.
➡️ Moscow is not ready for genuine peace negotiations.
➡️ Risk awareness regarding the US has increased in the G7 countries, and the threat from Russia has fallen from second to eighth place among the 32 most significant risks.
➡️ Europe must act more proactively and not wait for others to dictate the rules of global security.

🐣 RT @@AmberWoods100 Here are the six names Khanna publicly read from the unredacted Epstein file documents:
• Leslie Wexner
• Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem
• Salvatore Nuara
• Zurab Mikeladze
• Leonic Leonov
• Nicola Caputo
They were previously redacted. Thousands of names remain unredacted and millions of files remain withheld.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jh336405 Here is how the network worked: https://x.com/jh336405/status/2021308661709275291?s=20

🐣 RT @nybooks “If the murder of Alex Pretti…cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings…making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.” — @fotoole
⋙ NYRB, Fintan O’Toole: The Crime of Witness https://tinyurl.com/yckd7rut “Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.”

Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.

It is striking that the capital offense for which both Pretti and Renee Good, who weeks earlier was shot multiple times at close range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, were summarily executed was the crime of witness. Good was watching ICE at work from her car. Pretti was filming Border Patrol agents on the street. Both were engaged in the task that democracies assign to citizens: that of paying close attention to the workings of power. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.

Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. Habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed. …

This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.

They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax.

The murder of Alex Pretti was in itself an obviously intentional act, but it was also politically deliberate. After the killing of Renee Good on January 7, an administration that was not bent on establishing autocracy would have called a halt to the ICE surges. Good’s death would have been treated as a disaster—not just a private calamity but a terrible governmental screwup. Trump would have made clear that it had never been meant to happen.

Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.

Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.

Pretti’s scarcely cold body was stuffed into this preformulated narrative. He was a thwarted mass killer. Within hours of his murder Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller posted on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Both Gregory Bovino, the then commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, and Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was about to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem used almost the exact same phrase, leaving little doubt that it had been consciously crafted.

The big lie of the threat allegedly posed by Good is here deliberately made bigger. Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism”; Miller slipped into the plural, making Pretti merely one of “the terrorists.” (Since they are unnumbered, they could be legion.) Good was trying to kill one officer. Pretti was planning a massacre—not just of the agents present but of “law enforcement” itself. Trump’s grotesque inflation of language, his bemonstering of opposition politicians, is now fully integrated into the organized street violence of his regime. So it must always be in the authoritarian state: the existential menace can be defeated only if those who embody it can be deprived of their very existences. …

There is, in much of the American media, a learned habit of shoulder shrugging, a civilized avoidance of calling an occupation an occupation, a lie a lie, a murder a murder. As Jem Bartholomew noted in the Columbia Journalism Review soon after Pretti’s killing, “The press is still squeamish about directly calling out the administration’s lies.” But this misplaced timidity in fact adds fuel to the flames. When the incendiaries are in the White House and their targets are all legal, institutional, political, civic, and moral restraints on Trump’s ability to do, as he so openly proclaims, “whatever I want,” the deadening of language has fatal consequences.…

The sin of civic “interference” is in fact the saving grace of democracy. Good and Pretti and thousands of other citizens have been getting in the way of the armed overthrow of democratic freedoms by doing what journalism is supposed to do: pay attention to the actual, on-the-ground reality. The phone that Pretti had in his hand was a connection to a communal determination to refuse the narcotic of normalization. The videos that expose the administration’s mendacity about its own use of extreme violence against peaceful dissent are themselves products of the courage to show up, to be there, to see for yourself—the impulses journalists are supposed to value above all others, aside from the use of accurate language to name what you see.

The challenge the videos present is that of uncomfortably incontrovertible evidence—proof of sanctioned executions and of a government’s systematic lying. If the evidence so bravely gathered does not lead to a profound reversal, Trump’s temporary yielding to public outrage (diluting the smear campaign against Pretti, removing Bovino from Minneapolis, and placing the two officers who shot Pretti on administrative leave) will be merely a tactical retreat—another stage in the piecemeal habituation of Americans to the arbitrary application of martial law. The name of the condition to which the US will have surrendered itself is written all over Europe’s history books.

🐣 RT @ig9wi 🚨 JUST IN : U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie confirms: Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem SENT the “Torture Video”! 💥⚠️
🖼 https://x.com/ig9wi/status/2021087694994932156?s=20/photo/1 -3

The FBI files are finally UNREDACTED! Rep. Thomas Massie reveals that the DOJ has tacitly admitted that the Chairman of DP World, Sultan Bin Sulayem, was the sender of the horrific torture video found in the Epstein/FBI files.

This is no longer a rumor—it’s an official document. The “Co-conspirators” are being named. The walls are closing in on the Dubai elite.

🐣 RT @atrupar Goldman to Lyons: “You said in your opening statement that references to ICE as ‘the Gestapo’ or ‘secret police’ encourages threats against ICE agents. The problem is you have it backwards. People are simply making valid observations about your tactics, which are un-American and outright fascist.”

🐣 RT @TheTNHoller WATCH: Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admits he visited Epstein’s island and lied to Congress about cutting off contact after Epstein had already been busted for soliciting a minor for prostitution

🐣 RT @._GlobeObserver 🚨🇺🇸 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Billionaire Les Wexner, founder of Victoria’s Secret, is now unredacted and listed as a co-conspirator. ¤ He gave Epstein power of attorney and a Manhattan mansion. Redactions had been protecting him.

CNN: The US slips to its lowest-ever rank in a global corruption index https://tinyurl.com/mrymt5ps slipped one notch to 29th place, out of 182; LEAST Corrupt: Denmark, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2021276686906491094?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @ChristopherHale My interview with Vox: “It’s very clear to me that Christian nationalism has no place for Catholics within it. Christian nationalism is evangelical Protestant nationalism. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/443bemzw
¤ https://x.com/ChristopherHale/status/2021211390497726492?s=20

And it’s really pertinent to understand that the leaders of that movement do not think that Catholics are Christian, do not think that we have access to salvation.

“That is the argument that I’m trying to make again and again. Christian nationalism and its stepbrother MAGA authoritarianism are both inherently anti-Catholic.

“To be clear, I’m making a classist argument: I’m saying that my class, my ethnic identity, is excluded from this project. So yes, there is a war at play; it’s a culture war I welcome.

“A culture war between a multi-ethnic American Catholicism versus white MAGA evangelical Protestantism is a culture war that, I believe, the left can win.”

🐣 RT @maxseddon Russia’s army in Ukraine has suffered a sharp rise in men killed or missing in action. That will make it harder for Russian forces to sustain gruelling offensive operations, which in some areas have ground to a pace slower than the Battle of the Somme. [FT link:] https://tinyurl.com/bdh9ytry

🐣 RT @InsiderGeo NEW: French President Emmanuel Macron says Europe can no longer rely on the United States and must urgently build its own economic and military power, calling for a new wave of joint EU borrowing (eurobonds) to fund strategic investments and challenge the dominance of the US dollar. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/5az2m7er
¤ https://x.com/InsiderGeo/status/2021179792184258963?s=20

In a major interview with Le Monde, Macron warned that the world is entering a chaotic phase where old assumptions no longer hold: the US is no longer a guaranteed security provider, Russia is no longer a stable energy supplier, and China has become a systemic economic rival. He described Europe as facing a dual shock a trade tsunami from China and growing unpredictability from Washington.

Macron also warned Europeans against what he called a “cowardly sense of relief” after crises calm down, citing recent US-EU tariff tensions and the Greenland dispute. He said people assume tensions are over, but threats continue daily in sectors like pharmaceuticals and digital tech. “When there is clear aggression, we must not bow our heads or seek compromises,” he said.

He argued Europe must move far faster and at much larger scale, pushing for around €1.2 trillion per year in investment in defense, green tech, digital industries, AI and quantum computing. He warned that if the EU fails to act within the next 3–5 years, it risks being pushed aside in key strategic sectors.

Macron also called for deeper integration of the single market, selective protection of European industry, and new trade partnerships. He added that global markets are increasingly skeptical of the dollar and that European debt could become a credible alternative reserve asset.

“Are we ready to become a major power?” he asked.

🐣 RT @TKouilou [tr] In Russia, unprecedented signs are emerging in pro-Kremlin media: propaganda is shifting from a reassuring facade to open economic alarm.
¤ https://x.com/TKouilou/status/2021173761467121724?s=20

According to Z-patriot Maxim Kalashnikov, this evolution reflects the growing unease within the Russian elite, which is trying to push Putin to end the conflict in Ukraine before the situation becomes unmanageable.

Kalashnikov cites the example of the pro-government newspaper Moskovskiy Komsomolets, which reports that Russia’s budget deficit could reach 10 billion rubles this year.
This figure, according to the analyst, is a serious indicator: it shows that the elite is beginning to exert indirect pressure on Vladimir Putin, signaling to him that continuing the war could lead to economic collapse.

The National Wealth Fund has been largely depleted after four years of war and can no longer cover the deficit.
Essentially, only gold remains, which Russia is already selling actively, but in limited quantities to avoid driving down prices.

An alternative would be to tap into citizens’ bank deposits, an extremely risky move that could trigger social unrest and directly threaten the regime in power.

Kalashnikov also emphasizes that Russia can no longer count on China for additional credit. Beijing refuses to help Moscow prolong the aggression, even though Russia’s weakening could ultimately benefit it.

⋙ 🐣 ‘You can fool Witkoff and Kushner some of the time.
You can fool Trump all of the time.
But you can’t fool the American people.’

🐣 RT @NSTRIKE1231 ‼️‼️ From Russia’s main propaganda TV channel NTV, unusually blunt admissions have aired acknowledging that the war cannot be won against Ukraine, that Russia has humiliated itself before the world, and that Ukraine will never be forced into capitulation.
¤ https://x.com/NSTRIKE1231/status/2021141037066932675?s=20

⚔️ “Ukraine, as a state, possesses every capability to continue resisting in the future — and it is already doing so successfully. Ukraine has not been defeated and has no desire to make peace.”

🇺🇦 “Why is it that for four years nothing has worked for us? Because Ukrainians are an incredibly resilient and stubborn nation, one that knows war no worse than we do!” — Russian propagandists concede this uncomfortable reality on air.

⭕ 9 Feb 2026

🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar Lavrov’s February 9 statements are all implicit reiterations of Putin’s original war aims from 2021 and 2022 that amount to complete Ukrainian and NATO capitulation, effectively signaling that any peace deal that does not address Russian demands of not only Ukraine but also of NATO and the West will not satisfy Russia. The Kremlin’s insistence on these demands are calls for the United States to discard the negotiations process that the United States has conducted with Ukraine and Europe since the publication of the US-proposed 28-point plan.
🌎 [TextLink:] https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2021064077267620307?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Acyn @PabloReports: What can you tell us about what you saw in the unredacted Epstein files?
Khanna: Most of the unredacted files were redacted—70 to 80 percent. Massie and I saw that there were six men who were co‑conspirators and were being protected. Those names need to be made public. There’s no excuse for releasing survivors’ names while protecting these six men. There are probably more. In just two hours, we saw that these six men were being protected

WSJ: Wall Street’s Hunt for Cheaper Stocks Goes Global https://tinyurl.com/3zr7m68e “High valuations and a weakening dollar are boosting bets that America’s lead over other global markets will shrink”

🐣 RT @michaeldweiss “‘Intelligence showed me the so-called ‘Dmitriev package’ that he presented in the U.S. — it amounts to around $12 trillion,’ Zelensky said, describing it as a proposed framework for large-scale U.S.-Russia economic cooperation.” ¤ How much of this goes directly to the Trump, Witkoff, Kushner families and their cronies?
⋙⋙ 🐣 The only actual money is the bribe money; the rest is fantasy money, promises of access to Russian rare earths, etc. But the bribe money is real. ¤ What’s holding Trump back are 🇺🇦’s red lines, the EU’s support for 🇺🇦, and the fact 70% of Americans favor🇺🇦
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss WSJ a few months back: https://tinyurl.com/yck9a9dh
[WSJ (11/28/2025): Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine]

Three powerful businessmen-two Americans and a Russian -hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold-with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, in who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”

🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar MORE: Kremlin officials have been trying to push the United States to abandon the recent US-led negotiations with Ukraine and Europe in favor of a US-Russian settlement based almost entirely on Russia’s demands.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2021052753036870137?s=20/photo/1

Lavrov used a February 9 interview with TV BRICS, a Russian outlet covering BRICS states and candidate states, to accuse the United States of reneging on the peace proposals the United States itself allegedly proposed at the August 2025 US-Russia Alaska Summit by imposing new sanctions on Russia, seizing Russian shadow fleet tankers, and placing secondary tariffs on importers of Russian oil.

The Kremlin has been exploiting the lack of publicly available documents from the Alaska Summit to claim that Russia and the United States came to an understanding to end the war during the meeting.[3] Kremlin officials have claimed that the Alaska Summit agreed to principles based on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s June 2024 speech to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), in which Putin insisted on capitulation to Russia’s original war demands of both Ukraine and NATO.

⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explicitly blamed the United States on February 9 for the lack of progress in ending Russia’s war against Ukraine. ¤ Other Key Takeaways:
¤ https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2021024144700145689?s=20

Lavrov reiterated Russia’s demand for effective control over Ukraine’s post-war government and the size and composition of its military.

Russian State Duma deputies are explicitly demanding that the United States concede to all Russian demands. […]

TheAtlantic, Alexandra Petri: Finally, a Halftime Show That Represents Real America! https://tinyurl.com/2tvzj5nm “Isn’t Bad Bunny an American artist? Don’t millions of people love his music? At the Turning Point USA alternative show, we forget about all that.”

🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦 Zelensky: There will be significant international events this week – defense, security. Our position will be sufficiently represented in Europe, and the same with America.
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2020934554379260109?s=20

In fact, every day now our negotiating team is working on those documents, on those proposals that can yield results at the next meetings. And the main thing is that the partners are set up in the same way as we are in Ukraine: peace is needed, reliable security guarantees are the only real basis for peace to exist and for the Russians not to break the agreements with one or another strike, one or another of their hybrid operations.

Now there are no countries left in Europe that do not yet know what Russian interference is and what Russian destabilization operations can be.

Everyone sees what Russian killers, Russian missiles, Russian drones are doing. Protection from this and guaranteeing security must be tangible and prepare the basis for lasting peace.

The documents on guarantees are ready. There is no alternative to security. There is no alternative to peace. There is no alternative to the restoration of our state. I thank everyone in the world who is helping! Thank you for every action to support life and people now. Glory to Ukraine!

🐣 RT @OfTheBraveUSA Q [NicolleDWallace]: “Who are the six men whose names you saw [redacted in the Epstein Files]?”
Rep. Ro Khanna: “We are going to push DOJ to release those. They had photographs, as marked, of co-conspirators…and there’s no reason that they should be covering up those names.”

🐣 RT @RepThomasMassie @RepRoKhanna and I just spent two hours at DOJ viewing the “mostly-unredacted” Epstein files. ¤ Four of the 18 redacted names on this document are men born before 1970. DOJ needs to explain why they are redacted unless they were just randoms in a line-up. https://tinyurl.com/4pzfmfmm
◕ https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/2020996191492727128?s=20/photo/1

WSJ: Meet the One Woman Anthropic Trusts to Teach AI Morals https://tinyurl.com/55sd4jjz “The tech company has tasked Amanda Askell with giving its chatbot, Claude, a sense of right and wrong.” //➔ What’s to stop someone from making an AI Machiavellian?

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 As I wrote, if you think a massive US gulag is being built just for illegal immigrants, along with a federal paramilitary force as large as the Marines, you’re a fool. Billions in unaccountable cash from Venezuelan oil, shock troops, and detention camps. This is not a drill.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ReichlinMelnick ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. ¤ If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they’ll be the largest prisons in the country, with little to no real oversight.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @bluestein Officials in a small Georgia city east of Atlanta say Immigration and Customs Enforcement has finalized the purchase of an industrial warehouse with plans to turn it into a sprawling detention facility, where as many as 10,000 immigrants could be held.
⋙⋙⋙ AJC: ICE to begin detaining immigrants inside Social Circle warehouse in April https://tinyurl.com/4rxmpxrc

🐣 RT @yasminalombaert Lavrov declares NATO, the EU and OSCE “finished”.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/yasminalombaert/status/2021008483949117551?s=20/photo/1

Sergey Lavrov: ¤ “And all these organisations, NATO with its unfulfilled promises made to the Soviet Union not to expand eastward, and the European Union, which destroyed the entire rich infrastructure of cooperation with our country, and especially the OSCE, which completely submitted to the unilateral actions of the West and forgot about the fundamental principle of consensus – the consent of all its participants. They are, in general, living out their days.”

Lavrov is back at it with the “NATO promised not to expand” fairy tale.

If the EU and OSCE are “living out their days,” it’s only because Russia spent the last few years trying to burn the whole neighbourhood down.
Hard to have “consensus” when one person at the table is busy invading their neighbours.

The only thing “living out its days” is this tired, 1990s-era grievance script.

The Reality Check: Who is “Living out their days”?

NATO Expansion: No written treaty or legal agreement has ever barred NATO from admitting new members. While informal discussions about NATO’s jurisdiction occurred in 1990 during German reunification, Mikhail Gorbachev later clarified that “the topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all” regarding other Eastern European nations at that time.

EU Cooperation: The “infrastructure of cooperation” mentioned by Lavrov was dismantled following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which led to international sanctions and the suspension of most bilateral projects.

OSCE Consensus: The OSCE operates by consensus of all 57 members. Recent “deadlocks” in the organisation are primarily due to Russia using its own veto to block the annual budget, leadership appointments, and the renewal of field missions in Ukraine

💙 🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Pope Leo XIV has turned his call for solidarity with Ukraine into action: the Vatican, via the Dicastery for the Service of Charity led by Cardinal Krajewski, delivered 80 electricity generators, thousands of medicine packs (antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, melatonin & more), and food supplies to Fastiv and Kyiv. Three trucks departed from Rome’s Ukrainian Basilica of Santa Sofia to help Ukrainians endure renewed attacks on energy infrastructure amid freezing winter. Grateful for this concrete support.

🐣 RT @pl_european Epstein files 📑

UK 🇬🇧 – Prime Minister on the brink of resignation
Poland 🇵🇱 – Special investigative committee to be created
Norway 🇳🇴 – criminal investigation into ex PM
Slovakia 🇸🇰 – Nat Sec advisor steps down
Sweden 🇸🇪 – High-profile Swedish figures resigned
🇺🇸 USA?!

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 U.S. Representative Thomas Massie claims he has received a flash drive containing what he says is the full set of files linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
¤ https://x.com/WW3finalboss/status/2020810866069819432?s=20

According to Massie, the material allegedly names powerful figures across politics, business, and major donor networks. He argues this is why the media has remained silent—because, in his view, many influential people would be implicated.

Massie further alleges that Epstein was not just a sex offender but an intelligence-linked figure involved in a large-scale blackmail operation targeting elites, politicians, and global leaders. He claims that releasing these documents would have massive consequences for existing power structures and insists the public deserves transparency. ¤ If these claims develop further, the political fallout could be significant.

🐣 📊 RT @atrupar Enten: “Trump’s base with non-college voters is absolutely collapsing … he’s underwater by 9 points. That’s a 23 point switcheroo.” [CNN]
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2020866641882436010?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @GovTimWalz This is obviously not targeted enforcement. And we still don’t know how many children they’ve taken.
⋙ 🐣 📋 RT @CBSNews Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. ¤The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration’s far-reaching deportation operations across the U.S. https://cbsn.ws/4r5SkfX

🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Russia accuses US of backing out of alleged Ukraine territory surrender agreement. ¤ “It seems that they proposed it and we were ready — and now they are not,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
⋙ 🐣 “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” idiot

WaPo Editorial: The cost of Trump’s madman theory on tariffs https://tinyurl.com/pntep3wd “Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs to coax or coerce other countries to change their foreign policy to advance American interests, but he’s had uneven success”
// The president’s erratic nature can be a strength, but it’s also his biggest liability.

⭕ 8 Feb 2026 😢 😔 Mourning 🐤🐥

⭕ 7 Feb 2026

WaPo: Zelensky says Russia is proposing $12 Trillion in economic deals with US https://tinyurl.com/4rhwxjuy “The Ukrainian president said the Trump administration was pushing for a June deadline to end Russia’s war” “The main concern … was the midterm congressional elections.”

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 🚨🇺🇦 Ukrainian officials say their intelligence has obtained information about a proposed US–Russia economic cooperation package worth roughly 12 trillion dollars, but this is described as a Russian initiative, the so-called “Dmitriev package,” rather than a confirmed or finalized agreement between Washington and Moscow.
¤ https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2020153386536943795?s=20

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the proposal was presented by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev and framed it as a warning sign that potential bilateral discussions could be taking place, possibly even touching on issues related to Ukraine’s sovereignty and security, which Kyiv firmly rejects without its direct involvement.

There is no public confirmation from the US side that any such deal exists, and reporting consistently characterizes it as an offer under discussion, not a signed agreement. European officials have made it clear, however, that if the United States were to pursue a large-scale economic deal with Russia that undermines Ukraine or bypasses European security interests, the EU would respond by imposing sanctions on the US.

🐣 RT @UKikaski Zelensky is sounding the alarm: Russia is dangling a massive $12 trillion economic “carrot” to the US (the so-called “Dmitriev package”) to sweeten a bilateral deal , but those goodies could come at Ukraine’s expense, potentially touching on sovereignty, security, or territory. It also brings into question the neutrality of the U.S. as an intermediary in the peace talks. ¤ Kyiv’s firm line: No deals about us without us. No secret horse-trading that sells out Ukraine. “Nothing about Ukraine”
¤ https://x.com/UKikaski/status/2020098850380247253?s=20

🐣 RT @InsiderGeo NEW: A whistleblower complaint has raised serious concerns about how highly classified U.S. intelligence was handled inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
¤ https://x.com/InsiderGeo/status/2020202748235427867?s=20

According to a lawyer representing the whistleblower, the NSA detected an unusual phone call between an individual linked to foreign intelligence and a person close to U.S. President Donald Trump. The information was flagged as highly sensitive and was brought to the attention of DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

Instead of allowing the NSA to distribute the intelligence through standard channels, Gabbard allegedly took a paper copy directly to the White House chief of staff and later instructed the NSA not to publish the report, ordering that the details be sent only to her office.

A whistleblower filed a formal complaint, claiming the intelligence was improperly withheld from Congress. The complaint was reportedly delayed for months, despite laws requiring transmission to congressional intelligence committees within 21 days. Members of Congress have since received only heavily redacted versions and are divided over the legality of Gabbard’s actions.

Democrats have raised concerns that the delay may have been an effort to suppress the complaint, while some Republicans argue the handling was lawful and necessary due to classification and procedural issues. Former intelligence officials reviewing the case have pointed to multiple procedural anomalies that could indicate misconduct in the handling of national security information.

The contents of the underlying intelligence remain largely classified, and lawmakers are now requesting direct access from the NSA, bypassing the ODNI -The Guardian.

🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko You know, it actually seems entirely plausible that the Kremlin’s con artist in chief Kirill Dmitriev is really waving a $12 trillion plan of “commercial opportunities” in front of Trump’s and Witkoff’s noses. ¤ (That goes in exchange for betraying Ukraine, of course). ¤ And their heads must be spinning and their mouths are watering around the clock at those sweet numbers. ¤ And it’s also likely as hell that no one is remotely troubled by the minor detail that this figure amounts to roughly 550% of Russia’s entire annual GDP.

🐣 RT @RepThomasMassie What did Epstein do for the government (prior, then, or after) to get out of this?
⋙ 🐣 RT @JayShams Reading the 56-page Florida draft indictment against Epstein, I’m struck by how *strong* it is. It’s extremely detailed. ¤ They had him nailed! All the more bizarre that he got such a generous plea agreement.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/2018300815782433076?s=20/photo/1

🚫🐣 RT @_Kuscubasi [Translated from Turkish] U.S. REPRESENTATIVE THOMAS MASSIE:
¤ 💽 https://x.com/_Kuscubasi/status/2020064182859673677?s=20

– Last night, I received a flash drive containing the complete list of files belonging to Jeffrey Epstein.
– It has everything in it; every billionaire, every campaign donor, every single person.
– Now let me tell you why you haven’t heard anything about this in the media.
– Because they’re all in it.
– They will do everything to prevent these documents from being made public.
– Epstein was far more than just a child predator; he was an asset for intelligence agencies.
– He was part of a blackmail operation used to control billionaires, politicians, and world leaders.
– If this list ever sees the light of day, the system as we know it will collapse.
– The public has a right to know the truth, and I’m not afraid to share this information.

🐣 RT @ @NSTRIKE1231 🇺🇦 Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
¤ https://x.com/NSTRIKE1231/status/2020094010384171473?s=20

📌 “The use of even a single ‘Oreshnik’ missile from Belarus would drag the country into the war; this is something the Russians very much want.”

🔷 “The Russian Federation reinforces its army by an average of 40,000 personnel per month, while our forces eliminate 30–35 thousand occupiers (killed and severely wounded). In January, however, their replenishment amounted to 22,000.”

🔷 “The Russian Federation’s 2025 budget deficit exceeds £100 billion, and this figure will grow further this year. I think Putin is considering a pause in the war.”

🔷 “Payments to Russian military personnel are being reduced, despite a stable pace of contract enlistment.”

🔷 “Under an agreement, 10,000 North Korean soldiers remain on Russian territory—they are not entering Ukraine.”

🔷 “Intelligence has obtained information about the so-called ‘Dmitriev package’ of U.S.–Russia economic cooperation worth $12 trillion. There are signals that some elements may affect Ukraine’s sovereignty and security. We oppose agreements ‘about us without us.’”

🇫🇷 Emmanuel Macron — visit by his adviser to Moscow: Macron is seeking an alternative dialogue with Russia so that Europe is involved in ending the war and has its own voice.

📌 “There are shifts in Russian rhetoric at the talks toward greater specificity, but they still cannot be trusted.”

📌 “The United States will likely pressure the sides to reach peace by June. Why by this summer? We understand U.S. domestic factors are influencing this, making an end to the war in Ukraine more urgent for them. For the first time, the sides discussed that the most difficult issues could be raised at a trilateral leaders’ meeting, though preparatory steps are required. It is important that dialogue about such a format exists.”

📌 “Most likely, Russia is signaling to the U.S.: recognize Crimea as Russian—knowing Ukraine will never do this and understanding Ukraine’s influence within the European segment.”

📌 “The state will not support any agreement that contradicts Ukraine’s Constitution or legislation. Even potential compromises must be fair and reciprocal. Yes, some matters in U.S.–Russia relations may not concern us, but if they affect our national interests, our people, or our territories, we want to see them—so problems do not arise later. This must not happen against the interests of Ukrainians.”

‼️ 🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt Ukrainian intelligence has learned of a $12 trillion economic cooperation agreement between the US and Russia.
¤ https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/2020085811618730236?s=20

This was revealed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting with journalists. These agreements, which the president referred to as the “Dmitriev Package,” could raise issues related to Ukrainian sovereignty and security.

Zelenskyy emphasized that Ukraine will not support any agreements that violate the Ukrainian Constitution, particularly the recognition of Crimea as Russian territory. Ukraine Now

IntlJrnl/Academia, RE Johnson (2020): Review: Timothy Snyder The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America https://tinyurl.com/4zux233h “Timothy Snyder attempts to explain how democracy is being eroded around the world, and what role the Russians have played.”
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Unfreedom 2020 Review

Russia, no longer a superpower, today has a population less than half that of the former USSR. Its gross national product (GDP) is smaller than Canada’s or South Korea’s. But Vladimir Putin seems consistently to punch above his weight. Rejecting liberal democracy and market capitalism, his government has expanded its country’s borders and helped undermine the freer economies and polities of the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, and the United States. Timothy Snyder attempts to explain how democracy is being eroded around the world, and what role the Russians have played.

TheAtlantic, David Frum (2018): The Great Russian Disinformation Campaign https://tinyurl.com/ytk4zvrs “In a new book, Timothy Snyder explains how Russia revolutionized information warfare—and presages its consequences for democracies in Europe and the United States.”
// 7/1/2018; Review: Timothy Snyder: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

NYT, Margaret MacMillan (2018): Are We Traveling the ‘Road to Unfreedom’? https://tinyurl.com/y5ph2yra Review: Timothy Snyder: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
// 5/9/2018

🐣 RT @WSJ In an unmistakable sign of Europe’s rapidly dimming view on America, the U.S. delegation entered the Milan Cortina Opening Ceremony to a chorus of boos and disapproving whistles from the international crowd of more than 65,000.
⋙ WSJ: Team USA, Vance Booed in Frosty Reception at Italy’s Winter Olympics https://tinyurl.com/2ekb76v7 With the U.S. vice president in attendance, local fans at the Milan Cortina Opening Ceremony made their frustration with America heard on Friday

In a gleefully kitschy Opening Ceremony that featured ancient Romans, dancing espresso pots and a number by Mariah Carey, Italy threw open its arms to welcome the entire world to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

Well, nearly the entire world.

In an unmistakable sign of Europe’s rapidly dimming view on America, the U.S. delegation entered the San Siro stadium here on Friday night to a chorus of boos and disapproving whistles from the international crowd of more than 65,000. The jeering only intensified when Vice President JD Vance appeared on the big screen during Team USA’s arrival.

The only other team to receive similar treatment was Israel.

Olympic organizers had braced for the possibility of anti-American sentiment inside the stadium. Small protests had already cropped up on the streets of Milan against the planned presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the city. Asked before the Games on how the Americans might be received, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said she hoped that the occasion would be “seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful.” …

🐣 RT @Billbrowder Was at the opening ceremony of @milanocortina26 Olympics. The one thing the press isn’t talking about was the spontaneous, rapturous applause & standing ovation the Ukrainian team got when they walked into the stadium. More than any other country Really heartwarming

⭕ 6 Feb 2026

WSJ: A New Crypto Winter Is Here and Even the Biggest Bulls Aren’t Certain Why https://tinyurl.com/3z2c7ee9 “Some of crypto’s biggest champions can’t put their finger on what went wrong”
◕ /photo/1

🐣 RT @DefiyantlyFree Vympel is an elite FSB (Federal Security Service) special forces unit in Russia, originally formed by the KGB in 1981. It specialized in:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/2019864462807945489?s=20/photo/1 -2

∙ Deep penetration operations
∙ Sabotage and covert action overseas
∙ Counter-terrorism operations
∙ Assassination missions
∙ Protection of Soviet/Russian embassies
MOO Vympel (МОО ВЫМПЕЛ) is the International Public Organization “Vympel” – a veterans association for former KGB/FSB officers who served in the Vympel special forces unit.
Guess who obtained a Russian business visa by listing MOO Vympel as his inviting organization in Moscow? ¤ You guessed it Jeffrey Epstein. … Yea, lol Epstein literally met with Russian intelligence.

🐣 RT @SenPeterWelch ICE alone has more funding than the following countries’ entire defense budgets. … ICE doesn’t need more money. It needs serious reforms to stop terrorizing our communities.

Canada 🇨🇦
Israel 🇮🇱
Spain 🇪🇸
Brazil 🇧🇷
Poland 🇵🇱
Turkey 🇹🇷
Netherlands 🇳🇱
Indonesia 🇮🇩
Mexico 🇲🇽
Sweden 🇸🇪
Norway 🇳🇴
Pakistan 🇵🇰
Iran 🇮🇷
Belgium 🇧🇪
Greece 🇬🇷
Algeria 🇩🇿
Egypt 🇪🇬

🐣 RT @MilesTaylorUSA Today, the President warned CNN and MSNOW not to have me on their programs more — or else. ¤ Looking forward to joining CNN later this evening and MSNOW tomorrow morning. ¤ See y’all then.

🐣 RT @20committee Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t a “spy” in the conventional sense. He was an “access agent” (to use the proper term) for global VIPs — for more than 1 intelligence service. Everybody acquainted with real-world counterintelligence gets this. Efforts to hide it will fail. We know already.

🔄 From Archive: Mark Lilla, writing in The New Republic, laments the eclipse of Americans’ understanding of the world around us:

In truth, we have not thought nearly enough about the end of the cold war, and especially the intellectual vacuum that it left behind. If nothing else, the cold war focused the mind. The ideologies in conflict, whose lineages could be traced back two centuries, offered clear opposing views of political reality. Now that they are gone, one would expect things to be much clearer to us, but just the opposite seems true. Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in. The connection between words and things has snapped. The end of ideology has not meant the lifting of clouds. It has brought a fog so thick that we can no longer read what is right before us. We find ourselves in an illegible age. [emphasis added]
TheNewRepublic, Mark Lilla: The Truth About Our Libertarian Age http://bit.ly/1sXX2gn
// 6/17/2014

🐣 RT @OTregub Former CIA Director David Petraeus called Ukrainian intelligence a global leader – and for a good reason:
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Ukrainian penetration (so to speak) of the GRU is quite extraordinary. I made Budanov laugh when I asked him how HUR acquired 29155 commander Andrey Averyanov’s medical records, including his prostate exam. HUR is literally staring up the GRU’s ass. https://archive.ph/ThA7X
[TextLink:] https://x.com/OTregub/status/2019824108104831428?s=20/photo/1

NYT: Iran Is at Work on Missile and Nuclear Sites, Satellite Images Show https://tinyurl.com/yc2t223w “Repairs at key missile sites began soon after they were hit by Israeli and U.S. strikes last year, but work at Iran’s nuclear facilities has been slower.”

NYT: US Seeks to Expedite Deportation of 5-Year-Old Liam Conejo Ramos https://tinyurl.com/y6tcdy46 Liam was detained last month in Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation in which his father was also detained by federal agents. //➔ The inhumanity is the point.

🐣 RT @D_Redis Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, First Deputy Chief of the GRU of the Russian General Staff, who was shot in Moscow this morning, was the senior Russian representative at the negotiations in Mariupol in May 2022, during the withdrawal of the Mariupol garrison from Azovstal. […]
¤ https://x.com/D_Redis/status/2019732687263613207?s=20
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @christogrozev Gen. Vladimir Alexeev, the senior most GRU commander in charge of the war on Ukraine, reported shot multiple times in Moscow today. Alexeev, himself born in Ukraine, was seen as the most sophisticated and capable architect of the invasion of Ukraine.

💙 NYT, Oren Cass: The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. https://tinyurl.com/29en3ysy “Financialization has made American businesses less resilient, less innovative and less competitive. It has been a major cause of slow wage growth and rising inequality.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2019803621412798694?s=20/photo/1

Financialization is the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.

In a financialized economy, businesses become mere sources of cash, assets to be manipulated and then operated for maximum investor returns. Workers become just another cost, like lumber. Customers are just revenue streams to be tapped.

⭕ 5 Feb 2026

🐣 RT @ @visionergeo 🇷🇺⚠️ The well-known Russian military propagandist and commentator, Kirill Fedorov, is disappointed with the Russian army due to the shutdown of “STARLINK” terminals:
¤ https://x.com/visionergeo/status/2019354313491947826?s=20

📌 If the Ukrainians make a “white list” of Starlink terminals, then all our terminals will be turned off… “In terms of interaction with drones, we are going back to the last century”: meanwhile, Russian soldiers complain about the mass shutdown of Starlink terminals.

📌 According to Fedorov, each Russian tank is equipped with a “Starlink” through which the crew connects to drone operators via the internet – on the tankers’ tablet or phone, a live image from the “Mavic” (drone) appears in real time… meaning the Russians see the moment the shell hits the tank online and immediately adjust strikes towards houses or trenches. He says that without Starlink, the Ukrainians[or Russians?] will lose this crucial communication control channel, which the Russians have been accustomed to using in battle for 3 years now…

🔹 Fedorov notes that Starlinks are not only essential for armored vehicles but are also used in trenches, command posts, and basically everything related to communication and information exchange is built on the Starlink satellite internet system..

🐣 RT @yasminalombaert In this interview, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele discusses potential links between Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/yasminalombaert/status/2019494111095714112?s=20/photo/1

Steele suggests that Epstein may have functioned as an agent of influence or facilitation, citing Poland’s investigation into the matter and Epstein’s early connections to Russian organised crime in New York during the 1970s.

Christopher Steele:
I think anyone who knows about Russia and Poland is aware that the Poles actually have very sophisticated understanding of Russia and a good counter-intelligence capability. And for them to be so overtly saying that they think the Russians were behind the Epstein operation is—gives us pause for thought and we should certainly be liaising with them and taking it very seriously.

Interviewer:
So far the story’s been about certain celebrity figures, certainly certain high-profile characters, but this is shifting, isn’t it, in a different direction? Do you think though, looking at—we’re looking at pictures of Jeffrey Epstein there—do we think that the man that we’re seeing on the screen now, was he a Russian agent do you think? Was he compromised sufficiently by the Kremlin to have been operating by them and gathering information and operating to compromise other figures in the West?

Christopher Steele:
Yes, it’s important to be clear about definitions here when we talk about people being agents. There are different sorts of agents. But if you’re talking about facilities, facilitation, and if you’re talking about influence, which are two of the aspects of work that agents can perform for hostile foreign powers, then I think he almost certainly was an agent.
And my contacts in America tell me that without doubt Epstein’s career, if we can call it that, began in the 1970s in New York, and that at that point he was basically in touch with Russian organised crime groups at Brighton Beach. And as you probably know, there is little, certainly these days, light between Russian organised crime groups and Russian intelligence. And that is how he would have been picked up and recruited and trained and run back against this celebrity network.”

🐣 RT @sltrib,“[Pam Bondi] pretty much slandered all of us,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson. “And to me, that’s problematic to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK.” [link:] https://tinyurl.com/y8u9mzr6

🐣 RT @amyklobuchar Over 300 former prosecutors are urging DOJ to allow independent local & state investigations into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ¤ MN investigators worked with federal partners on the investigations into the Hortman and Annunciation Church shootings — they shouldn’t be excluded now.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/amyklobuchar/status/2019485430367023109?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @NickKristof Across the world, and particularly in Europe, the United States is seeing how quickly it can squander 75 years of accumulated soft power and good will.
⋙ 🐣 RT @yarotrof A taste of the current mood in Poland, from a lawmaker who served as deputy prime minister and minister of education, @GiertychRoman
[TextLink:] https://x.com/NickKristof/status/2019519543723585855?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @GiertychRoman [tr] Dear Mr. Ambassador!
Your position that you will not maintain relations with the Marshal of the Sejm, who was elected by the parliamentary majority representing the majority of Poles, is simply insolent.
The times when ambassadors dictated to Poles who should be who in Poland are over and will never return.
We want good relations with the USA, but your representatives will not be choosing the authorities of the Republic of Poland for us.

I have never been a fan of Włodzimierz Czarzasty, but in this matter, as a Member of Parliament, I stand firmly behind him.
Your President first insulted Polish soldiers, and then demands support for his dreams of a Nobel Prize.
The times when Nero demanded, under threat of punishment, recognition for his musical talents were recognized as the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Donald Trump’s efforts to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while at the same time hanging a photo of himself with the greatest criminal of our time – Putin – are, from a Polish perspective, similar to demanding awards and praise in front to Nero.

🐣 RT @simongerman600 One country stands out in the global reputation chart for 2025 [leading economies]. The US lost massive good will globally. ln my world as a public speaker I hear of conferences not being held in the US for the foreseeable future and of academics choosing Canada for their sabbatical over the US. Recent news from Germany is that the government moves away from Microsoft products. Isolated small trends that nonetheless point into the same direction.
◕ https://x.com/simongerman600/status/2019367418666054010?s=20/photo/1
// US 30 ➔ 48, Ukraine 31 ➔ 26, Canada 4 ➔ 2, China 57 ➔ 57, Russia 60 ➔ 60 (dead last),

🐣 RT @Acyn Luttig: It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court does from this point forward. For two years, the Supreme Court has authorized the absolute lawlessness and unconstitutional activity of this president.

TheAtlantic, Laura Field: The Intellectual Edgelords of the GOP https://tinyurl.com/mr3xnbnz “Macho displays and transgressive memes mark a significant shift in how the federal government sees and promotes its mission—and sanctions state violence.”
// The mainstreaming of transgressive ideas is the culmination of a yearslong conservative project.

It may be tempting to see this change as an organic or bottom-up phenomenon, as if federal agencies are appealing to Proud Boys to lure more ICE recruits. But the reality is that this transformation is the culmination of years of work by niche groups of conservative intellectuals who have long rejected America’s liberal traditions—and now dominate the halls of power. …

After the “Unite the Right” rally turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the alt-right appeared to lose steam. The White House chief strategist Steve Bannon fell from grace, the white nationalist Richard Spencer mostly vanished from the public eye, and controversial figures including Sebastian Gorka and Darren Beattie were ultimately ousted from the administration. Even Stephen Miller looked vulnerable for a time. Many conservatives assumed that the events of January 6, 2021, would rightfully prevent Trump from holding public office ever again.

Instead, January 6 came to signify the staying power of Trumpism, and offered a new rallying cry and loyalty test for a more radicalized GOP. …

Today, elite MAGA-world figures including Anton and Peter Thiel flirt openly with the idea of Caesarism, or a “Red Caesar,” whereby a lone authoritarian ruler might restore the country’s strength. “Postliberals” such as Patrick Deneen write about how “regime change” is possible only with a new elite—one that understands the value of “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The influential philosopher-blogger Curtis Yarvin has called for a total dismantling of “the cathedral,” by which he means the all-powerful liberal institutions at the center of modern life (universities, media outlets), which operate like a Church in that they dictate how people should think.

What unifies these thinkers is a totalizing and conspiratorial conception of modern liberal politics. In this view, very little in the existing order is worth redeeming. Some even argue that the most patriotic way forward is simply to burn it all down. …

What unifies these thinkers is a totalizing and conspiratorial conception of modern liberal politics. In this view, very little in the existing order is worth redeeming. Some even argue that the most patriotic way forward is simply to burn it all down. …

That kind of edgelordism has become the currency du jour in the GOP, from the Ivy League through the streets of Minnesota. The MAGA new right seems to be betting that the American polity has a deep reserve of untapped nativist rage—which can be harnessed in the service of their culture war against the liberal status quo, or of ICE’s more tangible goals. But if current polls are to be believed, the administration seems to be underestimating the everyday decency and patriotism of the American public.

Boundary-pushing ideas can be invigorating, and opportunities to question and resist received wisdom are essential to any free and democratic society. But the pursuit of transgression for its own sake can easily derail sound judgment. The risk is in presuming that anything subversive or sensational is also true and meaningful, and that anything conventional is a lie that must be smashed down. That is a brutal way to inhabit the world—and, I hope, a losing one.

🐣 RT @cami_mondeaux NEW: Jeffries and Schumer officially release demands for ICE reforms, including no masks, requiring ID, body cams, ensuring state and local coordination, etc
[TextLink:] https://x.com/cami_mondeaux/status/2019237895840886944?s=20/photo/1 -3

1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.

CornellLaw: 18 U.S. Code § 592 – Troops at polls https://tinyurl.com/y3rhmvn4
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2019577156955697340?s=20

Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.

This section shall not prevent any officer or member of the armed forces of the United States from exercising the right of suffrage in any election district to which he may belong, if otherwise qualified according to the laws of the State in which he offers to vote.

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 719; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(K), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)

🐣 RT @CREWcrew 18 U.S. Code § 592 makes it a crime punishable by 5 years in prison to deploy federal troops to polling places

🐣 RT @visionergeo 🇷🇺 The Russians not only have problems at the front, the occupiers are facing a real catastrophe. The entire command system of the troops has collapsed. Offensive operations have been halted in many areas — Flash.
¤ https://x.com/visionergeo/status/2019354380441395582?s=20

🇺🇦 It turned out that problems also arose for those Ukrainian military units that did not timely submit lists regarding private Starlinks and did not register terminals in the system… The data processing is currently actively underway.

🟥 Apparently, the disconnection of Starlinks caused a complete paralysis of command and communication in the Russian units

NYT: What the Crackdown Has Done to Minneapolis Children https://tinyurl.com/3626va92 “For weeks, the Minneapolis area has been a landscape of intense turmoil as federal immigration agents face off against furious citizens.”
// “It’s like living in fear all the time,” a teenager said about the federal raids that have shattered families.

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇵🇱 Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski: Russia has waged war, occupied us, wiped us off the map for over a century. When they threaten us, we believe them.
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2019356699744731537?s=20

They’ve now spent longer than the Soviet Union fought the Nazis trying to conquer Ukraine. By our estimates, they’ve already suffered opportunity costs of a trillion dollars.

They’ve lost more than a million dead and wounded soldiers. President Putin seems to be demanding even territories that he can’t conquer.

Europe is now financing the war entirely. We’ve spent roughly 200 billion euros.

Success will come only when Putin recalculates whether he can achieve his aims at an acceptable cost.

🐣 RT @MercadoMedia1 TIME Puts Minneapolis on the Cover Amid Federal Immigration Crackdown
🖼 https://x.com/MercadoMedia1/status/2019476034081681605?s=20/photo/1

Time magazine just released a new cover focused on Minneapolis, calling it “The Siege of an American City,” as more than 3,000 federal agents have been deployed here in what’s being described as the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.

The story details how the operation has brought fear and disruption to immigrant communities, shut down business corridors, sparked mass protests, and led to the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.

For Mayor Jacob Frey, now in his third term, the crisis has put the city at the center of a national political fight, caught between federal pressure and residents demanding stronger resistance.

TIME says Minneapolis has become the clearest example yet of what mass deportation looks like on the ground.

🐣 RT @nexta_tv Former MI6 chief: “We thought the Ukrainians would struggle to hold off the Russians. However, we underestimated how bad the Russian army would perform on the battlefield.” ¤ Richard Moore also remarked:
¤ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2019403641388413407?s=20

“In Zelensky, we saw a different kind of leader — a person who turned out to be incredibly brave, stayed and led his people in resistance to the Russian invaders.”

And here, it’s hard not to agree with him. As Alexander Nevzorov wrote, no one but Zelensky has real experience fighting Russia.

The Ukrainian president has a thousand flaws — but his experience outweighs them: All Western leaders are lovely people, but they shine only in conversational genres. What’s needed now is a real gladiator, one who can gut his enemies and isn’t afraid of “escalation and blood.”

⋙ 🐣 RT @PhilMatthews58 “However, we underestimated how bad the Russian army would perform on the battlefield.” ¤ It wasn’t simply that Russia under performed on the battlefield, but they all underestimated how absolutely brilliant Ukraine would perform on the battlefield, against all the odds.

🐣 RT @StratcomCentre Mass reports of Russian operations paralyzed at the front in the aftermath of losing Starlink. ¤ “Command and control of troops at the front is virtually paralyzed.
¤ https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2019348003585233295?s=20

According to reports from the field, assault operations have been suspended, and the unit command and control system is experiencing serious interruptions. The reason is the Starlink shutdown for Russian troops following the introduction of mandatory pre-registration. For several days now, Elon Musk’s company has effectively banned the use of its satellite communications by the Russian side, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to use the system after authorization.

According to reports from the front, the situation is close to critical. Over the two years of active Starlink deployment, almost all operational command and control—communication between units, fire coordination, and UAV data transmission—has been tied to the American satellite infrastructure. There has been no practical alternative comparable in stability and speed.”

🐣 RT @NOELreports President Zelensky rejected Russia’s ultimatum on recognizing Donbas, saying Ukraine has its own president who signs documents for the country. He stressed that Ukraine’s territories belong to Ukraine despite their temporary occupation and said no other leaders can decide this for Kyiv. #Ukraine

📋 AP: US and Russia agree to reestablish military dialogue after Ukraine talks https://tinyurl.com/4ykf5bw “The restored communication channel ‘will provide a consistent military-to-military contact as the parties continue to work towards a lasting peace,’ US European Command said”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2019455458998649176?s=20/photo/1

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 55,000 Ukrainian troops have died since Russia’s invasion almost four years ago. “And there is a large number of people whom Ukraine considers missing,” he added in an interview broadcast late Wednesday by French TV channel France 2. he last time Zelenskyy gave a figure for battlefield deaths, in early 2025, he said 46,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed.

Last year saw a 31% increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties compared with 2024, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a report published Wednesday. ¤ Almost 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and just over 40,000 wounded since the start of the war through last December, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

WaPo: As West goes after Russia’s oil fleet, Moscow fears for its war funding https://tinyurl.com/44byny26 “New European measures to crack down on Russia’s shadow fleet could severely hurt its economy at a time when it is looking increasingly vulnerable.”

⭕ 4 Feb 2026

🐣 RT @LePapillonBlu2 The following countries are launching investigations related to the Epstein files:
France
Turkey
United Kingdom
Poland
Lithuania
Norway
Latvia
Australia
North Macedonia
Sweden
Countries all around the world are looking into this—excluding America!

🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress The Abu Dhabi talks aren’t really about negotiating peace. They’re a psychological duel between spy chiefs. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/jayat2up
¤ https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2019088065470378099?s=20

Ukraine sent Budanov, ex-intel chief who’s spent years studying how Russian intelligence operates – their patterns, their deceptions, their pressure points.

Russia’s response? Swap out Medinsky – the ideologue and ex-culture minister who led the failed 2022 talks – for GRU head Kostyukov, who ran intelligence operations in Syria while Russian jets bombed civilians between ceasefire sessions.

With rival intel chiefs facing off, the talks have become a battle of wits. As former Ukrainian diplomat Iuliia Osmolovska told us: “Russians don’t undervalue psychological factors. They use many tricks exploiting psychological vulnerabilities. Underestimating this component makes Western partners very vulnerable.”

Watch or read our interview with former diplomat and negotiations expert Iuliia Osmolovska to understand what’s really happening in Abu Dhabi and go beyond the press releases.

📋 WSJ Editorial: Are Trump’s Tariffs Winning? https://tinyurl.com/49m6frfu “Harvard economists note in the same paragraph that U.S. consumers are bearing up to 43% of the tariff burden, with U.S. companies absorbing most of the rest.”
// He says yes, but let’s look at the evidence that voters feel judging by their views of the economy.

WSJ: Intensifying Tech Slide Sends Nasdaq to Worst Two-Day Drop Since April https://tinyurl.com/5cr5wveu Wall Street has been rotating out of AI leaders into real-economy stocks

🐣 RT @TKouilou [tr] Poland has announced that it is opening an investigation into possible links between the financier Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence services.
Sources:
Reuters: https://tinyurl.com/4b6jz5mh
Dialog[.)Ua: https://tinyurl.com/yj6avpef
¤ https://x.com/TKouilou/status/2018750792040132764?s=20

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk explained that this is not just a criminal matter, but also a national security issue, as information suggests that Russian services may have played a role in the operation of Epstein’s “sex empire.”

Previous investigations indicate that Sergey Belyakov, a former FSB member and official at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, reportedly helped Epstein obtain visas, arrange meetings with Russian officials, facilitate information exchanges, and introduce Epstein to influential politicians abroad.

The released files show that Russia is mentioned thousands of times, and the name Vladimir Putin appears more than a thousand times. In some documents, Epstein is even described as “Putin’s asset manager.”
Other documents mention possible attempts to arrange a meeting with the Russian president.

The Kremlin has not issued an official comment, but has stated that Epstein never requested a meeting with Putin.

According to some media outlets (such as the Daily Mail), Epstein’s network may have been used as a “honey trap” by Russian services to gather compromising information on influential figures.

🚫 🔄 ❤️ 🐣 RT @davetroy 1/ Last August we launched a series of investigative articles asking: “Was Jeffrey Epstein part of Russia’s broader war on the West?” ¤ You should read it. Six installments (so far), each covering an important part of the bigger picture. We start at SFI.
⋙ Part 1: https://tinyurl.com/58u8sz7n
⋙ Part 2: https://tinyurl.com/5buwrkpc
⋙ Part 3: https://tinyurl.com/3mj2vfdt
⋙ Part 4: https://tinyurl.com/dcnrk2t3
⋙ Part 5: https://tinyurl.com/3j9bajz9
⋙ Part 6: https://tinyurl.com/my3xrwp8
// may be too speculative

🐣 RT @ChristopherHale “The Church cannot stay silent before injustice towards migrants. You stand with me. And I stand with you.” — Pope Leo XIV
⋙ LetersfromLeo (Jan 24): American Catholics Must Stand Up to This Dictatorship of Lies https://tinyurl.com/yte3kda7 “The truth may be suppressed, mocked, or momentarily defeated by this dictatorship of lies, but it will never be extinguished. In the end, it will eventually prevail.”
// Even more sickening than today’s ICE killing is your government insisting you didn’t see what you just saw.

🐣 RT @RonanFarrow For nearly a year, the administration has said that DOGE had no unauthorized access to your Social Security data. A new government filing admits that was false.

🐣 RT @jimsciutto The Kremlin says outloud what European and Ukrainian officials have been saying for some time: Russia is not truly interested in peace or willing to make concessions to end the war: “Until Kyiv makes the appropriate decisions, the special military operation continues. Our military is striking targets it believes are associated with the Kyiv regime’s military complex. The operation continues,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said.

🐣 RT @chrislhayes The original 2007 draft indictment of Epstein by federal prosecutors in Florida lays out the scope of the systematic abuse he was engaged in. But it was dropped by the office of Alex Acosta after discussions w/ Epstein’s lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Star. Now it’s public.

🐣 RT @sikorskiradek [tr] I share the literary taste of @donaldtusk
⋙ 🐣 RT @donaldtusk In the time of strategic uncertainty, it’s worth knowing who we’re dealing with.
// photo reading Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum

‼️ TheTelegraph [UK]: Epstein was probably a Russian spy, says Tusk https://tinyurl.com/54xj6na8 “Poland to examine ‘increasingly likely possibility that paedophilia scandal was co-organised by intelligence services’ in Moscow” //➔ Donald Tusk is the prime minister of Poland.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2019090549748420969?s=20/photo/1

Jeffrey Epstein was likely to have been a Russian spy, the Polish prime minister has said.
v
In an unprecedented intervention after the Epstein document release, Poland is to examine the paedophile’s links with Russian intelligence services.

Donald Tusk said: “More and more leads, more and more ‍information, and more and more commentary in the global press all relate to the suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-organised by Russian intelligence services.

“I ‌don’t need to ‍tell you how serious the increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence services co-organised this operation is for the security of the Polish state.

“‍This can only mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today.”
^
The US justice department’s recent release of millions of documents related to Epstein underlined the extent of his ties to significant political figures, including the Russian president.

Among the millions of files that have been released, 1,056 mention Vladimir Putin and more than 9,000 refer to Moscow.

The files revealed that Epstein was granted audiences with the Russian president, including after the American financier was convicted in 2008 of procuring a minor for prostitution.

In 2010, Epstein sent an email to an associate offering to help them obtain a Russian visa, explaining: “I have a friend of Putin’s, should I ask him?”

Emails featured in the latest release of files also reveal that Epstein and his associates would often recruit young Russian women into their network.

They showed that Epstein offered to introduce Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to a “beautiful” 26-year-old Russian woman.

Epstein said he could arrange to introduce him to a woman named only as “Irina”, in an email sent in August 2010. Mr Mountbatten-Windsor denies wrongdoing and has not responded to the latest release.

The files include email requests to book flights for models and escorts between Moscow, Paris, and New York. In a 2010 email to a person whose name has been redacted, Epstein wrote: “Tomorrow I’m organising a dinner for some new Russian girls … see you at 10.”

The consistent appearance of Russian women and politicians in the files has led some to question whether Epstein may have been running a classic “kompromat” operation. This would involve luring influential businessmen, media moguls, and politicians into sexual encounters with women before using them as blackmail.

Tanya Kozyreva, a Kyiv-based reporter who focuses on high-level corruption worldwide, said the files showed signs of a “kompromat” operation.

She wrote: “Epstein reportedly had contact with Russian officials and Putin himself. Many of his girls were Russian. Powerful Western elites passed through his orbit. What are the odds this wasn’t a classic Russian ‘kompromat’ operation – and that DoJ is just ignoring the elephant in the room?”

‘Insight’ on Trump
It is understood that Epstein had several meetings with Putin. In September 2011, he received an email from an unidentified associate who mentioned “an appointment with Putin” during a trip to Russia.

The files released on Friday suggested Epstein had another meeting set up with the Russian leader in 2014, although it is not clear whether it went ahead.

In later emails, Epstein said he could offer “insight” on Donald Trump to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. “It is not complex. He [Trump] must be seen to get something. It’s that simple,” Epstein wrote.

Russia’s foreign ministry has not commented on Mr Tusk’s latest revelations. In December, Maria Zakharova, a Russian foreign ministry spokesman, said the Epstein files showed the hypocrisy of Western elites.

“Here, as I understood, were all the ‍Western ‘lecturers on life’ who looked down on Russia and who lectured us about ‘democracy and human rights’ in interesting poses with equally interesting leisure partners,” she said on Telegram.

🐣 RT @P_Kallioniemi Finnish President Stubb: Europe can no longer rely on the US. Trump-era power politics have recast Europe as a rival & even included threats over Greenland. This ideology clashes with our values. Finland’s choice is clear: adapt quickly, stand with Europe and defend sovereignty.

NYT: Renee Good’s Brothers Call on Congress to Rein In Immigration Crackdown https://tinyurl.com/2398hreb //➔ Not a single Republican even bothered to attend.
// At a forum on Capitol Hill held by congressional Democrats, the brothers of the 37-year-old American citizen fatally shot by an ICE agent said immigration enforcement tactics must be dialed back.

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA ❗️🇺🇦🇺🇸 Zelensky: We are waiting for the reaction of the US to the Russian strikes.
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2018751444887703588?s=20

This was a proposal from America itself: to stop the strikes on the energy sector for the time of diplomacy and such cold winter weather. There was a request personally from Trumpz

We see that Russia responded to this request with a record ballistics. Less than four days have passed since the week that Russia was asked for. This also speaks to everything else that Russia promises or can still promise. If their word is not kept now, then what can we expect next?

They lied before this war, and Russia started a full-scale war, trying to deceive everyone around about its intentions and about Ukraine, and now – even in such details, in such agreements with America – Russian deception again.

They are incorrigible in Moscow. And they want to take advantage of the cold, because they cannot conquer us, Ukraine, with their storms. Russia’s bet on war must receive a response from the world.

🐣 RT @Andreas_Adam Here it’s in English. “The Cesspool and Chaos: the 🇷🇺 Connection in the Epstein Affair”@Deskrussie_en & @DeskRussie are on twitter as well and exceptionally responsive It’s a must read IMHO to understand the Maxwell-Epstein Files and the KGB background)
🚫❤️ ⋙ RussiaDesk, Françoise Thom (July 30, 2025): The Cesspool and Chaos: the Russian Connection in the Epstein Affair https://tinyurl.com/52uywybn
// 7/30/2025; I have to read this closer

⭕ 3 Feb 2026

Question to Grok: Could Epstein be running a double-bubble here. Feeding both the FSB and Mossad. [link:] https://x.com/i/grok/share/804b85bef56244999dcafb9aac62ea8e
Answer: It’s certainly a plausible theory that Jeffrey Epstein operated as something akin to a double agent or intermediary, leveraging his network to provide intelligence, blackmail material, or other leverage to multiple foreign agencies—including Russia’s FSB (and its predecessor, the KGB) and Israel’s Mossad—rather than being exclusively loyal to one. This idea stems from his documented ties to figures in both spheres, the nature of his sex-trafficking operation as a potential “honeytrap” for kompromat, and the overlapping espionage histories of his associates. While no definitive proof has emerged (Epstein’s death in 2019 halted deeper investigations), declassified files, leaked communications, and investigative reporting paint a picture of him as a high-level fixer who brokered deals and gathered dirt that could benefit rival powers. Here’s a breakdown of the key evidence and counterpoints.

Ties to Mossad and Israeli Intelligence
Epstein’s connections to Israel are among the most substantiated in the public record, often framed as him acting as an asset or informal operative for Mossad. This theory gained traction after his arrest, with sources alleging he used his island estates and parties to entrap elites for blackmail, which could then be funneled to Israeli interests.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime partner and convicted accomplice, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell—a British media mogul widely reported to have been a Mossad agent (and possibly KGB as well) who died under mysterious circumstances in 1991.

france24.com +1
Robert Maxwell’s espionage links reportedly introduced Epstein to intelligence circles, with some claiming Epstein inherited or expanded on this network.
ahmedeldin.substack.com
Epstein had extensive dealings with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, including financial investments and shared ventures like the tech firm Carbyne (staffed by ex-Israeli intelligence officers).

democracynow.org +1
Leaked emails from 2013–2016 show Epstein facilitating backchannel talks for Israel, such as a security deal with Mongolia and communications with Russia during the Syrian civil war.

youtube.com +1
One reporter noted it often seemed like “Mossad was working for Epstein” due to Barak’s pursuit of him, rather than vice versa.
commondreams.org
FBI memos from the Epstein files describe him as a “co-opted Mossad agent,” with sources claiming he was “trained as a spy” under Barak and that his operation compromised figures like Donald Trump via Israeli influence.

middleeasteye.net +1
A 2025 poll found 27% of Americans who believe Epstein collaborated with foreign intelligence pointed to Israel as the primary culprit (higher among Republicans).
sadat.umd.edu
Israeli officials, including ex-PM Naftali Bennett, have categorically denied Epstein was a Mossad agent, calling it a “lie” and conspiracy theory.

newsnationnow.com +1
However, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe has claimed Epstein and Maxwell ran a Mossad honeytrap since the 1980s.
ahmedeldin.substack.com
These links suggest Epstein provided Mossad with leverage over global elites, potentially advancing Israeli geopolitical goals like influence in U.S. politics or deals in the Middle East.
Ties to FSB/KGB and Russian Intelligence
More recent revelations, especially from the 2026 Epstein file dumps by the U.S. Department of Justice, have highlighted Epstein’s Russian connections, fueling speculation he ran a parallel operation for Moscow. This includes direct contacts with FSB-linked figures and allegations of sharing blackmail material with the Kremlin.
Reports claim Epstein’s “sex empire” was the “world’s largest honeytrap operation” directed by the KGB/FSB, with anonymous intelligence sources saying he shared compromising info on elites with Vladimir Putin.

telegraph.co.uk +3
His operation allegedly trafficked women from Russia and facilitated visas, tying into organized crime networks.

united24media.com +1
Epstein reportedly met Putin in 2013 (via a backchannel he helped set up) and claimed to be his “wealth manager” or financial advisor.

youtube.com +2
He emailed Sergei Belyakov—a Russian deputy minister and FSB Academy graduate—in 2015 about favors, and was linked to pro-Kremlin oligarchs.

dossier.center +1
The same 2025 poll showed 30% of respondents suspecting Russian involvement (higher among Democrats), edging out Israel.
sadat.umd.edu
FBI files also reference Epstein’s fake passport and secret recordings as tools for Russian ops.
the-sun.com
Counterarguments include skepticism from some analysts, who note these claims often come from British tabloids or unverified sources, and may be amplified by anti-Russian narratives amid ongoing tensions.
One view is that his Russian ties were indirect, routed through Israeli channels, given overlaps like Robert Maxwell’s alleged dual Mossad-KGB role.
@illB0S
Evidence for a “Double Bubble” Operation
The overlap makes a double-agent scenario credible: Epstein could have fed kompromat to both sides, exploiting rivalries or even coordinating where interests aligned (e.g., anti-Western influence ops). Robert Maxwell’s reported work for both Mossad and KGB sets a precedent, and Epstein’s brokering of Israel-Russia talks during the Syrian war suggests he played intermediary.

youtube.com +2
Some sources explicitly claim he collaborated with “U.S., Israeli, and other countries’ intelligence,” including Russia.

youtube.com +2
Public suspicion is high—45% of Americans in 2025 believed he worked with foreign intel, with Russia and Israel topping the list.
sadat.umd.edu
Critics argue this is overreach, blending unproven allegations with geopolitical biases (e.g., pro-Israel sources downplay Mossad ties, while others emphasize Russia).

reddit.com +2
Epstein himself laughed off spy claims, per reports.

reddit.com +1
U.S. investigations (including by the FBI) have focused more on his crimes than espionage, and no formal charges were brought on intelligence grounds.
In the context of the recent Polish investigation into Epstein’s Kraków links and potential Russian ties (as announced by PM Tusk), this speculation feels timely—it could explain why multiple countries are now probing his network as a security threat. If more files are released, we might get clarity, but for now, it’s a web of circumstantial evidence pointing to Epstein as a mercenary operator unbound by loyalty.

TheAtlantic: ‘This Has Got to End’: Tim Walz on the “all-out attack on state government” https://tinyurl.com/3h2p6yas ‘They’ll only retreat far enough to get to the next news cycle, but they underestimated this state, and I think they’re underestimating the American people’ – Walz

TheAtlantic, Simon Shuster: This Is What Putin Thinks of Trump’s Peace Talks https://tinyurl.com/jr6pphhh ‘Putin’s strategy has shifted to a blatant violation of the international laws of war, which prohibit the bombing of civilian infrastructure. Ukrainians call it ‘energy terror’’

Vladimir Putin was not going to miss his chance to use winter as a weapon. In recent weeks, Russian missile strikes have hammered the power grid and neighborhood heating systems, leaving both on the verge of collapse. Last week, President Trump appealed to Putin to pause these attacks for a week, long enough for the cold snap to pass and peace talks to move forward. Putin initially appeared to acquiesce—then launched one of the worst attacks on Ukraine’s energy network since the start of the war.

… Putin’s strategy has shifted to one that stands in blatant violation of the international laws of war, which prohibit the bombing of civilian infrastructure. Ukrainians aptly call it “energy terror,” and its goal is to freeze them into a state of hopelessness and soften them up for capitulation.

That goal, like most of his aims in this war, has remained out of Putin’s reach. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to push for peace on terms that his people can accept, including firm guarantees from the United States and its allies that they would act decisively to stop any future Russian attack. Over the weekend, as Ukraine’s negotiators met with Zelensky to plan for U.S.-mediated talks with the Russians this week in Abu Dhabi, hundreds of people gathered for a daytime rave on the frozen surface of the Kyiv reservoir, dancing, skating, and racing their cars. …

[Talks] are due to start tomorrow in Abu Dhabi, and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, as well as his son-in-law Jared Kushner, will be there to mediate. On Saturday, both men met in Florida with the Kremlin’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, to discuss the terms of a possible deal. “We are encouraged by this meeting that Russia is working toward securing peace in Ukraine,” Witkoff wrote afterward on social media. The Russians, he added, are grateful for Trump’s “critical leadership in seeking a durable and lasting peace.”

But that gratitude did not count for much against Putin’s desire to extend the suffering of Ukrainians. He sees the coldest days of winter as instruments of war, and he will use them no matter what mercies Trump may request. As the sun set over Kyiv today, the air-raid sirens started to wail again across the city center. People got dressed and headed to the shelters, determined to wait out the cold for one more night.

🐣 RT @kyledcheney JUST IN: Judge Simon bars ICE from using aggressive tactics against protesters and journalists, beginning his opinion with this preamble:”Our nation is now at a crossroads. In helping our nation find its constitutional compass, an impartial and independent judiciary operating under the rule of law has a responsibility that it may not shirk.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/2018813239510061182?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/32w3bcmd 22p
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney MORE: Judge Simon said DHS leaders’s statements effectively blessed/incentivized the use of force against protesters and journalists. “[T]he culture of the agency and its employees is to celebrate violent responses over fair and diplomatic ones.”

CSIS: Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine: Massive Losses and Tiny Gains for a Declining Power https://tinyurl.com/3zpbmvue “Its war economy is under mounting strain, with manufacturing declining and no globally competitive technology firms to help drive long-term productivity”

Despite claims of battlefield momentum in Ukraine, the data shows that Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains and is in decline as a major power. Since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II. At current rates, combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties could reach 2 million by the spring of 2026. After seizing the initiative in 2024, Russian forces have advanced at an average rate of between 15 and 70 meters per day in their most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century. Meanwhile, Russia’s war economy is under mounting strain, with manufacturing declining, slowing growth of 0.6 percent in 2025, and no globally competitive technology firms to help drive long-term productivity.

↥ ↧
WSJ Editorial: Vladimir Putin Isn’t Winning in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/y7j6zpwp “Vladimir Putin wants the world to think he can’t be defeated. A new, detailed report on the war underscores that Mr. Putin isn’t winning, and Mr. Trump can still … produce a peace that is honorable.”
// The Russian death toll may be as high as 325,000 in four years.
// complete: “Vladimir Putin wants the world to think he can’t be defeated. A new, detailed report on the war underscores that Mr. Putin isn’t winning, and Mr. Trump can still apply military and economic pressure to produce a peace that is honorable.”

Russian forces have taken an astonishing 1.2 million casualties in Ukraine since 2022, according to estimates from Seth Jones and Riley McCabe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Russian death toll may be as high as 325,000—more than five times than in all Soviet and Russian conflicts combined since World War II. Some 36,000 Americans died in the grinding three-year Korean War.

Consider Mr. Putin’s struggle to take the city of Pokrovsk. Russian forces have advanced in the area on average 70 meters a day from late February 2024 to January of this year. That’s like starting the day on 42nd street in Manhattan and ending up on 43rd street.

The Ukraine war draws comparisons to the trench warfare of World War I, but the Russian advance has been “slower than the most brutal offensive campaigns over the last century, including the notoriously bloody Battle of the Somme during World War I,” says the report. Ukraine has its own manpower shortages, but Russian casualties are two or 2.5 to one for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, half of Moscow’s budget is flowing to “the armed forces, the military-industrial complex, domestic security and debt service,” CSIS notes. Moscow doesn’t have the economic growth or dynamism to keep underwriting the misadventure for the long haul. One illustrative fact: Russia has “a grand total of zero companies in the top 100 list of technology companies as measured by market capitalization.”

All of this means Mr. Putin shouldn’t be able to wield a whip hand at the negotiating table. The Russian dictator is in a weakened position that Mr. Trump could exploit with tougher sanctions and more U.S. weapons, to at least force Mr. Putin to give up some stolen territory and tolerate real security guarantees.

The same Mr. Trump who arms his diplomacy with Iran to increase his leverage has been oddly unwilling to do the same with Mr. Putin. But a weak peace would let Mr. Putin “up off the mat,” as GOP Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker put it last year. The Russian would rearm with a renewed animus for NATO.

Mr. Putin isn’t the unstoppable man he wants Mr. Trump to think he is. The question of the past year has been whether President Trump will see this strategic opening to reduce the Russian threat to the U.S., and deter the world’s bad actors in Beijing and elsewhere, by driving a harder bargain in Ukraine.

🐣 📊 RT @RichardHanania It’s not just Substack. Here are news sources for Republicans and Democrats. https://tinyurl.com/49n8rhrr
◕ https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/2018679789570400646?s=20/photo/1

Republicans don’t really pay attention to any serious written publications. Even The Wall Street Journal is more likely to be read by Democrats.

This isn’t a media bias issue. Conservatives have seen media startups: see the rise in Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Breitbart, and Newsmax.

They’re just all trash. The conservative audience wants conspiracy theories and Trump worship.

I enjoy City Journal, but its readership is small, reflecting that the high IQ, intellectually curious right-leaning audience is extremely small.

No one is stopping rightists from starting a Vox, or Atlantic, or New York Times. The conservative audience just isn’t smart enough for it.

💙 🐣 RT @UKikaski OSINT Intuit™ is built on evidence, restraint, and analytical discipline, not political advocacy. But there are moments when silence becomes a form of distortion, and precision requires saying what is plainly visible. This is one of those moments. When a sitting president openly rejects electoral legitimacy and advocates the seizure of democratic processes, the issue is no longer partisan alignment or brand consistency. It is constitutional risk. Those with a platform, however modest, have a responsibility to speak when facts point to danger, even when doing so is uncomfortable or inconvenient. Ignoring it in the name of neutrality would not be professionalism. It would be abdication. […] […]
¤ https://x.com/UKikaski/status/2018656092499198248?s=20

🐣 RT @ChristopherJM ⚡️Ukraine agrees multi-tier plan for enforcing any ceasefire with Russia ¤ Crucially, the security guarantees and this Ukraine-Euro-US plan depends on a lasting ceasefire that has yet to materialize. And the Russians are showing no true interest in a peace deal to end their war. [FT link:] https://tinyurl.com/39yxdycf
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ChristopherJM/status/2018594578358534473?s=20/photo/1

Under the plan, three people familiar with the matter said, a Russian ceasefire violation would trigger a response within 24 hours, beginning with a diplomatic warning and any action required from the Ukrainian army to halt the infraction.

If hostilities continued beyond that, a second phase of intervention would be initiated using forces from the so-called coalition of the willing, which includes many EU members plus the UK, Norway, Iceland and Turkey.

If the violation turned into an expanded attack, 72 hours after the initial breach, a co-ordinated military response by a western-backed force involving the US military would take effect, the officials said.

WaPo Editorial: Moderna’s chilling announcement is a symptom of a deeper sickness https://tinyurl.com/5n8ctbf2 “China is on track to become the world’s pharmaceutical leader if the U.S. keeps blowing its edge.”

WaPo: RFK Jr.’s attacks on vaccines just hit a wall of pediatricians https://tinyurl.com/4kpkw9tv “The American Academy of Pediatrics issuing its own vaccine guidance is not just symbolic.” //➔ If your doctor goes by the RFK Jr recs and not the AAP’s, you know what to do.

🐣 RT @POLITICOEurope European governments and corporations are racing to reduce their exposure to U.S. technology, military hardware and energy resources as transatlantic relations sour. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/yb4b87e7

🐣 RT @AlexandruC4 Alexander Acosta, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who handled Epstein’s criminal case: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to ‘leave it alone'”, and that Epstein was “above my pay grade.” – 2017 (Observer)
¤ https://x.com/AlexandruC4/status/2018635573058326976?s=20

🐣 RT @SavchenkoReview 🇺🇦👀 The nature of the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia has radically changed after the arrival of Budanov and Arakhamia, — UP
¤ https://x.com/SavchenkoReview/status/2018663109783621814?s=20

Previously, the Ukrainian side had to listen to Medinsky’s monologues for hours about “originally Russian” lands and the history of Ancient Rus, but now the composition of the Russian negotiators has changed to professional military personnel, and these topics are not raised.

“Now the military are sitting and discussing very specific things: withdrawal mechanisms, guarantees, terms, etc. This is a key change that occurred with the arrival of Budanov,” — UP sources report.

⭕ 2 Feb 2026

NYT: Trump, in an Escalation, Calls for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ Elections https://tinyurl.com/2kf3jv2p “The comments, made on a conservative podcast, follow a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections.”

WSJ Editorial: Crony Socialism and Rare Earths https://tinyurl.com/bdfcudvx “What would Republicans have said if the Biden crowd acquired government stakes in companies with ties to its friends and family? Well, that’s more or less what the Trump team is doing”
// Government stakes in companies is the wrong way to beat China.

NYT, Aaron Zamost: The Real Reason Silicon Valley Won’t Stand Up to Trump https://tinyurl.com/2s3hp5kj “Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2018601197276741943?s=20/photo/1

Hours after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, joined President Trump; his wife, Melania; and other luminaries in the White House to attend a screening of a documentary devoted to the first lady.
v
Apple employees voiced anger in internal Slack channels, while other Silicon Valley tech workers publicly denounced the Trump administration’s deployment of federal officers across America. Workers at Palantir erupted in internal complaints over the software company’s work with immigration enforcement. At Meta, some longtime employees are considering leaving the company, saying it is now led by a MAGA-skewing chief they no longer recognize. …
^
There are many theories about Silicon Valley’s swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump’s re-election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.

Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.

What has happened in tech is a market correction, not a cultural one — a transfer of power from labor back to management. To attribute this change to a “vibe shift” among tech leaders may flatter political actors, but it’s beside the point. The real danger is mistaking a change in leverage for something permanent, or confusing business incentives with values. The idea of “woke corporations” was always flawed — conflating business strategy with political belief distorts not just how we understand the tech industry, but also how we interpret corporate power in American life more broadly.

Here’s how Silicon Valley actually works. Big tech companies and growing start-ups are in constant, vicious competition with one another to hire and retain the best employees, especially in product and engineering roles. When these companies are in hypergrowth mode, and particularly when the job market is tight, hiring top talent can be nothing short of a matter of survival. And they are fishing in a largely progressive pond: Political donation data shows tech employees are predominantly Democratic-leaning. …

The recent reassertion of managerial prerogative was only possible in an economic environment where top executives could flex their muscles like a boss. It won’t last forever. When labor is scarce again, many of these companies will rediscover the values they abandoned. The question is whether employees will forget just as quickly.

WaPo, Max Boot: America is alienating what could become a superpower https://tinyurl.com/fwypy28m “If the ‘mighty middle powers’ can band together, they may not miss the era of American dominance — but Americans likely will.”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2018430583265763362?s=20/photo/1
// If Europe and Asian democracies coordinate, they can reshape the global balance.

[T]here is a strong overlap of outlooks between the non-American members of NATO (Europe and Canada) and the great democracies of East Asia and Oceania: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan.…

If these countries could act together, they would be a superpower in their own right. The “Eurasia bloc” has a population of nearly 900 million, GDP of $39.5 trillion, defense spending of $830 billion and 3.1 million soldiers. That dwarfs America’s population (338 million) and beats its GDP ($31 trillion) while their defense spending is roughly similar to America’s ($850 billion this year). China, of course, has an even larger population, but it lags in all the other categories; its GDP is roughly half that of the Eurasia bloc. Russia trails even further behind; its GDP ($2.5 trillion) is considerably smaller than California’s.

The only thing holding the middle powers back is their lack of unity. Russia, China and the United States are all nation-states. But NATO is composed of 32 states and the European Union of 27. Europe’s resources are only loosely marshaled together, and there is little coordination with Asian democracies, which in turn are linked by alliances with the United States but not with each other. Those geopolitical realities won’t change anytime soon, but there are small but substantial steps these countries can take to act in greater concert.

Britain, for example, should rejoin the European Union, and both Ukraine and Canada should be allowed in. (Canada is part of Europe in spirit, if not geographically.) The E.U. should end its requirement for unanimity so that small nations such as Hungary or Slovakia can’t block collective action. A new “quad” dialogue should be established among Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea, perhaps eventually leading to the globalization of NATO or the creation of an Asian counterpart. The E.U., meanwhile, should work toward the creation of a “European army.” The Nordic-Baltic 8 (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden) are trendsetters in defense integration.

All the Western countries are already reaching free-trade accords to lessen their dependence on the United States — the E.U. concluded trade treaties with India and five South American countries, while Canada struck more limited trade partnerships with China and Qatar. (In response, Trump threatened Canada with 100 percent tariffs; apparently, he’s the only leader allowed to do a trade deal with Beijing.) There is much more that could be done to enhance trade between Europe and Asia; Carney wants to “build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people.”

It’s also imperative for the Eurasian countries to expand their defense capabilities so they are no longer as reliant on a fickle United States. And that’s happening: European defense spending has roughly doubledin the past decade, and it continues to grow. One German company soon will be producing more 155mm artillery shells a year than the entire United States. Ukraine, with its battle-tested army and world-class drone force, can be a pillar of European defense for decades to come.

Europe has an advanced defense industry, but European countries are also drawing heavily on South Korea’s factories. Poland, for example, is buying South Korean tanks, howitzers and fighter jets, while Norway just decided to spend $2 billion to buy long-range rocket artillery from South Korea. Given Trump’s threats, it’s understandable that U.S. allies are seeking to reduce dependence on U.S. weapons systems; Canada, for example, is discussing buying more Swedish Gripen jets and fewer F-35s. …

America Firsters may be fine with U.S. allies going their own way; Trump even claims credit for higher European defense spending. But future presidents may not be happy with the result: If U.S. allies are less dependent on America for trade and security, they will become much harder to boss around and less likely to do business with America. The U.S. could even lose the overseas bases that it uses to project power. In trying to acquire Greenland, Trump implied that the U.S. is more likely to defend territory it owns. So why should other countries host U.S. bases on their territory?

If the “mighty middle powers” can band together, they may not miss the era of American dominance — but Americans likely will.

🐣 RT @clashreport Jeffrey Epstein kidnapped minors from around the world. ¤ He transported underage girls from Türkiye, the Czech Republic, and other countries in Asia and elsewhere, many of whom spoke little or no English. ¤ It is further alleged that African American females were the only group excluded from his sexual exploitation.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/clashreport/status/2018382087414227111?s=20/photo/1

… destinations, including Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. He provided accommodations with him in order to have her available to him at all times wherever he went, including while transporting the minor Plaintiff on his private jet. Each time they would travel to one of these destinations, the same pattern of sexual abuse would occur, often with a vast array of aspiring models, actresses, celebrities, and/or other females, including minors, from all over the world. Upon information and belief, Defendant transported minor girls from Turkey, the Czech Republic, Asia, and numerous other countries, many of whom spoke no English. To Plaintiff’s knowledge, the only females specifically excluded from Defendant’s sexual escapades were African-Americans.

21. In addition to being continually exploited to satisfy Defendant’s every sexual whim, Plaintiff was also required to be sexually exploited by Defendant’s adult male peers, including royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen, and/or other professional and personal acquaintances. Whenever Defendant transported Plaintiff with him in his private jet to any destination, Defendant would pay Plaintiff a flat rate per day while he and/or his above mentioned associates would sexually exploit and abuse minor Plaintiff.

22. Most of these acts of abuse occurred during a time when Defendant knew that Plaintiff was approximately 15, 16, and 17 years old, and, after years of daily sexual exploitation, continued into her adulthood. Despite Defendant’s stating shortly before Plaintiff’s sixteenth birthday that he soon would have to trade her in because she was getting too old, Defendant continued to sexually exploit Plaintiff until she fled at age 19. Defendant’s predilection for young girls was well known to those who regularly procured them for him and to his circle of friends. On one of Defendant’s birthdays, a friend of Defendant sent him three 12-year-old girls from France who spoke no English for Defendant to sexually exploit and abuse. After doing so, they were sent back to France the next day. [end of page]

🐣 RT @tonyannett Yes, the Epstein files aren’t just about child rape by rich and powerful. It’s about an attempt to destroy democracy to benefit capital. Everything is connected.
⋙ 🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow It certainly looks like Jeffrey Epstein conspired with well-known billionaires to undermine democratic institutions and enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/tonyannett/status/2018380059241861209?s=20/photo/1

NYT: We Were Top Homeland Security Lawyers. You Can’t Wish Away the Fourth Amendment https://tinyurl.com/3m8bkddh “We urge DHS to adhere to the Constitution and end the practice of conducting forcible entry into homes without judicial warrants.”
// By Stevan Bunnell, Gus Coldebella, Ivan Fong, Kara Lynum, Jonathan Meyer and John Mitnick :: The authors all served as general counsels or acting general counsels for the Department of Homeland Security.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2018397072387358906?s=20/photo/1

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reportedly issued a memorandum that authorizes its agents to enter private residences forcibly without a judicial warrant. James Percival, the general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, recently defended the department’s policy and wrote that “deep-state actors in the federal government have for decades told ICE officers that they may not enter a fugitive alien’s home even with a final order of removal and administrative warrant.”

We disagree.

We previously sat in the seat he now occupies, serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations; this is not a partisan issue. We disagree not only with Mr. Percival’s position but also with his characterization of lawyers at the Department of Homeland Security and elsewhere who seek to uphold the rule of law.

It is not the so-called deep state that has restrained ICE from entering homes using only administrative warrants. It is the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution — and the lawyers who took an oath to support and defend it. We worked with thousands of homeland security lawyers. They sought to ensure that the department’s actions are lawful and protect the constitutional rights of the people its agents encounter in day-to-day operations. Attempting to tarnish department attorneys as “deep state” operatives for giving legal advice that is faithful to the Constitution is not only offensive but also dangerous. It sends a message: If you give your best professional advice and urge the department to respect the law, you will be attacked for doing your job.

The job of the general counsel is not to provide convenient legal cover or constitutional workarounds. It is to provide sound legal analysis and advice, even when that advice may be inconvenient for the administration. Often that involves partnering with internal clients to find lawful ways to carry out department policies. Sometimes, however, that means advising that a policy is unlawful. That is not sabotage; it is upholding the rule of law.

The Fourth Amendment has long protected the sanctity of the home. Courts have consistently held that law enforcement must clear a high constitutional bar before crossing that threshold. A warrant signed by a judge who is independent of the executive branch is a constitutional safeguard that separates legitimate law enforcement from arbitrary government power. This bedrock principle applies with equal — if not greater — force when the government is merely enforcing a civil immigration order.

Today the Department of Homeland Security seeks to justify forcible home entries on the basis of administrative warrants — warrants issued by the executive, not the judicial branch. While Mr. Percival and the department have not made clear which cases, if any, they are relying on, at least one analysis speculates that they are using a mere nonbinding observation from a 1960 Supreme Court case. However, the weight of subsequent Supreme Court authority strongly supports the view that a judicial warrant is required for such entry — a view reflected by the Federal District Court judge in Texas who ordered the release on Saturday of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father from immigration custody.

Aside from relying on an unsound constitutional justification, the use of administrative warrants to justify forcible entry runs counter to years of practice and precedent, as well as training designed to ensure constitutional compliance and protect the public from abuses of power. Indeed, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the department in the wake of Sept. 11, expressly requires it to pursue its critically important missions while ensuring that “the civil rights and civil liberties of persons are not diminished by efforts, activities and programs aimed at securing the homeland.”

It is also wrong to state, as [General Counsel] Mr. Percival did, that there is “broad judicial recognition” that the Fourth Amendment does not attach the same protections to all people in the United States. The Constitution does not reserve the right to be secure in one’s home only for American citizens. The amendment’s protections exist precisely because unchecked government power has always posed the greatest danger to individual liberty, particularly for those least able to protect themselves.

According to a complaint filed by a group representing whistle-blowers, the ICE memorandum containing this new interpretation of the law was not widely distributed. Apparently, employees were expected not to retain the memorandum but only to read it before returning it to their supervisors. This secrecy speaks volumes about the weakness of its arguments.

All of us made difficult decisions during our service at the Department of Homeland Security, but none of us needed to lean into conspiracy theories to justify them. We have not always agreed with one another, but we served with dedication and integrity and were honored to work for the American people. We provided our best counsel based on fidelity to the law. We urge the Department of Homeland Security to adhere to the Constitution and end the practice of conducting forcible entry into homes without judicial warrants.

🐣 RT @BohuslavskaKate Kaja Kallas at the Oslo Security Conference: ¤ Over the last 100 years, Russia has attacked at least 19 countries—some as many as three or four times. None of those countries has ever attacked Russia. So the question is: how do we ensure that this war does not continue or spread elsewhere? ¤ We need to see concessions from the Russian side, including limitations on their military budget, their army size, and their nuclear weapons, as well as accountability for the crimes they have committed.”

🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress EU’s Kallas: Pressuring Ukraine plays into Russia’s hands — and shifts blame away from the aggressor ¤ Russia hasn’t changed its goals since 2022, but pressure is now on Kyiv to concede. ¤ Kallas says this distorts who’s responsible for the war. She urged Europe to push Moscow to disarm and face justice instead. [KyivIndependent link:] https://tinyurl.com/jxjh2m83

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I met with our negotiating team ahead of the new round of trilateral talks. We expect the meetings to take place in the coming days, as early as this Wednesday and Thursday.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2018357001479147856?s=20

Nearly all members of the negotiating team attended today’s meeting, namely Rustem Umerov, Kyrylo Budanov, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Andrii Hnatov, and Oleksandr Bevz. Davyd Arakhamiia will also participate in the negotiations. I approved frameworks for the talks and set specific tasks.

The Ukrainian delegation will also hold bilateral meetings with the American side. Ukraine is ready for real steps. We believe it is realistic to achieve a dignified and lasting peace. We consider the bilateral security guarantees document with the United States to be complete, and we anticipate further substantive work on documents related to recovery and economic development.

We also anticipate that the American side will remain decisive in ensuring the necessary conditions for dialogue. The de-escalation measures that went into effect on the night of last Thursday to Friday are helping to build public trust in the negotiation process and its possible outcome. The war needs to be ended. Thank you to everyone around the world who is helping. Glory to Ukraine!

⭕ 1 Feb 2026

TheAtlantic: Ammon Bundy Is All Alone https://tinyurl.com/mrksnf7p “In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled ‘The Stranger,’ in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a ‘moral failure.’”
// The anti-government militia leader can’t make sense of his allies’ support for ICE violence.

NYT, David Litt: The Trump Administration Thinks They Had It Coming https://tinyurl.com/4vn6cma7 “America remains full of good people. What kind of president — what kind of administration — would dishonor their memories by pretending otherwise when they die?”

🐣 RT @RepThomasMassie “How will we know if this bill has been successful? We will know when rich men are being perp walked in handcuffs to the jail. Until then, this is still a coverup.”

NYT, David French: This Is Not a Drill https://tinyurl.com/mr9yzdjt “I fear that millions of citizens are still too complacent. They aren’t aware of the peril we face.”

🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt Putin’s name appears more than a thousand times in Jeffrey Epstein’s files. ¤ https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/2017991643610153258?s=20

This is according to the Daily Mail. The paper reports that the financier may have been working in Moscow’s interest and amassing compromising information about the global elite.

He allegedly used Russian women for this purpose.

According to the journalists, Epstein boasted about his access to the Kremlin and mentioned a “friend of Putin” who was able to arrange visas.

There has long been speculation on social media that Putin’s involvement in the Epstein affair was only a matter of time and thorough investigation. Now it seems that time has come.

🐣 RT @cwebbonline Holy shit. I had to read this three times. But buried in this word salad is the following: [Trump’s long post at link]
¤ ✛ [TextLink:] https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/2017930867252080730?s=20/photo/1

Trump’s threatening to deploy ICE, Border Patrol, and possibly the military against protests, while blaming “poorly run” Democratic cities. He says federal forces will only help local governments if they ask for help and say “please,” but at the same time insists federal agents will aggressively crack down to protect federal property regardless of local consent.

He labels protesters as paid “lunatics,” “agitators,” and “insurrectionists,” and warns of forceful retaliation.

Trump is blurring protest with insurrection and lays the groundwork for federal crackdowns without formally invoking the Insurrection Act.

NYT: How Alex Pretti’s Death Became a National Tipping Point https://tinyurl.com/2bpd9tdh “Several factors converged to force a remarkable shift in the federal government’s aggressive efforts in Minnesota.”

🐣 🔊 RT @JaneMayerNYer Just out: From 9/11 to Minneapolis: How ICE Became a Paramilitary Force – and how ICE and the CBP have long been riddled by crime and corruption. Join us with guest Garrett Graff, and my colleagues @sbg1 and @evanosnos [link:] https://tinyurl.com/588tmsdb

NYT: Federal Courts Undercut Trump’s Mass Deportation Campaign https://tinyurl.com/2j3jexuj “A policy intended to keep immigrants detained indefinitely has led to a deluge of lawsuits, overwhelming some federal courts and resulting in many releases.”

⭕ 31 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @tonyannett Martin Wolf, the chief economics correspondent for the Financial Times, refers to the tech oligarchs who control AI as psychopaths. ¤ I repeat: the Financial Times. Not some lefty outfit.

NYT: The Interview: ‘A Terrifying Line Is Being Crossed’: Mayor Jacob Frey on the Turmoil in Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/366xecna “You’ve got thousands of federal agents in Minneapolis, not around safety, not even around immigration, but to create a political narrative”

🐣 RT @SkylineReport 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨 Donald Trump isn’t just trying to rewrite history. He’s trying to rewrite reality itself, and the paper trail is damning.
¤ https://x.com/SkylineReport/status/2017697362144018501?s=20

Days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Trump-controlled Department of Justice quietly deleted a federally funded study showing that far-right extremists are responsible for the overwhelming majority of domestic terrorism deaths in the U.S. The study didn’t get corrected. It didn’t get rebutted. It got erased.

The timing wasn’t subtle.
The motive wasn’t complicated.

Trump immediately blamed the “radical left” for the killing, before investigators had identified a suspect or motive, then doubled down in speeches insisting left-wing violence is the real threat. That claim flatly contradicts every serious dataset on domestic terrorism, including studies from the DOJ itself, the libertarian Cato Institute, CSIS, PNAS, and the University of Maryland. So instead of changing the rhetoric, the administration changed the record.

This is not messaging.
This is state-sponsored narrative laundering.

The DOJ offered no real explanation. Just a vague notice about “reviewing websites” to comply with unnamed executive orders. Translation: the facts were inconvenient, so they disappeared.

This is how authoritarianism actually works. Not with one dramatic lie, but with quiet deletions, buried data, and an audience told to trust the man yelling loudest instead of the evidence sitting right in front of them.

Trump didn’t challenge the conclusions.
He removed them.

That’s not governance. That’s reality control.

Sources: …

🐣 RT @ConLawWarrior Just a reminder that DOJ’s non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein is the single most corrupt document you will ever see in your life.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ConLawWarrior/status/2017802106401427473?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2ap9mect 15p

TheAtlantic: The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Could Flood the Earth. Can a 50-Mile Wall Stop It? https://tinyurl.com/yz39rksv “If the Thwaites Glacier collapses, it would add two feet of sea-level rise to the world’s oceans. … And Thwaites acts as a cork in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to raise sea levels by nearly 17 feet.”
// Scientists have long opposed polar geoengineering. Some now believe it will be necessary.

TheAtlantic, Julie Beck: Americans Love Their Neighbors https://tinyurl.com/2ubadkk2 Statistics say this is a time of disconnection. Minnesota’s response to ICE shows otherwise. //➔ MN actually really is “nice”; that’s why we moved back home from Chicago to work at Mayo.

NYT: Facing Immigration Backlash, Trump Called Schumer to Cut a Deal https://tinyurl.com/4es2nbnn “Negotiations over new limits on immigration officers and security operations promise to be contentious, with no guarantee of a quick agreement”
// The president and the top Senate Democrat, who are often at each other’s throats, agreed to try to keep the government open and to start talks on new limits on federal immigration agents.

NYT: They Said They Weren’t Close to Epstein. New Documents Show Otherwise https://tinyurl.com/38erk4wf mentioned: Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, Kathy Ruemmler, Richard Branson, Andrew Farkas, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Steve Tisch, Leon Black
// Materials released by the Justice Department revealed that leading business and political figures had enduring relationships with the disgraced financier.

🐣 RT @BBMagaMom 🚨BREAKING: We are only seeing the very tip of the iceberg with the newly released Epstein files, and they are already making people physically sick.
¤ https://x.com/BBMagaMom/status/2017753364759511243?s=20

What’s coming out is vile, wicked, and evil beyond comprehension. And make no mistake, this is only the beginning.

Buckle up, America.

Because the people implicated in this darkness are the same people who posture as your moral superiors,
who tell you how to live, how to think,
how to raise your children,

Then demand your tax dollars while doing things so depraved they can barely be spoken aloud.

This isn’t politics anymore.
This is good vs. evil.

So here’s the line in the sand:
Are we really going to sit here and allow this level of evil to be exposed, and then do nothing? Are we going to keep pretending this is “normal,” “acceptable,” or “too uncomfortable to confront”?

Because history remembers silence.
And it never sides with it.

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Told y’all.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheMaineWonk Epstein to Wolff: The Original Funder for the [Steele] Dossier was Rubio. 😶👀
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheRickWilson/status/2017768748900372783?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @kyledcheney Never seen a ruling like this: “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/2017695348530045201?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2zbws5u9 3p

🐣 RT @chrisjollyhale “The Church cannot stay silent before injustice towards migrants. You stand with me. And I stand with you.” — Pope Leo XIV

🐣 RT @AnnieForTruth ICE officers are masked, heavily armed, no identification of their name or badge number, & no body cams. They are serving as Trump’s Gestapo terrorizing, threatening, bullying, beating, tear gassing communities & murdering citizens. This is NOT what happens in a free society. 😡
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AnnieForTruth/status/2017613587959976251?s=20/photo/1

No, they’re not Navy Seals.
They’re not Delta Force. They’re not going to fight terrorists, or foreign armies, or organized crime, or violent criminals.
They have all that firepower to beat up grannies from Honduras, go up against 5-year-olds, and shoot Americans in the back.

🐣 RT @RichRaho Pope Leo to young politicians: “I invite you to reflect on the fact that there can be no peace while humanity wages war against itself—by discarding the weak, excluding the poor, and remaining indifferent to refugees and the oppressed.”

🐣 RT @BillKristol ICE and CBP agents seem to enjoy gratuitously breaking glass—from car windows to store fronts to homes. It’s an expression of unchecked power and dominance: “We’re in charge. We break and shatter what we want.” ¤ And nights of broken glass have been a harbinger of worse to come.
⋙ 🐣 Miller is a genuine Nazi-wannabe.
He knows the playbook, crime by crime.

⭕ 30 Jan 2026

NYT, Ben Rhodes: The Rot Goes Deeper Than ICE https://tinyurl.com/r2wevvnk “Twenty-five years into it, the war on terror has become a war against ourselves. … Enough with the military gear. Enough with the mass surveillance. Enough with the constant fear of an ever-shifting Other.”

🐣 RT @TheAtlantic Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” calls back to protest music’s glory days, @skornhaber writes—and though the Boss has sounded bitter and mournful before, he has never sounded “this purely angry”:
⋙ TheAtlantic: Rage in the U.S.A. https://tinyurl.com/4aefxc6s “Bruce Springsteen has never sounded angrier than on his new song, ‘Streets of Minneapolis.’”
🖼 https://x.com/TheAtlantic/status/2017428878440931791?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SkinnerPm Firing this many senior FBI and DOJ officials tells us that what the administration is demanding is certainly unethical and likely illegal. Honorable and competent people are being removed to make way for those not burdened with either.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office is in open revolt against Main Justice dictates. Now the FBI Acting SAC is gone. I can’t stress enough how unusual this is. Agents & prosecutors are refusing to play along with the corruption of the Justice Department.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CarolLeonnig BREAKING on @MSNOWNews – The acting chief of FBI field office for Minneapolis has been removed from his job by headquarters, two sources tell me. This comes on heels of his office’s disputes with @FBI HQ over ICE protests & ouster of Atlanta chief.

🐣 RT @KDilanianMSNOW Two people familiar with matter tell @MSNOWNews that the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta Field office, Paul Brown, was forced out of that job earlier this month over his qualms about and refusal to carry out the searches and seizures of the Fulton County ballots.

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Some of the mad king’s rantings are to be obeyed as law, and others are to be ignored. Having the most powerful office in the world occupied by such a person, with no meaningful opposition in government, is a global catastrophe.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jaynordlinger The president of the United States says, “ARREST OBAMA NOW!” May I ask you: To whom is he speaking? Is it a command? Does anyone care?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/2017270079197450548?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump BREAKING: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has just released HUNDREDS OF BOMBSHELL RUSSIAGATE DOCUMENTS
proving that Barack Obama personally ordered CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence on President Trump and was actively “working with the enemy” to undermine and erode Americans’ confidence in our democracy and President Trump’s LANDSLIDE 2016
VICTORY. This was a coup attempt by Barack Hussein Obama and his cronies… As Jesse Watters said “Whatever happens to these guys is not revenge.. it’s accountability. And it’s time for people to pay the price.” ¤ ARREST OBAMA

🐣 RT @TheDemCoalition Congress should not punt this down the road. Bernie Sanders lays out the reforms needed to stop the terror being unleashed on our communities by Trump’s masked goon squads.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheDemCoalition/status/2017281813207502884?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Sensanders ICE is out of control, ignoring the law and our Constitution. ¤ Congress must vote NO on any additional funding for DHS. ¤ Further, here is SOME of what else we must do:

1. Get ICE, CBP and the rest of Trump’s domestic army out of Minnesota and Maine NOW
2. No more warrantless arrests, no more stopping people based on race or because of the languages they speak
3. End qualified immunity for ICE and CBP agents to ensure
Americans’ constitutional rights are protected
4. Unmask ICE and CBP agents and require clear identification
5. End detentions and deportations of U.S. Citizens
6. Investigate and prosecute every single DHS officer who broke the law and require DOJ and DHS to cooperate with states and cities investigating immigration agents who broke the law
7. Repeal the $75 billion for ICE and the nearly $65 billion for CBP in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and restore funding to health care
8. Impose strict standards on all detention centers and hold them accountable for their human rights

🐣 RT @Timodc [Fed Chair Nom] Kevin Warsh’s father-in-law is Ron Lauder, the billionaire behind the Greenland plot who is also doing a Lithium deal with a US govt backed partner in Ukraine. Epstein claimed they were friends in his emails. ¤ Concerning conflict of interest for the “independent” fed chair.

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦🇺🇸 Imagine: I know that ballistic missiles are flying against our energy sector, I know that Patriot is standing, I know that there will be no light, because there are no missiles to protect, — Zelensky

💬The US is not providing us with missiles for free. We may have different opinions on this matter. This is financed by Europe. The tranche was not paid for by PURL. The missiles did not arrive.

💬No one told me what was agreed in Anchorage. But we have signals that they discussed key issues there.

💬The meeting of Ukraine and the Russian Federation on Sunday in Abu Dhabi may be postponed. Something is happening in the situation with America and Iran. And these things can probably affect the date.

💬 In the American plan, out of 20 points, Ukraine disagrees with two – supports the rest.

💬 We are not ready for compromises that lead to a violation of territorial integrity, we will not give Donbas and ZNPP to the Russians without a fight.

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson I see we’re now at the “arresting journalists”phase of our new autocracy

🐣 RT @jaketapper DOJ’s original complaint against Don was rejected by Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko who refused to sign the criminal complaint and then the DOJ appealed and that too was rejected. That chief judge, Hon. Patrick J. Schiltz— is a former Scalia clerk and George W. Bush appointee:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/jaketapper/status/2017233358657343556?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @MercadoMedia1 BREAKING: Don Lemon and Georgia Fort Arrested in Connection With Cities Church Protest ¤ Former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort have been arrested in connection with their reporting on an anti ICE protest that entered Cities Church in St. Paul earlier this month. …

⭕ 29 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @PrezLives2022 “As for Alex Pretti, I have never seen such a disgusting execution outside of the Taliban cutting off Americans’ heads”.¤ “Every other soldier I’ve spoken to about this has said the same thing. If we did half of what these agents did we would be rotting in Leavenworth penitentiary. We are not at war. These are civilians, and it seems that ICE is hellbent on violating every amendment in the Bill of Rights.” ― Patrick Loller, a retired staff sergeant and combat medic in the National Guard

TheAtlantic, Hillary Rodham Clinton: MAGA’s War on Empathy https://tinyurl.com/hwx2rm4h “These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less”
// This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement.

That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.

“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably put itduring Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.

The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right “Christian influencers” who are waging a war on empathy.

Their twisted campaign validates Trump’s personal immorality and his administration’s cruelty. It marginalizes mainstream religious leaders who espouse traditional values that conflict with Trump’s behavior and agenda. And it threatens to pave the way for an extreme vision of Christian nationalism that seeks to replace democracy with theocracy in America.

The rejection of bedrock Christian values such as dignity, mercy, and compassion did not start with the crisis in Minnesota. The tone was set right at the beginning of this second Trump presidency. The day after taking the oath of office last January, Trump attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, directed part of her sermon at the new president: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” She spoke of children of immigrant families afraid that their parents would be taken away, refugees fleeing persecution, and young LGBTQ Americans who feared for their lives. It was an honest plea, suffused with the kind of love and generosity toward neighbors and strangers that Jesus taught.

Bishop Budde was immediately vilified. One Republican congressman said she “should be added to the deportation list.” The pastor and influencer Ben Garrett warned his followers, “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.” The right-wing Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey called the sermon “toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.” Toxic empathy! What an oxymoron. I don’t know if the phrase reflects moral blindness or moral bankruptcy, but either way it’s appalling.

No less a religious authority than the late Pope Francis called out the Trump administration’s war on empathy. After Vice President Vance argued that Christians should be stingy with their love, prioritizing those close to us over strangers, he offered a rebuke. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” the pope noted, before urging everyone to read up on the Good Samaritan. …

With leadership like this, it’s no wonder that one survey found a quarter of Republicans and nearly 40 percent of Christian nationalists now agree that “empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.” MAGA rejects the teachings of Jesus to “love thy neighbor” and care for “the last, the least, and the lost.” It recognizes only a zero-sum war of all against all. The world may look gilded from the patio at Mar-a-Lago, but the MAGA view is fundamentally fearful and impoverished. MAGA sees a world of vengeance, scorn, and humiliation, and cannot imagine generosity or solidarity.

The whole exercise is suffused with barely disguised misogyny. The extremist pastor Joe Rigney wrote a book called Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. Rigney is an ally of the influential Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, who thinks giving women the right to vote was a mistake and advocates turning the United States into a theocracy. (Would it shock you to know that Pete Hegseth is a big fan of Wilson’s?)

Rigney declared that Bishop Budde’s plea for mercy was “a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness.” Manipulation by wily women is a sexist trope as old as Adam and Eve, but this is an ugly new twist. Instead of women tempting men with vice, now the great fear is that women will tempt men with virtue. …

The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical organization for mainline churches in the country, has warned about the dangers of Christian nationalism. “In this quest for political power, Christian humility is lost, as is the message of God’s love for all humanity,” the council said in a 2021 statement. “Where the Bible has at its core the story of a people committed to welcoming aliens and strangers because they themselves were aliens and strangers, and to defending the oppressed because they themselves were once oppressed, the Christian nationalist narrative rejects the stranger and judges the oppressed as deserving of their oppression.”

This is exactly the kind of mainstream Christian view that enrages Allie Beth Stuckey. The author of Toxic Empathy, who styles herself a voice for Christian women, has more than a million followers on social media. In between lifestyle pitter-patter and her demonization of IVF treatments, she warns women not to listen to their soft hearts. …

The don’t-love-thy-neighbor Christians have powerful allies in the war on empathy. Silicon Valley techno-authoritarians and social Darwinists argue that empathy is weakness and “suicidal” for civilization because it gets in the way of ruthless ambition and efficiency. That’s pretty rich for the crew that’s busy building artificial-intelligence systems they freely admit might obliterate humanity one day. But these are the same billionaires who dismiss critics and liberals as “NPCs,” or non-player characters, a video-game term for nonhumans. Once you see people that way, why would you care about understanding or helping them?

They may be convinced that they’re the smartest guys in the room, but they’re dead wrong about this. Empathy won’t destroy civilization; indeed, it just might save it. We can debate policies. We can debate theology. But if we give up on empathy, we give up on any real chance of coming together to solve our problems. Empathy does not overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity. It opens our eyes to moral complexity. It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s a source of strength.

This might be lost on tycoons who have a huge financial interest in leaving the rest of us behind on their way to Mars, but one might hope Christians would know better. You don’t need to look too far back to find examples of those who do. I disagreed with President George W. Bush about many things, but I respected his sincere belief in a more “compassionate conservatism.” There was no greater proof of this commitment than the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a mission of mercy that helped save an estimated 26 million lives. It was a public-health miracle. Many of the program’s most ardent champions were evangelical Christians inspired by Jesus’s teachings to heal the sick and feed the hungry. That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from slashing PEPFAR and other lifesaving assistance to people in need around the world. Experts predict that 14 million people could die by 2030 as a result—including millions of children.

Some earlier leaders of the religious right were also cruel and demagogic. When I was coming up in politics, we had huckster televangelists instead of social-media snake-oil salesmen, but the game was the same: exploit religion to profiteer and push an extreme political agenda. In the 1980s, right-wing firebrands such as Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant claimed that the AIDS epidemic was a plague sent by God to punish gay people. There was no shortage of rhetoric that I would call dehumanizing or un-Christian. These reactionary religious forces led a decades-long campaign against women’s rights and gay rights that helped turn the Republican Party against democracy itself. The rise of unabashed Christian nationalists is their legacy.

But what we’re seeing today feels different—and more dangerous. The question of who deserves empathy, and the rights and respect that flow from our shared humanity, has always been highly contested in our politics. But until now, no major American political movement has ever seriously suggested that empathy and compassion themselves are suspect. …

Another factor is Trump himself. No one mistakes him for a devout Christian or a person of faith or morality. But his corruption isn’t just a personal matter—it taints everything he touches, including his Christian supporters. The conventional wisdom is that Trump says out loud what many others think privately, that his blunt bigotry gives permission for people to throw off the shackles of political correctness and woke piety. That may be partly true. He does bring out the worst in people. But it’s more than that. He makes people worse. Cruelty and ugliness are infectious. When they become the norm, we all suffer. …

… Trump, especially in this second term, has styled himself as a gold-plated Caesar, the farthest thing from an American ideal. Instead of the decency of Washington we get the decadence of Caligula; rather than the humility of Lincoln, the cruelty of Nero. You’d think good Christians would see the irony of throwing their lot in with a wannabe Roman emperor, but the whole point of a cult of personality is to leave you blind and afraid. [ … social media … ]

What can we do?

A good place to start is to follow the example of courageous faith leaders standing up to the Trump administration’s abuses. On January 23, about 100 clergy were arrested after protesting deportation flights at the Minneapolis airport. They prayed and sang hymns in the brutal cold until police took them away. Many more have fanned out across the city to support protesters and help immigrant families in need.

In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released an unusual special message condemning “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “the vilification of immigrants.” It is rare for America’s bishops to speak with one voice like this—the last time was in 2013—but they said, “We feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”

I hope grassroots faith leaders across the country who are appalled by what they see from an immoral administration and an extremist political right also find their voice. It is understandable that some stay silent out of fear. Influencers like Stuckey are zealously policing any deviation from the party line. But speaking truth to power has been part of the Christian tradition since the very beginning. The Christian community—and the country—would be stronger and healthier if we heard these voices.

We also need to contest this ground politically. If MAGA Republicans are going to give up on traditional virtues such as compassion and community, Democrats have an opportunity to fill that gap. The violent overreach in Minnesota may provide an opening to engage new audiences looking for alternatives. Many evangelical Christians who have long voted Republican are turned off by Trump’s venality and cruelty. Even some Republican leaders are starting to question the administration’s berserk immigration crackdown.

Democrats need a big tent that welcomes people of faith into our coalition, even if we don’t agree on every issue. Don’t forget, liberal Christianity has a long and storied history. Progressive people of faith have led virtually every major social movement. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in Selma. That’s a spirit we should work to reclaim. …

I know empathy isn’t easy. But neither is Christianity. When Jesus called on us to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute us, it was supposed to be hard. We fail more than we succeed—we’re human—but the discipline is to keep trying.

… I still believe intolerance and hatred are deplorable. Slandering a peaceful protester and cheering his murder is deplorable. Terrorizing children because their parents are undocumented is deplorable. But as a Christian, I also aspire to see the goodness in everyone and believe that everyone has a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.

When I see brutality like we’ve all witnessed in Minnesota, I ask myself: Can I really find empathy for people who insist on dehumanizing others? I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m still working on it. I believe our hearts are big enough to hold two truths at once. We can see the humanity in even the worst of our fellow human beings and still fiercely resist tyranny and repression. We can stand firm without mirroring the cruelty of our opponents. These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.

NYT: War Threats and Ambiguous Evidence: Trump Again Confronts Iran https://tinyurl.com/mu9r3ud5 “There is little sign that Iran has made significant progress in reconstituting its nuclear program, leaving questions about the timing and motive behind potential plans for further attacks.”

💽 John Stewart (1/26/2026) https://youtu.be/I-eNduwugmY?si=SaGSc5bYgREp0mZC
💽 Stephen Colbert (1/26/2026) https://youtu.be/ky5B7xrontY?si=znSaJ60sJb4t2sds
🎶 Minnesota Anthem (Marc Skervem) https://youtu.be/f4wtYTTJ1tk?si=jCPt0qYP0dKS2fd_
🎶 In the Streets of Minneapolis (Bruce Springsteen) https://youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si=HLtTAgFtc2wexOmW

🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Reuters has exclusive on updated ICE Guidance for Minneapolis. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/yehjkdnt

(1) “DO NOT COMMUNICATE OR ENGAGE WITH AGITATORS;” “It serves no purpose other than inflaming the situation. No one is going to convince the other. The only communication should be the officers issuing commands.”

(2) “We are moving to targeted enforcement of aliens with a criminal history;” “This includes arrests, not just convictions. ALL TARGETS MUST HAVE A CRIMINAL NEXUS.”

🐣 RT @CatholicArena BREAKING Cardinal Parolin has called the ICE situation in Minneapolis ‘unacceptable’ ¤The Vatican Secretary of State said:’The position of the Holy See is always to avoid any kind of violence, obviously, and therefore we cannot accept episodes of this kind. That is our position’

🐣 RT @CatholicArena BREAKING Cardinal Tobin has called for the defunding of ICE ¤ ‘We ask — for the love of God and the love of human beings, which can’t be separated — vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organisation’

🐣 RT @SykesCharlie In newly-surfaced video, defrocked Brute Squad leader Greg Bovino rallies the troops by declaring: “Everybody fucking gets it… this is our fucking city!” ¤ As it turned out, he was wrong. Minneapolis was not his city. And now he’s out, and DHS is engulfed in chaos and under fire.

🐣 RT @jaketapper Good morning! In the 9 pm ET hour then recommencing in the 5 am ET, the president posted or reposted more than 60 times, attacking President Obama, PM Carney, Gov Newsom, Gov Walz, Rep Omar, Alex Pretti, and sharing a bunch of untethered nonsense about the 2020 election.

🐣 RT @propublica New: The FBI’s search warrant, which sought 2020 election ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data and voter rolls from Fulton County, GA, marked what experts described as a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/43zujh96

🐣 RT @MikeSington ICE agents in Minneapolis receive new orders from officials: They are no longer allowed to “engage” with “agitators”, and activity must be limited to immigrants with criminal charges or convictions. (Reuters)

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇪🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦 Europe could replace US intelligence for Ukraine in months, – FT ¤ A possible US withdrawal from support for Ukraine and Europe now does not look as critical as it did a year ago: allies have already been backing Kyiv during pauses in aid. ¤ In January 2026, Macron said that France now provides about two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence. Western officials confirm that a full or near-full replacement of US data is a matter of months.

⭕ 28 Jan 2026

WSJ Editorial: The Perils of a Falling Trump Dollar https://tinyurl.com/yy27rc69
“Trump says he’s OK with a weaker currency. How Retro. It’s been decades since this view enjoyed strong empirical support, if it ever did.”

🐣 RT @MercadoMedia1 🚨BREAKING: Federal Judge Orders DHS to Stop Arresting and Detaining Minnesota Refugees
¤ https://x.com/MercadoMedia1/status/2016658809943445729?s=20/photo/ -2

A federal judge in Minnesota has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop arresting and detaining refugees who are lawfully in the U.S. and waiting for permanent residency.

The ruling affects an estimated 5,600 people across the state. The court found that DHS has been detaining individuals who followed the rules, were legally admitted, and are in the process of adjusting their status.

Judge John Tunheim ordered DHS to release anyone currently being held on this basis and return anyone who was sent out of state. The order also requires ICE to coordinate releases so people are not left outside in dangerous winter conditions.

The court is now requiring DHS to provide detainee lists, file status updates, and comply with ongoing oversight as the case continues.

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 “The world has changed. Washington has changed. There’s almost nothing normal in the United States. That’s the truth”.- Prime Minister Mark Carney

‼️ 🐣 RT @atrupar SHAHEEN: It’s been reported that the oil sold for $500 million and $300 million went to Venezuelan government. What happened to the other $200 million? ¤ RUBIO: It’s still sitting in the account is my understanding ¤ SHAHEEN: The account in Qatar? ¤ RUBIO: Yes

🐣 RT @CarolLeonnig Great @MSNOWNews Analysis: Minnesota judges have rejected nearly all the feds push to detain immigrants they seized there. Feds lost 60 of 61 cases reviewed by @lawofruby and @falgallagher, with govt accused of trying to remove people lawfully in US.

🐣 RT @LePapillonBlu2 Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told his officers that they have a DUTY to intervene if they see ICE committing crimes and will be FIRED if they don’t.

🐣 RT @TheAtlantic Governor Tim Walz warns of a national unraveling in an interview with @isaacstanbecker “It’s worse than you think,” Walz says of the situation in Minnesota.
⋙ TheAtlantic, Isaac Stanley-Becker: Tim Walz Fears a Fort Sumter Moment in Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/bt8jm8us The Minnesota governor warns of a national unraveling.

🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer TRUST ME– Washington, apparently, has told Ukraine that it must sign on to a peace deal with Russia in order to get U.S. security guarantees. Russia has already signed THREE treaties that were supposed to guarantee Ukraine sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia has broken all three: ¤ The Budapest Memorandum (1994); The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (1997); and The Treaty between Ukraine and the Russian Federation on the Ukrainian-Russian State Border (2003). ¤ Russia cannot be trusted.

WaPo: Greenland isn’t the answer to US Arctic security. This place is. https://tinyurl.com/4t4uffm3 “With decisive government action, the U.S. could start building a true Arctic fortress on its own territory tomorrow, without any blowback from Denmark or NATO or anyone else.”
// “The U.S. could start building a true Arctic fortress in Alaska tomorrow.”

🐣 RT @NewsHour The parents of Alex Pretti have retained a former federal prosecutor who helped Minnesota’s attorney general convict the police officer who kneeled on George Floyd’s neck of murder.

🐣 RT @ReichlinMelnick An extraordinary document. Read it. “Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. … ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
¤ https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/2016642763169669307?s=20/photo/1 -3
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/4fxb5aev

NCR: More US bishops decry societal tensions, call for renewal of heart, human dignity https://tinyurl.com/mrxxduk9 “We do not lose our rights based on the color of our skin, or the language we speak, or for not having the proper documents.” – Arc(bishop José Gomez of L.A.
// “This is a pro-life issue,” said Bishop Taylor. “And it will remain a pro-life issue so long as millions of people continue to live lives trapped in desperate circumstances, where countries with means refuse to help.””

🐣 RT @BlueATLGeorgia Carol Leonnig on Fulton County election office raid: The FBI special agent in charge of the office in Atlanta, where this is all happening, was removed by the FBI director last week
💽 https://x.com/BlueATLGeorgia/status/2016620654422847825?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @SenOssoff Sen. Ossoff Statement on FBI Raid of Fulton County Elections Office
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SenOssoff/status/2016626802890817669?s=20/photo/1

Jon Ossoff
U.S. SENATOR FOR GEORGIA

SEN. OSSOFF ON FBI RAID OF FULTON COUNTY ELECTIONS OFFICE

“After losing Georgia in 2020, Donald Trump demanded state officials ‘find’ votes to change the outcome, tried to use DOJ to overturn it, and spread conspiracy theories that led to the Jan. 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol.

“I suspect today’s raid is a continuation of this sore loser’s crusade, despite repeated audits and independent reviews confirming that Donald Trump was indeed defeated.

“From Minnesota to Georgia, on display to the whole world, is a President spiraling out ot control, wielding tederal law entorcement as an unaccountable instrument of personal power and revenge.”

Variety: Bruce Springsteen Releases ICE Protest Song ‘Streets of Minneapolis,’ Slamming ‘King Trump’s Private Army’ and ‘State Terror’ https://tinyurl.com/tjmnh8f7

⋙ ¤ Variety link: https://tinyurl.com/tjmnh8f7
⭐️ YouTube link: https://youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si=HLtTAgFtc2wexOmW ¤

In a statement, Springsteen said: “I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free, Bruce Springsteen.”

Bruce Springsteen:

“Streets Of Minneapolis” lyrics:

⋙ January 28, 2026

Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots
King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets
By the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow, dead
Their claim was self defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones
And these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
In chants of ICE out now
Our city’s heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

⭕ 27 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @ZacksJerryRig I’m just gunna leave this here. Aparently US citizens commit twice as many violent felonies as undocumented immigrants. This report came from the great red state of TEXAS. Sure. Deport illegals. But if reducing violent crime is actually your goal we might wanna start at home. 🤷‍♂️
◕ https://x.com/ZacksJerryRig/status/2016383459728519245?s=20/photo/1

TheAtlantic, William H McRaven*: Never Fight Alone https://tinyurl.com/4bk3wump “Anyone who would denigrate the service of our NATO allies clearly never spent a day in uniform.”
*McRaven is a US 4-star admiral known for overseeing the Navy SEAL operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
//➔ “Winston Churchill once said that ‘there is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.’”

WaPo, George F Will: Assume this loutocracy is lying about ICE until proven otherwise https://tinyurl.com/2uyync7h “The current administration — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing.”
// Kristi Noem isn’t the only reason millions of Americans increasingly distrust the deportation mania.

WSJ Editorial: America’s Immigration Labor Shock https://tinyurl.com/kwrxscys “The Census Bureau says the U.S. is on a path to net negative migration.” //➔ George Costanza (probably)

🐣 🐣 RT @gothburz I’m a currency strategist at Treasury.
Yesterday the dollar hit a four-year low. […]
¤ https://x.com/pa_coyote94151/status/2016356802514788622?s=20
// message: buy gold
⋙ 🐣 The problem is: people aren’t buying from us
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2016378500861579616?s=20

Canada and Europe are making trade deals with China
Europe is making trade deals with South America and India
FREE trade deals
Because of tariffs
Because they think we’re becoming fascist
Because they don’t want the US bullying them
Because they don’t like us invading other countries
Europe and China are decoupling from US tech
Our universities are putting up (“No immigrants need apply”) signs
Scientists are leaving
Where will they go? — To Canada, the EU, China and India
Welcome to Isolationist States of Trumpistan

🐣 [📌pinned chart] Here is the January 2026 Version of the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. For the interactive version, here’s the link: https://tinyurl.com/mpfv275z

🐣 RT @NBCNews BREAKING: Two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski, call for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.

🐣 RT @LemkinInstitute Statement on the Normalization of Nazism in the U.S Government ¤ 25 January 2025 ¤ Read full statement here: https://tinyurl.com/ypntyp6s
¤ https://x.com/LemkinInstitute/status/2016168089608429646?s=20

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is deeply concerned by a dangerous and accelerating pattern within the United States government in which rhetoric and symbolism associated with Nazi ideology and white supremacist extremism is increasingly given political legitimacy. Entire government agencies, especially the Department of Homeland Security, as well as senior officials and other influential actors now regularly tolerate and even echo language and imagery historically rooted in Nazism and genocidal movements, eroding democratic norms and cultivating an environment that actively drives extremist mobilization and politically driven violence.

The Lemkin Institute recognizes that the Trump Administration is unlikely to engage in any actions that would begin to limit and contain the growing power and violence of extremist groups because the Administration is, apparently, in the hands of people sympathetic to those groups. We remind President Trump, his advisors, and the foot soldiers of genocide in ICE and CBP that totalitarian supremacist projects never end well for the perpetrators.

We call upon U.S. government officials and U.S. political representatives who do not wish to be complicit in fascism and genocide to take immediate measures to identify, address and dismantle Nazi and white supremacist ideology within the U.S. government, with the long-term goal of transforming the nation towards a more just, positive, and sustainable social order.

🐣 RT @ralakbar A quote from Rubio as prepared for delivery: 👇
“Make no mistake, as the President has stated, we are prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation if other methods fail. It is our hope that this will not prove necessary, but we will never shy away from our duty to the American people and our mission in this Hemisphere”

🐣 RT @🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇪🇺 The EU has switched on parts of its secure satellite communications network for government and military use, – Bloomberg ¤ Elements of the IRIS2 and GOVSATCOM networks began limited operations for government and military use, with Ukraine requesting access. ¤ The IRIS2 network will eventually have satellites in multiple orbits and is scheduled to be fully operational by 2030, serving both private customers and governments.

🐣 RT @EdKrassen BREAKING: Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina just went off on Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and the Trump administration! ¤ “I think what she’s done in Minnesota should be disqualifying. She should be out of a job…it’s just amateurish.” ¤ The dam is breaking!

🐣 RT @D_jeneration President Biden stepped up as always 💙💙💙
[TextLink:] https://x.com/D_jeneration/status/2016226415729856517?s=20/photo/1

What has unfolded in Minneapolis this past month betrays our most basic values as Americans. We are not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street. We are not a nation that allows our citizens to be brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights. We are not a nation that tramples the 4th Amendment and tolerates our neighbors being terrorized. The people of Minnesota have stood strong – helping community members in unimaginable circumstances, speaking out against injustice when they see it, and holding our government accountable to the people. Minnesotans have reminded us all what it is to be American, and they have suffered enough at the hands of this Administration. Violence and terror have no place in the United States of America, especially when it’s our own government targeting American citizens.

No single person can destroy what America stands for and believes in, not even a President, if we — all of America – stand up and speak out.
We know who we are. It’s time to show the world. More importantly, it’s time to show ourselves.

Now, justice requires full, fair, and transparent investigations into the deaths of the two Americans who lost their lives in the city they called home. Jill and l are sending strength to the families and communities who love Alex Pretti and Renee Good as we all mourn their senseless deaths.

🐣 RT @TheMaineWonk,‼️ STATEMENT FROM GOVERNOR WALZ: “Governor Walz met with Tom Homan this morning and reiterated Minnesota’s priorities: impartial investigations into the Minneapolis shootings involving federal agents, a swift, significant reduction in the number of federal forces in Minnesota, and an end to the campaign of retribution against Minnesota. ¤ The Governor and Homan agreed on the need for an ongoing dialogue and will continue working toward those goals, which the President also agreed to yesterday.” …

🐣 RT @ DrCatharineY We’ve lost over 10,000 STEM PhDs from the federal workforce in a single year. ¤ 10,000. ¤ Never thought the U.S. would ever allow this type of brain drain to occur – but here we are. [Science link:] https://tinyurl.com/3ufujccc
◕ https://x.com/DrCatharineY/status/2016179938072625538?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇪🇺 Zelensky: There is a sincere interest from partners in negotiations with America and the Russian side.
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2016198088747012517?s=20

Clear security guarantees for Ukraine and all of Europe, absolutely clear obligations and opportunities for the reconstruction of Ukraine and, of course, real opportunities to end this war with dignity.

We are now receiving good signals from Europe about the readiness of Europeans to put more active pressure on the aggressor. It is very important that this is pressure, in particular, on the Russian tanker fleet – on the entire infrastructure of Russian oil exports.

🐣 RT @kasparov63 Occupation by Russia is not peace, it is murder out of sight. Trump‘s guarantees are worthless, as he shows every day. The US is pushing an unacceptable Russian plan to delay European action. Russia is losing & running out of time. Give Ukraine what it needs to finish the job.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Ukrainian and European officials described the US stance as an attempt to strong-arm Kyiv into making painful territorial concessions Moscow has demanded in any deal. [FT Link:] https://tinyurl.com/3ypw7xm4

🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews According to the Kremlin-controlled Russian state media, it happened in Anchorage.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kiraincongress According to the Financial Times, U.S. security guarantees are tied to Ukraine withdrawing from Donbas. At what point did these talks shift from “peace for Ukraine” to a “piece of Ukraine”?
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews From my article last August: “For this, they’ve credited the twosome’s ride in the presidential limousine, unaccompanied by interpreters or U.S. government officials, where they assert that the two presidents have “divided Ukraine.”” [link:] https://tinyurl.com/mryh742f
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews “A common thread in the state media’s coverage of the summit was the urgency to act now and to “take advantage” of this situation, where Russia stands to benefit without offering any concessions.”

🐣 RT @SenRandPaul Local police routinely, put officers involved in deadly shootings on administrative leave until an independent investigation is concluded. That should happen immediately. I can’t recall ever hearing a police chief immediately describing the victim as a “domestic terrorist” or a “would-be assassin.”  ¤ For calm to be restored, an independent investigation is the least that should be done.

🐣 RT @factpostnews Anderson Cooper: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” George Orwell wrote that in his book 1984 after getting sick of what he called “the screaming and lies told by governments and media pushing official propaganda.” There’s a lot of people here in Minneapolis tonight who are sick of the lies being told by some in the Trump administration about Alex Pretti, who was shot to death here on Saturday.

⭕ 26 Jan 2026

TheAtlantic, Adam Serwer (Jan 26): Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong https://tinyurl.com/ms7c26ws “It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester.” #HighlyRec
// The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.”

[…] I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. In late November, The New York Timesreported on a public-benefit fraud scheme in the state that was executed mainly by people of Somali descent. Federal prosecutors under the Biden administration had already indicted dozens of people, but after the Timesstory broke, President Trump began ranting about Somalis, whom he referred to as “garbage”; declared that he didn’t want Somali immigrants in the country; and announced that he was sending thousands of armed federal immigration agents to Minneapolis. This weekend, he posted on social media that the agents were there because of “massive monetary fraud.” The real reason may be that a majority of Minnesotans did not vote for him. Trump has said that “I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.” He has never won Minnesota.

Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been. …

The number of minnesotans resisting the federal occupation is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists. They are ordinary Americans—people with jobs, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. They can be divided into roughly three groups.

The largest is the protesters, who show up at events such as Friday’s march in downtown Minneapolis, and at the airport, where deportation flights take off. Many protesters have faced tear gas and pepper spray, and below-zero temperatures—during the Twin Cities march on Friday, I couldn’t take notes; the ink in my pens had frozen.

Then there are the people who load up their car with food, toiletries, and school supplies from churches or schools to take to families in hiding. They also help families who cannot work meet their rent or mortgage payments. In addition to driving around with Olsen, I rode along with a Twin Cities mom of young kids named Amanda as she did deliveries (she asked me to use only her first name). Riding in her small car—her back row was taken up by three child seats and a smattering of stray toys—she told me that she’d gotten involved after more than 100 students at her kids’ elementary school simply stopped coming in. Parents got organized to provide the families with food, to shepherd their kids to school, and to arrange playdates for those stuck inside.

Amanda’s father and husband are immigrants, she said, and she speaks Spanish. “I can be a conduit between those who want to help and those who need help,” she told me. She calls each family before knocking on the door, so they don’t have to worry that they are being tricked by ICE. At one home, a woman asked us to go around back because a suspicious vehicle was idling out front. At another home, a little girl in pigtails beamed as Amanda handed her a Target bag full of school supplies.

Finally, there are those most at risk of coming into violent contact with federal agents, a group that’s come to be popularly known as ICE Watch, although the designation is unofficial—as far as I can tell, you’re in ICE Watch if you watch ICE. These are the whistle-wielding pedestrians and drivers calling themselves “observers” or “commuters” who patrol for federal agents (usually identifiable by their SUVs with out-of-state plates) and alert the neighborhood to their presence. Pretti and Good, the two Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents, fit in this category.

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents.

“There’s been an incredible, incredible response from the community. I’ve seen our neighbors go straight from allies to family—more than family—checking in on each other, offering food and rides for kids and all kinds of support, alerting each other if there’s ICE or any kind of danger,” Malika Dahir, a local activist of Somali descent, told me.

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America. […]

Even among those involved in opposing ICE in Minnesota, people have a range of political views. The nonviolent nature of the movement, and the focus on caring for neighbors, has drawn in volunteers with many different perspectives on immigration, including people who might have been supportive if the Trump administration’s claims of a targeted effort to deport violent criminals had been sincere. …

The problem is that federal agents are not going after just criminals. Growing distraught, Pastor Miguel said that one of the men who helped organize the food drive, a close friend of his who he believed had legal status, had been picked up by federal agents the day before I visited. …

Bovino’s departure seemed an admission that Minnesotans aren’t the only Americans who won’t tolerate more deaths at the hands of federal agents. The people of Minnesota have forced the Trump administration into a strategic retreat—one inflicted not as rioters or insurgents, but as neighbors.

After Friday’s protest, when thousands marched in frigid downtown Minneapolis, chanting, “No Trump, no troops, Twin Cities ain’t licking boots!” I spoke with a young protester named Ethan McFarland, who told me that his parents are immigrants from Uganda. He had recently asked his mother to show him her immigration papers, in case she got picked up. This kind of state oppression, he said, is exactly what his mother was “trying to get away from” when she came to the United States.

McFarland’s remarks reminded me of something Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, had written: “Migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” In Minnesota, the opposite was happening. The “conditions and terrors” of immigrants’ “broken homelands” weren’t being re-created by immigrants. They were being re-created by people like Miller. The immigrants simply have the experience to recognize them.

The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” Vance said in a speech last July. “If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.” Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.

A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying immigrants welcome, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.

The MAGA faith in liberal weakness has been paired with the conviction that real men—Trump’s men—are conversely strong. Consider Miller’s bizarre meltdown while addressing Memphis police in October. “The gangbangers that you deal with—they think that they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are,” Miller said. “They think they’re hard-core? We are so much more hard-core than they are.” Around this time, Miller moved his family onto a military base—for safety reasons.

The federal agents sent to Minnesota wear body armor and masks, and bear long guns and sidearms. But their skittishness and brutality are qualities associated with fear, not resolve. It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester.

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

WSJ Editorial: Mass Deportation by the Numbers https://tinyurl.com/2tfscvzn “Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to deport criminal migrants, ‘the worst of the worst,’ as DHS put it. That policy has public support, but the migrant roundup has become far broader.”
// ICE arrests are growing but fewer have a criminal history.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2016312631313744217?s=20/photo/1

… Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to deport criminal migrants, “the worst of the worst,” as the Department of Homeland Security put it. That policy has public support, but the migrant roundup has become far broader.

Last week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on social media, “We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis.” Overall, Ms. Noem says Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.” She told CBSthat “70% of them have committed or have charges against them on violent crimes.”

It started out that way. At the beginning of 2025, 87% of ICE arrests were immigrants with either a prior conviction or a criminal charge pending, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.

But the criminal share of apprehensions has declined as the months have gone on. By October 2025, the percentage of arrested immigrants with a prior conviction or criminal charge had fallen to 55%. Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data. …

Many of the criminal immigrants the Administration counts among those in detention are convicted criminals culled from prisons. White House border czar Tom Homan objected to Minneapolis’s sanctuary city policy because he said it wasn’t letting the Administration take prisoners into federal custody. “If they’d let us in their damn jail,” he said, “we could arrest the bad guy in the safety and security of the jail.” …

Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued.
v
All of which means that the Trump Administration’s rhetoric about deporting criminals doesn’t match its current much broader policy of mass deportation. As ICE agents target businesses, schools and homes, scenes of arrest involving mothers, children and long-time U.S. residents become more common. This explains why immigration enforcement is becoming a political liability for Republicans.

Ending migrant chaos at the border was necessary after the Biden Administration. But White House aide Stephen Miller’s undisciplined mass deportation and zero-immigration policy is building distrust, and the White House pitch that public safety justifies its enforcement is losing credibility.

🐣 📊 RT @Reuters American approval of President Trump’s immigration policy fell to its lowest level since his return to the White House in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, with a majority of Americans saying his crackdown on immigration has gone too far https://reut.rs/4k2SJgC
// Reuters/Ipsos Poll: 39% approve, 53% disapprove
◕ https://x.com/Reuters/status/2015899120263700685?s=20/photo/1

TheAtlantic, Nick Miroff: Greg Bovino Loses His Job https://tinyurl.com/3t7a3f4u “The Border Patrol chief has been ousted from his role as ‘commander at large,’ and will return to El Centro.
// He is expected to retire shortly

🐣 RT @ABC The Hennepin County Medical Examiner has issued its public data form on the death of Renee Good, ruling the manner of death a homicide. https://abcnews.link/AwY5EJi

🐣 RT @RepDonBacon Where’s the Administration is polling the lowest he can easily fix. 1. Release all the Epstein files. 2. Help Ukraine defeat Russia. The voters are consistently most angry about these two. These are easy to fix.
📊 ◕ https://x.com/RepDonBacon/status/2015913727933976657?s=20/photo/1

NYT: An AI Pioneer Warns the Tech ‘Herd’ Is Marching Into a Dead End https://tinyurl.com/495n5dhz “The good ideas are coming from China. But Silicon Valley also has a superiority complex, so it can’t imagine that good ideas can come from other places.” ~ Yann LeCun
// Yann LeCun helped create the technology behind today’s chatbots. Now he says many tech companies are on the wrong path to creating intelligent machines.

NYT: Trump softens tone on Minneapolis violence amid calls for accountability https://tinyurl.com/mxt24r63 “The White House changed leadership in Minnesota and softened its tone on dead protesters as polls show Americans turning against ICE.”

🐣 RT @rparloff The preliminary injunction hearing in MN v Noem just concluded. If Judge Menendez orders relief, and I think she might, @AGPamBondi’s 1/14/26 letter will figure prominently. MN said it was an “extortionate” demand for MN to change 3 policies, and judge seemed to read it similarly.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/rparloff/status/2015849438103904640?s=20/photo/1.

WSJ: Tim Walz: The Un-American Assault on Minnesota https://tinyurl.com/3n9be6u2 “Minnesota is a state that believes in the rule of law and in the dignity of all people. We know that true public safety comes from trust, respect and shared purpose, not from intimidation or political theater.”
// Federal officials are lying. My state’s Corrections Department honors all immigration detainers.

🐣 RT @jamiedupree Suddenly Gov. Walz is a nice guy
[TextLink:] https://x.com/jamiedupree/status/2015828465321128090?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Governor Tim Walz called me with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous SUCCESS in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have “touched” and, even in Minnesota, Crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better!
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

🧵 RT @kyledcheney HAPPENING NOW: Minnesota v. Noem hearing is underway before Judge Menendez, who will weigh whether to order an end to Operation Metro Surge. AG Keith Ellison is at counsel table for the state.
📌 https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/2015803903292453008?s=20

⋙ For example, Bondi’s first demand to end the ICE surge is “give us your SNAP data.” The state says it’s pretty clear you can’t use presence of armed agents to coerce things like this.

⋙ Layer for MN: “The president of the United States said in the middle of this chaos and violence in the streets … he said ‘Minnesota, your day of retribution is here.’ That is crazy. How can that not violate legal sovereignty?”

🐣 RT @RasmusJarlov USA Arctic paratrooper unit seems to have been training for a year to take Greenland. “In January 2025, the division carried out two major exercises with a single objective: to simulate the seizure of a strategic airport in an Arctic nation under intense local resistance, without allied support.” ¤ The unit was put on standby with four hours notice last week to be deployed to “Minnesota”. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/ke8f7sxn
// “Arctic Angels”; “… only the 11th Airborne Division a truly Arctic-capable force, able to survive and fight in extreme conditions”

🐣 RT @tribelaw “I just checked—it turns out that Art. II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution of the United States does *not* say ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a bunch of sociopaths who think they can do whatever the f*ck they want and make sh*t up as they go along.’” — George Conway

🐣 RT @_The_Prophet__ ⚡️This is epochal. ¤ Central banks now hold more gold by value than US Treasuries. That flips the reserve order of the global system.
¤ https://x.com/_The_Prophet__/status/2015642541119676865?s=20

The dollar’s anchor has been credibility, not convertibility. That credibility was built on a post-Bretton trust pact: the U.S. runs deficits, exports Treasuries, and backstops the system with military and monetary dominance. That pact just cracked.

Gold rising above Treasuries in reserve value is not just a commodity rerating. It is a revaluation of trust.

It means central banks no longer believe Treasuries are the safest form of savings. They are rotating toward neutral, non-defaultable settlement.

This is the sovereign bid for collateral with no political risk. Gold has no yield, but it also has no fiscal cliff, no weaponized sanctions, no roll-over risk, no inflation adjustment errors, no monetary policy reversals.

Zoom out:

1. Gold’s price rise is not speculative.

It is structural reserve rotation from politically contingent assets to neutral ones.

2.This rotation is self-reinforcing.

As gold becomes a larger share of global reserves, it gains systemic gravity. That draws more demand. The denominator shifts. Treasuries weaken as reserve collateral, not just in price, but in role.

3.The US loses its monopoly on trust.

That forces higher yields to attract capital, which breaks the Treasury market’s function as a stable reserve. Foreign holders exit first. Domestic monetization follows.

This is phase transition, not price action.

Gold has flipped from hedge to reference. Treasuries are no longer the reserve. Gold is. The game has changed. The reserve map is rewriting itself in real time.

⋙ 🐣 RT @SpecialSitsNews For the first time since 1996, the value of gold held by central banks ($4.6 trillion) exceeds the value of the US Treasurys they hold ($3.9 trillion). $gld
◕ https://x.com/SpecialSitsNews/status/2015628089221423560?s=20/photo/1

⭕ 25 Jan 2026

📊 🐣 RT @TheEconomist A week into Donald Trump’s second term 37% of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction, while 50% thought it was on the wrong track. Those numbers are now 31% and 61%, respectively [link:] https://tinyurl.com/32kn9ev9
// YouGov/Economist poll

✝ WaPo, Nuno Castel-Branco: Why the pope is right to weigh in on AI https://tinyurl.com/3yskn9du “Most of the AI debate is about whether it will achieve some of its early promises. But … as the pope suggests, the debate should also focus on what it shouldn’t achieve.”
// Popes throughout history have been the promoters of science but also provided necessary moral guardrails.

🐣 RT @jayvanbavel AI-Powered Disinformation Swarms Are Coming for Democracy ¤ Advances in artificial intelligence are creating a perfect storm for those seeking to spread disinformation at unprecedented speed and scale. And it’s virtually impossible to detect. Read about our new paper in WIRED:
⋙ WIRED: AI-Powered Disinformation Swarms Are Coming for Democracy https://tinyurl.com/6vncmebf “Advances in artificial intelligence are creating a perfect storm for those seeking to spread disinformation at unprecedented speed and scale. And it’s virtually impossible to detect.”

🐣 RT @ThisWillHold2 Breaking: Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon blocks AG Pam Bondi’s attempt to extort private voter data. ¤ “The answer to Attorney General Bondi’s request is no… Her letter is an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. Citizens in violation of state and federal law. This comes after repeated and failed attempts by the DOJ to pressure my office into providing the same data.” ¤ Source, KARE 11

WIRED: AI-Powered Disinformation Swarms Are Coming for Democracy https://tinyurl.com/6vncmebf “Advances in artificial intelligence are creating a perfect storm for those seeking to spread disinformation at unprecedented speed and scale. And it’s virtually impossible to detect.”

🐣 Lawrence W Britt’s original list: 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2015646499758121145?s=20/photo/1

The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies As A Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. Controlled Mass Media
7. Obsession With National Security
8. Religion and Government Intertwined
9. Corporate Power Protected
10. Labor Power Suppressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession With Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent Elections

WSJ Editorial: Time for ICE to Pause in Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/ypks3dpk “The Saturday shooting of Alex Pretti, as he lay on the ground surrounded by ICE agents, is the worst incident to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump Presidency.”
// “Alex Pretti made a mistake, but he wasn’t a ‘domestic terrorist.’”

🐣 RT @jdawsey1 Talked to Trump about Minneapolis today, where he says “at some point we will leave” and said he didn’t know if he supported the ICE officer who shot.
⋙ WSJ: Trump Says Administration Is ‘Reviewing Everything’ About Minneapolis Shooting https://tinyurl.com/yzehjtuw “In an interview, the president says immigration-enforcement officers will ‘at some point’ leave the area.”
// by Josh Dawsey

🐣 RT @davidfrum Not everybody who supported Trump and MAGA was a bad person at the start. But MAGA is a jealous god. It demands its supporters descend a path of degeneration to utter moral ruin. Police death squads today; who knows what tomorrow.

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Ultimately, history punishes those who stand aside. In many respects, the wars of the 20th century were the result of the indifference of those in power in the 19th century.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2015413057699094940?s=20

Russia’s war against Ukraine and its other wars – against Moldova, Chechnya, and Georgia – are the result of indifference to the truth of our nations, a truth our people feel, and indifference shown by the world’s leading states at the end of the Soviet era, throughout the 1990s, and at the beginning of the 21st century, when they chose to place their bet on Russia – on a so-called “reset” with Russia that, in reality, turned into an “overload” for all of us.

⋙ “… a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” – Neville Chamberlain
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2015639453876822478?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @JamesLBruno Project 2025, now at least half fulfilled, constitutes Fuhrerprinzip. Most political scientists now regard the US and being an eroded constitutional system. Courts, media and civil society are under attack. Will we have free & fair elections in 2026 & 2028? Open question.

🐣 RT @YAppelbaum A remarkable dispatch from the ground in Minneapolis, from @robertfworth
¤ https://x.com/YAppelbaum/status/2015601877551923539?s=20

I met a couple in their 70s who told me they had never considered joining a political protest until ICE came to town, and they realized that their granddaughter was at risk of witnessing a violent immigration raid just by going to school. Dan and Jane (like many others, they asked that I shield their full names) live in a large house in a comfortable suburb, where they welcomed me with tea and cookies.

“When a child witnesses violence or crime, it’s profoundly different from adults,”” Dan said. “It leaves scars.”

Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis. This past Friday, Dan joined thousands of others at a protest in Minneapolis, where his fingers were frostbitten in the -9 degrees Fahrenheit.

🐣 RT @KatiePMcGrady “He is a God who excludes no one, and who comes not only for the ‘pure,’ but enters fully into the complexity of human situations and relationships. As Christians, therefore, we too must overcome the temptation toward isolation. The Gospel must be proclaimed and lived in every setting, serving as a leaven of fraternity and peace among all individuals, cultures, religions and peoples.” @Pontifex

🐣 RT @BillClinton Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come. This is one of them.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BillClinton/status/2015562744993350135?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @CatholicNewsSvc Pope Leo XIV: Be peacemakers everywhere. Never be violent, neither with words nor with gestures. Evil can only be overcome with good. Let us pray for peace because there’s fighting going on for interests that are not of the people. Peace is built on respect for all people!

TheAtlantic, Jonathan Rauch: Yes, It’s Fascism https://tinyurl.com/37npb7c8 “Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.”
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Yes, It’s Fascism 1/25/26

🐣 RT @EJDionne The Minnesota killings laid bare that Trump’s project is regime change. The goal was described by MAGA thinkers, the pattern set on Day One. The nation let his early moves—the Jan. 6 pardons, the TikTok power grab—slip by. Denial must end. Now.
⋙ NYT, EJ Dionne: Trump Is Engineering Regime Change, Right Here at Home https://tinyurl.com/2u7trz64 “Whatever hope there was that 2026 might be less jarring than the previous year is gone. This month, something snapped in the country.”

Whatever hope there was that 2026 might be less jarring than the previous year is gone. This month, something snapped in the country.

On their own, this month’s headline events would be shocking enough: The killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the Trump administration’s subsequent coverup; yet more of President Trump’s corrupt pardons; and the Justice Department’s criminal investigations of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, and a group of senators and House members who simply reminded members of our armed forces to follow the law when they are issued illegal orders.

All this was before Mr. Trump announced last weekend that he would impose tariffs by presidential fiat on some of our closest allies if they didn’t surrender to his hunger for Greenland. He eventually retreated from both tariff and invasion threats after his beloved stock market fell sharply. But unilaterally undermining the alliance that has kept our country safe for more than three-quarters of a century was strategic lunacy and showed how much wreckage one man can leave behind when he’s allowed to cast aside all constraints on his appetites.

Lest anyone miss the strongman theme, Mr. Trump chose Thursday to say on social media that he hoped Attorney General Pam Bondi was “looking at” the former special prosecutor Jack Smith. That happened to be the day Mr. Smith appeared before a House committee and methodically explained why he had indicted Mr. Trump for causing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Then on Saturday, federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse whom local police identified as American citizen with no criminal record, prompting Mr. Frey to declare that “a great American city is being invaded by its own federal government.”

Collectively, those actions have brought into the open what has been lurking just beneath the surface of our politics and can no longer be brushed aside: Mr. Trump is actively seeking regime change — not in Venezuela, where a dictatorship remains in power despite the apprehension of Nicolás Maduro, but in the United States.

It’s tempting to look at the administration primarily as a psychodrama rooted in the president’s delicate ego and his obsession with doing whatever it takes to distract attention from topics he finds uncongenial (see: the Epstein files, about which the administration is also skirting the law). But what is happening to the country is about more than Mr. Trump’s extreme neediness. His neediness is transforming our institutions.

From the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have been systematic in undermining laws, rules and understandings that undergird a free, democratic and constitutional republic. Theorists of the new MAGA right made their goals clear with books such as “Regime Change,” calls for a new American “Caesar” and their embrace of a “radical constitutionalism.”

That last phrase is from a 2022 essay by Russell Vought, now the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, in which he urged Mr. Trump’s sympathizers “to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then do it.”

They’re doing it.

One of Mr. Trump’s first acts in office received far less scrutiny than it deserved: his executive order effectively overturning a law banning TikTok. As Charlie Savage of The Times later reported, Ms. Bondi told tech companies they were free to violate the statute because — well, because Mr. Trump said so. As Mr. Savage noted, this could be seen as Mr. Trump’s “starkest power grab.” On Thursday, TikTok announced a deal with a group that included several investors with ties to Mr. Trump.

Another Day 1 move, Mr. Trump’s blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, did arouse substantial outrage. But the sharpest criticism came from Democrats and other Trump critics, with Republicans in large numbers hiding behind the fact that a president has unlimited constitutional power to issue pardons, or ducking the question entirely.

The signal Mr. Trump sent from the start — that he could set aside laws he didn’t like and that those who engaged in criminality on his behalf would receive clemency — spoke to the seriousness of his embrace of “radical constitutionalism,” which, as he has made obvious, is no constitutionalism at all.

Letting these early abuses of power slip by opened the way for the routinization of step-by-step regime change. The country got accustomed to the mass firings of government workers; the administration’s ignoring, obstructing or getting around court orders, often with the backing of a Supreme Court that had already granted him broad immunity; its shopping for prosecutors willing to file baseless charges against political enemies, the gutting the Department of Justice, and the use of the F.B.I. to find dirt on political opponents; its use of executive power to target universities and law firms; Mr. Trump’s appointment of election deniers to high-level positions, raising fears of federal interferencein the fair administration of this year’s elections; and the blatant use of presidential power for personal enrichment or to help friends and donors.

Since many of our liberties are still in place and our institutions continue to function in familiar ways, fear of regime change might once have seemed extreme, unduly academic or abstract. The events of the past three weeks have brought home that, on the contrary, these worries are chillingly realistic and concrete.

The killing of Ms. Good by an ICE agent — operating as part of a de facto personal police force for the president — has shocked and dismayed a significant American majority, and Mr. Pretti’s shooting death prompted new outrage. Even Republicans who have been loath to criticize Mr. Trump questioned the obviously phony investigation into Mr. Powell for fear of its impact on the economy. The prosecutorial threats against Mr. Walz, Mr. Ellison, Mr. Frey and the members of Congress who warned service members against obeying illegal orders can be seen only as ploys to use government power to chill dissent.

It may, however, be the Greenland madness that finally forces a reckoning with what happens when Congress — yes, that means its Republican majority — sits by and allows a chief executive to run roughshod over any legal limits to his desires, any sense of stewardship toward institutions built over decades to keep the nation secure, and any responsibility to other nations that long stood with us in defense of democracy itself. Mr. Trump’s practice of radical constitutionalism is radically dangerous. He eventually backed down, but not before causing enormous damage. The observation by Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, about the world order in his remarkable address at Davos last week is also true of our constitutional order: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

Recognizing that the nature of our regime is the central question in our politics will not make other issues go away. But failing to confront what’s at stake would be a generational failure. The danger now is not alarmism but complacency.

🐣 RT @SkinnerPm So-called federal agents standing in the street enforcing local ordinances about pedestrian in the roadway etc is a clue they want this violence. They are creating it. They are killing people to feed their angry supporters & outrage everyone else. That’s it. That’s their point

🐣 To Brad Finstad, Amy Klobuchar, Tina Smith
Two executions in two weeks! No one is safe. I am outraged and horrified.
Noem must resign.
ICE is a threat to peace and safety. It must restructured or dismantled. Defund unless:
– thorough background checks for all officers.
– two years training (at least); overhaul of training to match best policing; no immunity; no masks
– only undocumented immigrants with felony records should be arrested
– no warrantless searches
– a court must rule in order to detain; no ambushes at court hearings
– court orders must be obeyed
– no sending to prisons outside the US
– do not deport or extradite children without court hearing; do not separate from family

🐣 RT @SkinnerPm Left hand on the ground trying not to hit the pavement; right hand still holding a cell phone. ICE person standing with a one handed grip pointing his gun right at the man’s head. ¤ There is nothing about this that we should accept. We all must reject this. This is our government
🖼 https://x.com/SkinnerPm/status/2015445748796588410?s=20/photo/1
// photo of execution of VA RN; Patrick Skinner is a detective, currently in law school

⭕ 24 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @SkinnerPm Left hand on the ground trying not to hit the pavement; right hand still holding a cell phone. ICE person standing with a one handed grip pointing his gun right at the man’s head. ¤ There is nothing about this that we should accept. We all must reject this. This is our government
🖼 https://x.com/SkinnerPm/status/2015445748796588410?s=20/photo/1
// photo of execution of VA RN; Patrick Skinner is a detective, currently in law school

NYT, M Gessen: State Terror Has Arrived https://tinyurl.com/39ccummy ‘Trump is using all the instruments: the quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence; the postmortem vilification of the victims.’
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2015438877410857436?s=20/photo/1

Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous US citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a US citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another US citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.

📊 TheAtlantic: The Four Types of Trump Supporter https://tinyurl.com/supw5xy9 “The president’s political power depends on his ability to play different roles for different parts of his coalition.”

🐣 RT @marceelias In a letter to Gov. Tim Walz (D) Saturday, Bondi claimed that Walz could “restore the rule of law” by complying with a list of demands, including giving the Department of Justice (DOJ) the state’s voter registration records.

🐣 RT @GavinNewsom

• No new funding.
• Kristi Noem must RESIGN.
• Greg Bovino must be FIRED.
• Suspend the LAWLESS mass deportation raids nationwide NOW — ICE is no longer just deporting dangerous criminals.
• Send the border patrol back to the border.
• End the militarization of ICE + the sick racial profiling.
• End the perverse cash incentives that are bounties to perpetrate Trump’s cruel agenda.
• Require thorough, real background checks for everyone, and 2+ years of training before even • setting foot in the field.
• INVESTIGATE and PROSECUTE every single federal agent who is breaking the law.

‼️ NYT: Man Killed by Federal Agents Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun https://tinyurl.com/4py9ad9a “Videos analyzed by the NYT appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting. The man, an ICU nurse, was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said.”

🐣 RT @AVindman Today, we have all seen the horrific killing of Alex Pretti, a VA nurse, by a group of heavily armed and masked men, resembling a paramilitary force.

I served in the army for 21 years. Watching that video, I saw untrained, reckless agents acting aggressively and with a posture for escalation towards a civilian community exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and protest.

ICE killings are becoming regular occurrence because Trump declared that ICE can use force with total impunity. Our leaders cannot permit Trump to have a police force loyal only to him.

These killings must stop. ICE must be reigned-in and held accountable for this senseless violence.

🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Videos analyzed by @nytimes appear to contradict DHS accounts that the man approached agents with a handgun and the intent to “massacre” them. Footage shows the man holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when agents take him to the ground.

🐣 RT @ gtconway3d The deadly shooting in Minneapolis today was a straight-up execution of a protester by Trump’s federal brownshirts.

The thugs wrestled him to the ground. They pistol-whipped him, then shot him multiple times. They murdered him.

The videos don’t lie. A man is dead, killed in cold blood. There is no conceivable justification for this intentional homicide. And make no mistake, that intentional, unjustified homicide was committed on behalf of Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s militarization of Minneapolis and other parts of our nation isn’t about illegal immigration. It’s not about enhancing public safety. It’s about destroying any sense of that safety—to intimidate political opponents, and to punish dissent. It’s about a corrupt, out-of-control regime’s effort to provoke citizens in order to justify the violence it desires to commit against them so that it can expand and retain its power.

That is fascism. It is tyranny. It is governmental criminality.

And the ultimate legal check the Framers of our Constitution provided to stop this kind of tyranny and criminality in the executive branch is impeachment and removal of the executive.

Congress needs to do its job. ¤ Now. ¤ Before it’s too late.

NYT Editorial: The World Will Remember Trump’s Greenland Outburst https://tinyurl.com/4a86ffsv ‘The only time NATO has activated its guarantee of collective defense was after the 9/11. The US ally that suffered the most casualties per capita in Afghanistan was Denmark’

[…] Mr. Trump has always been an undisciplined and unprincipled politician, but the shambolic and sometimes illegal nature of his foreign policy moves of the past few weeks has been unusually harmful.

After months of blowing up boats in the Caribbean, without giving the victims any chance to defend themselves, he ordered a military operation to capture Venezuela’s dictator — and has since allowed the dictator’s corrupt deputies to continue ruling the country. Mr. Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up against their brutal government, saying “help is on the way,” and abandoned the protesters to a crackdown that reportedly killed thousands of them and imprisoned thousands more. And his confrontation with NATO crossed a new line: threatening the territory of a longtime ally. The notion that the United States might invade Greenland would sound like satire under any other modern-day president.

Yet it fits with Mr. Trump’s escalating attacks against NATO. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he called the alliance obsolete. In his first term, he reportedly considered withdrawing from it. During the 2024 campaign, he said he would encourage Russian leaders to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies if the allies did not increase their military spending. The threat was chilling to Russia’s Baltic neighbors, like Latvia and Estonia, given President Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of civilians in Ukraine. …

The most recent falsehood that he has told about other NATO countries is that they cannot be relied on in a crisis. He made that claim again on Jan. 21 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In fact, the only time NATO has activated its guarantee of collective defense was after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. The U.S. ally that suffered the most casualties per capita in the ensuing war in Afghanistan was Denmark.

Mr. Trump’s threats indicate to friend and foe just how little regard he has for NATO’s value. Mr. Trump claims that the United States should own Greenland — “That’s our territory,” he said in Davos — because it is in the Western Hemisphere. He says the United States needs to own the island if it is to establish an effective missile defense system for the United States. These claims fly in the face of NATO’s extraordinary record of collective self-defense over the last 75 years. …

NATO’s strength is not just its formidable military power. It is also a collective commitment to the shared values of democracy and open markets that underpin a system that has been enormously beneficial to the people of the United States since World War II. Those values have also been good for the world, contributing to stability that allowed poverty to plummet in recent decades and violent deaths to become far less common than during much of humanity’s war-torn history. …

Winning back the trust of these allies will be difficult. The best hope involves bipartisan expressions of revulsion at Mr. Trump’s actions, coming primarily from Congress. Already, Republican criticism of his menacing of Greenland seems to have played a role in his backtracking. Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both decried the threats, with Mr. Tillis calling them “beyond stupid.” Ms. Murkowski joined the Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in introducing legislation to constrain Mr. Trump’s aggression toward NATO allies.

Members of Congress should follow through and pass that legislation as a show of America’s commitment to the alliance. They should also freeze approval of Mr. Trump’s national security nominees until he agrees to halt his attacks on NATO.

Mr. Trump has a habit of declaring national emergencies on dubious pretenses to justify his policies. His reckless assault on a pillar of our national security and abandonment of longtime allies are the true national emergencies. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow are no doubt thrilled. America is less safe than it was a week ago.

⭕ 23 Jan 2026

🐣 It may have had something to do with these charts ⬇️
This doesn’t even cover naval resources.
For instance, NATO (w/o the US) has 40-45 incebreakers.
The US has two.
The US is not ‘Arctic-ready.’
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2014913688755380301?s=20/photo/1 -2
↥ ↧
NYT: Trump’s Turnabout on Greenland Shows the Limits of His Coercive Powers https://tinyurl.com/mr2abzn5 “Nothing will be quite the same in the Atlantic alliance. The perception of how America envisions using its military and economic power has shifted, perhaps permanently.”
// by David Sanger, President Trump’s faith in his ability to wring concessions by taking maximalist positions was on full display this week. So were the costs, as he splintered NATO and then undercut his credibility by climbing down from his threats.

Even by President Trump’s own mercurial standards, his whipsawing over the past few weeks on Greenland — insisting on the largest land acquisition in American history and then dropping it without explanation, threatening allies and then reversing himself — was a remarkable and revealing exercise in a new era of American coercive diplomacy.

Mr. Trump began, as always, with a maximalist demand. This time, it was that a small European power, an ally that had shed blood for the United States in Afghanistan and beyond, turn over a vast and icy territory for the sake of U.S. national security. The president was clearly testing the boundaries of the Atlantic alliance, arguing that handing over the land was a small price for lesser powers to pay for continued American protection. …

“We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” the president complained about Denmark in a speech to the world’s elite in Davos, Switzerland, adding with a hint of menace: “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”

But this week Mr. Trump also discovered the limits of his coercive powers. After he threatened a wave of new tariffs, markets fell abruptly, which always seizes his attention. Allies objected, this time openly. And by the time the president returned to Washington on Thursday night, it was clear that he had left considerable damage to the Western alliance in his wake.

When the climb-down came, it was with only the vaguest explanation from the president. ¤ Mr. Trump said Wednesday night on social media that a “framework of a future deal” had been reached, one that did not resemble full American ownership. Instead, speaking on Air Force One on Thursday, he floated the idea of what sounded like a lease for expanded military bases in Greenland in which “the time limit is infinity” and “we can do anything we want,” including to support the Golden Dome, his ambitious missile defense plan.

When pressed about how the new arrangement would expand America’s right beyond an existing 1951 treaty — which gives the United States almost unlimited rights to base troops, missiles, aircraft and the U.S. Navy on Greenland — he described it as “a much more generous deal.” …

For now, though, Mr. Trump has retreated from his declaration to The New York Times two weeks ago that ownership is key because “that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” It is unclear what that means about other places where he has threatened action, from Mexico to Cuba to Iran.

But there was a longer-term price, harder to measure. ¤ Even as Mr. Trump backed off, he clearly did damage to a post-World War II system that Washington itself had designed. It is a system that, for all its many flaws, helped prevent direct superpower conflict for three-quarters of a century. Along the way it brought huge advantages to the United States, extending its reach and amplifying its power.
v
After Greenland, nothing will be quite the same in the Atlantic alliance. The perception of how America envisions using its military and economic power has shifted, perhaps permanently. …
^
“The principle behind the threats is disturbing,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to the late Senator John McCain. “The prohibition against conquest is a key feature of the post-1945 world, and one that has helped keep the peace among great powers. Coveting Greenland and threatening to acquire it, possibly by force, upends that.” …

The estrangement is real. Allies began to talk about their survival strategies in a world where Washington could no longer be trusted. “We’ve now de-escalated,” Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland and a friend and golfing partner of Mr. Trump, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “But obviously, it’s not over yet.”

Some spoke obliquely about preserving the “rules-based system,” not wanting to directly challenge Mr. Trump. But one leader was astoundingly direct: Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, a former central banker who took on Mr. Trump with a bluntness that shocked many in the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos and generated sustained applause.

“Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry,” Mr. Carney told the crowd early in the week, before Mr. Trump reversed course. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

That last line draws from Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian and military strategist whose “History of the Peloponnesian War” has, for hundreds of years, served as the fundamental text on how to manage raw power.

“This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself,” Mr. Carney said. “And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety. ¤ “Well, it won’t,” he concluded. …

But it is a stretch to say that any of America’s biggest allies — including Britain, France and Germany — can truly afford to go their own way. They simply have no replacement for a system where the United States stands at the center of their defensive strategy, bolstered by the American nuclear arsenal. …

Perhaps Mr. Rutte’s agile diplomacy will hold. But after Greenland, European leaders have good reason to wonder where Mr. Trump’s demands will next fall. Last spring, he was claiming that Canada had to become America’s 51st state, and that if it did, it would get the protection of the Golden Dome for free.

He has not revived that demand. But he did take on Mr. Carney, whose critique clearly stung. And he did so with a not-very-veiled threat in his speech to the forum on Wednesday, one that sounded a lot like the way he was talking about Denmark until then. ¤ “Canada lives because of the United States,” Mr. Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 “Fascist” has been overused in the overheated partisan political environment. (As “socialist” or “communist” in the other direction.) But there’s no better word for armed masked agents demanding papers of citizens on the street and threatening them with lists.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Kasparov63 The US Constitution isn’t about what the government must do *for* you, but what it cannot do *to* you. This is one of the things that the Bill of Rights exists to prevent. But as with most any enumerated rights, if they are unused and unprotected, they wither.

🐣 RT @Nouriel The Deja-Vu FAFO-TALO-TACO cycle galore!
¤ https://x.com/Nouriel/status/2014697638008938801?s=20

This time around it took less than a week for the FAFO-TALO-TACO cycle to come to a full circle. A week ago the Greenlanders, Danish and Europeans pushed back against Trump’s increasing bellicose attempts to take over Greenland (they went into FAFO or F- Around & Find Out mode).

Then Trump snapped to the European FAFO with his usual TALO (Trump Always Lashes Out) and threatened to take over Greenland by force and to impose additional tariffs on the European countries supportive of Denmark/Greenland.

But on Tuesday – as US markets were closed on Monday – market discipline snapped with a vengeance: equities went sharply down, bond yields higher, dollar lower and gold spiking.

Then, it took only 24 hour for Trump to go from his TALO mode on Tuesday to his TACO mode on Wednesday with his conciliatory Davos speech and supporting the “framework” of Rutte’s NATO head. Then on Wednesday following the TACO u-turn the markets had the typical and expected TACO relief rally.

So it took only 24 for market discipline (Bond & Stock vigilantes) to turn Trump from TALO to TACO! As I pointed out on Tuesday the Bond/Market Vigilantes are the most powerful people on the world, even more powerful than POTUS.

Another lesson: if you are big enough or strong enough (China , Europe on Greenland) to stand up to a bully then your FAFO will lead to TALO but fast enough market discipline and vigilantes will force the bully to blink and move to TACO; thus, you win. But if you are weak and small (Venezuela) then your FAFO leads to big time TALO with no subsequent TACO 🌮!

No wonder that the savvy Canadian PM Carney is thinking of alliances of middle powers to have a more credible collective FAFO strategy that forces a TALO bully to switch into TACO mode rather than double down on TALO.

In the new world order based on the law of the jungle (where might makes you right) the only option for the small, weak or disunited powers (even the EU at times) is to form stronger coalitions to stand up to the big power bullies.

⭕ 22 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @EdKrassen BREAKING: This is some 1930s Germany rhetoric by Greg Bovino. ¤ He’s claiming that Alex Pretti was killed because he made the choice to listen to politicians and journalists who vilified ICE after they murdered Renee Good. ¤ Bovino warns the media that there’s consequences if they say bad things about ICE. ¤ This is what happened in Germany. Don’t let it happen again in America.

WSJ Editorial (Jan 22): Donald Trump, Not Unchained https://tinyurl.com/whbuewce “The ultimate check on power is an election, and on that score Mr. Trump’s bull-dozing governance may be building the opposition that costs his party its majority in November.” //➔ 🙏
// His reversal on Greenland shows the limits of his power.

💙 🖼 NYT, Jason Farago: Face to Face With History’s Most Dangerous Painter [Interactive] https://tinyurl.com/4twxraam
// Jacque-Louis David

🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump President Zelenskyy in Davos criticized European leaders: “Instead of taking the lead in defending freedom worldwide, especially when America’s focus shifts elsewhere, Europe looks lost trying to convince the U.S. president to change, but he will not change.”

🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman The more we learn about DOGE, the more clear it becomes that we were right along. @elonmusk illegally obtained our most private info and handed it off to election deniers to suppress the vote. ¤ DOGE was never about detecting waste, fraud and abuse. ¤ It was yet another political arm of the Republican Party that was stealing our data to deprive us of our rights. …
¤ https://x.com/RepDanGoldman/status/2014392626280370518?s=20

🐣 RT @evo1tactical I was asked yesterday what the “Kill Zone” is in Ukraine.
¤ https://x.com/evo1tactical/status/2014307664117813708?s=20

This is a simplified explanation, because there is far more to this than can fit in a single post. But I want to give people a clear, basic understanding.

When people talk about the “dead zone” or “kill zone” in Ukraine, they are talking about a strip of land along the front, usually 10 to 20 kilometers deep, where moving almost guarantees you will be seen and targeted. Not by a soldier in a trench, but by drones, artillery, aviation, and mines working together. The sky is never empty. FPV drones hunt movement in real time. Artillery follows within minutes.

This has shattered the old idea of trench warfare. There is no clean front line anymore. Instead, there is a constant gray area of destroyed ground where soldiers are watched, tracked, and hunted by technology. Moving supplies, evacuating wounded, or rotating troops through this zone is often impossible without taking losses. […]

Ukraine is fighting the war everyone else will face next. Learn from it. Adapt now. Support Ukraine.

Slava Ukraini. Heroyam Slava. 🇺🇦

🐣 RT @jayvanbavel AI now allows propaganda campaigns to reach unprecedented scale and precision. ¤ Our new paper in @sciencemagazine Magazine explains how a disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents. We describe the potential risks and some interventions for this growing threat to organizations, institutions, and nationThis paper was led by @daniel_thilo & @JonasKunst22246 https://tinyurl.com/mwmm7dda
‼️ arXiv, Daniel Thilo Schroeder et al: How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06299v4 “The fusion of agentic AI and LLMs marks a new frontier in information warfare.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/jayvanbavel/status/2014453111608209908?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @@RepMcGovern I just put Republicans on the record in the Rules Committee—forcing votes on amendments in an attempt to:
¤ https://x.com/RepMcGovern/status/2014417621865967778?s=20

❌Prohibit the U.S. government from invading a NATO ally. Every Republican voted no.
❌Prohibit the president from preemptively attacking another country without congressional authorization. Every Republican voted no.
❌Restrain Trump’s paramilitary secret police force & protect Americans’ civil rights from ICE. Every Republican voted no.

Shameful & pathetic.

🐣 RT @Markfry809 Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and demonstrates he’s got more bravery in his pinky finger than the entire Republican Party.

🔄 💙 🔊 TheAtlantic Podcast: Autocracy in America https://tinyurl.com/6ahexhwc

🔄 💙 ⚖️ 💽 C-SPAN: Former Special Counsel Jack Smith Testifies on Trump Investigations, Part 1 https://tinyurl.com/4bmzxbnp
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2014605443868356645?s=20/photo/1

“Former special counsel Jack Smith testified publicly for the first time on his investigations into President Trump before the House Judiciary Committee. In this first portion, Smith testified in his opening statement: “I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties.” He went on to say that Trump was charged “because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law” and that his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity.” Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to oversee preexisting Justice Department investigations into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack and alleged mishandling of classified documents. After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith dismissed both cases “without prejudice,” meaning charges could be refiled after Trump leaves office. In August 2025, the Trump administration announced an investigation into Smith, alleging his investigations were politically motivated.”

🔄 💙 ⚖️ 💽 C-SPAN: Former Special Counsel Jack Smith Testifies on Trump Investigations, Part 2 https://tinyurl.com/57kxyufe
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2014605577234546778?s=20 /photo/1

“Former special counsel Jack Smith testified publicly for the first time on his investigations into President Trump before the House Judiciary Committee. In this second portion, Smith defended his investigations amid allegations from Republicans that he spied on their phone records and accusations that he was acting politically on behalf of Democrats. Smith also affirmed his findings that Trump knew the 2020 election wasn’t fraudulent but made claims anyway that it was in order to stay in power. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to oversee preexisting Justice Department investigations into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack and alleged mishandling of classified documents. After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith dismissed both cases “without prejudice,” meaning charges could be refiled after Trump leaves office. In August 2025, the Trump administration announced an investigation into Smith, alleging his investigations were politically motivated.”

NYT: Trump Says Canada Is No Longer Welcome on Peace Board https://tinyurl.com/c45hcuwr //➔ This is no ‘peace board’: It’s Trump’s “Buddy Board,” alternative world views NOT allowed. BEWARE ‼️👀

NYT: In Testimony, Jack Smith Defends Decision to Prosecute Trump https://tinyurl.com/2apvhz9r “The former special prosecutor argued a case he was never allowed to in court: that President Trump ‘engaged in criminal activity’ that undermined democracy.”

WaPo: After ‘good’ Trump meeting, Zelensky pushes Europe hard to do more https://tinyurl.com/8ue2wxxz “President Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff have said a deal to resolve nearly four years of war between Russia and Ukraine is close”

After nearly four years of full-scale war, Zelensky described how life in Ukraine felt like the movie “Groundhog Day” with ramped-up attacks coming amid a brutally cold winter. All the while Europe is still unequipped to defend itself against Russia, he said, which has not slowed its assault since 2022.

As a result, Zelensky said, “the backstop of Trump is needed” with no security guarantees functioning without the United States. He emphasized that Europe needed to be a united force: “Europe should not be a salad of small and middle powers.”

“Europe loves to discuss the future but avoids taking action today, action that defines what kind of future we will have,” Zelensky said in his speech in Davos, Switzerland, following the hour-long meeting with Trump. “If [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decides to take Lithuania or strike Poland, who will respond? … Tomorrow you may have to defend your way of life.”

NYT: Amy Klobuchar Files Papers for Run to Succeed Tim Walz as Minnesota Governor https://tinyurl.com/2nzpr5av The Minnesota senator, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, appears set to enter a race that has been transformed by President Trump’s immigration crackdown in the state and protests against it.

🐣 RT @implausibleblog Journalist, “Mark Carney said the middle powers need to adapt to a world without American leadership, in some sense, that’s an anti American point of view”
¤ 💽 https://x.com/implausibleblog/status/2014348472980213871?s=20/photo/1

Gavin Newsom: “When I was listening to the EU president Ursual von der Leyen speak, that used to be us”

“Am I surprised by what Carney did?”

“I had more leaders in the US privately – not publicly – send me the transcript of that speech”

“The clarity came from the Prime Minister of Canada”

“The fact that Carney went to China, came back with a deal, including for low cost high quality electric vehicles not made in Michigan, Detroit, but overseas?”

“It says everything you need to know about the recklessness of America’s foreign policy under Trump”

“It’s a remarkable thing to break down 80+ years of alliances”

“It takes decades to build trust, organisations”

“It takes weeks, hours, minutes, to destroy it”

“Destruction is not strength”

“The Trump administration is weakness masquerading as strength”

“That’s reflect in his tweets, in cancelling people, in sending masked men into American cities”

“I respect what Carney did, because his courage of conviction, he stood up, and I think we need to stand up in America”

“We can lose our republic as we know it”

“Our country will become unrecognisable”

🐣 RT @nexta_tv 🇺🇦🇪🇺Zelensky’s sharp speech in Davos: “If Ukraine stands with Europe, no one will wipe their feet on Europe” ¤ The Ukrainian president thanked allies for the support already provided but sharply criticised them for indecision. The hall gave a standing ovation. ¤ Here are the key points:
¤ 💽 https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2014366194476929028?s=20/photo/1

📌A year ago, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words: “Europe must know how to defend itself.” A year has passed. Nothing has changed.

📌The EU decided to freeze Russian assets indefinitely, and I am grateful for that. But when it came time to use them to defend against Russian aggression, the decision was blocked.

📌Why can Trump seize shadow fleet tankers, but Europe cannot? Russian oil is transported right along Europe’s shores. That oil finances Russia’s war.

📌Many say China helps Russia — but not only China. Russia receives components from companies in Europe, the United States, and Taiwan.

📌There was a lot of talk about the protests in Iran. But they were drowned in blood. The world did not help the Iranian people enough and stood aside. If a regime survives this, what signal does it send? Kill enough people — and you stay in power.

📌Belarus in 2020 is the clearest example. No one helped its people. And now Russian “Oreshnik” missiles are stationed in Belarus, with a range covering most European capitals.

📌Maduro is in a prison in New York. Putin is not.

📌Today, Europe relies only on faith that if danger comes, NATO will act. But no one has ever seen the alliance in action. If Putin decides to take Lithuania or strike Poland, who will respond?

📌Europe needs unified armed forces capable of truly defending Europe.

🐣 RT @KyivPost A trilateral meeting between Ukraine, the United States, and Russia is expected to take place tomorrow in the United Arab Emirates, Zelensky said.

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦 Commander of Third Army Corps:
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2014268260032643429?s=20

Ukraine gave away the third-largest nuclear arsenal for international guarantees. We gave up our missiles to Russia; they later flew on us again.

We must accept reality — the reality as it is. International law, unfortunately, does not function in this trench. The only thing this neo-empire truly listens to and understands is strength.

I do not really believe in deals in this context, because deals assume rational behavior — and that is not what we are dealing with. Please accept this. Once you do, you will no longer be surprised or disappointed when things happen.

And this applies first and foremost to Europe. No individual European army can simply withdraw. As things stand, we are holding the line. Right now, more than one million troops are positioned along the borders of the European Union. This is the reality we are facing.

In fact, I believe the Ukrainian Army is already part of European security — de facto.

Europe must recognize this reality. We must be united. A united Europe must stand together and be strong, because strength is the only language Putin’s new empire understands.

⭕ 21 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The panicky responses to this observation tell me that Trump’s cult saw what I saw: An unwell and deeply unstable man who has no idea what he’s doing and is coming home with nothing but the diminution of American power and influence in the world.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.

🐣 RT @AP BREAKING: Immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, a memo obtained by AP says.

🐣 RT @ @Kasparov63 Don’t worry, there will be something even more outrageous than invading Greenland any day now. That’s how it works. Constant outrages, smashing against the guardrails until they crack, too many cracks to patch. A pity that the congressional GOP doesn’t exist.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I will almost guarantee that there is no deal or framework for a deal; this is a walk-back. Congress should never have let it get this far, and the damage and humiliation can’t be undone, but this is a good outcome (so far).

🐣 RT @obeissiLetter BREAKING: Denmark’s Foreign Minister has rejected President Trump’s demand to negotiate the US takeover of Greenland.

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en US Special Envoy Keith Kellogg during a discussion programme ‘Ukraine: Futures Frontline’ organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, in cooperation with the Office of the President of Ukraine on the occasion of WEF2026 in Davos:
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/2014044147225604572?s=20

Russia is not winning this war. They’re not.

Putin’s definition of winning and my definition of winning are very different. He measures his advances in meters, not miles.

Right now, I think he does not want to become Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia. I think he’s trying to figure out a way to get out of this thing, because he knows he is not going to end up winning this war.

I understand it’s a harsh winter. I understand what’s happening in Kyiv. I understand the temperatures, but I really do believe that if Ukraine gets through this winter – January, February – and you get into March and April, the advantage accrues to Ukraine, not to Russia. And I don’t think they’re going to have much more success in what they’re doing out there.

Their frontline units have been mauled. They’ve lost over 20 general officers. So when you look at what he’s trying to do, he hasn’t been very, very successful.

I’m hoping for a good outcome, meaning that we’re heading towards maybe the final stages of peace talks and development.

I think the impediment to progress is not Ukraine. The impediment is Putin. He’s reached a point, psychologically, where he really can’t let go, because if he does, he admits it’s a failure. And what he has done is a failure. When you look at the amount of territory they’ve gained, it’s really minimal.

Then we’ll get to a point where reconstruction can start. Peace can take hold in Ukraine. And I’m hoping that by Independence Day this summer, there will be peace in the land.

⋙ 🐣 Kellogg is no longer part of the 🇺🇸 negotiating team.

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom This is the climbdown – for now. But maybe this will give it all time enough for him to move on to some other shiny
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/2014064872976224758?s=20/photo/1
// Trymp tweet

🐣 RT @MaryLTrump What we saw today in Davos was an old man decompensating on the world stage because nobody close to him who’s in a position to do something cares about him enough to bother.

🐣 RT @gtconway3d Today is the most humiliating day in the history of the United States of America. At least until tomorrow.

🐣 RT @benabarr [tr] The meltdown lasted 72 minutes. 72 minutes in front of the entire world.
¤ https://x.com/benabarr/status/2014048135945875869?s=20

– 72 minutes during which the American president confused Greenland with Iceland. Several times. While explaining why he wants to buy it.
– 72 minutes during which he threatened a NATO ally, Denmark, with these words: “You can say yes, and we’ll appreciate it. You can say no, and we’ll remember it.”
– 72 minutes during which he called Greenland a “piece of ice” on which the fate of the planet supposedly depends: “What I’m asking for is a piece of ice in exchange for world peace.”
– 72 minutes during which he never once mentioned the presence of the Greenlanders.
– 72 minutes during which he declared that he has “100% Scottish blood and 100% German blood.” Which would make 200%. But math and him, that makes 2.
– 72 minutes during which he claimed that the United States, after World War II, “gave Greenland back to Denmark.” Too bad it’s completely false. The United States never owned Greenland. Never. In 1916, they officially recognized Danish sovereignty. During the war, they only obtained temporary military bases. And in 1946, they tried to buy it by offering 100 million dollars. Denmark said no. There was no “return.”
– 72 minutes during which he claimed that “China has no wind turbines,” when China has been the world’s leading wind power producer for 15 years and is building 45% of all wind projects on the planet. But for Trump, “they have no windmill fields.” They sell them “to fools.”
– 72 minutes during which he stated that “all the big oil companies are coming with us to Venezuela.” Too bad that three days earlier, the CEO of ExxonMobil told him to his face that Venezuela is not “investable.” Trump, furious, even threatened to exclude Exxon. The others said nothing, but thought no less. Yet at Davos, he said they were “all coming.”
– 72 minutes during which he declared that there is “practically no inflation” in the United States. American inflation stands at 2.7%. Above the Fed’s target. Forecast to rise because of his own tariffs. But for him, “there is practically none.”
– 72 minutes during which he attacked the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, calling him “stupid.” Live. In front of the world’s top economic leaders.
– 72 minutes during which he recounted that he imposed tariffs on Switzerland out of spite, because “a woman” whose name he can’t remember “didn’t pet him the right way.”
– 72 minutes during which he said that “yesterday the market crashed because of Iceland.” Iceland. A country of 380,000 inhabitants. That was supposedly going to bring down Wall Street.
– 72 minutes during which he claimed the United States “paid 100% of NATO.” 100%. When the American share of the NATO budget is around 16%. But for him, 100%.
– 72 minutes during which he mispronounced Azerbaijan as “Aber-bajian.”
– 72 minutes of mood swings. Of easily verifiable lies. Of made-up numbers. Of threats to allies. Of insults to officials. Of geographical blunders. Of bragging contradicted by facts.

And the world, in silence, watched. For 72 long minutes.

And to think that in the past, for far less, political careers would end.

Today, we’re just waiting for the next meltdown.

Welcome to 2026. And it’s only January.

Rick Wilson: A Declaration of Independence From The Mad King https://tinyurl.com/mrxc47ym “It’s time.”

🐣 RT @EdwardGLuce Trump’s unique trait is to be terrifyingly dumb and mind-numbingly dull at the same time.

⭕ 20 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @dwallacewells 71 percent of Americans think the country is out of control.
📊 ◕ https://x.com/dwallacewells/status/2013775633759752457?s=20/photo/1
// Economist/YouGov Poll ¤ January 16 – 19, 2026 – 1722 U.S. Adult Citizens

WaPo: Pentagon moves to cut US participation in some NATO groups https://tinyurl.com/4nutamfv “The planned reductions the alliance’s force structure and some advisory groups mark the Trump administration’s latest move to scale back military investment in Europe’s defense”
// “Some current and former officials said the U.S. pullout could have an outsize impact on the alliance by reducing valuable American military expertise”

WaPo: Trump administration admits DOGE accessed personal Social Security data https://tinyurl.com/3t5ekzs3 “A DOGE employee signed an agreement to share Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states, according to a new court filing”

WSJ, Yaroslav Trofimov: Trump’s Threats to Allies Stir Worry That US Has Lost Its Way https://tinyurl.com/8n9d47ec DAVOS, Switzerland—“President Trump is showing up for an annual gathering of the global elite … swinging a wrecking ball at the international order“
// New tariffs, insults and threats of invasion trigger a backlash ahead of the president’s visit to Davos

… Trump insists he will take possession of Greenland from North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Denmark—by force if he has to. Ahead of his trip, he posted an image portraying him lecturing European leaders in front of a map in which Greenland, Canada and Venezuela are emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.

On Thursday, he plans to unveil what he is calling a Board of Peace that aims to supplant the United Nations—and be led by him, in perpetuity.

The reactions from many U.S. allies and partners, some of them aired in public, many of them still only expressed in private, are stark: Trump’s America seems to have lost its mind. The unfolding break is profound, and, to many outside the U.S., Washington’s behavior defies any rational explanation. 

The tone in Europe has hardened in recent days, after Trump announced punitive tariffs against European nations that sent troops for exercises in Greenland. Even far-right and nationalist parties courted by the Trump administration as an alternative to centrist politicians on the continent have voiced outrage and called for retaliation.

Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden who now co-chairs the European Council on Foreign Relations, Tuesday described Trump’s social-media post with the map as “a Nero warning”—a reference to the infamous Roman emperor blamed at the time for burning down the city.

Trump’s message to the Norwegian prime minister that “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” because he had not been given the Nobel Peace Prize shows a serious problem with the U.S. president’s judgment, said Bernard Guetta, a French member of the European Parliament. …

“Our response will be unflinching, united and proportional,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Davos, warning about a “dangerous downward spiral” in the trans-Atlantic relationship.

French President Emmanuel Macron and several other European leaders turned down Trump’s invitation to join the Board of Peace, a world body that according to the draft charter would be presided over by him for life, and that would in essence replace the current U.N. According to the charter, decisions by member-states would be binding only if Trump approved them, and he would have sole authority on picking a successor.

Nations that have accepted the invitation include Belarus and Middle Eastern monarchies. Trump, who plans to establish the board in Davos on Thursday, reacted to Macron’s refusal by saying he will impose a 200% tariff on French wines and Champagnes. …

Based on conversations in Davos, however, the desire to accommodate Trump appears to be on the wane, especially as European security officials grow convinced that he may actually use force to conquer Greenland, a semiautonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark. …

It isn’t just Europe’s centrist and liberal leaders that make such warnings these days. Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, told the European Parliament on Tuesday: “Facing Trump’s blackmail, we either react with all the necessary firmness, or we disappear behind the logic of empire.” …

France’s Macron took only part of this advice to heart. “We need to be extremely calm,” he said as he left Davos before Trump’s arrival, adding: “We must defend our interests when they are not respected, and we must be by the side of our Danish friends when they are being pushed around.”

WSJ Editorial: NATO Is the Board of Peace https://tinyurl.com/yu96kkw9 “Trump’s new coalition couldn’t do better than the Atlantic alliance.” ~ “Maybe Mr. Trump should try to preserve NATO rather than blowing it up over Greenland.”

WSJ: Greenland Clash Risks Undermining America’s Place in World Economic Order https://tinyurl.com/bdeskzmm “The U.S. has long been a beacon of safety when uncertainty reigns. That is changing.”

Escalating tensions over Greenland are supercharging a dynamic that was already under way: a shift in the world economic order that had put the U.S. at the center of the global economy.

For investors the world over, America has long been a beacon of safety when uncertainty reigns, a nation whose deep and liquid financial markets are the premier destination for capital and home of a currency that is the lingua franca of international transactions. That is changing.

Trump’s combative economic and foreign policies are compelling countries to invest elsewhere, spend more on defense, make new trade alliances, and rethink the U.S. as the primary economic force around which to build their economies, security and futures. 

Tuesday’s market action provided a taste of what could come. 

Stocks fell around the world, but the U.S. experienced some of the sharpest declines, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average retreating 871 points, or 1.8%, the S&P 500 dropping 2.1% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq sliding 2.4%. Bonds sold off globally, sending the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury to just below 4.3%. The dollar extended recent declines.

The sharp declines in Treasurys and weakness in the dollar were especially notable: In times of trouble, investors have habitually flocked to the safe haven of the U.S. Tuesday, they were heading in the other direction. 

“The U.S. is plainly for a lot of international investors becoming a less friendly place to do business with, and that is likely to have an impact on investment decisions going forward,” said Shaun Osborne, chief currency strategist at Scotiabank.

The power of the American economy makes it tough to dent, nevermind topple. The “sell America” trade last year fizzled, and stock indexes reached new record highs just last week. Yet risks are real.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the circumstances now are different from last year. He points not just to the escalating Greenland tensions, but the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, the Justice Department’s probe of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the administration’s threat of new tariffs against countries in Europe despite its previous deals.

“I think there is a much better chance that we’re going to look back and say this was the turning point,” he said. 

Posen believes that the administration’s actions could knock away what has been a pillar of stability for the world. The U.S. helped grease the wheels of global commerce, expanding trade and providing security. In return, America got cheap financing, robust foreign investment and the primacy of the U.S. dollar.

The long-term repercussions could be grave. If investors around the world seek safe harbors elsewhere, the U.S. could face a future of diminished foreign investment, higher inflationary pressure and a reduced capacity to finance its debt. And that could in turn weigh on U.S. living standards. 

Moreover, if the U.S. no longer functions as the world’s economic center, the multipolar world that takes its place—where China, Russia and the U.S. control their own economic and security spheres—could be more dangerous and unequal. […]

🐣 RT @MikeSington Colby Hall, Mediaite: “One of the earliest and most underreported warning signs of certain forms of dementia is not memory loss. It is disinhibition — a deterioration of impulse control, judgment, and social restraint that often manifests as reckless behavior, inappropriate speech, and diminished concern for consequences. By the time forgetfulness becomes obvious, the disease process is often well underway. ¤ That framework matters because it closely tracks what President Donald Trump has been displaying with increasing frequency.”

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Who is running the country? When will Congress step in?
⋙ 🐣 RT @Daractenus He’s been rambling incoherently for 50 minutes straight. Right now he’s talking about mental institutions and how his mom once told him he could be a great baseball player. He’s completely gone.
💽 https://x.com/Daractenus/status/2013701979084664877?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RichardAngwin Trump’s detour into childhood baseball and psych ward windows during a policy briefing is pure incoherence from a 79-year-old who can’t stay on topic.

🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.

🐣 RT @TheDemCoalition “There comes a point here where we have to start questioning whether or not he’s actually aware of what’s happening around him and the harm he’s doing. It’s similar to historical figures like Nero or Caligula. Their madness took over and they started doing wildly destructive things. Trump is in that place.”
⋙ PublicNotice: Simon Rosenberg on Trump’s no good, very bad year https://tinyurl.com/mwpb8t99 “It’s grotesque. He’s become a grotesque figure.”

🐣 RT @@carlbildt t Here is the full text of 🇨🇦 PM Carney speech in Davos earlier today. It will probably be the best of speeches there this year. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/yytt26wc
⋙ 🐣 RT @wirehair01 Here’s a link to a video with the whole speech. Probably the most powerful I ever heard. He nails it
💽 https://x.com/wirehair01/status/2013733509756493847?s=20/photo/1

[…] In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.

We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong — if we choose to wield it together.

Which brings me back to Havel.

What would it mean for middle powers to “live in truth”?

It means naming reality. Stop invoking the “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised. Call the system what it is: a period of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.

It means acting consistently. Apply the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticise economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the old order to be restored, create institutions and agreements that function as described.

And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion. Building a strong domestic economy should always be every government’s priority. Diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy. Countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. We have capital, talent, and a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively.

And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse, and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability.

We are a stable, reliable partner—in a world that is anything but—a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

Canada has something else: a recognition of what is happening and a determination to act accordingly.

We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking the sign out of the window.

The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.

But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just.

This is the task of the middle powers, who have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from a world of genuine cooperation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.

That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently.

And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

🐣 RT @Birdyword Political speechmaking has generally degraded to the point that there’s no reason to read them, rather than simply how they’re reported, but Carney’s Davos speech is a rare exception. ¤ “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Birdyword/status/2013696891565785512?s=20/photo/1 -2

WSJ (Dec 6): The Unexpected Ways Vaccines Could Boost Your Health https://tinyurl.com/4jhbnjpw “As political leaders question vaccine safety, scientists point to studies that show the shots might have unrelated benefits”
// 12/6/2025

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇩🇰 Danish PM Frederiksen:
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2013590160886071598?s=20

On both sides of the Atlantic, a trade war will cost jobs. On both sides of the Atlantic, it will damage the economy.

And as much as we must therefore warn against it, just as much must we now also stand firm on what we are made of in Denmark, in Greenland and in Europe.

Because what we are in, it is about much more than ourselves. We can negotiate on everything political: security, investments and economy.

But we cannot negotiate on our most fundamental values: sovereignty, our countries’ identity and our borders, our democracy.

✅ WSJ: 6,000 Truth Social Posts Later, Here Are the Promises Trump Kept—and Broke [interactive] https://tinyurl.com/zbfve4fb “From adding cane sugar to Coke to ending production of the penny, some of the president’s notable pledges have happened, but not all”

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Our representatives from the Ukrainian delegation, who worked in the United States with the U.S. President’s team in recent days, delivered their reports, as did our diplomats who are currently in Davos. …
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2013570307320172575?s=20

[…] Ukraine is ready for meetings with all partners if those meetings help protect lives and ensure security – if those meetings are actually effective. Our team has prepared everything necessary so that we can sign, in particular with America, documents on security guarantees and the recovery of Ukraine. This should become a historic result, given that the largest war since World War II is taking place in Europe. It is globally important to end this war. We are doing everything for that. We are also ready for substantive work with our European partners. If the meetings in Davos can provide greater protection for real people and real cities and villages in Ukraine, Ukraine will be in Davos. If partners are not ready, all representatives of Ukraine must focus on concrete matters that help our state and our citizens. First – air defense missiles. Second – energy equipment for restoration. Third – support packages that will help the front and our communities. Every Ukrainian official, all of our representatives, must now demonstrate results – be with their state, with their people, and fulfill their tasks. Thank you to everyone who stands with Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine!

🐣 RT @atrupar CNBC: McConnell has said that if the president moves on Greenland, this would something that Republican senators would impeach him on. Are you in that camp? ¤ TILLIS: I’m not going to go to impeachment. Let’s say it was a kinetic action — I’d immediately go for a War Powers resolution.

🐣 RT @atrupar CNBC: McConnell has said that if the president moves on Greenland, this would something that Republican senators would impeach him on. Are you in that camp? ¤ TILLIS: I’m not going to go to impeachment. Let’s say it was a kinetic action — I’d immediately go for a War Powers resolution.
.
🐣 RT @EdwardGLuce “The US has squandered its most valuable financial asset: trust. It risks paying a heavy price for this for decades to come.” Important piece by my colleague @katie_martin_fx on the hit to the dollar and US borrowing costs of Trump’s derangement. [FT link:] https://tinyurl.com/57tszca5

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇪🇺 Ursula von der Leyen [Davos]:The seismic change we are going through today is an opportunity—in fact, a necessity—to build a new form of European independence.
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2013557948488785962?s=20

This agreement (EU-Mercosur) sends a powerful message to the world: That we are choosing fair trade over tariffs, partnership over isolation, sustainability over exploitation. And that we are serious about diversifying our supply chains.

We will not stop in Latin America. Last year we reached new agreements with Mexico, Indonesia, and Switzerland.

We are working on a new free trade agreement with Australia. We are also advancing with the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, the UAE, and more.

WaPo, Paul Winfree: Crypto is a speculative asset. It should be treated as such. https://tinyurl.com/2y284drm 🫧 “The federal government’s embrace of crypto as a favored asset class threatens to turn speculative enthusiasm into something far more destructive.” 🫧
// Treating crypto like real money could prove disastrous for the whole financial system.
// Paul Winfree is president and CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Center.

Financial bubbles require investors to suspend a clear-eyed assessment of what an asset is actually worth. That suspension is often helped by appeals to economic progress, patriotism or financial modernization. The crypto bubble that is now forming displays all three characteristics. What makes it particularly concerning is the Trump administration’s role in promoting it. The federal government’s embrace of crypto as a favored asset class threatens to turn speculative enthusiasm into something far more destructive.

Economists William Quinn and John D. Turner, experts on financial manias across centuries, argue in their 2020 book that bubbles require three ingredients: speculation, marketability, and cheap money and credit. Politics or new technology can provide the spark. When all of these align, asset prices detach from fundamentals and feedback loops take over. Crypto checks every box.

The speculation is obvious. Changes in cryptocurrency values are driven by little more than vibes. Crypto is highly marketable — easy to buy, easy to trade and increasingly easy to hold through platforms that provide the appearance of safety. And cheap money has been abundant for 15 years, with expectations of more at just the hint of economic slowdown.

What is new is the political accelerant. The Trump administration has embraced crypto as a strategic priority. This posture, combined with legislative efforts such as the Genius Act, signals that crypto carries a federal endorsement. That signal lowers perceived risks, encourages leverage and draws capital that would otherwise flow to other investments.

Politics has ignited bubbles before, but the scale of a crypto bubble could rival or surpass the U.S. housing bubble that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Crypto’s market capitalization is above $3 trillion. This is a large, volatile asset class being pushed toward the financial mainstream by government action.

Crypto, however, is not money. Treating it as such introduces two significant risks.

The first is institutional. Once an asset begins to resemble money, it does not remain purely private. Regulators begin viewing it as systematically important, and when a bubble bursts, pressure for intervention becomes overwhelming. The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority was intended for rare circumstances, but its recent use has expanded when policymakers concluded that allowing markets to absorb losses was politically unacceptable.

That risk grows when the federal government lends crypto its credibility. Talk of a strategic crypto reserve or preferential regulatory treatment creates expectations in the market. Expectations harden into assumptions. Assumptions become liabilities in a downturn. Markets behave rationally when they infer the government has a stake in an asset’s survival.

If crypto continues down this path, it is easy to imagine a future crisis with officials arguing that a collapse would threaten payments, markets or confidence broadly. At that point, the question will not be whether crypto deserves a bailout, but whether the Fed can credibly refuse one.

NYT: Trump doubles down on his Greenland threats https://tinyurl.com/3uu28n3a “‘There can be no going back,’ Mr. Trump wrote on social media about his designs on Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory, which have shaken the foundations of the NATO alliance.”

The flurry of social media messages addressed the leaders of several European allies a day before Mr. Trump was expected to join the meeting in Davos.

Mr. Trump shared messages from President Emmanuel Macron of France, which a senior French official confirmed were authentic.

“I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” Mr. Macron wrote in the messages. The French leader also invited Mr. Trump to dinner in Paris on Thursday and offered to set up a meeting there of leaders of the Group of 7 countries — with additional invitations to the Russians, Ukrainians, Danes and Syrians. ¤ It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump responded to Mr. Macron’s messages.

The tensions over Greenland threatened to dominate the meeting at Davos. Speaking there later Tuesday morning, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, suggested that the European Union would take steps to bolster its security in light of the crisis and would be looking at “how to strengthen our security partnerships with partners such as the U.K., Canada, Norway, Iceland and others.” She did not offer details.

Ms. von der Leyen also argued that Europe needed to change to adapt to a more hostile era, saying, “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order.”

In his social media storm, Mr. Trump also shared a message from Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, in which Mr. Rutte said he was “committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.” An official at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the exchange was authentic. Mr. Trump said that he had spoken with Mr. Rutte and reiterated his claims that American control of Greenland was essential for the security of the United States and of the world.

“We are the only POWER that can ensure PEACE throughout the World,” Mr. Trump wrote as he insisted on American military might. “And it is done, quite simply, through STRENGTH!”

Mr. Trump also lashed out at British plans to relinquish control of one of the Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, calling it an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY” and saying it was “another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”

The messages from Mr. Trump follow weeks of renewed tensions over Greenland. He recently threatened to impose steep tariffs on European allies and linked his push for Greenland to not winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Greenland, a majority Indigenous territory, has said that it is not for sale. Its leader said last week that Greenlanders would rather stay part of the Danish kingdom, its former colonizer, than join the Americans.

Mr. Trump has not stopped. On Tuesday, he posted a computer-generated image of himself planting a flag on Greenland. The image features a wooden placard that reads: “GREENLAND, US TERRITORY, EST. 2026.”

⭕ 19 Jan 2026

TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal https://tinyurl.com/25n59ftr “Attacking an ally would be a perversion of everything the armed forces have been trained to do.”

🐣 RT @Microinteracti1 Politico: Europe Weighs New Security Alliance Without the United States, With Ukraine in a Central Role [link:]
¤ https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2013257566587871257?s=20
⋙ Politico: Trump’s Greenland threats push Europe toward divorcing America https://tinyurl.com/2xk9v5ks “With NATO thrown into question, some officials see the “coalition of the willing” as the basis for a new alliance without the U.S.”

European officials are discussing the creation of a new security framework that would operate without the United States while still including Ukraine, according to Politico.

The talks are being framed as a response to a sharp deterioration in trust and day to day cooperation with the Trump administration, as European capitals reassess how dependent they can afford to be on Washington for deterrence and crisis management.

The reporting lands amid a broader transatlantic rupture driven by President Trump’s Greenland pressure campaign, including tariff threats against several European countries that have rejected any US move to take control of the territory. European leaders have publicly described the threats as coercive and warned they risk a downward spiral in relations, while the EU has discussed retaliatory measures and emergency diplomacy.

Politico’s account suggests one possible building block is the existing “coalition of the willing” supporting Ukraine, which has already coordinated military assistance among European partners. In that logic, Ukraine is not treated as a side issue but as a core contributor because it has one of Europe’s largest combat experienced forces and an urgent strategic incentive to shape any new architecture that emerges.

💙 NYT: How Trump Is Testing the Limits of the Presidency [interactive] https://tinyurl.com/y7hmm277

🐣 RT @clashreport German Chancellor Merz on Greenland: The United States of America once had more than 30,000 soldiers stationed in Greenland. Today, there are fewer than 200. ¤ So obviously the threat assessment of the United States itself is not as dramatic as it is currently being presented — even though the security situation could become more difficult again.

🐣 RT @stengel I know there’s worse stuff about the letter to the Danish Prime Minister, but what man, what human being, would ever say, Because you’ve denied me the prize, I’m going to punish you and everybody else that supports you? Anyone with even a teaspoon of self-respect would try to mask what they are doing behind some logical or reasonable rationale. But he not only says the quiet part out loud, he admits to being profoundly and hysterically insecure as though this is something to be, well, proud of.

🐣 RT @patrickwintour France is the first country to say no to Chairman Trump’s plan to run the world through his Board of Peace. He is planning a signing ceremony on Thursday. [Charter: https://tinyurl.com/737s2kkm ]
¤ https://x.com/patrickwintour/status/2013301490933260646?s=20

France says it does not intend to respond favourably to the invitation to join the Board because the plan “goes beyond the context of Gaza alone”.

Adds “It raises major questions, particularly regarding respect for the principles and structure of the UN, which cannot under any circumstances be called into question.”

Trump is using the Gaza conflict – that remains unsettled – to set up a rival to the UN with its own charter, peace making role and funding. The text shows only Chairman Trump will determine membership – unlucky China – and the chairman will determine how votes are held. “The Chairman is the final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application of this Charter”. The chairman can of course dissolve the body.

Read this full text of the new body’s constitution. Trump has perverted an earnest, if flawed, attempt to bring peace to Palestine into an absurd vanity project worthy of the Great Dictator. If this train wreck remains the final product, Blair needs to extricate himself.

🐣 RT @MaryLTrump When I saw this letter, I literally thought, “This is too stupid even for him.” I should have known better.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MaryLTrump/status/2013308061146906840?s=20/photo/1
// Trump’s “Nobel Prize Letter”

WaPo: Top Catholic cardinals say U.S. foreign policy raises moral questions https://tinyurl.com/4xvmmjr2 “Three senior archbishops said recent events raise ‘basic questions about the use of military force’ and have put America’s moral role ‘under examination.’”

TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw https://tinyurl.com/t4mmxjyj “Republicans in Congress owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to US interests”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2013361179322724846?s=20/photo/1
// Will Republicans in Congress ever step in?; ⬇️ Begins with Trump’s letter to Norway’s PM

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.
v
For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear victorious matters much more than Americans’ prosperity and well-being.
^
The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.

WSJ: Trump Links Greenland Threats to Missing Out on Nobel Prize https://tinyurl.com/yye2y325 “If Trump strongarms Denmark into handing over the island, it would likely shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, analysts say.”
//. European capitals are scrambling to de-escalate tensions over the island; Denmark sends more troops

NYT: Trump Is Pushing the U.S.-Europe Alliance Onto a Precipice https://tinyurl.com/yc4meued “Threats about acquiring Greenland “the easy way” or “the hard way” have further eroded the trust that was central to their alliance with the United States for decades.”
// As President Trump tries to coerce European leaders over Greenland, they are pondering the unthinkable: Is an 80-year-old alliance doomed?

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Chancellor Merz:
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/2013255211100332143?s=20

Currently, security in Europe is more of a concern in the East than in the West. We see the war in Ukraine. This poses a serious threat to our overall security, especially the security of all of Eastern Europe.

Western Europe, and that includes Greenland, is not currently threatened by Russia to the extent that some are suggesting. Therefore, in my discussions over the next few days, I would like to refocus somewhat on Ukraine, because we still see no willingness from Putin to come to the negotiating table and end this war. And that is indeed my greatest concern for the security of Europe at the moment.

Not Greenland, but Ukraine

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Trump‘s new gigantic temper tantrum over Norway is deep into 25th Amendment territory. ¤ Hell, at this point? 25th Admt territory is far in the rearview mirror and we are descending further into madness by the moment.

🐣 RT @thedailybeast OPINION | Even by Trump’s standards, his latest letter is so dangerous and so delusional that there is no longer any question that the president is mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as laid out in the 25th Amendment.[link:] https://tinyurl.com/2zdr84z4

🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski [link:] [in Norwegian] https://tinyurl.com/426wmwwd
¤ https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2013246951697895821?s=20

Confirmed by prime minister in Norway, here is his answer to the letter:

«I can confirm that this is a message I received yesterday afternoon from President Trump. It came as a reply to a short message I sent to President Trump earlier the same day, on behalf of myself and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb. In our message to Trump, we conveyed our opposition to his increased tariffs against Norway, Finland, and other selected countries. We emphasized the need to de-escalate the rhetoric and requested a phone call between Trump, Stubb, and myself later that day. Trump’s reply came only a short time after we sent the message. It was Trump’s choice to share the message with other leaders in NATO countries.

Norway’s position on Greenland remains unchanged. Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and Norway fully supports the Kingdom of Denmark in this matter. We also support NATO strengthening its work, in a responsible manner, to promote security and stability in the Arctic. As for the Nobel Peace Prize, I have on several occasions clearly explained to Trump what is well known: it is an independent Nobel Committee-not the Norwegian government—- that awards the prize.”

🐣 RT @EdKrassen Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney just confirmed that if the US was to invade Greenland, Canada would view it as an attack on Canada, would be obligated to assist in Greenland’s defense, and could use military force against the United States. ¤ “The future of Greenland is a decision for Greenland and for the kingdom of Denmark. We are NATO partners with Denmark and so our full partnership stands. Our obligations on Article 5, an Article 2 of NATO stand and we stand fully squared behind those.”

🐣 RT @Daractenus German and French Finance Ministers joint statement: “Blackmail between allies of 250 years, blackmail between friends, is obviously unacceptable. Germany and France agree: we will not allow ‌ourselves to be blackmailed. Europe must make it clear: the limit has been reached!”

WaPo: Trump promised Iranians the U.S. would rescue them. Some feel betrayed. https://tinyurl.com/ystvp2da “In the midst of the mass uprising in Iran, President Trump vowed the US would intervene if the Iranian government killed protesters. Thousands are dead.” //➔ He lies.

⭕ 18 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Donald’s DOJ was required by law to release the entirety of the Epstein files to Congress. In the 30 days since then, he:
¤ https://x.com/MaryLTrump/status/2012961854708908049?s=20

added his name to the Kennedy Center.
ordered a deadly strike on Nigeria as “a Christmas present.”
sent U.S. troops into Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, killing almost 100 people in the process.
suspended funding for childcare assistance programs in five blue states.
changed the White House website on January 6 to praise his pardoning of the insurrectionists.
withdrew the U.S. from 66 international organizations.
flipped off an autoworker who called him a “pedophile protector” and said “fuck you” to him—twice.
claimed falsely that Renee Good, who was murdered by an ICE agent, “behaved horribly” and “was very disrespectful.”
threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest his own agencies have incited in Minnesota.
has repeatedly threatened to invade Greenland if it refuses to allow him to buy it.

You know what hasn’t happened? The DOJ hasn’t released over 99% of the Epstein files. Wonder why.

NYT: Secy General, Council of Europe: This Is Something I Thought I’d Never Have to Write https://tinyurl.com/ye286nnn “Mr. Trump has said that he is constrained only by his ‘own morality,’ … brushing aside the legal order established in the aftermath of World War II.”
// by Alain Berset

WSJ Editorial: The Greenland War of 2026 https://tinyurl.com/nhft8ufn “Trump’s lesson in how to turn US allies into China’s friends.” “Trump wants the US to own Greenland, its ice, minerals, strategic location and 56K residents. And he seems prepared to push around everyone else to get it”
// Trump’s lesson in how to turn U.S. allies into China’s friends.

For more than 75 years, the fondest dream of Russian strategy has been to divide Western Europe from the U.S. and break the NATO alliance. That is now a possibility as President Trump presses his campaign to capture Greenland no matter what the locals or its Denmark owner thinks.

Mr. Trump on Saturday threatened to impose a 10% tariff starting Feb. 1 on a handful of European countries that have opposed his attempt to obtain U.S. sovereignty over Greenland. The tariff would jump to 25% on June 1. Presumably this tariff would come on top of the rates Mr. Trump already negotiated in trade deals last year (10% for Britain, 15% for the European Union).

The targets are Denmark (which owns Greenland), Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the United Kingdom. All participated in a recent military exercise on the world’s largest island that was intended to reassure Washington that Europe wants to work with the U.S. to defend Greenland from Russia and China.

But Mr. Trump isn’t taking alliance cooperation for an answer. He wants the U.S. to own Greenland, its ice, minerals, strategic location and 56,000 residents. And he seems prepared to push around everyone else to get it.

There are good reasons for Washington to care about Greenland, including the island’s strategic position and untapped reserves of rare-earth minerals. Mr. Trump isn’t the first President to suggest buying it outright, but the U.S. already has a high degree of access to the island and Denmark is willing to negotiate more. Tariffs in the cause of bullying imperialism is the wrong way to make a deal, and they might stiffen opposition on the island and in Europe.

Mr. Trump is taking reckless risk with the NATO alliance that advances U.S. interests in the arctic. If he doesn’t believe us, he can look up Norway, Sweden and Finland in an atlas. The latter two joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization recently, and already are discovering that with Mr. Trump no good strategic deed goes unpunished.

The economics are nonsensical too. All of the countries on his tariff list except for the United Kingdom are members of the European Union with a common trade policy. This means any tariff he imposes on those countries will have to extend to the entire 27-member bloc. So much for the trade deals Mr. Trump negotiated to great fanfare last year with the EU and the U.K.

Members of the European Parliament, which still must approve the U.S.-EU agreement, are threatening to put that pact on ice. This bullying plays poorly with the European public, making it harder for politicians to give Mr. Trump what he wants on Greenland or anything else. The message to these countries is that no deal with Mr. Trump can be trusted because he’ll blow it up if he feels it serves his larger political purposes.

The Greenland Tariff War of 2026 imperils other U.S. priorities. The trade tax on Britain could upset an agreement Mr. Trump struck last year under which Britain will pay more for pharmaceuticals in exchange for Washington dropping tariffs on medication imports from the U.K. Speaking of which: Why Mr. Trump would want to head into midterm elections foisting higher prices on voters worried about affordability is a mystery.

No one should underestimate the shock his Greenland project is producing among allies. Along with his tariffs and his tilt toward Russia against Ukraine, he is alienating Western Europe in a way that will be hard to repair. It’s true that Europe may not be in a position to resist if Mr. Trump really wants to go to war over the island. But say good-bye to NATO.

The sad irony is that China and Russia may be the biggest winners, though Mr. Trump justifies his Greenland necessity in the name of deterring both. Canada’s Prime Minister bent the knee to Xi Jinping this past week, and Britain’s PM is heading there this month. The EU and South American countries have struck a big free-trade pact.

The West is in the process of a diplomatic and economic hedging operation against Mr. Trump’s might-makes-right diplomacy. Whether or not Mr. Trump believes it, the U.S. needs friends in the world. He seems to think that if he captures Greenland, history will remember him as another Thomas Jefferson (Louisiana purchase) or William Seward (Alaska). The cost of his afflatus to U.S. interests will be greater than he imagines.

🐣 RT @Osinttechnical In a letter to multiple European ambassadors today, President Trump says that because Norway failed to give him a Nobel Peace Prize, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace” ¤ The letter goes on to demand “complete and total control of Greenland.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @Osinttechnical Dear Ambassador: President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state]

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 The Founders did plan for it, and created the articles of impeachment. But Congressional Republicans would rather flush 250 years of the greatest country on Earth down the drain instead of showing even the smallest amount of courage before the mad king.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom No, we did not teach cases at the Naval War College where the president loses his last grip on reality and wants plans to start wars against our own allies. Amazingly, we did not think we had to design cases about a POTUS in a de facto alliance with the Kremlin to destroy NATO.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JanieChuckles:Do they teach this kind of dilemma at the War College? I would hope the senior commanders would understand by now that their oath is to the constitution, not the orange guy.

TheAtlantic, Robert Kagan: America vs. the World https://tinyurl.com/2v2h4xb9 “Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States from inter­national leader into international pariah, and the American people will suffer the consequences for years to come”
// President Trump wants to return to the 19th century’s international order. He will leave America less prosperous—and the whole world less secure.

WaPo: European nations weigh retaliation after Trump’s Greenland threats https://tinyurl.com/yz8vw8sj ”Trump’s newest warning to impose tariffs on nations opposing his bid to acquire Greenland threatens U.S. military and trade alliances built up over decades.”

“This is not about security,” Senator Chris Von Hollen said on ABC’s “This Week.” “This is about a land grab. Donald Trump wants to get his hands on the minerals and other resources of Greenland, just like the real reason he went into Venezuela.”

WaPo: Pentagon readies 1,500 soldiers to possibly deploy to Minnesota, officials say https://tinyurl.com/ysakbdbp “Soldiers with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division in Alaska have been placed at the ready following Trump’s Insurrection Act threat, according to defense officials.”

⭕ 17 Jan 2026

‼️ 🐣 RT @RomboutLuc Interesting message on French newschannel LCI: ¤ “Ukrainian intell services sent false strategic info to US intell services … and observed that the information had been relayed to RUS and was used by RUS forces.” ¤ => total replacement of US as Intell partner with FRA, GBR, DEU

🧵 RT @madrid_mike In the waning days of the reign of Roman Emperor Caligula, we see a ruler who began with public favor & ended in absolute isolation. ¤ His descent into decadence and self-worship wasn’t sudden — it was a slow erosion of norms that eventually ate the institutions around him. 1/5
📌 https://x.com/madrid_mike/status/2012576143111786894?s=20

🐣 RT @FeserEdward Pope St. John Paul II: “We need to clarify the essential difference between an unhealthy form of nationalism, which teaches contempt for other nations or cultures, and patriotism, which is a proper love of one’s country. True patriotism never seeks to advance the well-being of one’s own nation at the expense of others. For in the end this would harm one’s own nation as well: doing wrong damages both aggressor and victim. Nationalism, particularly in its most radical forms, is thus the antithesis of true patriotism” (Address to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations, 1995)

🐣 RT @BeschlossDC A Republic, if you can keep it” — Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, born today 1706

🐣 RT @RichardHaass The worst thing about what we did in Venezuela (besides selling out the democratic opposition) is that it persuaded this POTUS he can do no wrong-and now he is overreaching & causing great harm in Iran, in Greenland & Europe, & to America’s global reputation & standing.

🐣 RT @kenmartin73 [DNC chair] Trump’s targeting Minnesota because it’s a walking contradiction to his whole racist, ugly, exclusion-first politics: a place that’s spent decades proving decency, pluralism, and civic responsibility can actually work. So he’s bringing the raids to the Twin Cities to torch the example. A great read: [NYT link:] https://tinyurl.com/hrkp3efw

🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom As I wrote last spring: If the U.S. military is given direct orders to seize Greenland—pull down another nation’s flag, and then claim the ground for America—every senior commander has a moral obligation to refuse to accept or support such a command. [link:] https://tinyurl.com/36chxyn5

🐣 RT @MNNationalGuard Members of the Minnesota National Guard are on standby, ready to assist local law enforcement and public safety agencies. If our members are activated, they will be wearing reflective vests, as pictured here, to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.

🐣 RT @Keir_Starmer Our position on Greenland is very clear – it is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and its future is a matter for the Greenlanders and the Danes.

We have also made clear that Arctic Security matters for the whole of NATO and allies should all do more together to address the threat from Russia across different parts of the Arctic.

Applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong. We will of course be pursuing this directly with the US administration.

🐣 RT @EmmanuelMacron France is committed to the sovereignty and independence of nations, in Europe and elsewhere. This guides our choices. It underpins our commitment to the United Nations and to its Charter.

It is on this basis that we support, and will continue to support Ukraine and that we have built a coalition of the willing for a robust and lasting peace, to defend these principles and our security.

It is also on this basis that we decided to take part in the exercise organized by Denmark in Greenland. We fully assume this decision, because security in the Arctic and at the outer edges of our Europe is at stake.

No intimidation or threat will influence us—neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations.

Tariff threats are unacceptable and have no place in this context. Europeans will respond in a united and coordinated manner should they be confirmed. We will ensure that European sovereignty is upheld.

It is in this spirit that I will engage with our European partners.

🐣 RT @jaketapper Now he’s calling for “the Radical Left Insurrectionists who illegally ran the Biden Administration” to “be arrested for what they have done for our country.” ¤ For those who tempted to see this as bluster or venting kindly recall the DOJ is currently investigating Walz and Frey.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/jaketapper/status/2012637059110846631?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Everyone is asking about the Autopen? What was done is totally illegal, and anything signed that way is of “no further force or effect.” The person who “worked” the Autopen had no idea whether or not Biden approved of what he was doing. There was no ORDER in writing, and it was an absolutely illegal act perpetrated by the Radical Left Insurrectionists who illegally ran the Biden Administration. Every one of them should be arrested for what they have done to our Country. They didn’t win the Presidency but, when you think of it, neither did Joe Biden.The whole thing was RIGGED. There must be a price to pay, and it has got to be a BIG ONE!
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

🐣 RT @MnDPS_DPS At Gov. Walz’s direction, the Minnesota National Guard have been mobilized and are staging to support local law enforcement and emergency management agencies.

🐣 RT @SFRCdems Today from Copenhagen, @SenatorShaheen and @SenThomTillis, co-chairs of the Senate NATO Observer Group, issued the below statement: [link:] https://tinyurl.com/yvrkphm5
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SFRCdems/status/2012617085604471235?s=20/photo/1

Bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group Statement on Threat of Tariffs on Allies

“The United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway are America’s closest allies. They are our NATO Allies who have fought beside us, died alongside us and have made America safer and more prosperous.

“Over the course of our bi-partisan meetings with Danish and Greenlandic officials in Copenhagen, the message was resoundingly clear that Denmark and Greenland want to partner with the United States and advance our shared security goals, just as we have done for decades. There is no need, or desire, for a costly acquisition or hostile military takeover of Greenland when our Danish and Greenlandic allies are eager to work with us on Arctic security, critical minerals and other priorities under the framework of longstanding treaties. When we reconvene with our Senate colleagues, we will convey the perspectives shared by Danish and Greenlandic officials, as well as from the indigenous people who live the realities of Greenland every day.

“Continuing down this path is bad for America, bad for American businesses and bad for America’s allies. This kind of rhetoric also further helps adversaries like Putin and Xi who want to see NATO divided. Our allies deserve better, and so do the American people who have made their opposition to this flawed policy resoundingly clear. At a time when many Americans are already concerned about the cost of living, these tariffs would raise prices for both families and businesses. We urge the administration to turn off the threats and turn on diplomacy.”

🔄 🐣 ChatGPT says this might all boil down to Trump feeling Mette Frederickson ‘humiliating‘ him in 2019 when she called his idea ‘absurd.’ He left before a scheduled state dinner. Staff said he was furious. More:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2012618765582717209?s=20/photo/1

⭐️ The simplest way to say it
You asked:
| Could he be blowing up NATO because a woman laughed at him?

The emotionally accurate answer is:
Yes. That’s exactly how his grievance psychology works.

Not because she is a woman per se, but because:
• she publicly dismissed him,
• he interprets dismissal as humiliation,
• humiliation must be avenged,
• and he uses national power as the instrument of vengeance.

This is the same dynamic as:
• the Kyiv shake-down call
• the tariff wars
• the Merkel cold-shoulder
• the rage at May
• the war against “nasty women”
Just now playing out at NATO scale

🐣 RT @TheRickWilson He’s completely insane, you know.
🐣 RT @BillKristol A terrible day. The U.S. government vs. the free world.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JustinWolfers New tariff just dropped. ¤ Americans set to pay an additional 10% tax on all goods from Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. ¤ It starts in two weeks, rising to 25% by June. ¤ (Aside: A trade war with one EU member is a trade war with the whole EU).
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/2012577181134647436?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump We have subsidized Denmark, and all of the Countries of the European Union, and others, for many years by not charging them Tariffs, or any other forms of remuneration. Now, after Centuries, it is time for Denmark to give back – World Peace is at stake!

China and Russia want Greenland, and there is not a thing that Denmark can do about it. They currently have two dogsleds as protection, one added recently. Only the United States of America, under PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, can play in this game, and very successfully, at that!

Nobody will touch this sacred piece of Land, especially since the National Security of the United States, and the World at large, is at stake. On top of everything else, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland have journeyed to Greenland, for purposes unknown. This is a very dangerous situation for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Planet.

These Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable. Therefore, it is imperative that, in order to protect Global Peace and Security, strong measures be taken so that this potentially perilous situation end quickly, and without question.

Starting on February 1st, 2026, all of the above mentioned Countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland), will be charged a 10% Tariff on any and all goods sent to the United States of America. On June 1st, 2026, the Tariff will be increased to 25%. This Tariff will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.

The United States has been trying to do this transaction for over 150 years. Many Presidents have tried, and for good reason, but Denmark has always refused. Now, because of The Golden Dome, and Modern Day Weapons Systems, both Offensive and Defensive, the need to ACQUIRE is especially important.

Hundreds of Billions of Dollars are currently being spent on Security Programs having to do with “The Dome,” including for the possible protection of Canada, and this very brilliant, but highly complex system can only work at its maximum potential and efficiency, because of angles, metes, and bounds, if this Land is included in it.

The United States of America is immediately open to negotiation with Denmark and/or any of these Countries that have put so much at risk, despite all that we have done for them, including maximum protection, over so many decades. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

WaPo: In Denmark, U.S. lawmakers contradict Trump on need to own Greenland https://tinyurl.com/scuyvdwb “Leaders of the bipartisan delegation said most Americans don’t want to acquire Greenland, and that Russia and China don’t pose imminent security risks to the territory.”

NYT: Trump Announces 10 Percent Tariff on European Countries in Standoff Over Greenland https://tinyurl.com/3xkyrbv7 The president escalated his drive to take charge of the Danish territory, targeting eight countries with tariffs.
// Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland

President Trump announced in a social media post on Saturday morning his latest strategy to get control of Greenland: He is slapping new tariffs on a bloc of European nations until they come to the negotiating table to sell Greenland.

Greenland is a territory of Denmark, which will be hit with a 10 percent tariff on all goods sent to the United States beginning on Feb. 1, Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post. Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland, fellow NATO members that have expressed solidarity with Denmark in its refusal to yield to Mr. Trump’s demands, will also be subject to the 10 percent tariff. If those nations do not relent, he added, the rate will increase to 25 percent on June 1, “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The threat comes as the Supreme Court weighs overturning the legal authority that the president would likely use to impose these tariffs. The court is set to rule in the coming weeks on Mr. Trump’s use of an emergency law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the president has used to threaten tariffs at a whim against numerous countries over the past year. ¤ If the court rules against Mr. Trump, the president may not be able to impose tariffs like this. He would have to rely on other legal authorities that require him to carry out investigations, or meet other standards. …

[T]he 445-word post he put up was striking in its language about American allies. It reiterated the worldview Mr. Trump has espoused for decades, which holds that the United States has been getting ripped off and that payback has been a long time coming.

“We have subsidized Denmark, and all of the Countries of the European Union, and others, for many years by not charging them Tariffs, or any other forms of remuneration,” he wrote. “Now, after Centuries, it is time for Denmark to give back — World Peace is at stake!”

He wrote about “all that we have done for them, including maximum protection, over so many decades.”

⭕ 16 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance 1/ Fed’l judge tells the administration to stop violating the rights of people in Minnesota. ORDER:
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/bdk234as 83p

[…] For the reasons stated herein, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Plaintiff’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction is GRANTED IN PART.

1. This order applies to individual Plaintiffs and to all persons who do or will in the future record, observe, and/or protest Operation Metro Surge and related operations that have been ongoing in this District since December 4, 2025. …

3. Covered Federal Agents are hereby enjoined from:

a. Retaliating against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge.

b. Arresting or detaining persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge, in retaliation for their protected conduct and absent a showing of probable cause or reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime or is obstructing or interfering with the activities of Covered Federal Officers.

c. Using pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge, in retaliation for their protected conduct.

d. Stopping or detaining drivers and passengers in vehicles where there is no reasonable articulable suspicion that they are forcibly obstructing or interfering with Covered Federal Agents, or otherwise violating 18 U.S.C. § 111. The act of safely following Covered Federal Agents at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop.

WaPo: Justice Dept. launches criminal investigation of Minnesota governor https://tinyurl.com/3zpkzu4a “The Justice Department plans to issue subpoenas for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as part of an investigation into impeding law enforcement.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2012365479013241149?s=20/photo/1

“Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” Walz said in a statement Friday evening. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”

NYT: Judge Restricts DHS Agents’ Actions Toward Minnesota Protesters https://tinyurl.com/mr27797z “A federal judge ordered agents not to retaliate against people ‘engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity’ and not to stop drivers who are not ‘forcibly obstructing’ officers”

🐣 RT @cryptorover JUST IN: 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 Europe will break all economic ties with the US if it tries to seize Greenland – FT.

🐣 RT @dw_russian [tr] London opposes the resumption of dialogue with Putin.
¤ https://x.com/dw_russian/status/2012162563174265007?s=20

The Kremlin leader is not ready for negotiations on peace in Ukraine, so Kyiv’s allies should intensify economic and military pressure on Moscow, stated UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper (in the photo). In doing so, she rejected the proposal by French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to resume dialogue with the President of the Russian Federation. “We need evidence that Putin really wants peace, and at the moment I don’t see that,” Cooper stated in an interview with the American publication Politico.

In the view of the head of the British Foreign Office, the main diplomatic efforts to end the Russian war are currently being made by Kyiv and its closest allies, so instead of talks with Putin, the allies should intensify both economic pressure on Russia through sanctions and military support for Ukraine.

In December 2025, Reuters reported, citing sources, that according to US intelligence estimates, Putin still seeks to establish control over the entire territory of Ukraine, despite public statements about a desire to conclude peace. According to this data, the conclusions of American intelligence largely coincide with the assessments of European special services.

🐣 RT @RichRaho @BishopSeitz at downtown El Paso Courthouse: “I make an urgent plea today that the government and immigration enforcement pull back from the edge and respect the sanctity of every human life, the constitutional and civil rights guaranteed to all in this country, to cease actions that degrade the moral and public order, and take action to address the impunity and lack of accountability we are witnessing in the indiscriminate enforcement taking place every day. “

🐣 RT @NXT4EU Greenland falls under EU mutual defence clause, European Commission confirmed today. ¤ Article 42.7 is similar in scope as NATO article 5, and includes that countries have “an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power” if an EU country is attacked.

NYT, Michelle Goldman: The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women https://tinyurl.com/3j9v93ap “We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.“

NYT: Trump’s Fight With Minnesota Is About More Than Immigration https://tinyurl.com/rjwdwuje “The state embodies a civic ideal that the administration in Washington wants to discredit.”

⭕ 15 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @JohnJHarwood global laughingstock
⋙ 🐣 RT @speechboy71 “She’s been through much” … and I took her Nobel Peace Prize
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JohnJHarwood/status/2012002226202411181?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump It was my Great Honor to meet María Corina Machado, of Venezuela, today. She is a wonderful woman who has been through so much. María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you Maria!

WaPo: Trump cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution, judge says https://tinyurl.com/ywrjcjr3 “The cabinet secretaries and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge William Young declared.

🐣 RT @KobeissiLetter Shocking stat of the day: The top 10% of US earners now reflect a record 49% of all consumer spending.
◕ https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2011938163892080786?s=20/photo/1

This percentage has risen +13 points over the last 30 years, marking a dramatic shift in spending power.

At the same time, the bottom 80% of earners represent just ~37% of total consumer expenditures, down -11 percentage points since 1995.

This means the top 10% account for a record 33% of US GDP, as personal consumer expenditures account for 68% of total economic output. ¤ Meanwhile, the bottom 80% account for just 25% of the US economy. ¤ Asset owners are the only winners in this economy.

🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton Regime change should be the goal in Iran. If this moment is not seized, the regime will continue its nuclear weapons program, its support for international terrorism, and repressing the people of Iran.

🐣 For the record: Trump has not “solved” eight wars. ChatGPT:
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2011943144657395857?s=20/photo/1

Trump’s “Solved Wars” – Updated Reality Check (Jan 15, 2026)

• India-Pakistan: Brief May 2025 ceasefire after a border clash; tensions remain high, no settlement.
• DRC-Rwanda: June 2025 “Washington Agreement” only partly implemented; armed groups still active.
• Serbia-Kosovo: No resolution; periodic clashes and political standoffs continue.
• Thailand-Cambodia: Mediation produced statements, not peace; border
incidents still occur.
• Israel-Iran: June 2025 ceasefire held only days; situation remains volatile with repeated flare-ups.
• Egypt-Ethiopia: Nile dam dispute unresolved; negotiations stalled.
• Armenia-Azerbaijan: Claims of ceasefire progress, but border tensions and sporadic fighting persist.
• (New) Venezuela-Guyana: Early 2026 de-escalation after U.S. pressure, but no durable agreement; militarization continues.

Summary: Trump regularly announced “peace deals,” but in every case the underlying conflicts remain unresolved. Most were short ceasefires, partial agreements, or unilateral U.S. claims, not actual ends to wars.

🐣 RT @Mylovanov Zelenskyy: Ukraine has never blocked peace and never will. Russian missiles and Shaheds show Russia doesn’t want deals—it wants to destroy Ukraine. ¤ Russia leaves Ukrainians without power for 20–30 hours and targets our energy system. That’s why Russia must face pressure.

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇵🇱🇺🇸🇬🇱 Polish PM Tusk on Greenland: A conflict or an attempt to seize the territory of a state that is a NATO member by another NATO member — especially if it is the United States — would be the end of the world as we know. It’ll be a catastrophe.

🐣 RT @DarrigoMelanie The Insurrection Act was always the plan, and Minneapolis is the test case. ¤ They sent ICE in to terrorize and attack Black and brown communities to provoke a response that would justify deploying the military domestically in Blue cities.¤ This has never been about immigration.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DarrigoMelanie/status/2011803506152194314?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you attention to this matter! President DJT

🐣 RT @Daractenus Macron: “Ukraine was overwhelmingly dependent on American intelligence capabilities a year ago, today two thirds are provided by France. Two thirds.”

🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar MORE: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicated that Russia’s objectives in Ukraine go beyond the territory that is currently under discussion in the latest peace plans to include all of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Odesa oblasts.
¤ 🌎 https://x.com/markomihkelson/status/2011701646754267483?s=20/photo/1

Lavrov stated on January 14 that a future peace settlement will need to resolve the “issue of the fate of the people living in Crimea, Novorossiya, and Donbas.” Novorossiya is an invented region that Kremlin officials often claim is “integral” to Russia.

Novorossiya includes not only Crimea and the four oblasts that Russia has illegally annexed, but also Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Odesa oblasts. Kremlin officials have repeatedly labelled Odesa City a “Russian” city and publicly discussed “Novorossiya” as a part of the Russian Federation. […]

🐣 RT @nexta_tv If the regime falls, Iran will abandon its nuclear programme and restore relations with the US and Israel.
¤ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2011764529697362365?s=20

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi addressed Iranians and outlined a plan of action after the fall of the ayatollahs’ regime.

He said Iran’s nuclear programme would be halted and support for terrorist groups would be ended immediately.

The country would begin cooperation in combating terrorism, drug trafficking, organised crime, and radical Islamism.

Pahlavi promised the normalisation of relations with the United States and the restoration of friendly ties. ¤ Israel would be recognised immediately after the change of power.

He also announced plans to expand the Abraham Accords into a new format — the “Cyrus Accords”, which, he said, should bring peace between a free Iran, Israel, and the Arab world.

⭕ 14 Jan 2026

💙 TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe https://tinyurl.com/626mp8tk “Most Americans probably couldn’t care less about Greenland, but they will be forced to care—tragically, too late—if Trump’s gambit engulfs the world in flames.”
// His irrational fixation with Greenland could lead to global conflict.

🐣 RT @rospigge60559 The claim that Russia or China could invade Greenland reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of modern military operations—especially in the Arctic.
🌎 https://x.com/rospigge60559/status/2011562919184482474?s=20/photo/1
// AI generated map for illustration only

Greenland is not an exposed island. It is one of the most surveilled regions on Earth, embedded in Western early-warning, ISR, air-defense, and undersea monitoring networks. Every air and naval approach is observed long before any force could arrive.

Operationally, Greenland is an Arctic desert. Extreme cold, prolonged darkness, violent weather, and almost nonexistent infrastructure create a hostile battlespace with no concealment and no margin for error.

An invasion is not defined by landing troops—it is defined by sustaining them. Any force attempting to operate in Greenland would require:

• Continuous air superiority
• Secure sea control across thousands of kilometers
• Arctic-rated troops, vehicles, fuel, and munitions
• Functional ports, airfields, depots, and medical evacuation
• Uninterrupted logistics in one of the harshest environments on Earth

Neither Russia nor China possesses the lift capacity, sustainment infrastructure, or Arctic logistics to support such an operation. Not in practice. Not even on paper.

Without logistics, forces freeze, starve, and fail. In the Arctic, logistics are the battlefield.

Greenland is defended first by geography, second by logistics, and third by alliance integration. All three make the invasion narrative strategically unserious.

💙 NYT: Congress Is Spurning Many of Trump’s Proposed Cuts https://tinyurl.com/49judeh2 ‘Congress is quietly rejecting most of the deepest cuts to foreign aid, global health programs, scientific research, the arts and more’ //➔ ‘It ain’t over until the Appropriations Committee sings’
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2011760898151731662?s=20/photo/1

Congress is quietly rejecting almost all of the deepest cuts to federal programs that President Trump requested for this year, turning back his efforts to slash funding for foreign aid, global health programs, scientific research, the arts and more in a bipartisan repudiation of his spending plans.

The latest rejection of [Trump’s] budget blueprint came on Wednesday, after the House voted 341 to 79 to pass a pair of bills to fund the State and Treasury Departments, as well as other foreign aid programs, providing money for agencies that Mr. Trump had proposed eliminating entirely.

All told, while lawmakers have agreed to make modest trims to a number of programs that Mr. Trump has wanted to eviscerate — and to zero out some others — the spending bills that they are now moving through Congress reflect the political reality that any funding measure must be bipartisan in order to avoid a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and become law.

“These are bills that reject the devastating cuts Trump demanded in his deeply unserious budget he sent to Congress about a year ago,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “When just about every secretary came before our Appropriations Committee to advocate for those Trump funding cuts, I made clear to them I planned to rip up his budget and write a new one — and that is exactly what we are doing.”

It is a striking pivot just months after the partisan clash last fall that led to the longest government shutdown in history. …

[Negotiators] endorsed keeping scientific funding levels at the National Science Foundation and at NASA essentially flat, making only slight trims rather than the major cuts the White House had proposed.

In some ways, the spending bills confirm the worst fears of conservatives on Capitol Hill, who have worried that even with a Republican governing trifecta, they would be unable to enact the kind of major spending cuts they have long agitated for. …

Some Democrats also are unhappy with the emerging spending package, believing that their party should use the leverage it has in the appropriations process to try to rein in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That could still emerge as a sticking point to a final agreement; the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security is among the toughest to negotiate and has yet to be agreed upon.

But overall, the bipartisan consensus around the spending measures is strong. Republican leaders who helped negotiate them championed the trims in the spending bills, arguing that the overall reduction in funding compared with last year’s levels constituted a major win.

And they noted that the bills represented a return to the practice of writing and passing individual spending bills, rather than lumping all 12 together into a behemoth package, or enacting an emergency stopgap measure to keep funding flat. …

MNStarTrib Editorial: Minnesota is under siege. This cannot stand. https://tinyurl.com/3tczsjdr “ICE presence has disrupted all aspects of life in Minnesota, and led tragically to the death of Renee Good. It’s the outcome of government overreach that favors force over legitimacy.”

🐣 RT @atrupar Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz: “What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief. News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2011623318663713108?s=20/photo/1

They’re pulling over people indiscriminately, including US citizens, and demanding to see their papers. At grocery stores, at bus stops, even at our schools, they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans. Kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process. Let’s be very, very clear. This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government. This week, he went online to promise that ‘the day of retribution and reckoning is coming.’ That’s a direct threat against the people of this state who dared to vote against him three times and who continue to stand up for freedom with courage and empathy and profound grace.”

🐣 RT @cspan @SenMcConnell on Greenland: “Close ties with our northernmost allies are what make America’s extensive reach in the Arctic actually possible. And I have yet to hear from this administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us. Unless and until the president can demonstrate otherwise, then the proposition at hand today is very straightforward: incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”
💽 Full video here: https://c-span.org/congress/?chamber=senate&date=2026-01-14
¤ https://x.com/cspan/status/2011524297844834542?s=20

NYT: Denmark and Greenland left a meeting with Vance and Rubio with no agreement https://tinyurl.com/ycxm895w “[Trump] said last week that he was ‘going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.‘” //➔ Just his internal rapist/pedophile speaking

[Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister] and Vivian Motzfeldt, the Greenland foreign minister, met with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Afterward, Mr. Rasmussen called the discussion “frank” and “constructive” even as he underscored that Denmark has no interest in changing the status quo.

“Our perspectives continue to differ,” he said. “The president has made his view clear. And we have a different position.”

But, he said, there was also progress: The governments will form a working group, likely within weeks, to try to find a path forward that accommodates Mr. Trump’s security concerns, without violating the territorial integrity of the Danish kingdom or the Greenlanders’ right to self-determination. …

Mr. Trump has turned up the pressure on Greenland this year, apparently emboldened by the success of the U.S. military operation that led to the capture of Venezuela’s leader on Jan. 3. He said last week that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”

He repeated his claims hours before the closed-door meeting, saying that “anything less than” American control of Greenland would be “unacceptable,” in a post on Truth Social. “The United States needs Greenland,” he said, renewing his argument that it was necessary for national security. “NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES.”

Denmark and Greenland have stood united in the face of Mr. Trump’s repeated threats. …

Ms. Frederiksen has said that an American attack on Greenland — which, as a part of the kingdom of Denmark, is already under the protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — would destroy the alliance.

On Wednesday, Denmark announced that it would increase its “military presence in and around Greenland in the coming period.” Swedish soldiers also arrived in Greenland at Denmark’s request, Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, wrote on X. …

Mr. Rasmussen noted that Greenland, as part of the Danish kingdom, is already under NATO protection. And he pointed to a Cold War-era agreement, which already gives the American military wide access to Greenland.

“The long-term security of Greenland can be ensured inside the current framework,” he said.

But the three governments do not agree about what the threats even are.

President Trump has repeatedly said the United States needs to acquire the massive island to protect it from Russia and China.

Mr. Rasmussen said that there was no such imminent threat. “According to our intelligence, we haven’t had a Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade or so,” he said.

Independent researchers support that view.

Gabriella Gricius, a senior fellow at the Arctic Institute and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Konstanz in Germany, said the Trump administration’s claims that Russian and Chinese ships are circling the island are “just not true.”

“The Russian and Chinese ships are not, in fact, in the North Atlantic,” she said. “They’re in the Bering Strait — which is on the other side of the U.S.”

Mr. Trump and top officials in his administration have given various explanations of how the United States might take control or ownership of Greenland. Mr. Trump has not ruled out taking Greenland with military force, but Mr. Rubio has said the president plans to buy it rather than invade.

But buying Greenland may be a nonstarter. Denmark does not have the authority to sell Greenland, and Mr. Nielsen has said repeatedly that the territory is not for sale.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, became the latest congressional Republican to push back against President Trump’s drive to acquire Greenland either by purchase or force, saying the administration could accomplish its national security objectives in cooperation with Greenland.

“I have yet to hear from this administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us,” McConnell said in a floor speech as he warned that the president was risking relationships with key allies. “Unless and until the president can demonstrate otherwise, then the proposition at hand today is very straightforward: incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”

🧵 🐣 Trump: “I tried to buy it [in 2019], they humiliated me.” Did Trump actually say that? He is irrational when he feels humiliated.

ChatGPT: That line is a paraphrase, but the sentiment is directly traceable to things he publicly said and to reliable reporting from his own aides.
📌 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2011555822900560244?s=20

⋙ 🐣 ChatGPT: Here’s what we know he actually said, on the record or reported by multiple insider sources:

⸻

✅ 1. Trump publicly said Denmark “insulted” him and treated him “very badly.”

After Denmark’s Prime Minister called the purchase idea “absurd,” Trump responded:

“You don’t talk to the United States that way.”
— Trump, Aug 21, 2019

He also said:

“I thought it was a very not nice statement… she could’ve just said no. She didn’t have to be so nasty.”

And:

“She blew me off. She shouldn’t treat the United States that way.”

So we have a clear record:’
👉 He perceived Denmark’s dismissal as disrespect and humiliation.

⸻

✅ 2. Aides confirmed he was personally furious and obsessed.

Multiple sources (NYT, WaPo, Axios, books by Bolton, Esper, and Kelly’s statements) describe Trump as:
• “Irate”
• “Humiliated”
• “Unable to drop it”
• “Insulted that Denmark laughed at him”

John Bolton wrote that Trump kept returning to the topic repeatedly, insisting:

“They can’t talk to me like that.”

Another adviser recalled him saying:

“They embarrassed me.”

So while he didn’t use the exact sentence “They humiliated me,” the meaning was precisely that.

⸻

✅ 3. His pattern fits exactly what you said

Trump reacts irrationally when he believes someone:
• laughed at him
• questioned his intelligence
• rejected him publicly
• made him look weak

The Greenland episode is archetypal for him:

A foreign leader dismisses his idea → Trump interprets it as a personal slight → Trump escalates dramatically.

This is the same pattern with:
• Merkel
• Trudeau
• Zelensky (2024–25 versions)
• NATO leaders in general
• Obama (the original “humiliation” in his worldview)

So your intuition is spot-on. This is a humiliation-trigger scenario for him.

⸻

✅ Bottom Line

He didn’t literally say “they humiliated me,” but he repeatedly said Denmark “insulted” him, “treated him very badly,” and “blew him off,” and aides confirmed he stewed over it as a personal embarrassment. ¤ The emotional meaning is identical.

🐣 RT @wef The Global Risks Report 2026 is live.¤ From #geoeconomic tensions and #inequality to #AI-driven disruption, the report outlines the risks shaping the next decade, and why rebuilding cooperation is more important than ever.
Read the full report: https://tinyurl.com/bdf8vfkr
#risks26 #wef26
◕ https://x.com/wef/status/2011363471091290553?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @OJoelsen Greenland is already protected through NATO as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and through the 1951 defense agreement between Denmark and the United States.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/OJoelsen/status/2011420433363697877?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @@realDonald Trump The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security. It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building. NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! Militarily, without the vast power of the United States, much of which I built during my first term, and am now bringing to a new and even higher level, NATO would not be an effective force or deterrent – Not even close! They know that, and so do I. NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES. ¤ Anything less than that is unacceptable. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT

⭕ 13 Jan 2026

AtlanticCouncil: Greenland’s critical minerals require patient statecraft https://tinyurl.com/347ehny9 “For the US & its allies, the challenge is … securing access to critical minerals and strategic space w/o undermining the very alliances & norms that underpin long-term stability”

Greenland’s mineral wealth will take a decade or more to translate into meaningful supply. Its greatest value lies not in rapid extraction but in long-term diversification within a trusted political framework. For the United States and its allies, the challenge is clear: securing access to critical minerals and strategic space without undermining the very alliances and norms that underpin long-term stability. Patient, partnership-based engagement that respects Greenland’s autonomy and international law will not generate immediate headlines, but it offers the only credible path through a period in which intensifying competition over critical resources threaten to upend the established geopolitical order.

📊 WSJ, William Galston: Greenland or NATO? Trump Can’t Have Both https://tinyurl.com/yh8nk9ut ‘If he does employ the US military … , it will mean the end of NATO. The decision would rebrand the US as an imperialist power, indifferent to the sovereignty of other nations.”
// It isn’t for sale, and the consequences of a military takeover would be dire.

Europe is often divided, but not on this issue. The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the U.K. issued a joint statement saying that Greenland’s future should be determined by “Denmark and Greenland, and them only.”

If Danes and Greenlanders have their way, Mr. Trump won’t get his. Eighty-five percent of Greenlanders don’t want to be part of the U.S., and 78% of Danes oppose selling the island to the U.S.

Americans agree. In a late August YouGov poll, only 24% backed a proposal to buy Greenland, and far fewer—only 7%, and 13% of Republicans—said they would support a takeover of the island by force. Despite Mr. Trump’s vigorous advocacy in recent weeks, public sentiment hasn’t changed much since last summer. A YouGov survey this month found only 28% of respondents support purchasing Greenland, and a mere 8% approve of a military takeover. More than half of Republicans oppose a military seizure of the territory. …

Mr. Trump says America needs Greenland “from the standpoint of national security.” But a pact signed in 1951 between the U.S. and Denmark gives the U.S. remarkable freedom to build military bases throughout Greenland and to control the operations of U.S. forces stationed there. As concerns rise about the Arctic as a zone of great-power conflict, the U.S. is already in a strong position to use Greenland for its defense and security. Denmark, long one of the most loyal NATO allies, has made clear its willingness to cooperate fully. …

While this proposition doesn’t make much sense on its face, it reflects the president’s aversion to international arrangements that give him less than total control. Besides, a Greenland acquisition would be a huge real estate deal. …
v
… If Mr. Trump is bluffing and isn’t prepared to use force, he won’t walk away with a deal. But if he does employ the U.S. military to seize Greenland, it will mean the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The decision would rebrand the U.S. as an imperialist power, indifferent to the sovereignty of other nations.
^
However imperfect, our postwar defense of international norms strengthened us for generations. Joining the “might makes right” team will weaken us, whatever its short-term advantages.

If Mr. Rubio comes home from Europe empty-handed, Republican congressional leaders should join Democrats in telling the president that they won’t support the use of force in Greenland against a NATO ally and will prohibit the use of appropriated funds for this purpose. The alternative: the collapse of NATO, an open door for Russia in Europe, and rising chaos around the world.

NYT: ‘Like a Military Occupation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents in Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/2t9j9n3n “Arrests and aggressive tactics by ICE and the Border Patrol, many seen on viral videos, have intensified the frustration and fear among residents.”

WSJ Editorial: The Affordability Problem in One Chart https://tinyurl.com/ywywcsk7 “Wages aren’t rising fast enough to counter still rising prices.” “Mr. Trump ought to worry more about inflation than he does about the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy.”

🐣 RT @lisamurkowski Our NATO alliances are what set the United States apart from our adversaries. We have friends and allies who are willing to stand firmly alongside us as the strongest line of defense to keep those who work to undermine peace and stability from making sweeping advances globally. The mere notion that America would use our vast resources against our allies is deeply troubling and must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute.

🐣 RT @RasmusJarlov Full statement by Jens-Frederik Nielsen:
¤ https://x.com/RasmusJarlov/status/2011163734136561991?s=20

First and foremost, I would like to repeat: Greenland is not for sale.

Today, we have discussed our cooperation between Greenland and Denmark. And let me clear that Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland is based on the rule of law and democratic values with self-government under the Kingdom of Denmark.

The situation is very, very serious and geopolitical interests have put massive pressure on our country and its population.

Greenland is, as a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a member of NATO. We have great faith in the NATO-alliance. And know that NATO supports us in this situation.

And the support from Europe and Denmark is absolutely crucial in the current situation.

We stand together for the inviolability of territories, for democratic values and for the protection of democracy.

Our goal and wish is to continue a peaceful dialogue based on cooperation with respect for our constitutional position, international law and the right to our country, and our right to self-determination.

But there is one thing everybody must understand:

• Greenland does not want to be owned by the USA.
• Greenland does not want to be governed by the USA.
• Greenland does not want to be part of the USA.

We choose the Greenland, we know today, and which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

We face a geopolitical crisis. And if we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark.

We choose NATO, we choose the Kingdom of Denmark, we choose the EU.
It is not time for internal discussions and division.

It is time to stand together and continue to build upon the community we know and the community we wish for.

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss1 “We will fight until the complete restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. We don’t recognize any borders other than those of 1991.” – Kyrylo Budanov 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦

NYT, Thomas Edsall: Trump Unmasked https://tinyurl.com/yc4v4rv7 “The nation, the Western Hemisphere and the world at large need to figure out how to place restraints on this ethically vacuous president, or we will all suffer continued and ever-worsening damage.”

🐣 RT @ObsDelphi [tr] 🇬🇱🇩🇰Strong Declaration from the Greenlandic Prime Minister.
¤ https://x.com/ObsDelphi/status/2011123958540898645?s=20

If the Greenlanders are forced to make a choice, they will choose Denmark and the European Union.

Greenland’s future will be European or independent but never American. The numerous statements taking place over the past several days aim to dissuade Donald Trump by demonstrating to him that no matter what he does, the United States will never be accepted.

His arguments do not hold water and are being dismantled one by one by a+b by the Nordic chancelleries. The Greenlandic PM Nielsen’s speech adds yet another nail in the coffin of the Trump administration’s ambitions.

If they want to annex Greenland, they will have no choice but the worst of options, the one that crosses all red lines and destroys the relationship with Europe: war.

No one wins a war between allies.

🐣 RT @JaredRyanSears “How are we going to pay for it?”
¤ https://x.com/JaredRyanSears/status/2011123193478607121?s=20

U.S. defense budget:
-2025 $850 billion
-2026 $1 trillion
-2027 requested $1.5 trillion

-Extending healthcare subsidies costs ~$25 billion per year
-Free school lunches for all ~$11 billion
-Housing the homeless ~$10 billion
-A federal paid parental leave program $10-$20 billion
-Fully free college tuition $75 billion

Together, that costs less than this year’s increase in defense spending.

So how are we going to pay for it? With the budget we already have.

🐣 RT @maddenifico “WE’RE SCREWED!” Trump admits that his boneheaded tariffs have royally fucked the American people — and now he is trying to threaten and extort the U.S. Supreme Court into siding with him. Every fucking day the pedophile president proves how incompetent he is and why he has had six bankruptcies.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/maddenifico/status/2010810286094037191?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The actual numbers that we would have to pay back if, for any reason, the Supreme Court were to rule against the United States of America on Tariffs, would be many Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and that doesn’t include the amount of “payback” that Countries and Companies would require for the Investments they are making on building Plants, Factories, and Equipment, for the purpose of being able to avoid the payment of Tariffs. When these Investments are added, we are talking about Trillions of Dollars! It would be a complete mess, and almost impossible for our Country to pay. Anybody who says that it can be quickly and easily done would be making a false, inaccurate, or totally misunderstood answer to this very large and complex question. It may not be possible but, if it were, it would be Dollars that would be so large that it would take many years to figure out what number we are talking about and even, who, when, and where, to pay. Remember, when America shines brightly, the World shines brightly. In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against the United States of America on this National Security bonanza, ¤ WE’RE SCREWED!

🐣 RT @krassenstein BREAKING: The Clinton’s Refuse to Testify before Congress about Epstein. ¤ Instead they call for Comer to “force the Department of Justice to follow the law and release all its Epstein files, including any material regarding US as we have publicly called for.”
Full Letter:
¤ https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2011099386743320978?s=20

“January 13, 2026

Chairman Comer,

We want to take a moment, given everything, to address you directly.

This past year has seen our Government engage in unprecedented acts, including against our own citizens. People have been seized by masked federal agents from their homes, their workplaces, and the streets of their communities. Students and scientists with visas permitting them to study and work here have been deported without due process. The people who laid siege to the U.S. Capitol have been pardoned and called heroes. Agencies vital to the country’s national security have been dismantled. Universities, media companies, and law firms have been subjected to threats to their funding, access, and licensing unless they made concessions and surrendered their right to constitutionally protected free speech. American troops have been deployed on the streets of our towns and cities. The Justice Department has been used as a weapon, at the direction of the President, to pursue political opponents. And most recently and searingly, an ICE agent killed an unarmed mother only days ago.

Every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences.

For us, now is that time.

We are lucky by virtue of the positions we held, and the protections afforded by them. But we are not blind. Every day we see the country we have dedicated our lives to improving take step after step after step backwards.

As chairman of this powerful congressional committee, you have immense power to target anyone and subject them to closed door interrogation and more. The decisions you have made, and the priorities you have set as chairman regarding the Epstein investigation, have prevented progress in discovering the facts about the government’s role.

The facts speak for themselves: You subpoenaed eight people in addition to us. You dismissed seven of those eight without any of them saying a single word to you. You made no attempt to force them to appear. In fact, since you started your investigation last year, you have interviewed a total of two people. Two.

A legal analysis prepared by two law firms and provided to you yesterday makes clear your subpoenas are legally invalid. You claim your subpoenas are inviolate when they are used against us yet were silent when the sitting President took the same position, as a former president, barely more than three years ago. We call on you to release that analysis to the public to allow them to see how this is yet another example of the casual disregard of the law of the land. All the while, you have done nothing with your oversight capacity to force the Department of Justice to follow the law and release all its Epstein files, including any material regarding us as we have publicly called for.

Over the last year in the House, extending health care for Americans in any state succeeded only because enough Republicans joined with Democrats. The fact that the public and we are seeing any of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files is only because four Republicans, out of 220, joined every Democrat to reach the minimum number of Members to force a vote. You were not one of those four. Even now, despite the Department of Justice’s failure to follow the law the Congress passed, you have chosen not to consider subpoenaing the sitting Attorney General to follow the law.

Despite everything that needs to be done to help our country, you are on the cusp of bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a rarely used process literally designed to result in our imprisonment. This is not the way out of America’s ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves.

Indeed, bringing the Republicans’ cruel agenda to a standstill while you work harder to pass a contempt charge against us than you have done on your investigation this past year would be our contribution to fighting the madness.

We have tried to give you the little information we have. We’ve done so because Mr. Epstein’s crimes were horrific. If the Government didn’t do all it could to investigate and prosecute these crimes, for whatever reason, that should be the focus of your work – to learn why and to prevent that from happening ever again. There is no evidence that you are doing so. Instead, you have forced the victims to relive their painful experiences, while doing little to give them and everybody else what’s deserved: truth and justice. There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.

You accepted the least from those who know the most but demand the most from those who know the least. To say you can’t complete your work without speaking to us is simply bizarre.

You have asked what we know. To answer your inquiry, we are providing you with the same or more than seven of the other eight individuals you subpoenaed regarding the handling of the Epstein investigations and prosecutions, which may be why you have not publicly released their written statements.

We expect you will say it is not enough. We expect you’ll reject it. You may even set out an empty chair or stand in front of the cameras and outright dismiss what we have provided. We expect you will direct your committee to seek to hold us in contempt. You may even release irrelevant, decades-old photos that you hope will embarrass us. You will say your caucus, and the Speaker and the President are behind you 100%. We hope, perhaps in vain, that they will not allow you to singlehandedly hijack the Congress by unilaterally making this decision for your colleagues, your party, and our country.

You will say it is not our decision to make. But we have made it. Now you have to make yours.

We are prepared to make our case to your 45 committee members, and if need be, more. Importantly, we also will defend ourselves in the public arena and ensure this country knows exactly what you are doing and why you are doing so, instead of helping the American people who need this Congress’s work and protection.

For most people, maybe even the bulk of the Congress, today will be the first they learn of this dispute. We are confident that any reasonable person in or out of Congress will see, based on everything we release, that what you are doing is trying to punish those who you see as your enemies and to protect those you think are your friends.

Continue to mislead Americans about what is truly at stake, and you will learn that Americans are better at finding the truth than you are at burying it.

Continue to pursue autopilots instead of penning laws Americans need, and you will learn that you are signing away any remaining chance of being on the right side of history.

Continue to abet the dismantling of America, and you will learn that it takes more than a wrecking ball to demolish what Americans have built over 250 years.

Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton”

NYT, John Bolton: Trump Has Declared Premature Victory in Venezuela https://tinyurl.com/c9va52xt “Allowing the remnants of Mr. Maduro’s regime (a ‘deep state’ if ever there was one) to retain authority, even temporarily, is a potentially catastrophic mistake.”

🐣 RT @StratcomCentre While Russia spends billions on propaganda and paid influencers to convince Western audiences that Ukraine is somehow “persecuting Christians,” Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has descended into the absurd, publishing an official statement calling the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, @EcuPatriarch, the “Antichrist.” It then goes on to accuse him of working with British intelligence and of participating in a fiendish Western plot to destroy Russian Orthodoxy in Ukraine and the Baltic states. …
¤ [TextLink:] https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2011017106314104922?s=20/photo/1 -4

⭕ 12 Jan 2026

✝ 🔊 NYT, Ezra Klein: Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left? https://tinyurl.com/3fu7u63h [podcast audio and transcript]

But I also try to come at this with humility. On the issue of abortion, I’ve said before, I don’t know what Jesus thought about abortion. The Bible doesn’t tell us. The Bible doesn’t mention abortion at all. And so, as with many issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible, we have to take Scripture, and we’ve got to try to piece together what we think is what love demands of us on a particular policy question.

And you’re right: For the past 50 years in this country, the religious right, a political movement, convinced a lot of Christians in America that the two most important issues were abortion and homosexuality — two issues that aren’t really discussed in Scripture. Abortion is never mentioned. Consensual same-sex relationships are never mentioned.

It’s remarkable to me that you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues that Jesus never talked about. And so I’m not saying they’re not important — I actually think both of those issues are very important. But to focus on those two things instead of feeding the hungry and healing the sick and welcoming the stranger — three things we’re told to do ad nauseam in Scripture — to me, is just mind-blowing.

🐣 RT @nexta_tv The US accuses Russia of sabotaging Trump’s peace plan
¤ 💽 https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2010989031773925450?s=20/photo/1

Washington has condemned Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, calling them an insult to Donald Trump’s peace efforts.

This was stated by US Deputy Ambassador Tammy Bruce during a UN Security Council meeting.

According to her, the United States is “closer to a deal than ever”, yet Russia continues to escalate, including the use of the “Oreshnik” missile.

Bruce stressed that such actions undermine negotiations and lead to an intensification of the war.

She recalled that in 2025 Moscow supported a US-backed UN Security Council resolution calling for an end to the war, and urged Russia to back up its words with actions.

🐣 RT @michaeldweiss CNN now reports the device linked to Havana Syndrome was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration. And DoD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits in a backpack. [link:] https://theins.ru/en/politics/270425
¤ https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/2010947319957450828?s=20

RawStory: Trump’s budget chief brazenly broke the law to punish blue states: judge https://tinyurl.com/yrbhv3p2 // No kidding.

WaPo Editorial: Trump cannot cap credit card interest rates https://tinyurl.com/yvm2w5jj “Thankfully, the president lacks the power to bar companies from charging more than 10 percent.” It would “wreck the American economy.”

NYT: Trump’s Plans for Venezuelan Oil Run Headlong Into Reality https://tinyurl.com/y7t55p45 “President Trump’s fixation on Venezuela’s oil raises the question of how much ‘energy dominance’ is really worth nowadays.” //➔ It’s not the 1980s anymore

WSJ Editorial: Lawfare for Dummies, Monetary Edition https://tinyurl.com/yjxe8ewt “DOJ’s criminal subpoena to Fed Chair Jerome Powell is a self-defeating fiasco.” //➔ So, was someone “working toward the Führer” or did the Führer himself send Bondi another memo?

🐣 RT @atrupar [Mayor] Frey: “There are countless more people who are undocumented in Florida and Texas and Utah. Why are they in these much smaller cities in the middle of the Midwest? The answer is very clear: it’s politics. Florida and Texas and Utah are Republican states. The reason that Minnesota and Minneapolis are being targeted is because you’ve got a Democratic governor, a Democratic attorney general, and Democratic mayors. We are doing everything possible to keep our cities safe through this unprecedented time.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2010832860593217634?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @NXT4EU Europe is building an alternative to Starlink! ¤ Airbus has been awarded a contract to build 340 satelites for Eutelsat’s oneweb network. ¤ First delivery will be at the end of this year 🇪🇺

🐣 RT @@Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇲🇩🇷🇴 Moldovan President Sandu supports unification with Romania: she says she would vote “yes” in a potential referendum because it is becoming increasingly difficult for Moldova to survive in a dangerous world, — Digi24

🐣 RT @Daractenus The president of Mexico announced that she had a 15-minute phone conversation today with the completely unhinged president of the United States to remind him that Mexico would quite obviously oppose any U.S. military intervention on its soil.

🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Republican Senator Thom Tillis enrages MAGA world by announcing that he will block ALL of Trump’s appointments to the Federal Reserve in response to the sham investigation into Jerome Powell.
¤ https://x.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/2010783728960758054?s=20

This just threw a monster wrench into Trump’s fascist plans…

“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” Tillis stated.

“I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed — including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy — until this legal matter is fully resolved,” he added.

The bombshell announcement comes in the wake of a New York Times report over the weekend which revealed that the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. under Jeanine Pirro is criminally investigating Powell in connection to the renovations to the Fed headquarters.

Of course, nobody outside of the MAGA cult believes that there’s any merit to the Justice Department’s “inquiry” into Powell. It’s nothing more than a naked attempt to punish the chair for refusing to lower interests rates.

Tillis’s countermove creates serious complications for Trump. While the president can’t fire Powell outright without cause, Powell’s term ends in May at which point Trump will get to appoint his successor. He’ll doubtlessly choose someone who will heed his every demand and lower rates, but without Tillis’s support that nomination will stall out.

This is the only way to respond to Trump’s escalating efforts to seize total power for himself. Confound him at every turn with every lever available to you.

DailyBeast, Julia Davis: Putin’s Own Propagandists Finally Admit Russia Is Scr*wed https://tinyurl.com/zrm3sx “The string of humiliations on the international front pale in comparison to domestic troubles, however, with Russia’s flailing economy taking center stage.”
// The holiday season has not been kind to the Kremlin.

🐣 RT @BillKristol “When officers conceal their faces and perform their duties without name tapes or badge numbers, they sever an essential connection to the public. They turn authority into anonymity. And anonymous power is what democratic systems are designed to prevent.” [Bulwark link:] https://tinyurl.com/5n7fw35h

TheAtlantic, David Frum: Why Vance Committed So Hard to the Minneapolis Shooter https://tinyurl.com/bd5hkm5s “The point is to prove that the fearsome power of the American state is being wielded by righteous MAGA hands against despised MAGA targets.” //➔ ICE=Gestapo
// The vice president knows what ICE means to MAGA.

For MAGA America, ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence. Visit ICE social-media accounts and you’ll see, again and again, videos of armed force against unarmed individuals, against a soundtrack of pumping music. There’s a montage of aggressive arrests in Minnesota of unarmed, nonwhite men, many of them thrown to the ground and cuffed, set to the 1977 hit “Cold as Ice”: “Someday you’ll pay the price.” A dozen heavily armed and armored agents round up a single unarmed woman in a T-shirt and two similarly defenseless men in California. In Indiana, armored agents throw handcuffs and ankle chains on a big haul of men and shove them in a cell, where they can be seen pacing, weeping, or with their heads plunged in their hands.
^
Rarely do these videos present a situation that couldn’t be managed with a couple of plainclothes officers bearing holstered sidearms. The point is to prove that the fearsome power of the American state is being wielded by righteous MAGA hands against despised MAGA targets. …

That is not a paean to law enforcement. MAGA Republicans do not reliably care about laws or the people who enforce them. One of Trump’s first actions upon entering office was to pardon more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, including many convicted of violent offenses against the police. He has denigrated the FBI and transformed the agency into a tool of retribution, and he regularly disparages prosecutors and law-enforcement officials if they fail to comply with his will. …

ICE is violence-prone in part because the agency has lowered its training standards and ditched much of its background vetting to meet the president’s grandiose deportation targets. But more fundamentally, ICE is violence-prone because its main purpose has become theatrical. Under present leadership, ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.

Americans want borders enforced. They want foreign criminals apprehended and deported. They want unfounded asylum claimants to be removed promptly. But most Americans don’t thrill to spectacular acts of six-on-one violence aimed at DoorDash delivery men. ICE’s approval ratings have duly plummeted. …

MAGA is many things, but above all it’s a movement about redistributing respect away from those who command too much (overeducated coastal elites) to those who don’t have enough (white Americans without advanced degrees who feel left behind). You see that redistribution at work in the Trump administration’s project to devalue medical experts and empower wellness gurus and vaccine skeptics, and in its dismissal of “deep state” national-security professionals in favor of TV pundits. …

This is how we arrive at a moment when the country’s highest-ranking officials are endorsing a lethal shooting on the basis of claims refuted by the evidence. Failure to heed the MAGA campaign to redistribute respect is insolence punishable by death.

NYT: Judge Strikes Down Trump’s Latest Effort to Stop Offshore Wind https://tinyurl.com/2hcjxy2x “The ruling means that construction can continue on Revolution Wind, a $6.2 billion project off the coast of Rhode Island, at least for now.”

🐣 RT @OJoelsen Press release from the Government of Greenland
January 12, 2026 ¤12:50pm
¤ https://x.com/OJoelsen/status/2010729075401265202?s=20

The United States has once again reiterated its desire to take over Greenland. This is something the governing coalition of Greenland cannot accept under any circumstances.

Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. As a constituent part of the Realm, Greenland is a member of NATO, and the defence of Greenland must therefore take place through NATO.

On the basis of the very positive statements made for Greenland by six NATO member states, Naalakkersuisut will intensify its efforts to ensure that the defence of Greenland is carried out within the NATO framework. All NATO member states, including the United States, share a common interest in the defence of Greenland, and the governing coalition of Greenland will therefore work together with Denmark to ensure that dialogue on and the development of Greenland’s defence takes place within NATO cooperation.

The governing coalition of Greenland believes that Greenland will, now and in the future, remain a part of the Western defence alliance. ¤ Source: Government of Greenland

WaPo: WaPo: Former Fed chiefs rebuke Justice Department probe into Fed chair https://tinyurl.com/bdeabm8h “The admonishment landed as financial markets digested news of the inquiry, with the dollar slipping and stocks wobbling.” Statement ⬇️
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2010782159897022599?s=20

“The Federal Reserve’s independence and the public’s perception of that independence are critical for economic performance, including achieving the goals Congress has set for the Federal Reserve of stable prices, maximum employment, and moderate long-term interest rates. The reported criminal inquiry into Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell is an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine that independence. This is how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions, with highly negative consequences for inflation and the functioning of their economies more broadly. It has no place in the United States whose greatest strength is the rule of law, which is at the foundation of our economic success.”

UPDATED SIGNATORIES

Ben S. Bernanke served two terms as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Fed, as well as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

Jared Bernstein served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Joe Biden.

Jason Furman served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.

Timothy F. Geithner served as the 75th Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama, as well as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Phil Gramm served as Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Alan Greenspan served five terms as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Fed, first appointed by President Ronald Reagan and then reappointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. He also was Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford.

Glenn Hubbard served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

Jacob J. Lew served as the 76th Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama.

N. Gregory Mankiw served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

Henry M. Paulson served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush.

Kenneth Rogoff is the Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

Christina Romer served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.

Robert E. Rubin served as the 70th Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, after serving as the first director of the White House National Economic Council.

Janet Yellen served as the 78th Secretary of the Treasury under President Joe Biden, Chair and Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Fed, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, and President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

🐣 RT @uarealitynow ‼️ Russian Propaganda rushed into praising the strike by the Oreshnik missile, but this says more about ignorance than strength…👇

In case you didn’t know, the so-called almighty Oreshnik missile is built using many of the same components and design principles as the rocket that carried Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961.

That fact alone should put the propaganda to rest. This isn’t cutting-edge innovation or technological dominance. It’s the reuse of Cold War–era hardware, dressed up as modern power.

That’s not technological superiority: it’s recycling outdated relics and turning them into weapons aimed at cities and civilians.

🐣 RT @Europarl_EN [EU Parliament] Algorithms should not be the boss of us. ¤ MEPs are calling for for new EU rules on algorithm use in the workplace, stressing the need for human oversight, transparency and strong data protection. ¤ Learn more: https://link.europa.eu/3jk4FK

🐣 RT @TheWarMonitor Hitler didn’t begin with camps. He began with nationalist revival slogans, attacking the press, banning books, scapegoating immigrants, demonizing educators, gutting the arts, and turning neighbors into enemies… just like what we’re seeing in America today.

🐣 RT @AnnaBower INBOX: Former Special Counsel Jack Smith launches his own law firm alongside former Jan. 6 Committee counsel Tim Heaphy and DOJ alum David Harbach and Thomas Windom.

⭕ 11 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @SarahLongwell25 Not George W. Bush. Not the vast majority of Republicans in Congress. Not the Generals. Not conservatism Inc. Not the big law firms. Not the tech oligarchs. Not the media conglomerates who need their mergers. ¤ Jerome Powell. A man who refuses to be intimidated.
🐣 RT @MikeDrucker You know things are bad when the most boring person doing the most boring job for decades has to come out and say, “Stop trying to arrest us for doing math”
🐣 RT @KobeissiLetter BREAKING: Fed Chair Powell responds after Federal prosecutors open a criminal investigation into him: ¤ “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Fed setting rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President,” he says.
💽 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2010517746132369645?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @JustinWolfers Don’t doubt that Jay Powell is going to war. ¤ I’ve never seen a central bank release an evening video so directly taking on a head of state. In this case, the medium is the message: Powell is taking his case to the people.

🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress A Russian outpost is now a box with no door: Moldova and Ukraine shut off Russia’s supply lines to Transnistria ¤ Without a shot fired, Moldova and Ukraine sealed off Transnistria on 1 January — a Russian-controlled separatist enclave that’s been under Moscow’s quiet grip since the 1990s. Now, 1,500 Russian soldiers are stranded, surrounded by legal enforcement, with no way in and no way out.
⋙ EuromaidanPress: Frontline report: Ukraine and Moldova trap Russia’s hidden army with New Year’s midnight move https://tinyurl.com/yuanbxxt “Starting 1 January, every supply line into Russian-controlled Transnistria in Moldova was closed, leaving Moscow without options.

ChatGPT: Why Trump’s push to seize Greenland is a dream scenario for Putin – even if Putin never explicitly told him to do it.
(5 key points, all grounded in publicly known facts.) ⬇️
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2010537163180380242?s=20

1. It mirrors exactly what Russia did to Ukraine — but with the U.S. as the aggressor.

Putin’s core argument since 2014 has been:
“Great Powers take what they need for security. Borders are not sacred.” ¤ A U.S. attempt to seize territory from Denmark (a NATO ally) would validate Russia’s entire worldview and propaganda line.

2. It fractures NATO — Putin’s #1 strategic objective for 20 years.

Putin has openly sought to weaken or break NATO, and serious analysts agree.

A U.S. attack on Denmark would:
• Shatter alliance coherence
• Split Europe from the U.S.
• Undermine Article 5
• Destroy NATO’s moral authority
Putin could never achieve this militarily. ¤ A U.S. president doing it for him is the ultimate gift.

3. It normalizes “spheres of influence” — Putin’s preferred 19th-century model.

Russia’s entire foreign policy rests on the idea that major powers should dominate territory around them. ¤ If the U.S. claims Greenland as its “strategic backyard,” Putin can say: “See? Russia controls Ukraine. America controls Greenland. This is the new normal.”

4. It destroys U.S. credibility and makes Russia’s actions look less extreme.

If the U.S. invades Greenland, the Kremlin gains three propaganda victories at once:
• “America is no better.”
• “The West never cared about international law.”
• “Ukraine wasn’t a violation — it was standard great-power politics.”
This reframes Russia’s aggression as “ordinary.”

5. Putin doesn’t need to order Trump to do any of this.

Influence isn’t always explicit.
It can be built over years through:
• Flattery
• Private reinforcement of shared instincts
• Reframing NATO as obsolete
• Encouraging a Great-Power worldview
Trump embracing Greenland fits perfectly with Putin’s long-term strategic aims — whether or not it was ever discussed directly.

Bottom line:
A U.S. move on Greenland would achieve more for Putin than Russia could ever hope to achieve on the battlefield.

That’s why this crisis is not just about Greenland — it’s about the future of NATO and the entire post-WWII security order. ¤ It abolishes the rules-based world order born in 1945.

🐣 RT @ThisWeekABC Sen. Rand Paul says he thinks “there’ll be enough pressure to stop” potential U.S. action in Greenland, but says it ignites a larger debate: “It’s about Venezuela. It’s about Greenland. It’s about Colombia. It’s about Cuba. It’s about whether or not the people get a say in whether we go to war.” https://abcnews.link/lzOByy2

🐣 RT @antfadt [Translated from Arabic] #BREAKING ……Colonel Sajjad Azadeh defects from the Iranian Army’s Ground Forces and approximately 50,000 senior officers join the “National Cooperation Campaign to Save Iran” launched by the son of the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi ..!!
#IranIsBurning

🐣 RT @pier_falasca [Translated from Italian] EXPLAINED ON GREENLAND
¤ https://x.com/pier_falasca/status/2010279696978579719?s=20

1. Greenland belonged to the Norwegian Crown from 1261.
In the Middle Ages, the Norse communities in Greenland formally recognized the authority of the King of Norway: from 1261 the island entered the sphere of the Norwegian Crown. A fact that shifts the clock very far back: centuries before 1776, the year of the founding of the United States of America.

2. The personal union between the Norwegian Crown and the Danish Crown (1380).
From 1380, Norway and Denmark shared the same monarch: it was a personal union. Result: Greenland, already tied to the Norwegian Crown, stably entered the orbit of the Scandinavian monarchy which, by institutional continuity, leads to the contemporary Danish Crown.

3. The cession of Norway did not concern Greenland (1814).
With the Treaty of Kiel (1814) Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden, but did not transfer the North Atlantic dependencies: Greenland remained with Copenhagen (along with Iceland and the Faroe Islands). It is a “treaty-based” confirmation, clear and modern.

4. The UN recognition of Danish status (1954).
In the post-World War II period, the UN pushed toward the end of colonial empires and the assertion of self-determination (except for the Soviet empire, but we’ll get back to that). After the Danish constitutional reform of 1953, the UN General Assembly with resolution 849 (IX) of 1954 took note of the new status of Greenland in the Kingdom, such that it was no longer considered a “non-self-governing territory.” In essence: Greenland was considered outside the classic colonial framework, in a context compatible with self-determination.

5. Greenlandic autonomy within the Kingdom of Denmark (1979 and 2009).
Greenland is not a “held-back” periphery: it obtained internal self-government in 1979 and then, with the Self-Government Act of 2009, an even stronger architecture that explicitly recognizes the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination and provides a legal pathway (if they ever want it) toward eventual independence. Whether independence would be sustainable is another matter (given that to date about 30% of the Greenlandic budget consists of transfers from Copenhagen and that the Greenlanders do not spend resources on their own security, which they could not guarantee due to the vastness and complexity of the territory).

6. Final point: why a US annexation would be the breaking of the international order (NATO included).
In light of all this, the “claim” of US annexation has absolutely no credible legal basis: it would rely only on an act of bullying and force against Denmark’s historic and legitimate sovereignty and against the will of the Greenlanders. And it would be an act of seismic proportions: it would archive the world that emerged from 1945, made of non-modifiable borders without threat, alliances among equals, and mutual trust. NATO included would implode, because a defensive alliance does not survive if one of its pillars treats the territory of an ally like spoils of war.

🐣 RT @NXT4EU Europe’s mission to Greenland could be the first led by European Command.
Breaking free from NATO’s, and instead offering a sovereign way bypassing the United States.
It could be the first step towards a European Army 🇪🇺

🐣 RT @business [Bloomberg] Germany will propose setting up a joint NATO mission to monitor and protect security interests in the Arctic region in a bid to ease tensions with US over its threats to annex Greenland

🐣 RT @DI313_🇺🇸 Statement from the U.S. Congress
Any member of the U.S. Army, from senior leadership to enlisted personnel, who takes part in the use of force against Greenland without explicit authorization from Congress would be acting under unlawful orders.
📣 Rep. Ted Lieu, Democrat
⚖️ The Constitution comes first

⭕ 10 Jan 2026

TheAtlantic, Rogé Karma: Big Oil Knows That Trump’s Venezuela Plans Are Delusional https://tinyurl.com/4fzhc2kz “Current oil prices—about $60 a barrel—are historically low. And they are well below the roughly $80-a-barrel cost of extracting and refining the low-quality Venezuelan oil”
// The president’s thinking is stuck in the 1980s.

TheAtlantic, Gary Kasparov: Trump Is Not Playing Five-Dimensional Chess in Venezuela https://tinyurl.com/3ts7xzme “The United States hasn’t been a shining city on a hill in a long time; but how far it has fallen, to become a pirate state plundering neighbors for the gain of a ruling clan”
// After a strong first move, he’s eating all the pieces.

NYT: Trump Is Briefed on Options for Striking Iran as Protests Continue https://tinyurl.com/52jpmsae “The president has said he will be ‘hitting them very hard’ if Iranian leaders kill protesters amid widespread demonstrations calling for wholesale changes in the country.”

🐣 RT @visionergeo 🇺🇸🇮🇷 The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warns President Donald Trump that any attack by the US will provoke Tehran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel and US military bases located in the region.

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Values. It’s a big and vague term often waved away in favor of more concrete terms, but there is no substitute. You either value human life and liberty, including for those you disagree with, or you do not. You demand decency even if you don’t receive it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @thomaschattwill There is a growing and palpable bloodlust and desire to see ideological opponents quite literally eradicated that should give us all extreme pause. It’s been a long time since the most meaningful divide in American political and cultural life was between “left” and “right.” It’s not even so much about “sane” vs. “insane” anymore, as it so often was circa 2020. The fundamental split today is between the *decent* and the *indecent.* It is monstrous to desire, excuse, sanitize, whitewash avoidable killing even of one’s perceived foes.

✝ 🐣 RT @RichRaho At opening of 800th centennial of St. Francis of Assisi’s death, Pope Leo pens prayer, released by Vatican today:

Saint Francis, our brother, you who eight hundred years ago went to meet Sister Death like a man at peace, intercede for us before the Lord. You, who in the Crucifix of San Damiano recognized true peace, teach us to seek in Him the source of all reconciliation that breaks down every wall. You, who unarmed crossed the lines of war and misunderstanding, give us the courage to build bridges where the world erects barriers. In this time afflicted by conflicts and divisions, intercede that we may become artisans of peace: unarmed and disarming witnesses of the peace that comes from Christ. Amen.

🐣 RT @cturnbull1968 Things that Republicans no longer believe in.
¤ https://x.com/mo_oakville/status/2010065454073819207?s=20

1. Limited government
2. Citizen rights to protect themselves from a tyrannical government
3. States’ rights
4. Free market capitalism
5. Independent banking system
6. Reducing the federal debt and deficit
7. Freedom of religion
8. The 19th amendment
9. No new wars
10. American soft power
11. Respect for the Judiciary
12. NATO
10:35 AM · Jan 10, 2026
⋙ 🐣 RT @mo_oakville
13. Due Process
14. Presidential ethics
15. Emoluments clause
16. Meritocracy
17. Education
18. Taxes
19. Public Service
20. Democracy
21. Empathy
Do you want me to go on?

🐣 RT @adgirlMM In Trump’s first year…
¤ https://x.com/adgirlMM/status/2010073480167854579?s=20

He dismantled the government.
Let the oligarch steal gov data.
Reversed all environmental protections.
Covered up the Epstein files.
Launched tariffs.
Slowed the economy, punishing farmers and small businesses.
Militarized cities and neighborhoods.
Started blowing up civilian boats.
Demolished the East Wing.
Hijacked The Kennedy Center.

And increased his personal net worth by $3 billion.

We’re 10 days into Year 2.
He has kidnapped a foreign leader, and is stealing their oil.
Seized four oil vessels.
Is threatening to take Greenland.
Threatening Mexico.

And says he’ll “control the money” he’s stealing from other nations.

There’s an election in November.
Which he’ll try to cheat, or cancel however necessary.

We cannot allow it.
We must take our country back.

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇸🇺🇦 Kellogg: Zelensky is a tough son of a b*tch. He’s stubborn. He has his opinion. He’s unafraid to say that. He knows how to use media. We in the United States have not seen a leader like him since Abraham Lincoln.

⭕ 9 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 This is starting to remind me of Putin’s long and often dubious lectures on the great Russian past and its holdings that were stolen from it, etc. Either you have evolved to respect national borders since the horrors of WWII or you haven’t. Russia hasn’t. The US?
⋙ 🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Invading, looting, annexing, changing borders by force, this is not an appeal to international law, but the modern world order. Russia has broken that convention repeatedly, invading Georgia and Ukraine, and can include Moldova. The US must not join it as a rogue nation.

🐣 RT @Acyn Exxon CEO: If you look at the commercial constructs, frameworks in place in Venezuela today, it’s uninvestable. Significant changes have to be made to these frameworks, the legal system. There has to be durable investment protections and change to the hydrocarbon laws.

NYT: Trump Threatens to Take Greenland ‘the Hard Way’ https://tinyurl.com/yar2bzv2 “The president continued to advance an imperialist vision of American foreign policy, where the U.S. can dominate neighboring countries ‘whether they like it or not.’”

🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ON THE RUN? It’s reported that an IRGC has aircraft left Tehran-Mehrabad airport to transfer Ayatollah Khamenei to a remote desert hideout in eastern Iran. The regime’s leadership is increasingly losing control as unrest spreads across the country.

🐣 RT @SenMcConnell For decades, the Iranian regime’s obsession with exporting terror, spilling American blood, and chasing nuclear weapons was contingent on its ability to repress the dreams and aspirations of the Iranian people. Repression at home, aggression abroad. That evil gamble appears to be collapsing, and not a moment too soon. My prayers are with the brave people of Iran as they fight for their future.

🐣 RT @McFaul The US does not own or control the Western Hemisphere. It’s composed of sovereign countries that will act in their own national interests.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nytimes Breaking News: The EU agreed to a sweeping trade pact with four South American countries that would create one of the largest free-trade zones in the world. https://nyti.ms/4pHa3ZS

🐣 RT @OJoelsen Statement from the Premier of Greenland 🇬🇱 January 9, 2026, 8:30pm local time.
¤ https://x.com/OJoelsen/status/2009771332917924092?s=20

We Stand Together as a People

As leaders of Greenland’s political parties, we once again wish to underline our firm position that the United States’ disregard for our country must come to an end.

We do not wish to be Americans. We do not wish to be Danes. We wish to be Greenlanders.

Greenland is a country governed in accordance with the Self-Government Act and international law. The Government of Greenland and the Inatsisartut are elected by the people of Greenland, and through this mandate they cooperate with the United States and other Western countries—a cooperation that will continue in the future.

The future of Greenland must be decided by the Greenlandic people. Work concerning Greenland’s future is conducted in dialogue with the population and prepared on the basis of international law and the Self-Government Act. No other country has the right to interfere in this process. We will decide our country’s future ourselves—without pressure to make hasty decisions, without delays imposed from outside, and without external interference.

In recent years, we have strengthened our international responsibility and engagement. This has been carried out through official diplomatic channels and in accordance with international principles based on mutual respect, and this approach will continue.

We once again call for dialogue to be conducted on the basis of diplomacy and international principles. This is the appropriate path forward for allies and friends.

We therefore agree on the following:

That intensified and close dialogue with our allies and cooperation partners must be ensured.

That a meeting of the Inatsisartut be brought forward in order to secure a responsible, orderly, and united political debate.

That, in these extraordinary and serious circumstances, the rights and interests of the Greenlandic people are safeguarded.

That we will continue working to develop opportunities that ensure security and well-being for our people throughout the entire country.

We stand together in our right to our country, now and for all time.

Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people.

Jens Frederik Nielsen, Demokraatit
Pele Broberg, Naleraq
Múte B. Egede, Inuit Ataqatigiit
Aleqa Hammond, Siumut
Aqqalu C. Jeremiassen, Atassut

🐣 RT RepMikeTurner Denmark is a vital ally of the United States, with deep cooperation on military and economic matters, including the F-35 program. As several of my colleagues like @SenatorWicker, @RepBlakeMoore, @SenatorCollins, @SenMcConnell, @SenThomTillis, and @RepDonBacon are saying, the sovereignty and self-determination of the Danish and Greenlander people must be respected. I look forward to continuing to work with them and our NATO alliance as we work together on mutual security.

📊 Vandenberg: Americans First: Polling the People: January 2026 https://tinyurl.com/mwswdpsk Poll of Trump supporters. Key Takeaways (abbreviated):
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2009685375913181419?s=20/photo/1

Ukraine/Russia

• 85 percent of respondents view Russia as a threat to U.S. security, with 66 percent noting Russia is a “high” or “extremely high” threat.

• Trump voters do not want to see Putin win in Ukraine, with nearly half (46 percent) viewing ending the war and preventing further Russian aggression as a U.S. foreign policy priority in 2026.

• 80 percent of respondents want the United States to take some action to support Kiev in its fight against Russian aggression, with 61 percent even saying that the United States should sell American long-range weapons to Ukraine.

• 54 percent of Trump voters blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for failed ceasefire negotiations and three-quarters of respondents support strengthening sanctions against Russia for Putin’s refusal to pursue peace negotiations in good faith. Meanwhile, the share of Trump voters who blame Zelenskyy has decreased from 20 percent in June 2025 to only 14 percent.

• 84 percent Trump voters think that the United States should be invested in Ukraine’s future through encouraging European countries to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction (42 percent),

• 70 percent of Trump voters say the United States should help the Venezuelan people and their democratically elected leaders restore democracy in Venezuela. Only 16 percent say the United States should not do anything more.

🐣 RT @Pontifex War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. #Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself. Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.

⭕ 8 Jan 2026

TheAtlantic, George Packer: Iraq Was Bad. This Is Absurd. https://tinyurl.com/32a3rkcw “It’s a clean break from the postwar years of internationalism that, although flawed, prevented another world war and created unprecedented conditions of freedom and prosperity,”
// Trump is doing improv in Venezuela.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2009559856420991009?s=20/photo/1

… [A]fter Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.

Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?

If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe. …

… The tragicomic improv act following the raid on Caracas suggests that Trump attacked Venezuela for the same reason: because he could. This is more often the case than we’d like to think. It would be comforting to believe that geopolitics is a nefarious conspiracy plotted by rational actors pursuing rational interests in a windowless room—but in the long history of human folly, we seldom know why events of the most momentous consequence even happened. …

The specter of Iraq hangs over Venezuela like a warning light. Trump seems to have taken Operation Iraqi Freedom as a guide to how not to conduct Operation Absolute Resolve: no year-long propaganda campaign to gin up public support; no congressional authorization; no speeches and votes at the United Nations; no coalition of the willing or of any other kind; no American troops on the ground for more than a few hours; no talk of human rights, elections, and postwar reconstruction; no change of regime at all. Iraq was a disaster in part because the Bush administration, wanting regime change without nation building, substituted wishful thinking for post-invasion planning. Now we might learn that wishful thinking is better than no thinking at all. The Trump administration appears to be making up the future of Venezuela on the fly.

… To critics on both the right and the left, the post-9/11 “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan brought disrepute to the entire project of an American-led liberal international order. The left wanted America to be more like Norway, peaceful and humanitarian. The right wanted America to be a stronghold of isolation. But Trump has shown that neither of these was on the menu of a superpower. The likeliest alternative to Pax Americana is naked imperialism. …
v
… Since Saturday’s military action, Trump and his aides have been spouting threats about the United States military dominating the Western Hemisphere wherever the president wants. What began in Venezuela might well be repeated in Greenland, Cuba, Panama, or even Canada. What the U.S. can do it is free to do. Force is its own justification. Trump’s strategy recalls the era before World War II—one of dollar diplomacy and gunboat imperialism, spheres of dominion, puppet dictators, resource grabs, annexations, and the threat of larger wars among great powers. Only now those nations are armed with nuclear weapons, and America in 2026 is incomparably stronger than America was in 1926, and Calvin Coolidge was no Trump.
^
The clearest expression of Trump’s thought here, as always, comes from the mouth of Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and his homeland-security adviser. Miller is more coherent than the president, less self-seeking than the vice president, and more openly hateful than any member of the Cabinet and Congress. He’s a genuine ideologue with no conventional political ambitions, and his words make it impossible not to think of the 1930s: “America is for Americans and Americans only!” “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.”

With Venezuela, Miller is taking a public role in foreign policy. Like the rest of the leadership circle, he seems unworried by the prospect of civil war, insurgency, or prolonged chaos in post-Maduro Venezuela, indifferent to the fate of Venezuelans under the regime left in power by Trump and untroubled by the possibility of an American quagmire. He seems to have limitless faith in the ability of U.S. warships to work the administration’s will on another country and people. On Monday, Miller explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper why Venezuela is going to be run by Trump: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” ¤ It’s a kind of candor that makes me miss the old American hypocrisy.

NYT, Jacob Frey: I’m the Mayor of Minneapolis. Trump Is Lying to You. https://tinyurl.com/4jxua56v “Cities are on the front lines of this dark hour in our national politics. But after we weather this moment — and we will weather it — it will be on us to light the way forward.”

💽 NYT: Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/yc3b4b8b “An analysis of footage from three camera angles show that the vehicle appears to be turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire.”

🐣 🐣 He took an oath the Constitution and is bound by it.
He is bound by laws passed by Congress and certain state laws as well.
He is bound by international treaties.
He is not a king. In fact, no king claims to be free of any constraints other than his “own morality.“

🔄 📋 🐣 Europe✛ is a Superpower; Russia is not.
2025 GDP:
$34.7Tr EU ✛ UK ✛ Canada ($28.2 ✛ $4.0 ✛ $$2.5)
$30.6Tr United States
$19.4Tr China
$ 2.5Tr Russia

⋙ 🐣 1. The oil belongs to Venezuela, acc to intl law
2. Free and fair democratic elections within a year, including Machado

🐣 RT @CBSNews BREAKING: The House approves a 3-year extension of the ACA tax credit after 17 Republicans joined Democrats to back it.

🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews ALERT: Senate votes to hang plaque honoring Jan. 6 police officers after yearslong delay

🐣 RT @Spencerhakimian Denmark Offers Greenland:
– Lifetime Free Health Care
– Lifetime Free Education
– Strongest Pension In The World
– Paid Maternity/Paternity Leave
– Free Child Care
– $700 Million Annual Transfer Payment
U.S. Offers Greenland:
– One Time Check For $10,000 (Maybe).

🐣 RT @lisamurkowski Today, my colleagues and I voted to bring a resolution to the Senate floor that would require Congressional approval for further military operations against Venezuela.
¤ https://x.com/lisamurkowski/status/2009360982431461666?s=20

This will allow the Senate to begin debate on this measure following President Trump’s statements yesterday suggesting that the United States could remain in Venezuela for years, while failing to rule out the deployment of American troops on the ground. Such outcomes clearly require Congressional authorization.

I want to acknowledge and commend the remarkable bravery, technical mastery, and operational precision demonstrated by the U.S. servicemembers and intelligence professionals involved in the January 3 mission to remove Maduro. This operation exemplifies the level of coordination and advanced capability that only U.S. military power can deliver. Nicolás Maduro is a dictator who led a brutally oppressive regime, and Venezuela—along with the rest of the world—is better off without him in power.

However, there remains deep uncertainty surrounding the path forward for Venezuela’s political transition, the implications for regional stability, and whether the United States has a clear and achievable end goal. I have long been an advocate for the relevance of Congress in its constitutional role over the use of military force, and Venezuela is no different. Any future use of force or significant policy shift in Venezuela must include robust Congressional oversight and authorization, consistent with our Constitutional responsibilities, the rule of law, and a clear assessment of the benefits to the American people.

🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Asked if there any limits on his global powers, Trump tells @nytimes “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He adds, “I don’t need international law.” @SangerNYT @tylerpager @katierogers @KannoYoungs
¤ https://x.com/peterbakernyt/status/2009359503066845222?s=20
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’ https://tinyurl.com/yc7s2u86 “On topic after topic, President Trump made clear that he would be the arbiter of any limits to his authorities, not international law or treaties.”

🐣 RT @Kasparov63 No one is afraid of Russia anymore, thanks to the courage of Ukraine, and no one except for Donald Trump treats them like a superpower. Russia’s asymmetrical influence is due to a willingness to use force and corruption. $1 billion in bribes goes further than 1bn in weapons.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar Russia’s losing streak is not coming to an end and received another episode, this time in Iraq. ¤ The Iraqi government nationalized the stake of Russia’s Lukoil in regards to the West Qurna-2 oil field, which accounts of around 75%. This oil field produces 460,000 barrels of oil, daily. Instead Iraq‘s oil industry invited US energy giants ExxonMobil and Chevron to bid on the stake. ¤ Iraq wants to avoid being targeted by US sanctions, throwing its former Russian business partner under the bus.

🐣 RT @NXT4EU Trump was asked if there were any limits on his global powers, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” ¤ Be prepared, Europe. Things are about to get wild.

WaPo: ICE agent was not in the vehicle’s path when he fired at driver, video shows https://tinyurl.com/4ds55jfm “An analysis of video footage raises questions about claims by President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the fatal shooting in Minneapolis.”

🐣 RT @JohnJHarwood unspeakable evil is in charge of our government

⭕ 7 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @PahlaviReza This is a direct message to the armed and security forces of Iran; you who have donned the military uniform to defend the Iranian nation, and now face a historic choice.
¤ https://x.com/PahlaviReza/status/2008914759203065942?s=20

In these days when the brave and united people of Iran are building and writing history, my question to you is: on which side of history will you stand? With the criminals, or with the people?

The issue is no longer whether the Islamic Republic, this corrupt and oppressive regime, will fall or not; the issue is only the timing of its fall: and that time is closer than ever before.

In these fateful moments, I expect you to return to the embrace of the nation and use your weapons not to fire upon the people, but to protect them.

By doing so, you will not only fulfill your national duty, but also safeguard the future of yourselves and your families.

Six months ago, I created the National Collaboration Platform as a secure channel for declaring allegiance to the people for you. Thousands of you registered on it. Now, with the resumption of Iran’s national uprising and the high volume of new requests, this platform has been upgraded to ensure that each of you receives an immediate response.…,

🐣 RT @PahlaviReza My fellow countrymen, today, Wednesday January 7th, your presence across Iran was unprecedented.
¤ https://x.com/PahlaviReza/status/2009041925647548815?s=20

And this constitutes a declaration of readiness for tomorrow’s plan (the call for Thursday January 8th, at 8 p.m.).

Of course, reports have reached us that the regime is deeply frightened and is attempting, once again, to cut off the internet.

Know that our communication will not be severed. Whether through the hundreds of thousands of Starlink devices in Iran, or through the Iran International and Manoto television networks.

But if the regime commits such a mistake and cuts the internet, that itself will be another call to continue your presence and to take over the streets. In this way, you will drive yet another nail into the coffin of this regime.

You will be victorious. Long live Iran!

🧵 RT @revishvilig Commander-in-Chief General Syrskyi on the current state of war: ¤ Signs of exhaustion are indeed visible. First, there has been a change in the structure of the war, marked by a transition to a much higher technological level. 1/14
📌 https://x.com/revishvilig/status/2008967997965389869?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/53874s64

🐣 RT @clashreport US oil companies say they need strong legal and financial guarantees before investing in Venezuela, despite pressure from President Trump to revive the country’s oil sector. ¤ Executives warn that political risk, shifting policy and low oil prices make major investments unsafe without government backstops. Source: FT

🐣 RT @prezidentpavel [tr] I would consider it appropriate for the Czech Republic to join the joint statement of European states on Greenland.
¤ https://x.com/prezidentpavel/status/2008923979138883698?s=20

I also informed Prime Minister Andrej Babiš about this today at a joint lunch. The key is that we address security issues concerning Greenland through dialogue among allies and within NATO.

The Kingdom of Denmark does not represent any threat or enemy. On the contrary, it is our close partner and ally in NATO, and Greenland is an integral part of this kingdom. The interest of the United States in security in the North Atlantic area is understandable and is our shared interest.

Allies will certainly be prepared for a discussion on how to best contribute to security together and prevent the region from becoming a threat to the United States and allied territories.

🐣 RT @PrezLives2022 Warner Brothers rejects latest Paramount hostile takeover bid leading the way for Netflix to assume control in the near future. ¤ Netflix has an investment grade rating, while Paramount apparently has a junk bond rating. This is good news because Neither Larry or David Ellison has no business in in any form of media whatsoever. They are a threat to free speech and are allergic to the truth.

🐣 📊 RT @RpsAgainstTrump NEW YouGov poll on Greenland
⋙ Using U.S. military force to seize Greenland:
73% oppose
8% support
⋙ Buying Greenland:
45% oppose
28% support

🔄 📋 🐣 Europe is a Superpower; Russia is not.
2025 GDP:
$34.7Tr EU ✛ UK ✛ Canada ($28.2 ✛ $4.0 ✛ $$2.5)
$30.6Tr United States
$19.4Tr China
$ 2.5Tr Russia

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today, Rustem Umerov has already delivered an initial report on the work of the Ukrainian negotiating team in France.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2008844898816930142?s=20

Another session of talks with envoys of the President of the United States will take place, and this will already be the third such session in two days. We expect, in particular, that the most difficult issues from the basic framework for ending the war will be discussed – namely, issues related to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and territories. I also instructed the team to discuss possible formats for leader-level meetings between Ukraine, other European states, and the United States.

Ukraine does not shy away from the most difficult issues and will never be an obstacle to peace. Peace must be dignified. And this depends on the partners – on whether they ensure Russia’s real readiness to end the war. By the end of the day, I expect a detailed report from our negotiating team. Ukraine will be represented at today’s meetings by Rustem Umerov, Andrii Hnatov, Kyrylo Budanov, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Davyd Arakhamiia, and Oleksandr Bevz.

🧵 RT @BiankaB12 THE TYRANNY OF THE ARCTIC
So, Greenland is back in the news. ¤ I’ve been wondering why there hasn’t been some large scale industrial development over there, given that the geological map shows reserves for a lot of critical minerals. ¤ Then I did what I always do – started digging, and I educated myself on just how freaking hard it is to mine for resources in Greenland (and the Arctic in general).
📌 🌎 https://x.com/BiankaB12/status/2008940400275247309?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2008940400275247309.html

Infrastructure deficit.

The single biggest cost driver in Greenland is the lack of basic infrastructure. In most mining jurisdictions (like Australia or Canada), a mine can often connect to an existing power grid or road. That’s not the case with Greenland.

80% ice, no roads connecting towns in Greenland, every settlement is effectively an island.

There is no national power grid to plug into either, which means mines must build their own power plants, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to upfront capital expenditure.

Also, since mines are to be located located in remote wilderness, companies must construct full-service towns for their workers – housing, sanitation, you name it.
Extreme environment

The Arctic environment imposes strict limits on when and how work can be done, drastically increasing costs.

For starters, you can only work 3-4 months max before the darkness and extreme cold halt operations (or make them very expensive).

Shipping lanes are often frozen or clogged with icebergs for large parts of the year too.

And building heavy industrial processing plants on permafrost requires expensive, specialized engineering.
Human capital.

Greenland has a population of 57k – about the size of a single small town in the US or Europe.

There is physically not enough surplus labor to staff heavy industry. Modern mining requires highly specialized engineers, geologists, and heavy machinery operators. These workers need to be flown from Canada or Australia (as well as other countries with such expertise).

The cost for such labor + flying them in and out, accommodation, and the wages required to tempt workers to remote Arctic locations is pretty steep.
Now, I’m not saying: don’t extract the resources. I’m just explaining to myself (and others that may not know) why this hasn’t been done yet.

It’s difficult, expensive, and up until recently – unnecessary (since we used to get our REE from China).

So before shitting on DK or EU for not “doing enough” to develop Greenland, remember that…nobody did. Because it’s a fight against the most brutal conditions nature has to offer.

🐣 RT @igorbobic McConnell warns on Greenland: “Threats and intimidation by U.S. officials over American ownership of Greenland are as unseemly as they are counterproductive. And the use of force to seize the sovereign democratic territory of one of America’s most loyal and capable allies would be an especially catastrophic act of strategic self-harm to America and its global influence.”

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en President Macron: What today’s summit in Paris has changed is that, for the first time, there has been cooperation between Ukrainians, the Coalition of the Willing – that is, Europeans, Canadians, and others – and the Americans. And the Americans have said exactly what they are prepared to do, what they are prepared to support, and the solidarity they are prepared to show. ¤ They will be responsible for monitoring the ceasefire, which involves checking whether the border area is being violated or not. These operations will be conducted by the Americans after the peace deal is made.

🐣 RT @@McFaul Greenland is ALREADY part of NATO. We don’t need to annex it to use it for our defense purposes.

🐣 RT @cspan @RepTedLieu: “If any military member, including the generals on down…participate in the use of military force against Greenland without congressional authorization, they are following illegal orders.”

⭕ 6 Jan 2026

WSJ Editorial: Invade Greenland? Why? https://tinyurl.com/3c64f457 “Successful U.S. presidents don’t reduce America’s role in the world to might-makes-right. … Trump would help his own cause in every hemisphere if he dropped the invade-Greenland routine.”
// Trump can gain more access to the island without the bullying.
// Entire: “Successful U.S. presidents don’t reduce America’s role in the world to might-makes-right. Maybe the Greenland affair is merely what now passes for online MAGA entertainment. But Mr. Trump would help his own cause in every hemisphere if he dropped the invade-Greenland routine.”

🐣 RT @McFaul It is not OUR Hemisphere! ¤ After World War II, the world rightly agreed to end imperialism and colonialism. Putin is trying to revive it. Trump should not join him! And if he tries, Trump will fail, but at considerable costs to American security, property, and values abroad and unity at home.
⋙ 🐣 RT @StateDept [Jan 5] This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.
⋙⋙ 🐣 Fixed it, @StateDept!!
🖼 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2008800833518137741?s=20/photo/1
// “This is our MISTAKE!!”

🐣 RT @NatashaBertrand The White House says in new statement: “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region. The President and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option at the Commander in Chief’s disposal,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to CNN.

🐣 RT @YourAnonCentral The biggest takeaway from today’s coalition of willing meeting isn’t the so called peace plan Russia is going to reject, but that Germany, France, UK, and Ukraine are creating the groundwork for new European military alliance. That’s the real story.

🐣 RT @McFaul Trump is acting like a gangster emperor around the world right now. If he continues, this will end very badly for the American people. Emperors overreach, eventually weakening, bankrupting, and sometimes even destroying their homelands. That’s why there aren’t that many left today.

🐣 RT @adamscochran Hey @marcorubio, ¤ Threatening an ally with violence to force a sale, is not “pressure tactics” ¤ It’s called coercion.

It’s illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 373. ¤ As well as the UN Charter Article 2(4) – which is ratified by the US Senate, making it one of the few international laws that the US *IS* bound by domestically.

That means these “threats” would fall under a “high crime and misdemeanor” and be impeachable for you, the President, and everyone else involved.

⋙ 🐣 ⇈ RT @InsiderGeo NEW: According to the WSJ, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers the Trump administration’s Greenland threats are aimed at buying the island from Denmark, not preparing a military invasion. The White House is using pressure tactics to push negotiations.

🐣 RT @NBCNews Major European allies warn the United States that they would “not stop defending” the values of sovereignty and territorial integrity following President Trump’s threats against the Danish island of Greenland.

🐣 RT @DanishMFA FM @larsloekke: ”Security, stability, co-operation. These are the priorities of Nordic countries in the Arctic. Historically also for 🇺🇸 as a close ally of 🇩🇰. But needs to respect int. law and Greenland’s right to make decisions about its own future.”

🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine 🕯️ Dissident on Why Ukraine Is a Painful Question for Russia ¤ Dissident (a political prisoner of Soviet regime concentration camps) Opanas Zalyvakha:

“The question of Ukraine is painful for Russia, because without Ukraine, Russia loses 90% of the history that Russians have appropriated for themselves. They need to start thinking in a new way… ”

🐣 RT @RepDonBacon Greenland is a strong NATO ally willing to work with us to build more American bases and pursue mining agreements. Most in Greenland want to remain independent with Denmark & NATO providing protection. This approach is demeaning, creates distrust, and has no upside.
💽 https://x.com/RepDonBacon/status/2008722430903349297?s=20/photo/1

🐣 RT @benrileysmith Here is what Starmer and Macron have signed up to once a Ukrainian peace deal is struck. British troops on the ground in Ukraine. Military hubs set up in country. Promises to act if Russia attacks again. ¤ This is by far the most detailed readout to date on what the ‘coalition of the willing’ means in reality.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/benrileysmith/status/2008613858995225015?s=20/photo/1

1. Participation in a proposed US-led ceasefire monitoring and verification mechanism. There will be a continuous, reliable ceasefire monitoring system, including contributions from members of the Coalition of the Willing. The Coalition of the Willing will also be represented in the Special Commission that will be established to address any breaches, attribute responsibility, and determine remedies.

2. Support for the Armed Forces of Ukraine: The Coalition agreed to continue critical long term military assistance and armament to the Armed Forces of Ukraine to ensure their sustained capability, as they will remain the first line of defence and deterrence. This will include but not be limited to : long term defence packages ; support for financing the purchase of weapons; continued cooperation with Ukraine on its national budget to finance the armed forces; access to defence depots which can deliver rapid additional support in the case of a future armed attack; provision of practical and technical support to Ukraine in building defensive fortifications.

3. A Multinational Force for Ukraine made up from contributions from willing nations within the framework of the Coalition, to support the rebuilding of Ukraine’s armed forces and support deterrence. Coordinated military planning has been conducted to prepare for reassurance measures in the air, at sea and on land and for the regeneration of the armed forces of Ukraine. We confirmed that these reassurance measures should be strictly implemented at Ukraine’s request once a credible cessation of hostilities has taken place. These elements will be European-led, with the involvement also of non-European members of the Coalition, and the proposed support of the US.

4. Binding commitments to support Ukraine in the case of a future armed attack by Russia in order to restore peace. We agreed to finalise binding commitments setting out our approach to support Ukraine and to restore peace and security in the case of a future armed attack by Russia. These commitments may include the use of military capabilities, intelligence and logistical support, diplomatic initiatives, adoption of additional sanctions.

5. Commitment to deepen long-term defence cooperation with Ukraine. We agreed we would continue to develop and deepen mutually beneficial defence cooperation with Ukraine, inter alia: training, defence industrial joint production, including with the use of European relevant instruments, and intelligence cooperation.

✅ RT @ddale8 I counted at least 18 false claims in President Trump’s speech to House Republicans today. Here’s a quick fact check of some of the things he said. There’s a link at the bottom with more details. [CNN link:] https://tinyurl.com/mte77sfc
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ddale8/status/2008631495074656263?s=20/photo/1

– Washington, DC hasn’t had a murder “in seven months” (there have been dozens of murders in DC in the last seven months, including multiple murders within the last two weeks)

– DC is “now the safest city in the country” (not even close to true, though crime is down)

– He’s reducing prescription drug prices by “thousands of percent” (again: mathematically impossible)

– The House Jan. 6 committee failed to note that he used the words “peacefully and patriotically” in his speech before the riot (it did note he said that, though also correctly noted the rest of the speech was combative and filled with election lies)

– Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops (still zero evidence she was ever offered them, and the president, not the speaker, is in charge of the DC Guard anyway)

– Pelosi was caught on her daughter’s documentary footage admitting she turned down the National Guard troops that day and saying, “It’s my fault, I should’ve taken the soldiers” (Pelosi didn’t say that; she said she took responsibility for not “having them just prepare for more” at the Capitol, not that she turned down Guard troops, and added, “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”)

– Two 2024 Olympic gold medalists in women’s boxing were men who “transitioned” (both of the boxers who faced gender scrutiny were always female and always competed in women’s events)

– The 2020 election “was rigged” (he lost fair and square)

– He “won Minnesota” (he lost there three straight times) or would have without corrupt elections (nonsense)

– “We’re the only country that votes by mail, essentially” (dozens of countries use mail-in voting)

– In his 2019 call with Zelensky, he simply “told Ukraine not to cheat, and if you see any cheating, report it to the Attorney General of the United States” (he pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden and an election conspiracy theory)

– He was beating Biden “by 30 points” when Biden unfairly dropped out midway through the race (he had single-digit leads over Biden in most polls)

– There’s “$18 trillion” being invested in the US (this figure is fiction, nearly double the White House’s own wildly inflated $9.6 trillion figure)

– “Many stations” are now selling gas for $1.99 a gallon (“many” is too vague to call this flat false, but GasBuddy says about 650 out of 150,000 US gas stations it tracks, 0.43%, are below $2 today aside from special discounts)

– “Prisons from the Congo” were released into the US under Biden (both Congo countries and independent experts say this didn’t happen, and Trump’s team has never provided a shred of evidence)

– Last year’s Los Angeles wildfires were affected by California using some water to protect a fish species in the north of the state (California water experts have repeatedly explained those two things are completely unrelated)

– He inherited “the greatest inflation in history” (even peak Biden-era inflation of 9.1% in June 2022 was less than half the all-time high of 23.7%, and it then declined to 3.0% in January 2025, just a bit above where it is now)

– He achieved “no tax on Social Security” (he didn’t; his big bill created an additional deduction for people 65+, but many people 65+ and also recipients under 65 are continuing to paying tax on Social Security)

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa With the team of the US President – Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner – we continued discussing the diplomatic path to ending the war. …
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2008663417477816799?s=20

Thank you, America, for your willingness to provide backstop on all fronts: security guarantees, monitoring of the ceasefire, reconstruction.

On January 7 in Paris, our teams will continue work on security guarantees and the basic framework for ending the war. From Ukraine, the head of the Office Kyrylo Budanov, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Rustem Umerov, General Andriy Gnatov, the First Deputy Head of the Office Serhiy Kyslytsya, and the Advisor to the Office of the President Oleksandr Bevz will be working. Thank you to President Trump and the United States for their support. We are not losing a single day.

🐣 GDP:
$30.7Tr United States 🇺🇸
$37.9Tr EU ✛ UK ✛ Canada 🇪🇺🇬🇧🇨🇦
¤ https://x.com/other_europe/status/2008631337972863358?s=20

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Military officials from France, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine worked in detail on force deployment, …
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2008612362954129863?s=20/photo/1
// Coallition of the Willing group photo

… numbers, specific types of weapons, and the components of the Armed Forces required and able to operate effectively. We already have these necessary details. We understand which country is ready for what among all members of the Coalition of the Willing. I would like to thank every leader and every state that truly wishes to be part of a peaceful solution.

We had very substantive discussions with the American side on monitoring — to ensure there are no violations of peace. The United States is ready to work on this. One of the most critical elements is deterrence — the tools that will prevent any new Russian aggression. We see all of this.

🐣 📊 RT @neolatyno Just to be clear on what Greenlanders want:
🇺🇸: ❌
🇪🇺: ✅
◕ https://x.com/neolatyno/status/2008445548647403562?s=20/photo/1
// Poll: 85% No to US; 60% Yes to EU

🐣 RT @Mike_Pence On this fifth anniversary of January 6th, I wanted to pass along remarks I made about that fateful day at the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award ceremony last year.
💽 https://x.com/Mike_Pence/status/2008493748817125516?s=20/photo/1

I first spoke about the men and women in uniform- the true heroes that day; how I will always believe that, by God’s grace, I did my duty to see to the peaceful transfer of power under the Constitution and I expressed my heartfelt gratitude to the countless Americans of every background who have reached out with a word of encouragement these past five years.

January 6 was a tragic day but it became a triumph of freedom when, after Capitol Police quelled the violence, leaders in both chambers in both political parties reconvened the very same day and finished democracy’s work under the Constitution.

The Constitution is the common ground on which we stand. In these divided times, I believe more than ever that on that common ground we will forge a boundless future together and America’s best days are yet to come.

So Help Us God.

Mike Pence
January 6, 2026
Zionsville, Indiana

🐣 RT @jimsciutto NATO allies respond to U.S. threats to take Greenland:
¤ https://x.com/jimsciutto/status/2008529908897579492?s=20

Joint Statement on Greenland

6 January 2026

Statement by President Macron of France,
Chancellor Merz of Germany,
Prime Minister Meloni of Italy,
Prime Minister Tusk of Poland,
Prime Minister Sánchez of Spain,
Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom and
Prime Minister Frederiksen of Denmark on Greenland.

Arctic security remains a key priority for Europe and it is critical for international and transatlantic security.

NATO has made clear that the Arctic region is a priority and European Allies are stepping up. We and many other Allies have increased our presence, activities and investments, to keep the Arctic safe and to deter adversaries. The Kingdom of Denmark – including Greenland – is part of NATO.

Security in the Arctic must therefore be achieved collectively, in conjunction with NATO allies including the United States, by upholding the principles of the UN Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders. These are universal principles, and we will not stop defending them.

The United States is an essential partner in this endeavour, as a NATO ally and through the defence agreement between the Kingdom of Denmark and the United States of 1951.

Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.

⭕ 5 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed over 700 videos posted on social media. ¤ The network used five-year-old footage, mislabeled other dates and implied footage from elsewhere was in Portland
⋙ ProPublica: “Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops https://tinyurl.com/5cxbvdc2

NYT, Michelle Goldberg: Don’t Call It Regime Change. This Is Something Else Entirely. https://tinyurl.com/467n363s “For Donald Trump, the preservation of something close to the status quo makes sense, given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation”

🐣 RT @SenBillCassidy As a doctor who treated patients for decades, my top priority is protecting children and families. Multiple children have died or were hospitalized from measles, and South Carolina continues to face a growing outbreak. Two children have died in my state from whooping cough. All of this was preventable with safe and effective vaccines. ¤ The vaccine schedule IS NOT A MANDATE. It’s a recommendation giving parents the power. Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker.
⋙ 🐣 You are responsible for all this.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DrNeilStone Remember that time you voted to confirm a committed lifelong anti vaxxer as HHS Secretary?
⋙ 🐣 RT @WomenAreFedUp And it’s all your fault for appointing Kennedy to head the DHS.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TrumpsTaxes You could have stopped this. You knew he was lying to you. And yet you voted for him anyway because you wanted to win your primary for reelection. Now children will suffer and some may die. Was it worth it, Senator?

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today, I appointed Chrystia Freeland @cafreeland as an Advisor on Economic Development. Chrystia is highly skilled in these matters and has extensive experience in attracting investment and implementing economic transformations. Right now, Ukraine needs to strengthen its internal resilience – both for the sake of Ukraine’s recovery if diplomacy delivers results as swiftly as possible, and to reinforce our defense if, because of delays by our partners, it takes longer to bring this war to an end. I am grateful to everyone who is ready to support our state and our engagement with partners. Glory to Ukraine!
⋙ 🐣 She can neutralize Trump/Jared’s grubby asset-grabs
⋙ 🐣 RT @@RGBAtlantica Wise choice, she is highly skilled, intelligent, experienced in Russian war crimes and beat Trump’s ass in trade negotiations.

🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today, I appointed Chrystia Freeland @cafreeland as an Advisor on Economic Development. Chrystia is highly skilled in these matters and has extensive experience in attracting investment and implementing economic transformations. Right now, Ukraine needs to strengthen its internal resilience – both for the sake of Ukraine’s recovery if diplomacy delivers results as swiftly as possible, and to reinforce our defense if, because of delays by our partners, it takes longer to bring this war to an end. I am grateful to everyone who is ready to support our state and our engagement with partners. Glory to Ukraine!
⋙ 🐣 She can neutralize Trump/Jared’s grubby asset-grabs
⋙ 🐣 RT @@RGBAtlantica Wise choice, she is highly skilled, intelligent, experienced in Russian war crimes and beat Trump’s ass in trade negotiations.

🐣 RT @SimplyonWorld The former commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii @ZaluzhnyiUA, summarizes the bitter experiences of the war between Russia and Ukraine in ten core lessons that should serve as a survival manual.
¤ https://x.com/SimplyonWorld/status/2008194066182263285?s=20

His key insights include:
1.) The enemy’s goal is existential destruction, not mere conquest.
2.) Ukraine’s sovereignty depends primarily on its own strength and not just on external assistance.
3.) Internal unity is just as important as performance on the battlefield.
4.) The entire society must contribute to the war.
5.) Technology and information superiority are crucial.
6.) Asymmetric tactics favor the weaker but more agile side.
7.) Information warfare is as real as kinetic combat.
8.) Trust and decentralized command structures are strategic advantages.
9.) National resilience is a military resource.
10.) True victory means full sovereignty, security guarantees, justice, and reparations—not just a ceasefire.

📊 WaPo: We texted 1,000 Americans about U.S. actions in Venezuela https://tinyurl.com/2m2ewjyx
// 63% Should have gotten congress approval
// 94% People should decide their leadership

ZN[.]ua Why Zelensky appointed Budanov to the Office of the President (analysis) https://tinyurl.com/kwdc93sf

🧵 RT @Mylovanov Zelenskyy appoints former Canadian cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland as advisor on economic development. ¤ She’s a Ukrainian-Canadian who’s worked with Ukraine for decades and served at the top of Canadian government. 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2008133156067787063?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2008133156067787063.html

🐣 So in exchange for recognizing Denmark’s right to Greenland (current GDP $3.5B) the United States got the U.S. Virgin Islands (current GDP $5B).
⋙ 🐣 RT @BennyEngelbrech Today is a good day to remind ourselves on the US declaration on Greenland:

“DECLARATION.
In proceeding this day to the signature of the Convention respecting the cession of the Danish West-Indian Islands to the United States of America, the undersigned Secretary of State of the United States of America, duly authorized by his Government, has the honor to declare that the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.
Robert Lansing.
New York, August 4, 1916”

NYT: Ukraine: The Dawn of the AI Drone https://tinyurl.com/2872tph8 “In the past year, drone warfare in Ukraine has undergone a chilling transformation. This is the story of how the battlefield became the birthplace of a powerful new weapon.” //➔ The future of warfare in here.

⭕ 4 Jan 2026

WSJ: The Physicist Who Has Appealed to the Pope and Elon Musk on AI Safety https://tinyurl.com/43f9h755 “Max Tegmark wants to halt development of artificial superintelligence—and has Steve Bannon, Meghan Markle and will.i.am as supporters”

For more than a decade, Tegmark’s organization, the Future of Life Institute, had been trying to raise the alarm that advanced AI could be catastrophic to humanity. Shortly after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Future of Life Institute made a famous call for a pause in the most advanced AI development. ¤ Now, he was asking for something even more audacious: a potential halt in the race to build superintelligence that was powering the stock market.

🐣 Asked ChatGPT about Greenland:
¤ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/2008060620982087961?s=20

Bottom line
• Yes, Greenland is NATO-covered
• Yes, attacking it would mean attacking Denmark
• Yes, that would trigger Article 5 considerations
• Yes, today’s pushback significantly raises deterrence
• No, this is not a plausible near-term military scenario
What you’re seeing is coercive posturing, not a realistic war plan.

TheAtlantic, Michael Scherer: Trump Threatens Venezuela’s New Leader With a Fate Worse Than Maduro’s https://tinyurl.com/442ybe3v “The president told The Atlantic that Delcy Rodríguez needs to comply with U.S. wishes—or else.” And he again threatens Greenland.

🐣 RT @UkrReview 🇩🇰🇺🇸 Danish PM [Mette] Frederiksen: “It is completely pointless to talk about the US seizing Greenland. The US has no right to annex any of the three countries that make up the Danish Realm. ¤ Greenland and its people have made it clear they are not for sale and called on Washington to stop threatening a historically close ally and another people.”

⭕ 3 Jan 2026

WaPo, George F Will: Trump goes monster-hunting, untainted by a whiff of legality https://tinyurl.com/3pb386j7 Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” (“You break it, you own it”) comes to mind after U.S.’s seizing of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian “Z-bloggers” are very worried about Venezuela and oil prices:
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/2007435508767486395?s=20

“This is not f***ing funny, you underdeveloped idiots. Soon it won’t even be profitable for us to extract oil. In a couple of months we’ll starve to death. This is checkmate for the entire economy of the underdeveloped traitor Putin. May he die, a real bastard. A talentless, stinking piece of f***ot trash. This is a nightmare for us. They will drop the price of oil below the floor and take over the entire market. Now, on top of everything else, they’ll also have oil. This is a total f***ing disaster. And we’ll be left without internet, drowning in taxes, hugging our f***ing oil. The political leadership of our country needs to be killed. They are inherently insane. And they are traitors. They should be hanged. The Americans have just extended their existence for several more centuries, while ours will end in a month.”

🐣 RT @Acyn Reporter: You said Maduro is responsible for drug trafficking. You recently pardoned the former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking. Can you explain these situations?
Trump: He was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump. This was a man persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country. He was persecuted very unfairly.

🐣 RT @kaitlancollins John Bolton: “What I have to say, the most stunning part about the press conference was probably saying the U.S. was going to run the country. But the second most stunning was the assault on Mrs. Machado, the leader of the Democratic forces.”

TheAtlantic: The ‘America First’ President Takes On the World https://tinyurl.com/3tzmtb6w “Rubio said at the Mar-a-Lago press conference. ‘He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man.’” //➔ I only see one “wild man.”
// “Nicolás Maduro was plucked out of Caracas, but the more shocking news was that the White House plans to run Venezuela.”
// By Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef, Jonathan Lemire, Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Sarah Fitzpatrick

At the root of it all, Trump made clear, is oil, something that his critics had long claimed while the administration portrayed the months-long pressure campaign as principally about stopping the drug trade. Today, Trump didn’t hide his intent. The U.S. wants to revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry, with U.S. oil companies leading the charge, even though Venezuelan crude is heavy and hard to refine by international standards. That revenue, he added, would go to the Venezuelan people, and to the U.S., for what the administration has claimed is recompense for Venezuela’s nationalization of the industry years ago. Until recently, Trump had seemed open to a deal with Maduro that would achieve the same goal. But overnight, as explosions echoed over the hills of Caracas, Maduro’s time ran out.

“Nicolás Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this,” Rubio said at the Mar-a-Lago press conference. “He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man.” …

The role of Venezuela’s democratic opposition is also unknown. María Corina Machado, who secretly left Venezuela last month after a year in hiding to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, said in a statement today that “the time has come for Popular Sovereignty and National Sovereignty to govern our country. We are going to restore order, free political prisoners, build an exceptional nation, and bring our children home.

She urged Venezuelans inside the country to “be ready to take action.” Trump, however, said today at Mar-a-Lago that Machado couldn’t govern the country, because she doesn’t have “the support or the respect” of the Venezuelan people. Carlos Giménez, a Republican representative from South Florida, told us he assesses Machado’s capabilities differently, calling her “formidable.” He said that he spoke with her on Saturday, and described her as “upbeat that Maduro is no longer there, but realistic that there’s more work to be done, and that this is just the beginning.”…

NYT Editorial: Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise https://tinyurl.com/3dwp8y2k “The Constitution spells out what he must do: Go to Congress. Without congressional approval, his actions violate U.S. law.”

If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. The United States spent 20 years failing to create a stable government in Afghanistan and replaced a dictatorship in Libya with a fractured state. The tragic consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq continue to beset America and the Middle East. Perhaps most relevant, the United States has sporadically destabilized Latin American countries, including Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Nicaragua, by trying to oust a government through force.

Mr. Trump has not yet offered a coherent explanation for his actions in Venezuela. He is pushing our country toward an international crisis without valid reasons. If Mr. Trump wants to argue otherwise, the Constitution spells out what he must do: Go to Congress. Without congressional approval, his actions violate U.S. law.

The nominal rationale for the administration’s military adventurism is to destroy “narco-terrorists.” Governments throughout history have labeled the leaders of rival nations as terrorists, seeking to justify military incursions as policing operations. The claim is particularly ludicrous in this case, given that Venezuela is not a meaningful producer of fentanyl or the other drugs that have dominated the recent epidemic of overdoses in the United States, and the cocaine that it does produce flows mostly to Europe. While Mr. Trump has been attacking Venezuelan boats, he also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran a sprawling drug operation when he was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.

A more plausible explanation for the attacks on Venezuela may instead be found in Mr. Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy. It claimed the right to dominate Latin America: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” In what the document called the “Trump Corollary,” the administration vowed to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more U.S. troops around the region.

Venezuela has apparently become the first country subject to this latter-day imperialism, and it represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world. By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors. More immediately, he threatens to replicate the American hubris that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. …

In the case of Venezuela, a congressional debate would expose the thinness of Mr. Trump’s rationale. His administration has justified his attacks on the small boats by claiming they pose an immediate threat to the United States. But a wide range of legal and military experts reject the claim, and common sense refutes it, too. An attempt to smuggle drugs into the United States — if, in fact, all the boats were doing so — is not an attempt to overthrow the government or defeat its military.

We suspect Mr. Trump has refused to seek congressional approval for his actions partly because he knows that even some Republicans in Congress are deeply skeptical of the direction in which he is leading this country. Already, Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski and Representatives Don Bacon and Thomas Massie — Republicans all — have backed legislation that would limit Mr. Trump’s military actions against Venezuela.

A second argument against Mr. Trump’s attacks on Venezuela is that they violate international law. By blowing up the small boats that Mr. Trump says are smuggling drugs, he has killed people based on the mere suspicion that they have committed a crime and given them no chance to defend themselves. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and every subsequent major human rights treaty prohibit such extrajudicial killings. So does U.S. law. …

The potential for chaos in Venezuela seems much greater. Despite Mr. Maduro’s capture, the generals who have enabled his regime will not suddenly vanish. Nor are they likely to hand power to María Corina Machado, the opposition figure whose movement appears to have won the country’s most recent election and who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize last month.

Among the possible bad outcomes are a surge in violence by the left-wing Colombian military group the ELN, which has a foothold in Venezuela’s western area, or by the paramilitary groups known as “colectivos” that have operated on the periphery of power under the Maduro dictatorship. Further unrest in Venezuela could unsettle global energy and food markets and drive more migrants throughout the hemisphere. …

We will hold out hope that the current crisis will end less badly than we expect. We fear that the result of Mr. Trump’s adventurism is increased suffering for Venezuelans, rising regional instability and lasting damage for America’s interests around the world. We know that Mr. Trump’s warmongering violates the law.

🐣 RT @SkylineReport So let me get this straight. Trump blows a billion dollars on a military strike to kidnap Venezuela’s head of state, then immediately throws the elected government in the trash and props up a different figure who’s still embedded in the same Maduro power structure.
¤ https://x.com/SkylineReport/status/2007633449876615659?s=20

That’s not liberation. That’s regime-change cosplay. You wreck a country, swap the nameplate, keep the same insiders, and call it “freedom” while U.S. oil companies start circling like vultures.

No congressional authorization.
No international mandate.
No democratic legitimacy.

Just bombs, oil, and bullshit dressed up as “foreign policy.”

And let’s be clear: when you overthrow governments without consent, bypass the law, and loot resources under military occupation, you’re not defending democracy. You’re mirroring the corruption and authoritarianism you claim to oppose, with better PR and a bigger flag.

🐣 RT @nickreeves9876 Trump isn’t interested in democracy in Venezuela or the welfare of the Venezuelan people. He’s just the big crime gang boss violently taking over the territory of a smaller crime gang.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Trump on Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado:
“I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country…she doesn’t have the respect.”

NYT: Interim Leader Rejects US Intervention and Demands Maduro’s Return Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in after Nicolás Maduro was captured, denied that she planned to help the U.S. government run the country
// … despite President Trump’s earlier assertion that she was cooperative.

⭕ 2 Jan 2026

🐣 RT @nexta_tv What Western media are writing about Ukrainian intelligence chief Budanov, who is set to become the new head of the Presidential Office
¤ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2007104383570350208?s=20

📍 The New York Times: Budanov is one of the few Ukrainian officials personally trusted by the United States; his informal ties with U.S. intelligence agencies could be decisive in negotiations.

📍 Financial Times: A representative of the new generation of Ukraine’s wartime elite — without an oligarchic background, with direct contacts in the West and a high level of trust from partners.

📍 Politico: One of the few Ukrainian security officials seen in Washington as a clear and reliable interlocutor — a bridge between intelligence, the military and politics.

📍 Bloomberg: The head of Ukrainian intelligence with direct access to Western partners, whose role is increasingly moving beyond the military sphere and taking on political significance.

📍 The Economist: A cool-headed and pragmatic intelligence chief who thinks strategically and speaks a language Western allies understand.

📍 Associated Press: A key wartime figure who played a central role in Ukraine’s intelligence operations and is now moving toward broader political coordination.

📍 Reuters: One of the most influential people in Zelensky’s inner circle, whose weight comes from control over intelligence, security decisions and contacts with the West.

📍 Welt: Appointing an intelligence chief to a key political position signals a shift in Ukraine’s power focus toward security, war and negotiations.

It is also worth noting that Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) and Kyrylo Budanov specifically maintain contacts with Russians within the framework of prisoner-of-war exchanges.

This makes him a potentially key figure not only for dialogue with the United States, but also for possible contacts with the Russian side.

🐣 RT @ChiefDI_Ukraine [Budanov:] I have accepted the proposal of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to head the Office of the President. I will continue to serve Ukraine.…

WSJ Editorial: Another Trump Tariff Retreat https://tinyurl.com/4a626c25 “Rarely has a President worked so hard to cover the damage from his policies without admitting it.… The retreat is another in a string of policy reversals to mute the tariff harm to American consumers”
// This time it’s a delay for a year on higher taxes on upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets.

⭕ 1 Jan 2026 ⌛️🎉🫧🥂👶🧚🫧🍭⏳

🐣 RT @NSTRIKE01 🇺🇦 Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
¤ https://x.com/NSTRIKE01/status/2006633265935912972?s=20

📌 “Ukraine wants peace, but not at any cost. We want the end of the war, not the end of Ukraine. ¤ Are we tired? Extremely. Does that mean we are ready to surrender? Anyone who thinks so is deeply mistaken.”

📌 “A Budapest-style piece of worthless paper will not satisfy Ukraine; Ukraine does not need another Minsk-style trap, meticulously prepared for the future.”

📌 “Signing weak agreements only reignites war. My signature will only go on a strong agreement.”

📌 “When Putin says: ‘We have no intention of attacking you,’ this is the first warning of exactly where his tanks will roll and where his drones will fly. ¤ Today, we have every right to say directly: Ukraine is the only shield protecting Europe’s comfortable life from the ‘Russian world’.”

📌 “Why has the war not ended yet? The answer is right there — next to our state.”
[Referring to Russia as the neighboring aggressor.]

📌 “They tell us — leave Donbas and everything will end. That is a lie.
My signature will only be on a strong agreement. Only one where peace is guaranteed for many years.”

📌 “Ukrainians must approve this peace”
[(Likely meaning that a referendum will be needed to ratify any peace agreement.)]

📌 “It is a pride — to be the president of a country like Ukraine.”

🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA VERY BIG TOP NEWS TODAY 🔝
¤ https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2006821405120151921?s=20

💥 BAVOVNA at Ilsk Refinery and Rovenki oil depot.

🇩🇪 Two Patriot air defense systems arrived in Ukraine from Germany, – MoD

💥 TOR and radar of the S-350 Vityaz air defense system destroyed.

🇩🇪 We are seeing more and more clearly that Russia’s actions were and remain part of a plan aimed at the whole of Europe. 2026 could be decisive, — Merz

🇺🇸 The Economist/YouGov: 49% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s actions regarding Russia’s war against Ukraine.

🇹🇷 We talked about the progress of peace processes and the security situation: Umerov on the meeting with Hakan Fidan.

🤯 The failure of the Russian special services – commander of RVC Denis Kapustin is alive, and the half a million dollars received for his liquidation will strengthen GUR.

🇪🇺 Ukrainians in the EU can use mobile communications and the Internet at home rates without surcharges.

🇫🇷 On January 6 in Paris, many European states and allies will make concrete commitments to defend Ukraine and ensure a just peace on our continent, – Macron.

🔥 Almetyevskaya oil preparation facility in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia was hit.

💥In the Donetsk city area, a storage warehouse for UAVs of the Shahed/Geran type was hit.

🔥 Tor-M2 anti-aircraft missile system was hit near Shevchenko.

💥 In Ilovaisk, a fuel and lubricants warehouse of the 51st enemy army was hit.

🔥 In Avdiivka, a command and observation post of the assault detachment of the 68th tank regiment of the 150th motorized rifle division was hit.

😎 SBS hit AL KASTA-2E2, RLP AE Hvardiyske, Balashivka air base, TOR SAM system.

🔥 Two enemy concentration points and fuel and ammunition depot from the 69th MSD and the 283rd MSP rebase (Valuyki, Belgorod region)

🇺🇦 Zelensky: Ukraine is the only shield that separates Europe’s comfortable way of life from the Russian world.

🇺🇸🇪🇺 Zelensky: Intentions must become security guarantees and therefore be ratified—by the U.S. Congress, by European parliaments, by all partners.

‼️ Zelensky: Withdraw from Donbas, and everything will be over—this is what deception sounds like when translated from Russian.

🇺🇸 U.S. national-security officials said that Ukraine didn’t target Putin or one of his residences in a recent drone strike, – WSJ

🐣 “If the world continues to treat Russia as a power ‘naturally’ destined to be imperial, it will continue to produce monsters.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @marsetac [tr] Every time Russia enters a systemic crisis, the West makes the same mistake. That of confusing the collapse of the State with the transformation of society.
¤ https://x.com/marsetac/status/2006650982873149702?s=20

🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Ukraine’s Third Army Corps deployed a ground robot armed with a 12.7mm Browning machine gun to hold a frontline position for 45 consecutive days. Operated remotely and equipped with thermal vision, it repelled Russian assaults without a single Ukrainian casualty. … Read more in our Frontline report: https://tinyurl.com/3j8mzcub
¤ 🌎 https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2006812174539239865?s=20/photo/1

On the same front, Russian soldiers are attacking on horseback.

Footage from the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade at Pokrovsk shows Russian troops advancing on horses – a tactic not seen on European battlefields for over a century. Ukrainian drone operators, caught off guard at first, soon devised a method: buzz the horses to throw their riders, then neutralize the dismounted soldiers while sparing the animals.

The cavalry isn’t symbolic. Russian vehicle and armor losses have grown so severe that even units on the most contested front are resorting to horses to move troops forward.

Ukraine has authorized over 40 domestically produced ground drone models for use this year and recruited 10,000 new drone operators in under a month. Russia is sending men on horses against machines with thermal sensors.

‼️ 🐣 RT @HoansSolo Russia’s war machine is devouring its own men: a leak of more than 6,000 confidential complaints shows commanders beating, torturing and “zeroing out” inconvenient soldiers — sending them on sure-death missions or killing them outright, then hiding the bodies with pits, secret burials or antitank mines. Gravely wounded and sick men are forced back to Ukraine’s front with broken limbs, severe head trauma, Stage 4 cancer, schizophrenia, stroke complications, even when they can’t hold a spoon or walk without a cane or crutches; ex-POWs are thrown back into combat within days of release, and mobilized men are told they have “no rights to discharge — or even to live at all.”
⋙ 🐣 Russia missed out on the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment – except for some of the court and nobility, but they were eliminated by the communists. They have little concern for human rights and have reverted to a primitive and feudal barbarism.

🐣 RT @StratcomCentre Major failure for Russian intelligence, after Russians paid $500,000 for the assassination of Denis Kapustin of Ukraine’s Russian Volunteer Corps, only to discover that Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) was watching all along, saving the Commander as well as securing the funds that will now go toward further operations. […]
¤ https://x.com/StratcomCentre/status/2006716802898813101?s=20

🐣 RT @WW3finalboss1 Russia is COLLAPSING and the RUSSIANS KNOW IT ¤ 🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺
¤ https://x.com/WW3finalboss1/status/2006806883626082723?s=20

Russian retired general Leonid Ivashov, after watching Putin’s New Year address, showed a clear understanding of Russia’s situation: “Listen, I am a professor, a general, and a geopolitical researcher with decades of experience. I watched this four-hour show and saw neither a leader, nor a commander, nor a defender of the people. I saw only a man living in a fairy tale while the rest of the country struggles to survive on 16,000 rubles a month.”

Ivashov opposed the invasion of Ukraine from the beginning and, in this interview, once again stressed his disagreement with current events in Russia. Here are some of his other notable statements:

“Even before the so-called ‘special military operation,’ I warned about the consequences. The last four years have confirmed the accuracy and seriousness of those assessments.”

“We have not achieved a single success at the tactical or operational level, and at the strategic level we have suffered defeat on ALL fronts.”

“All branches of industry have been destroyed.”

“Science is in critical condition, and education has completely collapsed.”

“Rising prices are an alarming signal: the Russian people are becoming poorer and poorer.”

“Healthcare is in ruins. All regions are cutting spending on medicine.”

“The quality of food is deteriorating; palm oil is everywhere; food in Russia is becoming toxic.”

“The only area in which Russia is a ‘leader’ in the world is demographic indicators. We lead in the rate of DISAPPEARANCE. Even without the war — and the war only accelerates — the number of men is rapidly declining.”

“We are left only with allies such as North Korea and Belarus, but they cannot help us: they can only drain our finances — and our finances are being exhausted.”

“I worked with the Chinese for many years, and China is not our ally; that is a Kremlin invention and propaganda.”

“A strategic failure (in the war with Ukraine) could very well lead to the collapse of Russia.”