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Why do the babies starve
When there’s enough food to feed the world?
Why when there are so many of us
Are there people still alone?
Why are the missiles called Peacekeepers
When they’re aimed to kill?
Why is a woman still not safe
When she’s in her home?

Love is hate
War is peace
No is yes
And we’re all free

  • Zelensky’s five moves that set off Trump

  • Trump envoy calls Zelensky a ‘courageous leader’ after days of criticism from White House
  • Paranoia and Personal Grudges Explain Trump’s Turn on Ukraine
    The president’s beef with Volodomyr Zelenksy goes back to the ‘perfect phone call’ of 2019.

  • US says it will drop immigration case against SpaceX

    The Justice Department in August 2023 filed an administrative complaint alleging SpaceX from 2018 to 2022 routinely discouraged asylum recipients and refugees from applying for jobs and refused to consider them.

  • Why Is the DOJ Pretending Like Elon Musk Isn’t in Charge of DOGE?
  • How Vladimir Putin plans to play Donald Trump
    The Russian president thinks he is the better poker player

    Such vulnerabilities mean some in the West believe this is the worst possible time for America to be floating rapid concessions to the Kremlin. Even if the West cannot grant Ukraine ironclad security guarantees, it could maintain sanctions in order to hold Russia at bay, argues Mr Rogov. Yet Mr Trump is focused on keeping his promise to end the war quickly, not on constraining and deterring Russia for years. “We are finally getting Putin into the position where we wanted him to be for three years. It would be a terrible shame if we allow him to snatch victory from the teeth of defeat,” says an American official.

    Mr Putin believes Mr Trump is not just impatient, but open to manipulation, and he is playing him like a fiddle.

  • Dear Republicans: We get it. You all saw what he did to Liz Cheney, and you don’t want that to happen to you.
  • Social Security sending out checks to millions of dead people? It’s not just false. It’s absurd
    Elon Musk’s easily disprovable misrepresentation of a table of numbers threatens to erode confidence in one of the most reliable programs we have.

  • Trump Just Proclaimed Himself King and Above All Laws & Musk Fires Nuclear Workers, Then Realizes They’re Crucial to America’s Safety

    When Robbins tried to rehire the NNSA staff, she was unable to locate some and others said they were weighing whether or not they wanted to return to such a chaotic agency run by unstable leaders.

    Deputy division director Rob Plonski posted, “This is a pivotal moment. We must decide whether we are truly committed to leading on the world stage or if we are content with undermining the very systems that secure our nation’s future.”

  • AOC shows how to fight back and stand strong
    Other Democrats, from Schumer to Hochul, should follow her lead.

    AOC’s video — a fairly straightforward exercise in constituent services — enraged Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar/thug, who rushed to Fox News to threaten her with prosecution.

    Homan’s effort to use the power of the federal government to intimidate and silence political opponents is both dangerous and par for the course for the Trump administration. But it also demonstrates MAGA’s weakness.

  • Melania Trump’s Astonishing Verdict on Her Husband Revealed in Bombshell Book

    But the focus on Melania is likely to raise most eyebrows in the White House. Wolff writes that during the campaign Trump never acknowledged that, “the most public marriage in the nation was breaking down,” even though it appeared to be doing so in public.

    Wolff claims that Trump’s staff didn’t even know where Melania lived.

  • Undaunted: Courage is Contagious
    This week, The Contrarian honors Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear

  • DOGE Sparks Surveillance Fear Across the US Government
    The US government has increased the use of monitoring tools over the past decade. But President Donald Trump’s employee purges are making workers worry about how their data could be abused.
    …But the most eerie thing about the emails, which Bernier says began arriving after he filed an official charge accusing the Trump administration of violating his union’s collective bargaining agreement, is that they included personal details about his life—some of which he believes might have come from surveillance of his work laptop. The author referenced Bernier’s union activities, nickname, job, travel details, and even the green notebook he regularly uses. The most recent email implied that his computer was loaded with spyware. “Andy’s crusade, like so many before it, had been doomed from the start,” one email stated. “The real tragedy wasn’t his failure—it was his belief that the fight had ever been real.”

  • A visit from Lee Goodman

    “I walked around downtown Chicago today. I was wearing a replica of the uniform that prisoners in Nazi concentration camps wore during WWII. The bright blue triangle on my jacket is what migrants in concentration camps were forced to wear. Jews wore yellow patches, homosexuals wore pink, and other groups had their own colors.”I put on the uniform because Trump has begun rounding up migrants and deporting them, as he promised to do. He also promised to imprison large numbers of migrants in concentration camps. Because today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it seemed a good time to caution people about the direction our country is headed.”

    The Liberation of Auschwitz

  • Inside DOGE’s Dumbest Cut Yet
    Last week’s hastily reversed firings at the National Nuclear Security Administration have left a reeling, rattled agency in their wake.
    …one of the officials who was locked out of his work accounts was Acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency.

    Todd did not respond to a request for comment. But he wasn’t the only mission-critical employee swept up in the purge.

  • “Recoup the costs”
    The sadism of American policy to war-torn Ukraine
    The premise of American foreign policy to Ukraine, today, is one of grievance. As the American president, vice-president, and national security advisor constantly repeat, Ukraine, the victim of a large-scale and criminal Russian invasion, must “recoup the costs” to the US taxpayer for aid received under the Biden administration.

    It is worth patiently considering this proposition. It reveals little about Ukraine, but much about America in February 2025.

  • The Private Sector Can’t Fix What’s Wrong With America
    “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” read a line from an email sent to federal employees from the United States Office of Personnel Management in late January.

    The strategy of imploring Americans to “ask not what the private sector can do for you” is a deeply ironic one for the Trump administration to pursue. After all, the wealth inherited by the president came in large part on the back of federal housing subsidies. More directly, as Rogé Karma recently noted in The Atlantic, the single biggest success of President Trump’s first term came by way of the long-serving experts and career bureaucrats who helped turn Operation Warp Speed from an abstract idea into a historic, life-saving development during the pandemic. “The idea for the program,” Karma wrote, “came from Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Marks, an FDA official—two seasoned public-health experts who had served in top government roles for years before Trump took office.”

  • Alabama Tried a Trump-Like ‘Frankenstein’ Immigration Overhaul. It Ended Badly.
    The 2011 law provides some warning signs for MAGA.

    Local Republicans, elected officials, and law enforcement who had to deal with the realities of HB 56 turned against it long ago—a change of heart that could serve as a warning to MAGA acolytes following Trump and Stephen Miller into enforcement oblivion.

  • Pushback
    Nationwide protests, overflowing town halls, and Republican cold feet indicate that Trump’s aggressive actions are finally facing a public reckoning.

    A wave of personal stories, both narrative and in video form, has flooded social media. Fired federal workers are telling their stories and dominating the public narrative. And that is having an effect, even upon some of Trump’s closest allies.

    Jesse Watters of the Fox Network surprised his co-hosts when he complained that a friend, who was a long-serving veteran, was now afraid for his federal job.

    On Wednesday’s episode of popular show called “The Five,” Watters spoke about a 20-year military veteran whom Watters had first met at a shooting event.

    Watters described him as “one of the guys who has killed a lot of bad guys. Put his life on the line. He punched out after 20 years of working for the Pentagon. And he’s only been there a few months, so his probationary period, he just found out he’s probably going to get laid off.”

  • Stimulus Checks and Partisan Dishonesty
    …Those were apparently innocuous, but Trump and his economists blamed the third round of stimulus checks, those distributed by democrats in the spring of 2021, for helping to fuel the worst spike in inflation in four decades.

  • Fox News And Newsmax Among News Outlets Urging White House To Lift Ban On Associated Press Over Continued References To “Gulf of Mexico”
  • Elon Musk’s private security detail gets deputized by US Marshals Service
  • Georgia Republican faces town hall backlash over DOGE’s ‘chainsaw approach’ to federal cuts
  • House Republicans representing large shares of Medicaid, SNAP beneficiaries face tough budget test
  • ‘Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us’
    …“I would argue that every job at the FAA right now is safety critical,” said Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant who was a longtime official at both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates accidents. These cuts “certainly [are] not going to improve safety — it can only increase the risk,” he said.

    One of the people let go last week worked as an aeronautical information specialist, a member of a team of 12 just outside of Washington whose job is to create air maps or “highways in the sky,” the preplanned routes that pilots and controllers use to guide airplanes.

    “Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us,” the former employee said in an interview Wednesday.

  • Forever and forgotten wars
    U.S. sanctions hit Rwandan leaders backing rebels fighting in Congo, but the foreign aid cutoff worsens the civilian toll

    Don Bosco IDP camp in Goma had 28,000 people residing there the day I visited last year. Goma is a city of 2-3 million that’s the capital of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province. Don Bosco is what aid workers call a spontaneous camp, started by homeless war victims in late 2022 who reached the city for protection. It had 4,000 people one day, and tens of thousands nearly the next, as M23 rebels fought their way through Congolese villages to the north, taking territory and rekindling fear by raping women and plundering farming areas.

  • He Took Musk’s Resignation Offer. He Was Fired Anyway.
    Scott Curtis had a leadership role in a critical agency until being kicked “to the curb” by Trump and Musk. Only after this article was published was he rehired.

  • Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.
  • Steve Martin blames ‘SNL 50th COVID curse’ after Martin Short and Maya Rudolph test positive
    The diagnosis of his “Only Murders in the Building” co-star has forced the postponement of shows on the duo’s comedy tour, Martin said.

  • The Democracy Index

    North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about ‘credible death threats’ when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon.”

    Take the new initiative by Ed Martin, the interim and nominee for U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. Martin, who personally represented Jan. 6 defendants, sent a series of letters to Democratic members of Congress threatening federal prosecution for their criticisms of Trump allies like Elon Musk.

    After Trump and Musk attacked judges ruling against the Trump Administration, including Musk’s call for them to be impeached, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (WI) filed articles of impeachment on Thursday against the federal judge who blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury information. Other Republican congressmen have threatened to do the same.

  • The GSA is shutting down its EV chargers, calling them ‘not mission critical’
    The agency in charge of managing buildings owned by the federal government has begun the process of taking hundreds of EV charging stations out of service.

  • Some Cybertruck Owners Say Their Trucks Are Shedding Body Panels; One Thinks He Knows Why
    A Tesla owner who wraps the vehicles for a living has come up with a hypothesis as to why his truck lost a piece of its bodywork at speed.

  • We’ll Soon Find Out How Much Permanent Damage Trump Can Do

    It’s the House that will decide the fate of Trump’s legislative ambitions. Republicans have their smallest majority there since 1931, and Speaker Mike Johnson may only be able to spare a single vote.

  • If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it?
    If you’ve gotten cash from an ATM, you’ve interacted with a COBOL-based system. Here’s why this old programming language will probably outlive us all.

    COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, was developed in the 1950s and has become a critical component of the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) IT infrastructure. The SSA maintains over 60 million lines of COBOL code, which powers its core business functions, including processing retirement and disability claims.

    COBOL, you see, may be old, but it’s far from dead. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), numerous vital government systems still rely on legacy software and hardware. Some of these systems are more than 50 years old.

    These archaic systems include ones for the Department of Education for tracking students; the Department of Health and Human Services’ clinical and patient administration; and Medicare & Medicaid Services still uses COBOL-based systems for critical operations.

    Last but not least, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) still uses COBOL for some of its critical systems. Altogether, the IRS still relies on approximately 160 COBOL applications. At the IRS’s heart is every taxpayer’s Individual Master File (IMF). This is written not just in COBOL but in IBM Assembler as well. This is, in no way, shape, or form, easy code to work with.

    The Department of Defense’s computerized contract-management system, Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), is still with us after almost 67 years of service. That’s even older than the official release of COBOL itself. MOCAS was written in beta COBOL.

    In theory, the IMF was to be replaced by 2028. That was before DOGE cut 6,000 IRS employees out of the government agency’s approximately 82,990 employees.

  • RFK Jr. Adviser: Kennedy ‘Not Concerned With Measles’
    Caring about measles is too woke, according to RFK Jr. adviser Calley Means.

  • Are white Afrikaners at risk in South Africa? Not really, most say
    As Trump offers to take in Afrikaner refugees, many say right-wing lobbyists have spread misinformation and fear.

  • Trump Plans to Use Military Sites Across the Country to Detain Undocumented Immigrants
    The move would be a drastic escalation by the White House to militarize immigration enforcement.

  • Elon Musk’s DOGE reportedly cuts staff at agency that regulates Elon Musk’s Tesla
    Half of a small team overseeing self-driving car safety is said to have been turfed out.

  • RFK Jr. promptly cancels vaccine advisory meeting, pulls flu shot campaign
    Kennedy is reportedly planning to remove agency vaccine advisers, too.

    Just days after anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the country’s top health official, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already pulled back some of its efforts to protect Americans with safe, lifesaving vaccines. The agency has indefinitely postponed a public meeting of its vaccine advisory committee and killed a campaign promoting seasonal flu shots.

  • The Trumpland Diary – February 18

    Nawfal then tweets out to his 44 million followers: “DOGE investigations reveal mysterious Defense Department payments to Reuters for “large scale social deception” project between 2018-2022.”

    Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC is a cyber security firm that was contracted by the DOD to provide cyber DEFENSE AGAINST “large scale social deception.”

    This contract DOGE “uncovered” doesn’t involve in any way the media outlet they’re naming. They got confused because 2 different companies have the same name. And the actual contract they’re freaking out about does the exact OPPOSITE of what they’re claiming it does.

    Aren’t we all so lucky to have DOGE uncovering all this “waste, fraud, and abuse?”

  • DOGE Put Him in the Treasury Department. His Company Has Federal Contracts Worth Millions
    Experts say the conflicts posed by Tom Krause’s dual roles are unprecedented in the modern era.

    The Department of Treasury internally announced that Tom Krause had been appointed its fiscal assistant secretary, but that he would simultaneously continue his job as CEO of the company Cloud Software Group.

    Krause is now in charge of both a sensitive government payment system and a company that has millions of dollars worth of active contracts with various federal agencies through distribution partners, according to a WIRED review of searchable spending records. The Department of Treasury alone accounts for a dozen ongoing contracts tied to Krause’s company that are together valued between $7.3 million to $11.8 million.

  • Don’t Purge the Generals
    History shows that political firings of military officers endanger national security.

  • Elon Musk’s AI said he and Trump deserve the death penalty
    xAI’s head of engineering said the ‘really terrible’ response has been fixed.

  • DOGE’s Only Public Ledger Is Riddled With Mistakes
    The figures from Elon Musk’s team of outsiders represent billions in government cuts. They are also full of accounting errors, outdated data and other miscalculations.

  • My Open Letter to Elon Musk
  • New Bat Coronavirus Capable Of Infecting Humans Discovered In China