I’ve said it before, but the amount of terrible shit that’s going to come out about this administration will make our heads spin. And that’s considering the amount of bad shit that’s *already* known.

Israel has been dumping herbicides throughout southern Lebanon as part of a concerted ecocide campaign to render the region uninhabitable. This has been going on for months with Lebanese journalists & environmentalists regularly reporting on it. The BBC: we don’t know why the Israelis are doing it

How about $350,000 within hours? The pitches flood small businesses: "No hidden fees, No BS." These financial lifelines are barely regulated and can turn into trip wires.

Hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software, Persona. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet, and that was just the beginning. www.therage.co/persona-age-...

"The defendants pretended to represent their victims in sham court and other immigration proceedings, by impersonating immigration judges, lawyers and officials." DOJ says when one victim learned the law firm was fake, the group unleashed “threats of deportation and demands for additional payment”.

I would make people so mad in the 00s asking for practical measures showing the value of this spending. glog.glennf.com/blog/?catego...

Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel. “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”

👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics. "It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

Democrats can now credibly call for the repeal of the Trump tax cuts and the clawing back of the additional ICE funding as a way of offsetting the revenue loss from the ending of the illegal tariffs.

Even though the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariffs are illegal, the criminal intent behind them hasn’t changed. Scott Bessent said, in so many words, that the theft of the American people will continue. As for the money already stolen, he said: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see it.”

New Brunswick, NJ just canceled plans for a colossal AI data center after massive pushback from the community. That's a huge win for people power. AI data centers are sucking up communities’ utilities AND draining state resources — while enriching Big Tech CEOs.

The Supreme Court ruling has helped the family of one man in particular: the architect of Trump’s tariffs himself. A firm headed by Lutnick’s sons was allowing its traders to purchase the rights to hundreds of millions of dollars of refunds in the event tariffs were struck down. trib.al/JcwQ9MT

For the record we were five minutes into recording Serious Trouble when the tariff decision dropped. So we were able to stop, read it, and include it. This reflects God’s favor for our podcast and now nothing will disrupt our taping.

This agreement allows DHS agencies like CBP & ICE to essentially skip the competitive bidding process. Palantir's software is considered dangerous primarily because its technology facilitates mass surveillance & enables targeting which erodes civil liberties. Gift link => archive.ph/1yX5v

Relatedly, days before DHS released the files that revealed DHS was behind this killing, Todd Lyons boasted that ICE had opened a whopping 37 use of force investigations, when the number of incidents must be well over 400. emptywheel.net/todd-lyons-b...

Hmm. The US is giving $10 billion in taxpayer dollars, not appropriated by Congress, to a fake board set up by the President and which he put himself in charge of *for life*... seems very, very illegal.

Grift all the way down

look at my country man, we’re getting out-No Kings’d by the fuckin’ british

Yes, but if the Council of Nicaea *had* been overseen by an English unitary authority with a directly-elected mayor, I reckon we’d have more consistent dates for Easter. The movable feast thing plays havoc with the bin collection timetables.

Any Republican or Democrat who continues to support Palantir, takes money from them, or refuses to hold them accountable is not your friend and should not be supported.

Elon posted this yesterday. Just for fun I did it with my before/after cancer PET scans that I had already posted online. In the "before" scan Grok missed the massive tumor lighting up my liver, and in both scans it flagged a non-existent "area of concern" in my chest. Other than that, works great!

It's neat that there is a Republican primary election in Texas between a guy who had an affair with his staffer who then committed suicide and a guy who has expressed opinions sympathetic to the white supremacist Rhodesian colonialists and called the Civil War the "war of northern aggression"

A very detailed explanation of how FBI bamboozled a magistrate into authorizing a raid on Fulton County’s election offices by omitting critical information that would have totally undermined any probable cause claim. Pretty clear-cut case of calculated deception of the courts.

NEW: Rather than turn former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández over to immigration officials when he was released from prison less than four years into a 45-year sentence, the Trump administration paid to transport him 350 miles to a posh NYC hotel. By @keribla.bsky.social

1000%

The current person in charge of ICE's procurement for detention is a GEO Group executive who ran the company's immigration detention portfolio. He was granted an "ethics waiver" from DHS allowing him to hand out contracts to GEO in his new role.

they raided the child prison to confiscate letters from the children i just what are we doing here

DHS is holding a 2-month-old BABY at a detention facility in Texas. Last night, Juan Nicolás was rushed to the hospital after choking on his own vomit & being unable to breathe. This demands accountability — not a blank check for more cruelty.

Hey JD Vance, is this a violent criminal?

Pro-Trump white supremacist with "SS" tattoo who shot and killed family members, is being painted as example of "trans terrorist" by far-Right due to their gender identity. Comments in support of William Pierce, author of 'The Turner Diaries,' implies shooter was active neo-Nazi for decades.

BREAKING: I read the new version of the “Save America Act” (S. 1383) so u don’t have to. Here’s my summary. Point 1 is new. It requires that all 50 states send their voter rolls to the DHS to run thru DHS’s faulty “SAVE” voter purge program. Points 6 & 7 are new too. Tell ur Senators #NoOnSAVE 1/

Not sure if he is signaling to Nazis or he’s this stupid.

What would normally be presidency-ending scandals not even a blip on the radar Daily

How is it possible that Kristi Noem still has this job. Imagine if you’re a family member or a shipmate of this guardsman. www.nbcnews.com/politics/imm...

Imagine that. The “SAVE” America is here to save Trump, not America. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Blue Owl’s investment in Stargate Abilene means it gets paid a fee DURING CONSTRUCTION, and relieves them of any responsibility for finishing the data center if Crusoe goes bankrupt. Oracle waived all rights to cancel the lease. Does this even get built? www.theinformation.com/articles/blu...

Measles is a bellwether. Because it’s the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, when vaccination rates drop, it’s the first to start spreading. Now we’ve got mumps rolling up. Expect more. This is just the beginning of RFK Jr.’s successful infectious disease reintroduction plan.

John Boorman is 93. This anecdote about him & Lee Marvin has quite the punchline.

The fleecing of America continues. "Trump administration deported some migrants at a cost of $1 million each, Democratic report says." www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/p...

This is by far the most cartoonish politics has been in my lifetime. Extremely kind & decent people vs. the absolute dregs of humanity. It continues to baffle me that this is not equally clear to the whole country.

This is the most desperate thing I’ve ever seen a CEO do in response to a competitor announcing good news. The world’s richest and yet its most pathetic CEO.

Dr. Kirk Moore did not deny giving fake COVID-19 vaccine cards and throwing out vaccine doses. “All that stuff is true,” he told @sltrib.com and ProPublica. He also repeatedly made the unfounded claim that the vaccines were “bioweapons.” (Published Dec. 2025)

DOGE allegedly used ChatGPT to identify 1,400 NEH grants it said were DEI. Grants were terminated April 2025, according to a court filing. E.g. Film: 1873 Colfax massacre Film: first female pilots flying for U.S. military in WWII Film: “Untold Story of Jewish Women Slave Labor in the Holocaust"

The Project 2025 author is using millions of dollars in USAID money for his own security detail. It is estimated that 762,000 people have *already died* as a result of Elon Musk and Russell Vought’s obscene murder of USAID, including more than 500,000 children. Vought is a mass murderer.

“.. using millions of dollars from the former U.S. foreign aid agency to pay for the security detail of Russell Vought ..” @reuters.com www.reuters.com/world/us/whi...

In other words, long enough that habeas petitions can be filed on their behalf in Minnesota before they're whisked off to an immigration detention facility somewhere in the Fifth Circuit (where, under that court's current law, they wouldn't be eligible for a bond hearing).

Howard Lutnick misled the American people about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein because he didn't want to admit he continued interacting with Epstein even AFTER Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor.   It's a disgrace. Lutnick needs to resign as Secretary of Commerce.

U.S. consumers and businesses footed 95 percent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs between January and August of last year.

Swarms of bots linked to IP addresses in Lanzhou, China are absolutely flooding the internet. An absolutely fascinating story from our Made in China newsletter this week, by @zeyiyang.bsky.social