It looks like Trump is about to drop bombs in Iran for no sane reason, except that soon as the missiles and bombs fly, Americans will rally ’round the president. Retaliation is entirely possible/likely, and could spread throughout the region, or the world. Many people will die, and many of the survivors will hate America, with good reason, and a few of them will seek vengeance, in the style of 9/11/2001, and then America’s leadership will ask, “Why do they hate us?”

And also, the spirit of Judith Miller still works at the New York Times — notice that the nation’s paper-of-record doesn’t even slightly question the Trump regime’s claims of an Iranian nuclear buildup, nor hint at any legal or constitutional authority for an attack.

UK blocking Trump from using RAF bases for strikes on Iran

US envoy Mike Huckabee says it would be ‘fine’ if Israel took all Middle East land

So the logical question is: How many more people has ICE murdered, and kept secret?

After ProPublica published letters from ICE-imprisoned children, the camp was raided, un-mailed letters confiscated

Homan’s the guy who took a $50,000 bribe, on video, and everyone in the Trump regime is pretending it didn’t happen.

Excerpt: Mr. Ahmad said he believed that Wednesday’s ruling by Judge Provinzino, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., marked the first time that an official from Mr. Trump’s second presidential administration had been held in contempt of court.

Me again: Color me speechless, that this is the first contempt ruling.

Excerpt: “When 11 million international visitors aren’t showing up, the result is billions of dollars in economic losses to the travel industry,” said Erik Hansen, a senior vice-president at the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group that promotes travel to and within the country.

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks

Excerpt: Some time before I was born, America’s finest comedic minds decided it would be really funny if we all pretended that there was no greater idea than the notion that all people had inalienable rights, and that there could be no cause more noble than any effort to protect those rights for others. I, perhaps the biggest Bozo in the United States, totally missed that they were kidding.

Excerpt: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

Me again: This news hit while I was finalizing this page, and no way am I going to try replacing today’s many archive.today links before bedtime, but Wikipedia’s doing the right thing and so will I. There’ll be few-to-no new archive.today links after today.

Excerpt: The policy does not define what qualifies as “controversial” or what constitutes a “broad and balanced approach.” Opponents warned that leaving those terms undefined would force administrators to interpret them case by case, pressuring professors to avoid difficult material rather than risk complaints. …

Board Chair Kevin Eltife said the lack of specificity came as the system tried to craft a policy that could work in today’s politically charged environment.

“We are in difficult times,” he said. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

It’ll presumably be a “bad review,” but that’s not really the point. The point is, someone somewhere is at least paying a little attention to public criticism — so keep it coming.

John Carpenter’s The Thing becomes the game plan.

Excerpt: The Department of Justice spoke four separate times to a woman who credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein—but most accusations against the president appear to have been removed from the government’s documents on the alleged sex trafficker.

A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens. When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984.

Me again: I really shouldn’t have to explain this to professional journalists, but there’s no such thing as a woman in her early teens.

What an astoundingly naïve take. No. The US Supreme Court is still as corrupt as Trump himself — the Trump tariffs are so blatantly unconstitutional, they should’ve been summarily overturned without even a court date. Next, like every other time these current Supremes have ruled against Trump, you can count on a horrendous anti-American Supreme Court decision in 3, 2, 1…

The University of Chicago is mostly known for its libertarian tilt, so lack of principles and quick collaboration with fascism is not a surprise.

Please don’t.

Please do.

Excerpt: The US State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda, a move Washington views as a way to counter censorship, three sources familiar with the plan said.

The site will be hosted at “freedom.gov,” the sources said. One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user’s traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked.

Excerpt: We were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It’s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we’ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it.

So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.

In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, “Oh, you’re psychic,” or, “The show is prescient.” But in the rear-view mirror, it’s really a much sadder explanation than that.

Excerpt: Mr. Ahmad said he believed that Wednesday’s ruling by Judge Provinzino, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., marked the first time that an official from Mr. Trump’s second presidential administration had been held in contempt of court.

Me again: It is an absolute disgrace that this is the first contempt ruling.

Homan’s the guy who took a $50,000 bribe — on video — and everyone in the Trump regime is pretending it didn’t happen.

So the logical question to ask is, how many more people have ICE murdered, and kept secret?