It's amazing how utterly dumb the DOGE bros are and how little they let their total lack of intelligence, accomplishment and talent get in the way of breaking things that actually intelligent, accomplished and talented people had built.
Exactly this:
Bahrain, a key American ally that hosts one of the most important U.S. naval bases in the Middle East, is so concerned about domestic unrest that it is bringing in foreign security forces as protests erupt against the kingdom’s role as a launchpad for Washington’s expanding war with Iran. Bahrain has brought in anti-riot troops from Jordan to help suppress protests, national security sources tell me, confirming rumors that began circulating last week. The deployment marks the first time since the Arab Spring that Bahrain has called in foreign forces to quell domestic unrest – a sign of how seriously the monarchy is taking the threat of protests from the country’s Shia-majority population. Mass protests have broken out against the Bahraini ruling class and the U.S.’s involvement in the country, especially with the recent assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the most prominent Shia religious leaders in the world. Bahrain’s authorities have responded violently to protesters, firing tear gas directly into crowds. The demonstrations, one U.S. official told me, speak to how “deeply unpopular” the U.S.-backed regional order is in Bahrain and “the broader Muslim world.”
Bahrain bringing in Jordanian troops to stave off Shia unrest.
capitalandempire.com/p/bahrain-im...
NEW: Hundreds of mental health professionals have left the Department of Veterans Affairs since President Donald Trump took office, leaving staff “at a breaking point” and some veterans waiting as long as six months for help.
Trump has tremendous difficulty with principled people (even if as with the Iranian regime, the principles are bad). He assumes everyone is a transactional fraud like him. Works well with rich Americans and poorly with idealists of any stripe
After @mckaycoppins.bsky.social’s first bet on an NFL game, he was up $20. By the end of the season, he’d lost $10,000 and was checking DraftKings in church. Inside his season as a gambler—and what it taught him about how gambling is suffusing American life:
Diplomatic staff at the American consulate in Erbil were also forced to shelter-in-place when the facility came under attack from Iran before they were ultimately flown out of the country by the British Royal Air Force due to constraints on the U.S. military, which would normally carry out such a mission, according to the officials. The U.K. Ministry of Defense confirmed to ABC News that the RAF carried "a number of US consulate staff and contractors, at their request" from Iraq to Cyprus.
Trump apparently needed one of those allies he doesn't need anymore to rescue the Americans in Iraq who weren't evacuated before Trump shat the place up.
Meanwhile, Witkoff is meeting with the people who helped Iran do the targeting.
abcnews.com/Internationa...
This could be Venezuela before too long if Trump continues with his plans to steal their oil. Never forget how vulnerable and flammable oil infrastructure can be.
3/ "The Pentagon is moving parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system from South Korea to the Middle East, according to two officials."- Washington Post
What China couldn't do for ten years.
Trump forced to do it to protect Gulf Kingdoms.
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Missed this earlier in the week: The Tournament of Books is underway! “Every March, the Tournament of Books is a month-long battle royale among the year’s best novels.” [tournamentofbooks.com]
64/ Day by day, this war is becoming a ecological catastrophe.
on land and sea, fuel depots, oil fields, petrocehmical refineries, oil and gas tankers, are burning, billowing toxic smoke into the lungs of people and animals and sludge into marine life.
ceobs.org/how-does-war...
63/ RT @hunterub.bsky.social
Wow, Gulf shippers are in a real bind here. On one hand, Donald says everything's fine and Gulf shippers should sail on thru. On the other hand: massive boat-melting fireballs. Both sides make good points!
bsky.app/profile/atru...
lmao incredible new euphemism unlocked: I’m on a flight and they just said we’re going to be going through an area of “enhanced” turbulence
At least 1243 civilians killed by commercial drones operated by security forces and contractors, including Blackwater founder Erik Prince's employees, in Haiti from 1 March 2025-21 January 2026
www.hrw.org/news/2026/03...
Why am I fascinated? It's like it contains a whole different understanding of what italics, underline, bold, quotes, and spacing are supposed to convey. Maybe it's secret code.
a sign that reads: PARK HERE "ONLY WHILE" AT "LIBRARY" The stuff that's in quotes is also underscored, because why not.
shared with me by @jamesnevius.bsky.social
So the shoegate I understand it is this:
1. Trump equals shoe size to dick size
2. Trump asks Rubio, Hegseth and the rest of the ilk about their shoe size.
3. They all yell, like 10, 11, big, huge.
4. Trump buys those for them, and they shamble around in shoes twice their size.
tariffs happening for no reason and theyre making your life worse, secret police kidnapping people for no reason and making your life worse, firing thousands of government employees for no reason and making your life worse, going to war with iran for no reason and making your life worse
Very excited that we're somehow getting another day of discourse out of The Florsheim Affair, one of the most delightful stories of this awful last year and change. Keep on clompin' boys! defector.com/report-presi...
you can tell Wired has been doing good journalism lately because there's been increased whining by the extraction class about how Wired mysteriously changed in the decade since tech titans fully revealed themselves as sociopaths
from this recent Dorsey interview:
and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it;
Ch 93: The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
The most fearsome air power campaign by US and Israel are committing horrendous war crime after war crime in Iran
www.haaretz.com/middle-east-...
Trump's Iran war is breaking up the MAGA coalition. Among young and nonwhite working class, only *one in five* approve, per new data I've obtained. That's extraordinary and heartening to see. It's also delivering another blow to Trump's "realignment." 1/
(new piece)
newrepublic.com/article/2076...
This is certainly true in the modern polling era, but it's probably true for all of American history. Hard to think of any other major conflict which lacked majority popular support when it began.
50/ we are going to see weeks of market manipulation by Trump and his cabinet in coming months....
www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...
Whistleblower complaint says the DOGE engineer "told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal."
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
52/ "world's largest LNG plant hasn't exported a shipment in five days. That's the longest streak since at least 2008.”
Why Korea & Taiwans stock markets tanked.
No LNG -> No manufacturing of Chips -> No Sales to AI data centers
And why Asia is rationing electricity, fertilizers & industries.
A grim BBC report from Havana filed 4 days ago. The Trump Administration is deliberately causing the worst humanitarian crisis of my lifetime in the western hemisphere and the US prestige press can't be bothered to cover it. Please shame them into reporting on this crisis before people start dying.
