This week, Jennica Pounds—known on X as DataRepublican, whose work exposed the abuses of USAID funding—was doxxed by internet bullies, a vicious attack aimed at silencing her efforts to expose government waste and inefficiency.

What the government does for anyone it must do for everyone or it must do for no one. That's what equal treatment under the law is. That's how laws against unfair discrimination, for instance, discrimination based on inherent traits like ethnicity, must apply across the board, no matter what foot that shoe is on.

On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court seemed to be leaning into a favorable ruling for an Ohio woman who claimed to have been the subject of sex discrimination from her employer - because she is straight. //

Ames contends she was passed over for a promotion and then demoted because she is heterosexual. Both the job she sought and the one she had held were given to LGBTQ people.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars sex discrimination in the workplace. A trial court and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Ames. //

If we are going to have laws against arbitrary discrimination, then they must apply equally, to everyone, regardless of race, religion, sexual preference, anything. It's ridiculous that this obvious principle has to be fought out to the Supreme Court level, but here we are; if the Court finds in favor of the plaintiff, this will shake up the grievance industry of discrimination claims for a good long while.

The Vickers VC10 holds a special place in aviation history as one of the most elegant and innovative airliners ever built. Designed in the early 1960s to meet the unique requirements of British overseas routes, it became a distinctive icon of British engineering. Though it never achieved the commercial success of its American counterparts, the VC10 remains beloved for its quietness, comfort, and exceptional performance. It also just happens to be this author’s all time favorite passenger jet. Whilst I never flew on one, I had the pleasure of being around the jet in the UK and Cyprus as an air cadet, as well as seeing the last ‘living’ RAF VC10 displaying a fast taxi at Bruntingthorpe’s Cold War jets display back in 2019. Let’s explore the history of the VC10, its design, legacy, and influence on aviation.

During my first term, my Administration took historic steps to correct a fundamental wrong within the American healthcare system. For far too long, prices were hidden from patients and employers, with inadequate recourse available to individuals looking to shop for care or obtain pricing information from a healthcare provider in advance of a visit or procedure. These opaque pricing arrangements allowed powerful entities, such as hospitals and insurance companies, to operate with insufficient accountability regarding their pricing practices, resulting in patients, employers, and taxpayers shouldering the burden of inflated healthcare costs.

While signing the EO, Trump clarified how this EO not only re-established the directive he put into place above, but how this new EO had even more teeth.

The map below displays the locations of 2492 direct primary care (DPC) practices across all 50 states plus Washington, DC.

Direct Primary Care, or DPC, is a new way of providing primary care that's already helped a quarter million people stay healthier and spend less on healthcare. Patients at DPC practices often receive ongoing primary care from their doctor with zero copays, convenient online scheduling options, near-wholesale prices on medications and blood tests, and even their doctor's personal cell number. It's like having a doctor in the family.

So how is this possible? Easy: direct primary care practices cut out middlemen like insurance companies, freeing themselves to provide great care at fair prices. Unlike traditional third party practices that serve the needs of insurance companies, direct primary care is for everybody; most DPC memberships cost less than your monthly cell phone or cable bill, for great care whenever you need it.

The Trump administration is targeting court interpretations that have stripped the president of full control over personnel, and policy, within federal agencies.

Some 2 billion people drink tea on a daily basis worldwide, and numerous studies have suggested various health benefits from regular tea consumption. Most nutrition studies focus on things like polyphenols, caffeine, or other chemicals released during brewing, but such research overlooks a unique aspect of tea: unlike most food and drink, tea leaves are not directly consumed, and the brewing process allows tea leaves to adsorb chemicals as well as release them—most notably heavy metal toxins like lead, arsenic, or cadmium. (Adsorption is when a substance adheres to the surface of something; absorption is when a material takes in a substance.). //

The team found that cellulose tea bags work the best at adsorbing toxic metals from the water while cotton and nylon tea bags barely adsorbed any contaminants at all—and nylon bags also release contaminating microplastics to boot. Tea type and the grind level also played a part in adsorbing toxic metals, with finely ground black tea leaves performing the best on that score. This is because when those leaves are processed, they get wrinkled, which opens the pores, thereby adding more surface area. Grinding the tea further increases that surface area, with even more capacity for binding toxic metals.

But the most significant factor was steeping time: the longer the steeping time, the more toxic metals were adsorbed. Based on their experiments, the authors estimate that brewing tea—using a tea bag that steeps for three to five minutes in a mug—can remove about 15 percent of lead from drinking water, even water with concentrations as high as 10 parts per million.

It seems USAID security was trained for every contingency except that of an American citizen showing up at an American government agency — an agency, mind you, that is supposed to be something like the governmental equivalent of Samaritan’s Purse — and asking mundane questions.

One of the two receptionists invited me to sit down to prevent me from overhearing the phone conversation. As the security guard spoke quietly and nervously on the phone, a host of people came and went through the foyer. Whatever they were doing here, shut down they were not. //

This accusation was quickly dropped in favor of another: espionage.

I freely admitted it to the NSA man: “Yes, I am spying. On my government, not yours” — a cheeky reply but one that clearly caused some consternation.

“Do you have an Egyptian government permit to take photos of Egyptian government buildings?” he asked.

“No.” He briefly looked triumphant. “But I’m not taking photos of Egyptian government buildings. That,” I pointed in the direction of USAID, “is an American government building, and I am an American.”

Annoyed, he left again, pacing on the phone. They clearly did not know how to proceed, and while being charged with espionage is a terrifying prospect, I knew it was problematic for them because it would be a tacit admission that there was more than pallets of rice and canned goods behind the high spiked walls of USAID in Egypt. //0

Safely out of the country, there are several takeaways from this incident. The first is that this is how an intelligence agency behaves, not a benevolence arm of the United States. USAID security guards had been embarrassed by my previous visit where I had breached their security, not by force but with their assistance. This was, for them, a kind of payback. But neither Cairo police nor the NSA had any interest in that. Indeed, they treated USAID security contemptuously.

The second is that I was, I think, dealing with three governments: the authentic U.S. government represented by the naïve fellow who took my call at the U.S. Embassy, the Egyptian government represented by Cairo police and the state security apparatus, and the shadow government represented by whoever it was inside USAID that had the NSA on speed dial. President Trump doesn’t yet have all his own people in place, and the deep state, as real as any branch of government, is deeply embedded. Nowhere is that truer than in the corrupt USAID.

The third is the desperate attempts to get me to enter the USAID compound. One had the feeling they were trying, to quote Fox, to “Jamal Khashoggi” me. Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul of his own accord and was there murdered by his own government.

Finally, this was a monumentally stupid response. Had the USAID office, on my first visit, simply said something like, “Yeah, President Trump is slashing the USAID, and we are in the process of closing shop,” there would be no story here. But the fearful, reactionary response smells of corruption. This was the Streisand effect, initiating calls from high in our government to ask: What the hell is going on at USAID in Egypt?

I will leave that question unanswered. But with war in Gaza, Trump’s plan to resettle Palestinians, and mounting evidence that USAID has been funding not only the invasion of the United States by illegal aliens but the very demise of our republic and even terrorism, the destruction of this rogue agency cannot come soon enough.

sscnz Seniorius Lurkius
5y
7
So I have a new Kobo since last year, but I also have a fairly new Kindle Paperwhite and then then we have a few more Kindles in the family. So here's what I did which allows me to read all books across all devices with progress sync and the ability to push books down to a device from Calibre.

1. Jailbreak all Kindles using Winterbreak (works on latest firmware and will then disable future automatic updates from Amazon).
2. Download all purchased books from Amazon, import into Calibre which will do its DRM thing on import.
3. Install KOReader across all devices, enable progress sync and Calibre integration. Only works on jailbroken kindle devices but will install in seconds using a script on Kobo.

I can pick up my Kobo in my office, read a few pages, then before going to bed, pick up my Kindle on my bedside table and continue the same book where I left off.

What that means is that multiple systems inside Bybit had been hacked in a way that allowed the attackers to manipulate the Safe wallet UI on the devices of each person required to approve the transfer. That revelation, in turn, has touched off something of a eureka moment for many in the industry.

“The Bybit hack has shattered long-held assumptions about crypto security,” Dikla Barda, Roman Ziakin, and Oded Vanunu, researchers at security firm Check Point, wrote Sunday. “No matter how strong your smart contract logic or multisig protections are, the human element remains the weakest link. This attack proves that UI manipulation and social engineering can bypass even the most secure wallets.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has given all intelligence agencies until Friday to identify the employees participating in pornographic chats while on duty, revoke their security clearances, and terminate their employment. In a memo released Tuesday evening, Gabbard responded decisively to revelations that numerous employees who were members of a National Security Agency chat system used it to discuss fetishes, kink, and sex as part of the agency's DEI program. //

FL Free
16 minutes ago edited
People that mentally ill, that narcissistic, that incredibly foolish need to be as far away from national security as poosible.

Hmmmm….why don’t we gossip about, attack, and slander the likely incoming DNI on an official NSA communications platform where it will be archived? //

ConservativeInMinnesota
8 minutes ago
The hubris to put their depravities in writing on employer owned equipment speaks volumes about the corruption of the deep state. Most Americans would never dare to do something like that as they know they’d get fired on the spot.

Laocoön of Troy ConservativeInMinnesota
3 minutes ago
Intelink is NOT just employer equipment. It's a secure Intel Community comm node. They're supposed to arrest people for misuse of these assets.

Maximus Decimus Cassius ConservativeInMinnesota
4 minutes ago
Which speaks volumes about the culture, perversion and laxity among federal government employees.

And as each one of these details emerges it's only drawing more attention to the network, to the documentary, and to the problems behind BBC’s stance on the war.

With all of these controversies emerging, Israel is getting involved and has called for action. All of these developments have the network completely off balance now and internal reviews are taking place. This becomes a very interesting aspect because the BBC has a history of proclaiming how much editorial rigor they possess at the network. Questions are emerging now on whether or not this documentary passed through the proper editorial channels and legal assessments seen in the past at the BBC. //

What is fairly apparent is that this is a fiasco that has been generated from the network’s longstanding position of backing for Palestine and, by extension, Hamas. The BBC has held the approach towards this conflict of not labeling Hamas as a terrorist outfit, nor willing to call its violent actions acts of terrorism. The BBC has shown to be more than willing to run with claims and outright propaganda from Hamas with little journalistic skepticism.

When the group turned over the bodies of some of the murdered hostages, the BBC was sure to include the statement from Hamas that they did everything in their power to save their lives. It has been shown the family had been murdered by their captors. Over the weekend one of BBC’s prominent voices commented (in a now-deleted post) that Hamas celebrating over the bodies of hostages and Israeli emotional reactions to getting its people back were equally nauseating displays.

Loki
4 hours ago edited
I learned these from a self-defense legal protection group (Right to Bear):

• Call 911, do not admit to anything, when the operator tells you to hold the line, hang up and do not answer: you are being recorded.
• Immediately call your lawyer
• Do not answer any questions without a lawyer present

Example: I am a victim of a home invasion, the intruder has been subdued - do NOT say anything about your actions.

The money quote is: You have a right to remain silent, but very few are capable of doing so.

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger
·
Follow
FBI whistleblower @GOBactual confirmed to me that a source inside FBI said FBI employees were destroying evidence on servers, and that he informed @Kash_Patel

I hope he & @AGPamBondi @JohnRatcliffe @elonmusk @realannapaulina are preventing this.

We urgently need disclosure!
Anna Paulina Luna
@realannapaulina
There is a massive war happening in the intelligence agencies right now. The corruption being exposed right now is actual treason…
2:29 AM · Feb 25, 2025. //

Greg Price
@greg_price11
·
Follow
FBI Whistleblower Garret O'Boyle, whose family had to beg for clothes after exposing corruption at the FBI: "The FBI will crush you. This government will crush you and your family if you try to expose the truth about things they are doing that are wrong."

4:53 PM · May 18, 2023. //

It's like ferreting out a nest of snakes, and what a sad thought it is to think that there are such questions in our intel agencies. //

RatFink Just a tax payer
8 hours ago
I'm sure every branch of the government has these people and they are all destroying what will convict them of what the democrats say doesn't exist.

A New Harvard-Harris poll taken between February 19-20 of 2,443 registered voters shows that a whopping 75 percent of Democrats say they do not believe that Joe Biden and his hapless administration threw the doors of the United States wide open for millions of illegal immigrants to pour into the nation deliberately. The poll asked this question: "Do you think Democrats deliberately kept the southern border open to bring millions of immigrants into the country illegally, or was that not their deliberate policy?" Of those polled, 80 percent of Republicans believe the opposite, that Biden administration immigration policies were very deliberate.

According to the whistleblower, two female FBI undercover employees infiltrated Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign at high levels and were directed to act as “honeypots” while traveling with Mr. Trump and his campaign staff. //

This was not part of Crossfire Hurricane, this was reportedly a different operation.

The whistleblower agent “personally knew” that Mr. Comey ordered an FBI investigation into Mr. Trump and that Mr. Comey “personally directed it,” according to the disclosure. //

anon-adwq
21 minutes ago
This operation agains Trump was launched in 2015. The fact that all Biden's pardons of his stooges and his family begin in 2014 makes sense now.

The Dark Lord anon-adwq
15 minutes ago
Yes. John Brennan also started his overseas operations against Page, Papadopolous, Clovis, and Caputo also began in late 2015 or early 2016. One of those also allegedly involved a honeypot, either with Joseph Mifsud or Stefan Halper.

These people took oaths. They have — or had — security clearances, with the extensive background checks that go with those. I know — I've undergone a background check for a top-secret clearance myself. And, depending on which foreign government these disgruntled ex-employees might choose to go to, this act would be, arguably, treason.

Treason, I should note, is specifically called out in the Constitution. Article III, Section 3, Clause 1: //

If this were to happen, it would be troubling indeed; an indication that the rot in the federal government is far worse, runs far deeper, and is far more pervasive than we thought. The very idea that someone placed in a position of great trust, with insights into matters of national security, with access to highly classified materials, wou

A new poll by Harvard CAPS-Harris reveals the majority of the country backs President Donald J. Trump and his actions to bring much-needed reforms that are making America great again.

81% support deporting criminal illegal immigrants.
76% support a “full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government.”
76% support closing the border with additional security and policies.
69% support keeping men out of women’s sports.
68% support government declaring there are only two genders.
65% support ending race-based hiring in government.
63% support “freezing and re-evaluating all foreign aid expenditures and the department that handled them.”
61% support reciprocal tariffs.
60% support direct U.S. negotiations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
59% support cutting government spending already approved by Congress.
57% support ending the ban on new offshore drilling. //

olinka2022
4 hours ago
"Do you think Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) departments are needed in government or should they be eliminated to reduce waste?

this assumes that people actually understand what DEI is. I don't think that half of them understands their full meaning and implications.

Random Commenter olinka2022
3 hours ago
Which is good feedback for the Trump admin. Their message isn't understood. They need to keep educating people about what DEI actually does, and the problems it has caused.

I'd guess that at least a quarter of the people who currently think we need DEI would change their minds if they understood the reality of it.

Charlie Kirk

@charliekirk11
·
Follow
For the first time in my lifetime we have an administration that is dead serious about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in government so the next generation doesn’t live as debt slaves.

Every expense must be justified—with our tax dollars you are guilty until proven innocent.

5:11 PM · Feb 24, 2025. //

The thing to realize about the government is that it's not a citizen of the United States, and thus isn't subject to the same rights as we are. In fact, the government doesn't technically have any rights, it has allowances as agreed upon by the people of the United States of America. It has certain powers, to be sure, but these powers can be increased, decreased, or eliminated as the people see fit.

As you can see, this is exactly what's happening with DOGE. The people demanded a reduction in government power and a removal of waste, and that's exactly what's happening. Even as the Democrats and leftists cry foul, the government is losing its power.

There is a simple truth buried here.

If a government is unable or unwilling to reveal how it's using the money it takes from us with the threat of punishment for not giving up, then it's not our government. //

. In fact, government is often times a necessary evil, born out of a need to inhibit the worst impulses of man, whether those impulses be foreign or domestic. It is a system necessary for civilization to happen in an imperfect world, but it's the fact that we have an imperfect world that the system we create to curb is itself imperfect, and thus needs to be monitored, audited, and sometimes destroyed, at least in part so as not to have to be destroyed in its totality.

the Trump administration totally expects they are going to lose in court a lot. Do you know what it costs to do an executive order? A piece of paper and a Sharpie. That’s it. And they can go right back to the drawing board. One of these courts said, hey, the language was too vague. You know what that tells them? Just go draft another one. It's not like legislation where you need a bunch of people to agree on something.

[...]

They’re going to fight at every single turn. And that means appealing absolutely everything with the knowledge that they’re going to lose some of them because it costs them nothing. Executive Orders are the easiest thing to issue.

I do not see this as Trump losing over and over and over again. I think the more important bigger story is that they’re not going to stop and they’re going to keep fighting it every time, and they are going to win some of these. //

Political-Paige
4 hours ago
SCOTUS could end all this tomorrow with a sweeping (and utterly unassailable) order that these District Courts lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions against the Executive.
But the Roberts Court is so timid that it's allowing unprecedented chaos to reign across the country as activist inferior court judges strut their unearned power games.
It's appalling.