Rasmussen Reports has revealed that for the first time in two decades — two decades! — their Presidential Approval Roundup shows a majority of Americans believe the country is on the "right track."

Vice President JD Vance appeared in Germany on Friday for the annual Munich Security Conference and didn't hold back against America's ostensible allies. In a blistering speech that drew groans from the crowd, Vance ripped European hypocrisy on democracy and freedom of expression, pleading with them to get their houses in order.

Greg Price @greg_price11
·
JD Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and roasted the entire continent of Europe for being petty tyrants and criminalizing freedom of speech, including a British man arrested for praying at an abortion clinic.

2:02 PM · Feb 14, 2025. //

VANCE: I'm here today not just with an observation but with an offer. Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite and I hope that we can work together on that. In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town, and under Donald Trump's leadership we may disagree with your views but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.

Scanning for data on infections that can arise in the three places she visited and align with her symptoms, they came up with a list of 10 possible infectious causes: eight parasites and two fungal pathogens. They went through them one by one, crossing things off the list that didn't quite fit with everything they knew of her case. They ended with angiostrongyliasis, caused by the nematode (roundworm) Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm. //

This nauseating roundworm is a known plague in Hawaii. In fact, it gained attention in recent years after sparking small outbreaks in the state. In 2017, there were 19 confirmed cases, but case totals in each of the years since have remained below 10. //

There are no clear treatment strategies for angiostrongyliasis, and some can recover fully without treatment after the larvae die off. In this case, the patient and her doctors decided to use a 14-day combination of the immunosuppressive steroid prednisone and the anti-parasitic drug albendazole.

Fortunately, the woman's symptoms cleared with the treatment, and she was discharged from the hospital after six days.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over”

The truth is, “minimal education experience” is a qualification for running an unconstitutional agency that poses an existential threat to our republic. Myriad data indicate the education industry is one of the nation’s lowest-performing, and its institutions some of the nation’s worst.

Institutions are run by people. The people responsible for the horrific performance of America’s education institutions are the least qualified to improve them. This is Management 101. And it is borne out by numerous longstanding data points. Here are just a few.

Mongoose
7 hours ago
Really, Mr. Wyden? Refund delayed? Let me tell you a story. I was working financial intelligence and got a call from a local bank. Seems they had a guy who wanted to deposit a million dollar+ check from the IRS. His tax refund, he said. The bank, which is supposed to report sketchy-looking activity on Treasury Suspicious Activity Report forms, thought this was... suspicious. On account of this guy had a W-2 job that paid him about $50,000/year. The bank really, really, really did NOT want to do this transaction, which they were certain was fraudulent.
It sounded squirrelly to me, so I called the IRS-CID special agent who handled refund frauds and was surprised to hear he already knew about it. The guy was pulling a 1099 OID fraud (it's on Wikipedia), and the bank had already told the IRS about it. I said, "Well, good, you can stop payment on the check, nip this fraud in the bud."
Nope, they'd been instructed not to interfere with the deposits/cashing of any refund checks. Go ahead and do the transaction, they told the bank. If it's fraudulent, we'll try to get the money back later. They couldn't even delay the check for a couple of weeks to do an investigation. Why? Because of Ron Wyden and people (Senators and Congressmen) like him. Apparently taxpayers(?) had been complaining to their congress folks about not getting their refunds (especially the fraudulent ones) in a timely fashion, and Ron and his buddies don't like those kinds of calls and can earn some easy constituent gratitude by squeezing IRS to push out that check post haste, so that's what IRS did.
I told the S/A that I thought he and IRS were f'n morons and told him I was going to tell the bank that I believed their deposit of the check would be a potential money laundering violation (thereby guaranteeing they wouldn't touch it or that customer with a hazmat suit). Which I did. (And in fairness, the refund fraud S/A was as distressed about it as I was.)
The crook took his business elsewhere, deposited his check, moved all the money out and when IRS finally went to get it, it was gone.
Now, multiply that little piece of insanity by a couple hundred thousand taxpayers(?) and we're starting to talk real money. Wikipedia says one 1099 OID fraud case involved three quarters of a billion dollars in false claims.
But those checks all went out because Ron Wyden doesn't want your refund delayed.

Eco-activists protests are nearly non-existent. Meanwhile, Romanians may be getting the president they wanted after their country’s USAID-funded NGOs were gutted. //

The damage done by the exposure of USAID’s extensive, expensive meddling could be far-reaching as other countries in Eastern Europe that have governments that were unpopular with the Americans are left to wonder how much of their unpopularity in their own country was bought and paid for with American dollars. And how much of it was in concert with their like-minded globalist bug-buddies in Brussels. //

schmuul | February 12, 2025 at 9:53 am
You are also seeing the impact in Israel as well where US interference through fake NGO’s almost took down Netanyahu and the whole Knesset. It’s insane how much we meddled in other countries in ways that weren’t in the best interest of any stability or peace let alone self determination. I guess they were in the best interest of George Soros and some insane “progressive “ vision.

The Biden administration had asked the State Department to explore interests by private companies to make armored EVs, leading to a public Request for Information to find interested EV-makers, a department spokesperson said, adding that only one company responded at the time.

An official solicitation for EV manufacturers to bid on making armored EVs is on hold with no current plans to use it, the spokesperson said, adding that the government has not awarded any contracts. [....]

But if you were hoping to listen to it, and you were watching MSNBC as the swearing-in happened, you would have been out of luck. Here's host Katy Tur saying they're going to be listening to the event and what Trump has to say, and then cut to an "expert" for commentary about the event. But then, suddenly, she shifts and essentially says, "Oops, we're not going to be listening. Sorry, folks! We're just going to 'watch'" — without letting the people hear the ceremony or any of the important things they might have to say.

US government-owned "moored passive acoustic recorder" was able to hear and record the 2023 implosion of the doomed Titan submersible—even though the recorder was 900 miles away from the dive site.

That implosion, during an attempted dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, killed five people, including Stockton Rush, the CEO of the company that built and operated the Titan.

The implosion audio was just released publicly by the US Coast Guard's Titan Marine Board of Investigation, which has been investigating the disaster in enormous detail. As part of that investigation, the Coast Guard obtained the audio from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), part of the US Department of Commerce.

The audio isn't much to listen to—just some static followed by a staticky explosive noise that decays in swirling fashion for multiple seconds. The implosion itself, given the pressure the vehicle was under at the time, probably occurred in milliseconds, as you can learn from simulations of the event. //

Back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, this kind of sonic technology was deeply important to the military, which used the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) to track things like Soviet submarine movements. (Think of Hunt for Red October spy games here.) Using underwater beamforming and triangulation, the system could identify submarines many hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The SOSUS mission was declassified in 1991. //

"At some point, safety just is pure waste," Rush once told a journalist. Unfortunately, it can be hard to know exactly where that point is. But it is now possible to hear what it sounds like when you're on the wrong side of it—and far below the surface of the ocean.

The Trump administration celebrated the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services by rolling out the creation of the Make America Healthy Again Commission.

Make America Healthy Again arose as a slogan after RFK Jr. joined the Trump campaign. While some of Kennedy's ideas about health could be classified as "exotic," he asked questions that no one else seemed interested in talking about. Like why, with our enormous national investment in biomedical research and health care, is our nation a crap hole of health outcomes, particularly from chronic diseases?

This is from the introduction to the executive order creating the MAHA Commission:

A computer can never be held accountable. This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI.

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

The Paradox of DEI
DEI programs were instituted to ensure that workplaces and educational institutions reflect a broad spectrum of human diversity. Yet, there's growing concern that these initiatives sometimes overlook those who should benefit from true inclusion—individuals with disabilities, including those on the autism spectrum and other neurodivergent conditions.

Legal Protections vs. DEI Practices
Under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, disabled individuals are entitled to reasonable accommodations. This law was meant to level the playing field, ensuring equal access to education and employment for Americans with disabilities. However, the push for DEI often focuses on demographic diversity in terms of race, gender, and identity, which can conflict with the accommodations needed by people with disabilities. //

The Employment Dilemma
The statistics are telling. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 21 percent of disabled Americans were employed in 2022. This stark figure highlights not a lack of skill or ambition but rather systemic barriers, including those inadvertently created by DEI policies.

Real-Life Implications
In practice, this means that schools and companies might prioritize hiring for diversity in a way that doesn't account for the need for individualized learning or working accommodations. There are stories of autistic individuals being passed over for roles or being pushed out of jobs for not being a "cultural fit," a term often used to mask the inability or unwillingness to accommodate an individual's disability. //

The Path Forward
The irony of DEI policies marginalizing people with disabilities while claiming to be inclusive cannot be ignored. True inclusion means adapting our systems to genuinely accommodate all forms of diversity, including disability. //

anon-onh5
4 hours ago
"DEI programs were instituted to ensure that workplaces and educational institutions reflect a broad spectrum of human diversity."

DEI programs were instituted to divide people along racial lines and keep fostering race hatred. FIFY

$300 million worth of medications are sitting on pallets about to expire thanks to Trump's effort to gut foreign aid. These drugs would've prevented people from going blind from a preventable tropical disease—Donald Trump would rather waste them in an East African warehouse. ///

The fastest shipping to South Africa is 25 days. If true, these were expiring long before Trump ordered anything. //

GreenLanternMD
5 hours ago
The even funnier part is that what he’s describing sounds like ivermectin. //

OrneryCoot Largo Patriot
4 hours ago
It shakes them to their core and infuriates them. They have been accustomed to being the gatekeepers for all of the knowledge disseminated to the poor yokel masses, and shaping what is delivered to suit their purposes. They now have millions of fact checkers that can spotlight any falsehood or narrative almost instantaneously. They are continually being caught in pants-on-fire lies, and it erodes their credibility ever further. Thus, even more people dig in deeper on their half-truths and outright lies. It is snowballing so quickly that they are being replaced as the arbiters of truth in real time. The Democrats who push this and benefit from it are in a state of existential threat and denial that the old ways just don't work anymore, and they become ever more shrill and frantic. It is absolutely amazing to witness. Hallelujah!

Axios is confirming this sentiment in a focus group of swing voters that they surveyed. The focus group included 11 people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump in the 2024 election. Eight were independents, two were Republicans, and one was a Democrat.

Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump's actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk's efforts to slash government.

Margot Cleveland
@ProfMJCleveland
·
Follow
🚨🚨🚨Judge in ⬇️case denies stay pending appeal. Court's reasoning based on his huge walk back of what he really enjoined saying basically "oh, I've only ordered you to not do what you can't legally do." 1/. //

The pattern seems to be that judges respond immediately to requests for temporary restraining orders with overbroad language, then quietly walk the language back once the headlines pass.

For context, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider, accelerates protons to an energy of 7 Tera-electronVolts (TeV). The neutrino that was detected had an energy of at least 60 Peta-electronVolts, possibly hitting 230 PeV. That also blew away the previous records, which were in the neighborhood of 10 PeV.

Attempts to trace back the neutrino to a source make it clear that it originated outside our galaxy, although there are a number of candidate sources in the more distant Universe. //

Neutrinos, to the extent they're famous, are famous for not wanting to interact with anything. They interact with regular matter so rarely that it's estimated you'd need about a light-year of lead to completely block a bright source of them. Every one of us has tens of trillions of neutrinos passing through us every second, but fewer than five of them actually interact with the matter in our bodies in our entire lifetimes.

The only reason we're able to detect them is that they're produced in prodigious amounts by nuclear reactions, like the fusion happening in the Sun or a nuclear power plant. We also stack the deck by making sure our detectors have a lot of matter available for the neutrinos to interact with.

"An official website of the United States government," reads small text atop the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website that Elon Musk's team started populating this week with information on agency cuts.

But you apparently don't have to work in government to push updates to the site. A couple of prankster web developers told 404 Media that they separately discovered how "insecure" the DOGE site was, seemingly pulling from a "database that can be edited by anyone."

One coder couldn't resist and pushed two updates that, as of this writing, remained on the DOGE site. "This is a joke of a .gov site," one read. "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN," read another.

getting back to his comments about Trump's deportation plans, it seems especially disturbing, if not ridiculous, that the Pope wags his finger at those while issuing actual Vatican decrees for those who might break through the walls surrounding his own city.

According to the document, if you do, you will be fined between 10 and 25 thousand euros and may get tossed into jail for up to four years. Now, that's some brotherly love right there. Sure it's hypocrisy codified, but you know, Laws for thee....etc etc. Clearly a case of it here. What I find really crazy though, is the outright defiance of something the Jesuits taught me called The Double Standard. We all know what this is, but in college, they referenced it in every one of the 27 credit hours that I spent in philosophy classes at Rockhurst. Basically, if you're going to apply a double standard in your moral convictions, you have no convictions at all, as your principles are merely situational. Malleable. Prone to manipulation by events and others. You're a "squish."

OrneryCoot
5 hours ago
That woman is emblematic of the various NGOs and green companies that grift off of the Federal teat provided by Democrats and the administrative state. Especially the administrative state. Why do you think that the outcry is so great about what DOGE is doing? Because the gravy train is being brought to a crashing end, and the various vultures who are just like Elizabeth Holmes are realizing that the good times have suddenly gone. Good riddance. Hopefully, a lot more Elizabeth Holmes clones will be joining her soon. //

maroon
4 hours ago edited
Well of course People Magazine folks were sympathetic to her (they are Lefties, it's what they do). She conned them just like she did to all the other gullible victims, and she probably sold them ocean-front property in Switzerland (the deed is "in the mail"). Not surprising that sawdust brain Biden fell for it. Max Planck: "Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination." When presented with something that seems too good to be true, it's time for "experiments" to prove it.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy.
10:57 PM · Feb 13, 2025. //

TK421
4 hours ago
To that moron from the union: It doesn't matter whether there's precedent, just whether it's legal. And, your use of the term 'dismantling' is meaningless in a legal sense. What would be unconstitutional would be the Executive branch eliminating a Congressionally created agency. That hasn't happened. It was moved under the auspices of the State Department, so it still exists. One of the things the Executive can do, is determine the staffing level, and you have no right to argue otherwise. If the Executive branch determines that only 10 people are needed to administer the agency's programs (especially because those programs have been scaled back), tough luck. //

anon-tk7z NavyVet
37 minutes ago
do you know how many companies just gave up because of unions? This is exactly their position. Businesses were not negotiating with their people , they were negotiating with a distant entity that showed up for a day or two, threatened the company, left, destroyed the company, and left the workers with no jobs unless they moved. Bread companies, gum companies, toy companies, glass companies, local metalists, on and on and on, small businesses of 50-60 people. So, the companies just closed. Poverty and lack of self worth flourished. The good things unions did are now hard-wired into any business here in this country.

Under the Constitution, “the President is invested with certain important political powers, in the exercise of which he is to use his own discretion.” For his decisions, “he is accountable only to his country in his political character, and to his own conscience.” His choices cannot be questioned in court because “the subjects are political. They respect the nation, not individual rights, and being entrusted to the executive, the decision of the executive is conclusive.”

Who penned these outrageous words? Democrats and many pundits might answer Vice President J.D. Vance. Over the weekend, Vance provoked an onslaught of criticism for suggesting that federal district judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

But the usual suspects would be wrong. The right answer is John Marshall, the greatest chief justice in Supreme Court history. And he did not squirrel this view away in a private journal. Instead, Marshall publicly explained that courts could not review presidential decisions on “political” subjects “entrusted to the executive” in a Supreme Court opinion.

He announced this principle not just in any case, but in Marbury v. Madison, the greatest opinion in Supreme Court history. The very same Marbury that concluded that federal judges should reject unconstitutional statutes, also recognized that courts could not intrude into the president’s exercise of his constitutional — dare we say “legitimate” — powers. Marshall’s opinion has given rise to the “political question doctrine,” which prohibits courts from reviewing decisions vested in the Constitution in the other branches, such as making war, prosecuting cases, and conducting impeachments. //

During the Vietnam War, Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman sued to stop the bombing of Cambodia (which President Richard Nixon had ordered). Holtzman obtained an injunction from a district court. The court of appeals promptly stayed the district court order. Holtzman petitioned Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who oversaw that court of appeals, to vacate the stay. Marshall properly refused, writing “the proper response to an arguably illegal action [by Nixon] is not lawlessness by judges charged with interpreting and enforcing the laws.”. //

The question whether the president can fire heads of “independent” agencies such as multi-member commissions is still debated, but the clear trend of recent Supreme Court decisions indicates that the president can remove these officers if they refuse to carry out presidential orders. No doubt Trump’s recent removal of members of the National Labor Relations Board are intended to set up a case to settle this question at the Supreme Court. Our prediction is that Trump will win that dispute — decisively.