Mar 10, 2026

Women Showing The Way


Epstein In New Mexico

Melanie Stansbury is a champion.


If It Looks Like A World War



A world at war: Iran conflict goes global

Ten days into President Trump's Iran campaign, the war has gone global.

At least 20 countries are now militarily involved — shooting, shielding or quietly supplying — while a widening energy shock punishes nations far from the front lines.
Why it matters: This isn't World War III. But it may be the closest we've come in decades — drawing in more countries, more great powers and more overlapping conflicts than any crisis since the Cold War.

Zoom in:
Iran has struck at least 10 countries since the war began, hitting U.S. and Israeli bases, Persian Gulf capitals, oil infrastructure and civilian areas in an attempt to impose maximum pain on Washington and its allies.

Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which 20% of the world's oil flows — sending prices for oil, gas, plastics and fertilizers soaring across the globe.

Israel is fighting on two fronts — pounding Iran while battling Hezbollah on the ground in Lebanon, where more than 500,000 people have been displaced in a week.

Zoom out:
The war has spread far beyond the Middle East, pulling European militaries into the conflict and forcing NATO to shoot down Iranian missiles over allied territory for the first time.

France has dispatched its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to the Eastern Mediterranean, joining British warships after an Iranian-made drone struck a U.K. air base on Cyprus, a member of the European Union.

Greece and Turkey — bitter rivals within NATO — also have rushed forces to Cyprus, where their fighter jets now face each other across a partition line that has divided the island for 50 years.

Even Australia said Monday it's sending missiles and a radar plane to help the UAE and other Gulf countries defend themselves from Iran.

In the meantime, a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship last week off the coast of Sri Lanka — the first American torpedo kill since the final days of World War II.

Between the lines:
As the shooting war rages, a shadow conflict is playing out among the world's great powers.
  • Russia has been sharing satellite imagery of U.S. warships and aircraft with Iran, the Washington Post first reported, helping Tehran target American forces across the region.
  • Ukraine — which has spent four years defending against the same Iranian-made drones now battering the Gulf — has deployed specialists and low-cost interceptors to help protect the U.S. and its allies.
China, which is set to welcome Trump for a state visit in a matter of weeks, is navigating the war from both sides.

Facing billions of dollars in economic exposure, China has been calling for a ceasefire and pressuring Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Beijing relies on for roughly 40% of its oil imports.

At the same time, U.S. intelligence shows China may be preparing to supply Iran with financial assistance, spare parts and missile components, according to CNN.

What to watch:
The Iran war is reshaping every other major conflict on Trump's agenda.
  • Ukraine: U.S.-brokered peace talks planned for Abu Dhabi this week have been postponed indefinitely because of the war. India is back to buying Russian oil after the U.S. waived sanctions to help manage the energy crisis.
  • Gaza: Trump's flagship peace plan has been on hold since the war began, as the Gulf states that pledged billions to rebuild Gaza now scramble to defend against Iranian missiles.
  • Taiwan: The war is burning through missile stockpiles the U.S. has spent years building up to deter China in the Pacific — raising urgent questions about what happens if Beijing finally makes a move on Taiwan.

Mar 9, 2026

About That QAnon Thing

I may have said this before, but I can't shake the shitty feeling I get every time I stop and contemplate the very real (to me) probability that Epstein's whole kid-fucking thing was in service to gaining leverage over people with big money &/or big power in order to exert pressure to achieve political ends.

And the really shitty part of the feeling is that some people are going to start thinking that the end game actually makes trafficking kids a secondary concern.

I hate this fuckin' shit, but at least we're starting to sift out some of the bigger chunks of shit.


How the Epstein Files Reveal the Final Failure of QAnon

The most enduring conspiracy theories often contain kernels of truth, though it is debatable whether any popularly theorized conspiracy has later been proven as real by unassailable facts. But if one popular conspiracy theory seems to have been promoted from “theory” to fact, it would appear to be QAnon. What started as a far-right prophecy scam using codes and ciphers on 4chan to “reveal” the horrors of a pedophile cabal ruling the world has taken on a distinct tinge of truth thanks to millions of newly-released files involving fixer and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s easy to look at Epstein’s communications with billionaires and royals, famous directors and scions of old money, and see the dealings of a cabal. In those countless emails, we seem to have a notorious sex offender and lover of “young women” exchanging messages with some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. Some of them appear innocuous, and some of them are deeply weird and extremely disturbing.

Like QAnon’s accusations, at least some of these messages are written in what many researchers have theorized is a code for truly unspeakable things, such as powerful people trafficking their own children, or hunting and eating human beings. And just like with QAnon, it’s fallen to “citizen researchers” to dig through the “drops” from the Department of Justice, as unpaid truth crusaders churn through millions of messages full of noise to find the bits of signal that “they” were hiding from us.

Naturally, the Epstein revelations have resulted in some QAnon believers claiming that the Epstein releases validate their years of hard work and research into the “pedo elite” running the west. It’s also resulted in a number of stories, podcasts, and social media threads essentially saying that QAnon was right this whole time. Essentially, we all thought these Q people were crazy, but there really was a pedophile cabal running things, and the Q believers knew the whole time.

Except QAnon has not been “proven true,” and it was not right. This is not because of anything to do with Epstein, but because that’s not really what QAnon was about. The idea of a dark cabal running world events and doing horrible things in the shadows is only part of QAnon — and it’s the least original part, at that.

A secret government or society of insiders using the masses for their Satanic purposes has been a rich source of lore for countless cranks and conspiracists generations before Q emerged on 4chan. Its 20th century form began with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the aftermath of the First World War, was later adapted by bestselling tomes of Cold War paranoia like None Dare Call it Conspiracy and Secrets of the Federal Reserve, and would form the core of the lurid post-9/11 globalist fantasies of “Reptoid Elite” theorist David Icke and Infowars’ Alex Jones. The name of this group shifts, but its members are always a hopelessly complicated tangle of bankers, think tanks, political figures, universities, cultural luminaries, and wealthy families. Unsurprisingly, this is almost the same exact motley crew found in the Epstein emails.

Yes, this one happens to be real. But there has always been an upper tier of society walled off from the rest of us through money, influence, and power. It’s a group that is impenetrable and exists in a world of wealth and privilege that most of us only see in movies and tabloids. And many of its charter members have been credibly accused of unspeakably awful things over the last two thousand years. And for that long, they have gotten away with it.

Where QAnon was different, and where it failed spectacularly, was in promising that justice would finally be delivered to these untouchable insiders. It offered believers not nihilistic scapegoating, but a utopia that was just a few executions away. The basis of Q, and why it was so compelling to so many people, was that the monsters were finally going to be brought down by Donald Trump, a figure of outsider wealth beholden to nobody except those who elected him. Only someone with no connection to the powerbrokers and their ancient bloodlines could deliver justice. It would be done swiftly, correctly, and publicly. And nothing would ever be the same.

It’s not hard to understand why this bloody fantasy caught on with people struggling to understand why Trump wasn’t fulfilling the promises of his first presidential campaign. He ran on bringing down the deep state, giving power back to the people, and locking up Hillary Clinton and her goons. Why wasn’t it happening? QAnon gave you an answer: that it was, but it was happening in secret. Q was revealing that secret, and making its believers part of the world it was creating.

Past foundational works of conspiracism were all about what the “insiders” or “superstate of the elite” were doing to you. World domination was inevitable, total enslavement could not be stopped, and freedom was doomed. All one could do was research, prepare, and buy as much food and ammo as your credit card could take.

In contrast, Q believers were shown that victory was possible, if you prayed hard enough and spread the gospel of Q. The anonymous poster encouraged followers to be part of the operation by making memes, doing their own research, and waking up the people they loved. It made the humble “anon” the worst nightmare of the elite machine. While much of the media saw Q as an apocalyptic cult obsessed with violence and race, Q saw itself as the savior of humanity. To quote the title of one popular Q video, it was “the plan to save the world.”

QAnon was a play-by-play of the good guys finally winning, starting with the very first Q drop on Oct. 28, 2017, promising that Hillary Clinton would be arrested in a few days trying to leave the U.S., and that the president would deploy federal forces to put down riots ginned up by her allies.

By decoding the Q drops on 4chan and later 8chan, Q believers were positioned to know before anyone when the long-promised “storm” was coming, and with it, justice.

Q promised arrests and military tribunals for the worst evildoers in dozens of posts, the first of which would “shock the world.” As one Q catchphrase put it, “the hunters would become the hunted.” Another promised “power would be returned to the people,” and that “crimes against children” would be swiftly and brutally punished. Long-held secrets would be revealed, ancient cabals would fall, and those who had terrorized patriots for generations would be hauled away to Guantánamo Bay — or worse. It would all happen “soon” or in “two weeks” or in a “big week” ahead. And nothing could stop it.

Even with the antisemitism and conspiracism inherent to QAnon, some of these are admirable goals. It’s not wrong to want truth and justice, and for people who harm others to be stopped. This is what made QAnon so appealing to older people and religious believers. It wasn’t just anarchic meme-making, it was utopian.

But it was all a hoax. None of it happened, and the people Q promised would be taken down by Trump are still out there, presumably getting away with it. Hillary Clinton was never arrested. There were no mass arrests. It failed on every level.

Trump was supposed to destroy the elite traffickers and release all of the government’s files on their members. Instead, Trump has called the entire Epstein debacle a hoax created by Democrats, and held up the release of the Epstein files to the point where it took immense pressure from Congress for the DOJ to release what they had. Even then, they didn’t, as filings that involved Trump’s alleged assault on a 13 year old girl were only made public after NPR reported that dozens of pages had been withheld. This does not seem like the behavior of someone tirelessly working to bring down Epstein’s cabal of evildoers.

There was supposed to be a great purge of the worst people in society. There were supposed to be shocking arrests and a truth that would “put 99% of Americans in the hospital.” Not a single prominent American has faced legal accountability due to the Epstein fallout other than Epstein. And Epstein didn’t feel the rope of a military tribunal, instead taking his own life without ever facing his accusers.

QAnon wasn’t right. It was spectacularly wrong, stringing its believers along for years with promises of revenge and justice that all turned to dust. The enemy of the deep state turned out to be its most high-profile protector. And the people desperate for accountability are still vulnerable to conspiracy theories that prey on their very natural desires.

QAnon was supposed to be the plan to save the world. But the world is exactly the same as it’s always been.

Consumer Tariffs

Not to worry though. I'm sure those checks will be on their way in about 2 weeks.


Consumers Paid Tariffs on Overseas Items. Now They Want a Refund.

The Trump administration has yet to announce a process to return fees paid by companies and shoppers for tariffs now deemed illegal.


Dr. Andrew Angel, a physician from Cambridge, Mass., paid a tariff on a $345 pendant he bought last year from an eBay seller in Japan.

Now, after the Supreme Court ruled that one of President Trump’s most widely used tariffs was unlawful, Dr. Angel said he was entitled to a refund.

“The principle is obvious,” he said. “If it was illegal to collect my money, I would certainly like to have my illegally collected money returned to me.”


Like many other shoppers who bought goods overseas in recent months, Dr. Angel paid his tariff to the shipping company that delivered the item, in his case DHL. The company charged him $67 for the customs duty on the pendant, which was a birthday present for his wife, Dr. Irina Angel.

“She loves it. It’s a keeper,” he said.

For years, Americans who bought items from overseas did not have to pay tariffs on items worth $800 or less. Last year, Mr. Trump took away that loophole, known as the de minimis exemption, and shipping companies started demanding that shoppers pay their tariffs before they got their goods. The shipping companies have been paying the duties on behalf of the shoppers to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that collects tariffs.

Dr. Angel and many like him have the paperwork to prove that they paid tariffs.

That is not case for shoppers who paid higher prices because retailers or other businesses included all or some of the tariff in the final cost of goods. Such shoppers did not pay the customs duties themselves and, according to lawyers, would therefore find it hard to make a claim.

Costco, which has sued the government for its own tariff repayment, signaled during a quarterly earnings call last week that it could cut prices should the company receive a refund.

From the end of August until late November, Customs and Border Protection said, it collected about $400 million in tariffs on the lower-value items that were previously exempt from tariffs. The agency did not provide a more recent tally.

It also did not say how much of those funds came from the tariff that the Supreme Court said was unlawful, known as the IEEPA tariff because Mr. Trump introduced it under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. On all types of imports, the IEEPA tariff has collected over $100 billion, according to U.S. Customs data.

The Supreme Court did not lay out ways in which the government could make tariff repayments, something that lawyers say has been left for lower courts to decide. The Trump administration has tried to slow down the legal fight over refunds, angering those who opposed the tariff.

“That money does not belong to Washington. It belongs to the American people who earned it,” Sara Albrecht, the chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, which represented a set of small-business plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, said in a statement.

In an interview, Ms. Albrecht said Customs and Border Protection had long had processes to make tariff refunds and could most likely make smaller refunds speedily.

“Those refunds will go out pretty quickly and seamlessly as long as they have good records,” she said.

Because of the legal wrangling, the courts and the government have yet to determine a process to give out refunds. Shipping companies say they will provide details on how to get a refund once they have legal clarity.

In a statement, Isabel Rollison, a spokeswoman for FedEx, said the company would provide both “shippers and consumers” with information on how to get refunds “once next steps are clarified by the government and the court.” FedEx is suing the government to get its refund of the IEEPA tariff.

Natasha Amadi, a spokeswoman for United Parcel Service, said the company would support customers in obtaining refunds of IEEPA tariffs once a legal framework was established, adding that this applied to “customers of all sizes.”

In a statement, Glennah Ivey-Walker, a spokeswoman for DHL, said that when there was legal guidance for the refund process, the company would “communicate with our customers and take appropriate actions.” She declined to comment on Dr. Angel’s tariff payment.

Some shoppers paid tariffs to overseas sellers — not to shipping companies — when buying their goods.

Cynthia David, a retired librarian from Amherst, N.H., bought a paperweight decorated with a harvest mouse on a bramble from an eBay seller in Britain last year. She paid an import charge of 79.50 pounds ($107) — a large sum for an item that cost £160 ($214), but one she was willing to pay because it was a one-off item, she said.

“I love it,” Ms. David said. “It’s dead center in my collection.”

She said she would try to get a refund if eBay made it possible. It is not clear how American shoppers could try to get refunds of tariffs paid to foreign sellers on eBay or other platforms. EBay’s tariffs webpage does not say anything about getting the IEEPA levy repaid, and the company did not respond to requests for comment.

Consumers who have paid tariffs may be able to join class-action lawsuits.

Morgan & Morgan, a law firm, is seeking class-action approval for a suit it filed against FedEx. The suit contends that consumers are entitled not just to tariff refunds from FedEx but also to repayment of the fees the company charged for processing the levy. And it is seeking repayment even before FedEx gets its own tariff refund from the government.

FedEx “collected from us a fee that’s now been determined to be unlawful,” said John A. Yanchunis, a lawyer at Morgan & Morgan. “We’re entitled to that back.”

Ms. Rollison of FedEx did not respond directly to the lawsuit but instead referred to an earlier company statement on tariff refunds that said, in part, “If refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges.”

Today's TweeXt


A Cover

One of the great tunes written by Joni Mitchell, performed here - and better IMO - by The Tone Factory in Las Vegas.


Today's Erika

Voting YES would refer the matter to committee, which effectively kills it.

It's dead now - by a vote of 357 - 65




House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., had forced the vote in light of allegations that her Republican colleague Tony Gonzales of Texas sent sexual text messages to a subordinate.

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday voted to scuttle an effort by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace to shed more light on sexual misconduct allegations against members of Congress.

Mace, a conservative Republican who is running to be governor of South Carolina, forced a floor vote on her resolution directing the House Ethics Committee to make public all reports on allegations of congressional lawmakers and aides engaging in sexual misconduct or harassment.

But in a 357-65 vote, the House voted to refer the Mace resolution to committee — a move that effectively killed it.

The Ethics Committee had encouraged members to vote to refer the resolution. In a joint statement, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the committee argued it "could chill victim cooperation and witness participation in ongoing and future investigations" and would make it harder for the committee "to investigate and eliminate sexual misconduct in the House."

“Here and elsewhere, perpetrators of sexual misconduct should never be shielded from responsibility for their misdeeds,” Chairman Michael Guest, R-Miss., and ranking member Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., said.

But, they added, “victims may be retraumatized by public disclosures of interim work product, excerpts of interview transcripts, and certain exhibits. And witnesses, who often only speak to the Committee confidentially or on condition of future anonymity, could fear retaliation if their cooperation is made public.”

Mace has spoken openly about her own experiences as a sexual assault survivor, and she’s been at the center of the fight over releasing the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files. She was one of just four House Republicans who teamed with Democrats on a discharge petition last fall that circumvented her own GOP leadership and eventually led to the Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files.

She said her resolution came after NBC News and other outlets reported that a GOP colleague, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, had sent sexual text messages to a female aide, Regina Santos-Aviles, with whom he allegedly had an affair before she died by suicide last year. Gonzales previously denied having an affair but has not addressed the substance of the allegations since the text messages came to light.

Mace is among several Republicans who have called on Gonzales to resign.

“I would like members of Congress to tell their female colleagues where they stand on sexual harassment within the U.S. House of Representatives,” Mace told reporters. “Do you support women up here, that work up here, and who are your colleagues, or do you not?”

Earlier Wednesday, the House Ethics panel said it will open an investigation into the allegations against Gonzales. House rules explicitly prohibit lawmakers from engaging in relationships with their own staff members.

In a brief statement, Gonzales said of the Ethics probe: “I welcome the opportunity to present all the facts to the committee.”

In Tuesday night's primary in Texas, Gonzales was forced into a May runoff election against GOP challenger Brandon Herrera.

Sen Kaine


Tim Kaine has been largely stuck in my craw for a long time. He's the kind of Democrat that has never really delivered for me. I truly appreciate that he's a genuinely decent man, but he's taking forever to show me that he realizes the severity of the threat posed by Republicans and MAGA and Trump.

Under "normal" circumstances, I'm OK with him being Mr Congeniality, but these current circumstances are anything but normal.

It's a brick fight, Democrats
Throw some fuckin' bricks

He finally gets to it with this Colby guy - and I'm glad for that. I just wish now that he'd learn to stop smiling when does get to it.


A Death-Of-Stalin Moment



Three main components:
  1. Tactical: I have a tank. This is what makes it run, this is what it can kill, and this is what can kill it
  2. Operational: I have a battalion of tanks, and a supply train, and air support, and infantry, and field intelligence and and and - this is the hill we want our guys to take, and this is how the other guys could stop us 
  3. Strategic - what's the fuckin' point of all that? What have we accomplished in service to our long term interests?
We have the muscle to fuck up the whole day for anybody anywhere in the world.

But what's next? What comes after all that fuck-up-ery? How does all this shit Trump is doing manifest a coherent strategy?