Richmond Eustis

IDF accepts Gaza Health Ministry death toll of over 71,000 Palestinians killed in the war Although Many International Experts Have Accepted the Health Ministry's Data as Reliable, and Even Conservative Relative to the True Death Toll, Israel Had Refused to Accept the Health Ministry's Coun...

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable.

Biden himself said they were fabricated!

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Iranians Who Seized U.S. Embassy Release 4 Women and 6 Black Men (Published 1979)

In 1979 when Iranian students seized the US embassy they eventually let go all of the Black people working there because they understood that the US would only care about white Americans. Iran understands our society far better than we understand theirs or our own.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

We are run by malicious, incompetent, idiots, and a lot of people in this country think that's better than trusting actual experts.

My sink sponge is smarter than Markwayne.

“Every Republican president comes to office, cuts benefits for the poor, cuts taxes for the rich, raises prices, and then bombs a Middle East country.”

@mehdirhasan.bsky.social explains how Trump’s ‘anti-war’ campaign was a lie, noting the president has bombed seven countries in his second term.

why would you not come to our camp?

meanwhile, war rages on at home.

I wish I knew Russian!

FIFA to 'monitor developments' in Iran ahead of 2026 World Cup FIFA will "monitor developments" in Iran following the outbreak of military action by the United States -- the co-hosts of this summer's men's World Cup -- against the Middle Eastern nation.

Lots of comments about Trump's "FIFA Peace Prize"...

... meanwhile Iran is scheduled to send its national team to the US in a few months for the world's biggest sports event.

Hard to imagine the World Cup proceeding in the US.

Except the only thing more notoriously corrupt than Trump is FIFA.

Trump vies for Bush’s crown for worst foreign policy decision in history

The US president upended half a century of US foreign policy in an eight-minute video with another act of Middle Eastern regime change

our government combines the impulse control of pete hegseth, the intellectual rigor of rfk jr, and the attention span of donald trump with elon musk’s signature sense of humor

This is one of the videos the NYT has verified and links to in their reporting.

NYT: "Video verified by [NYT] showed ... rescuers digging through the rubble with building cranes and shovels, and piles of bloodied, dusty backpacks."

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/w...

the only genuine opposition statement we have, putting the spineless to shame, and it is NOT ENOUGH

underline "human misery" of the dead school girls requires our solidarity

underline "illegal, premeditated and unconstitutional" requires articles of impeachment introduced instantly

Chuck Schumer: ‘The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran’ WASHINGTON—In a pointed critique of President Trump’s foreign policy leadership, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stated to members of the press Thursday that “the American people deserve a presid...

From The Archives:

Why in the world is Melania Trump leading a UN security council meeting? | Arwa Mahdawi The first lady is a Trump and therefore automatically qualified to do anything her heart desires

"Foisting Melania on the security council as the US assumes the body’s rotating monthly presidency sends a clear message to the world about just how seriously the Trump administration takes the UN."

In case you were wondering what Trump thinks of world opinion.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Abstract in English, article text in Portuguese, which I really love having a reason to practice. I'm hoping I can find some practices to adopt in my occasional first-year writing courses.

Scholarly aside: reading things in other languages is a great joy I wish more people were able to experience.

A photo of a young woman in a black robe and headscarf and several monuments against a mountain landscape, from an analog photo album

I traveled across Iran in 2004 as a very young person. It's a beautiful country w/mountainous geography reminiscent of Colorado or Montana. Everywhere I went, people seemed eager to reassure me "we hate your government, not you." In our own hell, we are now experts at making that same distinction.

In a just world, every bad faith git with a platform who called Trump an anti-war president would be driving DoorDash for the next ten years. It was always such transparently false bullshit.

Another day, another episode of liberals shouting "Hey! You can't do that— it's against the law!" while the Right just does it anyway.

Murdering civilians overseas is not a distraction, it's not about money or airtime or domestic policy or the crimes of individuals. It's war crimes. It matters enough of its own to say stop without refocusing on anything else.

American liberal accounts calling it the Epstein War, do you have the capacity to think about anything other than yourselves for just one fucking minute? Not everything needs to be a Democratic branding exercise, my god

Democrats should promise that every refugee, asylum seeker, and green card holder illegally deported, arrested, sent to CECOT, or sent to a third country can come back to the U.S. with a fast track to citizenship.

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis US president violates UN charter just days into his Board of Peace era, and chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration

“The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.”

Related point, if you are in misinformation research and have been launching study after study to see what Uncle Fred thinks after seeing misinformation PLEASE listen to what @katestarbird.bsky.social and I have been saying for years: effects on elite and official action is what matters most.

Apply this maxim to any war you like.

"Don't take the bait! Murdering protestors and allowing masked paramilitaries to disappear immigrants and defying court orders and illegally bombing other countries is just a distraction to keep people from talking about how the cost of dining out is up 6.1 percent!" (Some Democrat, probably)

Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq The Trump admin can't seem to settle on a reason for war with Iran. That hasn't stopped them from planning a war without a "why."

The case for invading Iraq was based on lies. The Trump administration’s case for war with Iran hardly exists at all.

The people incinerating schoolgirls are not good people.

Don't stop at abolishing ICE, just abolish the whole damn country at this point. Give the land back, pay out anything in the coffers as reparations at home and abroad, just shut it down.