Douglas Main

U.K. might lose a prime minister because a guy who worked for him knew another guy who hung out with Epstein. Meanwhile the U.S. opposition party is telling our President, who was Epstein's best friend, that his secret police should get better training so their public street murders look less messy.

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

I think way too many journalists have given MAHA folks a platform and credibility.

Even if some of their goals are noble, they support a criminal and comically corrupt regime — beholden to Big Oil, Big Ag, etc — that is *obviously* not really genuinely interested in making Americans healthy.

Yeah, let's Make America Healthy Again, by:

-supporting the worst president in history on environmental and health issues
-who empowers/appoints industry lobbyists
-who is comically yet predictably corrupt

...and then I'll complain when he & his people do exactly what you'd expect.

Insane!

Funny to see this framed in terms what MAHA folks thinks. With all due respect, did you really think Trump was going to protect you from dangerous chemicals? Why did you think that? I appreciate the message, but hard not to be frustrated when these MAHA people helped us get into this mess.

Even herbicide-friendly extension folks, and many farmers, are against using this stuff, because it so readily evaporates and drifts.

It finds its way deep inside of forests, your neighbor's lilac bushes, organic vegetable farms. It kills and stunts leaves and harms these plants. Not good.

E.P.A. Re-approves Controversial Herbicide That Drifts to Nearby Land

ooooof. Not unexpected, still bad: EPA re-approves Dicamba, the pesticide that easily drifts outside of fields when sprayed to harm trees, vegetables, other crops, and which courts twice said shouldn't be used, for this obvious reason.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/c...

Donald Trump reminds us every day that he's a miserable, corrupt, fascist, ignorant strongman. I guess today he wanted to remind us that he's also a racist.

Trump just killed the CIA World Fact Book, which I fondly remember consulting from time to time since HS, yet another thing made worse for no good reason

www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

This is so weird man. AI characters are not actually people! OFC the ai, made by a dude, looks like an attractive woman. Everything about this skeeves me out.

blog.mindvalley.com/eliza-the-ai/

what a deeply misguided man

Perfection

We are deciding right now whether we want to be a country with ethnic cleansing and concentration camps.

What does at 14/86 female/male equity rate mean?

doesn't seem like a good thing but I dunno

(this is a Dutch artificial turf company)

www.tencategrass.com/our-story/at...

That Jeff Bezos's Amazon gave Brett Ratner, someone photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and in the Epstein Files, $75 million to make a doc about Melania Trump, while he chooses to destroy The Washington Post, says about all you need to know.

The big tech founder whose 417-foot, $500 million superyacht needs a 256-foot, $75 million superyacht to "shadow" it -- because the bigger yacht lacks a helipad -- had to cut his paper's newsroom almost in half, for reasons

A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."

Goddam it

38,000 mentions of Trump, but they weren’t friends or anything.

The Man Who Broke Physics Even before competing in his first Olympics, 21-year-old Ilia Malinin has transformed the sport of figure skating.

didn't know Ed Sheeran could skate

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

bsky.app/profile/dmai...

Disgusting stuff. Also FWIW, the pic on their page of smiling young women is a stock photo from Unsplash.

bsky.app/profile/dmai...

A screenshot of the Univ. of Illinois Young Republicans page, which shamelessly uses a stock photo of "friends in a coffee shop" (see next photo)

The source of the stock photo of "friends at a coffee shop" from Unsplash: It shows four students smiling and talking, including three young women presumably. Definitely not members of U of I young Republicans.

Another observation: U of I young Republicans have a photo of smiling youthful people on their page.

It's a stock photo from Unsplash, which you can find a the link below. "A group of friends at a coffee shop."

unsplash.com/photos/a-gro...

How can you call Good and Pretti "traitors" who believed they were "above the law" and imply they should be "felled"?

It's quite obvious that they were documenting ICE agents acting "above the law."

Can your eyes not see? What terrible thing went wrong in your short life to end up like this?

Somewhere deep in my marrow I want to believe there are "reasonable" people in such groups, ie since it's the collegiate rep of 1 of 2 major parties in the US. Have the R's all gone nuts? How is this POV accepted at an all-around good, reasonable, and friendly university? (In my experience)

The Young Republicans wrote: “for the past 60 years, & esp. in the last decade, our nation has come under invasion from the masses of the third world and those incompatible with Western civilization.”

This is not normal. This is indistinguishable from Nazi rhetoric. THIS is the future of the GOP??

This is disgusting stuff. I'm from Champaign-Urbana and love the U of I, so it's especially awful. This kind of hateful rhetoric has no place in what was once a "mainstream" college group.
A couple observations. 🧵

indeed. should not be part of the job!

How Shinzo Abe’s Assassination Brought the Moonies Back Into the Limelight A shocking act of political violence exposed the cult’s deep influence.

Wild story about the assassination of Shinzo Abe and how it brought the Unification Church into the spotlight. Must read.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Crested Caracara in some great light

Kicking off February with my favorite SE Arizona raptor, the Crested Caracara in fantastic light 🪶