KenK

New Novel: "Courage to Stand": What if the rules of the game are ignored? What can one person do to save the democratic republic from autocracy?

[Leonardo_DeLorian™_Call me D @Gr8CanadianFree]

She’s called “The Zapper”
Presses zapper on her stomach and it zaps Sleepy Don awake

[Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins]

Infectious Diseases Society of America President Ronald Nahass: “At a time when measles outbreaks are already threatening communities across the country, making vaccination more complicated and burdensome risks further reducing vaccination rates and leaving more children vulnerable to a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease."

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Donald Trump wants 'fighting communism' to be the GOP's midterms theme.

The man is seizing the central bank, nationalizing industry, and printing money with his face on it.

I worked for him. The guy IS the communist threat.

[KenK @Ken__42]

@eduardadotai Looking forward to trying it.

[Eduarda Ferreira @eduardadotai]

You know the scene in The Matrix where Neo uploads Kung Fu into his brain and instantly becomes an expert?

We built that for AI agents. Your domain knowledge, loaded into any agent before it starts working.

Socra Cortex. September 1st.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

What a joke. The Republican Party is officially over. Mike Johnson and his cult of MAGA House reps scream about socialism and communism while refusing to rein in Trump who takes a 9.9% stake in Intel and inserts himself into the US Steel-Nippon deal. https://t.co/eup1fLn0yO

[U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. @SenBillCassidy]

I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong. The President does not have the expertise to make these changes.

Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism.

Breaking up vaccines will mean children have to get more shots to get the same protection, not fewer shots. It will increase hesitancy and make children less safe.

Parents should listen to their child’s pediatrician about vaccines rather than listening to an inaccurate executive order. This is so wrong.

https://t.co/OBrUdakEor

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

From @WSJopinion: Trump’s Venezuelan oil boom sputters. The costs of forcing Caracas to hold free elections are too high for Washington now, writes @MaryAnastasiaOG.
https://t.co/2IolcZsx40

[KenK @Ken__42]

@millersarah47 Even better, doing nine roller coasters in a day.

[Yvonne Wingett Sanchez @yvonnewingett]

The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned
The Department of Homeland Security has stopped releasing timely, reliable statistics on immigration enforcement, writes ⁦@NickMiroff⁩ https://t.co/tVij7zHSAO

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

President Trump inherited a strong labor market from President Biden.

Since his inauguration, average monthly job creation has fallen dramatically: from 122k/month in 2024 to 33k/month in 2025-26.

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

I wasn't the first to say it, but I've repeated it often - every projection Trump makes is a confession.
Psychological projection was first described by Freud, wherein individuals transfer their own unacceptable impulses, desires, or emotions onto someone else. Carl Jung expanded this idea with the concept of a shadow self - when we project, we cast a shadow onto others, seeing in them what we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. It's not a leap to see this in Trump every f*cking day. He projects constantly.
But the biggest psychological projection of the Trump years is going on right now, and boy does it play to the ignorance of his base. This, of course, is the characterization of Democrats as communists. The Trump base, however, puts feeling before fact, and dopamine rushes before reasoned thought. They hear "Communist" and they hear "bad" so the attribution of Dems as Communist plays. They put no effort into understanding what the communist ideology actually preaches. Because it's a lot easier to feel than to think.
In Communism, the government wields power; it exerts control over the economy; it buys or takes stakes in businesses and industries; the government is weaponized to silence adversarial dissent; and the government glorifies its leadership. You want to see Communism in America? Look at Trumpism.
Where every projection is a confession.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE agent in plain clothes—points gun directly at multiple peaceful protesters.

Agent assaults woman walking away—already blinded by pepper spray.

Then points gun at people inside a crowded elevator.

Police helped the agent drive away.

Only person detained was a protester.

The LAPD actively assisted the federal agents in leaving the scene of the crime.

Video shows officers pushing protesters out of the way so the agent's car could leave the parking garage.

Incident occurred outside the Metropolitan ICE Detention Center in Los Angeles, California.

Cassandra Church doesn't have an account on this platform—so posting credited video here to help raise awareness.

[KenK @Ken__42]

@eduardadotai I’m not busy, I’m productive.

[Karly Kingsley @karlykingsley]

Dems are investigating whether the Trump admin is coordinating efforts to deport military service members and their families after an AP report that detailed how more than 50 spouses and parents of active-duty troops have been detained by ICE. Heartless and wrong.

[adelita 🦇 @sleepytejana]

and they’ll enforce a national abortion ban with the mass surveillance cameras they’ve been installing all over the country.

they already tracked a woman in Texas via Flock cameras to prove if she got an abortion or not

[Phil Gordon @PhilGordonDC]

U.S. acceptance of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz is an extraordinary outcome only made conceivable by an administration that squandered legitimacy, alienated allies, attempted regime change in a war it had not adequately prepared for and that is being forced to accept a catastrophic outcome without viable alternatives.

Counterfactuals are impossible to prove but in other circumstances Iran's closure of Strait by brazenly attacking maritime traffic and neighbors' civilian infrastructure would likely have justified and led to a united, global response--like the U.S.-led naval escort mission during the Iran-Iraq war, the global coalition that reversed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the multinational naval force enforcing UN sanctions in the Gulf in the 1990s, or the UN Security Council sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program in the 2010s--that led to the JCPOA.

Instead US and other countries are now being forced to accept an outcome that would have been unthinkable before the war but seems to have become unavoidable because of it.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Tourists walked into Yosemite National Park for free last winter.

A day pass normally runs $35 a car. Confused by their own good luck, because nobody was there to stop them or collect a fee.

There were no rangers at the gate. Not short-staffed. Not slow. Gone.

Without rangers around to stop it, visitors are cliff jumping. Flying drones over the valley. Driving the wrong way down one-way roads. One climber scaled Half Dome without the permit required to keep people from dying on that rock face, because there was no one at a desk to ask him for it.

And drivers are parking straight onto the meadows. Some of those wildflower meadows take decades to recover from a single set of tire tracks, if they recover at all. Nobody's there to stop the car before it happens, only someone left to survey the damage after.

One visitor described this spring’s opening weekend as apocalyptic. Cars squeezed onto curbs and into the dirt on both sides of the road. A climber who’d just come off Half Dome said he went looking for pizza afterward and found lines out the door everywhere, calling it a total junk show, more people than he’d ever seen in his life in that park.

This is Trump's Yosemite.

Months later, it's still true. The National Park Service is still down nearly a quarter of its permanent staff nationwide, gutted by DOGE layoffs, buyouts, and retirements the administration never backfilled.

A government watchdog report released this week found DOGE's own claimed savings, $110 billion of them, were riddled with errors auditors couldn't even verify. The cuts were real. The savings mostly weren't.

At Yosemite, the real cost shows up as people, not dollars. The scientists trained to study endangered species and plan for wildfires are the ones cleaning public toilets now, because there's no one else left to do it.

In February 2025, a group of park staff rigged ropes and rappelled down the face of El Capitan to hang an upside-down flag, the universal signal for distress, 3,000 feet up.

This spring, park leadership quietly killed the day-use reservation system that had actually been working, the one that gave Yosemite its sixth-highest visitation year on record in 2024 while cutting down traffic and overcrowding at the same time.

The people who fought hardest to end it weren't rangers or visitors. They were private lodging developers just outside the gates, the ones who profit every time more cars pour in with nowhere to go.

In the last decade, developers have built nearly 900 new hotel rooms, cabins, and glamping units in the towns surrounding the park. Another 1,500 units are already proposed.

Interior's own account posted a victory lap this year, bragging that gridlock days dropped from 120-plus a year to just two, with gate waits under 30 minutes even as visitation climbed 12 percent.

The replies told a different story. One commenter said they live 40 minutes from the park and called it a lie, with lines stretching to Highway 41 in July. Another put it more bluntly: "You are the epitome of mismanagement, and your lies are pathetic."

A longtime Yosemite conservation advocate warns vehicle strikes are already one of the leading causes of bear deaths in the park, and that more cars on the road means more dead bears, this as the park's new superintendent claims there's "zero evidence" crowds are doing any harm at all.

And the rangers who are still standing get yelled at by furious tourists for a mess they didn't create and don't have the staff left to fix.

How many close calls does it take before someone gets killed in a park with no one watching?

🦋Humanity United #DemsUnited

[Slawa @Slawa_tv]

🇵🇱🇺🇦 У Варшаві відбулася акція «Не будь байдужим» на знак солідарності з українцями та українками в Польщі.

Захід організували «Комітет захисту демократії» (KOD), «Громадяни РП», «Акція Демократія», фонд «Польський міграційний форум» та інші організації.

Учасники виступили проти хейту, агресії та насильства через походження, мову чи зовнішність. Організатори закликали поляків не залишатися байдужими та відкрито демонструвати підтримку українцям.

Подібні акції пройшли у понад 20 містах Польщі.

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

US defense giants Lockheed and Raytheon are reportedly resistant to licensing Patriot missile production to Ukraine because they fear that Ukrainian manufacturers will be able to “improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money.” -The Atlantic