Matt Robare

Sic Semper Tyrannis

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Florida paid a portable toilet company called Doodie Calls more than $92 million over six months to haul wastewater out of the Everglades. The state projected it would pay Doodie Calls $480 million over two years. For comparison, building a sewage treatment plant for a city of 10,000 people costs about $5 million.

That is one vendor. At one facility. Built in eight days on an Everglades airstrip using hurricane disaster funds because Ron DeSantis declared immigration a state of emergency in 2023 to access a $5 billion fund set aside for floods and hurricanes.

The facility costs between $1.2 million and $3 million per day to operate. A conservative estimate puts the annual per-capita cost at $500,000 per detainee. Florida spends $30,000 a year to house a convicted criminal in a state prison. The math on Alligator Alcatraz is not tougher than a prison. It is more than sixteen times more expensive.

Three quarters of the men held there have never been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting civil immigration proceedings. They are being held in kennels - cages with steel mesh sides, 16 bunks, three toilets, brightly lit 24 hours a day. Amnesty International documented what it called deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize, including credible allegations of men held in stress positions in direct sunlight without food or water for hours at a time.

Governor Braun opened the Speedway Slammer at an Indiana prison. The Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The Louisiana Lockup at Angola. The naming contest is ongoing. The cruelty is the point. The cost is someone else's problem. Florida's emergency fund has dwindled to $200 million. The facility cannot run to the end of the year.

The men in the cages are still there.

[Greg @gkamstra]

Why is education the only purchase where we’ve decided it’s okay for the provider to demand full income and net worth info in order to execute on a price discrimination strategy?

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

If a historian on the right abused evidence in this way, they'd face career ruination.

When Boston University's Quinn Slobodian does it, he gets a Guggenheim fellowship, book awards, and a Hewlett Foundation grant.

Academia's rot runs far deeper than a simple crisis of rigor.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Last night, the House chose to stand with Ukraine, and I was proud to cast my vote.

We passed military and reconstruction aid for Ukraine, plus hard new sanctions on Russia.

We did it over the objections of Mike Johnson and Republican leadership, who spent over a year trying to keep this bill from ever hitting the floor.

Eighteen Republicans crossed the aisle and did the right thing.

Why does this matter?

Because when a giant authoritarian state invades a smaller democracy, there is no gray area. There is no “both sides.”

Vladimir Putin is a thug. He started an unprovoked war. He flattened cities. He stole children from their families. Helping Ukraine isn’t charity. It’s the test of whether we still mean a single word we say about freedom.

I heard every excuse. The war’s winding down, they said, so let’s wait and see. Nonsense. You don’t strengthen a democracy by going wobbly the second things get hard. You don’t stop the next invasion by telling the world American resolve comes with an expiration date. Putin is watching. So is every dictator who dreams of taking what isn’t his by force.

This bill still has to clear the Senate and survive a presidential signature. The odds are long. But the House did its job. And we said it plainly: no country gets swallowed whole just because a tyrant wants it.

I’ll keep fighting to see this through. Ukraine’s fight is our fight, and we do not abandon our friends.
https://t.co/16OTeNW1dD

[BonkDaCarnivore @BonkDaCarnivore]

What's amazing to me is that, 10 years apart, there are the exact same clouds in the exact same positions.

DC truly is a magical place

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Even Arab leaders admit it.

Everyone is sharing the Bill Clinton clip where he describes how Yasser Arafat rejected a generous peace offer at Camp David that would have given the Palestinians a state on 96 percent of the West Bank, land swaps, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Clinton says Arafat lied to him and that the Palestinian leadership never actually wanted a two-state solution. They wanted to destroy Israel. It’s a video often shared by people like @VividProwess, and it’s an important one for people to see.

Of course, critics immediately dismiss it. They claim Clinton is biased or he’s pro-Israel. They’ll tell you that you cannot trust the American perspective.

Ok, so let us set that aside.

Now watch this.

In this powerful interview, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a major Arab leader who was directly involved in negotiations, says exactly the same thing from the Arab side. He talks about the Mena House Conference in Cairo as well as the Camp David negotiations of 1978. All failed because of the Palestinians repeatedly rejecting any offer. The Oslo accords were signed but because Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were not involved, they derailed the accords and any chance for peace by initiating 4 years of terrorist suicide attacks in Israel. Then came the second Camp David negotiations in 2000 which Arafat agreed to, then rejected and instead initiated the Second Intifada.

Mubarak explains how the Palestinians refused to even participate in the Mena House conference of 1977. He describes repeated opportunities they were given, including a detailed document that called for Israeli withdrawal from the Samaria, Judea and Gaza, security arrangements during a transitional period, and other major concessions. The Israelis were willing to negotiate on difficult issues like who would control security. The Palestinians, according to Mubarak, kept saying no and wasting chance after chance.

He speaks with clear frustration about how for decades the Palestinian side has rejected peace initiatives and realistic compromises.

The video further shows footage from the PLO representative in 1977, as well as old footage of Egyptian president Sadat who was involved in the Mena House and first Camp David negotiations of 1978.

This perhaps is far more impactful than Clinton’s account because it is not a Western or Israeli voice. It is prominent Arab leaders who lived the negotiations, who represented the broader Arab world, and who had zero incentive to defend Israel.

When leaders from both sides of the table describe the same pattern of Palestinian rejectionism and violence, it becomes much harder to dismiss as bias.

The pattern is clear across decades and across different voices… generous offers, repeated refusals, and continued demands for everything while giving nothing in return.

This is not ancient history. It is the core reason the conflict continues today.

If you value the truth, please share.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

BREAKING; A Hamas operative from Gaza, granted asylum in Greece, was just arrested in Crete.

He’d built a bomb lab in an Athens apartment, trained in explosives in Gaza and Malaysia, and is tied to four others held in Cyprus. He confessed he was waiting for instructions to attack Jews.

Greek police are checking whether the target was the Crown Iris, the Israeli cruise ship arriving Tuesday. The same one mobs greeted last year with throat-slitting gestures.

[OhioRob @TheOhioRob]

Weird how Israel and Egypt signed peace almost 50 years ago and haven’t had a single military conflict since then. Jordan in 1993, no conflicts since, either.

It’s almost like you don’t want peace in the region as long as one country with 8 million Jews remains in existence.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

When Gabriel Zucman manipulated tax rate stats to show the wealthy paying less than the poor and tried to memory hole his own previously published numbers that undermined this claim, academia cheered him on because they liked his political narrative and gave him the Clark Medal.

When Kevin Kruse plagiarized multiple passages in his published works over the past two decades, academia circled the wagons around him, attacked the person who discovered it (i.e. me) as "politically motivated," and dismissed overwhelming evidence as "accidental copying and pasting."

When Quinn Slobodian got caught altering the text of Mises quotations to make them sound racist, academia made him co-editor of the journal where he did it and showered him with prizes.

When Nancy MacLean got caught engaging in wholesale fabrications of evidence (as well as egregious incompetence) in her book about James M. Buchanan, academia made her a finalist for the National Book Award.

When Nikole Hannah-Jones got caught denying and ghost-editing one of her most controversial claims out of the 1619 Project, academia handed her a cushy endowed professorship with full tenure despite her having nonexistent scholarly research outputs and zero teaching experience.

When Michael Bellesiles falsified historical documents to make an anti-second amendment argument as part of his history of gun ownership in America, academia gave him the Bancroft Prize and only rescinded it after the evidence became so overwhelming that they could not deny it anymore.

When Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple scholarly works over her career, academia made her president of Harvard and also tried to circle the wagons until the evidence became so overwhelming that they could not deny it anymore.

Yes, higher ed has a politicization problem and it often shows through in the exceedingly low standards of rigor in many of these fields. But it also manifests in other ways that are much more serious than a simple lack of rigor.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Matt Robare @MattRobare]

WHY DOES IT TAKE FOREVER TO STOP BLEEDING WHEN YOU CUT YOURSELF SHAVING?!!!!

[Andrew Gebo @GeboMpls]

Car dependency is a mandatory tax on your freedom and bank account. True fiscal conservatism is living in a walkable neighborhood where you don’t need a $40,000 depreciating asset just to buy groceries.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

No, you’re not sending “more money to Ukraine,” and you never have.

You used to send American money to American arms manufacturers so that American workers and engineers could have more contracts, jobs, salaries, and tax revenue while producing American weapons in America for Ukraine or replacing old equipment from U.S. stockpiles.

That allowed the Ukrainian military to keep saving their country, while your top-tier geopolitical enemy, a KGB dictatorship obsessed with hatred toward you, could be defeated in its war of aggression in Europe and critically weakened for decades to come -- without a single American soldier firing a single shot.

But then you decided to start pretending that night is day.

[Blake Allen @Blake_Allen13]

The anger at Rep. Omar for voting against Russia sanctions & arming Ukraine is valid but if you don’t carry that same energy towards the 190 Republicans who voted no as well, you’re missing the point. They all voted wrong

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Ukraine’s drone forces have pulled off something genuinely significant at Donetsk Airport. The 14th Regiment of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces has established what they call “fire control” over the Russian-held facility, destroying launch pads, vehicles, and supply depots in a sustained campaign that has rendered the airport effectively unusable.

The target was not chosen at random. Russia had transformed the airport into a dual-purpose military asset: a launch site for Shahed-type attack drones and a logistics hub feeding front-line operations in the Donetsk region.

Taking it out of commission disrupts both functions simultaneously.

What makes this operation notable is its place within a larger strategic framework. Ukraine is pursuing what the BBC describes as a “logistics lockdown” strategy, using AI-guided drones to systematically dismantle Russian supply infrastructure behind the front lines rather than concentrating solely on direct battlefield engagements. The logic is straightforward: an army that cannot resupply cannot sustain offensive pressure.

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces described this as the first operation of its kind in modern military history, a claim that reflects how novel drone-on-infrastructure warfare at this scale and precision actually is.

Ukraine is increasingly using autonomous, and AI-assisted drones not just to harass but to degrade Russian operational capacity at depth.

[Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw]

Extraordinary Letter.

Points to Bill Pulte appointment as national security danger.

"The undersigned include twenty-eight former service secretaries and retired general and flag officers who
collectively served under every president from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden, Jr"

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Great article.

“ The UN has become one of the most dangerous instruments in modern geopolitics. Authoritarian regimes are using the UN’s prestige to normalise their behavior, conceal their crimes and peddle anti-Western propaganda. It should terrify all of us that the world’s most trusted watchdog has been successfully leveraged as a PR firm for tyrants.”

https://t.co/scgJQ6REmR

[Gary Winslett 🌐🇺🇸 @GaryWinslett]

Anti-billionaire sentiment really breaks some people's brains. If you can't afford medicine or housing, that's a problem. But if you can't afford NBA Finals in NYC......that's normal and not a sign it's the Gilded Age. Just watch it on TV.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

It's not just the evidence of assault.

It's not just the Nazi tattoo

It's not just lying about the Nazi tattoo

It's not just the Kik account

It's not just the adulterous sexting

It's not just the deranged posting

It's all of it (and the more that may emerge).

This is the guy you want to burn your moral credibility for to beat ... Susan Collins?

[🏴‍☠️Maddox🏴‍☠️ @realmaddox]

This is an insane story. The DOGE whistleblower who said that login attempts were made to the NLRB from Russian IP addresses minutes after DOGE got access had his brake lines cut and photos of him walking his dog from a drone taped to his door after Musk attacked him on Twitter