Janelle Corn

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The U.S. government just made a land deal with the world's first trillionaire. Not a sale. A trade.

Because apparently that's how we do things now.

715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge - built by Congress in 1979 to protect one of the most biodiverse wildlife corridors left in North America - handed to SpaceX.

Endangered ocelots. Aplomado falcons. Piping plovers. Land the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas has called sacred since long before there was a United States.

SpaceX built a rocket launch site next door. Then came the explosions. Concrete and metal hurled six miles across refuge land. A 2024 study found that after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the site suffered egg damage or loss. The Fish and Wildlife Service's response was not enforcement. It was a land swap.

FOIA documents show internal planning for this transfer started as early as April 2025 - while Musk was running DOGE and threatening to fire federal workers who didn't justify their jobs to him. The agency developed what they called "the most expedited schedule possible" to get it done.

Part of what's being handed over includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield - the site of the last battle of the Civil War. A National Historic Landmark. Once transferred, SpaceX can restrict public access whenever they want.

25,000+ people submitted public comments. Most opposed the deal. The government moved forward anyway.

A coalition of tribal and conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit this week to stop it. Because someone has to.

Why are we cutting real estate deals with a trillionaire when we could have just made him pay for it?

#DemsUnited

[Denis - The COVID info guy - @BigBadDenis]

🇺🇸US Weekly COVID update: Jun 15, 2026

🔸1 in 269 Actively Infectious
🔸182,000 Daily Infections
🔸1,270,000 Infections In The Past Week
🔸81,000,000 Infections in 2026
🔸64,000 to 250,000 Weekly Long COVID Cases
🔸300 to 600 Weekly Excess Deaths

Source: https://t.co/OXOyrHYP1K

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

If you enjoy #SaltingTheVibes on Linkedln, I am now posting PMC COVlD updates there too and have upgraded my profile picture to include the Flo Mask.

(link in next)

[tern @1goodtern]

Today has been a terrible year.

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

The CDC has continued to increase their resources surrounding COVlD forecasting.

Three critical pieces of information:
🔥The summer wave is coming
🔥The wave magnitude is highly uncertain
🔥The South/SE and West will get hit hardest

Agreed on all fronts.

[CyFi @CyFi10]

CDC publishes outlook for COVID, predicting a later start to the Summer wave, but the wave potentially peaking later than usual.
As of June 12, with moderate confidence
https://t.co/lqh8Jtce9M

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

The PMC county-level COVlD map has been updated w/today's CDC data.

Very High🔥🔥
▪️Guam
▪️Southeast Idaho
▪️Southeast Alabama
▪️Lorain, Ohio
▪️Waldoboro, Maine

High🔥
▪️Waco, Texas
▪️Lexington, Kentucky
▪️Lancaster, Pennsylvania

We've posted Monday's report early.

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[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

PMC Update, June 8, 2026

The CDC reports COVlD levels are "Very Low" across the US. PMC estimates 1 in 300 Americans actively infectious.

BUT there's an outbreak in Central/East Texas. We estimate ≈1 in 30 residents in key counties are infectious.

Video 👇

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[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

Our soldiers quickly captured two enemy columns of armored vehicles, including modern T-72B3s and even T-90Ms. Instead of simply blowing up the tanks, they did something the Russians certainly did not expect.

Ukrainian crews got into the captured Russian tanks, switched on the radios, adopted the Russians' call signs, and set off on a deep raid behind enemy lines, posing as friendly forces.

The Russian columns moved calmly, believing they were safe. Our tank crews quickly neutralized the original crews, mastered the equipment, and blended into the Russian traffic flow. They spoke Russian over the radio, used the correct call signs, and imitated the style of Russian communications. At checkpoints, they were waved through without suspicion: "Go ahead, guys."

The Ukrainians then calmly drove straight onto the grounds of a Russian brigade headquarters.

Once inside, they suddenly turned their turrets and opened fire. The headquarters, supply depots, and vehicle park were turned into an inferno within minutes. Russian troops ran in panic between tents, firing in every direction, but it was already too late. They had allowed a "Trojan horse" onto their own base.

The operation was carried out brilliantly. Ukrainian forces seized the headquarters, captured officers, destroyed key facilities, and withdrew with minimal losses.

[Conor Browne @brownecfm]

1. Remember that any attempt to paint Long Covid as psychogenic in nature deliberately and completely incorrectly biologically decouples SARS-CoV-2 infection from Long Covid. In essence, this rhetoric shifts the causative factor for LC from the virus to the patient's mind.

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

Now THIS is a fucking scandal.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

BREAKING🚨 A judge just read 135 pages into the record and said what millions of immigrants already knew the Trump administration threw them into legal limbo on purpose, broke the law to do it, and hid behind fake national security claims to cover it up.

On Friday, Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island issued a sweeping 135-page ruling striking down a series of Trump administration policies that had frozen immigration processing for people from 39 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Here is what the Trump administration actually did. Starting in November 2025, shortly after the shooting of two National Guard members at the border, USCIS quietly rolled out a cascade of new policies. First: treat nationality from any of the 39 travel ban countries as a "significant negative factor" in deciding immigration cases. Second: simply stop deciding those cases altogether. Green card applications left untouched. Work permit renewals ignored. Asylum requests frozen. Naturalization ceremonies cancelled. Citizens who had followed every rule, paid every fee, and passed every background check were told nothing, given nothing, and left waiting with no end date in sight.

Judge McConnell did not mince words. He wrote that USCIS had thrown the lives of "countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo." He said the delays were not because those people had done anything wrong. They were stuck, he wrote, "solely because of the circumstance of their birth."

Then he went further. He found that USCIS had violated the very immigration laws it is supposed to enforce. He ruled the agency's actions were "contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious." He found the national security justification pretextual, writing that it served to "mask anti-immigrant sentiments" that the agency was not letting itself admit openly.

The ruling covers all pending USCIS cases for people from the 39 countries. Green card processing must resume. Work permits must be adjudicated. Asylum applications must be decided. Citizenship ceremonies must be rescheduled. Not for a narrow set of plaintiffs. For everyone affected.

This is the second major federal ruling this week striking down the same framework: a Boston judge reached similar conclusions in April. Now a chief judge has gone further and vacated the entire policy structure in a single order.

The Trump administration is expected to appeal. The Senate passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement bill just hours before this ruling came down.

The judge gave them 135 pages explaining why the law does not care how much you spend on enforcement if you are breaking it yourself.

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: Last September, the President of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal.

Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “The largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” A few more weeks go by, and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project. In Kazakhstan.

All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

An Iowa woman moved to South Dakota to single-handedly save 950 acres of native prairie.

Her name is Tracy Rosenberg. She grew up on an Iowa farm in a state that had once been 85% Northern Tallgrass Prairie. By the time she graduated high school, that number was down to one-tenth of one percent.

She spent 35 years in Des Moines. A divorce forced the sale of the small farm she'd been planning to convert. She started looking for native prairie to buy in Iowa, but there wasn't any left to find.

Then she read a 2012 Star Tribune article about prairie conservation that mentioned Pete Bauman, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy working in the Dakotas.

She emailed him. Within an hour, he wrote back and told her that the Benedictine monks at Blue Cloud Abbey near Marvin, South Dakota, were closing and selling their land, including some of the last unplowed native sod in the state.

So she packed up and moved to a place she had never been.

In 2013, Tracy bought almost 1,000 acres of virgin tallgrass prairie. She named it Abbey Grasslands of the Prairie Coteau. Then she got to work with prescribed burns, intensive rotational grazing, and integrated pest management.

She's spent the last 13 years restoring degraded sections and protecting the intact ones. The federally threatened Dakota Skipper butterfly, gone from most of its historic range, has been documented on her land.

Tracy received the USDA NRCS Earth Team Individual Award and was named Conservationist of the Year by the National Organization of Professional Women.

She gives talks at national prairie conferences, hosts educational tours for ranchers and tribal college students, and runs the property as a working classroom.

Less than 4% of America's tallgrass prairie remains. The nearly 1,000 acres Tracy is protecting is some of it.

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

This is really cool. It's up to date through June 2. As an example, here's the "forecast" for COVlD nationally (orange), in Louisiana (blue), and in New Orleans (green).

Local Rt = 0.90, meaning declining levels.

US CDC 👏👏👏

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

Monday we officially launched our national county-level COVlD heatmap and called on the CDC to do the same.

They have not updated their main wastewater map yet. However, the CDC did update their main ED forecasting map with county-level data. #KeepFighting

[Michael T. Lester @MichaelTLester]

Yesterday I told you the government is pulling 900 ocean monitoring instruments out of the water.

Here is the part that should make every American angry, regardless of where you stand on climate.

Congress voted to fund this network. Not once. Twice. The Trump administration proposed cutting it by 80 percent in 2025. Congress restored the money. Proposed the same cut in 2026. Congress restored the money again.

So the administration labeled it a "descope" and ordered the instruments pulled anyway.

That is not a budget disagreement. That is an executive branch telling the legislative branch that its votes do not matter. The public paid for this infrastructure. Congress protected it. One office in Washington decided the public should not have it.

This is the pattern I document in 𝑾𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒂𝒅 𝑮𝒖𝒚𝒔. It is not about left or right. It is about who decides what Americans are allowed to know about their own planet.

Who should make that call?

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

Well, well, well…

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

BREAKING:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Divided appeals court panel rules Trump administration policy illegally banned transgender troops from military service.

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

PMC Update (Jun 1, 2026)

COVlD levels are "very low" relative to other time periods. 1 in 277 US residents are estimated actively infectious.

However, there active hot spots in the Central Appalachia Region, Guam, Franklin County (WA), & Morgan County (AL).
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