Matt

36. ☭

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

The House voted today on a new measure to fuse elements of the Israeli and US militaries, particularly on the cyberweapons front. Section 224, as its known, is included in the National Defense Authorization Act. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced an amendment to strip it from the bill. Watch as a stream of Republicans and Democrats stand up in support of the enhanced cooperation. Only Rep. Sarah Jacobs (D-Calif.) joined Khanna, and the measure failed in a voice vote. Watch:

[kev joon @never_oppressed]

I genuinely feel sick. This is just beyond anything the mind can fathom. And I keep thinking of what Ta-Nehisi Coates said. If you can’t draw the line at the genocide in Gaza, you can’t draw it anywhere else. Moral failure, on a mass and collective scale, brought us here.

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

🚨 The White House has created an FBI-led "NPSM-7 Joint Mission Center" dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans suspected of domestic terrorism https://t.co/MQOf3BiZtW

[Nima Shirazi @WideAsleepNima]

The New York Times is now describing Iran's very normal acts of self-defense - shooting down American jets that are BOMBING THEIR FUCKING COUNTRY - as an "escalation from Iran's leadership."

Completely unhinged to publish stuff like this.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇬🇧 ~ 40 countries held talks Thursday on reopening the Strait of Hormuz after Iran took control of the route in response to U.S.-Israeli strikes, Reuters reported.

🔸 The U.S. did not attend the talks, which followed remarks by President Trump urging countries reliant on the strait to “just take it” and secure it themselves.

🔸 European countries that initially refused to deploy naval forces are now considering a coalition, led by Britain and France, as energy prices rise.

🔸 Officials said discussions focused on which countries would contribute ships and aircraft, how to coordinate intelligence, and how to restore shipping confidence and reduce insurance costs.

🔸 French officials said any military reopening would be phased and could only begin once hostilities have calmed or ended, and would likely require coordination with Iran, citing risks from coastal defenses and missile systems.

🔸 British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Iran is “hitting our global economic security” and “holding the global economy hostage.”

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇪🇨 🇺🇸 A New York Times investigation raises serious questions about a March 6 airstrike that War Secretary Hegseth touted on social media as proof the U.S. military was “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land.”

The target, according to the Times, appears to have been a 350-acre cattle and dairy farm in San Martín (a remote farming village in northern Ecuador), not a drug trafficking compound.

Farm workers, including 32-year-old carpenter Miguel who owns the farm, told the Times that Ecuadorean soldiers arrived three days earlier, proceeded to detain four Colombian laborers, beating them severely, and subjecting them to waterboarding and electric shocks, before dousing nearby structures with gasoline and setting them alight.

They said troops returned on March 6 to film themselves bombing the still-smoldering ruins, producing footage later publicized by Ecuador and the U.S. governments as the destruction of a traffickers’ training camp.

The Pentagon said the strike was conducted “jointly” with Ecuador, though Times sources said U.S. troops had no direct involvement in the bombing itself.

Ecuador claimed to have recovered weapons and evidence of illicit activity but released no photographs, as it typically does following drug seizures.

“It’s a lie that 50 people trained here,” Miguel told the Times, standing amid his dead chickens. “There’s no logic.”

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

“We are killing people. The United States is killing people.”

Drop Site’s @RyanGrim challenged Newsmax to explain why the U.S. gets to decide Cuba’s future, describing the horrifying impact of the U.S. blockade, which is punishing civilians and rapidly collapsing daily life across the country.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Doctors are manually operating ventilators in order to keep babies alive in Cuba.

The U.S. is laying siege cruelly cut off all fuel, power is out, leaving hospitals without electricity. Dialysis patients, babies in NICU, and others will die. This’s a crime against humanity.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇨🇺 Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio:

“Yesterday we published that 96,000 Cubans are waiting for surgery as a result of lack of fuel and lack of energy, among them 11,000 children. So I would think that the American people would feel, why does our government treat the whole population of Cuba in this way?

And I hope that the people of the United States would understand that it’s not correct to treat another nation in the way the U.S. is doing it simply to try to achieve political goals.”

Watch this full exchange. Additional key excerpts highlighted in the replies: ⬇️

[Kawsachun News @KawsachunNews]

🇨🇺 U.S. politicians repeatedly claim that Cuba will ‘collapse on its own’.

Why then has the U.S. government spent nearly seven decades trying to destroy Cuba’s economy and system of government? @CarlosFdeCossio

[Matt @groovyautistic]

@arash_tehran

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

It’s cool how terms just mean whatever you want them to mean

[Matt @groovyautistic]

@DropSiteNews *ninth district

[Carl Zha @CarlZha]

Bro said w a straight face: "This could mean young men couldn't afford their OnlyFans anymore, this could lead to a revolution in the streets" 😭😭😭

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

MrBeast competition to see who can make it through the Strait of Hormuz

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Al Jazeera investigation: Iran girls’ school targeting likely ‘deliberate’

Al Jazeera investigation raises questions over deadliest single attack of war on Iran that killed 165 schoolgirls and staff.

https://t.co/C0BCCpJbQv

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🚨 Report: ‘Double-tap’ strike killed 165 Iranian schoolgirls in Minab

An investigation by Middle East Eye finds the deadly strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, involved two explosions, with the second blast hitting survivors who had taken shelter after the first attack.

▪️ Witnesses and Red Crescent medics said students were moved to the school’s prayer hall after the initial strike. A second missile then hit the same area.

▪️ 165-181 people were killed, almost all girls aged 7–12. Many parents had been called to collect their children when the second strike occurred.

▪️ Officials say the destruction was so severe that dozens of victims remain unidentified, with DNA testing underway.

U.S. and Israeli officials say they are “investigating” the incident. White House Press Secretary @PressSec responds in the clip below from today. 👇

[crisp mattman @cushbomb]

This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.

[Matt @groovyautistic]

@mbrenes1 i would love a copy

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

Michael Parenti (1933-2026) died today. He has, as his son Christian said, 'gone to the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky'. A socialist from early into his life till the very end, Michael Parenti wrote in a feisty way and spoke bluntly the truths that were not always easy to digest in a wretched capitalist system. He was a fierce critic of imperialist wars and suffered the consequences of this because he could keep and then hold academic jobs even in liberal states such as Vermont.

The toughest test for all of us came when the USSR collapsed, and it was in this period that Michael Parenti played an important role in the Battle of Ideas, fighting the reactionary Western media and the intellectual cowardice of his peers. His books on Yugoslavia's destruction earned him terrible attacks, which he brushed off as the necessary price you pay in this struggle. In the midst of it all, Michael wrote 'Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism' (1997), a rebuttal to the anti-Marxist and anti-Communist blather that had begun to infect the world. The book remains an essential tool to fight against the ridiculous anti-communist historiography that demeans the great achievements of the workers' movements.

He spent the last period of his life within himself, which was a loss to the rest of us, and now his departure leaves us without that anchor which he provided.

Michael Parenti. Comrade. Our Red Flag dips in your honour.