“The Department of Defense is re-evaluating our probationary workforce, consistent with the President’s initiative to reform the Federal workforce to maximize efficiency and productivity,” Darin Selnick, performing the duties of under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in a Feb. 21 statement.
“We expect approximately 5,400 probationary workers will be released beginning next week as part of this initial effort, after which we will implement a hiring freeze while we conduct a further analysis of our personnel needs, complying as always with all applicable laws.”
WASHINGTON – Today the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent a letter to the Maine Department of Education Commissioner Pender Makin announcing that OCR is initiating a directed investigation of the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) amid allegations that it continues to allow male athletes to compete in girls’ interscholastic athletics and that it has denied female athletes female-only intimate facilities, thereby violating federal antidiscrimination law. The letter also notifies MDOE that OCR is launching an investigation into Maine School Administrative District #51 (MSAD #51), after it was reported that Greely High School, a school under its jurisdiction, is continuing to allow at least one male student to compete in girls’ categories.
Elbridge Colby is Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as under secretary of defense for policy, but Sen. Tom Cotton is thinking about derailing his nomination. Colby not only has the president’s support, he’s also been defended on social media by the leading pro-Trump voices, from Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk to Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance. The Heritage Foundation has also called for the Senate to confirm Colby.
What makes Colby, who served faithfully in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, more objectionable to Cotton than Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy were? The Arkansas senator voted to confirm both of those ex-Democrats for higher offices than the one to which Colby has been nominated.
The answer, Cotton has indicated, is that he believes Colby is insufficiently fearful of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2010, Colby wrote a Foreign Policy essay arguing that Iran could be strategically contained even if it did develop a nuclear weapon, though Colby concluded, “containment is certainly not the best outcome—successfully preventing Iranian acquisition is.”
Most Americans don’t know that for much of U.S. history there was no federal income tax and there was no central bank. But now everyone assumes that we must have a federal income tax and a central bank in order to have a functioning society. Today, there are just a handful of nations that do not have an income tax, and more than 99 percent of the entire population of the globe lives in a country that has a central bank. Of course the two work hand in hand. A central bank creates a spiral of borrowing that is meant to be unbreakable, and an income tax is necessary to service payments on that debt spiral.
It is not a coincidence that a federal income tax and the Federal Reserve were both established in 1913. Since that time, we have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and that is precisely the outcome that the system was designed to produce.
If this happens it will be amazing. USA needs deep reform. Abolishing the Federal Reserve, income tax, and IRS would constitute deep reform. Along with other Trump policies, we may experience the Second American Revolution, this time done without violence. ABN
FBI Director Kash Patel has ordered 1,500 staff and agents to be transferred from its Washington, DC, headquarters to various locations across the nation. Some 1,000 agents and staff will be reassigned to cities the Trump administration has designated higher crime locations where they can fight crime rather than engage in political shenanigans. Another 500 staff will be reassigned to Huntsville, Alabama, which is the DC equivalent of exile to Siberia.
This is Director Patel’s first step, and it shouldn’t come as a shock. He told us it was going to happen.
The Kremlin seems to be surprised at how quickly the American president Donald Trump made concessions his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, just before negotiations began to end the Moscow war in Ukraine, said CNN Vladimir Milov, a former deputy minister of Russian energy.
The Kremlin expected Trump to set certain conditions for Russia, and Moscow “was preparing some sort of offer here and there to do what they call a deal ”, said Vladimir Milov, a former adviser to the late Russian opposition leader. Aleksei Navalnii.
Speaking from exile in Vilnius, Milov claims that, based on what he heard, “everyone in Moscow is totally amazed now that all the concessions they wanted have been made, even before the start of negotiations”.
“This is a shocking result, even by Vladimir Putin’s standards”, Milov commented, according to the source quoted by News.ro.
The long-term relationship between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenski was blown up this week.
The above is translated from Romanian, so grain of salt on that and it is hearsay, so a bit more salt. It does sound like Trump, though. There are many stories of him making very generous offers, which if not accepted will become much less generous quickly. My sense is this is a good start to ending the war and forming real-world mutually beneficial relationships with Russia, which geopolitically is of the greatest importance to USA, Russia, and Europe, not to mention Ukraine. ABN
Jeffery Sachs was the mastermind behind the invasion of the Southern Border, crafted the idea of using Catholic Charities to support migrants.
In his book “Ethics in Action,” which includes a foreword by Pope Francis, Sachs lays out a plan to use Catholic Charities and taxpayer funds to fuel the crisis.
Borders crumble while Sachs smirks behind UN goals. The border crisis was Sachs’ brainchild—Catholic Charities serve as his pawns, taxpayer dollars as his fuel, and the Pope’s nod as his shield.
It’s not aid; it’s war by migration.
Jeffery Sachs should never be trusted or his ideas given any weight, as he is the cause of many of the problems in the country today.
Sachs should be questioned and answer in detail if he is a Jewish supremist. He should be required to disavow Jewish supremacy on multiple occasions in public if he claims he is not one. To me he has always looked and acted like a covert supremist, starting with his major role in the rape and ruination of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. ABN
The pilot responsible for crashing a Delta plane upside down at the Toronto Pearson International Airport on February 17, 2025, has been identified as 26-year-old First Officer Kendal Swanson.
A beauty pageant winner from Minnesota, Swanson had only completed her training in April and had logged fewer than 1,500 flight hours at the time of the incident.
The more experienced captain, James Henneman, was managing communications during the crash while Swanson piloted.
No one should want to be put in a job they are not able to do. Swanson should not have wanted this and should have refused to attempt the landing, especially considering the stormy conditions. DEI fails at every level. And it especially fails at the level of the person who is promoted above their skill level. Swanson got lucky as no one died but the risk she took should be a warning to her for the rest of her life and to all of us that ideologies like DEI are not just stupid and wrong but extremely dangerous. Under Biden and his ilk we have been betting our entire nation and civilization on DEI. That kind of thinking must go. We will destroy USA and the West if we persist and then, even immigrants will have nowhere to go. ABN
UPDATE: Thanks to pimacanyon for providing the video below in his comment, which is well-worth reading. The video is a sort of rebuttal of my post above, which I am going to leave up since the public has a right to know what happened and if they don’t tell us even the basics, we are going to talk anyway. If Swanson didn’t land the plane, who did? If she was ‘qualified’ in some way or other, she was also only minimally experienced, so why did the pilot have her land the plane in such bad weather? I have seen a video analysis of the landing which claims whoever landed the plane failed to do a mandatory maneuver, which raises the plane’s nose, thus causing the aircraft to slam onto to the runway and overturn. When was the last time we saw a plane slam onto a runway and overturn like that? ABN
American Buddhist Net 