The new nominee for director of NPS has no experience in conservation or government and is an executive at Diamond North, which previously scored $12 million off NPS in a lawsuit:

www.sfgate.com/national-par...

There has never been a better argument for destroying capitalism than "if we can't make money off vaccines, then you don't get vaccines."

Hear me out: Publicly-funded vaccine research and everyone gets the vaccines for free.

You may find this map shocking. The crazy imbalance even surprised me!
It’s the ratio of record highs vs record lows in each city since 2020. That’s right, in Miami there have been 115 daily record highs, but only 1 record morning low! Phoenix: 138 to 0!… 1/

In a stunning shift today, NATO stripped the US of all of its operational-level Joint Force Commands.

For the first time since NATO’s founding, all of these commands will be led by Europeans.

NATO no longer feels the United States can be trusted.

breakingdefense.com/2026/02/nato...

Early, non-mRNA Covid vaccines from AstraZeneca and J&J had rare side effects--deadly blood clots and bleeding--that led to their discontinuance and fed anti-vaxx beliefs. Now researchers have ID'd the cause, which may make safer future vaxxes of this type, esp. a new Ebola vaccine.

Quick explainer on Judge Boasberg’s order just now.
It affects the handful of Venezuelans among the 135 sent to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act who, after being prisoner-swapped to VZ, escaped to a 3d country ...
1/7
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"When ICE's ordinary operations require protection from law rather than obedience to it, abolition is not a radical slogan but a natural conclusion."

"restored the Constitution" lol don't piss me off

also Senators start preparing yourself now to hold that seat open

Reading about Lake Kivu on the Rwanda DRA border that stores huge amounts of CO2 and methane that it releases once roughly every 1000 years and kills everything around and they can't actually clear it because if they drained all the CO2 from that lake it would be like 3% of annual global emissions

NEW: CBP signs a new deal with Clearview AI to access its scraped image database for "tactical targeting," including efforts to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” networks of people labeled security threats.

Of all of the cases state courts are allowed to hear, #SCOTUS in 1872 held that habeas petitions by federal prisoners aren't among them.

In today's bonus issue of "One First," I wrote about the ruling in Tarble's Case; why it's largely incoherent; and how it continues to cause ripple effects today:

A difficult things in covering trans science week after week is that the situation most resembles climate change propaganda from oil companies or obfuscation by tobacco companies in whether smoking causes cancer, but major science desks are invested in pretending it's a real scientific debate.

Also, no, seriously, the biggest concerns about conditions under Trump are places that _weren’t being used as detention centers before,_ or are now overcrowded due to _radical departures in policy._ This is actually an enormous change and a consequential one. mailchi.mp/43a225b48ded...

NEW: @naleoofficial.bsky.social says if the Census Bureau moves forward with its planned cutbacks to the 2026 Census Test, they will "set the Bureau up to fail in 2030 by sabotaging its ability to obtain a fair and accurate count of Latinos and the nation’s population as a whole"

The only way I know to turn
dross into gold is to learn
you can't.