Life and Times of Ogn Dulk

Trump Has No Cards 2KThe Atlantic by Anne Applebaum / Aug 16, 2025 at 7:57 AM Is this article about Military? President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement. Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States....

29Alternet.org by Thom Hartmann / Aug 16, 2025 at 5:56 AM Is this article about Opinions? This is what happens when cynical, greedy, amoral billionaires and psychopaths run a country. The Times of London (Murdoch-owned) is reporting that billionaire Steve Witkoff, billionaire Donald Trump, and billionaire Vladimir Putin have worked out a model behind the scenes to solve the Ukraine problem: just make it like Gaza. They’re planning, according to this reporting, to fully respect the borders of Ukraine and the country’s sovereignty, but with one catch. Just like Israel did with Gaza, Ukraine can “self-govern” but all political and economic decisions will be made or approved by Moscow, all funds flowing through Moscow, just like the governments of Gaza and the West Bank are subservient to the whims of Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset. It's essentially a plan to return Ukraine to the subordinate status it had when it was part of the old Soviet Union, which Putin appears committed ...

The Epstein ‘Client List’ Will Never Go Away The Atlantic by Kaitlyn Tiffany / Aug 7, 2025 at 8:27 AM Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list” is the conspiracy theory that may never die. A secret document detailing all of the elite clients that Epstein allegedly sex-trafficked minors to—it’s something of a grail for QAnon adherents, TMZ watchers, and serious news readers alike. There is no proof that such a thing exists. Yet President Donald Trump himself suggested that it did during his campaign, and pledged to release it before a disastrous backtrack from the Department of Justice last month. Now, in a poll released Monday, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that the Trump administration is hiding something, and 71 percent said they still believe that the list is real. Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has demanded that the list be released, Democrats are pushing the narrative that the Trump administration is orchestrating a cover-up, and yesterday the House su...

Take Off the Mask, ICE 3KThe Atlantic by Brandon del Pozo / Jul 7, 2025 at 4:21 AM Is this article about Law? From 2011 to 2013, I commanded the New York City Police Department’s 6th Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village. We had a team of plainclothes officers who went out looking for serious crimes in progress. Sometimes they worked out of a dilapidated unmarked van that looked like the one driven by the villain in The Silence of the Lambs. When things were slow, the team would arrest people who had slunk off from Bleecker Street to smoke weed on Minetta Lane. The sergeant who led these officers had come down from the Bronx, and he thought there was a certain justice in holding the Village’s nightlife crowd to the same standard we held Black teenagers in Kingsbridge Heights. One evening in 2012, the team noticed a woman smoking in the shadows and decided to make an arrest. The officers placed her in handcuffs, led her to the van, and opened its back doors. At the other end of th...

The Reality My Medicaid Patients Face The Atlantic by Lindsay Ryan / Jul 5, 2025 at 7:03 AM The bus smashed into him last month, when he was crossing the street with his wheelchair. By the time he made it to the public hospital in California where I work as a doctor, two quarts of blood had hemorrhaged into one of his thighs, where a tender football-shaped bulge distorted the skin. He remembered his view of the windshield as the bus bore down, then, as he toppled, of the vehicle’s dirty underbelly. He was convinced he’d die. He didn’t. Trauma surgeons and orthopedists consulted on his case. He got CT scans, X-rays, and a blood transfusion. Social workers visited him, as did a nutritionist—he was underweight. Antibiotics mopped up the pneumonia he’d contracted from inhaling saliva when he’d passed out. He remained hospitalized for more than a week. This patient, fortunately, had Medicaid, which meant not only that his care was covered but also that he could see a primary-care doctor ...

Opinion Eduardo Porter The profound hypocrisy underlying America’s immigration policy Behind the raids and rhetoric, Trump protects the immigrant workforce he vilifies. June 24, 2025 at 10:10 a.m. EDT51 minutes ago 6 min 51 A Home Depot worker cleans a sign on June 8, after protesters clashed with law enforcement in Los Angeles County. (Jill Connelly/Reuters) If President Donald Trump believes in anything, it must be in the imperative to expel every single immigrant living in the country illegally, right? This is one of his core commitments to the MAGA coalition. It’s why he hired ethno-nationalist Stephen Miller as a deputy chief of staff for policy — to reassure his followers that he will stop at nothing to shield them from the murderous filthy criminals lurking just beyond America’s borders. It’s why his border czar, Tom Homan, promised “more worksite enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation” to flush unauthorized immigrants from the workforce. Make sen...

The Biden Investigation Is a Path to Even Greater Lawlessness Trump calls Biden's auto-signing scandal •The Atlantic by Paul Rosenzweig / Jun 7, 2025 at 5:39 AM Is this article about Opinions? President Donald Trump’s presidential memorandum ordering an investigation of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his use of the autopen is just the most recent step in Trump’s hostile takeover of the Department of Justice. It is also nonsensical fan service, amplifying addled MAGA conspiracy theories that contend, with a straight face, that Biden was really a robotic clone. In these senses, the investigative order was a sign of just another Wednesday in the chaotic, topsy-turvy world of Trump. On a legal level, one thing is striking about the text of the memo: The order does not explicitly target Biden himself, at least not directly—only the aides who supposedly facilitated Biden’s use of the autopen and suppressed evidence of his decline. Biden’s absence as a direct target is almost certa...

Feudalism Is Our Future 100+The Atlantic by Cullen Murphy / Jun 3, 2025 at 4:40 AM 8 Companies See Insights Card Judging from news accounts and interviews, numerous people in and around the Trump administration are beguiled by imperial Rome. They see themselves as interpreters of its lessons—beware immigration; uphold masculinity; make babies—and inheritors of its majesty. A banner at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington, D.C., depicted Donald Trump in Augustan profile, his brow garlanded with laurel leaves. Elon Musk styles himself “Imperator of Mars” and has named one of his many children Romulus. Steve Bannon keeps a bust of Julius Caesar in his Capitol Hill office. Two decades ago, when maga was just a Latin word for “enchantress,” I wrote a book about ancient Rome and modern America. The book didn’t touch on masculinity or the birth rate, and it didn’t try to explain the fall of Rome; the idea was just to sift through the story of a past society...

Opinion Fareed Zakaria Trump’s war on Harvard is bizarre — and incredibly damaging He is wrecking American competitiveness. May 30, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT When historians write about the challenges to America’s global hegemony, they will point to the rise of China, the first full-fledged peer competitor to the United States in decades. They will also note the return of Russia and its efforts to disrupt the American-led security order in Europe. These are familiar patterns in the rise and fall of world powers. What is new and surprising is that these challenges, far from uniting America, have turned it on itself, with its government tearing down many of the crucial elements of its extraordinary success. Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter Consider the Nature Index, perhaps the most comprehensive guide to high-quality research in the sciences. It tracks contributions to the world’s leading academic journals. Its newest rankings sho...

Trump’s flip-flop on how easy it would be to end the Russia-Ukraine war The president has gone from a “24-hour” deal to “back away” in just a few months May 22, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT 15 min President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Feb 28. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Analysis by Glenn Kessler “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after we all together win the presidency, we will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled. The war is going to be settled. I’ll get them both. I know Zelensky, I know Putin. It’ll be done within 24 hours, you watch.” — Donald Trump, remarks at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, July 29, 2023 “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know detai...