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Monday, January 26, 2026

"Across the country, farmers are struggling. Prices for nearly every major crop are below what it costs to grow them. Much attention has been paid to Midwestern soybean growers, whose crop was at the heart of the trade war between the US and China. But farmers in Mississippi are perhaps worse off than farmers in the rest of the country. Rice is one of their biggest crops, and almost no one is buying."

Link


The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) is proposing a plan to slash the number of regional networks from 18 to five, just as the US Senate released a scathing report on the catastrophic damage the Donald Trump administration inflicted on the organization that cares for American military Veterans.

Trump War on US Veterans


Sunday, January 25, 2026

The Florida-based conservative fundraising platform PSQ Impact landed a giant client this week, Donald Trump's presidential library foundation, and Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr, stands to enormously benefit from the deal.

www.sec.gov


"Amnesty International calls on Congress to reject any additional funding for ICE and to immediately take steps to hold ICE accountable for the deaths and other human rights violations it has caused, and to end these deadly enforcement practices. Not one more life should be lost. Not one more dime should be spent enabling this horror."

Link


"On 23 Jan, at the direction of Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth, JTF Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Two narco-terrorists were killed and one survived the strike. USSOUTHCOM immediately notified the USCG to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor."

Murder-Death-Kill Map


Comments

FTA:

"Things feel so hopeless that at a recent Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation meeting, a group representing farmers, participants floated the idea of a government program that would pay producers to destroy the harvested rice sitting in their bins. A similar program was put in place during the 1980s farm crisis, when the Agriculture Department paid farmers to idle land and reduce huge surpluses of crops.

"We are making a lot of good crops, and losing money," said Gwin Smith, the longtime owner of Rutledge Investment Company, a Mississippi agricultural land broker.

The Mississippi Delta is a 200-mile-long pocket of fertile soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. But farming costs are high. Most crops must be planted in a short window between spring rains and summer heat, and it is always a race in the fall to harvest and prepare fields before winter rains render them muddy and unworkable. This forces up labor costs during those periods.
And unlike Midwest summers, when rains provide most of the water for crops, drier Mississippi summers mean crops must be irrigated, requiring equipment and expensive fuel to power pumping.

Mississippi's biggest advantage, besides good soil, is the diversity of things that can be grown. While most of the Midwest grows only corn, soybeans and wheat, Mississippi farmers can grow those crops as well as cotton and rice. Whenever one crop is selling at a premium, farmers will shift to growing more of it."


One farmer has more than 200,000 bushels of rice, or around nine million pounds, sitting in his bins, and had losses of around $600,000 in 2025. It is disconcerting even for somebody comfortable with agriculture's boom-and-bust cycles.
"There have been plenty of years in there where we have had a $100,000 to $300,000 loss in a year," he said. Usually, you make that up in the next year or two. "But we are basically on Year 4 of things being tight," he said.

~snip~

Between Dummkopf Trumpf's idiotic tariffs, ICE raids against migrant workers, and the inter-galactically stupid idea of dismantling USAID which could have bought these crops to feed vulnerable people in the Third World, today's American farmers may be writing their own sequel to The Grapes of Wrath.

Good job, American farmers. Betcha y'all will vote Republican again in 2026 and 2028.

Excerpt from US Senate report on the DVA: "Cuts, Cover-Ups, & Chaos: Harm of the Trumpf Junta's Ongoing Assault on Veterans."

"Under the diabolical Trumpf junta, VA lost more than 40,000 employees in FY 2025, with 88% of those employees coming from the Veterans Health Administration. The net loss of employees, however, is closer to Secretary Doug Collins' inhuman goal of shedding 30,000 employees for the year. VA lost 3,000 registered nurses and 1,000 physicians. The department has shed 1,100 custodians, 700 social workers, and nearly 2,000 claims processors."

"As of 6 Jan 2026, the national mean for wait times for new patients for individual mental health appointments was more than 35 days, significantly exceeding the 20-day wait time threshold for veterans to be eligible for care. Some states are reporting more than double the wait time threshold, with 40 to 60 day wait times, including Maine (61 days) and Maryland (54 days)."

"VA mental health clinicians are leaving at alarming rates. Veterans in some regions have been limited to eight therapy sessions due to staffing shortages, regardless of medical need. At one VA outpatient clinic in California, seven of twelve mental health providers left the DVA, citing return-to-office mandates. The wait time for new patients seeking mental health services at this facility is currently 134 days."

~snip~

On average, about 17.6 US veterans die by suicide every day (Source: www.mentalhealth.va.gov ). Another report suggests the number could be as high as 23, nearly one an hour. The nefarious Trumpf junta also recently slashed $2bn from substance abuse and mental health clinics.

In 2025, ICE deported approximately 10,000 immigrants who served in the US military and in Minneapolis their agents recently executed DVA ICU RN Alex Pretti. The Trumpf junta war on American Veterans, "suckers and losers" as he calls them, continues.


Thanks to 77,302,580 ignorant voters on 5 Nov 2024, we are all now suffering through the Fourth Reich.

~snip~

As promised for A. Friend (and others), here is another vignette from a happier time long ago.

The King of Late Night Comedy, Johnny Carson, hosted two fellow TV immortals only once during his multi-decade career: Ed Sullivan and Jackie Gleason.

The reasoning I won't speculate on, but both icons were superbly received by the NBC crew and the audience.


Tangent: Elvis Presley and Bruce Lee never appeared on the Tonight Show.

Meanwhile, Johnny Carson hosted Muhammad Ali several times and the "Greatest" not only kept up with Johnny Carson in witty banter, but in one show he flummoxed Johnny so badly that is only retort was to playfully hit Muhammad Ali.

And the two greatest martial artists of that long ago era, Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee, tragically never met.


Some mathematical perspectives on Israel and the Gaza Strip:

Nuclear-armed, wealthy Israel, which offers world class universal healthcare for all its residents (completely opposite of the US), is approximately the same size as New Jersey; the impoverished Gaza Strip is roughly the same size as Philadelphia PA.

In two years, three months, and 17 days (from 7 Oct 2023 to today), the Israeli Death Forces (IDF) killed 71,562 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
.
That means the IDF liquidated more than the equivalent of the entire population of Greenland (55,793 people).

In Europe's first case of genocide since WWII, from April 1992 to Dec 1995, the Republika Srpska (RS) paramilitary units using small arms fire and artillery, liquidated 25,609 - 33,071 Bosniaks and Croats, including 8,372 human beings slaughtered at Srebrenica; approximately 42,106 total genocidal deaths.

These figures do not include Bosnian military casualties (62,626 KIA).

Moreover, 30,000 to 50,000 Bosnian women were raped and 1,000,000 Bosniaks, Croats, and other non-Serbs were expelled from Bosnia-Hercegovina.

So, it took approximately three years and eight months for the Bosnian Serbs to exterminate 42,106 Muslims.

The IDF killed almost twice as many Muslims in far less time: 71,562 in two years, three months, and 14 days.

I hope the Israeli religious Settlers and real estate developers, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, Dummkopf Trumpf, AIPAC, Dr Sabo Amos, Miriam Adelson, Larry Ellison, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, the hardworking American taxpayer, and the Board of Peace are all happy with themselves.


Dummkopf Trumpf may have been stupidly referring to either the "StunRay" blinder or the "Dazzler," a portable handheld Directed-Energy Weapon (DEW) that induces nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and temporary blindness in living creatures by scrambling their brain cells.



The USSS have these non-lethal DEWs in their arsenal, so the FBI, Delta Force, the USN Seal Teams does too.

In the 2 May 2011 US commando raid to "capture" Osama Bin Laden, a Seal Team Six member did not deploy such a DEW against him and killed the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks before he could face justice in SDNY.

"The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says the fact that Osama Bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed left him with a "very uncomfortable feeling."

The Russians and Chinese have versions of these DEWs as well. The "Havana Syndrome" may have been caused by a portable DEW using high-frequency microwaves: Russian DEWs

mn.gov

mn.gov

nypost.com

The rightwing NY Post puts their spin on the murdered victim of ICE and the debacle.

"Migrants!"

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