ML Vercellotti

After a series of fatal strikes involving civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress directed the Pentagon to reduce civilian casualties as part of a 2019 law. During the Biden administration, the Defense Department created the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response initiative. The civilian mitigation teams – cut by 90% by Hegseth – work with military commanders on target planning, and making sure that targets are actually military sites. The teams help come up with "no strike" lists, including religious and cultural sites and schools

I knew that the Department of War shot a missile into a school & killed 175 civilians, mostly children.

This is learned today:

Secretary of War Hegseth had cut the teams assigned to prevent such tragedies by 90%.
www.npr.org/2026/03/11/n...

NEWS: The Trump administration confirmed it bombed a girl’s school in Iran.

It's one of the most devastating military errors in decades.

Trump lied about it. Pete Hegseth gutted the office preventing civilian casualties.

175 are dead. Most were kids. Hegseth should be fired.

Another word you might use for it is "looting".

"This appears to be the first administration to take such widespread advantage of taxpayer-funded military housing to accommodate political appointees who do not have a direct connection to the military..."

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/u...

Trump's Iran war is estimated to cost in the billions already, with no end in sight • Minnesota Reformer Members of Congress have not formally authorized a war in Iran, though they may soon be expected to approve emergency funding for the endeavor without any projection from the Trump administration as t...

Trump’s Iran war is estimated to cost in the billions already, with no end in sight minnesotareformer.com/2026/03/11/r...

“'The administration thoughtlessly terminated people with crisis experience, and now they’re left without depth in the bench in the middle of a wide scale and broadening crisis,' said a former official with more than a decade experience in evacuation operations..."

www.cnn.com/2026/03/10/p...

X
ABC
Meta
Paramount

These companies all settled lawsuits with Donald Trump by promising to donate as much as $63 MILLION to his presidential library.

But then, Trump dissolved a library fund.

So where'd the money go?

I'm pressing these CEOs for answers.

Keep in mind that Pete Hegseth's reported Pentagon spending spree happened just months after Trump and Republicans made devastating cuts to the social safety net in exchange for huge tax cuts for the rich.

And defense spending may soon hit a record $1.5 trillion.

Priorities.

The largest payment eliminated by DOGE was $38,468,659 to the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences for transition support services to adulthood for disabled children served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The missles in this video cost more than that.

AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense. The technology is increasing the speed, density and complexity of work rather than reducing it, a new analysis of 164,000 people’s work activity shows.

AI is increasing the intensity of work rather than reducing it, according to one of the biggest studies of AI’s effects on work habits to date.

Fluent at Home, Silent at Work: Growing Up Bilingual Millions of Hispanic professionals doubt a language they've spoken their whole lives. That doubt has a name, and it isn't failure.

Fluent at Home, Silent at Work: Growing Up Bilingual. Why so many Hispanic professionals doubt their Spanish.

The Italian movie poster: “l’ultima missione.”

The Italian title for Project Hail Mary is not, for obvious reasons, “Progetto Ave Maria.”

Dozens of U.S. service members in Kuwait suffered serious injuries, including burns, brain trauma and shrapnel wounds, sources say About 30 U.S. service members remained hospitalized Tuesday after an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.

That deadly attack on US service members also left "dozens w/ injuries including brain trauma, shrapnel wounds and burns. At least one may require the amputation of a limb."

More than 30 are hospitalized.

And credit where due: This is a strong story from CBS News.

www.cbsnews.com/news/strike-...

Q: A new report says that a military investigation has found that the US struck the school in Iran. As commander in chief, do you take responsibility?

TRUMP: For what?

Q: A strike on the school in Iran

TRUMP: I don't know about it

In Talking to Parents About Vaccines, Pediatricians Navigate a Sea of Misinformation

“And doubts about vaccines are increasingly spilling into refusal of other mainstays of pediatric medicine… At a hospital in Boise, Idaho, for example, three infants died last year after their parents declined a shot of vitamin K, administered to newborns to prevent bleeding, said Dr. Amanda Lee”

Insurrectionist Brunch: Trumpists plotted to deploy military on U.S. soil Before the 2024 election, a cadre of MAGA loyalists met over brunch to plot ways for Trump to use the military domestically.

This is just astonishingly great reporting.

All of the crises the White House has claimed over the last 14 months were planned in advance. All of them.

And however much contempt you have for media outlets who reverently relayed Trump's claim to have no relation to Project 2025, it isn't enough.

Dozens of U.S. service members in Kuwait suffered serious injuries, including burns, brain trauma and shrapnel wounds, sources say About 30 U.S. service members remained hospitalized Tuesday after an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.

NEW: The Iranian drone strike that killed 6 U.S. troops in Kuwait at the start of the war was far more devastating than previously disclosed.

Dozens suffered traumatic brain injuries, burns, and shrapnel wounds. At least one required an amputation. More than 30 remain hospitalized. (CBS News)

Undoing Accountability: An Update on Trump's Attacks on Inspectors General - Public Citizen

New: "Trump Eradicates Critical Oversight as he Fires More Inspectors General than All Other U.S. Presidents Combined"

Douglas S. Pasternak for @publiccitizen.bsky.social

AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense. The technology is increasing the speed, density and complexity of work rather than reducing it, a new analysis of 164,000 people’s work activity shows.

AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense.:

"It’s not that AI doesn’t create efficiency. It’s that the capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work, and that’s where the creep is likely to happen."

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-i...

Apart from the moral repugnance, this is so revealing of how ignorant conservatives are about poverty. Poor people have to think about money ALL THE TIME. They worry constantly about what everything costs, how to substitute one purchase for another, what bill can be put off until payday, etc.

Public health is a wild field to be in because when things go right, people assume we're not doing anything useful, and when things go wrong, people assume it's our fault.

This pattern dates back to the beginning of public health.

I dissect Pete Hegseth's claim on 60 Minutes that his DoD "never target[s] civilians."⤵️

False: Think of the 156 people killed on boats in Caribbean.

And for deeper dive on Hegseth's deflection on elementary girls' school bombing, my substack newsletter: ryangoodmanlaw.substack.com/p/unpacking-...

“In my 15 years in the Senate, I have never left a briefing this angry. We are heading down a path toward sending U.S. troops to Iran as ground forces,” — Sen. Richard Blumenthal

The Pentagon used $5.6 billion in munitions in the first days of its assault on Iran, according to officials.

The Trump administration is also expected to request a supplemental defense budget of potentially tens of billions of dollars, officials said. https://wapo.st/4aZHrXw

Chris Murphy: "I Just came from a two hour, closed door classified briefing on the war. It just confirmed to me it's totally incoherent. We are not gonna be able to achieve any of our stated objectives ... this is a disaster of epic proportions, a 10 day debacle"

I talked to dozens of experts in government, academia, cybersecurity, and industry about exactly this scenario last year and not only did not one of them think I was being alarmist, many brought it up unprompted and many said there was zero chance it hadn’t already happened

This sounds like somebody who grew up rich trying to imagine what poor people sound like.

We know how cash money works FAR BETTER than you do. You might know systems like stocks & IRAs & bonds & trust funds, but we do know cash money. We know SNAP doesn’t buy EVERYTHING at the grocery store.

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

"By and large, they [professors in the humanities] expressed the view that reliance on artificial intelligence is fundamentally antithetical to the development of human intelligence they are tasked with guiding."

www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Holy shit - this would be very, very bad:
"The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names."

Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job The Social Security inspector general’s office is investigating allegations that the former DOGE engineer took sensitive data on a thumb drive in a major potential security breach, said people familia...

Exclusive: The Social Security Administration’s internal watchdog is investigating allegations that a former DOGE engineer took sensitive data on a thumb drive and offered it to his current employer.