US fighter jets shot down yet another mysterious flying object over Lake Huron on Sunday, the third in three days to go down over North American airspace, CNN reports. The object was said to be “octagon shaped” and flying at circa 20,000 feet – potentially posing a threat to civilian aviation.

The chancellor of New Mexico State University announced the indefinite suspension of the men’s basketball program Saturday night after learning about a suspected hazing incident involving the team, ABC News reports.

In an example for a certain House committee chair on how to handle a reported assault on a sports team, Chancellor Dan E. Arvizu said he ordered the team to cancel Saturday’s game against California Baptist University, suspended the team’s future activities and put the coaching staff on paid administrative leave.  The team returned to Las Cruces from their trip to Riverside, California without playing the scheduled game.  Upon their arrival, school administrators required them to be individually interviewed by a team that specializes in investigating institutional reports of assault and hazing.

Although the details of the alleged incident were not revealed, Arvizu said in a state that “hazing is a despicable act. It humiliates and degrades someone and has the potential to cause physical and emotional harm, or even death. … Sadly, hazing can become part of an organization’s culture left unchecked.  NMSU policy strictly prohibits hazing, in all forms, and it’s something we simply will not tolerate.”

Fucking UFOs again, man. Those sons of bitches are coming out of nowhere and prompting the FAA to shut down the fucking airspace over Lake Michigan on Sunday, ABC 7 Chicago reports.

Republican donors hoping for evil little Florida Gov Ron DeSantis to knock off the Orange God Emperor are increasingly nervous about how Ron will be able to withstand the attacks, especially after a weak comeback to the “groomer” allegation last week, the New York Times reports.

“No Republican has ever emerged from an exchange with Donald Trump looking stronger, so the natural tendency is to deflect his attacks and avoid confrontation,” said GOP strategist Liam Donovan, adding “That’s easy to do, and maybe even wise when his barbs are confined to Truth Social. The question is what happens when DeSantis finds himself on a debate stage opposite Trump, and GOP voters want to see whether they are getting what they were promised.”

A survey conducted by The Workforce Institute last week estimated that a record 18.8 million Americans will skip work on Monday, Human Resources Director Reports, underscoring the need for the NFL to move the Super Bowl to a Saturday, which they won’t, ever. Some schools in the Philly area are starting classes late on Monday morning, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Asked Sunday about the classified documents found on a Trump political aide’s laptop, House Intel Committee Chair Mike Turner said “Yeah, I just don’t get this. I don’t get it with Biden, with Pence, or Trump all of them keep finding classified documents stuffed places,” rambling more for a bit before adding “We’re just amazed as people keep finding them stuffed in the strangest places, like behind Biden’s Corvette,” completely failing to address the question about the new subpoena on Trump.

Note the order in which he said their names too – Biden, Pence, then Trump. That’s a solid piece of MAGA accountability dodging there, like the two former Vice Presidents’ fuckups are actually worse than a political aide storing classified docs on a laptop that was connected to the internet.

The official death toll from a series of massive earthquakes in southern Turkey that also shook neighboring Syria on Monday rose past to at least 33,000 on Sunday, AFP reports.

Anger is growing over Turkish autocrat Recep Erdogan’s response to the disaster, which could not have come at a worse time for him as he faces voters again on May 14th. Already he’s working hard to find scapegoats, with at least 130 building contractors arrested for poor construction methods.

Montana’s senior member of the House, Republican Matt Rosendale, tweeted Saturday night that he learned from the US Northern Command that another unidentified object is floating over Montana and that the Pentagon will take action Sunday to down it during daylight hours.

The object is apparently drifting at an altitude that could interfere with commercial air traffic, prompting the FAA to close the airspace temporarily as it assessed the situation.  If confirmed, this is at least the sixth object found floating over North American, believed to be part of a Chinese spying operation that started in 2019.

Update 9:37 p.m. ET:  On Fox, Rosendale claims he may have been given outdated information by the Pentagon.

Fat former President Trump was subpoenaed – once again – for the classified document folder turned into the FBI last month – along with a laptop containing a digital copy of the folder’s contents – after the folder was observed at Mar-a-Lago by a witness, the Guardian reports.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reports that OAN host/Trump lawyer Christina Bobb testified to special counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury recently and man this does not sound good for Donald.

You could say today is the anniversary of the creation of the invention that fueled the Industrial Revolution.  You could also say it’s the anniversary of the start of climate change.  You would be right on both parts because 215 years ago today, in a small settlement known as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Judge Jesse Fell tested a new furnace grate that maximized the heat generated by burning anthracite, or “hard,” coal, increasing its efficiency in manufacturing as well as making it useable as a home heating fuel.

Fell’s invention led to changes across society:  families had an affordable compact heat source better than wood; industrial furnaces could burn hotter; and the small outpost in northeast Pennsylvania which had about 900 people exploded to a regional hub as Wilkes-Barre’s population topped 50,000 a century later as German, Polish and Eastern European immigrants came to work in the region’s mines.  Resorts sprung up on nearby lakes to entertain the new coal barons.

UPDATE 5:21 p.m. ET:  Washington Post reports US military aircraft shot down the craft they were trailing over northern Canada.

CNN reports that NORAD is currently tracking at least one more likely Chinese spy balloon that is floating at high altitude over northern Canada.  CNN says military aircraft (they do not specify if they are American or Canadian or both) are currently tracking one object, just a day after the US military shot down an unknown object that had entered US airspace over Alaska.

The Trump campaign in December of 2020 shelled out an unknown sum – but probably a lot of fucking money judging by their website – to an outside firm to find evidence the election had been stolen from him and then buried it when they came up empty, the Washington Post reports.

The Berkeley Research Group put more than a dozen researchers, including econometricians, on the project only to come up completely empty. “They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted. Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it,” said a source at the firm.

“None of these were significant enough. Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions,” another source said. The Post report describes a call that grew “contentious” when the researchers presented their findings to Donald and Mark Meadows in December.

So here’s Elise Stefanik, a woman with a very unattractive personality, ranting this week about how Twitter’s 2020 “election interference” by temporarily limiting the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story cost her Orange God Emperor reelection in 2020 based on the findings of a survey conducted two months ago by trashy UK tabloid Daily Mail and legitimate-ish pollster TIPP.

The 53 percent number she cites in one of comes from the question of “Would Knowing The Laptop Contents Were Real And Not ‘Disinformation’ Have Changed Your Vote?” in which, of their sample of 501 “adults” (not registered voters), 28 percent answered “Very Likely” and another 25 percent said “Somewhat Likely,” which of course this battle axe turns into “53 percent would have changed their vote.” By self-identified party, “Very” and “Somewhat” were tied among Democrats by 31 percent, so 62 total. Among independents 17 percent said “Very Likely” and 23 percent “Somewhat.”

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is planning to hold “a large-scale concert and rally event at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium” on February 21, just shy of the one-year anniversary of the launch of his murderous and suicidally stupid invasion of Ukraine, Breitbart reports citing state media.

It’s not known yet which acts will perform at the nationalist rally, but it’s not like we would recognize them anyway. Over 200,000 attendees are expected at the War-apalooza, and presumably at least some of them will sincerely want to be there. The concert will come immediately after a “State of the Federation” address by Putin, something he’s constitutionally required to do but skipped in 2022.

Toronto Mayor John Tory, 68, abruptly resigned Friday night, just an hour after the Toronto Star published a report on an affair Tory was having with a 31 year-old staffer, the CBC reports. Tory, an independent, had recently begun serving his third term leading Canada’s largest city.

• Had he done one thing Tuesday night, Joe Biden would have won the internet:  turn to Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy while the nihilists of the GOP shrieked at the SOTU and said, “Kevin, can’t you control your caucus?”
• Biden owned McCarthy and Republicans at the State of the Union.  I do not recall a SOTU when a President got the opposing Party to commit to a political promise he proposed during the speech.
• Ron DeSantis has made Florida a real-time experiment in the validity of the adage, “Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.”   One difference: Florida students can’t forget history they were never taught.
• Biden doesn’t order the shootdown of the balloon until after it gets to the East Coast; conservative bitch.  Biden orders one shot down just after it reaches US airspace, conservatives bitch.  I see a pattern.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CVIII”

Ron DeSantis’s censorship of any books that might make white students–particularly the male ones–feel bad about racism in the United States forced Duval County, Florida to remove a biography  of the man for whom Major League Baseball’s humanitarian award is named.

NBC News reports “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” was removed by school officials because passages in the book detail the racism the Black Puerto Rican baseball player experienced as he rose to stardom in the sport, and they felt it was inappropriate subject matter for the K-3rd grade target audience.  Another book, on the life of Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, was also part of the 176 books reported from an outside watchdog group that have been removed from Duval school libraries.  The county had retained 52 media specialists to review 1.5 million books, magazines, videos and other things that are housed at school facilities to determine their appropriateness under DeSantis’s law banning the teaching of things like slavery, racism, women’s rights and the fact that LGBTQ people exist.

An outspoken advocate for social issues relating to race and poverty, the 38-year-old Clemente died in a plane crash as he helped ship supplied to earthquake victims in Nicaragua in 1972.  The future Hall of Famer’s career ended with him having exactly 3,000 hits, 12 Gold Gloves, an MVP award and two World Series championships.

Not for nothing but maybe don’t acknowledge that Trump hung out at Jeffrey Epstein’s place at all if you want to make it sound like nothing happened with all the teenage girls he pimped out.

Desperate for people to like him, archvillain Elon Musk refused to accept the fact that Twitter users had tired of his antics, believing instead that the platform he owns was actively suppressing his reach, Platformer News reports.  After one of the company’s top two engineers explained that the underlying analytics and data–as well as an audit of the algorithm–verified it was a drop in audience engagement and not a conspiracy to silence him, Musk fired the engineer abruptly because he did not believe him saying, “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Musk is facing continued skepticism about his management of the social media platform, with usage down at least 9% since his takeover.  Musk’s vow to be transparent has apparently backfired on him:  a new feature showing how many people have actually seen individual tweets has led to heavy users realizing their posts are not generating the views they once did.  Random advertising and posts from people not followed by the user led to vocal dissatisfaction with Musk’s leadership.

A recent outage in service in which users were informed that they had reached their tweet limit was reported caused by an employee who had deleted key files for an internal service that monitors posting rates to detect spam and other malicious actors.  Musk had fired the team that oversaw that internal service.