What Happened Today - 9 Jan 2026
What Happened Today – 9 January 2026
Minnesota Shooter update
Protests Erupt
Judge Smacks Down Trump’s $10 Billion Revenge
Venezuela Update
Karoline…just stop girl, please.
Denmark… “We will shoot first”
Oval Office Interview with the New York Times
Jan 6 Memorial plaque finally placed
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Minnesota Shooter update
The wild part is that the clearest angle we have is literally from the shooter’s own cellphone video. The footage doesn’t make him look like some threatened hero; it makes him look like a guy escalating a situation and then casually dehumanizing the woman he just shot.
What the video actually shows
The video is shot from the ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s phone as he walks around Renee’s red Honda Pilot, filming her plates, her, and even the dog in the backseat like he’s documenting a trophy instead of a traffic stop. You can hear Renee sounding more annoyed than dangerous, saying things like “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,” while her wife is off to the side calling him out and telling him to “show your face” and “go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”
As other agents roll up, they start barking orders at her to get out of the car, ramping up the aggression, including “get out of the fucking car” as she’s trying to maneuver the vehicle. She reverses and then pulls forward and to the right, and that’s when Ross grunts, the camera jerks up toward the sky, and you hear multiple shots as her SUV lurches away and crashes.
The “fucking bitch” moment
Seconds after he shoots her, with her car already rolling down the street and crashing, you hear Ross mutter “fucking bitch” on his own recording, like he just flicked a bug off his shoe instead of putting a bullet in someone’s head. That one line has blown up because it completely undercuts the sanitized story DHS and the Trump people tried to spin about him firing in fear for his life in some split‑second emergency.
Commentary and coverage are hammering that detail because it shows his mindset: he’s not panicked, he’s pissed and contemptuous, which feeds right into the pattern of ICE treating certain people—queer, brown, immigrant‑adjacent, anyone who talks back—as disposable. It’s hard to keep pretending this was “regretful but necessary force” when the first thing out of his mouth after killing her is a slur, not a call for medical help.
How it clashes with the official story
Trump’s DHS, Kristi Noem, and the rest of the crew are out here branding Renee as basically a domestic terrorist over a car moving in a street, claiming she “tried to run over a law enforcement officer” and that the agent followed his training to the letter. But this new cellphone angle, plus other footage, makes it at best unclear whether she even hit him at all and absolutely clear that she was driving away when he chose to fire.
Local officials in Minneapolis are not backing the federal spin, with the police chief describing her as in a vehicle moving away and getting shot, and members of Congress now pushing DOJ and federal investigators to step in because the administration’s story is already getting shredded by the video. Meanwhile, online, people are replaying that “fucking bitch” audio on a loop because it captures exactly what’s wrong here: an ICE cop with a gun and a god complex, and a woman who never had a chance.
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Protests Erupt
Protests in Minnesota over this shooting are already big, angry, and growing, and it’s clearly spilling out nationwide with a whole weekend of action lined up.
On the ground in Minneapolis
In Minneapolis, people are out in the streets in the cold, marching in the rain down major roads like Lake Street, holding “killer ICE off our streets” and “ICE out now” signs, chanting Renee’s name and demanding these agents get the hell out of their city. Cops and federal agents have already pushed back hard, using tear gas near the Whipple Federal Building, tearing down tents, and arresting people at “nonviolent emergency” protests that kicked off as early as Thursday morning.
Local leaders like Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey are in that awkward place of telling people to stay peaceful while also openly saying ICE’s story doesn’t add up and calling for a transparent investigation, which just adds more fuel to the fire because even the locals in charge don’t trust Trump’s version of events. The state even activated the National Guard “out of an abundance of caution,” and some schools and an immigration court shut down citing safety concerns tied directly to the protests and federal presence.
Spillover across the Midwest
This isn’t just Minneapolis anymore; neighboring states are jumping in. In Wisconsin, people are already rallying with anti‑ICE signs and calling out Trump and his people for straight‑up lying about the shooting, and you’re seeing similar solidarity actions in other nearby cities that see this as part of the same federal occupation vibe they’ve been living with for months.
Organizers in Minnesota have also kept up daily actions at the Whipple Building, the same place Trump’s crew is using as a command center, and tensions keep flaring whenever protesters and federal officers get face‑to‑face out there. At the same time, pro‑ICE folks are trying to run their own little press events in support of the agents, which just sharpens the split between people demanding “ICE out now” and the law‑and‑order crowd cheering them on.
Nationwide protests and this weekend’s plans
Nationally, the whole thing has coalesced into a branded weekend of action: “ICE Out For Good,” with vigils, marches, and rallies planned for January 10 and 11 in cities all over the map. Organizers are talking about hundreds, even up to a thousand events, all framed around Renee’s killing in Minneapolis, the Border Patrol shooting in Portland, and a bigger pattern of ICE and DHS shooting, detaining, and abusing people with basically no accountability.
Big‑name groups like the ACLU, MoveOn, and the ICE Out For Good coalition are leaning all the way in, calling this a line‑in‑the‑sand moment and openly saying the endgame is to abolish ICE, not just get a slap‑on‑the‑wrist investigation. The plan for the weekend is mass, “nonviolent, community‑led” actions—vigils, walkouts, courthouse and federal building rallies—meant to put Renee’s name front and center and publicly pin every bit of this on Trump’s escalated immigration crackdown.
Energy, mood, and what’s next
The mood on the streets is that people have had it: they’ve watched ICE raids at schools and churches, seen people die in detention, and now they’ve watched a woman get killed on video and called a “fucking bitch” by the guy who shot her, and they’re not in the mood for another “we’ll review our policies” press release. The more the administration doubles down and ships in more federal agents to “restore order,” the more this looks to people like exactly the militarized, unaccountable state they’ve been warning about, and that’s why this weekend’s protests are shaping up like a real test of how far folks are willing to push back.
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Judge Smacks Down Trump’s $10 Billion Revenge
What Trump tried to do
HHS, under Trump’s people, suddenly froze about $10 billion in federal money that was already supposed to go to five Democratic‑led states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. They targeted three big lifeline programs all at once:
• TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) — about $7.3 billion in basic cash assistance and support for low‑income families with kids
• The Child Care and Development Fund — roughly $2.4 billion that helps working parents afford child care
• Social Services Block Grants — around $870–900 million that keeps community programs for kids, seniors, disabled people, and families afloat
The official excuse from HHS was “serious concerns” about fraud and maybe money going to undocumented folks, but they couldn’t actually back that up with real evidence; it was mostly vibes and Fox News talking points, plus demands that states dump mountains of documentation before they’d turn the money back on. State AGs and governors immediately called it what it looked like: a blatantly political hit on blue states that would land hardest on kids, single moms, disabled people, and low‑income families who did nothing except live in places Trump hates.
What the judge did and why it matters
The five states sued in federal court in New York, and Judge Arun Subramanian hit the brakes fast with a temporary order blocking Trump’s team from actually shutting off the tap. He ordered the administration to keep paying out the money from TANF, the child care fund, and the social services grants for at least two weeks while the case plays out, basically saying you don’t get to casually blow up anti‑poverty programs for millions of people while you fish around for proof of “fraud.”
The states laid out how ugly this would get, fast: Illinois alone was looking at about $1 billion in jeopardy, and across the board you’d be talking about child care centers shutting down, counties scrambling to figure out how to keep lights on, and families losing basic support in the middle of a brutal cost‑of‑living mess. California’s AG said the quiet part out loud, calling it “Trump’s willingness to throw vulnerable children, families, and seniors under the bus to wage his vendetta against Democratic states,” which is exactly the energy this move had written all over it.
So yeah, your original read is dead on: this was Trump trying to weaponize federal welfare and child care dollars as a political punishment tool, and a judge just told him—for now—you don’t get to starve out blue states and poor families just because you’re mad.
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Venezuela Update
Trump’s Venezuela move is classic “strongman cosplay meets zero planning,” and it’s already starting to bite him politically, legally, and even inside his own MAGA universe.
What he actually did in Venezuela
On January 3, he greenlit a special operations raid that went into Caracas, grabbed Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and hauled them out to face U.S. drug‑trafficking charges, all without looping in Congress beforehand. Then he got in front of cameras and bragged that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela for a while and oversee its oil sales during a “transition,” which sounds a lot less like a narrow law‑enforcement mission and a lot more like old‑school regime change.
The White House is trying to spin this as a “law enforcement” operation, not a war, to dodge the whole requirement to get Congress’s approval for military force, even though it used the military, violated another country’s sovereignty, and left U.S. forces in the region ready for a “second wave.” Legal and policy folks are already saying flat‑out there is no solid legal basis for this under either U.S. or international law, and that he’s stretching commander‑in‑chief powers past the breaking point.
Congress trying to put a leash on him
The backlash on the Hill was fast: the Senate just advanced a bipartisan war powers resolution that would bar Trump from launching any more military operations “within or against Venezuela” without Congress signing off. That procedural vote passed 52–47, with several Republicans crossing over to join all the Democrats—a clear “we see what you’re doing” warning shot at his go‑it‑alone attitude.
The resolution would also force him to pull U.S. forces out of any “imminent engagement” there unless Congress explicitly authorizes it, which is basically Congress saying: you don’t get to backdoor us into a wider war and then claim it’s just cops doing a raid. Tim Kaine and others are saying it out loud: this is an illegal war‑like move dressed up as a drug bust, at a time when people here are already drowning in costs and did not sign up for another foreign adventure.
MAGA’s weird split over all this
Publicly, most of the MAGA machine is still cheerleading—Trump allies and right‑wing media are calling it a “bold Monroe Doctrine moment,” talking about taking control of Venezuelan oil and framing critics as soft on socialism. Polling right now shows the bulk of Republican voters backing the move as long as it’s quick, cheap, and bloodless on the U.S. side, which gives him some cover in the short term.
But the cracks are there: some hardcore “America First” types, including a few MAGA‑aligned lawmakers, are warning that this looks exactly like the interventionist garbage they thought they were voting to end, not escalate. They’re basically saying: if this turns into any kind of longer occupation, real war, or big‑money drain, the base is going to sour fast, because nobody signed up for Venezuela to become Iraq 2.0 with Trump’s name on it.
Why this is blowing up on him
Trump himself is not helping at all—he keeps hinting at more strikes if the new interim leadership doesn’t “cooperate” and talking about “controlling” Venezuela and its oil, which is exactly the language that makes both lawyers and isolationist Republicans lose their minds. Every time he shrugs off Congress’s role and jokes about not being afraid to “go bigger” in multiple countries, he feeds the narrative that this is a straight power grab, not some principled stand.
So you’ve got Democrats hammering him as lawless, civil‑liberties folks saying this shreds any pretense of constitutional war powers, and a non‑trivial chunk of MAGA wondering why the “no more stupid foreign wars” guy is now doing cloak‑and‑dagger regime change for oil. If this drags out even a little, the split between the “bomb first, ask questions never” crowd and the “America First means stay home” crowd is only going to get louder.
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Karoline…just stop girl, please.
Karoline Leavitt has been a complete disaster in the briefing room, going all‑in on calling Renee Good a “deranged leftist” and framing the Minneapolis execution as an “attack on federal law enforcement,” even with the shooter’s own video contradicting their narrative. She keeps dropping phrases like “industrial‑scale fraud” and trying to paint protesters as enemies of “law and order,” which just makes the whole thing sound even more unhinged and divorced from what’s actually on the tape.
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Denmark… “We will shoot first”
Denmark’s basically saying, “Try some Venezuela shit in Greenland and we will light you up,” and they’re not being coy about it at all.
What “we will shoot first” means
Denmark’s defense ministry just confirmed that a Cold War‑era rule from 1952 is still active, and it literally says Danish forces must immediately fight back and open fire if their territory is invaded—no waiting for orders, no checking if there’s a formal declaration of war. That means if U.S. troops ever tried to roll into Greenland by force, Danish and Greenland‑based forces are under standing orders to “shoot first and ask questions later,” even if commanders haven’t been told war has officially started.
They’re re‑surfacing this rule right now because Trump has once again started running his mouth about “acquiring” Greenland, hinting that military force is on the table if Denmark won’t play ball. Greenland and Denmark keep saying, again and again, that the island is not for sale, not for annexation, and that any attempt to take it by force would be treated as a full‑on attack on a NATO member.
Why this is blowing up now
Trump’s team has been floating all kinds of wild ideas: direct U.S. cash payments to Greenlanders—tens of thousands per person—to get them to break away from Denmark, plus not‑so‑subtle public talk about Greenland’s value for U.S. missile defense and Arctic dominance. Karoline Leavitt even left the door open by saying “military action is always an option,” which absolutely freaked out European allies who just watched him snatch Maduro in Venezuela.
Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen basically said: if the U.S. attacks Greenland, NATO is done—“everything stops.” European officials are now openly warning that any U.S. move on Greenland would have to be treated as an attack on a NATO ally, meaning this isn’t just some quirky real‑estate joke anymore; it’s a live alliance‑crisis scenario.
How the U.S. is trying to walk it back
Marco Rubio, as Secretary of State, has been doing damage control, telling European and Danish officials there is no plan to “invade” Greenland and trying to frame this all as diplomatic and economic pressure, not a Venezuela‑style raid. But that doesn’t erase the fact that Trump’s people keep publicly treating Greenland like a pawn the U.S. is entitled to grab if negotiations don’t go their way.
Bottom line: Denmark pulled out the “we will shoot first” rule to make one thing crystal clear to Trump—Greenland is not some unclaimed prize, it’s defended territory, and if he tries to do there what he just did in Venezuela, they’re prepared to answer with bullets, not press statements.
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Portland Shooting…
In Portland, it’s the same script as Minneapolis: federal agents roll in, bullets fly, and the official story already smells off as hell.
What actually happened in Portland
Around 2:15 p.m. in East Portland’s Hazelwood neighborhood (8 Jan 2026), a Border Patrol/Customs and Border Protection team doing a “targeted vehicle stop” opened fire on a car with a man and a woman inside, hitting both of them. Portland police found the pair a short time later with gunshot wounds, got them to the hospital, and as of now officials haven’t given a clear public update on their conditions beyond saying they survived the initial shooting.
DHS says agents were after the passenger, not the driver, and that this was part of a broader CBP operation in the city dubbed “Operation Oregon.” The scene ended up spread across at least two locations: the clinic/parking lot area where the shots were fired and a red Toyota pickup several blocks away where the wounded man was seen bleeding and asking for help.
DHS version versus local skepticism
The DHS line is that agents identified themselves, the driver “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run them over, and one agent, “fearing for his life,” fired a so‑called defensive shot as the car came at them. They’re branding both people as undocumented Venezuelan nationals tied to the Tren de Aragua gang and even linking them to a prostitution ring and a prior shooting in Portland—but they haven’t put forward any actual evidence the public can see.
On Friday DHS named the driver as Luis David Nico Moncada and the passenger as Yorlenys (also reported as Yorys) Betzabeth Zambrano‑Contreras, saying the woman was the target and the guy wasn’t even who they were really after. Oregon’s Democratic attorney general Dan Rayfield and Portland’s mayor Keith Wilson are already publicly side‑eyeing the federal narrative, with Wilson basically saying “we used to be able to take them at their word—those days are over” and Rayfield launching a state investigation into whether this was a justified shooting at all.
How this ties into the bigger crackdown
This went down literally a day after the Minneapolis ICE killing of Renee Good, so people are reading it as part of Trump’s larger “flood the cities with federal agents” crackdown, not some isolated one‑off. Border Patrol was never Portland’s day‑to‑day cop shop; they’re being imported into city streets as a kind of roaming strike force, which is exactly what critics and protesters have been warning about since Trump ramped up these operations.
In response, protesters in Portland have already been out at the ICE facility and other spots, connecting the dots between what happened to Renee in Minneapolis and what happened to Moncada and Zambrano‑Contreras in that parking lot. For them, the pattern is obvious: every time Trump cranks up this federal enforcement machine, it’s more Brown and immigrant bodies on the line, more “vehicle as a weapon” excuses, and zero trust that the government’s version matches what really went down.
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Oval Office Interview with the New York Times
The Oval Office interview was basically Trump trying to launder his spin on Minneapolis, Portland, Venezuela, and Greenland through a “serious” setting, and he did it the way he always does: with a bunch of lies, contradictions, and a delivery that just made his age and cognitive issues even harder to ignore.
Big-picture overview of the interview
He sat with a small group of New York Times reporters for nearly two hours in the Oval Office, walking them through his version of the ICE killing of Renee Good, the Portland shooting, the Venezuela raid to grab Maduro, and his threats around Greenland. He even pulled up the Minneapolis shooting video on a laptop to show them, took a call from Colombia’s president in the middle of it, then gave them a little tour of the residence like this was all just another chill evening at Casa Chaos.
Throughout the conversation he kept bouncing between “I hate that this happened” and “the officer did nothing wrong,” between “we’re not invading anyone” and “of course we could do more if we want,” and between “I’m in perfect health” and a speaking style that tells a very different story. It was a snapshot of exactly how he operates: perform strength, deny reality, and talk long enough that people forget what the original question was.
The lies and bullshit in what he said
Here’s a rundown of some of the big lies or wildly misleading claims from that interview and the surrounding coverage:
• Lie 1: “She ran him over.” Trump claimed—again—that Renee Good “ran over” the ICE agent and that he clearly shot in self‑defense. Independent frame‑by‑frame reviews of both the overhead news clip and the agent’s own video show the agent on his feet as she drives past and then away; there’s no evidence she actually ran him over.
• Lie 2: The video backs him up. He acted like the very footage he showed in the Oval Office proves his story that she was trying to kill the agent with her SUV. Fact‑checkers who slowed the clip down say the opposite: you see him standing, then firing as she moves away, and he’s mobile enough afterward to approach the crashed car, which completely undercuts his “she ran him over” narrative.
• Lie 3: This is all Biden’s fault. In the same breath he blamed “Biden’s immigration policies” for the conditions that led to this ICE operation, even though this is his second term, his DHS, his surge of federal agents, and his agenda driving these raids. That’s just his standard move—blame the last guy for problems created by his own crackdown, especially when ICE or Border Patrol hurt or kill someone.
• Lie 4: Venezuela is just a narrow “law enforcement” mission. When pressed about grabbing Maduro, he framed it as a clean, targeted operation, implying it doesn’t really raise war‑powers issues because it’s about drug charges. Legal experts point out he ordered a military strike and cross‑border snatch without Congress, and that there’s no solid legal basis under U.S. or international law for a unilateral “we now run your country” operation.
• Lie 5: No long U.S. entanglement in Venezuela. He tried to downplay how deep this could go, but he also admitted the U.S. could be “involved for years” managing Venezuelan oil and “supporting” the new regime, which is exactly the kind of drawn‑out entanglement he once swore he’d avoid.
• Lie 6: Greenland talk is just normal strategic planning. He brushed off annexation/invasion fears while still insisting it’s obvious the U.S. should control Greenland because of its “incredible” strategic value. That’s happening at the same time Denmark is reminding everyone its troops are under standing orders to “shoot first” if Greenland is attacked, which shows how reckless his tough talk actually is.
• Lie 7: “Perfect health” and “aced” cognitive tests. Outside the interview but in the same news cycle, he’s been bragging yet again that White House doctors say he’s in “perfect health” and that he “aced” a tough cognitive exam for the third time. Reporting around that points out that people close to him say he struggles to hear in meetings, sometimes appears to nod off at events, and that the test he loves to brag about is a very basic screening tool—not proof of genius.
Put together, it’s the usual mix: lie about what’s on video, lie about legal authority, lie about who’s to blame, and lie about his own condition.
The slurred speech and cognitive red flags
On top of the content lies, the way he’s talking is setting off alarm bells for people who’ve been watching him for years.
• Reporters and commentators have pointed out that in recent appearances—including this stretch of interviews and brief remarks around the shootings—his speech has been more slurred, his phrases more jumbled, and his syntax more tangled than even his usual word salad.
• Neurologists and psychologists looking at his public speeches over the last few years have noted more verbal flubs, name mix‑ups (Haley vs. Pelosi, Obama vs. Biden), dropped words, and broken sentence structure, which can be consistent with aging and possible cognitive decline, even if nobody outside his medical team can diagnose him.
• There are also reports that people in the room often have to speak loudly for him to follow, that he sometimes seems to drift or close his eyes in long events, and that staff are constantly managing how long he’s on camera to avoid those moments getting too obvious.
In that Oval Office sit‑down, the written account smooths some of it out, but you still see the patterns: he jumps mid‑thought, contradicts himself within a few lines, circles back to the same brag about his cognitive test, and leans on stock phrases (“perfect,” “tremendous,” “very unfair”) instead of giving straight, detailed answers. That doesn’t prove a diagnosis, but it absolutely reinforces the sense that he’s not as sharp, linear, or in control as he pretends to be—especially when you hold his rambling stories up against the actual facts on Minneapolis, Portland, Venezuela, and Greenland.
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Jan 6 Memorial plaque finally placed
After years of stalling and bullshit, the Jan. 6 memorial plaque for the cops who defended the Capitol is finally going up, and it took a rare flash of bipartisan backbone in the Senate to force it.
What the plaque is and why it was delayed
Congress actually ordered this plaque back in 2022 as part of a funding bill, explicitly saying the country “owes its deepest gratitude” to the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 and requiring it to be permanently installed on the West Front by March 2023. The plaque was designed and made, listing the agencies that responded and meant to be paired with a full list of thousands of officers’ names, but House GOP leadership—especially Speaker Mike Johnson—kept it in limbo, claiming it didn’t meet technical legal requirements while Jan. 6 cops and Democrats accused them of trying to bury the truth about the attack.
How it finally moved: bipartisan Senate push
This week, on the fifth anniversary of the insurrection, a bipartisan pair—Republican Thom Tillis and Democrat Jeff Merkley, with backing from Democrat Alex Padilla—dropped a resolution in the Senate to force the issue. With no one on the floor willing to object, the Senate passed it by unanimous consent, ordering the Architect of the Capitol to “prominently display” the plaque in a public area on the Senate side until it can be moved to its permanent Jan. 6 location, effectively going around Johnson’s slow‑walking.
Tillis framed it as a straightforward duty to honor the officers and be honest with the public about what happened, while Merkley and Padilla called out the Trump White House’s attempts to rewrite Jan. 6 and said the Senate’s move is about locking in an accurate record. Even GOP leadership in the Senate, including John Thune, signed off, which tells you that at least there, the appetite for pretending Jan. 6 was “just a protest” has limits.
The bigger meaning
For years, more than 100 mostly Democratic members had resorted to taping cardboard replicas of the missing plaque outside their offices, while officers like Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges sued to force its display, arguing Congress’s delay was literally helping people rewrite history. Now, with this bipartisan move, the Capitol is finally going to have an official, public marker that says out loud: law enforcement stood in the breach on Jan. 6, they were attacked and injured in huge numbers, some later died, and their heroism isn’t going to be quietly memory‑holed because it’s inconvenient for Trump and his allies.
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Sorry for a delay today. I have been traveling quite a bit over the last 30+ days and finally caught a bug despite all the hand washing and avoiding coughing/sneezing/infected people. Def struggling with something I picked up on our flight home after the New Year.
I hope you have a safe and warm weekend, stay safe – if you protest – be peaceful—but I do encourage all to get out and have their voices heard. This kingdom will fall—our voices are the most powerful weapon right now.
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.