Sowing the tabs of love, tabs of love ...
🚨🇺🇸BREAKING: For those tracking the aircraft carrier Lincoln on its way to Iran: it has TURNED OFF its tracking device.
— Eli Afriat 🇮🇱🎗 (@EliAfriatISR) January 20, 2026
It is expected to arrive in the CENTCOM (US Central Command) area of responsibility within 72 hours. pic.twitter.com/IhnXTmW5Oo
Ed: Not that it will matter much, but opsec is still opsec. The Iranians likely have patrols flying along the expected route and will spot it once it's approaching. Even that won't matter much; the Iranians have very little capability to stand up against an American carrier group.
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Forbes: Here’s a new twist on Iran’s internet shutdown and the near total comms blackout that has engulfed the country for almost 300 hours. Starlink was presented as the hope for protesters to get their messages out of Iran. That was largely stopped by a regime armed with Russian satcom countermeasures. But not everyone was shut out.
According to Check Point, while “Iran’s internet has gone dark, Iranian hackers ”are using Starlink. After a week of quiet we are seeing that ‘Handala Hack’ of MOIS is back, operating from Starlink IP ranges and hitting targets across the Middle East."
Handala has consistently targeted Israeli government entities and officials. It’s little surprise to see this renewed activity, notwithstanding the Starlink twist as they hijack connections intended for other purposes to launch new attacks.
Ed: This seems less than wise, under the circumstances. Starlink can likely pinpoint the users exploiting their networks for such attacks. If we start going kinetic against the regime, these hackers will have painted a big target on their backs. But even if we don't go kinetic, they should not be surprised by countermeasures in cyberspace.
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BREAKING: Reports that protests are back in full swing today in Iran, with thousands of Iranians chanting, “Death to Khamenei, death to the dictator.”
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) January 20, 2026
pic.twitter.com/EonP78mqc1
Ed: Assuming this video was recorded in the past 24 hours, it's remarkable how determined the Iranians are to rid themselves of their tyrants.
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WSJ: The Iranian businessman was chanting antigovernment slogans along with hundreds of other protesters on the streets of northern Tehran on Jan. 8 when police opened fire. A man a few feet away crumpled to the ground, bleeding profusely.
The 38-year-old entrepreneur said he bent to help the wounded man, but fled as more bullets slammed into the retreating crowd at a packed intersection bordered by a park and a shopping mall.
“When they fired I was full of anger,” he said. “I felt good and scared—good to be doing something.”
That night, authorities shut down the internet. It was the start of a multiday crackdown that human-rights activists say killed at least 3,000 people.
Ed: The kilings began twelve days ago in earnest, and yet the Iranians are still attempting to keep pressure on the IRGC. Let's hope the arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln and its task force will produce a substantive result.
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President Trump says he “felt terribly” when an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis, but he understands "both sides of it.” The president went on to allege that some of the people who have protested ICE's conduct are "professional agitators."… pic.twitter.com/2ZW1NsYLYe
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 20, 2026
Ed: The latter is clearly the case. Trump has walked back his initial statements about the nature of the shooting, at least in tone, perhaps hoping that conciliation is still possible. The professional agitators won't care, but it could at least keep their recruitment efforts from succeeding as well.
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Axios: Protesters opposing ICE's mass deportation operations are increasingly turning to data leaks and homegrown surveillance tools.
Why it matters: The latest wave of U.S.-based hacktivism — where hackers launch attacks to make a political statement, rather than to make money or steal state secrets — reflects a more strategic, cohesive embrace of digital tools.
Driving the news: Someone leaked a trove of sensitive information about approximately 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees, including 2,000 frontline enforcement agents, to the site ICE List last week.
Ed: That isn't a grassroots effort. That is an organized effort to hack or exploit data for the purpose of "resistance" actions.
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The financial transfer portal is open https://t.co/FGRavJCupw pic.twitter.com/1qmkpWBrLS
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) January 20, 2026
Ed: Capital is always mobile, and it moves away from disincentives quickly. New York City will pay dearly for their experiment in socialism.
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Kat Rosenfeld at the Free Press: What began as gossip soon metastasized into something with the power to destroy a life. In hindsight, it’s astonishing that these vague allegations of unspecified wrongdoing—which could have been written by anyone, or even by just one person posting over and over—were granted such extraordinary weight, even in the comparatively capricious court of public opinion.
But at the time, the #MeToo movement was at a fever pitch. The cancellations of Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and Al Franken for sexual errors of various stripes were still fresh in the public mind; Harvey Weinstein was under investigation for assaults that would lead to bicoastal felony convictions; and the publishing world was still roiling from the fallout of the notorious Shitty Media Men list. The demand for rapists, predators, and other such malefactors to punish became so great that it threatened to eclipse the supply; soon, the line between asshole behavior and misconduct, criminal or otherwise, blurred in the public imagination until it had all but disappeared.
Asher wasn’t the only man—or woman—in this time to be targeted with vague, anonymous claims; he wasn’t the only one to suffer professional fallout. Long after the #MeToo movement has burned itself out, he is living proof that the people caught in its machinery are still being chewed up, spit out, and swallowed all over again.
Ed: Mob justice is mob justice, whether it's in cyberspace or in religious spaces in Minneapolis.
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I regret to inform you that the white people are at it again. https://t.co/4I7vD0HhcN
— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) January 20, 2026
Ed: I regret to inform you that no one is surprised by this development.
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Axios: Support among House Democrats for impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is skyrocketing, nearly doubling in the last week to 100 co-sponsors.
Why it matters: That's an unprecedented level of support for an impeachment effort during President Trump's second term, with lawmakers who have bristled at the topic in the past now warming to the idea.
Ed: Er ... that's still less than half of the minority caucus. It's barely outside of the House Progressive Caucus' membership. That's not really an "explosion." Not to mention that it's a deeply stupid and utterly futile gesture, since it targets an effort that still has significant support from voters.
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Things I didn’t have on my bingo card today: Justice Jackson defending the racist Black Codes as precedent for what we should consider constitutional. pic.twitter.com/I9yxcMsDrf
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) January 20, 2026
Ed: This is so dumb. An unconstitutional law is unconstitutional at its inception. The Bruen standard does not require courts to consider unconstitutional laws as part of the history of jurisprudence, a point so obvious that it could only escape the deeply stupid or deliberately obtuse. And Justice Alito says ...
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Must Listen: Justice Alito reveals the obvious irony of citing the Black Codes as justification for Hawaii’s 2023 firearm restriction law.
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) January 20, 2026
“They wanted to disarm the Black population in order to help the Klan terrorize them...they wanted to put them at the mercy of racist law… pic.twitter.com/GHerQmmM7C
“They wanted to disarm the Black population in order to help the Klan terrorize them...they wanted to put them at the mercy of racist law enforcement officers. So is it not the height of irony to cite a law that was enacted for exactly the purpose of preventing someone from exercising the Second Amendment right, to cite this as an example of what the Second Amendment protects.”
Ed: Exactly.
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Mediaite: CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is reportedly looking for ways to offload the salary of morning host Gayle King amid continued restructuring of the network.
News of the move came in a Tuesday morning report from Variety detailing the “dysfunction” within CBS News since Weiss’s arrival. The new editor-in-chief has faced intense scrutiny over a handful of editorial decisions, with the most notable being the last-second choice to delay a 60 Minutes report about the Salvadoran prison CECOT.
Ed: The rest of this report is full of non-sequiturs that distract from the real issue: is Gayle King worth $15 million a year? Oddly, neither Mediaite nor Variety mention the ratings that CBS' morning show gets. The answer is that King's show routinely finishes well behind ABC and NBC morning shows, and has for some time.
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We’re very happy to share some exciting news. Our family is growing! pic.twitter.com/0RohEBYXM7
— Second Lady Usha Vance (@SLOTUS) January 20, 2026
Ed: Many blessings on the Vance family!
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