The Thermal Drone Found the Missing 3-Year-Old at 5:12 a.m., but the Operator Radioed Something that Made No Sense...

The Thermal Drone Found the Missing 3-Year-Old at 5:12 am, but the operator radioed something that made no sense: “I’ve Got Two Heat Signatures.” The story comes from dairy country in northern Wisconsin; from an October night the volunteer search coordinator says he'll be telling for the rest of his life — because of the second signature.

The boy's name is Sammy. Three years old, visiting his grandparents' farm for the weekend. The cat's name is Waffles — the grandparents' six-year-old orange barn cat, who had appointed himself Sammy's escort the day the boy learned to walk. Wherever the boy went on that farm, an orange shadow went at knee height. The family thought it was cute. That was the whole depth of their theory about it.

At around 6:40 on Saturday evening, in the gap between supper and dusk when everyone believed someone else had him, Sammy followed something — a deer, the grandmother thinks — through an open gate and into the two hundred acres of woodlot behind the farm.

By 7:15 they knew. By 8:00 the county had two deputies, a fire crew, and every neighbor with a flashlight walking lines through the trees. By midnight there were sixty people, a search dog, and a drone with a thermal camera, and the temperature was on its way to 34 degrees.

Every parent knows the math the searchers wouldn't say out loud. A three-year-old, forty pounds, in a t-shirt, on a night one degree above freezing. Hypothermia doesn't need hours in a child that size. It needs the small hours, and it was getting them. What nobody had noticed, in all the counting and re-counting of that terrible evening, was that they weren't missing one member of the household.

At 5:12 AM, the drone operator, gridding the woodlot's far ravine for the third time, saw a bloom of white on his screen at the base of a fallen oak. One heat signature, child sized. He called it in, and then he looked closer at his screen and said the sentence that's now the title of the story:

"Correction — I've got two heat signatures. There's something on top of him."

The nearest search team was four hundred yards out. They ran it. And the first searcher over the ravine lip — a volunteer firefighter — swept her flashlight onto the fallen oak and stopped dead, because two eyes were burning back at her out of the dark.

Sammy was curled in the leaf litter against the log, asleep or close to it. And wrapped across his chest and throat — covering the exact places a small body loses its heat fastest — was Waffles. Seventeen hours. The cat had either followed the boy out the gate or tracked him into the dark, and at some point, in that freezing night, he had stopped escorting and started insulating pressed flat over the boy's chest, chin over the boy's neck, running his own small furnace against forty pounds of fading warmth.

He had not left to hunt. He had not left to shelter. Barn cats know every dry hollow in their woods. He'd spent the night in the open, on duty. And when the flashlight hit them, Waffles lifted his head and began to scream — the guiding cry, over and over, until boots arrived.

Sammy's core temperature was low enough that the ER doctor used the word "window." As in closing. As in — and this is the quote the family had printed and framed — "the heat source on his chest is a real part of why we're having a good morning instead of the other kind."

Sammy was home in two days, asking for pancakes. Waffles was checked, thawed, and returned to the porch, where he accepted a hero's breakfast with the expression of an employee reviewing a long-overdue raise. He still escorts the boy every visit, knee-height, everywhere. But the gate has a new latch, and the grandmother has a new answer when city visitors laugh at the phrase "barn cat."

She points at the woodlot. "Two hundred acres of dark," she says. "Sixty of us searching it. And the only one who never lost him — never once, all night — was already there."

— A true note inside it: if a child goes missing, note whether a pet is missing too — searchers say animals are found with lost kids far more often than people think. And latch the gate.

-FB

Now would be a good time to remind everyone of these Trump facts, because apparently some people still need the refresher

Ladies & Gentlemen: 

Please meet the President of the United States:

Flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. Just friends, I guess.

Pleaded the Fifth more than 400 times in a single deposition. Nothing says “innocent” like refusing to answer a single question about your own business.

34 felony convictions. A record most people would call disqualifying, and 91 criminal charges.

Accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. Tell me again how he’s a great guy.

6 corporate bankruptcies. The self-proclaimed greatest businessman alive somehow keeps running out of money.

5 draft deferments. Funny how the toughest guy in the room never actually showed up for duty.

4 criminal indictments. Not two. Not three. Four.

2 impeachments. A club of exactly one president.

2 of his own companies convicted of criminal tax fraud. Convicted. Not accused. Convicted.

1 fake university shut down. 1 fake charity shut down. Even his charity was a grift.

Paid 25 million dollars to settle the Trump University fraud lawsuit because scamming people who believed in you costs money eventually.

Ordered to pay 5 million dollars in the first E Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict, then hit with 83.3 million more in the second. A jury said it twice so nobody could pretend it was a fluke.

Ordered to pay 2 million dollars for looting his own so-called charity.

Stealing from a charity with his own name on it.

Found liable for business fraud and originally slapped with a penalty topping 450 million dollars, later thrown out on appeal while the fraud finding itself stuck to him anyway.

First president in modern history to increase the deficit every single year of a full term. Fiscal responsibility, apparently, was always just a talking point.

Kept the debt to GDP ratio above 100 percent for his entire first term.

Presided over the largest single day point drop in Dow Jones history at the time. So much for the guy who claimed to be a genius with money.

Set the record for the longest government shutdown in US history in his first term at 35 days, then couldn’t resist beating his own miserable record in his second term with a 43-day shutdown, followed by yet another shutdown just months later. Encore nobody asked for.

Added roughly 2.25 trillion dollars to the national debt in his first year back in office alone, pushing the debt past 39 trillion dollars. Somebody remind me who the party of fiscal discipline is again.

Pushed through the largest defense budget increase since World War Two while the debt kept climbing anyway.

Purged more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year back. Efficient, if your goal is chaos.

Pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 Capitol rioters on his very first day back in office, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. Law and order, except when it’s inconvenient.

At least 40 of those pardoned rioters have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for new crimes since walking free. Shocking absolutely nobody.

His family’s crypto ventures, including a meme coin and World Liberty Financial, pulled in more than 1.4 billion dollars in disclosed earnings while he sat in the Oval Office. Draining the swamp was apparently code for filling his own pockets.

Sent the National Guard into American cities at a cost of nearly 500 million taxpayer dollars in 2025 alone.

His own tariffs are projected to cost the average American household more than 2,500 dollars this year.
You’re paying for this. Not China. You.

Now sitting at one of the lowest approval ratings of his second term, stuck in the high 30s while inflation and gas prices make everyday life harder.

None of this is a conspiracy theory, a rumor, or something you saw in a group chat. It is the actual, documented record, sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to look.

So, the next time someone tells you to relax and give him a chance, ask them how many more indictments, judgments, and shutdown records he needs to rack up before that chance runs out.

-Anonymous 

"If he won’t save me, why should I keep his secrets?"

 

You’ll forgive the candor, but I’ve seen this particular opera before. The overture is dissonant; the soprano’s drunk, and someone has barricaded the emergency exits. What we’re witnessing is not an explosion. Not yet.

It’s pressure. The kind of pressure that builds slowly in a steel drum over a blue flame, hissing, rumbling, waiting for the weakest weld to split like a politician’s alibi. The MAGA faithful may have been promised a cleansing fire, but what’s rising isn’t righteous fury. It’s something far more dangerous: expectation laced with betrayal. 

My theory, if you’ll indulge it, is rather simple. Ghislaine Maxwell—yes, her—was sold a dream. A vile, cynical, and deliciously transactional dream. That if she kept her mouth shut through her trial, through prison, through the ritual shaming on the cover of tabloids she once hired photographers for, Donald J. Trump would return to power and, at precisely the right moment, make it all go away. A pardon. A clean slate. A golden parachute sewn together with denial and a wink. And for a while… it worked. She stayed quiet. Trump won. Or claimed he won.

Pam Bondi, Christopher Wray, Dan Bongino—yes, that’s how you pronounce it, like a failed pasta dish—began priming the base. Whispering sweet nothings into MAGA’s ear about how there never really was on an Epstein list, how the whole affair was a fabrication of the Clintons and the liberal elite. A psych-op. Smoke. Mirrors. Because the goal, always, was to prep the battlefield. To soften the edges of outrage. So that when the pardon came—wrapped in red, white, and a flaming Twitter post—it would be seen not as complicity but as justice.

But now? Now the whole thing’s blown a goddamn gasket. The narrative snapped. The list exists. The documentation exists. The tapes may very well exist. And Ghislaine, poor doomed Ghislaine, is sitting in her cell doing mental arithmetic with one equation: "If he won’t save me, why should I keep his secrets?"

Trump CAN’T pardon her. Not now. Not without confirming every fear, every accusation, every whisper in every basement bar and comment thread in America. To do so would be to stand on the gallows and wave a flag that says: Yes, I was in on it.

But if he doesn’t? If he tries to pivot, distract, throw Rosie O’Donnell under a bus or start a war in Patagonia to change the subject—at some juncture soon Maxwell will sing. Not just warble. Not just suggest. She’ll scream. She’ll torch every bridge and dance in the embers, and the whole rotted scaffolding will come down.

Which brings us to Pam Bondi and the gang. Up till now, their job was simple: look the other way. Pretend not to notice the smell from the basement. But now, to save him, they’d have to start committing active, prosecutable felonies. Destroying evidence. Lying under oath. Obstructing investigations they no longer control. And here’s the kicker: the Supreme Court may have given Trump temporary sanctuary, but they aren’t protected. Not even a little.

And they’re beginning to realize, with the exquisite clarity of someone holding a grenade with the pin already pulled, that Donald Trump will let them drown before he risks getting his cuffs wet. He’s in a lifeboat—yes—but it’s built for eight and he’s armed with an oar, cracking skulls to keep it balanced. He promised safety, and now they’re treading water, watching him drift away.

And what happens when the frog in the pot realizes the water’s boiling? Either she gets fried and served with a side of plausible deniability… Or she jumps. And if she jumps, she burns the whole goddamn kitchen down…"

-Robert Hawks, writing for "Democrats, Republicans and Independents Against Trump and Trumpism"

Trump’s Speech About 2020 Proved He Was a Loser — and Still Is

Thursday night’s self-ballyhooed presidential address was the same old Donald Trump. Six years on, he still refuses to accept the clear and unambiguous fact that he lost the 2020 election. Thursday’s speech was the same desperate claims — this time from the East Room in the White House. No wonder almost every respectable network refused to carry it, with CBS — now owned by his enablers the Ellisons — a notable exception.

Pay close attention: Trump didn’t claim that there was any actual interference in voting or election results. At no point did Trump say or point to any evidence that a single vote was changed or altered. Indeed, even White House conspiracy theorist John Solomon admitted as much to reporters afterwards. That’s because it did not happen. Audits, recounts, certifications, federal investigations, and more than 80 judges, including those appointed by Trump himself, have all uniformly rejected his attacks on the 2020 election. What we got instead on Thursday was a rehash of four myths, all of which fall apart on close examination.

Myth #1: Purported Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting and Ballot-Counting Systems

Trump spoke broadly about vulnerabilities in voting machines, but he did not say there is evidence that voting machines or votes were breached. And that’s because they weren’t. He wants to scare you with the hypothetical, but truth is that our election officials put safeguards in place to minimize any vulnerabilities. Their dedicated work and vigilance ensure our elections work as intended, protected from technological exploitation.

Myth #2: China’s Acquisition of American Voter Data

This is a scare tactic. Trump made wild claims about the compromise of election data, but let’s be clear: He did not say that votes were exploited or compromised. The voter registration data he is in a twist about actually consists of basic and publicly available data such as names and addresses — far less personal information than what the average American shares when ordering clothes on Temu.

Myth #3: Michigan Voter-Registration Investigation

Again, there was zero evidence of voting fraud here. Trump didn’t point to any and can’t. Though there were isolated cases of irregularities in registration, local election officials flagged them in real time. Our elections systems worked as intended to unearth them. This is a backhanded endorsement, not a critique.

Myth #4: Noncitizens on State Voter Rolls

Trump has made these wild claims of folks improperly registering over and over again using baseless allegations and wrong lists, such as the error-ridden and oft-abused Department of Homeland Security SAVE databases. The truth is that Americans follow voter registration laws and cast ballots in good faith, as we documented in our Democracy Defenders Action report with LULAC on The Big Lie.

Then there was the avalanche of documents Trump said would prove him right. They did just the opposite. For example, they show Russia, not China, was working to interfere in the 2020 election — to help Trump! If all of this is the best he and the election deniers have, they are in trouble.

Thursday was a flop — a predictable one. One of us (Norm) was asked by cable TV to do a curtain raiser for the speech. The forecast was for a comically loony mishmash along the lines of other famous conspiracy theories, and boy did Trump deliver.

Trump lost in 2020. This will remain true no matter how many pieces of bogus evidence he invents or floats. The truth is Trump and his fellow election deniers are not just trying to prove bizarre counterfactuals about prior elections. They’re trying to fool us into doubting the next one... 

More from The Contrarian: Department of Injustice

Trump’s Cronyism Signals a Chilling — and Familiar — Story

Brian Tyler Cohen analyzed how Trump’s corruption is following an all-too-familiar global playbook — Putin’s — and what we need to do to step out of Russia’s post-Soviet footsteps. “If the next Democratic administration doesn’t take note and prosecute the criminals of today to the fullest extent of the law, then that criminality is doomed to repeat itself.”

The Tea ft. Alphonso David

Global Black Economic Forum President Alphonso David joined April Ryan to talk about Lindsey Graham’s Senate replacement, Trump’s renewed attacks on Georgia’s senators, and what a Todd Blanche DOJ would mean for minority and underserved communities.

Trump DOJ’s NYT Subpoenas Are the Latest Encroachment on Press Freedom

Josh Levs wrote on the latest moves of an administration actively hostile to a free press and how coverage has fallen short by ignoring the history of reporter subpoenas. “It’s crucial information because it shows the media’s successful track record in fighting back.”

Trump’s Lawyers Should Be Sanctioned

Erwin Chemerinsky argued — apropos of a federal judge shutting down Trump’s outrageous IRS lawsuit this week — that all lawyers complicit in Trump’s abuses of power should expect repercussions for egregious misconduct. “Abuses of the legal system, even at the direction of the president, are unacceptable.” […].

-Norman Eisen and Sarah Jackel, The Contrarian

 

Canadian Fires

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love my American friends. But seeing people complain about the wildfire smoke coming from Canada is hard when so many of us are living through this.

I live in Ontario, and these fires are devastating. Entire communities have been evacuated. Families have lost their homes. Emergency responders and volunteers are risking their lives every day, and countless animals have lost their habitats. People are dying. Animals are dying. Homes are gone.

The smoke reaching the U.S. is the result of a much bigger tragedy. I completely understand that the poor air quality is frustrating, but please remember that on the other side of that smoke are people who have lost everything.

A little compassion goes a long way. Instead of blaming Canada… let’s hope for rain, support those affected, and keep our first responders, families, and wildlife in our thoughts. 

-Tay Spicer

We are facing the biggest test of our democracy since the Civil War

The real message to be drawn from Trump’s address to the nation is that he will call into question the votes of every state and city that chooses a Democratic senator or representative in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll push Republican governors and mayors not to certify the results. He’ll demand recounts and audits.

We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding. His address tonight was absurd. It was riddled with so many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should have them.

He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Mich. that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020 — but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. The F.B.I. closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”

He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years. 

Nothing suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, U.S. intelligence assessment says China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”

The most significant foreign influence operations occurred in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of Trump, according to the Mueller report. To the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite his repeated assertions that U.S. elections are not secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it validated the integrity of the 2020 election.

So, the entire performance tonight was fake — an extension of his Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. It was also a commercial for the “Save America Act,” which would make it harder for many American citizens to vote. 

Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote, with documents such as an enhanced form of REAL ID (a state ID card compliant with federal regulations) that indicates American citizenship; a birth certificate; a passport or military identification card.

An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less, according to a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45 states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.

The point is that American democracy is acutely endangered by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get the results he wants. This means that you and I and every other patriotic American have to do whatever we can to ensure free and fair elections, and fight Trump’s torrent of lies and authoritarian moves. If you’re anything like me, you’re warn out by Trump. You’d like nothing better than to tune him out. I get it. But American democracy is seriously on the line here. We must keep up — and accelerate — the fight.

-Robert Reich

Academic Freedom Advocates Stand Up at Yale: Democracy does not defend itself

It is all too common, as Anne Applebaum wrote of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a Republican politician to “abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.” We have seen a horde of figures in civil society make their Faustian bargain with Donald Trump and his authoritarian, white supremacist regime. However, for those in positions of responsibility in academe, Big Law, media, and business, there is an alternative to slavish careerism and unbridled ambition to climb the inner rungs of power.

Even when elite institutions appear ready to buckle, individuals and groups with modest financial resources and limited legal protections have proven that they can stand up — at great risk to themselves— and shame the accommodationists, thereby slowing the rush to collaborate with a tyrannical regime. 

The contrast between feeble ingratiators and principled dissenters has been especially vivid in the realm of higher education. Harvard, Penn, and a batch of elite universities have compromised academic independence and thrown diversity under the bus to ward off Trump regime threats to slash funding by signing off on agreements that compromise academic independence, allow government oversight, forfeit efforts to recruit a diverse student population, and cede protection for vulnerable LBGTQ+ students.

These sorts of agreements, which have been imposed at Penn and the University of Virginia, have been roundly condemned for abrogating First Amendment rights and academic freedom, two cornerstones of our democracy. “These agreements are vague, contradictory and contain unlawful terms that subject universities to ongoing legal jeopardy,” wrote two Yale alums currently teaching at Penn. “For example, following Virginia’s policy could imperil Yale’s laudable efforts to expand access to low-income and first-generation college students.” 

Some of these extortionist deals have limited foreign student enrollment and forced schools to discriminate against trans students. They’ve also opened a Pandora’s box of ongoing litigation. “Provisions that conflict with the law and with one another expose institutions to liability from all directions. Also, the use of vague terms such as DEI, gender ideology, and domestic terrorism bolsters executive discretion and invites overcompliance.”

Last month, we learned that the Trump regime was “conducting a far-reaching investigation into whether Yale University’s admissions practices violate anti-discrimination laws, prompting one of the country’s most elite schools to pursue settlement talks with the government,” the New York Times reported. 

The Justice Department, as it has time and again, has speciously claimed that efforts to expand diversity amount to illegal discrimination. In this case, DOJ is not only attempting to bully the medical school (the focus of its original allegations of “illegal preferential treatment to Black and Hispanic applicants”), but also the law school and undergraduate programs. Not everyone at Yale, however, has been willing to roll over and play dead.

Yale Law School (Credit: CHUYN)

Fortunately, Yale’s law school dean and other faculty are leading the charge against the latest infringement on academic freedom and the crusade against diversity. “The dean, Cristina M. Rodríguez, and a group of law school faculty members have quietly lobbied top Yale leaders in recent days, arguing that the Trump administration cannot be trusted, and that settling would threaten the rule of law and the university’s reputation,” the New York Times reported. “They have even explored whether the law school could be excluded from any settlement with the federal government. Students, faculty, and alumni have been openly pressuring Yale President Maurie McInnis,” a sign that Rodríguez has a reservoir of support.

In an insightful interview with the Yale Daily News, Yale alum and former FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter (whom MAGA Supreme Court justices ruled that the president had unlimited power to fire without cause), reminded the Yale community that “it cannot be that I, Becca, normal human, had the wherewithal to challenge something that was wrong and an abuse of power, and Yale — with its $44 billion endowment — does not.” She acknowledged, “It’s not fun to push back — it’s much nicer to sort of think about how to walk away or make it go away in the short term — but it’s so much better in the long term to stand on principle,” adding that “especially as an academic institution, I think Yale has an incredible obligation to do that, and that obligation is to its students, to its alumni, to its faculty, to its employees, to its partners.”

Courage may prove contagious at Yale, where an array of groups — including the Yale College Council, Yale College Democrats, the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and an alumni group “Stand Up for Yale” — have mobilized to put the kibosh on capitulation. Yale’s chapter of AAUP put out a letter declaring, “The choice before Yale is not simply whether to settle one investigation. It is whether to participate in a broader campaign to turn civil rights enforcement into a mechanism of political control.”

On Friday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) spoke at Yale alongside Yale students, alums, professors, and Mayor Justin Elicker to push back against collaboration. “We’re at a legacy-defining moment,” Blumenthal said. “Yale will be regarded either as a beacon and a fighter for academic freedom or as the weakling who succumbed and obeyed.”

Whether defenders of academic freedom can prevail at Yale or not, the concerted effort to object to spineless capitulation and force institutional elites to justify their actions is critical in the fight for democracy, preservation of First Amendment rights, and defense of civil society. When elites learn that capitulation will spark fierce criticism and exact lasting personal and institutional cost, they are much less likely to engage in Quisling behavior and more inclined, however reluctantly, to resist authoritarian intimidation.

As the Trump administration and its MAGA enablers now face frequent legal setbacks and edge closer to a potentially devastating midterm election, it is especially critical for democracy advocates to hold the line, refuse to give away precious democratic ground, and deny the Trump crowd any easy wins. Now, more than ever, it is time for Yale, higher education, and civil society as a whole to keep their nerve and refuse to voluntarily concede critical freedoms to a faltering fascist regime growing more desperate by the day to cling to power.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.