2026-02-26

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• Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardry Explained

  “Purple Haze” firmly established that an electric guitar can be used not just as a stringed instrument with built-in pickups for convenient sound amplification, but also as a full-blown wave synthesizer whose output can be manipulated at will. Modern guitarists can reproduce Hendrix’s chain using separate plug-ins in digital audio workstation software, but the magic often disappears when everything is buffered and quantized.

Horseshit

• Will artificial snow save the ski industry in the long run, or curse it?

• Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

• The quantum era is coming. Are we ready to secure it?

• T. Rex Ran on Its Tiptoes 'Like an 8-Ton Chicken'

• Why everyone is reading fantasy

Epstein

• Lawrence Summers Will Resign from Harvard After Epstein Revelations

  • Former Harvard president Larry Summers will fully resign from Ivy League school over Epstein ties

  Summers, a pal of both Obama and the Clintons, has seen his reputation and status collapse in just a matter of months, following November’s release of his extensive communications with convicted sex offender Epstein. The pair regularly messaged each other about women, politics, and Harvard-linked projects, the emails released by the Department of Justice show. Summers even reportedly honeymooned on Epstein’s island, flying with his wife, Elisa F. New, and Ghislaine Maxwell, on “The Lolita Express” after their Dec. 11, 2005, wedding in Cambridge, Massachusetts, flight records show.

• Bill Gates admits to affairs, apologizes for Epstein relationship

  Bill Gates "took responsibility for his actions" over ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a town hall meeting with employees of the Gates Foundation, the group said in a statement. Gates answered questions at the twice-a-year meeting Feb. 24 on a range of issues, "including the release of the Epstein files," the foundation said. "In the townhall, Bill spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions," the foundation said. The statement came in response to a Wall Street Journal report that said Gates had apologized to staff at the event over his ties to Epstein.

  • Bill Gates 'took responsibility' over Epstein ties in staff meeting

  • "I Did Nothing Illicit": Bill Gates Begins Apology Tour Over His Epstein Ties | ZeroHedge

  • Bill Gates Apologizes to Foundation Staff over Epstein Ties

Obit

• Elaine Radigue, Electronic music pioneer, dies at 94

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Jesse Jackson Paved the Way for a New US Left

• West Virginia's Anti-Apple CSAM Lawsuit Would Help Child Predators Walk Free

Musk

• Tesla must face lawsuit alleging anti-American bias in hiring, US judge rules

Electric / Self Driving cars

• UK self-driving startup Wayve raises $1.2B from investors including Mercedes

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple Set a European iPhone Sales Record Last Year

• Google 'deeply sorry' after N-word written out in alert about BAFTA Film Awards

• NVIDIA hiring engineers to optimize Proton and Vulkan API performance on Linux

• The war against PDFs is heating up

• It's Called the 'Fitbit for Farts'–and It's No Joke

• Apple rolls out age-verification tools worldwide

• Facebook designed an app for teens called Bell but never launched it

• Big Tech still dreams of mass surveillance – now people are pushing back

• Never Buy A .online Domain

  As the situation stands, the registry won't reactivate the domain unless Google removes the flag, and Google won't remove the flag unless I verify that I own the domain, which I physically can't.

• Colorado Lawmakers Push for Age Verification at the Operating System Level

• New York sues video game developer Valve, says its 'loot boxes' are gambling

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Japan aims for world first in space-based solar power

• The Pentagon's UFO Psyop

  according to a little-noticed story in The Wall Street Journal, the 2024 AARO Report was a cover-up. At the insistence of the Air Force, a section of the report was scrubbed. What the report hid was that much (if not all) of what Americans have been led to believe about UFOs may be the result of a massive, decades-long military psyop. According to the Journal, Air Force officers were told they were being read into a program code-named “Yankee Blue” — a purported top-secret initiative to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft. They were shown fabricated photographs of otherworldly vehicles, signed non-disclosure agreements under threat of severe penalties, and told they were privy to some of the nation’s (and the world’s) most closely guarded secrets. But it was all an elaborate fiction.

• Artemis rocket heads back to its hangar for repairs as moonshot put on hold

  • NASA says it needs to haul the Artemis II rocket back to the hangar for repairs

• One of the biggest stars in the universe might be getting ready to explode

• Fincke reveals it was his medical issue that led to early mission end

  Veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has confirmed that he was the crew member who had a concerning “medical event” that led to an early exit from the International Space Station last month.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

  • Anthropic Adds Caveat to AI Safety Policy in Race Against Rivals

  • Anthropic Dials Back AI Safety: pressure prompts pivot from a cautious stance

  • Anthropic ditches its core safety promise

  • Anthropic Dials Back AI Safety Commitments

• US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards

  • Pentagon Gives Anthropic an Ultimatum

  • US threatens Anthropic with deadline in dispute on AI safeguards

  • Hegseth threatens to cut Anthropic from Pentagon in showdown with CEO

  • Pentagon sets Friday deadline for Anthropic to abandon ethics rules for AI

  • Pete Hegseth goes to battle with Anthropic

  • Hegseth demands Anthropic to allow unrestricted military use of Claude

  • Anthropic faces Friday deadline in Defense AI clash with Hegseth

  • Pete Hegseth tells Anthropic to fall in line with DoD desires, or else

  • The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic

  Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go. More important, I don’t want the Pentagon to destroy Anthropic.

  • 30 seconds to midnight? 15?

  Anthropic’s showdown with The US Department of War may literally be life or death for all of us.

• AMD and Meta strike $100B AI deal that includes 10% stock deal

  • AMD and Meta Announce Partnership to Deploy 6 Gigawatts of AMD GPUs

• Citrini's Scenario Is A Great But Deeply Flawed Thought Experiment

  A viral essay from Citrini about how AI bullishness could be bearish was impactful enough for Bloomberg to give it partial responsibility for a decline in the stock market, and all the cool economics types are talking about it.

  • Citrini's AI crisis thesis resonates with 77% of influencers on X

• Fed's Cook says AI triggering big changes, sees possible unemployment rise

• Chinese Propaganda in Open Source AI: Moxie Marlinspike's Confer

  Yes, we have a problem: most of the good open (self-hostable) AI models are from China. China really has won the AI race, and they did it in a smart way: while we, in the Western world, with our MBAs and greed and quarterly reports were busy building datacenters and squeezing every possible cents from every possible source while closely guarding out "frontier models" as trade secrets, China has invested public money to give these black-boxes away for free to anyone. And this is the real soft power of this century, something that has the potential of shaping the thought and the society of generations to come, and we completely fell for it because we built no alternatives.

• Michael Pollan punctures the AI bubble

• AI is threatening science jobs. Which ones are most at risk

• A Meta AI security researcher said an OpenClaw agent ran amok on her inbox

• Amazon would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

• WiseTech Global to cut 2k jobs as AI ends era of 'manually writing code'

• 'People are doing dumb things', says Jamie Dimon amid fears of AI bubble

• Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese rivals of mass data theft

• Tech Firms Aren't Just Encouraging Their Workers to Use AI. They're Enforcing It

• Amazon AI lab chief to depart amid leadership shake-up

• Most teens believe their peers are using AI to cheat in school

• OpenAI says Chinese cops used ChatGPT to track smear ops against opponents

• Hacker Used Anthropic's Claude to Steal Sensitive Mexican Data

• AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

• Can A.I. Detection Tools Spot Fake Images?

• The AI Bubble Is Bursting

  the AI hype train is derailing as I write this. AI will eventually lead to gains in productivity, but those gains are going to be marginal. That’s the optimistic take. Right now, there are practically zero gains.

• Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define 'alive'

• Trump made tax day more complicated. ChatGPT and Claude can make it easier

• Companies cutting jobs as investments shift toward AI

• Apple's Contrarian 'Nah, We're Good' Strategy Defies Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet

• Hacker used Anthropic's Claude chatbot to attack government agencies in Mexico

• US judge dismisses xAI trade-secrets lawsuit against rival OpenAI for now

• AI bit barns grow climate emergency by turning up the gas

• The Peace Corps is recruiting volunteers to sell AI to developing nations

• Canada's AI minister blames OpenAI for 'failure' after mass shooting

• Meta's AI sending 'junk' CSAM tips to DOJ

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Kalshi reveals insider trading case against editor for MrBeast

• Kalshi suspends users for insider trading

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What's Going on with the Price of Gold

• Amazon Busted for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy

• Traders Rush to Dump Software Loans That Began Year at 100 Cents

• Stripe is reportedly eyeing deal to buy some or all of PayPal

  • Payments Processor Stripe Expresses Interest in PayPal

• Intel Strikes Deal with a Chip Startup Its CEO Invested In

• Warner Bros. Discovery says Paramount made higher bid, board will weigh offer against Netflix deal.

• Private Credit Fears Deepen with UBS Warning of 15% Defaults

• Wall Street extends tech-powered rally ahead of Nvidia earnings

• Jane Street Accused of Insider Trading That Helped Collapse Terraform

• A Natick couple wanted $500M from eBay for harassment. They've settled

• Nvidia's Quarterly Profit Hits $43B on Strong AI Chips Sales

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Why isn't LA repaving streets?

  Avoiding a full repaving means avoiding having to bring adjacent sidewalks up to the latest ADA standards.

Trump

• Trump says he has told big tech companies to build their own power plants

• US tariff rate to hit 15% or more for some nations

Democrats

• Zohran Mamdani Wants to Reclaim Efficiency from the Right

• Schiff and Salwell work for Venezuela

  Venezuela’s former intelligence leader Hugo Carvajal has CONFIRMED that Democrat Senator Adam Schiff and Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell, both of California, are two of the top names on the VENEZUELA LIST of US politicians that are receiving MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN KICKBACKS AND LAVISH GIFTS from the Maduro regime and Venezuelan drug trafficking organizations

Left Angst

• The Price of American Authoritarianism What Can Reverse Democratic Decline?

• Socialist Excellence in New York City

  Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements.

  But lately, I've been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right's mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right's twisted obsessions. Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: "We'll run the government like a business." Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.

• Data center developers asked Trump for an exemption from pollution rules

• Boise woman arrested after five-day search following ambulance crash

  Authorities have arrested the alleged suspect in the case of a stolen Canyon County Paramedics ambulance that was then crashed into the Portico North building Thursday morning in Meridian. Law enforcement had been pursuing George since the crash just after midnight on Thursday. As of early Thursday afternoon, there were no injuries reported. After the ambulance was driven out of its parking spot, the suspect allegedly drove it north through the parking lot and “retrieved gas cans that had been staged in nearby vegetation,” according to Basterrechea at the news conference on Thursday afternoon. “The suspect then drove the ambulance directly into the North Portico building, which houses (DHS) offices,” Basterrechea said. “Investigators believe the suspect poured an accelerant (a substance used to aid the spread of fire) inside and around the outside of the ambulance. (At the time of the Thursday news conference) it appears the suspect was unable to ignite the accelerant before being scared off by responding agencies.”

• Leaked Documents Show Meta Cracking Down on Access to Abortion Information

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• DJI Sues DoD for injury due to import restrictions

• US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

World

• Japan antitrust watchdog raids Microsoft over cloud services concerns

• Australian man jailed for selling US cyber secrets to Russian broker

• Could Canada and Australia form a critical minerals supergroup?

• Facial recognition error prompts police to arrest wrong man for burglary

• Japan to deploy missiles on island near Taiwan by 2031

• Disabled woman put in nursing home against her will says she feels 'betrayed'

• Cuba says four shot dead on US-registered speedboat

  Cuba's Interior Ministry has announced that four men on a US-registered speedboat were shot and killed after being intercepted in Cuban waters. In a statement, the ministry said that the speedboat's passengers opened fire on a coast guard vessel that approached them. Six additional passengers were wounded in the incident, which took place near an island on Cuba's northern coast. The identity of those on board the vessel or what it was doing in the area are unclear, with the Cuban government saying an investigation has been launched to "clarify" the event.

  • Cuba Shoots Four Dead in Clash With Florida Speedboat

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• What happened after Elon Musk took the Russian army offline

• Russia fines Google for distributing VPN services

• Russia sends migrants into Europe through secret tunnels

• Russia Moves Closer to Banning Telegram App, Saying It Foments Terrorism

China

• China Supreme Court rules drivers remain liable despite autonomous driving tech

• Nvidia still hasn't sold a single H200 to China

Health / Medicine

• First British baby born using transplanted womb from dead donor

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid's origins: what we do and don't know

  We are 23 of the 27 original members of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) for the World Health Organization (WHO). After nearly 3.5 years of deliberations, we concluded our independent assessment of the origin of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and provided our report1 in June 2025 to the WHO director-general. In the 78-page document, we determined that most of the peer-reviewed scientific evidence supports the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 has a zoonotic origin, meaning that it came from an animal. But until requests for additional information are met or more data become available, there can be no certainty about when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population. Of the four original members of SAGO who are not co-authors of this article, one resigned before the 2025 report was finalized. Three others dissented from our decision to evaluate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 had leaked from a laboratory on the basis of there being no evidence for this (see hypotheses three and four below).

  • What they know is different from what is acceptable to say.

• Hospitals fighting measles confront a challenge: Few doctors have seen it before

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Regulating the environmental impact of asteroid mining

• After the Endangerment Finding, States Must Prove CO2 Harms. Wisconsin Can’t.

• Boozy chimps fail urine test, confirm hotly debated theory

  most of the urine samples (16 out of 20) contained significant levels of ethyl glucuronide, a byproduct of alcohol—above the 500 ng/ml that is roughly equivalent to one or two drinks for humans. And that is a conservative estimate. Once again, the most likely source is the fermented fruit the chimps consume in such large quantities. In short, “We find widespread physiological evidence of the consumption of alcohol by chimpanzees,” Maro said. “If there’s any doubt about the drunken monkey hypothesis—that there’s enough alcohol in the environment for animals to experience alcohol in a way analogous to humans—it’s been cleared up. Food and alcohol evolutionarily are, as it turns out, very much connected, especially in the lives of chimpanzees.”

• Largest coral colony discovered off Australian by mother-daughter team

• The Last Mystery of Antarctica's 'Blood Falls' Has Been Solved

• Major gap in Earth's rock record likely due to tectonics–not glaciers

• School students launch satellite to detect fungi in atmosphere