2026-02-05
Horseshit
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Minions music leads to nightmare for Olympic skater, spotlighting a problem
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Middle age is becoming a breaking point in the U.S.
Americans born in the 1960s and early 1970s are reporting higher levels of loneliness and depression than people from earlier generations. They are also showing declines in memory and physical strength. These patterns are unusual when compared with other wealthy nations.
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Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original
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Launching The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative
- I'd like to know how much money (% of donations) that gets dispersed to people uninvolved with running the project.
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"Superhuman": A 13 year old boy swims 2.5 miles to save family swept out to sea
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DoorDash and Other Food Delivery Apps Are Reshaping Mealtime
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"Yes, It's Happening. Yes, it's real." March For Billionaires, SF, 02/07/2026
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We asked retired astronauts about their favorite space movies
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- Wherever you are, there is something wonderful, beauteous, and miraculous in your reach. all you have to do is see that it is there. Microscopes can be a great tool to help you get a different perspective.
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The Muppets are horny and weird again (just like Jim Henson intended)
- The Muppets were fun, because the team behind them was having fun. New teams should crate new things, instead of being forced to make mock of their inspirations and destroy the value of their memories.
Epstein
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Goldman Defense of Lawyer's Epstein Ties Provokes Unease at Bank
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Melinda French Gates Appears to Confirm Divorce Was Related to Epstein
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Epstein, Western decline and the moral collapse of the elites
the truth only came out because it stopped being useful to keep it hidden. For decades, all of this was known behind the scenes. The silence was not the result of investigative failure, but of a high-level decision. The press stayed silent. The agencies stayed silent. The courts stayed silent. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to, all in order to protect itself. Western societies now face a dilemma that cannot be resolved through elections, parliamentary commissions, or encouraging speeches. How can one continue to accept the authority of institutions that shielded this level of horror? How can respect be maintained for laws applied selectively by people who live above them? How can one speak of “Western values” after this? The problem is that the modern West has forgotten how to react to anything that is vile and essentially evil.
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Newly released files shed new light on Chomsky and Epstein relationship
In Friday’s tranche of documents, which built upon earlier disclosures of their close social ties, there is no specific indication that the famed academic and linguist was referring to his friend’s private Caribbean island where children were sexually abused. But the personal familiarity between the two men in that exchange is palpable, as it is in numerous other emails between Chomsky and Epstein aimed at planning more mundane social gatherings. There additionally was an exchange in which Chomsky wrote to Steve Bannon, the rightwing chief White House strategist during Donald Trump’s first presidency, requesting an introductory meeting. “Lots to talk about,” Chomsky wrote, adding that he had been provided Bannon’s contact information by Epstein, a former friend of Trump.
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I think Epstein's regard for Chomsky had a lot to do with his prominence.
If you’re younger than 35, you might have no idea how much of the internet used to be occupied by people arguing about Noam Chomsky. Left-wingers used to fight with liberals and conservatives at insane length over the merits — or lack thereof — of the ageing linguist and anti-war commentator. Had Chomsky excused dictators like Pol Pot? He had been too soft on Holocaust Deniers? Was he a denier of genocide in Bosnia? Such questions were fiercely and exhaustingly disputed.
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EU lawmakers request TikTok probe into alleged censorship over Epstein files
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In Putin's Orbit: The Crypto Politics of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel
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Jeffrey Epstein made lucrative investment in crypto exchange Coinbase
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Epstein associated with Silicon Valley elite years after his release from prison
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As the latest Epstein Files release continues to provide premium toilet reading and no arrests, tech billionaires Bill Gates and Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman are in full damage control mode, while President Donald Trump - whose name is all over the files as well, is back to asking if we can just move on. Other notables mentioned in the release are Steve Tisch, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Harvey Weinstein, Leon Black, Peter Mandelson (who just imploded), Sergey Brin, Jason Calacanis, Howard Lutnick and the Nobel Prize committee (more on that later, it's a fun one), and of course Ehud Barak.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
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Despite new curbs, Elon Musk's Grok at times produces sexualized images
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Musk's Boring Tunnel in Nashville Has Mayor Hoping No One Dies
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Now Musk likes it, skepticism becomes permissible:
even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
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SpaceX grounds Falcon 9 missions, could impact ISS launch
NASA said Tuesday its next crew rotation to the International Space Station could be delayed after SpaceX announced it was grounding flights of its Falcon 9 rocket to investigate an unspecified issue. SpaceX, the private space company owned by Elon Musk, has paused flights of its Falcon 9 rocket following an issue its second stage experienced during a routine launch Monday of Starlink satellites into orbit. The grounding could potentially delay the next NASA crew rotation to the International Space Station, which currently is slated for February 11, given that those astronauts launch with a Falcon 9 rocket.
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Judge gives Musk bad news, says Trump hasn't intervened to block SEC lawsuit
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Stanford's Fake Disability Crisis Is America's Future
When 38% of students at one of America’s most elite universities claim disability status, the system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed. And that’s the problem. The gaming has become normalized, and it’s not limited to DraftKings and crypto—it’s metastasizing through our most prestigious institutions.
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Film Students Are Having Trouble Sitting Through Movies, Professors Say
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Professors Are Being Watched: 'We've Never Seen This Much Surveillance'
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Intel is moving into GPUs and has hired a chief architect, CEO Lip-Bu Tan says
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GitHub Ponders Kill Switch for Pull Requests to Stop AI Slop
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Remnants of Flash: Adobe is killing off software animators around the world are using every day
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Western Digital doubles the performance of HDD with dual-actuator High-Bandwidth
- IIRC there was a Conner 500MB drive with dual head assemblies; this appears to be single arm but multiplexed heads and multiple platters being read simultaneously. see also Multi-Actuator Technology
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Survey: Game Developers Hate AI, Want Unions, and Are Abandoning Xbox
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FBI Couldn't Get into WaPo Reporter's iPhone Because Lockdown Mode Enabled
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Netflix says users can cancel service if HBO Max merger makes it too expensive
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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PicoIDE - A Journey Into Understanding the IDE Bus
While looking at all these standards, something caught my eye: the technical editor for several versions of them had a work address just a couple doors down from where I worked! It was an old office of Maxtor, which came out of the acquisition of the ill-fated MiniScribe. As it turns out, this area of Colorado had a large part in the development of storage technology and still does: Maxtor was acquired by Seagate which still maintains an office here. In any case, I had to make a mini-pilgrimage and take a selfie in front of the nondescript building in an industrial park where the standards I had been poring over were written.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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NASA hit by fuel leaks during a practice countdown of the moon rocket
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NASA acknowledges the elephant in the room with the SLS rocket
If NASA were really going to do the best it could with this rocket, there were options in the last three years. It is common in commercial rocketry to build one or more “test” tanks to both stress the hardware and ensure its compatibility with ground systems through an extensive test campaign. However, SLS hardware is extraordinarily expensive. A single rocket costs in excess of $2 billion, so the program is hardware-poor. Moreover, tanking tests might have damaged the launch tower, which itself cost more than $1 billion. As far as I know, there was never any serious discussion of building a test tank. Hardware scarcity, due to cost, is but one of several problems with the SLS rocket architecture. Probably the biggest one is its extremely low flight rate, which makes every fueling and launch opportunity an experimental rather than operational procedure. This has been pointed out to NASA, and the rocket’s benefactors in Congress, for more than a decade. A rocket that is so expensive it only flies rarely will have super-high operating costs and ever-present safety concerns precisely because it flies so infrequently.
Until this week, NASA had largely ignored these concerns, at least in public. However, in a stunning admission, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledged the flight-rate issue after Monday’s wet-dress rehearsal test failed to reach a successful conclusion. “The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion,” he said as part of a longer post about the test on social media. The reality, which Isaacman knows full well, and which almost everyone else in the industry recognizes, is that the SLS rocket is dead hardware walking. The Trump administration would like to fly the rocket just two more times, culminating in the Artemis III human landing on the Moon. Congress has passed legislation mandating a fourth and fifth launch of the SLS vehicle.
- space enthusiasts have been screaming for a decade to quit wasting money on this crap.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Does AI have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear
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Anthropic's launch of AI legal tool hits shares in European data companies
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Lotus Health nabs $35M for AI doctor that sees patients for free
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NASA's Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars
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AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed
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Alexa+ powered by Anthropic now Generally available in the US
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Anthropic's new AI tool: Next black stock market day for the software industry
Neo Gambling / Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Pinterest sacks two engineers for creating software to identify fired workers
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'Get Me Out': Traders Dump Software Stocks as AI Fears Erupt
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The world is more equal than you think
Data released on January 20th, covering 194 countries and economies, and compiled by the World Data Lab, a research firm, show that the ratio between spending by the world’s richest 10% and the poorest 50% has more than halved since 2000. Back then, the rich spent about 40 times more than the poor; today the figure is closer to 18. Over the same period, the richest 1% have also seen their share of consumption shrink. The shift is driven mostly by gains in low- and middle-income economies, rather than changes in rich countries. Poorer countries have grown faster than rich ones and consumption has risen with incomes.
- China's population dominates statistics when convenient to the conclusion desired.
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Once the Hottest Bet on Wall St., Private Credit Has Started to Crack
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Texas Instruments to buy chip designer Silicon Labs in $7.5B deal
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As software stocks slump, investors debate AI's existential threat
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Apple Beats Tech Stocks by Most in a Year as It Avoids AI Panic
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Left Angst
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Washington Post Begins Layoffs
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Washington Post cuts a third of its staff in a blow to a legendary news brand
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'It's an absolute bloodbath': Washington Post lays off workers
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I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone
It's not that Resistance leftist politics don't have a market. They do. One third of the country are, alas, woke communist psychopathic nihilists. You should be able to sell a paper appealing to this lunatic cohort. The trouble is, every media outlet, pretty much, panders to this same lunatic cohort. They're all reading from the same depraved Marxist prayer book.
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DHS Hunts Down 67-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Who Criticized Them in Email
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Donald Trump boasts that he will be the “fertilization president.” American couples — meaning white couples — will be given incentives by his administration to have more children to counter declining birth rates. In the vernacular of the right wing, those who promote this updated version of “positive eugenics” are known as “pronatalists.” The Trump administration will also reduce refugees admitted to the United States next year to the token level of 7,500, with most of these spots filled by white South Africans. Trump’s allies in Big Tech are busy creating the fertility infrastructure to conceive children with “positive” hereditary traits. Sam Altman, who has been awarded a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce “designer babies.”
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"This Job Sucks": DOJ Attorney Asks Judge to Hold Her in Contempt
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The Remaking of Alex Pretti: Imperfect Times Demand the Perfect Hero
MS NOW has admitted that it used an AI-enhanced photo of Pretti that made him look more handsome. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was criticized for bringing to the Senate floor an altered image, featuring a headless immigration agent, that made it look like officers executed a kneeling Pretti with a shot to the head. Pretti needs to be be inviolate to make the government seem vile in the eyes of the public. He is being described as the combination of Florence Nightingale and Crispus Attucks. A CNN panelist and co-host of “The View,” Ana Navarro, voiced the new orthodoxy that Pretti was the “perfect guy … the guy you’d want to date your daughter, the guy you want your son to grow up to be, a decent human being who was serving humanity.” She added that he was so perfect that “there is nothing that has been said about that man that isn’t wonderful. And so they can’t malign him.” The point is that any skepticism, let alone criticism, is no longer acceptable.
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Amber Schlegel, the man's sister, told KOLD-TV Wednesday that he had placed many people in danger through his actions. "To hear that he's back running illegals again didn't surprise me, but to hear that he actually fired at federal agents — that took me by surprise," she said. "He is no victim. He is a violent person. That's who he always has been." She said that she had already sought a protection order against him when he threatened her for speaking out against him. "He's where he should be," she added. "Whether he recovers or not, he needs to be locked up for a very long time."
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Tech billionaires fuel Donald Trump’s $429mn haul ahead of midterm elections
Donald Trump and his allies raised a record $429mn in donations last year, as tech billionaires and companies lobbying for policy changes helped build a war chest for the president ahead of the midterm elections. A single political action committee controlled by Trump allies, Maga Inc, is sitting on $304mn — more than any Pac has ever held heading into a midterm election year, FT analysis found. The sum is tens of millions more than any group connected to the Democratic Party has on hand.
- How much did the Biden / Kamala campaigns raise? How tight do they have to shut their eyes to make "more than any group connected to Democrats" fly? It's one thing to slant a story but this is bald faced lies.
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The Discourse is Getting Both Smarter and Dumber
Ten years ago, anti-vaxxers did not have any role in national politics. Now they’re running HHS. During Obama’s first term, the most prominent conspiracy theory on the right was that the president had been born in Kenya. That wasn’t true, but it’s a fundamentally different belief than the idea that Charlie Kirk was a time traveler who was monitored from the time he was a child, or even that each election Republicans lose was probably stolen. The leaders of half of the political spectrum now consider Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old who does not know common English words, a great journalist.
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Republicans haul Netflix before Congress for being too ‘woke’
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee highlighted an array of traditional merger concerns on both sides of the aisle: that the deal could potentially raise costs for consumers, limit their theater experiences, or shrink the market for entertainment jobs. But a large chunk of the session also focused on Netflix’s allegedly “woke” programming, including content that features transgender characters.
- If they were as Evangelical about, say, Mormonism as they are about woke, does anyone think the Democrats would not have crushed them already?
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment reports
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Plans for Iran nuclear talks are collapsing, U.S. officials say
The U.S. and Iran had agreed to meet on Friday in Istanbul, with other Middle Eastern countries participating as observers. But the Iranians said on Tuesday that they wanted to move the talks to Oman and hold them in a bilateral format, in order to ensure that they focused only on nuclear issues and not other matters like missiles that are priorities for the U.S. and countries in the region. U.S. officials considered the request to change the location, but decided on Wednesday to reject it. "We told them it is this or nothing, and they said, 'Ok, then nothing,'" a senior U.S. official said.
World
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EU rejects 'nonsense' censorship charge from Trump allies
The accusations drew a strong rebuke from the EU. "On the latest censorship allegations. Pure nonsense. Completely unfounded," EU digital affairs spokesman Thomas Regnier said. A first report by the House committee last year took aim at the EU's legal armory, especially its 2023 content law, the Digital Services Act – which Trump's administration accuses of discriminating against US firms.
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Amazon is finding that Europe is not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to, well, power.
flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years,
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UK services sector job cuts continue as companies automate, PMI survey shows
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Japan begins 24-hour social media monitoring at Winter Olympics
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Cannabis usage in older adults linked to larger brain, better cognitive function
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The copay card brings this $957 tube of skin cream down to $10. That’s a 99% reduction in price that we only got because we knew to look for it. It makes me wonder how many harried people are too busy to do anything but scramble to scrape together $957 or $765 or $208. Or, more likely, how many skip their prescriptions entirely?
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One-third of dementia cases are linked to non brain-related diseases