2026-02-20

Horseshit

• Nearly half of L.A. County's pavement may be unnecessary, new map finds

• The Popper Principle

  Popper lambastes Plato for inventing a rigidly stratified state, a purified tribal society preferable to the Athenian democracy into which he was born. It is composed of three classes: the guardians, their troops, and the workers. Ruling over this ideal republic were philosopher-kings, who pedaled “noble lies” that justified a hierarchy of social classes. If human beings believed that they were made of different metals—their station in life determined by how much gold, silver, iron, or brass was within them—they would not only accept the stratification of the classes but also care for one another and for the state. Thus could the self-described best and brightest maintain their power by sheer force and fantasy; the poets, whose tales might reveal the injustices and insanities of the Republic, would be banished.

• Yes there is a right way to stack the dishwasher. Here are the 5 rules

• Rare gifted word-learner dogs like to share their toys

• Ski mountaineering makes Olympic debut on snowy day

• Astronomers detect a solar system they say should not be possible

• The 30-year fight over how many numbers we need to describe reality

• Chicago Bears are ‘committed’ to Indiana move. Here’s what would need to happen

Epstein

• Former Prince Andrew Arrested over Epstein Probe

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office

  "We will not be naming the arrested man, as per national guidance. Please also remember that this case is now active so care should be taken with any publication to avoid being in contempt of court." Assistant Chief Constable Oliver Wright said: “Following a thorough assessment, we have now opened an investigation into this allegation of misconduct in public office.

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office over ties to Epstein.

  • Former Prince Andrew arrested by British police

  • Former Prince Andrew arrested on birthday after Epstein files revelations

• Epstein Ally Was Talking To Feds About Flip, Wanted $3 Million To Keep Quiet, Then Backed Off Deal | ZeroHedge

  French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel - whose network delivered new girls from around the world to Jeffrey Epstein on a regular basis, was prepared in 2016 to tell U.S. prosecutors what he knew about Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. According to newly released files from the DOJ, the now-deceased Brunel’s lawyer was negotiating with attorneys for Epstein’s victims about a possible meeting with federal prosecutors in New York in exchange for immunity - and Epstein knew it. And of course, Goldman Sachs (soon to be ex-) General Counsel Kathy Ruemmler is involved. According to handwritten notes taken by a federal prosecutor in February 2016 state: "One of Epstein’s bfs, Jean Luc Brunel, has helped get girls. He is wanting to cooperate." The notes add: "Brunel is afraid of being prosecuted," the Wall Street Journal reports.

  It remains unclear why Brunel ultimately declined to cooperate, or whether Epstein gave him $3 million not to. What is clear from the files is that no investigation was opened at the time. A 2021 government court filing states that the prosecutor who took the February 2016 notes discussed the meeting with colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI, but no probe was initiated.

  Brunel was arrested in France in 2020 on allegations of rape and supplying girls to Epstein. He died in jail in 2022. Prosecutors in Paris said Saturday they would re-examine the case and create a special team to analyze evidence that could implicate French nationals.

• Why Killing Epstein Was a Catastrophic Engineering Failure

• Well, no; they appear to have generated these docs in 2025, FBI agents mailing each other: FBI Interviewed Trump Accuser, Epstein Files Show

  “[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the presentation says. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” The victim would have been “approximately 13-15 years old when this occurred,” according to the presentation. The alleged assault took place in the early-mid 1980s, and the same woman also claimed to be an Epstein victim.

• DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events

• Amid Epstein fallout, Bill Gates becomes point of controversy at India AI summit

  • Bill Gates cancels AI summit address amid fresh scrutiny over Epstein links

• Epstein kept a secret garden of toxic plants that turn people into 'zombies'

  The recent release of Jeffrey Epstein's emails suggested he had an interest in potentially toxic plants that eliminated free will. In an email dated March 3, 2014, sent to an individual identified as Ann Rodriguez, Epstein wrote, 'ask chris about my trumpet plants at nursery [SIC]?,' a line that may indicate he had Angel's Trumpet plants.

celebrity gossip

• Mark Zuckerberg testifies in social media addiction trial

  • Mark Zuckerberg to testify in landmark social media trial

  • Mark Zuckerberg: "I don't have a college degree in anything"

  • Meta CEO Knew Kids Were Being Hurt and He Covered It Up

  • Mark Zuckerberg Grilled on Usage Goals and Underage Users at California Trial

• 'Epstein of the West' socialite allegedly pimped out gf to Silicon Valley elite

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• From Paris to New Delhi, the Push to Ban Teens from Social Media Is Going Global

Musk

• The political effects of X's feed algorithm

• Grok Exposed a Porn Performer's Legal Name and Birthdate–Without Being Asked

• SpaceX's Starbase city is getting its own court

• SpaceX rocket fireball linked to plume of polluting lithium

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Ford to follow Tesla Cybertruck with electrical tech in new EV pickup

• Waymo Faces Setback as New York Withdraws Robotaxi Service Plan

• Plug-in hybrids use three times more fuel than manufacturers claim

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• China's humanoids are dazzling the world. Who will buy them?

• Toyota deploys Agility humanoids at Canadian plant

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Gay Tech Mafia

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Reassessing the Scientific Method

  Is the scientific method really the best approach to learning about the world?

  “The traditional ways we teach people to do experiments seem very premeditated: let’s confirm what we know, let’s try to falsify a dominant theory, let’s resolve a disagreement between two theories. But weirdly enough, we found that such carefully-motivated experiments don’t seem to guide scientists toward useful theories as well as randomly-chosen ones,” Dubova explains.

• The Brown University shooter and the MIT professor he killed

• Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future

• Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• V&A Museum acquires YouTube's earliest video from 2005

• Memory Mania: How a Once-in-Four-Decades Shortage Is Fueling a Memory Boom

• The CEO of SSD controller company Phison says many consumer electronics companies will be forced to close their doors because they can't buy the chips to continue operations.

• Laser-etched glass can store data for 10k years, Microsoft says

• Apple Just Officially Ushered in Podcasting's Generational Shift

• Satellite Feature on iPhone Allowed Skiers to Seek Help After Avalanche

• As memory shortage persists, vendor price quotes are not long remembered

• Apple sued by WV for alleged failure to stop child sexual abuse material

• The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

• Roblox sued by L.A. County for allegedly failing to protect children

• A $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Puts Starliner Mishap in Same Class as Shuttle Tragedies

  • NASA chief classifies Starliner flight as "Type A" mishap

• Starliner Crew Flight Test Investigation Letter from Isaacman

• Trump all but confirms Obama's alien bombshell is true

  President Trump alleged Thursday that former President Barack Obama revealed “classified information” — a potential crime — when he said that aliens are “real” in a recent interview. “He gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I don’t know if they’re real or not, but I can tell you he gave classified information.” “He made a big mistake,” Trump went on. “He took it out of classified information. No, I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”

  • Trump has prepared speech on extraterrestrial life, Lara Trump says

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Atlassian Halts Hiring as AI Pressure Mounts

• Anthropic is clashing with The Pentagon over AI use. Here's what each side wants

  • What's Going on Between Anthropic and The Pentagon?

• Gemini will now generate musical slop for users

• Have we entered a new age of AI-enabled scientific discovery?

• AI Agents Are Taking America by Storm

• I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes

• New OpenAI funding to top $100B

• Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

• Do the people building Claude understand what they've created?

• Perplexity AI drops ads implementation plan to keep user trust

• Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling

• Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

• The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun

• Accenture 'links staff promotions to use of AI tools'

• OpenClaw security fears lead Meta, other AI firms to restrict its use

• Pentagon-Anthropic battle pushes other AI labs into major dilemma

• HR teams are drowning in slop grievances

• What If No One Wants This?

  Less than a third of Americans trust AI. Less than half of Americans have a favorable view of AI. Half of Americans say they’re more concerned about AI than excited (the highest in the world). Less than a quarter say they enjoy using AI (one of the lowest in the world). Three quarters of Americans think AI is going to reduce the overall number of jobs. More than half think it’s going to negatively affect our ability to do things on our own. 77% think it poses a “threat to humanity.”

• Why are AI leaders fleeing?

• San Francisco's next crazy idea: Civil rights for AI

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Blue Owl permanently halts redemptions at retail investor private credit fund

  • Blue Owl Capital stopping withdrawals has El-Erian making Bear Stearns parallels

• Etsy sells second-hand fashion app Depop to eBay for $1.2B

• Amazon takes the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500, ending Walmart's 13-year run

• U.S. stocks are falling behind. It could be the beginning of an epic shift toward global markets.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• New California bill to require license plates for electric bikes

• NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya will take over leadership of CDC temporarily.

• California's New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report Themselves

• Warren warns Fed, Treasury against crypto bailout

Trump

• Hassett says authors of New York Fed tariff study should be disciplined

  White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said Wednesday that the authors of a recent New York Federal Reserve paper that found U.S. companies and consumers are shouldering most of the tariff burden should be “disciplined.” In a CNBC interview, the National Economic Council director ripped the report, saying that central bank researchers ignored key aspects of how the duties worked and instead simply focused on prices. Hassett said the research also should have included the upward impact on wages and benefits that U.S. companies see by bringing more production onshore.

  • Too bad they can't yell "Report it right!" and have the media change their tone, as previous administrations have done.

• Trump has prepared speech on extraterrestrial life, Lara Trump says

• Trump says FEMA will play ‘key role’ in coordinating response to Potomac sewage spill - POLITICO

• Trump vows $10B from U.S. for his Board of Peace

Democrats

• Mamdani poised to ‘freeze the rent’ after stacking NYC board with likeminded lefty appointees.

• Sanders and Newsom become adversaries over push to tax California billionaires

• Orders have gone out

  In the past 48 hours prominent Dems and the Media have pushed the narrative that no one has called POTUS Trump racist and they haven’t referred to him as Hitler.

Left Angst

• Europe Worries About Another Trump Blowup, This One on Tech

• Canada will have to accept higher U.S. tariffs and unthinkable concessions

• One Man Stole $660 Million. He’ll Never Pay It Back. - The New York Times

  In a world where the Department of Justice and the president are either indifferent to or actively support rich criminals, what can be done? Fortunately, there is a range of legal tools that ordinary citizens can use to pursue civilly the sort of corruption that would ordinarily be prosecuted criminally. The shareholders potentially cheated by Mr. Wiederhorn could sue the Trump inaugural committee under the federal civil RICO law — written to destroy the Mafia — for seemingly helping to secure Mr. Wiederhorn’s freedom. Companies that follow the law can sue rivals, like Binance, that do not, under California’s Unfair Competition Law. And investors scammed by Mr. Milton can sue the political committees he donated to if they were “unjustly enriched” by his scheme.

  • Will these laws serve people who don't like Democrats, too? Or is this going to be yet another case where courts are only open to Democrats' grievances?

• US funding for global internet freedom 'effectively gutted'

• Brendan Carr defends FCC role in dropped Colbert interview: 'No censorship'

• FDA reverses course and will review Moderna's mRNA flu shot, company says

• No First Amendment Right to Force Government to Provide Live Feed of Macaques

• The Mathematician Lifting the Lid on Trump's "Attacks"

  Pagel is behind the Trump Action Tracker—the world’s only comprehensive dashboard of the actions, statements and plans of the Trump administration. Along with her small team of volunteers, she has manually logged almost 2,500 examples that may “pose a threat to American democracy” since January 2025.

• Trump's Order Aims to Boost Ingredient Used in Roundup

• Trump administration recruits tech bosses to train 'elite' government coders

• DOGE Bro's Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?'

• We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

• Minnesota judge holds federal attorney in civil contempt

• In contrast with Trump's America, Europe's 100 gigawatt clean energy hub

• The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig on her “hypothetical,” heavily reported measles essay

  When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.

• HUD proposes rule that would force noncitizens from public housing

• Pardoned Binance Founder Hobnobs with Trump Sons, at Mar-a-Lago Crypto Fest

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Police killed fewer Americans in 2025 under Trump than in Biden era 2023 or 2024.

• Members-only Philly cop bar has been linked to two DUIs and a third crash

• Armchair Detectives Complicate Nancy Guthrie Case

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Germany seeking more F-35 jets as European fighter program falters

• The Far-Fetched Mission to Reclaim Islands That Host a Key U.S. Military Base

• U.S. military prepared to strike Iran as early as this weekend, but Trump has yet to make a final call, sources say

  • Trump has discussed timeline for Iran strikes — including as soon as this weekend — but no decision yet.

  • Lindsey Graham Just Gave a Major Hint About What the Admin Plans to Do About Iran

  "The US decision regarding Iran has already been made. The ships are not arriving in the area only because the weather is pleasant at this time of year”

• UK 'blocks US from using RAF bases launch Iran strike prompting anger from Trump

  • UK has not given US permission to use RAF bases for Iran strikes

• Freedom Is Coming

  • Freedom.gov: US State Department Plans VPN Portal for Europe

  • US builds website that will allow Europeans to view blocked content

World

• Without America to rely on, EU gearing up to be a global power in its own right

• UK Names Antonia Romeo as First Woman to Head Civil Service

• Firms must remove 'revenge porn' in 48 hours or risk being blocked, says Starmer

  • Tech firms will have 48 hours to remove abusive images under new law

  • UK to force social media to remove abusive pics in 48 hours

• Extension of interim rules to combat CSAM must prevent indiscriminate scanning

• 'No red lines': Spain reveals EU supergroup's plan to challenge US and China

• India Seizes Sanctioned Shadow Fleet Tankers Amid Trade Thaw with U.S.

• Germany's Merz calls for real names on the internet

• Greece throws support behind social media bans for kids

• South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

• That irritating feeling that France was right

• Tour Guides Accused of Scamming the Louvre Out of $12M

• Malaysian Farmers Made a Fortune on Durian. Now It Is Piling Up

• Why there's no quick fix in sight for the problem of dazzling headlights

  It's an issue that has even reached the United Nations - it will mandate all new cars to automatically adjust their headlight levels. But this will only affect new cars. And so the questions many are asking are: what, if anything, can be done about all the cars currently out there causing headlight discomfort - and why did nobody spot that this might be a problem?

Greenland

• Hitler's Greenland Obsession

Venezuela

• SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan’s meeting with Venezuelan interim authorities

  The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Chargé d’Affaires to the Venezuela Affairs Unit, Ambassador Laura F. Dogu, and U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and the Americas Joseph M. Humire met with Venezuelan interim authorities in Caracas February 18, 2026.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Musk cuts Starlink access for Russian forces – giving Ukraine an edge

China

• Stock Slide and Slow Sales: What's Happening in China's E.V. Market?

Health / Medicine

• Think chicken is healthier than beef? New study says not so fast.

• (Oct 2025) The Great Alzheimer's Scam and the Proven Cures They've Buried for Billions

• 'Bacterial constipation,' new disease caused by gut-drying bacteria

• Baby microbiomes in the West differ from those everywhere else

• Red blood cells soak up sugar at high altitude, protecting against diabetes

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe

• Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Wellington rages as litres of raw sewage pour into ocean

• What causes snow slopes to collapse? A physicist and skier explains

• Fast-growing trees are taking over the forests of the future

• The West's Winter Has Been a Slow-Moving Catastrophe

• Seal pup communication is more similar to that of humans than previously thought

• The Human Exposome Project will map how environmental factors shape health

• New technology solves production bottleneck for black soldier fly larvae

• Indigenous trees might be the secret to climate resilient dairy farming in Benin

• A milestone achievement in our journey to carbon negative

• Indonesia bans elephant riding in landmark welfare move