2026-01-27

etc

• On Weather Forecasts and "Trusting the Science."

  I’m writing this from Knoxville, Tennessee, where the entire town was more or less shut down by fears of a historically huge blizzard that never happened. At one point last week, there were models showing upward of 29” of snow for us.

  I discounted that at the time, but the models’ consensus was still over a foot of snow. We actually got a few flurries and some rain and sleet that never even turned into an ice storm as predicted.

  “trust the science” only goes as far as the science itself. Meteorologists can make predictions, and they’re right more often than they used to be, but they’re still wrong a lot. They simply don’t have the tools to do a better job yet, and there are reasons (like the inherent unpredictability of chaotic systems, which weather pretty much is) to doubt that they will ever be close to perfect. Most of the time people rely as much on what’s sometimes called “the persistence theory of meteorology,” assuming that the weather at present probably represents the state of the weather in the near future, and perhaps that the typical weather for a given time of year is likely to be the weather we experience again. That usually works.

• What weather apps sometimes miss about dangerous winter storm conditions

• Power plant outages surge in Eastern US amid restricted gas supplies and frigid weather.

Horseshit

• Screen time limits for children are no longer enough, new US report finds

• How Big Tech killed literary culture - UnHerd

  “I would never read a book,” declared crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried in a fawning profile published by the venture capital firm Sequoia in September 2022. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up.” When SBF, as he likes to be called, was arrested for fraud and money laundering a couple of months later, journalists and other literary sorts seized on his words as evidence of moral corruption. Expressing a disdain for books is not only “ignorant and arrogant”, wrote The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams; it signals “a much larger deficiency of character”. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t read,” ran the headline of a Washington Post editorial. “That tells us everything.”

• The Secret Society of People Who Know the Formula for WD-40

• Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo

• Sucking up CO2, refrigerator-sized machine makes gasoline out of thin air

  • At only 10x the cost of traditional (discounting energy inputs)

• Study shows porn use leads to hangover in some, but not all, users

• "Infinite Jest" Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It?

Obit

• Leader in smallpox eradication, Dr. William Foege, dies at 89

Musk

• EU investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes

  • Elon Musk's X Faces EU Inquiry over Sexualized AI Images Generated by Grok

  • EU Commission investigates Grok and X's recommender systems under the DSA

  • EU launches formal investigation of xAI over Grok's sexualized deepfakes

• Starlink Now Uses Customers' Personal Data for AI Training

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Nearly 3k Australian EV drivers warned not to charge cars

• China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to deal with their aging batteries

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Most Important Question Is 'What If I'm Wrong?'

• Replication crisis as a service.

  This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it.

• Covid's long shadow looms over a new generation of college students

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The end of the curl bug-bounty

  The never-ending slop submissions take a serious mental toll to manage and sometimes also a long time to debunk. Time and energy that is completely wasted while also hampering our will to live. I have also started to get the feeling that a lot of the security reporters submit reports with a bad faith attitude. These “helpers” try too hard to twist whatever they find into something horribly bad and a critical vulnerability, but they rarely actively contribute to actually improve curl. They can go to extreme efforts to argue and insist on their specific current finding, but not to write a fix or work with the team on improving curl long-term etc. I don’t think we need more of that. There are these three bad trends combined that makes us take this step: the mind-numbing AI slop, humans doing worse than ever and the apparent will to poke holes rather than to help.

• Nvidia is about to challenge 'Intel Inside' with as many as eight Arm laptops

• Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare: Microsoft says some PCs might not boot

• Intel's Panther Lake Chip Is Its Biggest Win in Years

• Television is 100 years old today

  The man who first demonstrated television was John Logie Baird, a former engineering apprentice from Helensburgh. And although there are other places that can plausibly claim to be TV's birthplace, including a terraced street in Hastings, a hill in north London and Selfridges, most people agree that the decisive moment was a demonstration given to journalists in Frith Street on 26th January 1926.

• Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability

• California Post brings brash New York-style tabloid news to the West Coast

  • The California Post heralds a new era for the Golden State — we will fearlessly tell you the stories that really matter

• Why I'm launching a feminist video games website in 2026

• The Windows PC is dying, thanks to cloud-based services and AI

  • And the fact that windows has gone from a peak of "moderately stable" to unmitigated suck in the past decade.

• TikTok USA Is Broken

  • US ownership of TikTok off to a rocky start as outage continues into second day

  • TikTok reports 'major infrastructure issue' causing app glitches, bugs

• TikTok removals up 150% following U.S. joint venture

• Valve's Proton 10.0-4 Released with More Windows Games Now Running on Linux

• Why has Microsoft been routing example.com traffic to a company in Japan?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• ChatGPT can analyze Apple Watch health data

• Instructions in papers can manipulate AI reviewers 78-86% of the time

• KPMG: USA dominates the race for AI – Europe just ahead of China

• Faster-Drying Paint and Better-Smelling Soap: AI Tries Product Development

• AI Job Cuts Are Landing Hardest in Britain, Morgan Stanley Says

• 6.1M workers with 86% women, face AI disruption without a safety net

• 'Halo' Actor Steve Downes Asks You Not to Remake His Voice with AI

• ChatGPT Is Pulling Answers from Elon Musk's Grokipedia

• Gamers protesting 'AI slop' are forcing studios to cancel titles

• Yann LeCun warns AI tech is marching into dead end

• Nvidia Invests $2B More in CoreWeave, Offers New Chip

• AI "swarms" could distort democracy

• Georgia leads push to ban datacenters used to power America's AI boom

• Anthropic CEO's grave warning: AI will "test us as a species"

• AI Coding Startup Replit Nears Funding at $9B Valuation

• Pope Leo's latest AI warning: 'overly affectionate' chatbots

• "Wildly irresponsible": DOT's use of AI to draft safety rules sparks concerns

  • Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using Artificial Intelligence

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• 40 years after Challenger: Lingering guilt and lessons learned

  "He said we are going to have a catastrophic event today," recalled his daughter Leslie Ebeling, who, like her father, worked at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol and who was in the car in 1986 on that 30-mile drive to the company's booster rocket complex outside Brigham City, Utah. "He said the Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die. And he was beating his hands on the dashboard. … He was frantic." The night before, Ebeling and other Morton Thiokol engineers tried to convince NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that launching in cold weather could be disastrous. The Thiokol engineers had data, documents and photographs that they believed provided convincing evidence of the risks. And Thiokol executives agreed, at first. Their official recommendation to NASA: Do not launch tomorrow.

• NASA is sending people to the moon in spacecraft some experts think is not safe

• Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: "I don't think they're great "

• Post-Perihelion Integral Field Spectroscopy of the Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

Crypto con games

• Tether says it bought 27 tons of gold in fourth quarter

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Hard Times in the Delta as Farmers Consider Letting Crops Rot

• Stocks Near Highest Valuations Since 1880

• Qualcomm CEO pockets 15% pay rise as profits fall 45%

• Gold blasts past $5k to record high on safe-haven rush

  • Gold price tops $5k an ounce for first time

  • Gold Price Tops $5k for First Time

• Japan Bond Crash Unleashes a $7T Risk for Global Markets

• SoftBank Halts Talks to Buy Data Center Firm Switch in Blow to Son's Ambitions

• Startup Incubator Y Combinator Cuts Canada from Countries Where It Will Invest

• VW considers pulling out of US factory plans due to tariffs

• As lawyer rates surge, US firm charges $4k an hour for top partners

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• California's exodus isn't just billionaires; it's regular people renting U-Hauls

• Ending tax refunds by check risks sidelining people who don't have bank accounts

• Newsom's signature water tunnel is set back by California court ruling

Trump

• Tom Homan Pushes Border Patrol Out of Minneapolis

  Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino - dubbed 'little Napoleon' - has been ordered to leave Minneapolis in a major shakeup initiated by Tom Homan. Donald Trump sidelined Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Monday, dispatching Border Czar Homan, an ICE veteran, to take charge of the deteriorating crisis in Minnesota after a protester was shot dead on Saturday.

Democrats

• Ringleader Behind the Somali Fraud Scandal Says There’s No Way that Walz and AG Keith Ellison Didn’t Know She Was Stealing a Quarter Billion Dollars

Left Angst

• The Anti-ICE Signal Chat in Minneapolis Has Reportedly Been Infiltrated

  the anti-ICE Signal chat that’s been used to coordinate operations against federal immigration agents and officials has been infiltrated and exposed. Higby got inside and learned as much as he could. Pretti was a member of the group, along with an alleged former campaign strategist for Tim Walz. Also, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is in the chat, too.

  • Left-Wing Activists Run Shadow Police Force On Signal To Target ICE In Minneapolis | ZeroHedge

  • Anti-ICE Signal Chats: Walz Administration Implicated, Foreign Funding Revealed.

  We know that Tabke was involved because people who signed up for that chat received a welcome message from him containing his personal cell phone number, and, obviously, Falconer admitted his role. For the rest of the people mentioned in this article, their involvement is not 100 percent confirmed; for many, their involvement is presumed because of the username in the chat and leadership position, but a definitive determination would need to be made by law enforcement or their own admission.

  It's clear that Walz, Frey, and Flanagan want this insurrection to continue because it takes the focus off the massive fraud that's been occurring in that state, much of it with Walz's knowledge. Related to that, it's interesting that the address where the shooting occurred, 2614 Nicollet, an 1100 square foot building that's home to eight businesses: Smart Therapy Center, New American Development Center, Nicollet Senior Center, United Wellness Center, African American Family Services, Millenium Health Services, Bloom Home Health, and Global Interpreting Innovations. And, there are 184 National Provider Identifier numbers listed as doing business at the address.

  • 'Signal-Gate': Anti-ICE 'Insurgency Command' Chat Was Highly Organized | ZeroHedge

  What appears to be unfolding in Minneapolis, particularly following the emergence of "Signal-Gate" on Sunday via citizen journalists on X, extends well beyond any conventional protest activity. The evidence so far suggests coordinated pressure campaigns against federal agents exhibiting characteristics of a low-level insurgency, with direction, tasking, and information flow routed through encrypted messaging apps, implying an organized command-and-control structure functioning as a shadow revolutionary force. What's more, former Tim Walz campaign adviser Amanda Koehler, as well as Minneapolis City Council Member Aurin Chhowdhry, have allegedly been identified as a key figures in the now-leaked Signal group chat.

  • Far-left groups mobilized before and after deadly Minneapolis shooting | Fox News

  A coordinated web of encrypted chats, street alerts and tracking of ICE "Abductors" in a sophisticated database reviewed by Fox News Digital shows that agitators were already mobilized at the scene where 37-year-old Alex Pretti was killed minutes before any shots were fired. ICE and Border Patrol agents were there to arrest an illegal immigrant criminal, and Pretti and others were there, outside a donut shop, to meet them as part of a strategic pattern of organized interference with law enforcement operations. Over the following hours, a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States leveraged the tragic fatality into a nationwide protest operation. While grief and outrage over Pretti's death is genuine, the network's real-time rapid response, using short sensational video clips and emojis as weapons of propaganda, offers a window into the disciplined logistics, messaging and coordination of far-left warriors fomenting insurgency-like confrontation with authorities.

  • Special Forces Veteran: This Isn't a Protest, This Is an Organized Insurgency Like We Faced in Iraq

  This isn't spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace "ICE agents" with "occupying coalition forces" and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s. The most sobering part? It's domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they're trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers--complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that's already turned lethal--you're no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You're facing a distributed resistance that's learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

  • Mainstream Media Refuse to Report the Full Facts on ICE Protests, so Americans Must Rely on X Indies

  Whatever you think of the Minneapolis situation, it could only happen in a limited number of locations in America. How many? Well, Kevin Bass analyzed media reports on anti-ICE incidents around the nation for the past year and found nine counties that accounted for two-thirds of all such violent confrontations. The nine are all connected to deep-blue big cites with far-Left Democratic mayors and with long-standing sanctuary status, including Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, New York, and Newark. Statistically, those nine counties turned out to be 590 times more likely to experience violent anti-ICE confrontations than all of the remaining 3,134 counties in the United States! Coincidence?

• ICE follows starkly different playbooks in red and blue states

  • Being targeted for violence by stat officials will cause that.

• The Minneapolis Uprising - The Atlantic

  But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

  • "Fortifying the election" grade shit here. "Antifa isn't real", eh? When the Lt. Governor is directing militia operations in opposition to Federal law enforcement; what shall we call it?

• When Constitutional Guardrails Fail

  the structural safeguards that distinguish us from historical horrors are eroding. Not hypothetically. Not theoretically. Right now, in documented ways you can verify yourself. What I’ve presented here is only a smattering of the available evidence, and more of it compounds every day. I am not saying ICE is the Gestapo. I am not saying this is Nazi Germany. I am saying we are on a trajectory, and that trajectory is accelerating. Gregory Stanton has spent his career studying how societies slide into genocide. His warning is explicit: preventive action must come early. By the time the comparison becomes exact, it’s too late.

• Immigration: The Federal Solution

  A better solution is federalism. For the current conflict, that means deporting illegal immigrants from Florida, where the state government supports doing so, ignoring them in Minnesota and California, where the state government and, I suspect, a substantial majority of the population, do not. If illegal immigrants are mostly criminals and welfare scammers, as one side’s rhetoric implies, the blue states will bear most, although not all, of the cost. If they are mostly hard working and, immigration law aside, law abiding, blue states will prosper.

• ICE tells legal observer, 'We have a database, now you're a domestic terrorist'

  • right alongside the abortion protesters...

• On immigration warrants

  As a matter of law ( 8 U.S.C. § 1357) warrants are not strictly required for immigration enforcement. That may be a bad law – then run folks for the legislature to change it. That may be unconsitutional law – then sue in court and let the lawyers hash it out. That may be immoral law and we should support jury nulification.

  I think the most unconscionable thing is that we have given officers legal remit to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien”, “to arrest any alien in the United States, if he has reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest”, “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States, to board and search for aliens any vessel …, railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle” explicitly without a warrant and then have neither had the populace buy in nor curtailed the law.

• Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking

• Minnesota CEOs call for ‘immediate deescalation’ in the state.

• As Tech Chiefs Woo Trump, Silicon Valley Seethes over Minneapolis Shooting

• Palantir Defends Work with ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti

• Barack Obama issues rare political statement condemning DHS over Alex Pretti shooting — as Dems rally against Trump admin.

• JD Vance Notes Something Very Important About Minneapolis Chaos - The Last Refuge

  Fraudulent day cares, fraudulent healthcare services, fraudulent transport companies, fraudulent “Health Outreach Workers” and various governmental offices all involved in bilking taxpayers for billions upon billions. At the same time there is a massive money laundering operation in the underground economy. After two decades of this unchecked corruption, there’s no way to guess how much of the regional economic activity is actually dependent on the financial fraud. My best estimate is that over fifty percent of all economic activity -in the entire region- is based on fraud. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions are the surface level issue for the regional and state government. However, it is the widespread financial fraud that turns the activity of the leftist agitators on the street into a useful tool for the regional officials to manipulate in order to hide the true financial fraud that surrounds the area. The “local authorities” are working with the “far left agitators” because the Minneapolis region is a network of codependent fraud.

• Wheelchair bound ICE protester seems to temporarily have a divine intervention

• Right Wing Influencers Used AI Slop to Turn Renee Good into a Meme

• DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online

• Trump Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using Artificial Intelligence

• Tim Cook Attended Melania's Movie Screening. Apple Customers Want a Boycott

  • Tech CEOs attend Amazon-funded "Melania" screening at White House

  • Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, and Lisa Su Attend White House Melania Doc Screening

  • Aside from That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?

• "Bitcoin Jesus" Avoided Prison, Thanks to One of the "Friends of Trump"

• 'Trump Phone' Still Doesn't Exist, Pre-Order Totals Appear Made Up

• Voters See a Middle-Class Lifestyle as Drifting Out of Reach, Poll Finds

  • They were telling us how good the economy was in the Biden years, using the same techniques to avoid facts and substitute feelings.

• OpenAI's president is a Trump mega-donor

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Trump says US used secret weapon to disable Venezuelan equipment in Maduro raid

  • The 'discombobulator': Did US use 'secret weapon' in Maduro abduction?

• U.S. carrier strike group enters Middle East region

World

• UK among 10 countries to build 100GW wind power grid in North Sea

• UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

• UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

• India to slash tariffs on cars to 40% in trade deal with EU

• NORAD pact would change if Canada pulls back from F-35 order: envoy to Ottawa

• A China-Europe energy alliance could deliver a new world order

• Saudi Arabia ordered to pay £3M to London dissident over Pegasus spying

• Iran's shadow fleet is fueling the Myanmar junta's air war

• Over 700k graduates out of work and claiming benefits, analysis suggests

• Meta drops appeal against ruling for non-algorithmic timelines in Nederlands

• Saudi Arabia to scale back flagship NEOM project.

• French MPs take first step to ban social media for under-15s

Iran / Houthi

• How Iran Crushed a Citizen Uprising with Lethal Force

• Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Researchers say Russian government hackers were behind attempted Poland power outage.

China

• China's Top General Accused of Giving Nuclear Secrets to U.S.

• Beijing: Highest-profile purge to date of senior military commanders

• Xiaomi SU7 outsells Tesla Model 3 in China for the first time

• China hacked Downing Street phones for years

Health / Medicine

• Bro, Enough with the Protein. You're Just Making Expensive Pee

• The truth about detoxes – by a liver specialist

• We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• You are probably getting brain damage from all those Covid infections

• The pandemic's hidden toll: chronic conditions left undiagnosed

• UK loses measles elimination status

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water

• Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say

• Common Plastic Chemical Found to Feminize Males and Masculinize Females

• Rain, not snow: Extraordinary warmth leaves mountains less snowy across the West

• How bad is Delhi's air? Like smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day

• Wyoming Goes from Sub-Zero Temperatures to Hurricane Force Winds in 24 Hours