2026-02-06

Horseshit

• The Viking messages unearthed on Sweden's rune stones

• BMW Commits to Subscriptions Even After Heated Seat Debacle

  • BMW's Newest "Innovation" Is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair

• America's Cows Are Making Too Much Butterfat

  In recent years, American milk has undergone a quiet transformation. The milk produced by our dairy cows has become creamier and more luscious as breakthroughs in cow genetics and nutrition have pushed the fat component of milk—also known as butterfat—to all-time highs. In 2000, the average dairy cow made 670 pounds of fat in her milk a year; today, she’s making 1,025 pounds. No single trait in dairy cows has improved as rapidly with genomic selection as fat, according to Chad Dechow, a dairy-cattle geneticist at Penn State. It’s a triumph of dairy science. Lately, though, all is not well in the world of butterfat. Dairy science has arguably made our cows too good too fast at fat-maxxing.

• Too Many Sperm, Too Few Families

  Russian billionaire Pavel Durov has made his frozen sperm available worldwide through his Altra Vita clinic. He claims that he is doing this to alleviate a shortage of “high-quality donor material.” And he adds that his sperm has fathered at least 100 children in at least 12 countries. Then we read of Chinese billionaires going outside of China, where domestic surrogacy is illegal, to quietly have large numbers of U.S.-born babies. Specifically, Xu Bo, a Chinese billionaire, claims to have more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S. More than that, this online gaming billionaire has, for years, broadcast his ambition to build a “sprawling dynasty of children.” What does the future hold, since it sounds like he is just getting started? May I remind us that by virtue of the 14th Amendment, a baby born in the United States is a U.S. citizen? Stop! Hold it! Does anyone speak out for all those babies, and what is going to happen to them? And what about the women, lured into being inseminated by a Russian billionaire, who believe he will leave his money to them and their babies. Both of these stories are missing more than just outrage; they are missing moral clarity. These billionaires represent a growing global fertility marketplace that completely misses the mark by treating women as a means and children as an outcome. Where is the moral clarity necessary to support these human beings with lifelong needs?

• The 'elite' couples breeding to save mankind

• Why our ancestors had straight teeth without braces

• Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50% when heritability is redefined to be something completely different

  ow heritable is IQ? The wise man answers, “Some number between 0% or 100%, it’s not that important, please don’t yell at me.” But whatever the number is, it depends on society. In our branch of the multiverse, some kids get private tutors and organic food and $20,000 summer camps, while other kids get dysfunctional schools and lead paint and summers spent drinking Pepsi and staring at glowing rectangles. These things surely have at least some impact on IQ. But again, watch this: Say I redefine “IQ” to be “IQ in some hypothetical world where every kid got exactly the same school, nutrition, and parenting, so none of those non-genetic factors matter anymore.” Suddenly, the heritability of IQ is higher. Thrilling, right? So much science. If you want to redefine stuff like this… that’s not wrong. I mean, heritability is a pretty arbitrary concept to start with. So if you prefer to talk about heritability in some other world instead of our actual world, who am I to judge?

• Imane Khelif confirms SRY gene and 'hormone treatments' before Paris Olympics

• Birthrates Are Down. That Can Be a Sign of Progress

Epstein

• Epstein files rife with uncensored nudes and names, despite redaction efforts

• Brad Karp, Chairman Of Top Law Firm Paul Weiss, Resigns Over Epstein Ties | ZeroHedge

  The chairman of one of the nation's top law firms suddenly resigned Wednesday evening after a series of embarrassing emails emerged between him and Jeffrey Epstein became public in recent days. Brad Karp, who has been at the helm of law firm Paul Weiss for 18 years, gave no explanation for his decision - aside form a statement that "Recent reporting has created a distraction and has placed a focus on me that is not in the best interests of the firm."

• Noam Chomsky advised Epstein about 'horrible' media coverage, files show

• Did a renowned hacker help Jeffrey Epstein get 'dirt on other people'?

  The exact nature of the relationship between Iozzo and Epstein remains a mystery. It is not clear, for instance, whether Epstein sought Iozzo’s help in hacking into computers or cellphones to gather information on friends or foes. However, an informant told the FBI in 2017 that Epstein “had dirt on other people.” Iozzo, now CEO of SlashID, an identity security firm, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Straight Arrow News. But documents released by the Department of Justice about investigations into Epstein show that Iozzo was a presence in the disgraced financier’s world for at least four years in the 2010s, a period between Epstein’s first conviction on sex-related charges and the arrest that preceded the end of his sex trafficking schemes and of his life.

• Jeffrey Epstein's Money Mingled with Silicon Valley Startups

• The time I didn’t meet Jeffrey Epstein

  I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my colleagues can say. The bulk of the correspondence involves Epstein wanting to arrange a meeting with me and Seth Lloyd back in 2010, via an intermediary named Charles Harper, about funding a research project on “Cryptography in Nature.”

  my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”

• On a software credits page: I'm in the Epstein Files

  I suspect that there will never be a full reckoning for Epstein’s disgusting actions—not only his crimes but also his tentacled influence over world affairs—because even though Epstein is now dead, his former friends and allies remain at the highest levels of government and industry, eager to protect themselves and cover up their own misdeeds. It’s difficult to avoid conspiracy theories when perhaps the largest conspiracy we’ve ever known has been revealed. We should never underestimate the extent to which the most powerful people are organized, communicating and collaborating with each other. Don’t let them tell you that the world is a “meritocracy” based on individual achievement; that’s a cover story for the masses who are not invited or refuse to enter into the social circle of hell.

• Redditors Hack Epstein Personal Email!

Obit

• Billy Bass Nelson, Original Bassist for Funkadelic, Dies at 75

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Understanding the Political Disconnect

  To find out why lower-income people vote at significantly lower rates than other Americans, a group of Swarthmore researchers conducted in-depth interviews with a diverse group of 144 Pennsylvanians who do not vote regularly. Respondents described a deep sense of disconnection from politics, saying they don’t believe elected officials are sincerely interested in helping them or their families.

• Why my "metric-free" social network failed and became a toxic void

  I had the same hypothesis: if we remove the dopamine-chasing metrics, people will engage in pure, meaningful conversation. I was wrong.

Musk

• Pentagon asked to probe SpaceX for potential Chinese ownership

• Pentagon embraces Musk's Grok AI chatbot as it draws global outcry

• Elon Musk is betting his business empire on AI

• Tesla Profit Slumps, but Investors May Not Care

• Notes on Space GPUs

  Elon kept pointing out the bottlenecks we’ve already run into on Earth. You can’t plug into the utilities—the interconnect queues are too long. You can’t do behind the meter and generate power yourself—lead times for turbines stretch past 2030. You can’t do solar on Earth, because of permits, and because of the tariffs. And Earth has clouds and nights, requiring overbuilt solar and batteries. In space, you can just put the satellites in sun synchronous orbit!

  • Elon Musk is getting serious about orbital data centers

• Starlink fuels SpaceX growth with potential phone, more internet services

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• China is winning the humanoid robot race while Tesla's Optimus lags

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• AMA Now Says ‘Evidence Is Insufficient’ for Trans Surgeries.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Spotify, with Bookshop.org, Will Soon Offer Physical Books

• Valve's Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing

  • AMD has confirmed that the Steam Machine will ship early this year.

  • Steam Machine and Steam Frame delays are the latest product of the RAM crisis

• Strava removes 2.3M rides from leaderboards in clampdown on cheats

• The Wayback Machine's plug-in to fix the internet's broken links problem

• These assholes still have paying victims: CISA flags critical SolarWinds RCE flaw as exploited in attacks

• Digital Privacy Is the New Casualty of Convenience

• Substack Data Breach Leads to Leak of Nearly 700k Records

• Leading PC manufacturers considering using Chinese memory chips, report claims

• Unsealed Court Documents Show Teen Addiction Was Big Tech's "Top Priority"

• Nvidia won't release new gaming GPU for 'first year in three decades'

  • When pyramid schemes make more money than product, why make product?

• Microsoft does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows

• Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5M sites

• Notepad++ says Chinese government hackers hijacked software updates for months

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

  Around this time, you realize that the web interface for this thing has some stuff that phones home, and part of what it does is to send stack traces back to sentry.io. Yep, your browser is calling back to them, and it's telling them the hostname you use for your internal storage box. Then for some reason, they're making a TLS connection back to it, but they don't ever request anything. Curious, right?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Probably not: Astronauts Are Going Back to the Moon for the First Time in Half a Century

• Artemis

  very concerned that if Artemis launches this month, that there are going to be significant issues potentially up to the loss of vehicle and crew. I hope I’m wrong, and would love to eat crow on this one. That said, there are echoes of Apollo 1 and Challenger for me, and that makes me very concerned.

• NASA will allow astronauts to bring their iPhones to space

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic Takes Aim at OpenAI's ChatGPT in Super Bowl Ad Debut

  • Sam Altman responds to Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" ads

  • ChatGPT boss ridiculed for online 'tantrum' over rival's Super Bowl ad

  • Sam Altman got exceptionally testy over Claude Super Bowl ads

  • OpenAI is hoppin' mad about Anthropic's new Super Bowl TV ads

• The fall of the nerds

  Software stocks crashed today. It’s never possible to be sure why something like that happens — this selloff may even be irrational — but everyone seems to agree that it’s being driven by the fear that AI is rendering a bunch of software business models obsolete. Whether AI will do the same to every engineering and scientific discipline is still very much up in the air. We may soon have “vibe physics theory”, “vibe electronics”, “vibe airframes”, and so on — or we may not, if AI hits technological limitations that are as poorly understood as its explosive rise. But it seems certain that although software is particularly amenable to automation by AI, the current technological revolution is not done upending the lives of various types of technical experts.

• Your phone edits all your photos with AI–is it changing your view of reality?

• Amazon's Alexa+ Now Free for All U.S. Prime Members

• Nvidia CEO says AI-replacement fears tanking software stocks is 'illogical''

• Sam Altman and the day Nvidia's meteoric rise came to an end

• Data Center Demand Story Doesn't Add Up

• Google goes from laggard to leader, pulls ahead of OpenAI with stellar AI growth

• Why Big Tech Is Throwing Cash into India in Quest for AI Supremacy

• Altman Says OpenAI May Back Firms Using AI for Drug Discovery

• No, we can actually influence the path of AI: Is AI the Next Climate Change?

• AI 'slop' is transforming social media – and a backlash is brewing

• Bedrock, an A.I. Startup for Construction, Raises $270M

• Anthropic Is Close to Releasing Claude Sonnet 5, per Rumors

• Alphabet expects 2026 capex in the range of $175B to $185B

  • Google set to double AI spending to $185B after strong earnings

• Open-source AI program can answer science questions better than humans

• Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

• AI Won't Kill the Software Business, Just Its Growth Story

• Rent-a-Human Site Lets AI Agents Hire a Person

  I’ve only found one person who claims to have actually completed a task and gotten paid for it thus far: Pierre Vannier, CEO of a startup called Flint Company. “One agent rented me for checking on all API_KEYS in the env files. I checked it’s ok now,” he wrote on Twitter. He also revealed something important about the payment: It’s in crypto, not cash. Altan Tutar, the co-founder of “crypto-native earning platform” MoreMarkets, found that only 13% of users who have signed up for RentAHuman have actually connected a wallet to the platform, suggesting most people think this is more novelty than reality.

• Amazon's got AI churning out tennis biographies by the dozen, but to what end?

• Anthropic, OpenAI rivalry spills into new Super Bowl ads as both fight to win

• Security firm finds Moltbook's 1.5M 'AI agents' run by 17K humans

• The $3T AI Data Center Build-Out Becomes All-Consuming for Debt Markets

• San Francisco is seeing a jobless AI boom

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Nouriel Roubini: The Coming Crypto Apocalypse

  The future of money and payments will feature gradual evolution, not the revolution that crypto-grifters promised. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ latest plunge further underscores the highly volatile nature of this pseudo-asset class; one only hopes that policymakers will wake up to the risks before it's too late.

  Seventeen years after Bitcoin’s launch, the one and only “killer app” in crypto is the stablecoin: a digital version of old-fashioned fiat money, which the financial and banking industry already digitalized decades ago. Yes, whether digital money and financial services should be on a blockchain (distributed ledger) or a traditional double-ledger platform remains a question. But 95% of “blockchain” monies and digital services are blockchain in name only. They are private rather than public, centralized rather than decentralized, permissioned rather than permissionless, and validated by a small group of trusted authenticators (as in traditional digital finance and banking) rather than by decentralized agents in jurisdictions with no rule of law.

• Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

• Bitcoin drops below $67,000 as selloff heats up and pessimism grows about crypto

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Boomcession: Why Americans Hate What Looks Like an Economic Boom

• Trillion-Dollar Tech Wipeout Ensnares All Stocks in AI's Path

• Novo Nordisk Warns of First Sales Drop Since Start of Ozempic

• Banks seek out new buyers for Oracle data centre loans

• Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees

• Layoffs in January were the highest to start a year since 2009

• Are Meta and Google ads recession-proof?

• China Trader Who Made $3B on Gold Bets Big Against Silver

• America's 'white gold' rush kicks off as $2.3T worth of lithium is discovered

• 2025 was the worst year for hiring since 2020, December jobs report shows

• US job cuts surge to highest January total since 2009

• Microsoft Gets Rare Downgrade: 2027 Expectations "Too Optimistic"

• Minute Maid's frozen juices are being discontinued

• Stocks tumble for a third day, pushing the S&P 500 into the red for 2026

• Why Building Alone Won't Solve the Housing Crisis

• The U.S. New Car Market Is Starting to Look Like a Luxury Business.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Senators Accuse Equifax of 'Price-Gouging' Medicaid Programs

• Obscure Mandatory Independent Audits Show Huge Waste, Potential Corruption Problems in Blue and Red States

• (PDF) U.S. House Report: E.U. Campaign to Censor the Internet

• Supreme Court lets California use its new congressional map

  • Supreme Court allows California to use congressional map benefitting Democrats

• US launches plan to tackle China's critical minerals dominance

• CIA ends publication of its popular World Factbook reference tool

  • CIA ends publication of its popular World Factbook reference tool

  • CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

• IRS taps HR, IT staff to handle returns amidst hiring crunch

Left Angst

• QuitGPT – OpenAI Execs Are Trump's Biggest Donors

• ICE seeks industry input on ad tech location data for investigative use

• Protecting Our Right to Sue Federal Agents Who Violate the Constitution

• ICE surveillance tools and tactics raise questions about civil liberties

• New records reveal misconduct inquiry into federal judge

  Mark Wolf, 79, retired from the federal district court in Massachusetts last November, after more than 40 years of service. He penned an essay in The Atlantic tying his departure to actions by President Trump. "My reason is simple: I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom," Wolf wrote Nov. 9. "The White House's assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out." Wolf's decision to retire coincided with an inquiry by another federal judge into potential misconduct, according to newly published orders. That inquiry found probable cause to believe an unnamed jurist had engaged in misconduct by creating a hostile workplace for court employees.

• Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad with Neo-Nazi Anthem

• Why Local and State Police Rarely Investigate Federal Agents

• Apple's Cook Vows to Lobby Lawmakers on Immigration Issue

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FBI stymied by Apple's Lockdown Mode after seizing journalist's iPhone

• Investigators found 'concerning similarities' between Reedley, Las Vegas labs

  A shocking connection out of Nevada is now putting the spotlight back on an illegal operation that shook the Central Valley more than three years ago. "As our investigation progressed, we determined that the home was owned by the same individual connected to a prior illegal Bio Lab investigation in Reedley, California, that occurred in 2023," said Las Vegas Metro Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill. The FBI and LVMPD revealed Monday that Chinese national David He, operator of the illegal Reedley biolab at the center of that 2023 congressional investigation, is now linked to a similar operation in Las Vegas. Investigators searched two Las Vegas homes over the weekend and discovered more than 1,000 samples of what they call "illegal medical-type biological research materials"-- later taking them for testing. "We recognize that the public is seeking clarity. What were they testing for? What possibilities are being considered? However, as the sheriff mentioned in cases like this, our process relies on being slow and methodical," said FBI agent Christopher Delzotto. 55-year-old Ori Solomon, identified as the property manager, was arrested on scene. David He is said to be the owner, but not a primary suspect. He has remained in federal custody since 2023. His attorney told Action News he has no connection to this latest case.

  Investigators have not determined exactly what was found in the Las Vegas lab, but say that similarities to discoveries made in Reedley raised red flags. "The nature of that earlier investigation raised significant concern for what we might encounter in this new case. In Reedley, investigators reportedly discovered an illegal biolab containing materials possibly associated with the range of infectious diseases, including hepatitis, COVID, HIV, malaria, and other potentially dangerous pathogens," said Sheriff McMahill.

  • "possibly associated"? After 3 years that's all we can report about he previous lab? And people wonder why public trust has eroded...

  • FBI finds Chinese biolab in Vegas with vials labeled “Ebola,” “Malaria,” and “Dengue Fever” (the house was also an Airbnb).

  • Illegal Chinese Biolab Used As Airbnb, Made Several Deathly Ill; Defendant Owns Multiple Homes in NV, CA – RedState

  Several people who stayed at the Las Vegas home apparently doubling as an illegal Chinese biolab became sick after their visit, with two people becoming "deathly ill" a few days after entering the home's garage,

  • Several fall 'deathly ill' from Las Vegas bio lab; tip leads FBI, police to garage

  Ori Solomon, 55, faces a felony charge of disposing or discharging hazardous waste, according to state court records, the 8 News Now Investigators first reported. Late Monday, federal prosecutors filed paperwork to charge Solomon on a gun charge. An LLC tied to the home’s county records matches the name of a company that is part of an ongoing federal case in California involving a biological laboratory there, the 8 News Now Investigators first reported Sunday. In that case, a Chinese citizen with potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party, David He, faces federal charges for allegedly manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices at a warehouse in Reedley, California, according to federal prosecutors.

  • Excellent reporting: Biolabs in California, Las Vegas raided by FBI tied to indicted Chinese national

  Despite repeatedly attempting to use his Las Vegas property on Sugar Springs Drive and Salomon the property manager as justification to be allowed out on bail, Zhu remains behind bars in federal detention ahead of his trial. Despite Zhu repeatedly and publicly linking himself to Salomon and the Vegas property over the years, Christopher Delzotto, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Vegas field office, said Monday that “I don’t know that I can comment on that or if I have knowledge of that” when asked if this house had ever been searched before. He said it was searched now based on “intelligence that was gathered” recently.

• Fined $48k for using a jammer to keep commuters from using phones while driving

  We find Jason R. Humphreys apparently liable for a forfeiture of $48,000 for using a cell phone jammer in his car during his daily commute between Seffner and Tampa, Florida. Mr. Humphreys' illegal operation of the jammer apparently continued for up to two years, caused actual interference to cellular service along a swath of Interstate 4, and disrupted police and other emergency communications.

  • Was a time that they were much more active about enforcement. Taking down the police band with a jammer woulda had DF trucks cruising around within a day or two. If the local foxhunters didn't have a location already.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The last U.S.-Russian nuclear pact is about to expire

• U.S. and Russia agree to observe New START nuclear pact after expiration

World

• UK unemployment set to hit 11-year high in 2026, NIESR forecasts

• A Wargame Shows Just How Vulnerable Europe Is to a Russian Attack

• Russia 'intercepts Europe's key satellites'

• Trevi Fountain fee goes into effect as Rome seeks to manage tourist flow at celebrated water feature

• BT loses more than 200k broadband customers as profits slump

• Hackers Hit Sensitive Targets in 37 Nations in Spying Plot

• Saudi Arabia is lifting the alcohol ban for wealthy foreigners

• 'Orwellian' incident in supermarket using facial recognition tech

• Japanese city cancels cherry blossom festival over badly behaved tourists

• Colombia Turns to LNG as Domestic Gas Runs Out

• Carney Stakes Canada's Auto Future on EVs as It Pulls Away from the U.S.

Greenland

• U.S. Push for Greenland's Minerals Faces Harsh Arctic Realities

Israel

• Made in the USA: How American-Built Weapons Have Wrought Destruction in Gaza

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia used Starlink in drones; SpaceX's cutoff collapsed command system

• Ukraine starts blocking unregistered Starlink terminals

• Imitation banknotes with QR codes used by Russia to evade sanctions

China

• President Xi Jinping Speaks with U.S. President Donald J. Trump on the Phone

• China's population is projected to halve by the end of the century

• China’s disappearing generals

Health / Medicine

• New York poised to legalize medical aid in dying

• Some people experience an inability to burp

• Hims launches $49 compounded copy of Wegovy weight-loss pill

• Wegovy pill in high demand in weeks since launch, Novo Nordisk says.

• Autistic girls less likely to be diagnosed, study says

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Nasal spray could prevent infections from any flu strain

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate Change Economic Models Omit Shocks, Likely Flawed

• Understanding the hazard potential of the Seattle fault zone