2026-02-14

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• The Wonder of Modern Drywall

  Drywall’s fatal vulnerability has long been water damage. Fortunately, the quiet innovation engine is still humming along, churning out mold-resistant, fire-resistant, and soundproof drywall. There are even ‘smart drywall’ systems with integrated temperature, humidity, and sound sensors. You’re in luck if you’ve been hankering to have your wall connected to wifi.

  • I built my house 20 years ago with no drywall whatsoever; I have never regretted the effort it took to avoid it.

Horseshit

• Astronomers observe a star that quietly transformed into a black hole

• Drunk man's penis freezes to icy pavement during arrest on night out

  During a struggle with police and security, McPhee's trousers and pants fell off. His manhood got stuck to the icy pavement. It is reported McPhee was stuck to the ground like this for around 20 minutes. Police and security guards had to force the man up - leaving some skin behind in the process - in order to remove him from the ice, it is understood.

• Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong

• Americans are on the verge of ‘sextinction’ as shocking numbers are going without sex — and social media are partly to blame.

  • Touching another person gives them the ability to put you in jail for sexual assault forever after; and people wonder why there's more loneliness. If you're a normal person, that is. The Important People dont' have to worry about it as long as they're not foolish enough to do something that gets them kicked out of the club, like disagreeing with the rest of the Important People.

• Rich, bored and isolated: Why Texas oil country loves OnlyFans

• Before the Super Bowl, Seahawks kicker Jason Myers was so calm he felt nervous

• Olympic athletes push their bodies to the limit. Should we?

• (Aug 2025) The United States Is Southern Now

• Pre-exercise sexual activity does not harm strength or endurance in male athletes, finds new study.

• Give Me One Good Reason Not to Buy This 1960s Articulating Dump Truck for $10,000

  Powering the truck is a Detroit Diesel 8V92. That’s a two-stroke, in case you didn’t know, measuring 736 cubic inches. The ad says it was recently rebuilt with a rating of 450 horsepower. It’s enough to make a fella go deaf sitting right next to it, but presumably, the hearing protection we have these days is a lot better than it was back then.

  • This era of equipment was fun. Massive mechanical hacks. Anything still operable is likely to be its own unique creature; having been reinvented and bodged for years. These machines can have soul.

Epstein

• Richard Dawkins met Epstein despite knowing of conviction

• The DOJ is spying on members of Congress who review the Epstein files

• How The Times Is Digging Into Millions of Pages of Epstein Files

  • With great care not to find anything upsetting to the current employees and owners.

• Top Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to resign over Epstein links

  Her decision comes after documents showed she held extensive discussions with Epstein between 2014 and 2019, long after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Ruemmler joined Goldman in 2020. Goldman chief executive David Solomon has stood by Ruemmler since her close association with Epstein first emerged in 2023. He said in a statement on Thursday that she “will be missed”.

  • Jeffrey Epstein Showered Obama White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler With Gifts

• The hypocrisy of the Epstein panic

  he files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”) After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defence that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

• Canadian physics professor steps back from job over Epstein questions

  Lee Smolin, an American Canadian professor of physics and philosophy, has "agreed to pause his working relationship" with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., according to an email on Thursday from Perimeter's executive director, Marcela Carena. The files show that Smolin continued to correspond with Epstein, and the two made repeated efforts to talk by phone and meet up, until at least 2013 — five years after the latter pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor and another criminal count. The paper trail appears to contradict Smolin's own account of his relationship with Epstein.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Murdoch to take over printing of The Guardian

  The newspaper is currently printed by Reach, which owns titles including the Mirror and Express. However, Reach this week outlined plans to shutter two of its three remaining print sites in an effort to cut costs. The overhaul means that the majority of Guardian newspapers will now be printed by Newsprinters, a joint venture between Mr Murdoch’s News UK and Daily Mail publisher DMGT, at its site in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. A smaller number of copies that are currently printed at the Reach site in Glasgow will be transferred to Scottish publisher DC Thomson. The transfer, which is due to be completed by July under a 10-year outsourcing agreement, puts The Guardian’s print operations under the control of one of its most deep-seated ideological opponents.

• Political polarization in Pittsburgh is rooted in economic neglect

Musk

• Elon Musk's Sci-Fi Hyperloop Failed

• Why is Bezos trolling Musk on X with turtle pics? Because he has a new Moon plan

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo Paying DoorDash Drivers to Shut Open Robotaxi Doors

  • Waymo is asking DoorDash drivers to shut the doors of its self-driving cars

  • What if riders don't close a robotaxi door after a ride? Try DoorDash

• Waymo robotaxi drives into active police scene

• Driverless trucks can now travel farther distances faster than human drivers

• The Rapid Rise and Fall of the Ford F-150 Lightning.

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Robotics firms struggle to develop hands

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why I’m Done with Notre Dame.

  Not all of the problems that drove me away from Notre Dame obviously pertain to Catholic mission. Another is Notre Dame’s out-of-control branding, marketing, public relations, social media, fashion line, entertainment, and merchandizing machine. That juggernaut has grown so powerful that Notre Dame, Inc., increasingly operates in a world of curated appearances with little connection to academia or Catholicism.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Amazon's Ring cancels Flock partnership amid Super Bowl ad backlash

• Unreal Tournament 2004 is now available for free

  • Installer script

• Ring owners are returning their cameras

• Discord walks back age verification fears for most users

• Windows 11 Notepad flaw let files execute silently via Markdown links

• Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

  • Meta Plans 'Name Tag' Facial Recognition for Ray-Ban Smart Glasses

  • Meta Reportedly Wants to Add Facial-Recognition Tech to Its Smart Glasses

• MyMiniFactory Has Acquired Thingiverse Bringing Anti-AI Focus

  • MyMiniFactory Has Acquired Thingiverse

• archive.is owner remarks on FBI subpoena

  Imagine my surprise, then, when the matter spilled into the mainstream news and reached million eyes. But let us be clear: these were not news reports in any genuine sense. The standard refrain read, “We have reached out to the site's operator and will update this story upon receiving a response.” Yet no journalist ever contacted us (only exception is Meduza, asking for an interview and a bigger article later). This was not investigative journalism; it was dissemination - pure and simple. A prepackaged narrative, delivered to newsrooms with the polite request: “Dear comrades, here is the truth - please publish it.” Curiously, every one of these ersatz “news” pieces prominently cited a two-year-old blog post by a certain Jani Patokallio as its authoritative source - a rather odd choice, given that it was merely a personal blog entry by an unaffiliated third party.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Harmonic Radar Finds Hidden Electronics

  In testing, the system was able to easily detect several cameras, an infrared sensor, a drone, a walkie-talkie, and a touch sensor, all while they were completely unpowered, at a range up to about ten meters. Concealing the devices in a desk drawer increased the ranging error, but only by about ten percent. Even in the worst-case scenario, when the system was detecting multiple devices in the same scene, the ranging error never got worse than about 0.7 meters, and the angular error was never worse than about one degree.

  • The vacuum tube shall rise again

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• bungee cords: Scientists Say It’s Time to Learn More About Sexual Health in Space.

• Europe joins the constellation-launching game with debut of Ariane 64

• NASA loading liquid hydrogen aboard Artemis 2 rocket in unannounced test

  • If they don't blow the thing up soon; someone in the Trump administration might stop them before they get to kill anyone else.

• Space Forge is sending a factory into space to make materials for semiconductors

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Table for one? Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s ‘world first’ companion café

• You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth

  The coming of AI means that humanity's destiny is (mostly) out of our hands.

• OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips

• AI Agent Seemingly Tries to Shame Open Source Developer

• AI coding platform's flaws allow BBC reporter to be hacked

• Anthropic to donate $20M to group backing AI regulation

• AI authors flood market with 45-minute novels

• Anthropic's Chief on A.I.: 'We Don't Know If the Models Are Conscious'

• OpenAI says China's DeepSeek trained its AI by distilling US models, memo shows

  • OpenAI accuses DeepSeek of malpractice ahead of AI launch

• Swarms of AI bots can sway people's beliefs

• Manipulating AI memory for profit: The rise of AI Recommendation Poisoning

• AI is making online crimes easier. It could get worse

• I used Claude to negotiate $163,000 off a hospital bill

• Heads of 20 nations: Who is attending India's mega AI Summit

• 'We're All Polyamorous Now. It's You, Me and the A.I.'

• Most white-collar tasks will be automated by AI within 18 months

• The Women Mourning the "Deaths" of Their AI Boyfriends

• Anthropic taps ex-Microsoft CFO, Trump aide Liddell for board

• OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

• Disney sends cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0

• Pentagon Used Anthropic's Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Coinbase Posts $667M Net Loss, Revenue Declines 20%

• CEO of Digital Asset Company SafeMoon Sentenced to 100 Months in Prison

  for conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in connection with a scheme to defraud investors in a decentralized finance digital asset called “SafeMoon.” As part of the sentence, Karony was ordered to forfeit approximately $7.5 million. The amount of restitution to the victims will be determined at a later date. Karony was convicted by a federal jury following a three-week trial in May 2025. “Braden Karony exploited his access to SafeMoon’s liquidity pool to divert and misappropriate millions in cryptocurrency. He deceived investors, using their funds to lavishly expand his portfolio with million-dollar homes and luxury cars. By employing complex transactions to obscure the movement of these illicit proceeds, Karony acquired over $9 million in crypto assets.

• Israel accuses two of using military secrets to place Polymarket bets

• Why governments insist on CBDCs or stablecoins when most people don't want them

• Polymarket's Free Grocery Store

  In what may be a new and as-yet-undefined stage of capitalism, the prediction-market site Polymarket opened New York City’s first free grocery store today. Stealing a march on Zohran Mamdani, “The Polymarket” makes a humble promise: to provide New Yorkers with the chance to “achieve food security” at a time when grocery prices are surging. Even the Mayor is begrudgingly impressed. There are, of course, a few caveats to this venture. The pop-up store will be open for just five days, and only for a few hours each day. Entry is capped at 300 customers per day, and supplies are limited. (This is still a business after all, even if its trading volume exceeded $9 billion last year).

  I came expecting to see swarms of hype beasts, influencers and students jostling to take selfies outside the store. There was plenty of that, but the reality was rather more grim. Nearly all of those at the front of the line were women, each one armed with what the French call chariots de course. Many appeared to be genuinely in need, with one telling me that she was struggling to keep up with the cost of groceries. “I got here five hours early because my bills are getting so high,” she said. “I can’t afford to miss out on free food.” Another woman, who was one of the first to arrive, declared as she left the store: “I’m so relieved! This helped a great deal. I’m waddling with all this stuff!” Others could not speak English, but told me that they were “muy feliz” several times after collecting their items.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of these women had even heard of Polymarket. If it wasn’t for the local news, they wouldn’t be here. Poor, very-offline immigrants are hardly the company’s target demographic. Online prediction markets are, and will continue to be, a young man’s game.

  • they could offer the poor young women jobs performing intimate physical services for the young male customers they have. That's pretty traditional for gangster charity like this.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Ethnic minorities are driving America's startup boom

• Goldman's India Push Pays Off in Crowded Wall Street Field

• Illegal Immigrants Are Just The Tip Of The Iceberg In Trucking Industry’s Troubles

• Private Credit's Software Bet Is Even Bigger Than It Appears

• The U.S. needs leading-edge chip research. Can Intel deliver? Will it even try?

• Home Sales in January Posted Biggest Monthly Decline in Nearly Four Years

• Inflation eases in US as prices for used cars fall

• US Fed to tap former Wall Street lawyer Guynn for top bank oversight role

• VC-backed unicorns are losing their horns

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Justice Department antitrust chief Gail Slater resigns

  Slater announced her departure via X, without giving a reason for her decision or mentioning Trump

• America at 250

• Not all computer code protected as speech, US court finds in ghost gun case

• Amtrak's Largest Train Revamp in 55 Years Is Coming Soon

• No Republicans to appear on ballot in 2026 New Mexico Senate election.

• Hmmm. As Welfare Money Dries Up, Luxury Goods Prices Suddenly Drop

  PepsiCo spent $2.8 million last year lobbying to keep junk food eligible for food stamps. Then RFK got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of soda, candy, and processed snacks. Within a week, PepsiCo cut Doritos, Lay's, and Tostitos prices by up to 15%.

  CNN's Ashley Allison says SNAP is having a "massive impact" after she went to her eyebrow technician who told her they had to fire people because clients don't have money to do their brows.

• Virginia court allows Democrats' redistricting vote in plan to counter to Trump

Trump

• US judge says Trump's defamation case against BBC to go to trial next year

  Judge Roy K. Altman of the federal court for the Southern District of Florida rejected an attempt by Britain’s national broadcaster to delay proceedings. He set a provisional start date of Feb. 15 2027 for a two-week trial. Altman’s court order was issued Wednesday.

• Trump pauses China tech bans ahead of Xi summit

Democrats

• Mamdani Health Czar Ran Left-Wing Nonprofit That Registered Patients in Mental Hospitals To Vote.

Left Angst

• RFK Jr. food pyramid site links to Grok, which says you shouldn't trust RFK Jr

• Charts show how Trump is isolating the US on the world stage

• A Pilot Fired over Kristi Noem's Missing Blanket and Constant Chaos Inside DHS

• False claims made by the Trump admin as it revokes a key scientific finding

• The Future of Democracy

  Liberalism should be at one and the same time the friend and the foe of democracy. It should be its friend, because the governing class is fluid, and its efforts are applied to increasing its membership and its following and to choosing them more carefully, and thus democracy implies an administration that provides at the same time an education of the governed for governing. But liberalism must be the foe of democracy when the latter tends to substitute mere numbers or quantity for quality, because by so doing democracy is preparing the way for demagoguery, and, quite unintentionally, for dictatorship and tyranny and its own destruction.

• Yes, It's Fascism, but That Doesn't Mean We're Cooked

• Latest Jobs Report Explains Why Dems Hate Trump So Much

  January, the economy added 172,000 private sector jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which was better than economists had expected (which seems to be a running theme in the Trump administration). And the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3%. So, what’s the bad news for Democrats? The number of federal government jobs shrank by 32,000. Worse still, this is on top of a string of monthly government job losses since President Donald Trump took office.

• Google is stifling anti-ICE speech in the workplace

• Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say

  • To the extent of having embedded Federal employees banning people and participating in quasi-official "Misinformation suppression" efforts, like with COVID? Or have we exceeded that level of acceptability yet?

• Trump Antitrust Is Dead

  Trump's antitrust boss Gail Slater talked a big game about "Trump Antitrust" but was thwarted at every turn by giant corporations who figured out that if they gave a million bucks to a MAGA podcaster, they could go over Slater's head and kill her enforcement actions.

• A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes

• CBP Signs Clearview AI Deal to Use Face Recognition for 'Tactical Targeting'

• The El Paso Balloon Incident Could Have Been a Disaster

• Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation

• Trump FTC wants Apple News to promote more Fox News and Breitbart stories

  • aren't they glad they didn't hand Trump a Federal level Information Hygiene Department...

• A Climate Supercomputer Is Getting New Bosses. It's Not Clear Who.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Pima County Sheriff Pulls Stunt in Nancy Guthrie Case That Has the FBI Fuming

  The Pima County sheriff has primary jurisdiction over the case, and FBI assistance must be officially requested by the county, otherwise the FBI is legally precluded from taking part in the investigation. The official said the county has spent some $200,000 so far to send evidence in the Guthrie case to the the Florida lab.

• El Paso Laser Weapon Targeted Suspected Drones. It Hit Party Balloons Instead

• US Military disrupts cell phones in Texas after UFO reports

• Bay Area men sentenced for their part in $2.5M DoorDash scheme

• Woman sentenced for accusing her ex spouse of accessing bank account from space

  A Kansas woman has been sentenced to federal prison after making false claims that astronaut Anne McClain illegally accessed her bank account while deployed to the International Space Station, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Summer Heather Worden, 51, of Sedgwick County, Kansas, pleaded guilty on November 14, 2025, to making false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations to law enforcement. U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett sentenced her to three months in federal prison, followed by two years of supervised release. The court also ordered Worden to pay $210,000 in restitution.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Why doesn’t the CDC care about Chinese biolabs in America?

  • People at the CDC are working for the same boss as the people running the labs?

• Opinion: NATO Has Seen the Future and Is Unprepared

• Air Force Now Denies Receiving F-35s Without Radars.

• Russia Attacks a NATO Country in a War Game. It Doesn't End Well

World

• Meta unit must pay Deutsche Telekom $36M over network services, German court say

• Danish Students Face Legal Action and Fines over Textbook Piracy

• Suspected spies arrested in French town

• Will pressure cause Cuba to finally buckle?

• Bali's thieving monkeys can spot high-value items to ransom

• Heathrow boss: Airport isn't crowded foreigners just walk the wrong way

• French police arrest nine people over suspected €10M Louvre ticket fraud

• The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

• Dutch Lawmakers Approve a 36% Tax on Unrealized Crypto, Stock, and Bond Gains

Iran / Houthi

• Even the Hospitals Aren't Safe in Iran

• Iran Turns to Digital Surveillance Tools to Track Down Protesters

Israel

• Israel used weapons in Gaza that made Palestinians evaporate

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• WhatsApp Basically Wiped from Russian Internet

• Putin Didn't Know How Good He Had It

China

• US billionaires race China to moon

• What China is up to in the Arctic

• China performs an impressive rocket landing.

Health / Medicine

• How often does the average person fart? Scientists built a device to find out

• The 'astounding' rise of semaglutide – and what's next for weight-loss drugs

• Natural sunscreens show potential to support skin health and blood pressure

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Doctors bear the burden as 'medical freedom' fuels measles outbreak

• Measles cases reported at Florida university amid historic outbreak

  • I'm beginning to wonder how long the "new" measles vaccines were effective for.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• What we know about the first gray wolf seen in L.A. County in a century

• DC has spilled 250 MILLION gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac in the past month: “Largest spill … in U.S. history”.

  • DC Water CEO addresses community in wake of massive sewage spill - WTOP News

  The failure in a section of a 72-inch sewer pipe, known as the Potomac Interceptor, resulted in the release of hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the river just inside the Beltway along the C&O Canal in Montgomery County, Maryland. It’s considered the largest spill of wastewater in U.S. history.

• Shark filmed swimming in deep Antarctic waters for first time

• Sharp temperature contrasts seen in the Northern Hemisphere in January

• Olympic skiing drops PFAS waxes – and their 'ridiculous' speed