2026-02-21

Horseshit

• I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia's most famous painting

• Did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman's life story?

• California Let Robots Build a Neighborhood, Here's What Happened to Prices

• From chickens to humans, animals think "bouba" sounds round

• Jaguar F-Type Crashes Into Florida School Bus, Winds Up Jammed Underneath

• She Wanted a Quiet House in the Berkshires for About $800k

• The Race to Give Every Child a Toy

• Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

• Family deepfakes help people celebrate and grieve in India

• The Unlikely Success of an Alabama Bookstore

  Jake Reiss only sells signed books, and mostly at publishers’ prices. It shouldn’t work, but it has.

  Jake Reiss got into bookselling for the money and the girls. Now that he’s ninety years old, he cares less about both,

Epstein

• The Israeli Government Installed and Maintained Security System at Epstein Apartment

  The Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building managed by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to a set of emails recently released by the Department of Justice. The equipment was installed starting in early 2016 at 301 E. 66th Street—the residence where former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak frequently stayed for stretches at a time. The security operation at “Ehud’s apartment” was in place for at least two years, emails from the DOJ disclosure show, with officials from the Israeli permanent mission to the United Nations corresponding regularly with Epstein’s staff regarding security.

celebrity gossip

• Legendary director Steven Spielberg is latest billionaire to flee California in another blow to state

• William Shatner Prepping Heavy Metal Album With Sabbath, Maiden Covers

Obit

• Aldus founder PageMaker pioneer Paul Brainerd, 1947-2026

  Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Hacked Elmo X Account Used to Spread Antisemitic Incitement to Millions Online

Musk

• Elon Musk wants to put a satellite catapult on the moon. It’s not a new idea.

• German court orders X to hand over data to German-based NGOs to identify 'disinformation or foreign interference'

  EU-funded NGOs are pursuing election data to examine foreign interference in the Hungarian election, but the U.S. House Judiciary Committee recently revealed the scale of election interference from Brussels itself

• The sale of xAI comes with tax, financial and legal benefits for investors

• Tesla to pay $243M judgement over Autopilot crash

• Turns Out There Was Voter Fraud in Georgia–By Elon Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Most EV batteries outlast their cars, real-world data shows

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

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

• Toyota contracts seven Agility humanoid robots for Canadian factory

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley

• Heaven Has a Physical Location, a Physicist Claims

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Ring's Founder Knows You Hated That Super Bowl Ad

• Microsoft: Anti-phishing rules mistakenly blocked emails, Teams messages

• Wikipedia has deprecated and will blacklist archive.today

  It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived websites in order to advance their point of view in the area of the dispute.

  • Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site

  • Wikipedia bans Archive.today after site executed DDoS and altered web captures

  • I have seen both archive.is and archive.org return inaccurate copies. Archive.org has been doing it since 2005 at least.

• West Virginia sues Apple for prioritizing user privacy over child safety

• Judge scolds Mark Zuckerberg's team for wearing Meta glasses to trial

• Gentoo Linux moves away from GitHub due to AI

• Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

  Clay Shirky’s old argument against micropayments from 2003, based on mental transaction costs, doesn’t work so well any more. We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Shirky was probably right for the micropayments of his day, but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.

  • exchange real money for in-game coins—which feels like you’re not spending, just exchanging one currency for another.
  • exchange in-game coins for an in-game asset—which feels like you’re not spending real money.

  A brilliant cognitive trick that works in all kinds of games.

  • News sites really do not want to have the customer feedback; the notion that the customers, rather than the journalists, should decide what stories are food and which should be rewarded... well, that strikes at the root of the entire propaganda business complex.

• Formula 1 races to screen live in U.S. IMAX theaters

• PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months

• West Virginia Claims That Apple Allows Sharing of Child Sexual Abuse Material

• Game Publisher Says TikTok Is Creating and Running Racist GenAI Ads for It

• Xbox chief Phil Spencer retiring after 38 years at Microsoft

  • Xbox President, Microsoft Gaming VP Step Down

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA chief classifies Boeing Starliner failure as Class A Mishap

  • NASA boss says Boeing Starliner failure one of worst in its history

  • Bungled Boeing Starliner mission put stranded NASA crew at risk

  • NASA recalls dysfunction, emotions during Boeing's botched Starliner flight

  • ‘We almost did have a really terrible day.’ NASA now says Boeing’s 1st Starliner astronaut flight was a ‘Type A mishap.’

• Moon mission fueling test concludes with no major problems

  • Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a ‘successful wet dress rehearsal’ despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface.

  Furthermore, we are assured that the engineering on SLS/Orion is so rigorous and the team is so elite that it's totally okay to test fly this turkey with four currently living astronauts on it, not to Low Earth Orbit like some kind of participation trophy Starliner repeat, but all the way around the Moon, on a completely unique, untested configuration. On the same week that a key SLS contractor's solid fueled booster rocket engine, launching a critical national security payload on a flagship national rocket, managed to explode, for the second time in three flights, for no apparent reason.

  We can choose to roll the dice with four lives on Artemis II. If they survive the launch, they can snap some really cool photos with their newly certified iPhones of the Moon shooting by out their window as they follow a trajectory that Apollo 13 took only under extreme duress. They can fulfill Artemis II's (I kid you not) "science objectives" by performing a visual inspection of the Moon that you can do yourself in the comfort of your own backyard with a $200 pair of binoculars. But when (not if) something goes horribly wrong, I do not want to hear "no-one could have seen this coming" or "we followed a rigorous flight rationale process" or "we checked all the boxes" or "this was the best we could do".

• NASA targets March 6 for Artemis 2 launch to take astronauts around the Moon

  • NASA targets early March to send humans back around the Moon

• Trump to order declassification of UFO/UAP related files

  • Trump directs US govt to release files on 'alien and extraterrestrial life'

  • Trump directs US government to prepare release of files on aliens and UFOs

  • Trump orders agencies to identify and release government files on aliens

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. It Doesn't Offer Much Proof

• AMC Theatres Will Refuse to Screen AI Short Film After Online Uproar

• Sam Altman says companies are 'AI washing' by blaming layoffs on the technology

• Accenture combats AI refuseniks by linking promotions to log-ins

  • Accenture links staff's AI use to promotion

• Paul Ford: 'The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun'

• Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot

• Japan's largest toilet maker is undervalued AI play, says activist investor

  • Japanese toilet maker 'most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary'

• Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $30B in OpenAI, source says

  • Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment

  • Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $30B in OpenAI

• AI is creating new occupations

• The U.S. and China Are Pursuing Different AI Futures

• The battle over Scott Adams' AI afterlife

• China's latest AI is so good it's spooked Hollywood

• Perplexity's Retreat from Ads Signals a Bigger Strategic Shift

• Defense Dept. and Anthropic Square Off in Dispute over A.I. Safety

  • Tensions between The Pentagon and AI giant Anthropic reach a boiling point

• Microsoft deletes blog telling users to train AI on pirated Harry Potter books

• Sequoia leads $1B seed round for ex-Google scientist's new AI lab

• Congress–Not The Pentagon or Anthropic–Should Set Military AI Rules

• Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent's mistake

• AI Becomes the Tone Police for White-Collar Workers

• Bay Area Apartment Hunting Has Turned into an AI Hellscape

• OpenAI resets spending expectations, target is around $600B by 2030

• Chatbots Are the New Influencers Brands Must Woo

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Meta cuts staff stock awards for a second straight year

• Airbus CEO Criticizes Pratt and Whitney over Engine Supply Issues

• Top Lawyers' Fees Have Skyrocketed. Be Prepared to Pay $3,400 an Hour

• Micron Is Spending $200B to Break the AI Memory Bottleneck

• How much sleep does a banker need? A US court will decide

• US GDP growth falls sharply to 1.4% in fourth quarter

  • Fourth-quarter U.S. GDP up just 1.4%, badly missing estimate; inflation at 3%

  • Economic Growth Slows in Fourth Quarter, Hurt by Government Shutdown

• California importing oil from Bahamas as state faces highest US gas prices

• The US imported more from Taiwan than China for the first time in decades

• Blue Owl shopped debt for a CoreWeave data center. Lenders weren't sold

• From 'buy America' to 'bye America', Wall Street exodus gathers pace

• Amazon Is Now America's Biggest Company by Annual Revenue

= eBay buys Depop for $1.2B in effort to lure younger shoppers

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Robin Hood state is coming for the rich

• Supreme Court rules that Trump's emergency tariffs are illegal

  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion and the court agreed 6-3 that the tariffs exceeded the law. “The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope,” Roberts wrote for the court. “In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.”

  • (PDF) Court opinion

  • Trump's Global Tariffs Struck Down by US Supreme Court

  • US Supreme Court rejects Trump's global tariffs

  • Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs

  • Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump's Global Tariffs

  • Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs

  • Supreme Court strikes down most of Trump's tariffs in a blow to the president

  • Supreme Court rules most of Trump tariffs illegal

  • U.S. Supreme Court strikes down tariffs

  • Trump overstepped executive power by imposing tariffs, Supreme Court rules

  • Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

  • Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump Tarrifs

  • Flexport's take on the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs: What's next? Refunds?

  • Didn't Presidents from Nixon to Biden also use this law to impose tariffs? Are those vacated as well?

• CA bill restricts 3Dprinters to state-approved models to stop printing gun parts

Trump

• White House Offers New Details on Its Push to Ban Housing Investors

• Trump announces new 10% global tariff after raging over Supreme Court loss

  • Trump plans 10% global tariff, says refund fights may take years

Left Angst

• Suspect allegedly steals ambulance, crashes into Idaho DHS office

  State and federal authorities are investigating after a suspect allegedly stole an ambulance, loaded up staged gas cans and plowed the emergency vehicle into a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office in Idaho — in what investigators believe was an attempted arson attack. Just after 11 p.m. Wednesday, an ambulance was stolen from a bay at St. Luke's West hospital. The suspect, who has not yet been identified, drove the ambulance through the parking lot and retrieved gas cans that were staged in nearby vegetation, according to Meridian Police Chief Tracy Basterrechea. The suspect then drove the ambulance directly into the North Portico building, which houses DHS offices, Basterrechea said. However, the suspect was unable to ignite the accelerant before being scared off by responding agencies, according to Basterrechea.

• ‘It’s a mess of his own making,’ says daughter of Séamus Culleton, the Irish man held by ICE

  Mr Culleton (38) was eventually detained and has spent the last five months at a facility in El Paso, Texas. He arrived in the US on a tourist visa, which allows visitors to travel for up to 90 days. Problem is, he extended his holiday to nearly 17 years. His case made international headlines last week after he went on RTÉ Radio 1’s Liveline, comparing the conditions to a “concentration camp”.

  Old clippings from the New Ross Standard were shared on social media, revealing how Mr Culleton, then aged 22, had been charged with the unlawful possession of drugs, possession for sale of supply, as well as obstruction in relation to an incident on May 17, 2008, in Glenmore. After he failed to appear at a sitting of New Ross District Court to face the charges, a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest in April, 2009, a month after he moved to the US. While details of those charges may have been news to some, they were not to his teenage daughters, Heather and Melissa Morrissey. “We had been told about some of the issues he had when in Ireland,” Heather said. She has publicly criticised Mr Culleton, claiming he “upped and left” when the twins were just 18 months old.

• A Primer on Terrorism, Insurgency and Protest

  I think it is fairly clear that the ‘anti-ICE’ or ‘Abolish ICE’ movement – the name being a catchy simplification for a wide range of protests against immigration enforcement – is primarily a non-violent protest movement. Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol. As I hope we’ve already demonstrated, mere organization is not an indicator of an insurgent movement: non-violent movements have to be organized (even if just locally so), often more organized and better trained than violent ones.

• US Justice Department hangs Trump banner at headquarters

  • Large banner featuring Trump's face is displayed on Justice Department HQ

• Tariffs paid by midsize US companies tripled last year JPMorganChase study shows

• No respite for World Cup fans affected by Trump travel restrictions

• Trump order seeks to protect weedkiller at center of barrage of lawsuits

• ICE's ELITE system turns neighborhoods into suspects

• America is at risk of becoming an automotive backwater

• Ieepa Ieepa Ieepa

• MAHA Moms Turn Against Trump: 'Women Feel Like They Were Lied To'

• FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance

• DHS Admits Its Website the 'Worst of the Worst' Immigrants Was Rife with Errors

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FBI 'Asset' Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold Fentanyl-Laced Drugs for Years

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• UK PM Starmer Blocks Trump From Using RAF Bases to Strike Iran Amid Escalating Tensions: Report.

• Trump says Iran has 15 days to reach a deal or face ‘unfortunate’ outcome

  • Massive fleet of US warplanes heads to Iran as insiders warn of 90% chance of conflict

  • Trump warns of 'bad things' if Iran doesn't make a deal | AP News

  • US is on the brink of a major new war that Trump has not bothered explaining

  One of the most striking and alarming aspects of all of this is that Trump — outside of a few off-the-cuff banalities — has barely attempted to offer a case to the American public as to why such a major new war is necessary. This unilateral march to war resembles what we saw in the lead-up to the bombing of Venezuelan boats, culminating in the U.S. invading force that abducted (“arrested”) the country’s President, Nicolas Maduro, and took him and his wife to a prison in New York.

• Silicon Valley engineers were indicted for allegedly sending secrets to Iran

  • Ex-Google Engineers Charged with Stealing Trade Secrets for Iran

  • Three Engineers Charged with Stealing Trade Secrets from Leading Tech Companies

• US removing guardrails from proposed Saudi nuclear deal

• Ted Cruz believes it’s ‘entirely possible’ regimes in Cuba, Iran and Venezuela will collapse in six months.

• 'freedom.gov' will allow Europeans to view hate speech and other blocked content

World

• That irritating feeling France was right – US makes Gaullism respectable again

• Mystery donor gives Japanese city $3.6M in gold bars to fix water system

• Weed backlash grows in Thailand as kids turn to cannabis

• Nine arrested in France over death of far-right student

  Nine people have been arrested in France following an investigation into the murder of a far-right nationalist student by suspected militants from the far-left. Those detained include a parliamentary assistant for a deputy from the radical left France Unbowed (LFI) party. Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old maths student, died in hospital on Saturday - two days after being beaten and kicked about the head by a gang of masked young men in Lyon. It happened after a small demonstration by far-right feminists - who Deranque was supposed to be helping protect - at the city's Institute of Political Studies (IEP), commonly known as Sciences-Po.

  • "Far-right feminists', eh?

• France and Germany can't agree on who is in charge of building fighter jet

• Extreme ways countries are combatting overtourism

• 7-Eleven bets on Australian stores to show it can grow globally

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The Russian village that lost its men to war

• Russia Eyes Balloon Communications System After Losing Starlink

• U.S. and Dutch Pilots Flying Ukrainian F-16s in Combat

• Email blunder exposes $90B Russian oil smuggling ring

China

• China Is Killing the Fish

• China confirms visa-free travel for UK and Canadian nationals

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Iowa farmers swapped pigs for mushrooms

• Point of no return: a hellish 'hothouse Earth' getting closer, scientists say

• Lidar can reveal archaeological sites while overlooking Indigenous peoples

• Why too much phosphorus in America's farmland is polluting the country's water

• Cleaner fish show intelligence typical of mammals

• Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds

• KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge