Links 2/6/2026

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1. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 7:37 am

   ‘The Grayzone
   @TheGrayzoneNews
   The Grayzone BLOCKED by Paypal on political grounds
   This October, Paypal suspended The Grayzone’s account, blocking our audience from donating to us without explaining anything to them, and preventing us from accessing several thousand dollars already in the account.’

   It’s not like the GrayZone did not have plenty of notice that this could happen. PayPal suspended the WikiLeaks account and that was fifteen years ago so this could have happened at any time. Had a weird experience with PayPal yesterday. I let my wife use my old PayPal account to order something. I soon got an email from that seller that had the last 4 digits of the bank account attached to that PayPal account (which I never use for any other purpose). How does that work out? PayPal is not suppose to disclose such information to seller and yet they had it. Zero trust with PayPal.
   1. lyman alpha blob February 6, 2026 at 9:23 am

      I created a paypal account and used it one time a while ago to make one purchase, and that only because it was the only payment type the website accepted. I’ve been getting scam emails related to that paypal account ever since.

      Still trying to figure out exactly what convenience paypal provides over other previously existing electronic payment methods. No idea why anyone would use it regularly, much less depend on it for an income stream.
      1. mzza February 6, 2026 at 12:09 pm

         my memory is that for a time it was the primary—if not only—way to buy and sell on ebay, which was the time that ebay was claiming the used auto, etc. market from Craigslist. That’s one large example but my guess is there are more.
   2. Es s Ce Tera February 6, 2026 at 1:27 pm

      I refuse to use Paypal. They also suspended Occupy donations accounts across North American cities. As far as I know, they’ve pocketed the funds, who knows how much they made off of Occupy alone but regardless Paypal operates on a business model of theft – anytime the government or police tell them to shut an account they do so with delight because they get to keep the proceeds.
   3. Ben Panga February 6, 2026 at 6:39 pm

      Max just said on the Grayzone live stream that their account has been unblocked again. Said it was due to an erroneous flag on a donation from an Iranian. Also mentioned a different donation service they’ll use (which I missed the name of)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2wz4rGGRGA
2. johnnyme February 6, 2026 at 8:00 am

   In the ICE video clip, note the different front and rear license plates on the Nissan Titan. Swapping license plates is a very common tactic ICE/CPB agents are using to try and make it difficult for citizens to track their movements.
3. Afro February 6, 2026 at 8:05 am

   On AI, this podcast by astrophysicist David Kipping (exoplanets and exomoons) has gotten a lot of attention. He happened to attend a meeting on AI at the institute for advanced study and was startled by what he saw.

   https://youtu.be/PctlBxRh0p4?si=vOIbxopXE3FLrgX3

   AI does a lot of things simply much better than humans do, the most obvious example is writing code where there was a consensus that AI has achieved “coding supremacy”. A lot of people are delegating tasks to AI such as writing and editing documents. One person had an AI review graduate school applications and apparently it did really well. People recognized that there are issues of privacy, money, etc but at the same time the advantage of using AI is just too great. David Kipping compared not using AI to not using Google maps or not using the Internet.

   (It is probably the case that if you are better at code yourself, you’ll be a more effective user of AI coding).

   I agree on the advantage. I’m an academic as well. To do my job well and fully and satisfy everybody, id probably need to work 70 hours a week, but then my health and my children would be fully abandoned.

   I worry though that in twenty five years there won’t be as many opportunities for young people, they won’t be able to become artists or scientists or doctors, which is already a hard thing to achieve.
   1. Yves Smith February 6, 2026 at 8:23 am

      Do not present the opinion of someone who is neither a software professional nor an AI maven as definitive. His view in fact appears to be flat out false.

      From in January, as in fresh, from AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse:

      Until recently, the most common problem with AI coding assistants was poor syntax, followed closely by flawed logic. AI-created code would often fail with a syntax error or snarl itself up in faulty structure. This could be frustrating: The solution usually involved manually reviewing the code in detail and finding the mistake. But it was ultimately tractable.

      However, recently released LLMs, such as GPT-5, have a much more insidious method of failure. They often generate code that fails to perform as intended, but which on the surface seems to run successfully, avoiding syntax errors or obvious crashes. It does this by removing safety checks, or by creating fake output that matches the desired format, or through a variety of other techniques to avoid crashing during execution.

      As any developer will tell you, this kind of silent failure is far, far worse than a crash. Flawed outputs will often lurk undetected in code until they surface much later. This creates confusion and is far more difficult to catch and fix. This sort of behavior is so unhelpful that modern programming languages are deliberately designed to fail quickly and noisily.

      https://spectrum.ieee.org/sheffield-battery-energy-storage-system-research

      And a late December study by Code Rabbit: Our new report: AI code creates 1.7x more problems

      https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report

      https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades

      https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades
      1. ilsm February 6, 2026 at 9:13 am

         Thank you saved me time!

         I have somehow acquired “gemini”, IDK I do not want it, to synopsize e-mail trains. An acquaintance through a group I belong to seems to use it and it may travel on his e-mails!

         Annoying as if I can’t read, which may be the point!

         So far gemini is not rolling ads.
      2. Afro February 6, 2026 at 10:13 am

         The person, who is a scientific professional and a good coder though not technically a software professional, was reporting on the views heard at a meeting attended by several people who write *a lot* of code, people who write software at the level of expert software professionals. It certainly has meaning. Though he may not be an “AI maven”, he says that he has published on AI, and regardless that was certainly the case of people at the meeting he attended.

         All of the issues that the paragraph can be rectified by having a human go over the code (for now), but that requires vastly less effort than having a human produce the entire project. Accepting the article you link to, AI code is doing splendidly, it only produces 70% more errors. What happens in five years?

         But anyway it doesn’t matter. Computers will surpass humans at coding like they did at chess and at multiplication, but I don’t see that as a big loss. I am more worried about what happens if computers surpass us at writing, filmmaking, drawing, etc cetera. That’s more meaningful and fundamental to human expression and existence.
         1. Yves Smith February 6, 2026 at 10:49 am

            SINCE WHEN IS PRODUCING 70% MORE ERRORS AND HAVIG SOMEONE HAVE TO FIND AND FIX THEM ACCEPTABLE? Have you lost your mind? Or are you paid to tout AI? That is how bad your line of argument is. It looks like shilldomm.

            First, AI coding does NOT increase productivity. This was posted in the last week: Anthropic: AI assisted coding doesn’t show efficiency gains and impairs developers abilities. https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1qqy2ro/anthropic_ai_assisted_coding_doesnt_show/

            Second. coding skills are degrading due to AI reliance.

            Third, my links disproved your contention. The errors in AI code are becoming MORE severe.

            You need to stop misleading readers and get down the curve on this topic.
         2. ChrisFromGA February 6, 2026 at 10:57 am

            Besides the error rates, there is the issue of AI being really efficient at generating technical debt much more efficiently vs. humans. Security bugs, functional bugs, etc., all need to be addressed.

            I am not really worried about computers surpassing humans at creative endeavors such as writing and music. At least during my lifetime. If you understand how generative AI really works, you’ll understand that all it can do is crank out derivative schlock.

            (Now, if people decide that’s all they want, that’s another story.)
            1. Oregon Lawhobbit February 6, 2026 at 2:58 pm

               Quoth ChrisFromGA: “…all it can do is crank out derivative schlock.”

               So … good bet for replacing most of Hollywood? ;-)

               My biggest concern with AI is its ability to generate output that can end up “accepted as real” by the hard-of-thinking. Or even the allegedly not-so-hard-of-thinking, as the steady stream of AI citations in legal pleadings and briefs shows.

               My second concern is that obviously it cheapens and devalues cute animal videos. That is arguably a sin far greater than mere citation to a nonexistent F.Supp (unpublished) case….
         3. cfraenkel February 6, 2026 at 12:41 pm

            Too funny. “having a human go over the code (for now), but that requires vastly less effort than having a human produce the entire project. ”

            Sounds like someone who’s obviously never tried to debug someone else’s spaghetti code…..
            1. neutrino23 February 6, 2026 at 4:52 pm

               +1,000
      3. hk February 6, 2026 at 11:04 am

         With all due respect, I don’t think Afro or Kipping are talking about professional programmers.

         One consequence of the way things have been evolving is that a lot of semi-technical to technical professionals have to spend a lot of time coding in all sorts of things: SQL inquiries for this database or that, MATLAB codes to do this or that, R and Python codes to analyze data and to generate graphics, and so on. After experience, we get to be somewhat to pretty good at these, but we are not “professionals” at these, in the end, Here, the role of AI is powerful, and the cumulative effect of AI on people like Afro, Kipping, and well, myself, might be substantially more powerful than that on real professional programmers if only because there are a lot more of us doing a lot of different things in many places.

         This is a bit different from AI achieving “coding supremacy.” Goolge maps aren’t as good as top notch cartographers either, I’d assume, but, for the vast majority of us, access to top notch cartographers is not in the cards and AI is easily accessible so it winds up having on oversized influence on what we do.
         1. Yves Smith February 6, 2026 at 11:15 am

            “With all due respect”?

            I did not go back to Kipping but you are misrepresenting what Afro clearly stated:

            AI does a lot of things simply much better than humans do, the most obvious example is writing code where there was a consensus that AI has achieved “coding supremacy”

            Afro may have misrepresented Kipping.
            1. Afro February 6, 2026 at 12:30 pm

               “Coding supremacy” was not actually Kipping’s term, but was in fact the term used by a speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study, which in my honest opinion is a *very* credible source.

               I, like hk above, am not a software professional, I have simply written thousands of lines of code a year for decades. It’s my experience that AI is not only very good at coding, and that is the case for people near me. It makes a lot of (fixable) mistakes, yes, but so do humans.

               I think it’s an interesting subject, but also a frightening one, as it’s difficult to project how well LLMs will do moving forward, and how they’ll be adopted for that mater. I have both wonder and fear as to where we’re going.

               I believe that you are much more skeptical than I am about the effectiveness of AI, maybe you’re right, a large part of me hopes that you’re right, and for now I’ll agree to disagree.
               1. Yves Smith February 6, 2026 at 1:04 pm

                  While that may justify your reliance on them, as I indicated, there is ample real world contradictory evidence. They are wrong. I have not gone digging through my inbox but the reason it was apparent to me was other takes I have seen from AI experts and sites actively on this beat.

                  Many also regard the Institute for the Study of War as trustworthy. And the Council for Foreign Relations.

                  The quote you cited discredits them on AI. This does not seem like it is in the center of their wheelhouse. Their expertise is theoretical research, not applied.
                  1. Kouros February 7, 2026 at 2:55 am

                     I use it to speed up my work and get scripts in R, SQL, SAS. It works quite well, especially if the data structure to be worked upon is very clearly defined and also if the task at hand is very cleary defined. I can get hundreds and thousands of lines of code with nary an error. My problem is that I cannot immediately cut and paste ‘cus I work in secure environments, with no online access. So typing back helps go over potential errors in logic or typing. Overall, it helps and it functions a bit as a research/ executive assistant. But I woudn’t pay for them. As long as I can use them for free, I am going to.
            2. hk February 6, 2026 at 12:58 pm

               Yes, the bit about “coding supremacy” is absurd. AI affects a lot of pseudo-professional programmers, ppl who code a lot for work, but not are not real pros. I would say that these pseudo-professional coders do a lot more coding than the real profesdionsls, and worse, are called in to replace the real pros when we may not be really qualified when emboldened by AI, which I think is the real danger.
         2. cfraenkel February 6, 2026 at 12:49 pm

            Y, wow…. Those weekend warrior type ‘coders’ are the **last** people you’d want brandishing AI tools. Shades of handing a machine gun to a toddler. They typically have never heard of maintenance, don’t build testing frameworks, develop on production systems, don’t care about readability, don’t document anything etc etc. How is this sort of mentality expected to care enough to audit the AI ‘code’. Much less be expected to find any subtle bugs that don’t immediately show up. Pity the fool stuck with keeping these monstrosities running after the ‘author’ has failed upwards….
            1. cfraenkel February 6, 2026 at 12:58 pm

               Not to mention that weekend warrior coders aren’t being paid to code, as in that’s not what their primary function is, nor are they then the ones on the chopping blocks for CEO pie in the sky cost AI cost reduction fantasies. What we’ll lose are the professionals keeping your bank account safe, airplanes from occupying the same airspace, and your medical records from getting mixed up with your neighbor’s.

               If you happen to be using this AI stuff to whip up some convenient script that gets thrown away after one use, go to town. But at least be honest that your use case is irrelevant in making a dent in the CapEx debt mountain.
            2. grateful dude February 7, 2026 at 9:15 am

               Used to work as an enterprise architect on large systems where the SDLC was spread across companies and continents. Documentation was essential, and getting it right at each step mattered, so test, test, test. Design top down and build bottom up. We used OWL ontologies to model data and the target organization environment including some off-the-edges parts where roles and responsibilities interact peripherally with the applications and various repositories. We used BPMN to model processes – use cases in general, and then cross reference them with the OWL models to get the right data to the right processes at the right time. Any decision point in a process model is a candidate for an analytics call-out.

               Changes in business requirements and/or target platforms, and/or bugs downstream may need iteration through upstream design and documentation.

               SDLC is a carefully formalized and standardized scheme.

               And algorithms! We don’t need no stinkin’ algorithms.

               Does AI code generation replace all of this?
         3. Chris N February 6, 2026 at 1:49 pm

            Here, the role of AI is powerful, and the cumulative effect of AI on people like Afro, Kipping, and well, myself, might be substantially more powerful than that on real professional programmers if only because there are a lot more of us doing a lot of different things in many places.

            It’s not, because as ChrisFromGA mentions, amateurs or generalist coders cannot understand and appreciate the technical debt they are accumulating as a result of relying on AI to vibecode software they need, instead of doing it themselves and having other software designers and developers review it.

            In scientific research, using code generated from a black box is dangerous, because it means that whole families of studies can become invalidated if someone reviews the software that was used for data analysis and finds that the code was not written well or robust enough that it’s possible to inject errors or abnormal behavior in the results by introducing certain values in the data or input. You may save time today, but you are introducing Taleb’s concept of fragility in your development. One day a critical bug will be found that caused your data analysis to report a positive instead of negative finding, and every decision based on that incorrect finding will have to be undone.

            From October 2009 to February 2016, there was a whole competition dedicated to finding these sorts of flaws and errors in software, called the Underhanded C Competition. The 2014 results are particularly entertaining

            Significant portions of code generated by AI can fall into the categories of exploits that certain entrees in that competition used. However, unlike those entrantees, your code being produced from an LLM isn’t going through a referee filter to identify what are obvious vs subtle errors.

            When you add in the time to review, identify, and fix those types of errors than to start with a robust design pattern and test and refine the code oneself from the start, the refactoring time and effort ends up exceeding the amount of time spent using AI. This is doubly so if the software is intended to control expensive hardware that could be destroyed by executing a program that can put the hardware in a destructive state (such as overcurrent draw on a power supply rail)
            1. NN Cassandra February 6, 2026 at 6:40 pm

               There is massive amount of relatively easy tasks that could be automated but are not, because you have to talk to computer in peculiar kind of language that not many people have the patience to learn. And while in theory it would be nice if all this was be done by professionals the “right way”, in reality there is not enough programmers for this. So LLMs, which can take human description of the problem and piece together solution from things that already are on the internet and in manuals, because it was solved thousands of times before, is the next best thing.
               1. Chris N February 6, 2026 at 11:26 pm

                  LLMs, which can take human description of the problem and piece together solution from things that already are on the internet and in manuals, because it was solved thousands of times before, is the next best thing.

                  If the solution already exists on the Internet because of either some open source library/repository or an answer on stackoverflow or some other website, then the LLM didn’t actually generate a solution for you, it merely replaced conventional search engines/web-search as a tool to find the solution you wanted.

                  Furthermore, using those solutions which already exist properly requires some familiarity with coding. Otherwise one can succumb to the joke that to make one’s linux based system faster, they read advice suggesting to remove foreign languages such as the French language pack by running ‘sudo rm -fr /*’ in their terminal (Do not do actually do this, ever.)
      4. Yalt February 6, 2026 at 12:32 pm

         Kipping’s own hands-on experience would be with pattern-matching tools. Exoplanet/exomoon searches are the sort of problem computers are extremely good at; if he comes in with positive experiences of “AI” he might be more susceptible to the marketing pitch at a conference.
         1. Yves Smith February 6, 2026 at 12:59 pm

            That makes sense.
   2. lyman alpha blob February 6, 2026 at 9:28 am

      I mentioned previously that a company I’m familiar with spends a great deal on AI, mostly to assist in writing an editing documents. Now I might ask why a bunch of college graduates aren’t able to perform these tasks using their own gray matter – a business email really isn’t all that difficult to compose. But even if you’re committed to hiring people who can’t write a few sentences on their own, it’s still cheaper to hire a couple English majors to assist the rest of the increasingly illiterate staff than to pay for the outrageous AI licensing costs. Whether the MBA brain geniuses figure that out remains to be seen.
      1. ChrisFromGA February 6, 2026 at 11:04 am

         There is a very scary scenario out there that any CEO/CIO worth his salt is probably staying up at night worrying about. You replace your entire staff (well, a good chunk of them) with these moronic ”
         AI agents” that Silicon Valley is mongering. Then, you become totally dependent on those outrageous AI licensing costs. Including future price rises to pay for all that CAPEX going on now.

         And since you fired all the staff, you can’t just walk away from the contract with the AI-mongers.

         Now you’re screwed. Better to keep some staff around as insurance. Plus, they’re easier to fire.
         1. Jason Boxman February 6, 2026 at 12:31 pm

            Then, you become totally dependent on those outrageous AI licensing costs. Including future price rises to pay for all that CAPEX going on now.

            Intuit QuickBooks says hello! They’ve been phasing out desktop for cloud-only, and the remaining subscription desktop products are $1k/yr starting. And regardless, you don’t own your software, or your data. After a year of not subscribing, Intuit locks your data. Not even read-only. Inaccessible.

            Apparently not at all illegal.
         2. Peter Steckel February 6, 2026 at 12:52 pm

            But as an ex-corporate defense attorney, I can tell you that management fired all the experienced, i.e. costly, coders, and the ones that are left lack the experience and WISDOM of the older coders. Good luck getting that back and coherently running a “shop” in short order.

            None of this will end well, even for the folks that are riding off in to the sunset with bags of cash now.

            “Fly, you fools!”
            1. hk February 6, 2026 at 3:21 pm

               That’s what worries me. A lot of people who work as “coders” are not real professionals; they are no more skilled than I am and presumably, Afro is (he’s probably much more skilled than I am, I suspect.) We do have plenty of coding experience, enough to get by, but we are just not professionally trained and it’s not really our main background. As cfraenkel put it, we are weekend coders and shouldn’t be relied upon to take responsibility of real professional programmers. Yet, I have strong suspicion that there aren’t that many real professional coders doing coding work (which, to be fair, is everywhere nowadays.)
         3. Oregon Lawhobbit February 6, 2026 at 3:10 pm

            And the AI lawyer who assured them it was a good deal is likely not carrying malpractice insurance to help make things right… ;-)
   3. XXYY February 6, 2026 at 1:10 pm

      AI does a lot of things simply much better than humans do, the most obvious example is writing code where there was a consensus that AI has achieved “coding supremacy”

      Four-decade software professional here. Contrary to this assertion, work to date with AI-writing software has been very uninspiring, with little or no productivity increase and a great deal of justified trepidation from people in the software community.

      Remember LLMs are only able to spit out things that they have previously encountered in their stealing of other human’s work from the internet (disingenuously called “training”). Thus, the very best they would be able to do under ideal circumstances is paste in some code that some human has previously written. This is not “much better than humans do”.

      In any case, the ideal circumstances are never going to happen. Software is a uniquely unforgiving discipline, and one omitted or transposed character in some body of millions of lines of source code somewhere can cause the entire system to fail without warning. Anyone who has ever participated in a code review knows that these kinds of mistakes are almost impossible to catch, and by far the best defense against coding errors is to avoid making mistakes to begin with, which is something that requires discipline, experience, and imagination, qualities we are not likely to get from stochastic parrots that hallucinate 50% of their output.

      I know it’s fun to believe that robots are better than humans. I read Isaac Asimov when I was a kid, too. But it’s not happening now, and I very much doubt that it will anytime in the next few centuries, if our species survives that long.
   4. Rick February 6, 2026 at 3:53 pm

      Another engineer here (graduate ECE degree, life senior member IEEE) with decades of experience. Anybody who thinks code that “needs review” is some sort of win can be discounted.

      One of the problems with discussions about “AI” is the term covers too many technologies and hence generates category errors. There are some technologies that can be called “AI” (e.g. place and route for FPGA design) that are amazing and truly make possible things that humans would take way too long to accomplish. Writing useful code is a different category that there has been no evidence AI can do anything but slow down development.
      1. Afro February 6, 2026 at 8:23 pm

         “Anybody who thinks code that “needs review” is some sort of win can be discounted.”

         All code needs review.

         The first person who ever me taught me code, then a CS professor, had spent the 1980s designing chess software, used to compete against what became Deep Blue. He said he never got it right the first time, and nobody should expect to do so. That was one of his first lectures.
4. Wukchumni February 6, 2026 at 8:16 am

   The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin: Blockchain’s “Digital Gold” Faces a Crisis of Faith Amid a 67% Plunge Frame the Globe News
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   There is a lot of selling of ‘packaged air’, and where do the proceeds go that wont leave a trail of spoor?
   1. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 8:44 am

      Bad news when all your ones and zeroes all go to zero.
   2. Wukchumni February 6, 2026 at 8:52 am

      p.s.

      I’ve often compared 1970’s Franklin Mint limited edition* proof coin sets from primarily the Caribbean-to limited edition Bitcoin, and a funny thing is happening with the price of silver skyrocketing, in that all of these proof sets have surpassed their 1970’s bubble highs now, for instance a Bahamas proof set has 2.87 Troy ounces of silver, making it worth over $200. These topped out at around $150, circa 1974 when silver was $4 an ounce.

      https://www.apmex.com/product/28322/1970-bahamas-9-piece-proof-set

      * a 1970 Bahamas proof set had a mintage of just 22,827 sets, compare that to Bitcoin’s 21 million!
   3. ilsm February 6, 2026 at 9:16 am

      Imagine someone valued SpaceX at $1,000B, then valued merged with xAI $1,250B!

      John Lennon comes to mind, I had a rock with Imagine on it.
      1. Peter Steckel February 6, 2026 at 12:54 pm

         My Dad referred to this concept as trading two $5,000 cats for a $10,000 dog…
   4. Tom Doak February 6, 2026 at 9:19 am

      The lack of math skills in the real world is wild. Bitcoin has fallen from $126,000 to $63,000. That’s exactly half, yet the headline is a 67% plunge. Either they got the memo on where it’s headed, or they’re just dumb.
      1. bradford February 6, 2026 at 10:42 am

         126000 / (126000+63000) = .6666

         It’s just math!

         Hand calculators should never have been allowed, but it’s far too late.
         1. jsn February 6, 2026 at 11:28 am

            Percentage Decrease = [(Old Value – New Value) / Old Value] × 100

            [(126,000-63,000)/123,000)] x 100 = 50%

            Your math works, I’m not sure where your equation came from. Maybe I missed that class?
            1. KLG February 6, 2026 at 2:31 pm

               My first graduate student advised me to never do math in public. She also was the first I heard say, “If you’re feeling froggy, jump!” when I was thinking about a new project. Very smart woman who is now a successful jewelry designer. Anyway, my 25-year-old hp33s scientific calculator also says “-50% change.” I won’t be able to function when that thing gives up the ghost. I cannot use a calculator that does not use RPN! I’ll probably have to go to eBAY for the first time.
               1. brabo February 6, 2026 at 4:10 pm

                  old hp calculators:

                  You could try swissmicro. They make clones of the HP RPN calculators.

                  Note: haven’t tried these myself.
               2. Yalt February 6, 2026 at 4:40 pm

                  Looks like prices have come back to earth (I have a 33s too, for the same reason, and I’m afraid I’m going to survive it). There was a time about a decade ago when a working 33s would sell for $300+; apparently it was in demand as the only RPN calculator model allowed into the room for engineering and surveying exams.
               3. jsn February 6, 2026 at 4:40 pm

                  I had an HP like that one, I’ve been lost since it died!

                  Fortunately, the only math I need for what I do is trig which I can still do mostly in my head.

                  My dad was a slider rule man who thought me profoundly undisciplined for using the HP!
      2. Objective Ace February 6, 2026 at 10:45 am

         Thank you – im glad im not the only one!.

         Similiary, the Ken Kipperstein article says that a reduction of 2700 ICE agents to 2000 is a 1/3 reduction when its actually much closer to 1/4th. That one’s at least a little forgivable since its seems the miscalculation is due to using the wrong base (700 is about 1/3rd of 2000)
   5. Craig H. February 6, 2026 at 10:53 am

      Is that George Bush fuzzy math or Sam Altman hallucinating AI?

      126K -> 63K = 67% drop?
5. Nikkikat February 6, 2026 at 8:37 am

   Extremely cute black kitty!
   1. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 9:13 am

      Time for the Soft Kitty song-

      https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p3mSGmduBU0
   2. LaRuse February 6, 2026 at 9:26 am

      Absolutely love the antidote today! That little one looks like a baby version on my Midnight, a street cat I rescued a few years ago who was about 18-months old when he showed up. Midnight has that same ghost-of-a-tuxedo patch and he has a sprinkling of white guard hairs all over (like stars in a midnight sky, hence the name). He’s 3, going on 4 now, but Midnight’s eyes look just like that right before he goes on glomping up and down the stairs in a spastic feline fit.
      1. Laughingsong February 6, 2026 at 12:15 pm

         Indeed, that face presages a “boing-bong-cuckoo” episode for sure! Same as our Midnight, though she was my little girl, not boy. She too was a rescue, but she was around 5 years old when we adopted her.

         Unfortunately we had to put her to sleep just before this last Christmas, after living almost 20 years! I sincerely hope that your Midnight lives at least as long.
6. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 8:43 am

   “Italian investigated over claims he paid to shoot people during siege of Sarajevo”

   I heard the same about the civil war in Lebanon with people paying to shoot civilians from buildings. Thing is, how come these people were not investigated and arrested by their home countries at the time? The Italian guy they are going after is 80 years old so he got away with it. Could it be that a lot of them were wealthy and so could afford to go “on safari” which also gave them cover at home. I am reminded of a scene from that film “The Purge” where you had tourists arriving at an airport in America so that they could take part in the legal killings. Unfortunately you are always going to have people like this.
   1. Wukchumni February 6, 2026 at 9:55 am

      One thing to emphasize in regards to the USA gun couture, is that the vast majority of gats in the hands of the public have never been fired or only sparingly.

      There’s also a fair swag of Americans that really want to shoot somebody, you get the feeling.

      That ICEsassin in Minneapolis that fired 9 bullets into Alex’s back after the first ICEsassin fired one shot into his back, was sadly what I’m talking about.
   2. Aurelien February 6, 2026 at 10:05 am

      This is not a new story: there were lots of similar rumours going round during and after the war, although then the clientèle was supposed to be mainly German. The going rate for a pitch on the hills around the city was apparently 100DM a day. There was never enough evidence to bring prosecutions, though.

      The logic from the Bosnian Serb (VRS) side was clear enough. Apart from being a nice little earner, the weapons the foreigners were using were much more advanced and much newer than those the VRS had, which by that stage of the war were badly worn and inaccurate. That’s why, whilst there are plenty of examples of VRS troops blindly opening up on targets in the city, they seldom hit anything. The vast majority of the dead were in battles between the VRS and the Muslim Army, the ABiH. So a few expert shots with expensive rifles might have sown fear among the civilian population, and helped to take the city, which the VRS couldn’t do by frontal assault since they didn’t have the manpower. Human nature is wonderful.
   3. jo6pac February 6, 2026 at 10:38 am

      Here’s more on this subject.

      https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-role-of-snipers-in-the-arab-spring-and-maidan-protests/
7. flora February 6, 2026 at 9:05 am

   File under L’affaire Epstein:

   From Due Dissidence, utube, ~28+ minutes.

   LEAKED AUDIO: Epstein TALKS UP PALANTIR To Fmr Israeli PM!

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE1mW-fSozE
8. Wukchumni February 6, 2026 at 9:18 am

   2026 Winter Olympics: Why rumors of penis injections of hyaluronic acid is doping concern for WADA CBS Sports
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   A good many winter Olympic events are all about sticking the landing, so I can see how penis injections would be popular.
   1. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 6:02 pm

      WADA must be going nuts because they can’t put any blame on Russian athletes for any of this. Hey, is this what they meant by “Norwegian Wood”?
   2. chris February 6, 2026 at 9:40 pm

      The broadcasters have already completed their moral triple double flips, by managing to bring up Ukraine and its challenges several times during the parade of nations.

      I thought I heard some booing in the crowd when the Israelis walked in. Did not expect that.
9. Tom Doak February 6, 2026 at 9:22 am

   Stoller’s article on Jeff Bezos and the oligarchy is terrific, just the kind of thing you can pass along to anyone with a brain. The funny part is that the Democratic elites had no problem with oligarchy, when they thought they were the oligarchy . . .
   1. lyman alpha blob February 6, 2026 at 10:21 am

      Heh. Remember the “good billionaires”? I’m sure the Democrats will all be shocked, SHOCKED, once it turns out the Pritzkers are only in it for the money too.
   2. Carolinian February 6, 2026 at 10:41 am

      Wasn’t Marty “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Baron in charge when the WaPo attacked sites like this one? I’d say the downfall of the WaPo is less Bezos and more hubris begets nemesis. Let the warmongers hit the unemployment line.

      And in related news

      https://responsiblestatecraft.org/aipac-new-jersey/
10. Mark Gisleson February 6, 2026 at 9:27 am

    Are there ANY articles about Trump and 2020 that do not use the word “falsely”?

    Even in real time it was obvious something happened. Twenty million extra votes showing up out of nowhere was an obvious cheat, it would be impossible to turn out the vote that successfully without a major impact on social media but there was never any kind of grassroots boom in pro-Biden comments, just heavy handed censorship of anti-Biden remarks.

    Media is downplaying Fulton County but to anyone who has actually worked elections, everything coming out is 100% consistent with a rigged count. Electronic voting insufficiently gamed the system, Team Biden manufactured absentee ballots for the win.
    1. lyman alpha blob February 6, 2026 at 10:35 am

       I haven’t seen Trump’s people make any valid claims at all regarding the 2020 elections. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything amiss. I used to be a regular reader of BradBlog which covered previous election shenanigans, so I checked him out briefly to see what he had to say. He doesn’t see any valid claims from Trump either (although I do detect a whiff of TDS in his writing) but he does note the atrocious unaccountable electronic voting machines that GA is still using. That to me indicates there could have been a big problem, just not the one Trump focused on.

       Trump’s mistake was wildly claiming fraud based on not much evidence at all – it was a PR campaign more than anything. He could have focused on the hardware and tried to get to the bottom of how these machines work (or don’t), but for some strange reason he chose not to go that route.
       1. Mark Gisleson February 6, 2026 at 4:07 pm

          I once knew someone who had Tourette’s and would literally have to gag himself before going out in public. I think half of Trump’s problems would go away if his handlers just gave him something to bite on when someone points a camera at him. That and they should put a captcha challenge on all his social media.

          You don’t need proof to challenge an election. If the results smell bad the losing candidate should have every opportunity to challenge the results. I think most folks have forgotten that Trump’s challenges were mostly dismissed for lack of standing. The funny thing about that is that if you look at all the challenges in all the states, they came from voters, candidates, organizations etc and uniformly the courts ruled that none of them had standing to challenge. The challenges were not heard, they were dismissed. Hard to see any justification for “falsely” when a better word would be “unsubstantiated.”

          Georgia smells bad. In the ’90s and 2000s, it was the red states whose election results smelled bad. Then the Citizens United enrichified neoliberals bought the voting machine companies and it’s been the blue states stinking up elections ever since. Electronic voting machines are suicide booths for democracy.
    2. Lefty Godot February 6, 2026 at 6:30 pm

       “Extra” votes showing up out of nowhere were the many people like me who hadn’t voted in ages but got bamboozled by the steady drumbeat of Trump=Satan stories in the mainstream news. And I didn’t even believe the Russiagate nonsense, just that Trump was uniquely bad, incompetent and deranged. Well, I sure wish I could take that vote back. If Trump had won in 2020 he’d be gone now and we wouldn’t have gone through four years of an actually demented President trying to get us in a war with a major, nuclear-armed nation. You can see what happened based on 2024. All the people like me went back to not voting again. Fool me twice, shame on me. If there was obvious cheating going on, the Trump team was never able to present any credible evidence of it in any court across the country. Even when their handpicked computer wiz kidz got all the ballots in Arizona, they still couldn’t come up with anything. “Stop the Steal” was a prefab campaign that had been in existence for years, just looking for an excuse to start making outraged noises.
11. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 9:48 am

    “Hegseth to take control of Stars & Stripes for ‘warfighter’ makeover”

    I can see where this will be going based on newsclips the past several months. Hegseth will be “whitewashing” the Stars & Stripes so soldiers will find that there will not be many images of black or Latino soldiers and certainly not women either. They do not fit in with what Hegseth sees as the modern US military. He has shown a hostility to women in the service and has caused plaques recognizing WW2 black soldiers to be taken down overseas. And gay soldiers? No such thing. Hegseth seem to be a very ill-humoured individual and I think that the Stars and Strips will be reflecting this.
12. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 10:01 am

    ‘Christopher Webb
    @cwebbonline
    Wait! The public face of nationwide immigration enforcement, Gregory Bovino, said in a newly discovered email that his boss wasn’t the head of CBP. He reported to Corey Lewandowski instead.’

    That seems to be a common thing with the Trump White House. That chains of command are ignored and bypassed in favour of ad hoc relations. But as Bovino was reporting to Lewandowski this means that the Trump White House was directing operations on the ground and now there is no hiding it. Whatever has been happening in Minnesota has been as the result of orders coming from the White House and now here is proof.
    1. Wukchumni February 6, 2026 at 10:12 am

       I keep wondering what the Keystone Kops Kryptonite is?

       They are impervious to insult in any form or obvious embarrassment on their part, empathyless to a fault, and crave power like an AI installation.
    2. Smith, M.J. February 6, 2026 at 11:57 am

       “This job sucks”
       https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/frustrated-judges-grilling-of-extremely-sleep-deprived-trump-admin-lawyer-was-even-more-startling-than-initially-reported-transcript-shows/

       Amazing exchange between pissed off judge and stressed out prosecutor. Never seen anything like this in my 40 years in and around federal courts. Read the whole transcript to understand the escalating war between our executive and judicial branches, and why the rule of law is hanging in the balance.
       1. johnnyme February 6, 2026 at 12:34 pm

          Thank you for a link to the full transcript! Local news stations here have dropped a bit more than the often cited “this job sucks” and “please hold me in contempt” quotes and I have not been able to locate the complete exchange.
       2. Jonathan Holland Becnel February 6, 2026 at 11:16 pm

          WOW

          WE ARE DEFINITELY HEADED FOR #AMERICANREVOLUTION2

          EVEN THE LAWYERS ARENT EATING THE DOG FOOD
13. LY February 6, 2026 at 10:50 am

    The Democratic primary for the NJ-11 special election for former US Rep. Mikie Sherill’s seat is still too close to call. The two front runners are former Rep. Tom Malinowski and Analilia Mejia, a member of Bernie Sander’s 2020 election campaign. In third place is former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way.

    What’s interesting was that a pro-Israel PAC UDP (associated with AIPAC) is running attack ads on Malinkowski (https://njdemocrat.substack.com/p/about-that-aipac-attack-on-malinowsk). None of those ads mention Israel. And he is endorsed by J-Street as well as a former Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro. I suspect the attack ads will be cranked up in the general election based on the two Democratic front runners, I’m guessing they wanted Gill or Way as their candidate.
14. Jeremy Grimm February 6, 2026 at 11:26 am

    Some of the links I sampled in today’s offering bemoan the depravity of the elites and their tendency to regard members of other classes of Society as sub-human tools to be used and discarded. The elites regard sufferings of the non-elite without sympathy and worse, with pleasure and enjoyment. When contemplating the regard with which today’s elites show to the underclasses, my first impulse is to question how much ‘progress’ and humanization there has been in the behavior of the elites toward their underlings. Read some of Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, particularly her descriptions of how the father of French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy delt with those peasants on his estate who caused his displeasure. The chief difference between what happened in that nobleman’s basement and today seems that instead of a direct experience and enjoyment of the processes much has been outsourced to ‘professionals’ working at various ‘black’ sites. But vicarious enjoyment is proving insufficient to fully satisfy our elites. Similarly, other hungers of our betters find satisfaction at special sites like Epstein’s island.

    Unhappily, I also wonder how much the humanity of the underclasses differs from that of the elites. Many seem to share elite tastes but merely lack elite power, wealth, and the relative freedom from consequences they convey.
    1. Kouros February 7, 2026 at 12:24 pm

       There was that clip with the Mexican model coming out dazed and shocked from an Epstein party yelling to those around: “They are eating people.” She apparently was dissapiered…

       And the last observation, in my ex-wife’s region in southern Romania, Oltenia, the saying is that in every peasant from Oltenia there is a sleeping boyar from Oltenia…
15. Carolinian February 6, 2026 at 11:53 am

    Re data centers–a couple have been proposed near me with usual under the radar preliminaries. However unlike some rural areas we have major industries including BMW that may object to electric rate increases to support a boondoggle. Here it is still early days.
16. Ann February 6, 2026 at 12:03 pm

    Found on Reddit this morning that made me laugh:

    “Why are liberals still wearing masks at the grocery store?”

    “To piss you off. I mean you, specifically. We had a meeting and everything.”
17. alrhundi February 6, 2026 at 12:04 pm

    The Epstein fortnite story is actually crazy. It’s confirmed via the files that he used the same handle, and previously bought Fortnite in-game currency. The activity history for the account shows no games played during the time of his arrest, but games before and after. The account has the Israeli flag chosen. The account went private as of yesterday when the story broke.

    It actually makes a lot of sense that he could use connections to fake his death. The idea of that happening and him hiding out playing fortnite is wild.
    1. AndrewJ February 6, 2026 at 3:49 pm

       it’s wild! It’s pretty blatant, too. Who else would be using his gamer name?
       Of course, his body was apparently cremated….
       1. alrhundi February 6, 2026 at 9:16 pm

          https://xcancel.com/FortniteStatus/status/2019817972831780952

          Fortnite says it’s a hoax
          1. jsn February 7, 2026 at 9:48 am

             Natch.

             Because of course they would.

             If it’s digital, it can’t be trusted.
18. Carolinian February 6, 2026 at 12:05 pm

    Re “Putin’s kiss”

    According to its website, Sanctum describes itself as “a private members-only club known for its elite erotic gatherings” where “theatrical grandeur and refined sensuality” create “an atmosphere that captivates those seeking both luxury and discretion.” Membership starts at $15,000 a year and can reach $125,000. Cellphones are not allowed, and Sanctum says it maintains strict confidentiality protocols.

    Wait I saw this movie–EyesWide Shut. It once seemed far fetched on the silver screen but perhaps more of a documentary. But then–these days–the same can be said of Dr. Strangelove or even 2001 with its Howard Johnson’s in space. Bezos and Musk are on it.
19. vao February 6, 2026 at 12:15 pm

    Regarding How Romance, Romantasy, and “Smut” Took Over Publishing and Entertainment: A Statistical Analysis, I just wonder how much the preponderance of various kinds of “romance” literature is really something new.

    After all, there was a time when the novels by Marie-Louise Fischer, or in older times Hedwig Courths-Mahler (talking about German authors) were huge best-sellers. The latter one had several movies based on her works shot in the 1920s, and then again, for television, in the 1970s. What did not exist in their times (as far as I know) was “romantasy” (vampires? hockey???) and smut.

    So is what the article describes actually the manifestation of a cyclical phenomenon of popularity for the genre?
    1. JustAnothetVolunteer February 6, 2026 at 2:49 pm

       Here is a great deep dive on genre romance in 1965.

       https://robimes.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-guide-to-category-romance-series-1965.html

       Mills and Boon have published writers guides for years that give the current formulas they are buying.
       They target their current readers as next generation writers and perpetuate the cycle.

       I miss the gothic lines.
       1. Stephanie February 6, 2026 at 5:44 pm

          Fascinating, thanks. The writer’s guide has certainly changed over the years. I’ve been reading through Mary Burchell (Ida Cook’s) Mills and Boon output and it is a wonder to me that so much of it managed to be published as category romance, or any sort of romance at all. I can only guess that by the later part of her career she was a reliable enough seller that the editorial staff just sort of waved their hands and told her “as long as somebody gets married at some point it’ll do”.

          As for today’s output, I think if you look under the hood of most published romantasy you’ll find a GOT or LOTR fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. And speaking of filing off the serial numbers, now that Netflix has purchased Warner Brothers I am fully expecting an exciting new limited series about two actors who play road-tripping, crime-fighting brothers by day while battling real-life paranormal phenomena on location and resolving sexual tension by night.
    2. The Rev Kev February 6, 2026 at 6:08 pm

       ShoeOnHead came out with a great video showing where some of this is leading us-

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3OPifyQZ8 (30:35 mins)
       1. vao February 6, 2026 at 7:22 pm

          At this stage, I can only say that I find all of this extremely disconcerting — leaning towards the disquieting.

          And to think that AI will help boost the production of that kind of literature is quite dismaying.
20. Historicality February 6, 2026 at 12:15 pm

    Portlandia: the Epilogue?

    The Real Clear Investigations article is down on Portland. Is there hope for what made that city known for livability and appreciation for nature?
    1. Oregon Lawhobbit February 6, 2026 at 3:22 pm

       Probably not.

       While not being much of a dazzling urbanite, I enjoyed my three years of law school there before heading out to the desert.

       Now, on the occasions when I drive through on the way to conferences on the coast, it’s … different. And not in a good way.

       But I see no indication from my toe-dips into local news that there’s really any plan or idea to bring it back to what it was decades ago. :-(
    2. lyman alpha blob February 6, 2026 at 10:24 pm

       Sad to here about the layoffs at Powell’s over the last year. I haven’t been to Powell’s for probably 20 years, but it’s in what used to be the cool and funky part of town. Maybe the layoffs aren’t solely due to the current problems and social unrest, but I’m sure they haven’t helped.

       The original Portland on the right coast isn’t faring much better. It’s been very cold lately and there are tons of people sleeping in the streets. Every morning on my way to the office I see people in the storefront alcoves buried under sleeping bags trying to keep warm. Developers keep building high end expensive condos downtown while many businesses are moving out. Lots of vacant storefronts. Just last month a downtown department store moved out. This is the kind of place people go to to furnish their apartments. If a store like that can’t stay up and running, something is seriously out of whack. I have a feeling those expensive condos are going to get a lot cheaper here too.
21. Tom Stone February 6, 2026 at 12:21 pm

    Can any of the commentariat share insights on Vance’s political base?
    I watched a clip of Trump walking and speaking from his first term and one from the other day and he does not look or sound well.
    There is a cult of Trump that gives him a degree of political power in addition to his support from some of the Oligarchs.
    Vance, at first glance, has the same political base as Kamala Harris, Money.
    If, as seems likely, Trump leaves the scene soon, will Vance have what it takes to make the USA a third world shithole?
    1. Ben Panga February 6, 2026 at 6:58 pm

       Vance is a creation of Peter Thiel primarily, and I consider him part of the Thielite “post-democracy” project. Vance’s role is to seem credible to the base as he grew up poor etc. In reality, Vance long ago abandoned his community and became a VC guy.

       I’m not plugged into MAGA to know how he is viewed by the base. I do think he is a more capable politician (in an evil way) than he is given credit for.

       I remain of the opinion that from the Thielites perspective it makes sense to remove/whack Trump long enough before the 2028 election to give Vance time to be Prez first. Assuming there will be an election.

       And by “Thielite” I mean the whole node of power that has grown from Palantir/CIA/VC capital/Zionists guys who came up in the War On Terror. Lotta spook involvement.
22. AG February 6, 2026 at 12:23 pm

    re: Big Oil vs. EV

    JACOBIN

    Did Big Oil Conspire to Kneecap the EV Industry?

    By Emily Sanders

    The state of Michigan filed a lawsuit in federal court last week against major oil companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron, accusing them of engaging in a decades-long conspiracy to block the development of clean energy and electric vehicles.
    https://jacobin.com/2026/02/fossil-fuels-michigan-trump-lawsuit
    1. Jeremy Grimm February 6, 2026 at 5:10 pm

       Is it disingenuous to wonder what EV industry, and what clean energy? If the American automobile companies, including that of Musk, constitute the nascent EV industry so rudely ‘kneecaped’, I cannot imagine what wonders they might have come up with had they not been so frustrated. The American automobile makers, have demonstrated little ability in the last 70 years to craft a decent and affordable automobile of any kind — whether EV, hybrid, diesel, or gasoline powered. As for the EV industry, I believe the Chinese EV industry might shakeout to provide some somewhat reliable and affordable[?, very much depending on u.s. dealer markups, tariffs, and the ultimate value of u.s. dollars] automobiles, assuming they can ever find their way into the u.s. market.

       This is not to suggest that Big Oil is not rapacious in its depredations and relentless unprincipled agnotology. Perhaps Big Oil had a play in keeping Chinese EVs out of the u.s. market, … not to diminish the probable efforts of the good Mr. Musk.
       1. AG February 7, 2026 at 8:15 am

          One thing e.g. I always found absurd over the decades is the continuous growing size of car models.
          Every new generation was larger than the one before all the while politics, media and popular science was argueing we need our space and resources not for cars.

          I often thought this has among others 2 reasons:

          1) to challenge public long-distance transport and commercial aviation´s comfort by creating oversized, overstuffed, comfy cars with which you could race Autobahn with the feel of sitting in a spaceship
          2) SUVs apparently were initially – as a guy from BMW I believe once claimed – designed for the Saudi market but then turned out to be bestsellers in Europe and the US too

          It is of course absurd that e.g. a city like Munich which is the home of BMW and relies on the commercial success of the company tries to do what it can to block cars from the city either by restricting parking spaces by high ticket prices, by reducing traffic lanes or by introducing ridiculous speed limits in the city on huge inner-city highways. So that people drive cars which are built for 200mph with 20 mph over miles and miles – creating traffic-jams which is the actual intent of it all.

          And yet they are surprised that customers who are constantly told “buy our cars as a patriotic cause” and who pay tens of thousands for a single car are not very sympathetic to “green” policies? And so you do not have less cars but more?

          None of this makes any sense. And it all is prove of how totally helpless and clueless German industry and German city communities are in regards of the civilizational challenges of climate and mobility crises which have now turned into an economic and industrial one too.
       2. AG February 7, 2026 at 8:21 am

          edit: proof not prove
    2. Louis Fyne February 7, 2026 at 9:32 am

       a plague on all their houses. Big Oil is bad! Corporate Greenwashing is just as bad! billions spent on wasted products and projects, public subsidies turned Elon-Tesla into the world’s richest man.

       No amount of wind turbines or solar will heat your house under certain weather conditions during polar vortexes (as evidenced by spot electricity prices >$1.00 per kWh last month.)

       The public’s desire to be green was parlayed into self-enrichment by lots of grifters….and “the Left” is angry at an Elon boogey-man that their pet policies created, lmao
23. Jason Boxman February 6, 2026 at 12:35 pm

    Is Harris still working tirelessly on that ceasefire?

    Mr. Sanders, a leader of America’s progressive political movement, has often operated as something of a lone wolf. An independent who never formally joined the Democratic Party, he has a personal and political rigidity that at times angers his colleagues.

    For a time, it seemed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez might take a similar approach. She marked her arrival in Washington by joining a climate protest outside Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office and had a tense relationship with the former Democratic speaker. She refused to contribute to the House Democratic campaign arm during her first stretch in Congress.

    But over the years, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has tempered her critiques of moderate Democrats, and is now a regular dues-paying member to the House campaign committee.

    Clearly the NY Times is giving AOC their solid stamp of approval.

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Steps Onto a Wider Stage (NY Times)

    That says much about who and what she is.

    This perhaps goes under Democrats Suck. (yes they do)
    1. Milton February 6, 2026 at 6:06 pm

       moderate Democrats

       Oh you must mean the far-left wing of the party. Because, as any clear-thinking person can ascertain, the core party is rabid far-right.
    2. AG February 7, 2026 at 8:45 am

       thanks

       L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)
       “Why did you become a cop?”
       1:46
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tdcuaYdTTs
       1. Yves Smith February 7, 2026 at 9:15 am

          That is a great movie…..
          1. AG February 7, 2026 at 7:47 pm

             https://ok.ru/video/7910803180053
             (or free on amazon prime 30day trial)

             industry review

             “L.A. Confidential: Exposing Hollywood’s Sordid Past
             Director Curtis Hanson and cinematographer Dante Spinotti, AIC add a realistic touch to this film noir story.”
             https://theasc.com/articles/la-confidential

             Not by accident “HEAT”, another Classic, was also shot by same Dante Spinotti.
24. XXYY February 6, 2026 at 12:41 pm

    This October, Paypal suspended The Grayzone’s account, blocking our audience from donating to us without explaining anything to them, and preventing us from accessing several thousand dollars already in the account. The Grayzone

    This right here is the biggest reason to resist the conversion to electronic forms of payment, private currencies, and corporate intermediation in the money system. Being able to decide who can participate in the financial system and who can’t is a ridiculous amount of control that we don’t want to give anyone, particularly private organizations who are subject to government and elite control. We have been headed down this path for a long time, but seem to be accelerating.

    One of the early signs of this was credit card companies refusing to process transactions for WikiLeaks a decade or two ago. Now we are seeing “de-banking” operations against even minor individuals who have offended some powerful person, for which there seems to be no due process or appeal. This happened to Scott Ritter for example, recently, obviously because he pissed someone off.

    Scary and dystopian, to say the least. Obviously the best thing to do at an individual level is stockpile cash and diversify your payment systems. It’s not clear what recourse you have through official channels if this kind of thing happens to you.
    1. Wukchumni February 6, 2026 at 8:17 pm

       Early in the Great Depression, banks one by one and then in droves, all put a hold on customers deposits so they couldn’t make cash withdrawals.

       The end around move was the same banks had real estate they wanted to get rid of, and an after market was established in 1931-32 where you could get anywhere from 35 to 65 Cents on the $ for your money, as the discounts represented what a bank had in real estate, using your money as payment.

       Never saw this tidbit in any history book on the Great Depression i’ve ever read, and came about in the wonderful The Great Depression-A Diary, by Benjamin Ross, who had a keen mind and duly recorded happenings in Youngstown Ohio, where he was an attorney.
25. Mikel February 6, 2026 at 12:48 pm

    https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2026020624/super-bowl-lx-is-turning-into-ais-coming-out-party/
    Super Bowl LX is turning into AI’s coming-out party

    Anybody else remembering that time the Super Bowl was crypto exchanges’ “coming out party”?
    1. Mikel February 6, 2026 at 1:01 pm

       And NFTs…
    2. Jeremy Grimm February 6, 2026 at 4:32 pm

       I remember the Superbowl as the coming out party for Xerox. That commercial remains a classic.
    3. Milton February 6, 2026 at 6:01 pm

       What about pets.com – – poster child for the dot com bust after 2000.
26. Bugs February 6, 2026 at 12:56 pm

    Hilarious Elizabeth Spiers review of the Melania flick.

    https://www.elizabethspiers.com/melania-the-movie-rei/

    I needed a chuckle after what’s up today; jeez Louise things are not good.
    1. Jeremy Grimm February 6, 2026 at 4:30 pm

       That review of the Melania flick is quite wonderful in its clever deprecations. The film sounds so horrible it might be camp[?]. However, I did spot one very small, microscopic saving grace for our President’s current wife: “As first lady, Hillary Clinton tried to fix the healthcare system; Melania got stationery printed.” I can only hope this example of adhering to “do no harm”, whether intentional or as a consequence of great shallowness and lack of imagination, might characterize Melania’s entire reign as first lady.
27. johnnyme February 6, 2026 at 1:23 pm

    Continuing on from yesterday’s protest music thread, local Minneapolis radio station The Current posted an interview with Billy Bragg:

    Interview: Billy Bragg talks about “City of Heroes” and shares words of solidarity for the people of Minnesota
28. kareninca February 6, 2026 at 5:37 pm

    I know it is a truism at this point, but the medical system really wants us dead. I had a cardiac stress test done today; the tech hinted that the results were fine so that is good. I’m under insane stress due to my 83 y.o. mom’s rapid cognitive decline at a 3,000 mile distance; she has loads of friends and 24/7 care but that is not the same as my being there. So I can go out in a couple of weeks, now that the test is done. I sure know a lot of people with cognitive decline right now.

    But the nice guy from the Philippines who ran the test really wanted that N95 off of me. First he suggested that the treadmill would be so much easier without it. Then he asked me repeatedly if I would like a little water. He looked unwell and coughed occasionally. I kept the mask on; as far as I can tell I haven’t caught covid yet.

    In other health news, people in my small New England hometown are continuing to die in their 50s in unexpected numbers (and it is not drug use deaths). In the past couple of weeks one elderly relative in Maine died of Powassan, one relative in CT died of sepsis due to a UTI (she had been in a facility), another relative in CT died of cancer that they thought was under control, a CT friend’s stepdaughter’s mother just died, the same friend’s son has what seems to be really sudden severe cardiac disease and will need bypass surgery. There may be more but I am losing track.

    UTIs are a much bigger deal now; they are leading to sepsis way more than in the past. I have a friend who is 62 y.o. who is a “healthy person” who has gone septic twice in the past two years due to utis. My neighbor here in CA is in hospice now due to a series of utis that led to sepsis. My mom caught utis twice in rehab last month, and I went to huge effort to get her out and get her home since I could see where that was going. Her 24/7 home caregiver is extremely skilled at dealing with UTIs. I would rather have her out here with me but I don’t see being able to replicate that skill here.

    Oh, another anecdote. I live near a small Lutheran church, and one of my neighbors attends it. She has a “godmother” at the church, an elderly lady who introduced her (in her late middle age) to Lutheranism. The church members dote on this lady and are in charge of her life in a lot of ways since she is in mental decline and has no kids. She is much loved. However, she was just in the hospital and now has to move into a small group home. The hospital social workers put her in a facility 85 miles from here. Since this area is staggeringly expensive, and cost is a factor. I guess she will still get some visits. Not so many. I’m not blaming the church people or the social workers, but boy is this bleak.
    1. johnnyme February 6, 2026 at 7:42 pm

       I’ve seen what Acute Transverse Myelitis resulting from a UTI can do to someone. He isn’t much older than me and it’s heartbreaking.
       1. kareninca February 6, 2026 at 9:13 pm

          I had to look that up. That is terrible. It never occurred to me that utis could cause neurological disorders. But then my neighbor who is on hospice is bed bound due to his utis.
    2. Jokerstein February 7, 2026 at 10:26 am

       Have the bacteria causing all the UTIs been identified? Are they the same or similar? Are they drug-resistant? If there is a big, sometimes/often fatal outbreak it would behoove the medical folks to investigate, wouldn’t it?
       1. kareninca February 7, 2026 at 12:29 pm

          My mom’s UTIs have all been e coli. Each one she caught in the rehab/nursing facility was resistant to more types of antibiotics than the prior one (despite still being e. coli). I don’t know about the other people’s cultures. By getting her home I am hoping the pressure to become more resistant will lessen. The instances I listed are widely dispersed so I don’t think it is an outbreak. I think it is that people’s immune systems are shot due to covid.
          1. Ignacio February 7, 2026 at 12:53 pm

             UTIs are more frequent in summer (heat and sweat) and other risk factor I know for women is sexual relations (recommended peeing and thorough washing after the event to reduce risks). Could it be that heating was too high in your mother’s rehab room? Multi-resistant E. coli strains are now an environmental risk in many places and quite common in UTIs in such places as hospitals, nursing facilities and well beyond those places in some locations where such strains have become prevalent.
             1. kareninca February 7, 2026 at 6:14 pm

                As it happens my mom hates central heating and had her windows at the rehab place open most of the time in December-January freezing weather. Maybe she would have gotten something worse if she hadn’t.

                What I am seeing on reddit (with links to things like the AARP’s site) is that hormone replacement therapy, or topical estrogen cream, helps prevent UTIs in older females. But I can’g convince my mom’s caregiver or her supervising nurse (both of whom are admittedly extremely smart and experienced) to try that.
29. johnnyme February 6, 2026 at 7:15 pm

    Minnesota representative Kelly Morrison (MN-03) was granted access on her third attempt to enter the Whipple Federal Building today and describes what she saw while representatives Betty McCollumn (MN-04) and Angie Craig (MN-02) were denied access:

    Some lawmakers denied access to ICE HQ while attempting conduct oversight
30. Ben Panga February 6, 2026 at 10:13 pm

    Epstein, Israel and the Middle East (Middle East Eye, YT, 21 minutes)

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1HTuRhEKR8

    Good, clear interview with the guy from Dropsite.

    Covers Iran-Contra, Wexner, as well as a load of ME nuggets on UAE, Somaliland and more.

    Whitney Webb and others had already covered the Iran-Contra aspect of Epstein saga, but it bears repeating:

    The planes used in Iran-Contra were transferred to leading American Zionist Les Wexner, who then gave power-of-attorney to Epstein. Thus, Epstein was given control of the Iran-Contra fleet. Epstein had already worked for British Arms Dealer and Iran-Contra major player Douglas Lees as well as arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
    1. AG February 7, 2026 at 8:35 am

       thanks!

       p.s. Orson Welles´s fictional take on “Kashoggi-like” arms dealers in his political drama (although inspired by older such stories since Kashoggi just started his career by then but Kashoggi´s name is still often associated with the film.)

       “CONFIDENTIAL REPORT” (1955)

       full movie, B&W

       87 min.
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM13TcHF1dU
31. David in Friday Harbor February 7, 2026 at 1:42 am

    Epstein has to have been murdered.

    We already knew that he was strangled while celled with an accused strangler whose death penalty was later lifted and that the guards falsified counts and failed to conduct “mandatory “ 30-minute checks the night of his death.

    Now it comes out that nobody noticed an inmate wandering around while the cameras were “down” and that “…a noose collected at the scene was later determined not to be the ligature used in Epstein’s death.”

    Too many coincidences. As Epstein’s brother Mark has noted, there are only three ways to die in that jail: natural causes, suicide, or homicide. We know from the document dumps that Epstein only had one real enemy; everyone else loved him. The implications are chilling to contemplate…

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