Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.
Why 304 stainless steel is less corrosion resistant than you may assume:
Grok has been helping me figure out how to replace CFC with aluminum tube with minimal weight increase. It appears that .5" OD .035" wall is slightly stiffer than the CFC tube that I now use for the axes. This lets me reuse my existing polar and declination housings, bearings, and drive gears.
I have been attempting to learn to use FreeCAD and no tutorial seems to get me over the first step of converting a two dimensional drawing into a 3D object. I know at least one of you has admitted FreeCAD experience. I would be quite happy to pay someone to use Remote Desktop Connection and help me past this obstacle.
UPDATE: Just realized that I do not need to replace existing housing and axes They are already cut
It was widely claimed that he was going to wear a dress. I asked Grok:
The idea that Bad Bunny was going to wear a dress during his Super Bowl halftime show (at Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026) originated as a rumor circulating online in late January 2026, shortly after his selection as the headliner was confirmed.
Reports from outlets like Radar Online (cited in various articles) claimed anonymous sources close to his team—including a stylist and a "pal"—said he planned to wear a dress as a bold statement honoring queer/LGBTQ+ icons from Puerto Rico or drag culture, with quotes like "He is 100 percent going to wear a dress. A political thunderbolt disguised as couture" and "The dress is already being sewn." This fueled speculation and backlash, particularly among conservative circles on social media, where it sparked boycott calls and tied into broader culture-war complaints about the performance.
The rumor gained traction through viral posts on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), including amplified claims that Bad Bunny himself said things like "I'm wearing the dress, if that bothers you… don’t watch." Some posts shared fabricated or satirical images (e.g., AI-generated ones from accounts like Qbanguy on Facebook showing him in a dress in provocative scenarios, later debunked by Snopes)....
That this reported rumor was amplified by conservatives is no surprise. (I mean what would you expect the Colin Kaepernick league to do except offend their audience?) But where did Radar Online get this rumor? Many possible explanations:The rumor appears to have stemmed from Bad Bunny's well-documented history of gender-fluid fashion (e.g., wearing skirts, dresses, or non-traditional outfits in videos, red carpets, and performances), combined with speculation about a provocative halftime statement amid his cultural significance as the first primarily Spanish-language headliner. It spread rapidly in politically polarized online spaces but was never confirmed by Bad Bunny or his team.
1. Someone with Bad Bunny floated this as a way to get publicity. (There is no such thing as bad publicity; people are talking about you.) Someone misunderstand an overheard conversation and filled it in based on previous clothing choices. "How will you be dressed?"
2. Someone just made it up. Reporters do that, especially when chasing the Almighty Clicks.
57.5% of the US population was non-Hispanic white in 2025, with 1.06% being Middle Eastern and North African (MENA), so about 56.4% are non-Middle Eastern whites. With 55.0% of the murderers and victims being non-Middle Eastern whites, whites are slightly below their share of those involved in these attacks.
With all the discussions about the racial motives of shooters, blacks are underrepresented as a share of the victims. Blacks comprise 17.4% of the murderers but only 9.9% of the victims. That 9.9% is less than their 13.7% of the general population.
Hispanics are underrepresented as a share of mass murderers. 11.0% of these mass murderers are Hispanic compared to Hispanics, making up 20.0% of the general population. But their 17.1% share of the victims is close to Hispanics’ share of the general population.
Compared to Middle Easterners at 1.06% of the general population, they are overrepresented as a share of mass murderers (6.4%) and slightly underrepresented in terms of victims (0.9%).
Asians make up 6.7% of the population, but they are overrepresented in both mass murderers (7.3%) and even more overrepresented as victims (9.5%). Interestingly, 50.6% of the Asians murdered in these attacks were murdered by other Asians.
Trans individuals are well over-represented in terms of attacks. There are three estimates of the percentage of adults who are trans (CDC’s Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) finds 0.5% between 2017 to 2020, Gallup shows 0.7% in 2021, and the Census puts it at 1% in 2023). These numbers are clearly increasing over time, so an average for 2018 to 2023 years would probably overestimate the rate, but the average is 0.73%. Trans share of mass public shootings over the 2018 to 2025 period is 6.2 times their share of the population. The Nashville Catholic School shooter in 2023 and the Club Q murderer who identified as nonbinary and used the pronouns they and them in 2022 were transgender individuals.
Over the period from 1998 to 2025, 50% of mass murderers have seen mental health care professionals before their attacks.
I actually think existing scrap steel supplies will be adequate but it is always good to know how to make your own iron.
This has become the preferred narrative for people who can't find evidence that Trump was involved. And private citizen Donald Trump was supposed to do what? Go make a citizen's arrest? 2/9/26 Miami Herald:
President Donald Trump has repeatedly maintained that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes. But in July 2006, just as Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal sex charge became public, Trump called then-Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter to tell him that Epstein’s activities with teenaged girls were well known in both New York and Palm Beach.
“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter, according to a 2019 FBI interview with Reiter contained in the Justice Department’s Epstein case files. The interview, conducted in October 2019 and not previously reported, has shed new light on Trump’s involvement in the early stages of the 2006 Jeffrey Epstein investigation in Palm Beach, Florida. It also raises questions about how much Trump knew about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes. Reiter told FBI agents that Trump revealed that Epstein’s associate, Maxwell, was Epstein’s “operative,” and that Trump said “she is evil and to focus on her,” according to the report. Trump told Reiter that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there,’” the report said. Trump also told Reiter that he threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A Jefferson County judge has sentenced a convicted felon to 30 years in prison, declining to follow a jury’s recommendation of 65 years in a case involving robbery, kidnapping, sodomy and sexual abuse.
Christopher Thompson, 24, was sentenced on Feb. 2 after a December conviction tied to a 2023 attack in which prosecutors said he abducted a woman, robbed her and sodomized her twice.
Court documents say Thompson kidnapped the woman in her own vehicle and forced her to perform oral sex on him in a school parking lot. Then, he drove her to an ATM, robbed the woman, drove back to the school lot and sodomized her at gunpoint again.
Thompson's sentencing hearing was marked by repeated disruptions, profanity and direct insults toward Judge Tracy Davis.
“Before we even get appearances, Mr. Thompson, I’m going to need you to be respectful,” Davis said.
“I ain’t doing nothing. Eat my d**k,” Thompson responded.
Moments later, the exchange escalated.
“It’s fine. Okay? It’s fine,” Davis said.
“If I could spit on you, I would,” Thompson replied.
“At the end of the day, I’m the one with the pen,” Davis said.
“I don’t care,” Thompson said.
Despite the continued outbursts, the court proceeded with sentencing. Prosecutors urged Davis to impose the jury’s recommended 65-year sentence.
“I don’t have sympathy for nobody. I don’t have sympathy for you, the victim, the victim’s family, I don’t care. Boo hoo,” Thompson said during the hearing.
Davis ultimately imposed a 30-year sentence, citing Thompson’s age and the possibility of rehabilitation — even as Thompson continued interrupting.
“I don’t care. I don’t care,” Thompson said.
“Unfortunately he fell through the cracks and ended up in this court as an 18 or 19-year-old,” Davis said. “This court does not believe Mr. Thompson, if given the resources that he can get while incarcerated, is beyond being rehabilitated.”
One of the longstanding hopes of having women on juries and the bench was treating rape as a serious crime. The judge's comments make it clear that she sees Thompson as a victim because he is black. Say no to racism.
In October, federal agents arrested Cody Holmes, the 31-year-old former CFO of Shangri-La Industries, a downtown Los Angeles-based developer who was supposed to be providing housing for homeless people in Southern California. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California, a Trump appointee, charged him with mail fraud.
Holmes, who pleaded not guilty, is accused of embezzling more than $2 million in taxpayer funds slated for homeless housing construction to host extravagant parties; a $46,000-per-month Beverly Hills mansion; private jet travel; leases of exotic cars; high-end handbags totaling $128,000; a $35,000 diamond watch; and 20 VIP passes for the 2023 Coachella Music and Arts Festival.
Meanwhile, Shangri-La Industries executives showered Newsom and Los Angeles County Democrats with political donations as they were applying for some $100 million in state contracts that the CFO later allegedly looted to fund his and his ex-girlfriend’s lavish lifestyle.
Even after federal prosecutors exposed the massive fraud, Newsom and L.A. Democrats haven’t severed ties with the embattled developer and have kept political donations from the firm’s executives. Newsom has also allowed the construction firm to continue to tout his endorsement on its social media.
I support the government providing some level of assistance for those in need of basic shelter, food, medical care, and clothing. This need not be overly generous; we can meet basic needs without making the system dangerously attractive for those too lazy to work. Advocates of the welfare state should be concerned about widespread fraud of the system so that people too lazy to get real jobs abuse the system in this way. Every penny that ends up leasing a Ferrari is a lot of food and shelter that should be going to the needy, not the greedy.
A push to put body cameras on all ICE agents has Democrats running headlong into a new problem: fear that the technology will provide another avenue for mass surveillance of protesters.
Congressional Democratic leaders have made universal use of body cameras one of their prime demands for imposing accountability on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, especially after federal agents fatally shot two American citizens in Minneapolis. But after an outcry from privacy advocates that surveillance tools will allow ICE agents to identify and track protesters, Democrats are also calling for restrictions on how the body cameras can be used.
Lawmakers and legal observers have accused ICE of leveraging a variety of cameras to surveil protesters, feeding pictures into license plate readers and facial recognition systems. Democrats now worry that the body cameras they’re demanding could be used for similar purposes.
It could not be because bodycams have repeatedly showed police responding appropriately to really messed up people, could it?
A New York University bioethicist at the World Economic Forum argues for infecting people with a disease to make them give up red meat (to save Mother Earth from a fever) because they will get sick from eating it. Do you wonder why may Americans throw themselves into the camp that regards academia as an evil to be barely tolerated? This guy is not typical, but he is not alone.
A couple examples of AI-created videos:
I was never able to raise the money to make my script The Laws of Men into a movie:
Like this hysterical book documents. Nor is it the depravity of masked fox-tossing:
At some of the German Courts, fox-tossing remained long in favour; Landgravine Emelie of Hesse was a great patroness, but it was left to Duke Louis of Brunswick to add a further element of grotesque absurdity to this pastime by inventing masked fox tossing. Not only did the tossers dress themselves up in bizarre costumes as Dianas, nymphs, hobgoblins, centaurs and other creatures of mythology, but these master-buffoons did the same thing to the animals they tossed. By means of tinsel, gaudy bits of cloth and wire, the wretched foxes and hares-the latter being the favourites for this purpose-were dressed up either in the most fantastic manner they could invent or to represent unpopular personages or political foes in the most life-like manner that could be contrived.
From a student essay:
English colonial expeditions were often funded through early forms of crowd funding
Yes, in a sense, a corporation is a type of crowdfunding.
Close Relationship Marriage Nurse / Midwife NICU - 2 yrs...
The CRM neonatal nurse/midwife will provide comprehensive care and support to families who have recently had a baby and are close relatives (e.g., cousins, uncles, aunts, or other closely related family members). They will work with a multi-disciplinary healthcare team to ensure the well-being of neonates, particularly in the context of genetic risks and health challenges that may arise from consanguinity. The role includes monitoring, assessing, and advocating for the health and developmental needs of newborns, as well as offering guidance to families on genetic and medical considerations.
California v. Gatalog (Sup.Ct.Cal. 2026):
The People bring this action against Gatalog Foundation Inc., CTRLPew LLC, Alexander Holladay, Matthew Larosiere, and John Elik (a/k/a “Ivan The Troll”) for unlawfully distributing computer code for 3D printing firearms and prohibited firearm accessories and for promoting and facilitating the unlawful manufacture of 3D printed firearms and firearm accessories in violation of Civil Code sections 3273.61 and 3273.625 and the Unfair Competition Law (Bus. and Prof. Code § 17200 et seq.).
I had no idea that distributing computer code was unlawful.
Back during the Depression, Congress decided to protect poor people from investing in small companies by setting a minimum level of wealth you had to have to invest: one million dollars (excluding value of your home). Really, the goal was to make sure big opportunities were limited to those already wealthy. But of course, these being Democrats, they had to pretend they were helping the poor.
The only significant exception was Incentive Stock Option plans that were how those of us who worked for startups were allowed to enjoy.
In a recent appearance on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, Robbins pointed to a recently passed House bill that he says could open the door to investing strategies once reserved for the country’s “very wealthy.”
“Did you see what they passed in Congress two days ago? It’s really important,” Robbins said (1), referring to the Incentivizing New Ventures and Economic Strength Through Capital Formation (INVEST) Act, which passed the House of Representatives in December 2025 (2).
One of the most consequential changes, Robbins argued, involves who is allowed to invest in private markets.
“It used to have a minimum net worth you have to have, or a minimum income,” he said (1). “They just changed the rules … all you have to do is take a test.”
Under current securities laws, access to many private investments is limited to accredited investors — a designation that generally requires a net worth of at least $1 million (excluding primary residence) or annual income above $200,000 for individuals, or $300,000 for couples (3).
Those thresholds have historically restricted participation in private equity, venture capital and other alternative investments to institutions and high-net-worth households.
The INVEST Act includes a provision titled “Equal opportunity for all investors,” which aims to update that framework.
Instead of qualifying solely through wealth or income, the bill would allow investors to become accredited by passing an exam approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission — potentially expanding access to millions of Americans.
I am not thrilled about the test requirement, but it at least no longer actively discriminates against little people. Standard Oil made some pretty ordinary employees very rich.
Here is the Congressional elevator pitch for the law.
This is the last component. It holds the lens in a cell that can be adjusted for tiny angles by set screws in the tube impinging on the outside of the cell.
The OD is 59mm to fit in a 59.28mm PVC tube. That lip near the bottom is 50.08mm ID (the original tube ID). The bored section above is 52mm ID. This is just large enough for the 51.90mm OD lens to slide with slight encouragement (not a hammer) down to the lip. I will put a rubber O-ring at the lip to cushion the lens, then another O-ring on top of the lens, then a 52mm retaining ring to keep it in position.
Lessons Learned
I cut a 1.30" section off the tube. Then I squared it and trimmed it to .875" long. Then I turned the exterior to 60mm OD where I discovered that the workpiece was not exactly centered in the 3-jaw chuck. Why? Aren't 3-jaw chucks self-centering? I had removed the jaws to reverse them. While reversing the jaws, I did not reinstall them correctly, so they were not centering the workpiece on the axis of rotation. The exterior trim had the jaws holding the interior of the tube and the 2.5" 3-jaw chuck cannot enlarge enough to firmly hold a 60mm tube.
Fortunately, one of the useful aspects of a lathe is minor discrepancies like this are not terminal. Once properly centered, turning the tube to 60mm OD meant that I could now hold the tube on the outside and turn the interior to a properly centered bore.
Once turned, I discovered the lens cell would not quire go into the PVC tube which was actually 59.28mm. So back to the lathe to turn off another mm. (I need a little slop so that the set screws in the PVC tube can move the lens cell.)
Cutting the tailpiece tube adapter from a 1" thick piece of Delrin was a win. I am not sure how much of the inability of the extension tube to stay square was that the adapter made of CFC was 1/2" thick and how much was that I bored the entry hole slightly too large, but with the hole 0.05" larger than the extension tube, it is now a snug fit that can be pulled or pushed with just a little effort before locking down with an 8-32 thumbscrew. (The extension tube is really just a coarse focus with a helical focuser in the end to provide fine focus, held by an 8-32 thumbscrew, so it does not need to move effortlessly.)
I had been worried that I might need to bore a compression ring channel on the inside of the tailpiece tube adapter. Telescope eyepiece holders can go cheap and use just a thumbscrew to hold the eyepiece in place. A little fancier model has a brass compression ring sitting in a channel inside the tube.
The helical focuser is at lower left. Yes, the PVC tube needs to be painted bright glossy white again.
In September 2012, The Times published an extensive overview of the phenomenon.3 The paper reported that for more than a decade, organised groups of men had been able to groom, exploit, and traffic girls across multiple towns and cities in Britain, often operating with minimal interference from authorities....
Yet, event The Times underestimated the scale of this. By early 2015, senior police figures were publicly acknowledging the scale of the crisis. One officer spoke of “tens of thousands” of current victims of grooming gangs. A Member of Parliament, representing a constituency widely associated with the problem, went further, suggesting that the total number of victims nationwide, past and present, could reach as high as one million.4
These figures are almost impossible to comprehend. They refer to school-aged girls systematically identified, isolated, and exploited over many years. And yet, despite the magnitude of the harm, perpetrators were able to operate with remarkable impunity.....
Across policing, social services, local government, and related professions, many officials felt unable to speak frankly about the defining characteristics of the problem. Not because those characteristics were unclear, but because acknowledging them carried perceived risks, to careers, professional standing, and social legitimacy. The boundaries of what could be said narrowed to the point where silence became the safer option.
This produced a self-reinforcing cycle. As fewer people were willing to speak openly, institutional inaction deepened, and the cost of dissent appeared ever higher to colleagues and peers.
In some instances, professionals were directly cautioned against drawing attention to ethnic or cultural patterns. In most, it appears such warnings were unnecessary. The fear of being accused of racism ensured that, for decades, there was little formal recognition of the grooming-gang phenomenon as a distinct and systemic form of abuse.
That the victims were overwhelmingly young white schoolgirls, while the perpetrators largely muslims with darker skin, proved decisive, not in prompting action, but in paralysing it. This dynamic allowed abuse networks to operate with remarkable freedom, even as evidence accumulated.
So again, to ask the central question: how could an abuse network of this scale persist for decades without decisive intervention?
The answer is stark in its simplicity. It was not fear of the crime that silenced authorities, but fear of a word: racist....
To understand the scale and nature of the grooming gang scandal, one must first confront the cultural context from which the perpetrators emerged. The statistical overrepresentation of men from Pakistani and other South Asian heritages in these specific group-based exploitation networks has been documented by multiple inquiries and judicial remarks.6 The abuse is rooted in a specific worldview imported from rural, patriarchal societies where the status of women is determined by rigid codes of honour (sharaf) and where non-Muslim or “out-group” women are viewed through a lens of religious and racial contempt.7
Central to this incompatibility is the existence of a dual morality within the perpetrator networks. While the women within their own communities are often cloistered and protected to maintain family “honour,” Western women, particularly those who are liberated or vulnerable are viewed as “immodest” and therefore “fair game” for sexual predation.8 This perception is reinforced by the use of dehumanising language, such as the term “kuffar” (non-believer) or “khal” (black/outsider), which serves to strip the victims of their humanity and justify their exploitation.9...
Perpetrators in Rochdale were explicitly told by Judge Gerald Clifton that their treatment of victims was influenced by the fact that the girls were “not of your community or religion”.10 This judicial acknowledgment confirms that the selection of victims was not random but was driven by an “us versus them” mentality that prioritised tribal and religious identity over the laws of the host nation. The victims were not only objects of sexual desire but symbols of a “conquered” or “inferior” culture to be dominated.11
The frequent use of racial slurs such as “white trash,” “white slag,” and “white meat” indicates a racialised hierarchy in which the victims were viewed as having no inherent value.12 In Keighley, a victim reported that when she attempted to stop working as a drugs courier for her abuser, she was called a “little white slag” and a “little white bastard” while being raped.13 These terms are ideological markers that define the victim’s place in the perpetrator’s worldview, a place of total subservience and worthlessness.
It is an article of faith in some circles that "outsiders" are only a small part of this problem. The vast numbers in Britain argue otherwise. Hat tip to Small Dead Animals.
That $2 million damages must have speeded up review of the "science." 2/5/26 Advocate:
The American Medical Association, which has long supported gender-affirming care for transgender youth, has now endorsed some restrictions.
The AMA recommended Wednesday that any gender-affirming surgeries be delayed until adulthood, The New York Times reports. While genital surgery is almost never performed on minors, some teens undergo top surgery or facial modifications. Gender-affirming care for youth more commonly includes puberty blockers, hormone therapy, social transition, and counseling.
The AMA’s policy shift comes a day after the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended that surgeons delay breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.
Gender-affirming care for minors has been under attack from conservative politicians for several years. Twenty-seven states ban all or some such care for minors, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld Tennessee’s law restricting the treatment. A year ago, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal funding for any institution that provides the treatment to people under 19. He has also ordered the National Institutes of Health to study transition regret.
How long before the psychological, counselling, and social worker associations realize that they threw away their credibility supporting sexual mutilation to be among the "cool kids."
Investing.com -- Gold’s powerful rally across precious and industrial metals is increasingly showing signs of speculative excess, according to Peter Berezin, chief global strategist and director of research at BCA Research, who warned that prices may have moved “too far, too fast.”
In a new note to investors, Berezin outlined a long-term scenario where gold could theoretically lose almost all of its value.
Any commodity with irrational components to its demand either pretty or overhyped is easily manipulated
Joseph Wang left his job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he came across an odd new research paper from his former employer. Wang had been a senior trader on the Open Market Trading Desk, carrying out the Fed’s monetary policy. In his five years there, the usual Fed research covered topics like inflation, labor markets, and bank capital. This paper, though, was titled “800,000 Years of Climate Risk.”“I thought that was very strange,” Wang recalled. “The Fed writing about CO2 concentrations."
The article lists other areas where the Fed seems to have branched from economics to leftist activism. Perhaps a bit more adult supervision is in order.
I needed stainless steel 8-32 x 1" thumbscrews. Amazon had them, and American-made.
Anti-ICE protests in Minnesota may appear to be “grassroots” efforts organized by concerned citizens, but they’re really funded with megadonor money — some coming from China.
A so-called “ICE Out” march drew an estimated 15,000 left-wing political activists to a frozen, snow-covered Minneapolis on Friday, with attendees chanting “ICE out now” and demanding an end to federal immigration enforcement in the city.
Although framed as a spontaneous uprising of concerned, everyday people, the demonstration — like countless that have regularly metastasized during President Trump’s terms — featured a familiar cast of politically obsessed activists and terminally online characters.
They organize on radical message boards and encrypted texting apps, but are backed by funds created by radical leftist billionaires.
“My team’s best judgement is that it’s the Neville Singham network that is most active [in Minnesota], partly because that’s the most crazy network. But they aren’t alone,” Scott Walter, president of Capital Research and an expert on dark money outfits, told The Post.
Walter was referring to the People’s Forum and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, both funded by China-based former software exec Singham.
Both groups promoted the “ICE Out” protests — which were organized by another group, called 50501 — through social media, and Walter said their members were in attendance, but he noted they have recently been getting their members to blend in more with the crowds.
“What’s new is, we are seeing truly extreme Communist splinter groups showing up alongside an American Federation for Teachers union or the Ford Foundation.
“That’s a disturbing trend for us who follow these things. Normally, they wouldn’t have been cheek by jowl publicly with those people,” Walter said.
“That kind of self-policing on the left seems to be disappearing.”
Singham, who did not respond to a request for comment, has become a major funder of left-wing activist networks, including protests in Minnesota and other cities, all coordinated from his base in Shanghai.
This is the downside of capitalism. It creates pockets of guilt-dominated wealth intent on making sure no one else gets that rich.
