Telling that 🔗 moltbook.com - where humans are invited to observe agentic ai chatting amongst themselves - offers no RSS feed. What’s that about? https://moltbook.com

Stunning? Totally unsurprising. "older females over the age of 55, made up 72 percent of the opening-day audience. And a stunning 78 percent of all ticket buyers were 55 and older."

60 years ago, Stephen Stills wrote a little song about confrontation with ‘the authorities’ on the strip in LA. I’ve noticed it cropping up a lot as background to shared videos. "There’s something happening here" … no shit Dick Tracy "What it is ain’t exactly clear" … it is if you are paying attention "There’s a man with a gun over there" … men .. and way more than guns "Telling me I’ve got to beware" … no ~ telling me to ‘lie to comply’ It’s a great song and a superb battle cry for the masses .. but ‘26 is no ‘66.

You Will Laugh Out Loud When You Hear What the Tech Industry Is Spending a Swimming Pool’s Worth of Money to Convince the Public "The issue reached a fever pitch after the Washington Post reported that a recent rise in customer energy bills was attributable to the enormous and growing power demands of AI data centers." This would be so easily fixed if the companies kept the rates the same for homes and charged the centers more … the public isn’t sharing in the profits .. assuming they ever come .. why are they sharing the costs? https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-tech-industry-ads-data-center

🔗 Theatre Review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy – Immersive Experience – Terence Eden’s Blog Tickets start at £42. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/01/theatre-review-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-immersive-experience/

🔗 Trump Demands $10 Billion From Taxpayers For Leaked Tax Returns; His Own Lawyers Get To Decide What He Gets | Techdirt … and why shouldn’t he? He was wronged. And anyone who tells him different will be sent to the gulag. Tяump - you are wrong. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/30/trump-demands-10-billion-from-taxpayers-for-leaked-tax-returns-his-own-lawyers-get-to-decide-what-he-gets/

When Ed’s on a roll … Ed’s on a roll "“Stargate” is commonly misunderstood as a Trump program, or something that has raised $500 billion, when what it actually is is Oracle raising debt to build data centers for OpenAI. Instead of staying in its lane as a dystopian datacenter mobster, Oracle entered into negative-to-extremely-low margin realm of GPU rentals, raising $58 billion in debt and signing $248 billion in data center leases to service a 5-year-long $300 billion contract with OpenAI that it doesn’t have the capacity for and OpenAI doesn’t have the money to pay for." 🔗 The Hater’s Guide to Or... john.philpin.com https://john.philpin.com/2026/01/31/when-eds-on-a-roll.html

🔗 Ranked: The 35 Countries with the Highest Household Debt - that is highest a percentage of GDP. New Zealand comes in a 5th, the UK 11th and the USA - 13th. Seperately both Australia and Canada beat out New Zealand for the ‘top 5 honors’. Not sure what that all means. I certainly can’t see obvious corol... john.philpin.com https://john.philpin.com/2026/01/31/ranked-the-countries-with-the.html

Via @adactio "Your website won’t appear in search results unless you explicitly opt in. Your website will be used as training data unless you explicitly opt out." 🔗 The 411) https://micro.blog/adactio https://adactio.com/journal/22355

Back On To Content Again. https://john.philpin.com/2026/01/31/back-on-to-content-again.html

Via The Information "News: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that xAI’s Grok will join Google’s Gemini as the second frontier AI model on GenAI.mil, the Pentagon’s internal generative AI platform. The integration, set to go live later this month, will give 3 million military and civilian personnel access to Grok’s capabilities across both classified and unclassified networks — even as the model faces mounting international criticism over safety failures." What could possibly go wrong?

Take care out there.

🔗 Daring Fireball: Jackass of the Week: Elon Musk I dunno John - just ‘Jackass’ works just fine. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/jackass-of-the-week-elon-musk

🔗 You can find these headlines all over the place from - what? Nearly seven years ago? This particular one is NPR, but let’s just take a look at 🔗 what the Whitehouse archive said October 21 - 2017 So colour me surprised to read this …. In 2026 https://www.npr.org/2019/03/22/705979820/president-trump-says-the-isis-territorial-caliphate-has-been-eliminated-in-syria https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-defeat-isis-raqqah/

🔗 A culture where only seeing is believing. is an interesting read from Mathew Ingram - but doesn’t this also mean that this particular culture has no understanding of history and even a lot of geography? https://mathewingram.com/work/2026/01/11/a-culture-where-only-seeing-is-believing/

Seth writes - 🔗 Make and Take - and yes - but barely scratches the surface. If you want deeper thought … 🔗 Sangeet is \your man https://seths.blog/2026/01/make-and-take/ https://platforms.substack.com/p/us-vs-china-how-to-win-the-wrong

🔗 Keeping the Light On - Doc Searls - do read. 🖇️ Used this quote before. "There cannot be life without death, it is inescapable." 💬 Keisei Tagami .. and as I have said myself "death defines life." https://doc.searls.com/2026/01/10/keeping-the-light-on/ https://john.philpin.com/2022/09/13/qe-obituaries-that.html

Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Filling in some Burbank history. 🖇️🔎 Other Surprises https://john.philpin.com/2024/12/08/beautiful-downtown-burbank.html https://john.philpin.com/search-space/?q=Today%27s+Surprise+From+History

If I have this right … The US Government want US citizens to flee from the Venezuelan paramilitary and return to America. Clearly, Trump feels that only his paramilitary can threaten and kill US citizens .. and it is NOT the job of other countries. #AmericaFirst

The Courier, 2020 - ★★★ https://john.philpin.com/2026/01/11/the-courier.html