[Clarice @ AT] This week’s major developments include a number of secondary explosions: government bureaucrats who censored free speech on internet platforms using NGOs as covers will be facing court action; the fallout from the boomeranging Epstein disclosures keep damaging the Democrats and their foreign allies; the media’s promotion of the moronic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only served to highlight that she’s is ill-informed and too lazy to prepare for interviews; and DOGE and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent are making it very hard to keep hiding Democratic corruption.
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02/15/2026 06:22 ||
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That last section is very exciting, especially for our many computer jockeys:
New Tech and the Great American Fraud Hunt
Jeff Childers highlights how DOGE, new tech, and geniuses like DataRepublican are making it ever easier to catch corruption.
Beyond all reckoning, the goofy DOGE geniuses did it! It’s done. For six years, they guarded this data like the nuclear codes. Yesterday, DOGE slapped it on the internet, ribbon-wrapped for Valentine’s Day. DOGE -- whose death was obviously slightly exaggerated -- just dropped a tactical nuke on both the vaccine debate and welfare fraud -- and launched the biggest crowdsourcing project in human history. Yesterday, Axios ran the story headlined, “Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release.”
He should declare victory. DOGE teams originally accessed the HHS data in February, over the backs of hysterical Democrats and enough lawsuits to keep a medium-sized law firm busy for a decade. Since then -- crickets. Until now. And it was the most Elon solution ever. They open-sourced HHS’s top-secret Medicaid claims database -- 11 gigabytes worth -- and dumped it on the internet before Democrats could even say “injunction.”
The release was framed as an anti-fraud move, surfing a wave of public outrage washing out of Minneapolis and Nick Shirley’s viral video. In making the announcement (on X, of course), DOGE-HHS pointed out, “For example, using this dataset, it would have been possible to easily detect the large-scale autism diagnosis fraud seen in Minnesota.” The space billionaire quickly chimed in. “Medicaid data has been open-sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify,” Musk wrote. “DOGE is not a department, it’s a state of mind,” he added. 🎶 Wastin’ away again in DOGE-eritaville. 🎶
The 11GB file can be searched or downloaded at OpenData HHS, and includes aggregated provider-level claims data, by billing code, by month, between 2018 and 2024 -- bookending the whole pandemic period. (Note -- It does not contain patient-level data.) It includes records from all Medicaid claims submitted by providers for reimbursement during that period.)
This is clearly not just a DOGE project. It is a coordinated effort across the Trump Administration. For example, timed with the release of the data, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a related new program. Not only have they open-sourced the research, but they have gamified it. Bessent said Treasury was setting up a website for people to report Medicare fraud -- and they’ll get up to 30% of whatever’s fined and recovered. [snip]
If the $1 trillion fraud estimate is even half right, the government just turned fraud detection into the world’s largest treasure hunt. Some kid in a bedroom with a laptop, a chatbot, and a case of energy drinks might make more money this year than most hedge fund managers…
[NY Post] With Vladimir Putin’s war machine sputtering, it’s time to push the Kremlin even harder to force an end to his war on Ukraine.
President Donald Trump’s moves such as seizing “shadow fleet” tankers and piling on new tariffs on importers of Moscow’s oil are plainly hitting hard: You can tell because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is whining that Washington won’t make Kyiv agree to de facto surrender (e.g., Russian control over Ukraine’s post-war government) as he claims President Donald Trump had agreed to do.
Why does Russia need America’s intervention, if it’s winning on the battlefield?
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/15/2026 00:00 ||
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[WebIndia123] The India AI Impact Summit will be held from February 16 to 20 at Bharat Mandapam in the national capital, bringing together policymakers, technology experts, researchers, startups, and entrepreneurs from across the country and abroad to discuss the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. With 800+ dialects the LLM will be huge.
OMG, the things that don’t occur to me until I read them here!
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] Eighty years ago, on February 14, 1946, the University of Pennsylvania unveiled to the world what journalists called a monster of lamps and wires: ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
Newspapers told the public about a brave new world: a machine could perform thousands of additions in a second, and at the time, it sounded like a victory over human consciousness. Just as in the 2020s, the takeover of the labor market by artificial intelligence was seriously discussed, so too was this unwieldy machine perceived after World War II.
Official "programmer's days" in different countries have their own lives. But hardware and IT specialists themselves like to believe that February 14, when ENIAC was unveiled to the world, marks the beginning of the era of computing machines, which—as they now fear—will soon take over the world and enslave humanity.
NEW POTENTIAL
The idea for ENIAC arose in the midst of World War II, in the spring of 1943.
The American army was overwhelmed by calculations. Ballistic calculations were time-consuming: they had to calculate the angle, wind, temperature, humidity, barrel wear, and projectile type. This was a time-consuming manual process. The machine was supposed to increase the intensity of combat operations.
Developers John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly proposed delegating warfare to smart hardware. Their idea differed from manual calculations in two respects.
Firstly, ENIAC was conceived as a completely electronic unit, without any intermediate electromechanical compromises. Secondly, it was intended to be programmable, meaning its operations could be modified to suit the task at hand.
There were machines in those days that could count, and there were machines that could be reconfigured, but ENIAC promised to combine the speed of electronic circuits with the flexibility of customization.
It was assembled late, in May 1945, when the war in Europe was already drawing to a close. History has a knack for such twists: what was created for one war usually reveals its potential in another.
For example, as was the case with the first ironclads during the Crimean War (1853–1856); with the Prussian Dreyse needle rifle, created in the 1840s and which flourished during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871; and many other inventions of engineers serving the front.
ENIAC didn't quite manage to become the ballistics table factory of World War II, but it quickly proved itself a versatile tool for tasks that required mountains of calculations. It was used in aerodynamics, in the numbers pi and e, in cosmic ray models. It was linked to research that would later become part of the nuclear and rocket eras.
SIX WOMEN AND THE NEUMANN ENGINEER'S MONSTER
How does ENIAC differ from coding? Both are programming. But they are very different. In the ENIAC world, a program was a physical pathway of electrical impulses. The operator connected, switched, and moved cables, panels, and switch arrays. Each task required its own sequence of connections.
An error meant hours, sometimes even days, of lost time. The machine crunched formulas in seconds, while people spent days trying to get it to do exactly what they needed.
That's why programmers 70 years ago came up with an idea that isn't even explained in sixth-grade computer science classes today: storing a program inside a machine.
For someone in the 1940s, this was a true revelation. The idea arose amid military secrecy and haste, when engineers saw that the current reconfiguration scheme was killing efficiency. It would later be formalized as the stored-program principle, and around this principle would emerge the architecture associated with the engineer John von Neumann.
It's important to grasp the practical reason: it was an attempt to free engineers from the endless "replace the cable, flip the switch" chore. While a modern smartphone fits in the palm of your hand, ENIAC occupied a room the size of several apartments and weighed tens of tons. Inside were thousands of tubes, relays, capacitors, and diodes.
It consumed hundreds of kilowatts and burned the air in the rooms. Additional ventilation was required to operate the machine.
The first programmers of this machine were a group of women who would later be called the ENIAC Six. History has preserved their names, which are no less important to history than that of engineer von Neumann: Betty Holberton, Jean Jennings, Kay McNulty, Marlene Weskoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Bilas Spencer.
The feminine term "programmer" would likely have simply made these ladies with a mathematical background laugh. They were selected as the most skilled calculators, then taught to work with new technology, often without the usual instructions.
They learned to operate ENIAC from diagrams and drawings, as the project had been kept under strict secrecy for a long time. Then they ran the tasks themselves, debugged the configurations, and explained how to make the machine calculate correctly.
The media somewhat tarnished the impression of these women. When ENIAC was discussed in newspapers and photographs, male engineers were often featured, while the work of female programmers was not included in the reports, not even discussed.
Recognition came decades later, when historians and engineers began to put names and faces back into the story.
SYMBOL AND WARNING
The USSR boasted exceptional schools of mathematics and physics, vast experience in mobilization projects, and a powerful defense industry. It seems computing technology should have taken off immediately. And it did develop, but overcoming specific obstacles.
Cybernetics came under attack in Soviet public culture in the early 1950s. The press accused it of being "reactionary," of serving bourgeois goals, and of dreaming of replacing humans with machines (the communist idea, however, was to create a new type of human, not a machine).
Cybernetics was declared a threat emanating from the West. For a time, it sank into oblivion, but then a reversal began. By the late 1950s, the science gained institutional support. The Cybernetics Council, sections, conferences, collections, and scholarly and popular texts emerged.
The country is beginning to discuss the use of computers in economic management, planning, and statistics. Cybernetics is incorporated into the concepts of state plans, right down to the slogan "In the service of communism."
Historians of computing note a paradox. The USSR achieved success in rockets, nuclear weapons, and space exploration, but lagged behind the United States in the mass computing industry. The explanations often boil down to several factors.
First: an industrial base of components and mass production. The computer industry requires a stable supply of components, standardization, quality, and a strong production culture.
Second: software and ecosystem. A machine's value lies in its ability to solve many problems, and this quickly leads to a world of operating systems, libraries, tools, and languages. Copying Western architectures provided access to software, but perpetuated dependence and a lag in the face of cutting-edge discoveries. Alas.
Third: the relationship between the military and civilian sectors. In the US, technologies often migrated from defense to commercial use, and commercial use scaled them up. In the USSR, the military sector was a "black hole" for innovations that didn't yield the desired benefits for civilian use.
And fourth: governance policy. The idea of a unified computer network for economic management required a reform of the governance structures themselves. Technology could speed up the flow of data, but it could not, on its own, replace conflicts of interest and the fear of losing power.
ENIAC was shut down in the fall of 1955. In nine years, it had become a symbol of progress and a warning to humanity.
But as is often the case with high technology, the machine quickly became obsolete. The world was moving toward more convenient architectures, toward the binary system as the basis for electronic computing, toward memory that stores instructions, toward input-output devices, toward new elements. Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, then integrated circuits appeared, and the scale of miniaturization turned computing into a mass commodity.
ENIAC was dismantled. The wire monster fell asleep. Now other machines are taking over the world. And their development is proceeding at a completely different pace. Frightening
[ConservativeTreehouse] Overnight in the USA time zones, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a very important speech at the Munich Security Conference [3:00am ET]. The video is below [prompted] and a FULL transcription will soon follow Added Below:.
This is a critically worded speech that is very important to listen to with great deliberation. Within his remarks Rubio is telling Europe that we want to remain allied in our interests, but we are no longer going to allow the system of “globalism” to destroy our uniquely American life.
The United States is separating from the madness; this is not up for debate. The only question is whether Europe is too far gone, or whether they will join us.
The euphoria that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, “led us to a dangerous delusion. That we had entered quote the end of history. That every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood. That the rules-based global order, an overused term, would now replace the national interest, and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world. This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history, and it has cost us dearly.”
[Transcript] SECRETARY RUBIO: “Thank you very much. We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation – actually, it was on a continent – that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.
And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe – one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. We were unified not just by what we were fighting against; we were unified by what we were fighting for. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole. ”
[THE WRAP] Bill O’Reilly says there’s one reason the Democrats in Washington are stalling on the latest federal spending bill — and it’s based on a misleading statistic.
The most recent continuing resolution expires Friday at midnight, and if that date passes without an agreement, the government will have to shut down — again.
"You know, we do this every two months, right?" O’Reilly said on Friday’s episode of "No Spin News." "But here’s why they’re holding it up: because Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries really want to gut the Homeland Security apparatus and ICE in a specific way. They want to neutralize it so that Homeland Security will have a far more difficult time controlling undocumented migrants already in this country ... OK, let me prove it to you."
[IsraelTimes] Despite its losses to Israel, Tehran retains missiles, manpower and regional reach.
With one American carrier strike group already in the Middle East and another apparently on its way as US President Donald Trump ...His ancestors didn't own any slaves... ramps up pressure on Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... to give up its nuclear program, fears are rising of the outbreak of another war that could spread into a regional conflict.
The 12-day Israel-Iran war last year appeared to cripple key elements of Iran’s military, yet left its capabilities far from neutralized — a distinction that looms large as tensions rise again.
If hostilities erupt again, the risk of a broader protracted conflict returns, especially if Iran’s leadership sees the fight as one for its existence.
With one American carrier strike group already in the Middle East and another apparently on its way as US President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program, fears are rising of the outbreak of another war that could spread into a regional conflict.
The 12-day Israel-Iran war last year appeared to cripple key elements of Iran’s military, yet left its capabilities far from neutralized — a distinction that looms large as tensions rise again.
If hostilities erupt again, the risk of a broader protracted conflict returns, especially if Iran’s leadership sees the fight as one for its existence.
OPEN SKIES
The June 13-24 war started when Israel launched strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear program and top military officials, saying it was responding to an existential threat posed by the nuclear program as well as Iran’s massive ballistic missile array. The United States joined the conflict, hitting three nuclear sites with massive "bunker-buster" bombs dropped from B-2 stealth bombers that flew their mission from their home base in Missouri.
It was a risky move for Trump, who has criticized his predecessors for involving the US in "stupid wars," but Iran responded weakly to the US attack, with a limited missile attack on an American military base in Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... that it warned Washington of in advance, and which caused no casualties. Tehran and Israel then both agreed to a ceasefire.
Israel was able to significantly degrade Iran’s air defenses with Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s and covert attacks from teams on the ground. Iran, presumably aware that its older F-14 and MiG-29 fighters were no match for the fifth-generation American F-35 stealth fighters and other aircraft flown by Israel, also never sent its air force into action.
That left the skies clear for Israel to carry out waves of attacks, and for the US to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities and get out of Iranian airspace without the B-2 bombers ever being fired upon.
If hostilities resume, that scenario is likely to repeat, said Sascha Bruchmann, a defense analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain.
"In practical terms, in reductionist terms, the sky is open for American and Israeli planes," he said. "The problem is how to defend the region from the retaliation."
Bruchmann said in the case of an expanded war, Iran would most likely hit back by targeting US bases in the region, but could also attack oil infrastructure and mine the Strait of Hormuz, which links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil is transported.
They could also attempt to hit the American aircraft carriers, though they’re well defended by the destroyers in their strike groups, Bruchmann said.
"If the regime itself believes its survival is at stake, which it did not believe in June last year, I think the game is different," he said. "If you have a ... regime that thinks it’s about to go down, then why would you hold back with retaliation?"
IRAN’S MISSILE CUPBOARD
Iran fired hundreds of missiles during the 12-day war and used more than 1,000 attack drones, killing nearly three dozen Israeli civilians and wounding thousands.
Danny Citrinowicz, a researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and a former Iran specialist in Israel’s military and intelligence services, said that it remains unclear how much missile capacity Iran has rebuilt.
"You can see through satellite imagery, attempts to restart manufacturing," he said, adding that government leaks in Israeli media suggest that Israel assumes Iran still retains a substantial number of short-range ballistic missiles.
Israeli strikes last year focused on what officials saw as the most immediate threats — Iran’s medium- and long-range missiles — leaving Tehran with a reduced but far from eliminated ability to threaten Israel. Its ability to hit nearby US bases with short-range missiles seems barely diminished.
"The short-range ballistic missiles did not suffer any significant hit whatsoever in the 12-day war," Citrinowicz said.
Iran’s exact capabilities aren’t known, but it’s thought to still have more than 1,000 long-range missiles that could hit Israel, and several thousand of the shorter-range missiles that could be used to hit American bases or other targets nearby, Bruchmann said.
Missile stockpiles matter only if a country retains the systems to launch them. Israel also took out many of Iran’s launchers, but wasn’t able to destroy them completely, and it seems likely that Iran will have been working hard to rebuild that capacity.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Clarice @ AT] This week’s major developments include a number of secondary explosions: government bureaucrats who censored free speech on internet platforms using NGOs as covers will be facing court action; the fallout from the boomeranging Epstein disclosures keep damaging the Democrats and their foreign allies; the media’s promotion of the moronic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only served to highlight that she’s is ill-informed and too lazy to prepare for interviews; and DOGE and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent are making it very hard to keep hiding Democratic corruption.
...
