HMM: Russia is ready for ceasefire but not defeat, says ambassador to UK.

Russia is ready for a ceasefire in Ukraine at any time but the prospect is “unrealistic” and unacceptable as long as Kyiv and the West insist on Russia’s military defeat, the Kremlin’s ambassador to London has told The Times.

Moscow’s threatened spring offensive is likely to come in the next few weeks, when the weather improves and the terrain is firmer, Andrey Kelin said.

Kelin acknowledged the crucial political and economic support China was giving Moscow, but said that its proposals for a peace settlement were only a framework and not a detailed plan.

That’s the second — albeit small — indication in the last week that both sides might be ready to talk.

MONEY. NEXT QUESTION? How Did George Soros’ Son Score So Many WH Meetings?

CHANGE? Biden Admin Concedes It’s Unfair To Let Men Compete In Women’s Sports With New Rules Allowing Men In Women’s Sports. “Under the long-anticipated proposal, the Department of Education outlined new guidelines that would invalidate bans on men in women’s sports currently implemented across 20 states. At the same time, schools that receive federal funding and therefore subject to Title IX stipulations may bar male athletes on female teams in competitive leagues.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Blood On Biden’s Hands From Afghanistan Withdrawal Can’t Be Washed Away. “The Biden lackeys in the federal government are beyond disgusting for trying to pull a Pontius Pilate here — they’re just plain evil.”

HMM: American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect.’

The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series).

On the flip side, however, scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period. “There’s a debate about what’s causing it, but not every domain is going down; one of them is going up,” Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study, says in a news release. “If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that’s not the case. We need to do more to dig into it.”

Less stringent reading and writing assignments, more 3D videogames?

PRIVACY: AI Firm Scrapes 30 Billion Social Media Photos, Hands Them to Law Enforcement.

SPACE: NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down.

At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet’s magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun.

The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites — including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it — made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth’s magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.
…
The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they’d delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

As a Starlink customer, here’s to hoping that’s a mistake they make only once.

GO WOKE…: Bud Light Goes Quiet, Hasn’t Posted on Social Media Since Making Dylan Mulvaney Its Spokestrans.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Hey, Won’t You Play Another Somebody Done Somebody with a Machete Song. “On this week’s Florida Man Friday we have one man’s violent passion for karaoke, the curious case of the slippery burglar, and the worst police impersonator in all of Michigan.”

DEGLOBALIZATION: China Plans to Ban Exports of Rare Earth Magnet Tech. “Beijing is currently in the process of revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export — a list of manufacturing and other industrial technologies subject to export controls — and released a draft of the revised catalog for public comment in December. In the draft, manufacturing technologies for high-performance magnets using such rare earth elements as neodymium and samarium cobalt were added to the export ban. The solicitation of comments ceased late January and the revisions are expected to be adopted as early as this year.”

It isn’t that rare earths are all that rare. It’s that Western enviros won’t let us process ours.

PRIVACY: If you’re a Tesla owner, employees might be sharing your camera recordings.

Although Tesla’s privacy policy notes, “Your privacy is and will always be enormously important to us,” recent interviews by Reuters revealed the opposite. Between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared sensitive customer information via an internal messaging system.

Some recordings showed crashes and road-rage incidents. For example, a Tesla was seen in a video from 2021 driving at high speed in a residential area and hiding a child riding a bike.

An ex-employee said the video circulated “like wildfire” through private chats within a San Mateo, California Tesla office. And in another video, a former employee described how the recording showed a naked man approaching the vehicle.

Enormously important, eh?

BANKERS SHOULDN’T BE SO FLIPPANT ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF: JP Morgan CEO Suggests Seizing Land for Wind and Solar.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: What’s the Matter With Wisconsin?

If Republicans dominate in rural precincts and Democrats in urban enclaves, then the suburbs are majority makers. Yet the suburbs have been receding from the GOP since the dawn of the Trump era.
Consider: In 2014, the last election before Trump descended on his escalator, Republicans won the suburban vote 55 percent to 45 percent. They won both the white non-college vote and the white college vote by double digits. They won voters making between $50,000 per year and $100,000 per year by 10 points.

By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, majorities among suburban white voters near the middle of the income distribution fueled the GOP’s greatest electoral strength in close to a century. Unease over Trump shrank this coalition in 2016: Republicans won the suburbs by 5 points, white non-college voters by 39 points, white college voters by 4 points, and middle-income voters by 4 points. That gave Trump the Electoral College, but not a popular vote majority.

Then Trump entered office. He retained his support among white voters without college degrees in 2018. But the remaining pillars of Republican rule crumbled beneath him. White voters with college degrees voted for Democrats by 4 points. Middle-income voters went for Democrats by 2 points. And the suburbs turned against Republicans, voting Democratic by 11 points.

Trump’s trick in 2024 — or whoever the GOP nominee turns out to be — will be winning back the burbs without alienating the rural voters who put him in office in 2016.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Tennessee House Expels Two Democrats Who Led Floor Protest Against Guns.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China tests a Stirling engine in orbit. “Similar to how hydroelectric dams generate power, a Stirling unit converts heat into electrical energy through a series of piston-driven magnets. These pistons rely on a fuel source to generate heat, pushing the magnets back and forth through a coil of wire, generating electrical current. This process is known as the Stirling cycle, which is more efficient than solar-powered systems and conventional batteries. Compared to other power systems, it is also lightweight, has a simple structure, a quick start-up cycle, and produces minor vibrations and low noise.”

GO AWAY: The New Nike Spokesperson for Sports Bras Is… Yeah, That Guy Again.

SO MUCH FOR THAT RUMORED APRIL 10 TEST FLIGHT: SpaceX pushes window for first-ever orbital launch from its Boca Chica Starbase out to mid April.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter Code Included ‘Government Requested’ Intervention Tool.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘Something is going to go boom’: IMF chief warns of a more fragile global economy.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: A Lot of the Trans Folks Are Self-Identifying as Violent Now. “Not only is the trans crowd not keeping a low profile after one of their own slaughtered six people less than two weeks ago, but they’re also being pretty clear that there’s more where that came from.”

BRAVE NEW WORLD: Google Will ‘Absolutely’ Bring AI Chat to Your Searches. “As the world’s most popular search engine, Google serves up information and links in response to billions of queries every day. Bringing AI chat to Google Search would make the technology accessible to significantly more people, taking it from the realm of experimental project to everyday tool used to find information.”

But: ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim.

An Australian mayor said he may take legal action over false information shared by advanced chatbot ChatGPT.

Brian Hood, Mayor of Hepburn Shire Council, says the OpenAI-owned tool falsely claimed he was imprisoned for bribery while working for a subsidiary of Australia’s national bank.

In fact, Mr Hood was a whistleblower and was never charged with a crime.
His lawyers have sent a concerns notice to OpenAI – the first formal step in defamation action in Australia.

OpenAI has 28 days to respond to the concerns notice, after which time Mr Hood would be able to take the company to court under Australian law.

If he pursues the legal claim, it would be the first time OpenAI has publicly faced a defamation suit over the content created by ChatGPT.

And: Defamed by ChatGPT: My Own Bizarre Experience with Artificiality of ‘Artificial Intelligence.’

Until AIs stop making stuff up, I’m not sure I want to trust them with my search results.

I’M NOT SURPRISED: Bill Gates Rejects Elon Musk’s Plea to Pause AI Development Over Potential Dangers.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China declares price war on SpaceX reusable rockets, with economy driving new aerospace programme.

With an aim of bringing the payload cost down to about US$150 dollars per kilogram, the Chinese space plane is likely to remain competitive as the space race moves to a new, more intense stage, according to Song’s team.

China conducted two test flights of the new transport system in the Gobi Desert, the researchers said.

In July 2021, a space plane blasted off vertically from a rocket launch pad, made a suborbital flight in space and touched down at a military airport.
The same hypersonic vessel was launched again in August last year and returned unscratched, proving the reusable design was feasible.

But the tested plane was smaller than the final version, which still needs years of development to enter commercial service, according to Song’s team.

It’s one thing to declare a price war, but it’s quite another to actually wage one with a launch vehicle that doesn’t exist yet.

WATCH: Pentagon Propagandist Admits Intelligence Agencies Are Essentially Useless in Afghanistan Withdrawal Report Briefing.

BREAKING: Another Would-Be Trans Mass Shooter Arrested.