Happy Birthday, Pedo!
Well, that’s one way to keep the Epstein Pedo-Files in the news.
It would be a great birthday present for Ursula, er, Pam Bondi to release the files, now more than a month past the legal deadline.
Well, that’s one way to keep the Epstein Pedo-Files in the news.
It would be a great birthday present for Ursula, er, Pam Bondi to release the files, now more than a month past the legal deadline.
The Week Ahead
The Journos at the NOTUS email thingie have consulted the mystical Ouija Board, cross-tabbed with the I-Ching sticks, and confirmed with the Magic 8-Ball that these will be the stories of the week:
Today: Supreme Court expected to release opinions.
Wednesday: Trump is scheduled to speak at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. SCOTUS is set to hear oral arguments in the Lisa Cook case.
Thursday: Gavin Newsom will reportedly also speak at Davos. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Trump is set to hold a “charter signing ceremony” in Davos for his Gaza “Board of Peace.”
Friday: The March For Life will be held on the National Mall.
So you can see it will be an action-packed week. As always, look at what Hair Füror does, not what he says. The record, the record, the record (as Molly Ivins used to say), is what counts.

Cowboy Diplomat Grandpa Sundowner: “Yippy!”
Tiger Beat on the Potomac (thanks Charlie!) email thingie’s summary of Grandpa Sundowner’s wild night —he was as frantic as a Beagle in a vacuum cleaner factory— reads like a demented Harold and the Purple Crayon:
While you were sleeping: In a series of extraordinary late night statements, the president doubled down on his threats to take over Greenland — and Canada — while at turns mocking, threatening and humiliating the European leaders who have resisted his advances. This crisis feels like it’s spiraling out of control.
FIRST UP: Speaking in Miami after attending last night’s college football national championship game, Trump confirmed he has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to join his Gaza Board of Peace. You can imagine the reaction in Europe, where Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Only last night, Putin’s military was bombing residential areas across Kyiv as thousands of freezing people cowered without water or power.
And there’s more: Trump then threatened to slap France with a 200-percent tariff on wine and Champagne after learning French President Emmanuel Macron is snubbing the same board over fears it seeks to ape and overshadow the U.N. — concerns widely shared around Europe, per the FT.
We interrupt this TBotP to remind everyone of the horror of…
We return now to TBotP:
This you? After boarding Air Force One, a still-rankled Trump published a private text message from Macron showing the French president reaching out to him in friendly terms. In the text, Macron offers to work closely with Trump on Middle Eastern projects and to host emergency G7 talks in Paris later this week. “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” Macron writes. A French official told POLITICO the text is genuine.
We interrupt to snicker:
Back to TBotP still in progress:
Who needs sleep anyway?? By 1 a.m., Trump was busily posting AI-generated images to illustrate his designs on Greenland — one showing him planting a U.S. flag on the island, a second of him showing a modified map of the Americas to European leaders in which the U.S. owns Greenland, Canada and Venezuela. Are we about to see the first empire built entirely by meme?
We interrupt again…
…and again…
Back to TBotP…
Coming attractions: Trump then revealed a positive conversation on Greenland with NATO chief Mark Rutte, and confirmed he’ll hold talks “with the various parties” in Davos. “Greenland is imperative for National and World Security. There can be no going back,” Trump wrote. (The president also leaked a fawning private text message from Rutte for good measure.)
I’m getting dizzy from all the interruptions:
And finally … Trump unloaded on British PM Keir Starmer, with whom he has established a warm relationship these past 12 months. Starmer is under pressure at home over a decision to hand ownership of the Diego Garcia archipelago — which hosts U.S. and British air bases — back to Mauritius, and then lease the land back for 99 years. Trump had been careful not to criticize the agreement, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly welcomed it last year.
But now Trump takes aim: Posting at 1:38 a.m., the president mocked Britain for an “act of total weakness,” which he suggested played into Chinese and Russian hands. And he directly linked his newfound hostility to his quest for Greenland. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY,” Trump added, “and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.” The U.K. government made clear this morning it’s not budging.
I’m getting tired of interrupting…
(And just for the point of clarity: Diego Garcia and Greenland are in different hemispheres, and have nothing in common except being surrounded by salt water.)
Vanity Fair cover girl Susie Wild weeps: So much for the focus on affordability. It’s going to be completely drowned out by foreign affairs.
And I think we’ll call it a night, er, morning. Whatever.

I forgot about Lord Damp Nut’s decree that as of today, interest rates on credit cards will be limited to 10%!
To hell with the expense, I’m giving the canary an extra seed today!

H/T @NamelessCynic
“My Future’s So Bright, I’ve Got To Throw Shade.”
I doubt I can get $2 Ameros for my future, but a boy can dream.

H/T Scissorhead D-Cap
Not gonna say, “I told you so,” but damned if we didn’t:
Told you so:
Told ya so:
Wouldn’t it be great if Davos kept him?

Greenland
From the AP on the possible use of the Insurrection Act to invade Minnesota:
“The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans, said two infantry battalions of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division have been given prepare-to-deploy orders. The unit is based in Alaska and specializes in operating in arctic conditions.”
Gee, the 11th Airborne Division —From Alaska— sure would be useful if Cadet Bone Spurs was going invade, oh, let’s say Greenland, which happens to be in the arctic. This is so obvious —even to a dummy like me— it has a ring of the dumbass’s usual strategy of trying to head-fake everyone. It’s like his RISK board-game strategy. In other words, it’s so stupid it probably is correct.
This would also be a good time to remind the troops that “Just obeying (illegal) orders” got a lot of attention in the Nuremberg trials, and not the kind you want.

H/T @NamelessCynic
“You’re not the boss of me, hoomin!”

AI?
Axios —who I think must be doing paid PR for Fancy Autocomplete— has TWO item in this morning’s email thingie. The first item is absolutely bonkers:
Elon Musk and his SpaceX team believe they’ve cracked the code on building orbiting data centers to power the future of AI — and plan to use the company’s upcoming public offering to help fund the audacious vision, people briefed on the plans tell Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen for a “Behind the Curtain” column.
- Why it matters: Musk and top executives at other AI giants believe that earthbound data centers will become politically toxic and less efficient than space, which they see as the inevitable answer.
The intrigue: Sources tell us OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees with Musk on the physics, but knows the two men are unlikely to work together while they’re battling in court.
- Altman has explored a deal with Stoke Space, a Seattle-area startup building fully reusable rockets, as a potential acquisition to build his own orbital fleet.
Altman “lights up” when he discusses space, and is prepared to spend billions to stake an off-planet claim, sources tell us.
- A Silicon Valley investor told us that space is such an essential frontier in the AI race that OpenAI has to “do something relatively quickly. Otherwise, they run a real risk of being left behind. Sam’s not going to allow that to happen. … He’s thinking very long-term.”
“If Sam doesn’t invest heavily in Tulips, he’ll be left behind!”
After reading that excerpt, you tell me if we are in a goddamn tech bubble.
Axios continues with numbers of Ameros at stake:
🛰️ The scorecard: Google owns roughly 7% of SpaceX — an investment worth around $100 billion at the company’s rumored $1.5 trillion valuation. So Google wins big if Musk is right, even as it pursues its own rival moonshot called Project Suncatcher.
- The money at stake here is hard to comprehend. The biggest data center companies are already expected to spend more than $500 billion just this year on expansion. Now add the cost of satellites and launches.
That’s half of a $1T Ameros. That will be a big hole to fill when it crashes.
And now on to the physics:
Here’s how it works: Musk plans to use SpaceX’s Starship — the most powerfullaunch vehicle ever built — to create a huge satellite constellation, much like today’s Starlink constellation, as the data centers of the future.
Starship would be the rocket that blows up on the launchpad, if memory serves. So the big bet involved using the serial failure to launch. Got it.
- Today’s rockets can’t lift the heavy cooling systems that AI chips require. Starship can. It will carry massive next-generation Starlink satellites that function less like internet routers and more like supercomputers in the sky.
By positioning these satellites in a high orbit that stays in constant sunlight, they can harvest solar power around the clock. No night. No clouds. No electric bills.
- And instead of sending data through fiber-optic cables under the ocean, information travels between satellites via laser beams through the vacuum of space — faster and without the infrastructure.
Rep. 3-Toes left too soon. You know that Jewish Space Lasers is gonna make a return appearance.
Back to physics
🥊 Reality check: Cooling computers in space is brutally hard. On Earth, air carries heat away from processors. In the vacuum of space, there’s no air—so chips overheat and die.
- Musk claims SpaceX has designed massive, foldable radiators that unfurl in orbit to vent heat into the cold of deep space. Skeptics call it the biggest engineering hurdle since the reusable rocket.
Now imagine if every time the IT guy is called to fix something, a rocket has to be launched…
Between the lines: This isn’t just about AI. It’s about energy.
- Earth’s power grids are maxed out. Data centers are already competing for electricity with factories and homes. Musk is betting the only way to scale AI without crashing the grid is to move the computing off the planet entirely.
I cannot imagine any engineering that would say that to solve a problem like that one would need to make a complex NEW system with tons of moving pieces instead of building new power plants.
💥 Friction point: On Earth, upgrading a data center is easy — just replace some hardware. Skeptical technology watchers will gladly tell you the obvious: It’s not so simple in space.
- Massive robotics innovations will be necessary to maintain a fleet of space data centers, unless companies want to launch all-new satellites and somehow dispose of the old ones every time there’s a hardware failure or an upgrade cycle.
Planned obsolescence is the American Way.
The bottom line: If Musk pulls this off, SpaceX won’t just own transportation to space. It’ll gain a huge edge on the computing power of the future.
Now tell us about Musk’s stunning success with self-driving cars and the hyper loop.