WHAT THE HELL is the American Humane Society doing hosting their fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago and being addressed by Trump? Put aside the creepy French Revolution dog-headed dancers furry vibes, if they want to lose the goodwill of their donors by getting into bed with Trump and his puppy-shooting DHS secretary, while Trump's administration is tearing down species protection laws across the country, the Society sure found a way to disgust people everywhere.

[Uh ... ] Trump's Mar-a-Lago Hosts Deranged 'Furry' Marie Antoinette Party

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Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Hosts Deranged ‘Furry’ Marie Antoinette Party

A swanky event at Donald Trump’s winter White House featuring dog mask-wearing dancers in aristocratic outfits is drawing criticism for being “...

IMPORTANT: #Google site crawling policy rumor: I've been getting a lot of queries over the last few days regarding a recent rumor spreading rapidly that Google has or will soon be changing their site crawling policy to omit indexing of sites that do not have a robots.txt file. This rumor appears to probably trace back to this Google webmaster community video:

[video] Fix 'robots.txt unreachable' Error | Website Not Indexing? - Google Search Central Community

<div>Is your website not showing up on Google? Getting a &quot;robots.txt unreachable&quot; error in Google Search Console? This common SEO problem...

This video does seem to say that robots.txt is the first file on a site Google will attempt to retrieve, and if it can't find it the crawling and indexing stops at that point. Not crawling/indexing sites without robots.txt files would make no sense to me -- vast numbers of older sites and others have never had robots.txt files because they never felt a need to publish crawling restrictions. Also note that this Google support doc:

​robots.txt report - Search Console Help

See whether Google can process your robots.txt filesThe robots.txt report shows which robots.txt files Google found for the top 20 hosts on your si...

explicitly says that robots.txt files are not required for crawling/indexing. Several sources at Google (thanks all!) have now confirmed directly to me that robots.txt files are NOT required for indexing and no change to this policy is in the pipeline. Of course, if you have a sitemap that specifies a robots.txt file that doesn't actually exist you might create a suboptimal crawling situation, but again Google's official statement to me on this is that robots.txt files are NOT required to be present for a site to be crawled and indexed by Google.

Media Matters says it's leaving X due to TOS changes

After 48 hours of panic, $2 billion in mental health grant cuts are restored https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5677714/trump-administration-mental-health-addiction-grant-cuts-restored

BREAKING: White House meeting with Greenland/Denmark blows up -- EU sending military forces to Greenland to protect it from U.S. attacks

The only way to reign in #AI is to make the Big Tech firms 100% responsible -- in a civil and criminal sense -- for damages done by AI responses. No exceptions. Make sure that any of their attempts to shield themselves under Section 230 fail. There are already politicians attempting to undermine Section 230 more generally. I have long been a defender of 230, but if decimating 230 is what's necessary to slow down this AI Horror show, then so be it. There will be a lot of collateral damage on the Internet in that case, but it could well be worth it to society. And lives will be saved.

New MAGA CBS News is in a ratings freefall under its new anchor