2026-08-14

Cool

• Stunning Eclipse turns daylight into darkness across Europe

Horseshit

• The shock revelation that light bulbs are wrecking your metabolism

• Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts

• The Quest for Caffeine You Can Have at Night

  Since the beginning of time, mankind has yearned to drink a cup of coffee at 5 PM and go to sleep at 10. But now there’s an entire scientific subfield and several companies pandering to this absurd fantasy.

  • Never mind the people with tolerances, or who metabolize things differently: they don't count. We're doing Science(TM)!

• Medical Startup Selling Prescription Kit for Nuclear Disaster

• Shattered skeleton is first confirmed death from trebuchet

• The Improbable, Inevitable Return of the Suit

• In praise of designer-ish babies

• Americans Love the Roar of a V-8 Engine–and They Don't Want to Give It Up

celebrity gossip

• Garry Tan says turning down early offer to join Palantir a $2-4B 'mistake'

Obit

• Hiroshi Okuda, Toyota chair who pushed for the Prius, dies at 93

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• SPLC official arrested as feds allege $4.1M donor scheme tied to extremists | Fox News

  A former top Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) official was arrested on charges Wednesday as federal prosecutors unveiled sweeping new allegations that donated money was allegedly secretly funneled to extremists and used for activities including recruiting members, staging rallies and buying materials for Ku Klux Klan robes and cross burnings. Heidi Beirich, 59, of Palm Springs, California, was charged alongside the SPLC with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank. The second superseding indictment also charges Beirich with a conspiracy to commit concealed money laundering. Beirich was served with an arrest warrant Wednesday morning, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Alabama.

Musk

• Swedish union IF Metall halts strike against Tesla – all members bought out

• Elon Musk, the Most Famous EV Pioneer, Is Now Leaning into Fossil Fuels

• X open sources its ranking algo, letting users see if they've been shadowbanned

• Tesla paid Elon Musk 2.5M times more as CEO than its average worker in 2025

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Polestar Dealer Claims Automaker 'Orchestrated' Its U.S. Ban in Lawsuit

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why must a socialist also be woke?

• Scientist Proposes Consciousness Might Be the Fabric of Reality Itself

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple TV just added a bunch of classic movies to stream for free

• German nonprofit files criminal complaint over Meta smart glasses privacy

• Google's newest Pixel Watch monitors blood pressure and insulin resistance

• Smart pet feeders stopped feeding pets during a cloud outage

• Flock changes surveillance rules after cops used it to stalk exes

  • Despite Updates, Flock's Creepy Cameras Remain Major Civil Liberties Threat

  • Flock boss admits surveillance firm took too long to act over police abuse

  • Flock Again Activates a Camera System a Town Had Voted to Shut Down

• Bending Spoons Customers Decry 'Outrageous' App Price Hikes

• PBS station loses 50TB of data; 70 years of TV history after cloud vendor defunct

  • It reads like someone's nephew was chosen to run a front company for the backup services, the actual data was held by a real company that still has it. The front has collapsed and the TV station wasn't the customer for the people holding the data, so the courts have to be involved to get it back.

• Forbes Fired Top Editor After Discovering He Received Secret $6M Payment

• 'Zoomsday' flaw lets anyone in a Zoom call take over any device

• Namecheap Phoenix datacenter overheats taking all sites down

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole 'star'

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Booksellers suspect AI firms are buying and then destroying rare books

• Anthropic in Talks to Buy World Model AI Startup Decart for $6B

  • Anthropic in talks to buy Decart AI for $6B

• Video game lawyer says all her clients have anti-AI contracts

• Jeff Dean has been in talks for a $10B valuation for his new AI startup

• 'Near-autonomous' AI agents attack Taiwan's nuclear safety agency

• The White House Is Going to Expand It's AI Policy

• Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

• Twitch Now Trains Amazon's Generative AI Models on Your Channel by Default

  • Twitch CPO squirms, admits everyone hates its new AI training 'feature'

  • Amazon will train on Twitch streamers' content by default, unless they opt out

• Nvidia doubles RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell's MSRP to a staggering $16,000

• Putting Sign Language AI into Users Hands

• Why Japanese firms are being so slow to use AI

• Over 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers; US protests intensify

• Chinese censorship is leaking into answers from American AI

• General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI

• Apple in Talks to Pay Publishers for News Content to Power Siri AI

  • Apple in Talks to Pay Publishers to Improve AI-Powered Siri

• Apple and AI: Siri the Early Years

  there is a credible scenario where Apple is a huge winner - possibly even the biggest winner - in the ‘AI revolution’.

• The "Godmother of AI" says the biggest risk to AI is students losing the desire learn.

• How Kids feel about AI, in their own words

• AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

  • Free sites too. I've stopped posting to printables.com, myself; the unprintable AI crap flooded out the clever effort.

• AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

• If You Weren't Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks

• Anthropic reportedly plans a $2T IPO in October

  • Anthropic investors bet on $2T valuation in record IPO

• Banning Open-Weight AI Models Could Cost America the AI Race

• Rogue AI Agents Aren't Evil. They're Just Eager to Please

• It May Be Time to Panic About AI

• OpenAI Hires New Chief Revenue Officer After Less Than a Year

• Samsung is using Claude to verify chip designs. It's not going smoothly

• Five European companies just agreed to buy AI compute that doesn't exist yet

• Amazon loses US court ban on Perplexity's AI shopping tools

• Person Hides Prompt Injection in Legal Filing Telling AI to Side with Them

• Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live

• Chatbots are doing the work of Congress with little oversight

• OpenAI's Revenue Run Rate Tops $40B Ahead of IPO

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Goat herding hedge: Susquehanna, Kalshi help company offset change in law

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Return to the 'Trust Us' Days of Central Banking? No Thanks

• Ratings Firm Accused of Grade Inflation Vouched for $40B of Insurer Debt

  • Credit ratings are a matter of how much you pay to the agencies issuing them, as was proven in 2007...

• OPEC further lowers 2026 global oil demand growth forecast

• Why Gen Z is ditching traditional finance for crypto and social apps

• Bank of Japan September rate hike locked in; SME bankruptcies hit 12-year high

• US sells 30-year bonds at highest borrowing costs since 2001

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• White House Lifts Ban on TikTok from US Government Devices

• US Justice Department shifts focus to government programme fraud

• SF exempted 1900 parcels from a housing law. YIMBYs are suing city to reverse it

Trump

• Trump to allow use of cyber tools to target transnational criminal organizations

  • White House Opens Path for Private Companies to Hack Cybercriminals

  • In a first, US will allow some private firms to carry out cyberattacks

Left Angst

• Richest to Profit in Trump's Capital Gain Tax Ideas for Midterms

• Law firm declines offer to represent migrant children

  A small Texas law firm with ties to the Trump administration declined a $150 million federal contract it was offered to represent migrant children traveling alone to the U.S., authorities said Wednesday, raising long-term questions about who would represent them.

• Lawsuit fights Ellison-Trump corruption's harm to news outlets

• Elon Musk's DOGE Promised Savings, but It's Cost Us a Fortune

• Trump has amassed staggering wealth in 'most openly corrupt' presidency

• CBP workers accused of using government databases to spy on exes

• Trump's 401(k) Proposal Shows Evidence of Phony Public Support

• DOJ finds three federal STEM education programs unconstitutional

• The Trump administration's Most Dangerous Attack on Science Yet

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Three years after police raid on Kansas newspaper, reporter settles for $850K

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• They Spoke English, Wore U.S. Flags and Attacked Fishermen. Who Were They?

• Pentagon missile buildup changing the factory floor

• Drone Sightings Happening at Diego Garcia, US's Remote Strategic Island Outpost

• North Korea's Operation to Conquer the American Job Market

  • What We Learned Tracing North Korea's Hidden Workforce Inside American Companies

• Desperate US sailors trying to jump overboard on extended Middle East deployment

  • US Navy sailors try to throw themselves overboard after 250 days at sea

• How U.S. Navy Pilots Really Get Their Callsigns

• Ukrainian drones wipe out US tank brigade in live war game

• Trump Orders Navy to Restore Steam Catapults in Aircraft Carriers

World

• An Indian cash scheme for women drops nine million beneficiaries – 29k were men

• EU seeks alternatives to US payment cards

• The longest ballot in British electoral history

  The list for the Clacton parliamentary by-election, which was prompted by the resignation of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, is 90cm (3ft) long. When people unfold the paper, they will find it is longer than most adults' arms.

• Train derails near Lewes in East Sussex, British Transport Police say

Iran / Houthi

• Iran Is Defying U.S. Pressure by Becoming a ‘Survival Economy’ - WSJ

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine's farmers despair as Russia's Black Sea blockade traps their harvest

• What's behind the rise of teens spying for Russia?

China

• Zhu Rongji, China's chief engineer of economic reform and former premier, dies

• Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

• China's renewable boom masks a quiet Coal-to-Liquids expansion

• Microsoft Retreats in China

Health / Medicine

• A controversial Alzheimer's surgery is said to reverse symptoms

• Science investigation casts doubt on genes hailed for warding off Alzheimer's

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Major Covid study that fueled vaccine skepticism retracted over 'misinformation'

  The article was originally published in the BMJ Public Health in May 2024. It analyzed data from 47 Western countries and concluded that there had been more than three million excess deaths between 2020 and 2022, a statistic known as excess mortality. “Overall, the journal concludes that the discussion of causes of mortality is imbalanced, lacks rigour, and includes misinformation,” the BMJ stated in the retraction notice.

• ‘Rodent Urine’ & Other Unsanitary Conditions Spark MAJOR Recall Across Multiple Food Brands.

  The facility distributed recalled products to 50 stores across three states: Indiana, Minnesota, and North Dakota. “Exposure to contaminated products can pose serious health risks to consumers, including the potential for bacterial contamination, which may result in illness or infection, including Salmonella,” the recall states.

• Toddler's tragic death from brain-destroying amoeba offers lessons for doctors

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Rapid warming may tip AMOC at 2°C, slower warming may avert collapse

• Potatoes boil in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia

• Romania to shut down nuclear plant due to low Danube level

  • Romania shuts only nuclear plant as heat causes drop in Danube River level

• Record heat is drying up Europe's major rivers, as these striking images show

• The End of the Endangered Species Act?

  Each species listing lowers annual permit flows by 10% in the permitting jurisdictions nearby the listed habitat. There have been hundreds of new additions to the endangered species list since 1980 and endangered species habitats now cover the vast majority of the country. Adding up the implied effects across all of these listings I find that the ESA has reduced US housing stock by around 6.3 million units since 1980, which is about 4% of 2025 housing stock. Without the several hundred ESA listings since 1980, the US would be permitting hundreds of thousands of additional units annually with gains concentrated in major metro areas and especially coastal California.

• An Ice Island as Big as Manhattan Just Broke Off Greenland

• The Mystery of Dark Oxygen

  Scientists once thought that life-sustaining oxygen existed only near Earth’s surface. Then they detected it deep underground.

• Northwest Indiana residents dealing with 'largest outage event on record'

• California bans paraquat, highly toxic herbicide outlawed in 70 countries