2026-05-30

etc

• Bodies recovered after chemical tank implosion at Washington paper mill

Horseshit

• Influencers spread news of healthy French cheese

• The Midwestern Exodus Is Finally Ending

• Don't shoot for the moon: aiming for above average is key to success

• In 1930 Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-hour weeks. Why was he so wrong?

• Gen Z Men Want Babies. Gen Z Women Don't

Epstein

• Bondi refuses to answer questions about Trump's involvement in Epstein files

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike

Musk

• They hate none so fiercely as the apostate: Musk abandoned his own solar electric economy to burn gas for an unused AI chat

• Why Tesla's AI trainers don't trust its self-driving tech

  • Tesla's FSD safety claims are misleading marketing, not safety research

• ChatGPT isn't the only chatbot pulling answers from Elon Musk's Grokipedia

• Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

• SpaceX skeptics' added reason for concern: Musk comments diverge from IPO filing

• SpaceX's index fund debut will look nothing like what most investors expect

• SpaceX and the 'Enshittification' of Markets

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo launches cheaper robotaxis in Los Angeles

• Ferrari bungled the design of its first EV

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Humanoid robots 'the future' of car making, says BMW

• Scientists found the optimal robot body, and it has 20 legs

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which we publish

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Intel makes bid for handheld gaming with Arc G3

• Bluesky embraces long-form content to counter X Articles

• Microsoft walks back "Microsoft Windows Defender is all you need" statement

• Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump

  • A shared responsibility: Protecting customers through Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure

  The vulnerabilities known as RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma were not responsibly disclosed. In response to the unnecessary risk created by these disclosures, our security teams have been working around the clock to understand the impact, protect our customers, and develop security updates. We remain firmly opposed to these actions, and any disclosure outside proper coordination that could harm our customers and the digital ecosystem. Uncoordinated disclosures that put proof-of-concept code for unpatched vulnerabilities into the hands of bad actors are never justifiable and have real-world consequences. Our security teams across the company work tirelessly tracking threat actors who look for weaknesses just like these to attack Microsoft and our customers. Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity – coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world.

  • Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump

• California Attorney General sues 23andMe successor for 2023 data breach

• Meta asks users to pay for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook

  • What do you get with Meta and Instagram's new $3.99 subscription plan?

• Social media bans for teenagers lack evidence and pose risks, scientists say

• The End of Factorio

  We envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio, and we will shift the focus onto long term support. So things like bug fixes, platform support/compatibility, modding features, etc. Other than that we feel we've reached a good place to conclude the active gameplay development.

• "I somehow managed to import 1.8M books to calibre"

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Supercomputers once worth millions to be auctioned

  One of the machines is called a Cray Triton T-932 and is believed to be one of only three left in the world. It was once owned by the UK government and while the exact price of this one is not known, the model had a list price of $39m (£29m) at the time. One the machines is the first Cray T3D, known as Typhoon, once the fastest supercomputer in Europe, weighing more than three tonnes and nearly 2m tall.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Details Its Plan to Build a Lunar Base at the Moon's South Pole

• Visible to Orlando: Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explodes during prelaunch test

  The company's powerful New Glenn rocket exploded during a routine prelaunch engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday night (May 28), creating a huge fireball that lit up the dark Space Coast skies. Nobody was injured, Blue Origin said in an update on X on Thursday night. But damage to the pad — Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) — could be extensive, judging by the extent of the explosion, which multiple rocket-watchers captured on video.

  • Blue Origin's New Glenn explodes on the pad during static fire test; no injuries

  • Blue Origin New Glenn rocket explodes on launch pad during engine-firing test

  • Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded during a static fire test

  • Blue Origin rocket, owned by Jeff Bezos, explodes during test in Florida

  • Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explodes on launchpad

  • Blue Origin New Glenn Rocket Apparently Explodes at Cape Canaveral, Florida

  • Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explodes during testing in Florida

  • Blue Origin rocket explodes on launch pad in Florida.

  • This angle is even crazier

  • Blue Origin rocket explodes on launchpad in a setback

  • Here's why the failure of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is so catastrophic

  Multiple sources have confirmed that there is significant damage to Blue Origin’s launch site in Florida, LC-36A. The company invested years and at least hundreds of millions of dollars in this facility. The scale of the massive lightning towers is difficult to comprehend unless one has climbed one of them. The company does not have another launch site for New Glenn. It has begun preliminary work on a nearby pad, LC-36B, and has plans to develop another site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But these projects are just getting started. Rebuilding the company’s pad, or finishing a new one, will likely take at least a year, even with a major effort by Blue Origin, and drawing upon Jeff Bezos’ nearly infinite resources. One source familiar with pad rebuilds estimated that 15 months was a “best case” scenario.

  You might wonder what the big deal is. SpaceX has been blowing up Starship rockets left and right, and the space nerds seem to be cheering them on. The reality is that Blue Origin took a more traditional design route with New Glenn, as opposed to SpaceX’s iterative design, which seeks to test, fly, fail, and fix hardware. The New Glenn first stage had performed nearly flawlessly during its first three flights. It is a mature design. Because of this, Blue Origin had reached the point where it was poised to begin near-monthly launches of the vehicle during the second half of the year, serving a variety of customers, from NASA to Amazon, AST SpaceMobile, and its own internal payloads. With the Vulcan rocket also currently offline due to an anomaly, it once again places all of the US medium- and heavy-lift launch capacity in SpaceX’s basket, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

  • I must submit that it easier for the public to have confidence in multiply tested, failed and fixed designs. The NASA attitude of "we got it right and you may not say otherwise" doesn't engender trust.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic reaches $965B valuation, surpassing OpenAI as most valuable AI firm

  • Anthropic hits $965B valuation with latest funding round, overtaking OpenAI

  • Anthropic's growth is 'just the tip of the sphere' for AI rally

  investor demand for AI companies is just getting started, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. Ives told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday that “for the first time in 30 years, the U.S. is ahead of China” on technology. He said that Anthropic’s latest valuation of $965 billion after securing $65bn in funding on Thursday is “just the tip of the sphere,” and investors should turn their attention to data layer companies, such as Snowflake, Datadog and InnoData. “Our view is the second, third, fourth derivative, just like we saw this week with Snowflake and Dell, is showing where the spending is,” he added.

• CNN sues Perplexity over alleged AI copyright theft

• Evidence that the first papal encyclical on AI was substantially written by AI

• Is Peter Thiel the Target of Pope Leo's Gandalf Quote? An Investigation

• GPUs and RAM Are in Short Supply, but the Real Bottleneck for AI Is Electricians

• Nvidia bets $150B on Taiwan as Trump's plan to make US an AI hub backfires

• The $500K AI Film That "Premiered at Cannes" Was Not in the Official Festival

• Nonfiction Book Publishers Aren't Remotely Ready for AI

• Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets

• The Digital Economy Is Destroying Our Lives and Our Planet

• LLMs believe false statements even after explicit warnings that they're false

• Anthropic's self-reported run-rate revenue growth is wild

• Funny but serious, Chieng issues an AI warning to grads

• I Tried to Sell My House with a Chatbot

• Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people

• Sam Altman Says AI 'Jobs Apocalypse' He Once Predicted Probably Won't Happen

• Kevin O'leary claims China stirred data-center protests

• Ronny Chieng Tells Harvard to 'Destroy AI' as Graduates Cheer

• The Vatican's Man Inside Anthropic

• The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disaster

• The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI

• Not That Georgia. A.I. Compounds a Nation's Identity Woes

• A.I. Doesn't Have to Mean Layoffs

• Mystery company accidentally blew $500M on Claude AI in a single month

• Startup offers free home cleaning–if it can record it all for robot training

  • Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

• Tech companies desperately want to film you doing chores

• Apollo and Blackstone are wrangling $36B to buy Google chips for Anthropic

• AI Slop Is Coming for Your Playlists

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Why Prediction Markets Are a New Frontier for Insider Trading

• Kalshi launches an "S&P 500 for politics"

• Kalshi launches perpetual futures in America

• Why Would Someone Publicly Burn $8M Worth of Bitcoin?

• Google employee charged with using insider data to rig bets on Polymarket

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

• After Cyberstalking Settlement, eBay Rewrites Board Oversight Rules

• The 'Salami Incident' That Has JPMorgan Chase on the Hook for $4.25M

• Americans Are Falling Behind on Their $1.25T Credit-Card Bill

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Judiciary Tried to Hide Judge's Name. It Left a Roadmap to Identify Her Instead

  As soon as we flagged an unnamed federal judge having sex in chambers as part of an extramarital affair with a “high ranking law enforcement officer,” everyone asked the immediate follow-up, “how is a federal judge unable to afford a hotel room?” Followed soon after by, “who is the anonymous judge?” Because despite the severity of the allegations — an affair that raised serious blackmail risks, attending openly partisan events, and lying to investigators when caught — the Eleventh Circuit and the Judicial Conference both concealed the judge’s identity.

• Sex-obsessed prison warden and OnlyFans mom filmed romping with inmate in cell regrets ‘everything I did.’

• We are going to DEMAND that nonprofits know their grant recipients

  The IRS is now giving guidance on the Form 990, which nonprofits they have to file. We are going to DEMAND that nonprofits know their grant recipients." "So if a grant recipient is violent, if they are suppressing people's rights, then YOU are responsible for that."

• A spin-off deal saved TikTok’s US future. Sen. Ed Markey is questioning if it puts national security at risk

• FCC warns US broadcasters their licenses are a privilege, not a right

• Tennessee’s GOP State Government is Subsidizing the Relocation of Cultural Adversary Starbucks; How Did TN Leaders Promise $30M that Hadn’t Yet Been Approved in a Public Forum?

  How did Governor Lee know he could promise a $30 million incentive to Starbucks if it hadn’t yet been debated in a forum open to the public? I am not accusing the five members of the Tennessee State Funding Board of doing anything illegal. To the contrary, I am sure they have very good counsel who ensured that what they did is technically in accordance with state law. But that doesn’t make it right.

Trump

• White House pushes Congress to approve $250 bill with Trump's image

• Troops to get free tickets to White House UFC event, must meet weight standards

• David Sacks's 11th-Hour Plea Led to Trump's Backtrack on AI Executive Order

Democrats

• Gretchen Whitmer rules out running for president in 2028.

• Newsom says he wants 100% tax on Californians that get money from Trump’s J6 compensation fund.

• A Theory of Everything Is Revolutionizing the Democratic Party

Left Angst

• The White House Intervened to Get a $620M Deal for Donald Trump Jr

• Whitehouse.gov/Aliens

  • White House Maps Immigration Arrests on a Site Themed as an Alien Invasion

• Trump Administration Defends Samuel Alito's Son as Secretive Role Revealed

  Treasury Department officials defended the employment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's son Thursday after a report revealed he held a senior legal role inside the department during the High Court cases involving President Donald Trump.

• Republicans are poised to finish this year’s redistricting war 10 seats ahead of Democrats.

  The GOP kicked off the fight last year in Texas, changing boundaries for US House districts in the hopes of improving the party’s chances of surviving a blue wave this fall, with Democrats responding in turn. The US Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision last month to gut one of the remaining pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act further supercharged redistricting efforts across the South, prompting several Republican-controlled states to move election dates and eliminate districts with sizable Black populations.

• DC's Columbus Circle fountain repaired

• OMB's Proposed Federal Rules That May Destroy American Science

• Federal judge orders Trump's name be removed from Kennedy Center

• SEC moves to repeal rule that companies report greenhouse emissions,climate risk

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Like a Naked Emperor

  In the annals of Deep State WTF-ery, is there a stranger case than CIA officer David Rush turning up with $40-million in 303 one-kilogram gold bars, plus $2-million in cash, plus a stash of 30 mostly Rolex watches? Well, yeah, the stranger story is how the guy got hired by the CIA in the first place.

  Rush first applied for a job at the CIA in March 2006. He claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in math from Clemson University and a master’s from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He was rejected. He reapplied later that same year. Bumped again. He reapplied again in 2009, adding a new credential: that he’d been a US Navy test pilot and flight trainer. This time, he was hired. Rush’s college credentials were found to be false, but it is unclear when that was discovered. Since he included them in his two earlier 2006 failed applications, why were they not flagged in his successful 2009 application? His claim of being a US Navy pilot was also found to be false (he was an information systems tech in his Navy service). The FBI affidavit unsealed recently details the pattern of lies across all applications.

  Rush allegedly requested the gold and foreign currency from the CIA for “work-related expenses” between November 2025 and March 2026. The agency later could not account for the assets or locate records explaining their official purpose. A search of a storage locker at CIA connected to Rush turned up only a small amount of the requisitioned cash.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Military personnel are being targeted using location data

  • Troops' phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

  • The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops' Phones for Years. Now They Are

• Report urges Space Force deployment to counter China.

World

• The internet has become too American to trust

• AI to be used to estimate age of UK asylum seekers

• How the Boomers Screwed Europe

• Indian brand sues Google, wins ban on rivals bidding on its trademark

• Germany's most wanted woman jailed after three decades evading police

• Why Britain's fintech stars faded

• Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years

• Hotel that refused to give tourist tap water acted lawfully

• EU's Economic Powers Seek Unity to Push Capital Markets Merger

• The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup with Big Tech

• Canada Dips into Technical Recession for First Time Since 2020

  • Canada in Technical Recession

• The Bottle of Freedom

  When the Portuguese government decided to add a 10-cent deposit to the price of every plastic bottle under 3 liters (101 fl oz), a small family business in central Portugal did the math and launched a 3.1-liter (105 fl oz) bottle.

• UK Visa Portal exposed passports and selfies – then called the lawyers on us

• Why German trains are never on time anymore

• Der Spiegel has made Nazi party membership cards searchable

Iran / Houthi

• US says ‘very close’ to deal with all eyes on Trump to agree

Israel

• Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize 70% of Gaza Strip, violating ceasefire

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• NATO member Romania says Russian drone hit block of flats, injuring two

  • Russian drone crashes into apartment building in Romania

• Putin's $26B Quest for Longevity

China

• Huawei bets on speed over shrinking transistors to sidestep US chip sanctions

• China is building launch pads near its nuclear missile silos

• Satellite images show China preparing expansion nuclear capabilities to hit US

Health / Medicine

• Blood test could detect Alzheimer's signs 'decades before symptoms appear'

• SlimTide Reviews: Full Slim Tide Consumer Report Reveals Hidden Risks

• Ozempic may be reshaping the brain, scientists say

• Scientists Discover Sperm Seem To Bypass a Fundamental Law of Physics.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Deadly fungal storms are sweeping US and spreading disease few doctors recognize

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Can DEET attract mosquitoes? A lab study offers clues

  Yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) exposed to the insect repellent DEET can learn to associate the off-putting chemical with food, researchers report May 28 in Journal of Experimental Biology. The finding suggests that mosquitoes can link unpleasant odors with rewards — turning a negative experience into a positive one — although it’s unclear what might happen outside the lab.

  • Mosquitoes seem to be getting over insect repellent

  • Mosquitoes can learn that DEET means dinner is served.

• Scientists accidentally discover sea cucumber with 'tissue immortality'

• The 'Renewable' Boondoggle

• Poisonous invasion: What is the 'devil's trumpet' harming crops in Iraq?

  Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior has warned farmers and residents to be on the alert for an invasion of datura plants – commonly known as jimsonweed, thorn apple or devil’s trumpet.

• Pigeons may be navigating with their liver, study suggests.