2026-08-01

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• Reaping the Whirlwind: Inside the Potomac River Midair Collision

Horseshit

• A Reporter Infiltrated a Teen Takeover in DC. Here's What She Found.

  An 18-year-old girl named Mekala told me the event was coordinated by “DPR.” I asked what the letters stood for and she didn’t know, only that “DPR” puts these events together for teens to “come out and have fun.” She said the organizers reach the kids through Instagram. It turns out DPR is the District of Columbia’s Department of Parks and Recreation. The teens I spoke to that night said they were there for the government-organized event.

• At the end of the day, my slaves are just a tool

  Slaves are bred as slaves, raised as slaves and know they will die as slaves. The self-determination of free men is of no interest to them, nor is the responsibility that comes with it. They are resigned to their role and for that, they do not suffer it as a free man would in their place.

• UK's only all-female chess team promoted – then told they must recruit a man

• Longtime Bay Area tech conference is leaving San Francisco after a 50-year run

• Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?

• Accept Your Fate. Don't Wear Shorts to the Office

• Poochmaxxing: The wellness industry is coming for your pets

• Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy

• The great wealth transfer reality check

  New research from Visa Business and Economic Insights finds that $36 trillion in baby boomer wealth will pass to Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years after subtracting liabilities, excluding the top 1 percent of households (the outliers in how they spend their wealth), and accounting for retirement spending, charitable bequests, taxes and fees. That is a little over one‑third of the $93 trillion headline figure, and by our estimate the amount spent will be smaller still at $8 trillion,* because most households receiving an inheritance are already affluent and likely to save or invest much of what they receive. Even so, that roughly $8 trillion still has meaningful implications at the spending‑category level, especially in housing and travel, where support is already arriving through down‑payment assistance, skip‑generation vacations and similar wealth transfers happening now rather than far off in the future.

• The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town

  Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary's, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn't permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary's have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove

• Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons Are Collaborating

• The end of roommates? Why young San Franciscans aren't living with each other

• Why pubs are closing: meet the new Gen Z social scene

celebrity gossip

• Boy George Drops Out of London Jesus Christ Superstar Production After Stirring Controversy With AI-Generated Pro-Israel Song

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• What 20M Bans Reveal About the Stress on Wikipedia's Volunteers

Musk

• Musk dismisses report of Tesla's potential China business sale

  • Tesla Weighs Sale of China Business to Pave Way for Potential SpaceX Merger

  • Tesla Weighs China Unit Sale Ahead of SpaceX Deal

• A discarded SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the moon

  • Drifting SpaceX rocket heading for accidental collision with moon

  • A piece of a SpaceX rocket is about to hit the Moon.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• A London Taxi Family Confronts the Driverless Future

• Why the UK is dithering over what to do about e-scooters

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• High school axes plans to deploy AI robot called Sally after ties to sex dolls

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• UK: Puberty blockers trial can start recruiting children

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• How the Startup Mentality Failed Kids in San Francisco

• "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

  For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question. I was at an oral defense a few months ago. My older colleague kept raving about the extensive review of the literature. He kept saying that he had never seen such a young person produce such an extensive review in so little time. This same colleague is proud to say that he opposes ChatGPT and friends. Would I tell him? No, I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose.

• Over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers

• Did 75,000 Students Cheat on a College-Entrance Exam in Mexico?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

• Sony Not Budging on Ending PlayStation Discs in the Face of Fan Protests

  • Just because a game is on disc doesn't mean it will work in the future

• Flock surveillance cameras can pose a crash risk for drivers, US experts say

  • In California town, Flock misread license plates in 71% of alerts sent to police

• Netflix sued for $105M for losing HDs with unencrypted film masters

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Energizing a vacuum-tube flip-flop module from a 1948 IBM system

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• From discussion of GCC's AI contribution policy:

  "The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth."

• Judge Voices Doubt US Has Justified Its Ban on Anthropic AI

  • Judge says Trump still lacks evidence for Anthropic supply-chain risk

• Jealous of all the free press OpenAI got, Anthropic joins the fray:

  • Anthropic AI Models Hacked Three Organizations During Tests

  • Anthropic says Claude hacked three companies during tests

  • Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke into Computers at 3 Organizations

  • Anthropic's Claude breached 3 orgs, uploaded PyPI malware during tests

  • Anthropic finds three hacking incidents similar to the HuggingFace attack

  • Anthropic says Claude AI hacked three organisations during cyber tests

  • Anthropic's AI Claude escaped testing environment and hacked organizations

  • Anthropic Discloses That AI Models Testing Hacked Three Companies

  • Now Anthropic Is Saying Claude Escaped and Hacked Several Companies

  • Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests

  • Anthropic finds that its models also compromised external systems during testing

  • Anthropic's AI models hacked 3 organizations during testing

  • Anthropic Says Its A.I. Systems Broke into Computers at 3 Organizations

  • Anthropic says its AI models hacked 3 organizations during testing

  • Claude published malicious code to the Internet and attacked 3 real companies

• OpenAI's Hack of Hugging Face

  • OpenAI finds evidence other AI agents escaped containment as it widens probe

• Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

• LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated 'slop'

  • LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button

  • LinkedIn adds a 'seems like AI slop' button

  • LinkedIn Is Cracking Down on 'AI Slop' with New Reporting Tool

• Google pauses AI satellite images, after fears of deepfakes in the sky

  • The problem with putting an AI image generator in Google Earth

  • Google withdraws new Earth AI tool after warnings over misinformation risks

  • Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

• America's biggest companies are burning cash on AI. It's risky for everyone

• German court rules AI music firm Suno broke copyright rules

• Boomers Can't Stop Gifting Their Grandkids AI-Generated Slop Books

• Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

• 'First tremors' of AI earthquake showing in digital revenue hit

• Nvidia's $750B AI bet deepens fears of a circular tech bubble

• Amazon finds cases of AI causing runaway spending on tech projects

• The End of an Era

  We had less than 20 years of writing being hard and publishing being easy, and we will never get that window back. Ever. I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP, that brutality became a choice, not a necessity. I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted.

  • Another Reason Not to Use "AI" for Your Writing

  No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to “help me write” in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to “help me write” in Google Docs. The very fact these “AI”s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a provenance standpoint. These “AI” tools are making it harder for all writers in this regard, not easier. If you’re a writer who hopes to get your work into film and TV, or grab one of those big publishing deals, stay the hell away from “AI.” Don’t incorporate it into your writing process; every part of the process needs to be demonstrably free of any “AI” input because “AI” training data is full of other people’s copyrights.

• Moonshot built on 20k Nvidia chip cluster from Alibaba

• EU tells firms to label AI-generated content from Sunday

• AI bubble will burst if 10-year moves above 5%, says Breakout Capital's Sharma

• The biggest gamble in the U.S. economy is starting to look riskier

• AI's Wildest Spenders Are Hitting the Accelerator

• Coal back in favour as US plant bidding war highlights rising demand to power AI

• Big Tech Holds $2.4T of Spending Commitments for AI Boom

• AI Boom Spurs Insider Selling by Nvidia, CoreWeave Billionaires

• Nvidia in Talks with OpenAI to Guarantee $250B Financing for Data Center

• Apple's Siri Got an A.I. Brain Transplant. Try These 5 Prompts to Get Acclimated

• $2M crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• New York sues Kalshi, says its prediction markets are illegal gambling

  • New York Has Sued Kalshi for Running Illegal Gambling Operation

  • New York Alleges Kalshi Is Running Illegal Gambling Operation

  • NY sues prediction market Kalshi alleging it's an illegal gambling operation

• Bitcoin slides as Strategy plans up to $5B in crypto sales

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Aschenbrenner's hedge fund forced to unwind all public stock positions

  • Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 'golden child' of the AI trade, was laid low

  • What a Hedge Fund's Implosion Says About the A.I. Trade

  • Citadel buys Situational Awareness equity holdings after steep AI losses

  • Situational Awareness Down 67% in July in AI Stock Rout

  • Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45B AI hedge fund lost most of it in days

  • The market's big AI doubts are exposing the riskiest players

• Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the AI Bubble?

• Samsung's chip workers are jumping ship to rival SK Hynix

• The bond market isn’t buying what Fed Chair Warsh is selling

• America's startup boom offers hope for the future of work

• Warner Bros. Deal Collapse Would Cost the Ellisons $9.8B

• Fitch's Private Credit Default Rate Hit Record in Second Quarter

• VC-backed startups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Fauci Legend Will Not Die!

  “The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.”

  This is Fauci in writing explaining that 9 of 12 scientists at a key meeting he attended at the beginning of the pandemic felt that “deliberate insertion” of a key mutation was possible, in part because a prominent Chinese scientist known to all had been working on that exact sequencing problem just miles from where the first cases were reported. To repeat the smoking gun line: “Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.” For Fauci to subsequently say in public that the notion of laboratory release was without “scientific basis” was clearly deceptive.

  • After Fauci Debacle, Our Idiot Press Circles the Wagons

  As one virologist told me three years ago: “If someone proposes to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan, and then one year later we see a bat SARS coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in Wuhan, that is highly unlikely to be a natural event.”

• The nation's harshest data privacy law collides with a political problem

  The language includes companies that share people’s information with data brokers, which the bill’s proponents said could include tech giants such as Meta and Google. Consultants, advertisers, Democrats and Republicans worry it also includes the political data brokers who sell insights to campaigns about hundreds of millions of potential voters and the issues they care about, which could pose a massive setback for tech-powered campaigns.

• Department of Commerce takes equity stake in 7 private semiconductor firms

  • Government Ownership Stakes in Companies Becoming Routine Under Trump

• NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Democrats

• Maine Dems Swap Nazi Senate Candidate for Guy Who Fathered Kids With His Second Cousin

Left Angst

• US cites 'unauthorized travel' to end DACA status for mother deported to Mexico

• Why the world trusts China more than America

• 7 in 10 Americans say large tech companies have too much power

  • No one wanted to ask this, when the tech companies were being ordered to censor COVID / election stories...

• US Government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

• U.S. Weighs $100k Fee for Foreign Students Wanting to Work After Graduation

• Uninsured Patients Rise Sharply, Hospitals Report, Citing Obamacare Cuts

• Canada celebrates new bridge to US while fighting Trump tariffs

• 'The Boss Wants This Money': Inside Trump's Unprecedented Fundraising Operation

  • No "10% for the Big Guy"? Amateurs...

• How many people are dying as a result of USAID's demise?

• Trump to Use Anti-Redlining Law to Target 'Activist' Groups

• FBI gets voter's IP address in new fraud probe tactic

  The FBI recently obtained the IP address of someone who registered online in South Carolina, according to documents first shared with Axios. The bureau's request for the address, which state and local officials complied with, offers a glimpse of how federal authorities are stepping up their probe of voter rolls and registration practices under pressure from President Trump.

• The Incoherence of the Iran Hawks

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Military jamming disrupted a medical plane's GPS system before it crashed

  The GPS system on a small medical plane that crashed into a mountainside last month in New Mexico malfunctioned because the military was jamming that signal throughout the area at the time although pilots had been warned to expect that, according to federal investigators.

• US investigating if Iran was behind cyberattack on water systems in seven states

  • Authorities investigating possible Iran links in Minnesota community water system cyberattack.

  • Iranian hackers likely behind Minnesota municipal water cyberattack

  • Cyberattack on water systems in multiple states has US officials on edge

World

• Why is 'Chat Control' one of the EU's biggest digital rights fights?

• Japan is launching its first centralized intelligence agency since WWII

• Teen hackers tell BBC how police are helping them use their skills for good

  Some critics argue that teaching cyber skills to young people who have already shown an interest in hacking risks making them more capable offenders.

• Australia's Social Media Ban for Under-16s Has Had Limited Impact So Far

• Migrants swim from Morocco to Spanish enclave of Ceuta

  • Spain says huge surge across border into enclave has reversed, half of migrants go back

  • About 60k migrants arrive in Ceuta in 24 hours, Spanish territory's leader says

  • Italy suspends Schengen with Spain over Ceuta crisis

  Italy decided to suspend, Friday, the Schengen Agreement with Spain following a meeting at the Interior Ministry and in line with the political directive issued a day earlier by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, according to Italian media reports. The Italian Interior Ministry subsequently announced the closure of the country's air and maritime borders with Spain.

  • Italy suspends Schengen agreement with Spain after thousands of migrants storm border.

  • Finland, Austria join Italy’s call for Schengen border closures after mass migrant arrivals in Spain’s Ceuta: ‘Spain has completely failed to protect Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,’ Finnish interior minister says.

  • 48K/50K ppl who crossed illegally into Ceuta have been returned to Morocco

  • Thousands of illegal African migrants overrun Spanish enclave, turn streets into open toilets and bathe in fountains: 'An apocalypse'

  Harrowing local media reports reveal residents and business owners in Ceuta – a Spanish territory located on the north African coast – are terrified to open their doors amid the rush of migrants, many of whom arrived wearing nothing but swimwear without a penny or possession to their name. “Businesses closed. Shops shut because if you open a business, it gets overrun … We’re scared. The streets are packed. There are no measures in place. It’s every man for himself. They’re not giving us any help,” a terrified downtown restaurant owner who didn’t want to give their name told state-owned Spanish media outlet RTVE. “It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” a spokesperson for Spain’s Guardia Civil police told Reuters on Thursday. Ceuta’s president estimated Friday that around 60,000 people had crossed by sea and land from Morocco over the past 24 hours — a sea of humanity representing nearly 70% of Ceuta’s population of 85,000.

  • Tens of Thousands of Migrants voluntarily leave after crossing into Ceuta

Iran / Houthi

• Iran struck Amazon data centers again amid widening war, satellites show

• Drone strike in Egypt sparks security concerns about Suez oil exports

• Man Accused of Spying for Iran at British Air Base in Cyprus

• Saudi Arabia prepares sea and possible land offensive against Houthis

• Iran to get Chinese shoulder-launched missile systems in weeks, sources say

• Russia is sharing valuable Intel with Iran, officials say, as U.S. war drags on

• Ukraine's Strike on Iranian Ship Shows How Two Wars Could Merge and Spiral

Israel

• 'Lasting peace': Hamas, Trump announce 'complete disarmament'

  • Trump announces deal for Hamas to disarm; Israel ‘skeptical’

China

• Chinese military researchers tap US AI models to train defence systems

• What does China's 15th '5-year plan' for renewables mean for climate change?

• Norway Went Hunting for a Chinese Kill Switch in a Bus. It Found Out Every Connected Vehicle Already Has One.

• China's Xi urges military to step up use of unmanned AI technologies

Health / Medicine

• Montana's new "right to try" law can't come soon enough for some

• Veterans' PTSD resolves with psychedelic therapy in small US study

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Sunken Nazi warships resurface as water levels drop

• It's Time to Give Up on the Nonstick Pan as We Know It

• A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

• Farmers spreading crushed glass on their crops

• The European Forest Fires

  In France, there have already been over 160 arrests for arson. Yesterday, the French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said nine out of ten fires were caused by humans.

• Concrete Is Damaging the Planet, While Defending It from Climate Change

• A Ton of Space Junk Tumbles Unpredictably to Earth Every Week

• How to Survive an Infestation of Toxic Caterpillars

  • better livin thru biology: Bacillus thuringiensis

• Colorado River Water Plan Postpones Reckoning with a Drier Future