2026-09-24

etc

• Mexican Navy's tall ship Cuauhtémoc will be at the Embarcadero all week

Horseshit

• Is your job giving you erectile dysfunction?

• A New DNA Analysis May Solve the Centuries-Old Medici Mystery

• Sadness and Suicidal Behavior Among Teenagers Is Declining, CDC Finds

• Hundreds of Flights Grounded Across the Eastern Seaboard as Government Rolls Out AI Air Traffic Control System

  Preliminary reports indicate some sort of air traffic control glitch at one of the major airports along the East Coast, with Bloomberg TV reporting a circuit malfunction at an air traffic control facility in Philadelphia, and Reuters noting that a fiber optics cable was accidentally clipped in New Jersey. At the time of writing, it isn’t exactly clear what’s behind the turmoil. What is clear is that the region’s air traffic control system is a tangled mess — and unfortunately, this could just be a sign of things to come. Strikingly, the massive air traffic outage comes right as the Trump administration moves ahead with a controversial AI air traffic control system known as “Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories,” or SMART.

• Fremont firefighter applicant rejected over homeschool diploma requirement

• Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time

• Epic: The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?

  what would grog actually have to contain to behave this way? The present work addresses this question semi-quantitatively. Rather than starting from possible formulations, we treat the game’s observation as an inverse problem: we use the apparent rate of mug deterioration to estimate the proton supply required by a simplified corrosion model. The objective is not to propose an experimentally reproducible formulation of grog, an endeavour that would be both inadvisable and potentially disappointing to pirates, but to determine which chemical characteristics are necessary to reconcile its behaviour with known corrosion science.

• 8 in 10 people aged 16-34 say smartphone use harms their everyday life

celebrity gossip

• Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 15 years after sexual assault conviction

  Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 15 years on Wednesday after being convicted of sexually assaulting former TV production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006 at his Manhattan apartment. Haley appeared in court on Wednesday morning and delivered a victim impact statement.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• UK to fight Russian disinformation and push new global AI standards Burnham says

  Burnham announced a new National Centre for Information Defence to detect and disrupt AI-enabled disinformation campaigns by hostile states. The centre will work alongside intelligence agencies, government departments, law enforcement and social media to bring together expertise to combat "information warfare".

  • Not the "Ministry of Truth"?

Musk

• Tesla Closes Texas Airspace for Roadster Launch Event

• Paramount weighs tapping Musk for equity investment

• We've Turned Starlink into a Planetary Barometer

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Comma's hands-off driving tech under investigation after 2 fatal crashes

  • After multiple deaths and injuries, NHTSA is investigating comma.ai

• What to do when your Waymo holds up a Secret Service motorcade

• Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric

• Zoox grounds Atlanta test fleet after workers report toxic gas exposure symptoms

  • Just pivot: "Mobile Suicide Booths!" MAID comes to you!

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Toyota orders workers to train humanoid robots but says humans won't be replaced

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Blood Transfusion: Jehovah's Witnesses revise medical guidelines

  “The decision to accept red cells, white cells, plasma or platelets from another person’s blood is a matter of personal conscience,” a statement by Jehovah’s Witnesses world headquarters in New York said on Friday. “The longstanding refusal of whole-blood transfusions on religious grounds, a core teaching based on the command to ‘abstain from blood’ (Acts 15:20), is unchanged,” the organisation said.

  • Jehovah's Witnesses allow blood-derived products but keep ban on whole-blood

• Massachusetts lesbian bar nearly bullied out of town after lifting mask mandate — for one night a week.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The next generation of American scientists is fading away

• Andreessen Horowitz is launching an (AI) 'academy' with no homework

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Samsung's AI fridges shut down after update, causes outrage

  • Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update

  • Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges

• First Petabit-Class Transoceanic Subsea Cable

  • Meta's new transoceanic undersea cable boasts a petabit of bandwidth

• Netflix is in the doldrums. A comeback is unlikely, Wells Fargo says

• Acer CEO says memory makers are hyping 2030 shortage fears to protect margins

  • Acer says the memory shortage will end before 2030.

• Ella Langley's Choosin' Texas now longest-running number one in US chart history

• Texas jury hits Bambu Lab with $27.6M verdict in Stratasys patent fight — X1, P1, and A1 printers found to infringe prime tower and bed-leveling tech.

• YouTube's Custom Feeds Give You More Control over the Algorithm

• iPhone 18 Pro Max SSD drops lower than hard drive at 1.1 MBs during heavy writes

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Smart glasses are causing havoc in India

• Meta expected to unveil smart glasses without camera as privacy concerns grow

• Facing Congressional Scrutiny, Flock Details New Search Guardrails

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Rocket Lab Poised to Become “Only Viable Alternative” to SpaceX, Says Cantor Fitzgerald.

• Startup Hubble Reaches Unicorn Status for Space-Based Bluetooth

• A new report from Europe raises serious alarms about orbital collisions

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The 'AI Safety' Movement Is Making AI Less Safe

  • Sen. Bernie Sanders unveils bill to ban artificial superintelligence

  The bill, provided first to The Associated Press, would also pause advanced AI development until guidelines are implemented while creating the Department of Artificial Intelligence. Multiple employees at leading AI companies are endorsing the bill.

  • Bernie Sanders proposes to ban 'superintelligence' and put violators in prison

  • United Nations: AI Agents, Misalignment and the Risk of Losing Human Control

  • The Business of Building God

  • Americans Fear AI Will Make the World Worse, Love It Anyway

  • The Preference Cascade Is Only Getting Started

  • AI anxiety is sweeping the globe – and cutting across party lines

  • How Scientists Contained a Threat That Could Have Destroyed Humanity

  • Even Americans who use AI every day are worried about it

  • Illinois, California governors fast-track AI safety measures with EOs

  • AI leaders warn UN of security risks as systems grow more powerful

  • An 'AI freeze' could make big AI companies bigger and hurt smaller firms

• Trump says US will henceforth call AI 'super intelligence'

  • Dear President Trump, here’s a deal you can actually make that will make you look great

  China is practically begging to collaborate. This morning I read in The Guardian that:

  Tuesday’s front page of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese communist party (CCP), ran an article saying that the US and China should “make Al a new frontier for China-US cooperation” and “make good use of the intergovernmental dialogue mechanism on AI.”

  • The Guardian is the totally trustworthy voice of the CCP in the West.

• Meta admits Muse's likeness to OpenClaw isn't a coincidence

  • Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Made by Humans in a Call Center

  • Meta's New Muse AI Agent Read My Private Messages. I Never Asked It To

  • I Gave My Life over to Meta's A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away

  • Meta's New AI Agent Is an Instant Hit–and the Backlash Has Begun

  • Meta testing a 'human concierge' for its new personal AI agent, Muse

  • Surprise, Meta's latest AI gimmick is just underpaid humans

• Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google's AI

  • Google confirms Gemini models hacked three companies in May 2026

  • Google says its AI model gained unauthorized access to three outside systems

• OpenAI 'agent' hacked Australia's health service

  • OpenAI agent hacked Medicare, Albanese expressed 'extreme concern' to Sam Altman

  • OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals

  • OpenAI hacked Australian Medicare portal

  • OpenAI agent hacked into Australia's national healthcare system

• Amazon is trying to rehire workers it laid off, emails show

  • Amazon re-hiring laid-off workers for AI

• Anthropic-linked CVEs pile up, attackers mostly shrug

• Positive emotions toward AI outweigh negative ones in 34 out of 37 countries

• Microsoft disrupts AI-assisted platform that compromised 12,000 accounts

• Australia's giant data-centre boom

• Province of BC Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over Tumbler Ridge School Shooting

• America is in the wrong AI race with China

• Big Banks Say They're Uneasy About People Shopping via AI Agents

• Snorkel AI triples valuation to $3.5B as demand for AI training data booms

• The 'AI confidence trap' many New Zealanders are caught in

• Naming AI agents after Seinfeld characters helps bots join the team – report

• Z.ai uploading local code repos to overseas cloud without consent

• OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'

• Americans' Views of Data Centers Have Turned More Negative

• AI video won Nikon Image Competition, microscope user needs to talk about it

• Community condemn Bedminster AI mural as 'insult' to artists

• Netflix's 'Wonka's the Golden Ticket' Is a Ghoulish Misuse of AI Gene Wilder

• Amazon opens its seller tools to outside AI agents, starting with Anthropic

• I Built AI Clones of My Coworkers. Things Got Weird

• OpenAI nabs key Patreon execs ahead of upcoming announcement

• A Startup Wants to Power Data Centers with 'Supercritical' Carbon Dioxide

• AI is a Boring Technology

  The future I want is local — off-grid AI. A model on a laptop that belongs to the person using it, the way a lamp belongs to the person who switches it on. We’ll know it worked when the word disappears from the headlines. Not because anything was settled dramatically, but because the interesting part will have moved, as it always does, to whatever someone made with it.

• Uproar in France over award-winning author accused of using AI

• Data centers are black boxes, but California wants to change that

• Stanford violated AI policy after race-swapping students in ad

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Kalshi to allow trading on borrowed funds

Economicon / Business / Finance

• A $5k Bike Shows Why It's Hard to Build in America

• USDA Survey Shows Most U.S. Farmland Is Owned by Older, Non-Operating Landlords

  • We're approaching 20 years of agricultural land being an "investment opportunity" with the fields worked by serially bankrupt production services companies that often don't bother with crop rotation or other basic conservation practices.

• Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

• McDonald's bets on chicken to win back diners as beef prices soar

• Morgan Stanley Investment-Bank Deal List Leaked in Email Misfire

• The Vigilante Who's Taking Down Recruitment Scammers, One Fake Job Ad at a Time

• Toys 'R' Us is opening 120 new stores as grownup collectors fuel toy sales

• ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe, executive says

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Former Utah postal worker indicted for dumping 300 mail-in ballots in primary

• White House Says Access Is a 'Privilege' in Court Filing Defending Media Ban

• President Trump Will Be Attending the Tennessee/Texas Game on Saturday.

Trump

• Trump's warning to the United Nations hits the nail on the head

  Trump touted America’s rebound since his return to the White House and trumpeted his effective work to “reshape the world stage”: his peace deals, his Venezuela move, his Greenland entente and, above all, his defanging of Iran. Indeed, he vowed to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if it refuses to make an acceptable deal.

• US preparing to ban exports of diesel fuel for 90 days

• Trump Invites Putin to G20 in Miami, Rubio Says

Left Angst

• Cities across US oppose Trump FCC plan to preempt local broadband rules

• Trump TV Flops in Embarrassing Numbers Disaster

• Empire of Grift

• Trump's sneaky plan to gut Endangered Species Act draws from 1995 Scalia dissent

• 39% of Democratic Voters Think Restaurant Industry “Should Be Publicly Owned and Operated.”

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Just Made Another Business-Friendly Move

• Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI

• Immigration changes are driving foreign researchers to leave the U.S.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• ShinyHunters claims FBI hack: 'This is NOT financially motivated'

  • 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees

  • Hackers Say They Stole Sensitive FBI Personnel Records

  • FBI Hack Exposed FBI's Own Hacking Unit

  • Hacked FBI data has sensitive information about employees' intelligence roles

• Chicago Police Made Nearly 200k Secret Traffic Stops Last Year

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Denmark agreement enhanced veto rights over Greenland econ and military

• US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'

  • Trump administration attacks Australia optout algorithm law in rare intervention

• Beware of CCP Unrestricted Warfare

World

• How Zambia Approved an HIV Drug Quickly

• London buses in decline? Why public transport in global cities is slowing

• Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC

  • New U.S. sanctions against the ICC threaten European sovereignty

• Listening to loud music on a Singapore bus? It'll cost you

• Secretive gambling industry exposed in leak

• Irish data protection watchdog fines Google €403M over GDPR breaches

• Helium balloon lifts up to two tons of building material over Tibet's mountains

• UK to launch new military space squadron to protect satellites

• Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees

• Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

• UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told

  The RAF has been using a ground-based system for the past year, which a defence source said had already been used "to deter our adversaries". It is understood the system could be used to prevent a hostile nation's satellites from tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces.

  • RAF launches first space squadron dedicated to defending Britain's satellites

• Germany pledges to phase out fossil fuels for first time with target of 2045

• Bulk Orders Surge at Used Bookstores in Japan; 50 Tons Sent to U.S.

Iran / Houthi

• Oil Tanker Costs Hit Record $1.2M a Day as Iran War Disrupts Shipping

China

• China Just Missed the Income Cutoff to Become a High Income Country This Year

• China Spends Record Amount Importing over 1K Tonnes of Gold This Year

• China's ByteDance gained access to over 2k Nvidia B200 chips through Norway

• Is China's Power Advantage About to Trigger an 89% Crash in U.S. AI Stock

Health / Medicine

• What anaesthetics are revealing about consciousness

• Americans Are About to Lose Access to Prescriptions from Canada

• Having disproportionately big boobs linked to a surprising health issue: study.

  Looking at the health records of 687 women treated at headache and neurology clinics, the researchers found that women with enlarged breast tissue were twice as likely to experience neck pain and more than twice as likely to have cervical radiculopathy, or a pinched nerve in the neck. What may be more unexpected was that women with macromastia were about 40% more likely to have chronic migraine than women without the condition.

• Why are US mortality rates increasing relative to other countries?

• How the pro-nicotine 'wellness' movement rebranded an addictive drug

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• El Niño projected to cause 450k deaths in next six months

• NASA-Funded Research Finds Complex Life Defying Record Heat

• Scientists discover first new penguin species in more than 100 years

• Small undersea volcanoes may unleash outsized tsunamis

• Amateur Naturalists Are Helping Scientists Track What Everything Eats

• UK on course to miss climate targets, energy secretary admits

  • UK shares findings of damning climate crisis national security report

• odd numbers sound more real: Heat May Kill 451,000 People in First 9 Months of Super El Niño