2024-10-15

RMS dissed, Metaverse busted, celebrating SpaceX, political schooling, WordPress and apocalypse, Harris bribes Black men, what laptop?, carjacking crisis, Novichok is back, COVID boosters affect IQ


celebrity gossip


Musk

  • 'I, Robot' Director Mocks Elon Musk for Tesla Ripping Off Film for Optimus

  • Are Tesla's robot prototypes AI marvels or remote-controlled toys?

  • Elon Musk says he will take legal action after California officials cited his politics when rejecting SpaceX launches

  • I read all the community notes on Elon Musk's X account. Here's what I learned

  • Liberals are Losing their Minds over Elon Musk – JONATHAN TURLEY

    Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee called for Musk’s arrest and said that, as a condition of getting government contracts, officials should “require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security.” Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wants Musk arrested for simply refusing to censor other people. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called for Musk to be deported and all federal contracts cancelled with this company. As with many in the “Save Democracy” movement, Olbermann was unconcerned with the denial of free speech or constitutional protections. “If we can’t do that by conventional means, President Biden, you have presidential immunity. Get Elon Musk the F out of our country and do it now.”

    Of course, none of these figures are even slightly bothered about other business leaders with political opinions, so long as, like McNamee, they are supporting Harris or at least denouncing Trump. Musk has failed to yield to a movement infamous for cancel campaigns and coercion. The usual alliance of media, academia, government and corporate forces hit Musk, his companies and even advertisers on X. Other corporate officials collapsed like a house of cards to demands for censorship — see, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Musk, in contrast, responded by courageously releasing the Twitter Files and exposing the largest censorship system in our history. That is why I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech. The intense hatred for Musk is due to the fact that he was the immovable object in the path of their formerly unstoppable force.

  • Elon Musk’s SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary

    Mr Musk’s ambitions for Mars are part of an ambition to safeguard civilisation which also entails, in his eyes, the re-election of Donald Trump (on which he is working hard), and, apparently, the use of X, a social network he owns, as a personal platform and a tool for the spread of misinformation. This is something about which many have strong concerns, and rightly. But with the Super Heavy cooling down in its elevated cradle, the getting to Mars bit, at least, looks more real than it has ever done before.

  • Internet troll Joshua Goldberg's response to Elon Musk posting his old bait

  • Musk on Starship

    if rocket technology can be improved by 1000X, then the cost of becoming sustainably multiplanetary would drop to ~$1T, which could be spread out over 40 or more years, so <$25B/year. At that cost, it becomes possible to make life multiplanetary, ensuring the long-term survival of life as we know it, without materially affecting people’s standard of living on Earth. Starship is designed to achieve a >1000X improvement over existing systems and, especially after yesterday’s booster catch and precise ocean landing of the ship, I am now convinced that it can work.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

TechSuck / Geek Bait

Harris / Democrats

Trump / Right / Jan6

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • He was sentenced to death. Shaken baby syndrome is at the heart of his appeals

  • Wait ... isn't crime supposed to be way down? The Carjacking Crisis (Archive)

    Dalton, a 15-year police veteran, is one of a dozen detectives on the new Prince George’s County Carjacking Interdiction Unit. In the District of Columbia and the surrounding area, which includes Prince George’s County pressed up against most of the city’s eastern border, this crime has become an offense committed not just by seasoned criminals but by adolescents looking to rob people, go for a joyride, and beef up their street-tough bona fides. Since early 2023, a third of the unit’s detectives have been shot at or have fired their own gun while pursuing carjackers.

    In Washington, the number of carjackings more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from 152 to 360, and then kept climbing—to 484 in 2022, and 958 in 2023. This startling increase stemmed from a complex and still somewhat mysterious set of factors, but prominent among them, at least according to cops in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, were protracted school closings, which fueled truancy and juvenile crime; police reforms that restricted the ability to fight crime effectively; and a new hesitancy among some officers about risking their career or their life in a political atmosphere (“Defund the police!”) that they felt villainized them more than the criminals.

    If the SUV turned left, staying in Maryland, the detectives could chase it. But if it slipped across the D.C. line, the officers would have a harder time getting permission to chase it. This, too, was an outgrowth of the changing politics of policing over the past decade: Communities all over the country had placed new restraints on police departments’ ability to aggressively pursue criminals. There were good reasons for these reforms—tragic examples of police overreach and outright abuse, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods, were common. But police say this sudden overhaul had serious unintended consequences: more murders, more carjackings, and more violent crimes of other sorts, most of them in the very communities that the police reforms had ostensibly been aimed at protecting.

    Some people say that society can’t arrest its way out of a crime problem. “Yes, we can,” Mrotek said. “It’s actually very simple.”

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

  • Vial with nerve agent that killed woman contained enough to kill thousands

    The lead counsel for a public inquiry into the 2018 death of a British woman poisoned by a Soviet-developed nerve agent said Monday that there was enough poison in the vial she unwittingly opened to kill thousands of people. Dawn Sturgess and her partner collapsed after they came into contact with a discarded perfume bottle containing the nerve agent Novichok in the southwest England town of Amesbury. She had sprayed the contents of the bottle on her wrist and died days later. Her partner survived. "The evidence will suggest that this bottle — which we shall hear contained enough poison to kill thousands of people — must earlier have been left somewhere in a public place creating the obvious risk that someone would find it and take it home," lead counsel Andrew O’Connor said. Their exposure came four months after a former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter were sickened by Novichok in an attack in the nearby city of Salisbury.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

  • Covid-19 may increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and deaths for 3 years

  • How skipping your COVID booster could reduce your IQ - Los Angeles Times

    Using data from more than 100,000 people who completed online tests in England, the authors of a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that those recovering from COVID, including those with only mild symptoms, had measurable cognitive deficits. Even participants who had “mild COVID-19 with resolved symptoms” exhibited deficits “commensurate with a 3-point loss in IQ” compared with uninfected participants. The cognitive loss was more pronounced in those who experienced more severe infections. Participants who had long COVID — that is, with symptoms that lasted more than 12 weeks — had the equivalent of a 6-point IQ loss on average, and those who had been “admitted to the intensive care unit had the equivalent of a 9-point loss.”