2025-12-13

Horseshit

• Critical design flaw in women's running shoes, scientists warn

• Roman occupation of Britain damaged the population's health

• Crumbling New York Parking Garages Get a New Life

• Humans were making fire 400k years ago, earlier than thought

• Too Busy for the Gym This Holiday Season? Try These Workday Exercises

• Armenia’s ancient 'dragon stones' are the work of a 6,000-year-old water cult

• It's end-of-year concert season. Why do kids struggle with performance anxiety?

• New review challenges the idea that highly intelligent people are hyper-empathic

• America's Betting Craze Has Spread to Its News Networks

• Researchers uncover clues to mysterious origin of famous Hjortspring boat

• Vålerenga call for changes after artificial pitch causes failed drug test

• Stanford's star reporter takes on Silicon Valley's money-soaked startup culture

• Do Dyslexia Fonts Work?

  • Special Dyslexia Fonts Are Based on Voodoo Pseudoscience

• Think Tanker Altered Ukraine War Map Before Big Polymarket Payout

celebrity gossip

• Rescued at Sea: How Venezuela's Machado Survived the Riskiest Leg of Her Escape

Obit

• John Varley (1947-2025) – Locus Online

  John Varley (78) died December 10, 2025 in his home in Beaverton OR. He had COPD and diabetes. John Herbert Varley was born August 9, 1947 in Austin TX. He attended Michigan State University. His first novelette, “Picnic on Nearside”, released in 1974, establishing the Eight Worlds universe. He went on to publish about 20 more Eight Worlds works... Varley was nominated 15 times for a Hugo Award, nine times for a Nebula Award, and 40 times for a Locus Award.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Algorithms do widen the divide: Social media feeds shape political polarization

• Rise in violence against women journalists and activists linked to digital abuse

• After 27 years, a Bay Area news anchor is off the air. Here's why.

  Folsom’s contract with KRON-TV expired Nov. 12. She said contract negotiations hit a wall shortly before this expiration date. And while Folsom has a lawyer, and said she plans to sue the station for the severance she believes she is owed, she’s come to accept her departure. In recent years, she’d begun to doubt her profession, she said. “I’m done spreading news, and judgement, and stress, and sickness,” she said. “I want to spread love, right? And perspective and power.”

• Censorship in Western Academia and the War in Ukraine

  The following is a response to the editors of the Review of Democracy (RevDem), the online journal of the Democracy Institute at the Central European University, who suspended an event that they agreed to host on December 11, 2025: “Men in the Vans, Women on the Streets: Gender, Resistance, and Forced Mobilization in Ukraine and Ex-Yugoslavia.” Its authors are the panelists who were scheduled to speak at the event.

  This case illustrates how academic freedom and open debate are eroding in Western institutions, including those that publicly position themselves against authoritarian trends. Concerns about “balance” and “public responsibility” in discussions of the Russia–Ukraine war are applied in a highly selective way, effectively excluding scholars who are among the very few conducting empirical research and publishing on silenced and inconvenient topics.

• US pop music has grown darker and more stressed over 50 years

Musk

• SpaceX Plans to Go Public. Why?

• Newsom Press Account Had NO IDEA the Hell They Would Unleash Trolling Elon Musk With His Mentally Ill Son

• Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Uber Boss Sees Robotaxis in More Than 10 Markets Next Year

• Ford's Car of the Future, Hatched in a Skunk Works Near Los Angeles

• Fewer EVs need fewer batteries: Ford and SK On end their joint venture.

• Robotaxis offer a path toward smarter and fairer urban mobility

• Waymo cars ignored stopped school buses in Atlanta. What happens now?

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• "what is a woman?" 'The patriarchy runs deep': women still getting a raw deal in the workplace

• 'Beyond gender': Psychedelics are revealing hidden sides to people's identity

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• (Apr 2025) It’s Time for College Professors to Teach

  It is no coincidence that the nation’s most expensive colleges are those at which faculty teach just two to four courses per year (amounting to three or six hours a week of classroom time each semester). At these institutions, faculty devote the lion’s share of their time to research, bureaucratic duties, and chasing grants. In a burst of candor, John McGreevy, provost at Notre Dame, revealed that his institution boasts whole departments in which the faculty norm is a 1-1 teaching load (that is, teaching one three-hour class in the fall and one in the spring). Indeed, McGreevy notes that teaching loads at the leading colleges have shrunk precisely because colleges compete for faculty by promising that they’ll teach less. The result? Colleges have resorted to relying on part-time faculty to provide the requisite teaching. Between 1999 and 2022, the 45% growth in faculty substantially outpaced the 25% increase in undergraduate enrollment.

• Trump admin drops hammer on ‘ghost students,’ claws back $1B from alleged loan scammers.

• Laughing about science more important than ever: Ig Nobel founder

• The Quiet Scandal of Affirmative Action for Men

  Admissions rates by gender, which some colleges do publish, for example, usually show higher rates for men than for women. In the 2024-25 cycle, 29,917 women applied to Brown, and 1,309 were offered a slot, for an admission rate of just 4.4 percent. The number of men who applied was far lower: 18,960. Even so, the number of men who were offered a slot was actually somewhat higher, at 1,326, giving men a much higher admission rate of 7 percent.

• Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Native ads coming soon to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange

• Amazon will let you download your e-books in ePub in 2026

• The Tor Project Is Making a Switch to Rust, Ditches C

• TikTok algorithm favors mental health content, analysis finds

• How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking

• Nintendo Switch 2 RAM prices rise 41%, NAND flash up 8% – shares nosedive

• The Best Big Media Merger Is No Merger at All

• Meta Reportedly Set to Raise VR Headset Prices, Keep Existing Devices Longer

• Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case

• Android users can now share a live video on 911 calls

• Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems

• Amazon pulls AI-powered Fallout recap after getting key story details wrong

• Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

• Russian hackers debut simple ransomware service, but store keys in plain text

• The Nintendo Virtual Boy Is Now Available for Preorder

• US TikTok investors in limbo as deal set to be delayed again

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Disney Accuses Google of Copyright Infringement

  • OpenAI makes $1B deal to bring Disney characters to ChatGPT and Sora

  • Disney accuses Google of 'massive' copyright infringement

• Europe must be ready when the AI bubble bursts

• Open AI, Microsoft face lawsuit over ChatGPT's alleged role in murder-suicide

• AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue CCP talking points, tests show

  • Chatbot-powered toys rebuked for discussing sexual, dangerous topics with kids

• OpenAI releases GPT-5.2 after "code red" Google threat alert

• Is A.I. Actually A Bubble?

• The next version of the web will be built for machines, not humans

• The Race to Run AI from Space

• Scammers gotta go where the stupid money is being sprayed: Next-gen supersonic jet engine gets a less glamorous job

• The Death of the Scientist

  it is acknowledged that humans, with our limited memory and information processing capacity, will never really know everything. Still, this newfound and humbler stance is supplemented with the assumption that we are the single superior biological species who can build the technologies that will.

• Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price

• The Aftermath of the AI Boom

• Bill Gates' daughter secures $30M for an AI app she built in Stanford dorm room

• Your earbuds can translate 70 languages in real-time now, thanks to Gemini

• Netflix's Reed Hastings on the Impact of AI on Schools

• Meta's New A.I. Superstars Are Chafing Against the Rest of the Company

• Arizona city rejects data center after AI lobbying push

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Southeast Asia seeks its place in space

Crypto con games

• Congress screwed up on the GENIUS act: stablecoin holders have fifth priority

• Crypto Entrepreneur Do Kwon Gets 15-Year Prison Sentence

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Welcome to the golden age of employee monitoring

• Intel has tested chipmaking tools from firm with sanctioned China unit

• Federal Reserve cuts interest rates by 0.25%

• Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars

• Palantir sues CEO of rival firm, alleges widespread effort to poach employees

• When did the job market get so rude?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• America's Debanking Witch Hunt Finds No Evil

  • US bank regulator says large banks engaged in 'debanking' of disfavored industries | Reuters

  Without providing specific examples of wrongdoing at the banks, the OCC said its ongoing review found the firms all had policies that either refused services to some industries or required higher levels of scrutiny in excess of the actual financial risks from the years 2020 to 2023. “It is unfortunate that the nation’s largest banks thought these harmful debanking policies were an appropriate use of their government-granted charter and market power. While many of these policies were undertaken in plain sight and even announced publicly, certain banks have continued to insist that they did not engage in debanking," Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said in a statement.

• NSF announces initiative for new generation of research organizations

• Fed Chair Warns Trump Admin May Be Seriously Exaggerating Jobs Numbers

• DC Pipe Bomb Arrest Raises Questions About Christopher’s Wray’s FBI

  Perhaps the biggest headscratcher – how the new team of investigators used cell phone data that D’Antuono claimed had been corrupted – demands answers. In sworn testimony to Congress, D’Antuono had told lawmakers that the FBI “did a complete geofence” for the night of Jan. 5 but that “some data was corrupted by one of the providers.” That assertion appears to be false.

• Semiquincentennial Coins and Medals

Trump

• Trump signs executive order blocking states from regulating AI

• Trump Poised To Greatly Ease Federal Marijuana Regulation | ZeroHedge

  In a move seen as long overdue by many people on both sides of America's left-right political divide, President Trump is expected to use an executive order to dramatically reduce federal restrictions on marijuana. The order, which may come in the next few weeks, will direct federal agencies to move toward reclassifying marijuana as a "Schedule III" drug, which would put it on the same level as common prescription painkillers. The shift would carry implications for not only for patients, medical researchers and recreational users, but the many companies seeking to thrive in the evolving US cannabis market as well.

  • Executive order to reclassify marijuana as soon as Monday

Democrats

• Social Justice Gone Wild: Oklahoma BLM Leader Indicted On Fraud, Money Laundering Charges | ZeroHedge

  Tashella Sheri Amore Dickerson, 52, served as Executive Director of Black Lives Matter OKC (BLMOKC). As Executive Director, Dickerson had access to BLMOKC’s bank, PayPal, and Cash App accounts, where federal prosecutors allege she looted the organization “for her personal benefit,” including travel to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, tens of thousands of dollars in retail shopping, more than $50,000 in food deliveries, a vehicle, and six properties.

• Somali Immigrants in Minnesota

  Nearly every Somali household with children (89 percent) receives some form of welfare. 37.5 percent of adult Somali immigrants in Minnesota live below the Census Bureau’s official poverty line, compared to just 6.9 percent of adult natives. Even more concerning is the status of Somali children. More than half (52.3 percent) of children in Somali immigrant homes live in poverty, while only 7.6 percent of children in native-headed homes are in poverty.

  49 percent of working-age Somalis with more than 10 years of residency still speak English less than “very well” — only a small improvement over the 58.2 percent among the full Somali population. Similarly, 46.6 percent of children in long-term Somali households are still living in poverty, compared to 52.3 percent in all Somali households. Even these marginal improvements in the long-term data should be interpreted cautiously, since adaptation is not the only possible explanation for them; it’s also possible that newer waves of Somali immigration have lower initial skill levels than the older waves.

• 'Mamdani Effect' Is Seeing More People Moving to New York, Not Leaving It

Left Angst

• White House Turning to Private Firms in Cyber Offensive

• The EPA Was Considering a Lead Cleanup in Omaha. Then Trump Shifted Guidance

• Attorney General Phil Weiser statement on the President's attempt to pardon Tina Peters

  “One of the most basic principles of our constitution is that states have independent sovereignty and manage our own criminal justice systems without interference from the federal government. The idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court has no precedent in American law, would be an outrageous departure from what our constitution requires, and will not hold up.”

• Man accused of killing Charlie Kirk makes 1st in-person court appearance

  Prosecutors have charged Tyler Robinson with aggravated murder in the Sept. 10 shooting of the conservative activist on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem, just a few miles north of the Provo courthouse. They plan to seek the death penalty. Robinson, 22, arrived amid heavy security, shackled at the waist, wrists and ankles and wearing a dress shirt, tie and slacks. He smiled at his parents and brother sitting in the front row. His mother teared up after he walked in and clutched a tissue throughout the hearing while his father took notes. Robinson had previously appeared before the court via video or audio feed from jail.

• Senator endorses discredited book that claims chemical treats autism, cancer

• US to mandate AI vendors measure political bias for federal sales

• Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants

• Stephen Colbert Wonders Why ‘The Late Show’ Was Canceled if Paramount Has $108 Billion to Offer for Warner Bros.

• Congress imposes new security restrictions on U.S. researchers

• Arkansas becoming first state to sever ties with PBS, effective July 1

  The eight-member Arkansas Educational Television Commission, made up entirely of appointees of the governor, announced in a news release Thursday that it planned to disaffiliate from PBS effective July 1, citing annual membership dues of about US$2.5 million it described as “not feasible.” The release also cited the unexpected loss of about that same amount of federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was targeted for closure earlier this year and defunded by Congress. PBS Arkansas is rebranding itself as Arkansas TV and will provide more local content, the agency’s Executive Director and CEO Carlton Wing said in a statement. “The commission’s decision to drop PBS membership is a blow to Arkansans who will lose free, over the air access to quality PBS programming they know and love,” a PBS spokesperson wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

• Pope criticizes US bid to 'break apart' US-Europe alliance

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• $262M stolen in account takeover fraud schemes this year, FBI says

• Cambridge ends contract for license plate cameras after breach of trust

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US threatens new ICC sanctions unless court pledges not to prosecute Trump

  • Cut off by their banks and from Alexa, sanctioned ICC staffers remain resolute

• With Three Weeks Left, DJI Issues Last Plea for US to Start Its Mandated Audit

• From Chips to Security, China Is Getting Much of What It Wants from the U.S.

• Mapping escalating US pressure on Venezuela

• US Removes Brazil Supreme Court Judge from Sanctions List

World

• Reddit launches high court challenge to Australia's under-16s social media ban

  • Reddit files lawsuit against Australia's youth social media ban

• 'Already had a profound effect': parents react to Australia's social media ban

• Suneung: South Korea exam chief quits over 'insane' English test

• Microsoft fights $2.8B UK lawsuit over cloud computing licences

• Greenlandic women's victory in legal fight with Denmark over forced IUD scandal

• Cuba blames online news site 'elTOQUE' for the country's economic chaos

• Guernsey group backs Australia-style teen social media ban

• The snail farm don: The most brazen tax avoidance scheme of all time

• Sexual predators target girls in mixed changing rooms

• The UK economy is not nearly as bad as you've been told

• Amazon pledges $35B worth of investments in India with AI focus

• Microsoft Deepens Its Commitment to Canada with Landmark $19B AI Investment

• EU ban on combustion engine cars off table, EPP's Weber says

• Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC

• Thailand seizes millions in assets and issues arrest warrants in scams crackdown

• They Droned Back

  Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.

Iran / Houthi

• Iran to attend World Cup draw after reversing its planned boycott

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• EU agrees to indefinitely immobilise €210B of Russian assets

• Germany accuses Russia of 2024 cyber-attack and disinformation

• Young journalists expose Russian-linked vessels off the Dutch and German coast

• Ukrainians sue US chip firms for powering Russian drones, missiles

China

• Tibetan Activists Say China Has Detained Protesters Who Staged Act of Defiance

• A Chinese whistleblower living in the US is being hunted by Beijing with US tech

• China leads research in 90% of technologies

• Historic Shift Underway in China's Economy as Investment Slump Deepens

Health / Medicine

• Cadmium Zinc Telluride: The wonder material powering a medical 'revolution'

• Untreated sleep apnea raises risk of Parkinson's, study finds

• Viagra goes pink (finally!): First-of-its-kind cream promises to jump-start arousal in women.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• You find, we'll shred: how orcas and dolphins hunt salmon as a team

  • Killer Whales and Dolphins May Team Up to Hunt Salmon

• Historic Flooding in Western Washington

  • How many dams and other flood control structures have been removed from this watershed since the 1990s?

• 6.7 Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Off Northeast Japan

• Forget flowers: These ancient plants attract pollinators by getting hot

• Air passengers exposed to high levels of ultrafine particle pollution

• Britain Asked a Power Plant to Build a 'Fish Disco.' It's Not Going Well

• To Feed Data Centers, Pennsylvania Faces a New Fracking Boom

• Solar geoengineering startups are getting serious