2026-09-22

Horseshit

• Eagles, Titans endure hot feet and melted cleats as turf temp hits 157 degrees, per TV broadcast

• JRR Tolkien on 'the most tragic moment' in The Lord of the Rings

  "People have often asked me what moves me most," said Tolkien. "I think the most tragic point in the whole story is the terrible irony that good often does evil. The most tragic moment is when Sam in his protectiveness says, 'Take your hands off.' And therefore defeats Gollum's repentance. Because that seems to be very true to life."

• What would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now

• We Asked a Urologist Whether Icing Your Testicles Boosts Testosterone

• US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut

  • US DOT unveils new air traffic control system aimed at reducing flight delays

• Why are all these longevity bros such total snowflakes?

• A Kansas girl ran off to join the circus and changed the tattoo world

• What's Behind the Baby Bust?

• British Museum bans visitors from photographing Bayeux Tapestry

• What's a 'wellness darty'? Gen Z's latest college party trend

  A traditional "darty" — literally, a daytime party — usually revolves around drinking, music, and hanging out. At the wellness version, the agenda might include Pilates, a run, an ice bath, and a coffee or matcha afterward.

celebrity gossip

• Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton: 'I'm an Omni-geek

Musk

• FSD Supervised now approved in Czech Republic

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• LGBT tolerance slumps in the Netherlands, 22% of boys have LGBT+ positive views

• Effective Altruism is evil.

  The idea is that there will be hundreds of billions to quadrillions of future conscious beings capable of suffering, so it does not matter what you do today to help actually living conscious things. All that matters is the tiny, minuscule, marginal impact of what you do today on the quadrillions of future minds.

  William MacAskill, who is one of the high priests of effective altruism, writes in What We Owe the Future that it is "plausible (though uncertain)" that the lives of wild animals are worse than nothing on average, and that if so, "from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing." He leaves it there, but Brian Tomasik, one of the movement's house philosophers on animal suffering, does not, and follows the premise exactly where it goes: "loss of wildlife habitat should in general be encouraged rather than opposed," and "our best option is to reduce the number of wild animals that exist." So the patron saint grants the premise, the disciple bites the bullet, and nobody in the movement can explain to you, from inside the math, why Tomasik is wrong when he says we should literally kill all wild animals currently alive.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• College Is Coming Apart After Successive, Overlapping Crises

• NYTimes Journalist Regrets Long Ordeal Sending Daughter to Worse NY Schools

  • The Tragedy of Nikole Hannah-Jones

  The essay makes for hard reading and I acknowledge NHJ’s courage in writing about her mistakes and the cost to her child. The piece is raw and true when talking about her personal choices, but the larger story in which NHJ embeds her personal history is mostly false. The problem isn’t funding. The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average. Ironically, NHJ invokes the heroic history of Black Americans integrating schools to justify keeping her own child in a segregated one.

  • Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Hard Bigotry of Progressives

  Jones worries that in fighting for all children and standing true to her values, she let her child down, but she’s asking the wrong question entirely. It’s not that raising your children with values rooted in your ideological framework is a bad decision; it’s the choice most parents make, whether that be based on religion, culture, or politics. The problem is that Jones’ ideology is inherently poisonous. All of her answers to the problems were because of whiteness, structural racism, funding, poor teachers, or understaffing; on deeper examination, all of those explanations fall apart. Jones is so profoundly inept at analyzing cause and effect that at this point it’s a moral failing.

• The reason children no longer enjoy reading

  What we are seeing, says an academic called Carl Hendrick, is a generation of kids who are not less cognitively capable but rather who have been raised in a culture of skills-based reading which implicitly tells them that what you read is less important than how you read it. And perhaps “hasty reading” isn’t the worst of it either. I have a teacher friend who tells me she has bright students who seem incapable of understanding the sense of what they’ve read. They can say the words out loud, even scan for a simile, but when she asks them to retell the story or to anticipate what might come next, they’re at a loss. They can’t inhabit the sentences; they’re not making pictures in their minds as the story unfolds. Not hasty readers, but zombie readers. Perhaps as smaller children they knew how to sink into a story, but the extract factory has put paid to that. Now all they can do is stare at the surface of a text, hoping for a fronted adverbial to bob by.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Intel Ends Its $100k Bug Bounty Program

• Notorious cybercrime group claims hijack of rival's website

• Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Flock Partnered with Nonprofit That Uses AI to Rally Public Support

• Australia considers banning the use of smart glasses in government buildings

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Reviving TEMPEST Attacks With An Injected Signal

• What Sun Got Wrong

  Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's Moon Orbiter Spots New, 'Once-in-Century' Moon Crater

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• How Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's Writings Help Explain A.I. Fears

  • Nvidia's Jensen Huang rejects AI extinction warnings as "doomsday narratives"

  • How Google is drafting AI chatbot laws around the country

  • Nvidia boss says there is '0% chance' AI destroys the world by 2030

  • Same Crowd, New APOCALYPSE

  Yesterday, dozens of them marched from OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters to Anthropic’s offices beside Salesforce’s Dreamforce crowd, then on to San Francisco City Hall. ‘Stop the AI Race’ wanted Mayor Daniel Lurie to declare a local “AI state of emergency.” Chalk on the pavement read “Extinction is on the table.” Staff at both labs were told to quit. Organiser Michaël Trazzi said industry leaders had asked Washington to regulate and been turned down. Fellow organiser Hunter Glenn told reporters, “I was pretty scared about the possibility of extinction for awhile,” and called AI safety a bipartisan cause. Other demonstrations dubbed ‘PauseAI’ and ‘Pull The Plug’ assembled outside Downing Street in London after Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could “kill all humans” within a decade.

  • AI is becoming too interconnected to fail

  • A Doomsday Scenario for American AI

  • Building standards for the next phase of AI

  • Human extinction fears make me want to flee AI and live on an island.

  • Measurements for understanding the pace of AI development inside frontier labs

  • OpenAI Urges U.S. Government to Create Global AI-Safety Standards

  • Anthropic, OpenAI et al. face antitrust suit for agreeing to slow AI development

  • Is AI going to kill us? 11 experts, 11 answers

• Trump says it's time to rebrand AI with a new name

  • US and China Discuss Alerting Each Other to AI National Security Threats

  • The president wanted to unleash AI. Then came Anthropic

  • A Silicon Valley radical: Trump's AI whisperer pushing for limited regulation

  • Congressional Democrats in Hysterics About Saving the World From AI.

  • US will form 'AI Force' and appoint an artificial intelligence tsar

• OpenAI Sees Burning Through $278B by 2030: FT

  • OpenAI projections point to a $278B cash burn through 2030

• Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI agent from checkouts

  • Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping

  • Amazon Blocks Meta's Muse AI Agent from Its Retail Site

  • Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent

• Meta's Muse Is Better at Surveilling Than Helping Me

• Meta's New Muse AI App Tops Charts, Draws Strong Early Reviews

• Muse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-day

• Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI

• AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US Military attack

  • Almost started a war: Report reveals dark reality as AI permeates civilisation

• Spending on data centers and hardware now exceeds housing investment

• Shopify CEO says employees' slop grenades making more work for everyone else

• OpenAI Degrading Their Models, Also for Paid Users

• Compsci grads facing recession-like job prospects thanks to AI

• AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries 'most of the time'

• World model companies are keeping a lot of secrets

• AI is breaking the academic sorting machine

  I have more AI accounts than most people have pencils and I am working 50 hours a week. Intelligence is not a scalar quantity. Once an AI can do something, I somehow always find more work to do.

• The End Of Upward Mobility – AI is coming for the meritocracy

• SoftBank Seeks Over $11 Billion in Junk Bonds for OpenAI Bet

• AI-controlled robot arms attempted harmful tasks 97% of the time

• DeepSeek injects 50% more security bugs prompted with Chinese political triggers

• Will new grid rules put the future of UK datacentres at risk?

• Disney Hires Character.ai Chief to Drive Its Technology Push

• OpenAI Weighs Funding Round at over $1.2T Valuation

• A.I. House Can Provide You with Connections. It Also Has a Dark Side

• Google Rolls Out $899-Plus 'Ai laptops'

• AI co-scientists are revolutionizing how research is done

• 'How can I build a bomb? It tells you how': How Boko Haram fighters are using AI

• WTF Is Up with Napster's AI Pivot?

• US District Court Decision in AI's Favor Worries Open-Source Developers

• Anthropic at $2T isn't far-fetched

• Boomers love making AI images of their grandkids. Millennial parents hate it

• Wall Street Is Growing Skeptical of the Data Center Boom

• B.C. government to sue OpenAI after Tumbler Ridge mass shooting

• The data does not show mass unemployment

  If AI is causing mass unemployment among software developers, it is not showing up in the data yet. The USA had more software developers as a percentage of the population in 2025 than in 2021.

• US data centres 'are short six NYCs of electricity'

• In the heart of tech country, voters turn on AI

• Unsealed files describe OpenAI "research mission" to supplant human authors

• Google confirms Gemini models hacked three companies in May 2026

• Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem?

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• I Investigated Coinbase a Year Ago For Forbes. The Bigger Story Now Is Its Power

Economicon / Business / Finance

• AMD becomes latest chipmaker to reach $1T valuation on AI demand

• It's Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb

• Paramount to Settle Lawsuits, Paving Way for Warner Bros. Merger

  • State attorneys general agree to settle Paramount-Warner Bros merger lawsuit

  • Paramount settles with US states in big step towards closing Warner Bros merger

• Goolsbee: The Fed Can't Keep Waiting Out Oil Shocks

• Stocks had a great Monday, but something alarming occurred not seen since 1999

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (2025) History Explains Why the U.S. Doesn't Ban Hate Speech

  • "All lives matter"

Trump

• Trump Says His Contested Arch Would House Drones and Snipers

• White House press pool (5 networks) suspends coverage

  • Major television networks agree to suspend pool coverage of Trump after White House bans CNN

  For years, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC have shared television coverage of presidential events, pooling the financial costs and distributing the footage that is aired by news organizations globally. The networks perform these duties on a rotation, and CNN had been scheduled to cover Trump's travel to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. Print, radio and wire journalists are still expected to cover the president's activities, along with their photographers. Bryan Boughton, the Washington bureau chief at Fox News, wrote in a note to television pool members on Monday that the TV pool would be suspended as a result of CNN being turned away from the White House, adding that updates will come as the situation develops.

• Trump says U.S. working on deal to buy potash from Belarus instead of Canada

Democrats

• Nobel economists throw support behind California billionaire tax

• Gov. Gavin Newsom Bans U.S. Soldiers From Entering California

• Family tied to suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang gave $4.4M to Newsom

Left Angst

• Trump Ramps Up Bid to Dismantle International Criminal Court

• The Questionable Legality of ICE's Palantir Elite System

• Judge Rules EPA Must Reinstate $7 Billion Biden-Era Subsidies For Solar Promotion

World

• Australia banned these Chinese CCTV cameras. Now they're turning up in EVs

• How the EU's age-verification app for children would work

• New air traffic control failure delays flights at UK airports

• North Korean Hackers Posed as Recruiters. They Infected 30k Devices Worldwide

• Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing

  • Germany election: Merz's CDU shut out as AfD wins Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

  • Merz pledges reset as he admits German conservatives don’t have the ‘answers'

• Meta launches fresh legal challenge over UK's Online Safety Act

• Canada and France to Develop Space Systems

• UK productivity grew twice as fast as thought after 2008 financial crisis

• Probes into Toronto's shooter-for-hire network thwarted by impenetrable phone

• The Destruction of the Scottish Canon

• Beyond Ukraine: Why Europe is preparing for a wider conflict

• Google hit with $463M fine for EU location data rule breach

• Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain

• Bunker mentality: the Nordics' cold war shelters being given a new lease of life

• Pakistan Tells Hospitals to Clear Bed Space for "Mass Casualty Incident"

Iran / Houthi

• Saudi Arabia facing 'biggest threat' ever to oil production as Iran-proxy Houthis launch attacks, expert says

• Saudi Arabia says Houthis targeted its capital with a missile

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukrainian naval drone sinks Russian kamikaze drone boat

China

• China is not ready for a post-American world

Health / Medicine

• Dreams of making drugs and tissues in space get closer to reality

• Teen Autopsy Marks Arrival of Deadly Drug Cychlorphine in San Francisco

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Fourth Florida resident dies after contracting flesh-eating bacteria linked to oysters

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists heard a knock at the door. It was a pelican in need of help.

• Super El Niño bursts through temperature record months ahead of peak

• How to Bring a Geothermal Well Back from the Dead

• France to Upgrade Heat Wave Modeling After Record Nuclear Curbs

• US 'super-emitters' of planet heating methane identified by satellite analysis

• A Major Cold Intrusion Spreads Across Eastern Europe: Seasonal Frost to Follow

• 'Planetary boundaries' necessary for flourishing of life have been breached