2026-10-30

Worthy

• I Didn't Leave the Democratic Party Because I Wanted To. I Left Because I Was Paying Attention.

  I have absolutely no intention of rejoining the Democratic Party. I don’t foresee that changing. I desperately want Democrats to rediscover some degree of political sanity. Not because I want them to win every election. Because I want them to be capable of winning elections. There’s a difference.

  See, Republicans have a problem. They’re lazy. As a political institution, the Republican Party has developed a remarkable ability to avoid doing anything useful while pointing across the aisle and shouting: “WHAT, ARE YOU GOING TO VOTE FOR THOSE LUNATICS?” And the infuriating thing is that this argument often works. Its working for me, now during the midterms. That pisses me off.

etc

• A New Kind of Chemistry

  In some cases, the nuclear chemistry process might let you make “normal” materials that are otherwise difficult or expensive to get. Marathon Fusion got a lot of attention last year (and last week) for a fusion neutron-driven reaction that can create gold using mercury as an input.

Horseshit

• New superconducting chip aims to help tame fusion plasma

• The Milwaukee Brewers win the first World Series title in franchise history

  • Brewers Apologize over $1k 'Timeless Ticket' World Series Seating Dispute

• Drugged driving is a national crisis. Officials do little to stop it

• The provocative new theory that could explain aging and disease

  many chronic diseases we treat as separate failures of separate organs may share one deeper problem: cells struggling to extract and use energy from food. If they are right, a common weakness runs beneath diseases now parceled out among different specialties, and medicine might have spent a century drawing boundaries in the wrong places.

• Comets Probably Didn't Bring Life's Building Blocks to Earth

• A Self-Described 'Junkie' Rode Synthetic Drugs to Oblivion – and Fame

• What America Is Living Without

• An Ancient Virus Explains Why the Human Brain Is Special

• The New Faces of Optimized Motherhood

• The Rise of Rib Remodeling

• The Origin Story of Candy Corn

• The Hottest New Side Hustle Is Stripping Copper Wire and Posting About It

celebrity gossip

• Edgar Allan Poe, Quintessential American Writer

Obit

• RIP Elke Sommer, actress who made her name opposite Peter Sellers in the second Pink Panther film

• Patrick Stewart Dies at 86

  • Patrick Stewart Dead: Star Trek and X-Men Actor Was 86

  • Patrick Stewart Dies at 86

  • Patrick Stewart, 'Star Trek' Captain and 'X-Men' Superhero, Dies at 86

  • Patrick Stewart Has Died

  • Patrick Stewart, legendary actor of 'Star Trek' and 'X-Men' fame, dies at 86

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Former NWSL player says league culture pressured athletes to support political messages they opposed

• The tragedy of losing your Wikipedia page

Musk

• SpaceX has told the FAA it is planning for 10,000 launches per year.

• SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that's a problem for America's space agency

• How Elon Musk Turned on Ukraine

• Law Firm Linked to Elon Musk Started an 'Election Integrity' Organization

• Anthropic is SpaceX's largest single customer, overtaking NASA and The Pentagon

• Tesla caught altering specs following rear suspension collapse reports

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Ford's new Fathom electric truck - which is expected to start below $30,000 - doubles as a 10kW whole-home UPS.

  • Haven't they run this promotion once already and bailed out on the idea?

• A new wave of electric ferries is here in the US. Some even fly

• Mexico is a showroom for electric vehicles you can't buy in the U.S.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Noah's Ark remains found burned and buried 30 feet below final resting place

  Andrew Jones, project head and founder of Noah’s Ark Scans, told the Daily Mail that they’ve discovered both charred and uncharred wood nearly 30 feet underground, which could potentially be “the charred remains of Noah’s Ark.” However, Jones notes that the wood could entail the remains of a campfire a shepherd had started while sheltering inside the Ark hundreds of years ago.

• Cult of the Emperor Augustus Might Have Created the Template for Christianity

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Top Dartmouth Leader Steps Down over Undisclosed A.I. Use in Writings

  • Dartmouth provost resigns following accusations he used AI for writing

• Bay Area candidates push back against plan to eliminate honors classes

• My Students Can’t Read

  Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it. When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Outcry after Call of Duty maker uses real footage of deadly Seoul crowd crush

• Google Home Speakers downloading massive amounts of data

  a Google Home Speaker that has not been used in the past day for voice commands or media streaming consumed 17 GB of data in 24 hours.

• Oura sues rival Ultrahuman again, threatening its US smart ring comeback

• The Beleaguered Chip Sellers Getting Their Revenge on Apple

• Apple's New Touchscreen MacBook Pro Costs Up to $14,549

  • The Inside Story of Why Apple Brought a Touch Display to the Mac

• FAT32 File-System Seeing as Much as 265x Improvement with Linux 7.4

• As search traffic dries up, Reddit announces shift to a logged-in experience

  • Reddit will force everyone to log in

  • Reddit will require you to log in eventually, CEO confirms

  • Reddit will force users to log in as AI is killing search traffic

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Your Cryptography Conspiracy Theory Is Wrong

  Conspiracy theories about the NSA and/or NIST are a dime a dozen these days. And, ever since the Snowden disclosures in 2013, I am politically primed to directionally agree with distrusting the US government wholesale. But most of the technical arguments baked into folks’ conspiracy theories make no goddamn sense.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Astronomers Discover a Possible New Dwarf Planet in Our Solar System

• Cowboy Space unveils ‘Big Iron’ rocket to launch 20,000 AI data centers.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• What Wall Street Thinks About the AI Trade Now

  • HSBC Seeks to Hedge Data Center Debt with Credit Risk Insurance

  • AI build-out hits snag as Google and Microsoft put off raising capex forecasts

  • Why Anthropic's IPO Prospectus Is Missing So Many Key Figures

  • Anthropic Is Going Public

• How teachers are remaking classrooms for the AI age

• "No human at the helm": Delaware plan would let AI agents run businesses

• Claude's new smart reports tell bosses when workers are 'off-topic'

• Why Wouldn't Google Tell Me Who Won the 2020 Election?

• Meta has a new AI pet app called Waddle World

• AI Chatbots Are Building an 'Algorithmic Self-Portrait' of You

• Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race?

• AI startup hacked Anthropic, gains access to employee details, internal messages

• Epileptic woman dies after going to ChatGPT for medical advice

• Opera adds local AI to its browsers

• Anthropic engineer declares the coding interview dead

• I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here's What Happened

• AI Industry's Gamble on Trump Crashes into New Political Reality

• A golden age of science is coming

  It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI.

• Man Wins First-of-Its-Kind Religious Exemption from Mandatory AI Use at Work

• Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning

• DeepSeek, Moonshot used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to train latest models

• 'Hideous' and 'devastating': Data centers are shaping how these women vote

• AI hardware can be hacked so chatbots provide dangerous answers, research shows

• Computerized clairvoyance: psychics push back against AI-generated readings

• MIT professor says AI is taking over your brain

• An Al Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research 'Irrelevant'

• Disney Files Patents for AI That Form Emotional Bonds Using Guest Memories

• Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse

• The Economics of Intelligence

• Canada to invest up to $1.6B in Toronto-based AI company Cohere

• Americans Are Open to AI in Healthcare, but Want Humans Making Final Calls

• A Defense Contractor Gave Their AI Agent Access to a Secure Pentagon System

• Let China Copy American AI

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Utah charges Kalshi and its CEO with illegally promoting online gambling

  • Utah files criminal charges against Kalshi and its founders under gambling laws

• Over $5B drained from Binance in apparent hack

  • Binance hot wallet drained of about $2.5B in tokens on Ethereum

• Polymarket suspends trading after third-party breach leads to user losses

  • Polymarket Pauses Trading After Some Users Report Funds Drained

  • Polymarket halts trading after compromise, impacted users will be 'made whole'

  • Polymarket Halts Trading as Users Report $1.4M Drained

  • Polymarket Halted International Trading After Hackers Drained Accounts

  • Some Polymarket user funds stolen, matter referred to UK authorities

  • Polymarket resumes trading after $2.65 million exploit, says third-party provider was compromised

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Microsoft just shared Azure's actual revenue in dollars: $33.2B

  • Microsoft Azure revenue surges 48% to $33.2B, beating expectations

  • Microsoft has hit ten quarters in a row of record-breaking revenues.

• S.Korea AI chip startup raises $620M at a $2.9B valuation

• Samsung Electronics shares slid despite record profit in the third-quarter

• Zillow to pay $212.5M to settle class action for real estate venture

  • Zillow's $212.5M settlement hides an $880M lesson

• DoorDash to Buy Instacart for $17B, Uniting 2 Delivery Giants

  • DoorDash is acquiring Instacart for $17B

  • DoorDash is buying Instacart for $17B

• U.S. cruise ship suspends a global voyage due to fuel costs

• US economy beats forecasts to grow at 3.4% rate in third quarter

  • Real GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.4 percent in the third quarter of 2026

• Alphabet shares tumble in $500B rout

  • Investors turn on Alphabet after profit miss, ad slowdown and high spending

  • Alphabet earnings miss first real sign that AI is taking a bite out of search

  • Alphabet's Revenue Miss Reignites Fears over AI Spending Binge

  • Google struggling to make money from AI Mode

  • Google admits AI search makes less money, but it's fixing that with more ads

  • Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue

  • Alphabet heads for a $500B drop in market value, biggest in its history

  • Google's stock price plunges, erasing $500B in value

  • Google value plunges by $500B as AI fears rattle Wall Street

  • Alphabet stock sinks as search woes cause revenue miss, cash burn worsens

• US suit claiming Google wouldn't give employee new job following military leave

• Intel stock plunges after posting disappointing Q4 outlook

• Flexible wage deals can boost competitiveness, protect jobs, study says

• Palantir shareholders want to know when they'll get their money back

• Credit Swaps for Tech Companies Reach Records Amid Supply Fears

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Billionaires shatter spending record to fight California wealth tax

  • Minecraft billionaire is latest California resident to flee state — as he offloads $70M Beverly Hills mansion.

  • Billionaires or Democracy: Choose One

• TikTok Is Changing Politics (Perhaps for the Better)

Democrats

• Peltola campaign and national Dems recruited spoiler candidates according to NYT

• Judge throws out new charges against ex-FBI officials in Hunter Biden probe

  • 'Shadow Government' FBI Official Got Advance Word Of NBC's Hunter Laptop 'Foreign Op' Story, Complaint Shows

• Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage

  Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother.

• California's High-Speed Rail Chief Quits Amid Questions About Spending

Left Angst

• James O'Keefe and Cam Higby charged with unlawful voting for YouTube videos

  “I think it’s pretty clear they did not intend to vote. That’s not the question here,” Moriarty said Wednesday as she unveiled the charges against O’Keefe and Higby. While neither man signed the oath to vouch for the other would-be voter — an act Moriarty said would have been felony perjury — “you cannot give somebody else’s name and misrepresent yourself as you go through the process.”

  The state has several ways for unregistered voters to register on Election Day, including vouching. To vouch for someone, a voter who is already registered in the precinct goes with an unregistered voter to the voting precinct and signs an oath confirming the unregistered voter’s address. Under state law, a registered voter can vouch for up to eight people. State court records show the specific election interference charges against O'Keefe and Higby have only been used once since 2021.

  • Soros Prosecutor Charging James O’Keefe and Cam Higby With Felonies for Exposing Election System.

• Hackers identify ICE employees in data breach

  • Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees

  • Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees

  • Bluesky Is Blocking Links to a Major Leak of DHS Employee Records

• Tech Giants Ramp Up Resistance to ICE in Bid to Avoid Democratic Scrutiny

• What about Hyperpolitics

• Trump administration will allow pharmacies to make popular peptides

  • Some wellness peptides will become widely available, HHS says.

• Can Democracy Survive the Next Financial Crash?

• Hegseth Fires Top General After Laura Loomer Targets Him

• Trump and aides helped Flávio Bolsonaro flee Brazil amid criminal investigations

  • Brazil’s treatment of Bolsonaro undermines rule-of-law confidence

  Losing an election shouldn’t drive candidates to flee their countries. But it happened with Flávio Bolsonaro, who arrived in Miami on Wednesday, three days after his defeat in Brazil’s presidential runoff, because he feared imminent arrest. Allies say he doesn’t think he can get a fair shake from his country’s justice system. That’s an indictment of the Western Hemisphere’s second-largest democracy, even if a criminal investigation against him turns out to be justified.

  Bolsonaro’s claims of political persecution hit differently because of the extraordinary powers Brazil’s judiciary has amassed in recent years. Judges often act as investigators, prosecutors and adjudicators. Moraes has used investigations into “disinformation” and supposed attacks on democracy to assert significant control. The Brazil Supreme Court opened its own investigation into “fake news” in 2019, and Moraes has used that probe over the ensuing seven years to order searches and arrests, freeze accounts and remove individuals from social media. In 2024, Moraes demonstrated how far he was willing to go. He ordered the shutdown of X, the social media platform, across Brazil and directed Apple and Google to make it harder for X users to obtain software that could circumvent the ban. Though he backed off that portion of the order, he left in place a fine of 50,000 reais (about $9,000) per day for anyone using a virtual private network to access X. Service was restored after X agreed to comply with court orders, pay fines and appoint a local legal representative. The flagrant attack on free speech put Brazil in a rogues’ gallery that includes China, Iran and Turkmenistan.

• Bloomberg, trading firms to pay Trump for faster Truth Social access

• ‘Affordability’ Is A Trojan Horse For Democrats To Bring Back The Biden Years.

• "Peak Greenwashing": Two Bills in Congress Endorse Misleading Recycling Claims

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• DHS suspends visa-free travel program for Chinese nationals amid birth tourism, security concerns. DHS cited birth tourism, espionage concerns and illegal travel to nearby Guam in announcing the program suspension.

• Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot

  • Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang

  • Nvidia CEO reportedly targeted by Chinese spy

• Trump says imported robotics pose national security risks

• Pentagon treating military base freezer malfunctions as suspected cyberattack

World

• Spain train crash: What we know after two trains crashed with dozens feared dead

• France's Senate Approves Bill Expanding Police Powers over Online Speech

  • Meta loses appeals against interim measures imposed by French regulators

• Failed $44B Firmus float probed by corporate watchdog

• Cuba is skipping its November 1, 2026 clock change and staying on DST until 2027

• Gardaí fear 'attack a strong possibility' ahead of EU leaders' visit next month

• Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?

• An underground network of tunnels was discovered under Liverpool

• Europe's central bank chief Christine Lagarde to step down nine months early

• EU backs away from offer to Canada to start 'associate member' talks

• Canada to join EU network of supercomputers

• UK social media ban may lock out more than 100k teenagers without ID

• Alberta-made low-tech tractor getting attention worldwide

• Offshore workers turn to weight-loss jabs to meet helicopter weight rules

• Rising water is forcing this French town off Newfoundland to move

• Brazil will require facial recognition to keep a mobile phone line by 2029

• Cambodian police and soldiers helped guard abusive scam compounds

• The Streisand Effect Case Might Have Played Out Differently in Germany

Iran / Houthi

• America’s Military Presence Reshapes Hormuz.

Israel

• Netanyahu's party claims election 'stolen' by 'foreign entities'

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia arrests two men who ran a website for train enthusiasts

• Putin hails Elon Musk 'genius' announcing plans for Russian version of Starlink

China

• Soccer star Kylian Mbappé apologizes for apparent reference to Mao as a dictator

  • “That’s not funny!”

  • China's Utter and Total Erasure of Kylian Mbappé

• Welcome to the New 'Made in China'

Health / Medicine

• Nose Spray Made From Toad Venom Compound Quickly Eases Depression For Weeks in Clinical Trial.

• The brain liquidates billions of mutant neurons around the time we're born

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Congo's Ebola outbreak tops 10k cases as authorities race to slow the spread

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Finland launches criminal probe of suspected environ. damage at Google DC site

  • Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees

  • Finland launches criminal investigation into Google's clearing of forest

• EU tells countries to make plans to cope with 3C of global warming

• L.A. fires exposed millions to lead levels way above normal, study says

• New Batteries That Store Blistering Heat Are Taking Off

• Study Finds ‘Climate Change’ Stopped The Next Ice Age — Why Aren’t We Celebrating?

• What satellites see at MrBeast's TeamTrees sites

  Even where satellite imagery confirms strong tree growth, like Kijabe Forest in Kenya (+13.0 points), charities refuse to publish GPS polygon maps (shapefiles) of their plots. As a result, at least five separate global funders (#TeamTrees, Ecosia, One Tree Planted, Mastercard's Priceless Planet, and UNDP) can point donors to the exact same greening hillside as proof of their own campaign.

  • So let's blame this guy instead of looking deeper into the "fraud masked as charity" network he's joined up with. Which has been operating for decades and used numerous partners to play these silly games.

• El Niño Is Flooding California's Coasts with the Highest Tides to Come