2025-11-24

Horseshit

• Titanic passenger's pocket watch sold for record £1.78M at auction

• Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices

• Should you dry someone else's abandoned laundry?

• Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri Disqualified from Las Vegas Grand Prix

• Artist Reconstructs Face of Julius Caesar and Others from Ancient History

• Fertility startup that screens embryos to predict height, intelligence and disease sparks debate with ‘great genes’ campaign.

• Archaeologists think they've solved Peru's 'band of holes' mystery

• Mind-reading devices can now predict preconscious thoughts: is it time to worry?

• Subtle Signs That You Are Ready to Retire

• Gen Z and millennials are driving a great American drinking decline

• The first-ever common language for cannabis and hemp aromas

• Four-Fifths of the Population Now Live in Urban Areas

• Why America Is a 'Creedal Nation'

Epstein

• Chomsky had deeper ties to Epstein than previously known, documents reveal

• Inside the extended courtship linking Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, and Israeli officials

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Agartha: History of a Meme - by Vishal Prasad

  Yes, I am woke. Yes, I watch quite a lot of white nationalist content on Instagram. Two things can be true at the same time. My favorite type of fascist brainrot involves Agartha, the legendary kingdom hidden within the hollow Earth that is the home of all true Aryans. Agartha occupies a place of honor within the memetic language of the dissident right. Surprisingly, Agartha content has become spectacularly popular on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube Shorts. This is a subject worth studying. Should we non-White, non-fascists be worried about this development?

• The Werewolf game: an interview with Google's former news chief Richard Gingras

  This was the climax of NewsGeist, Google’s annual gathering for publishers and editors. The game was Werewolf, sometimes called Mafia, a contest of deception and power where “villagers” must identify the killers among them as they are being eliminated one by one. Google executives, led by Richard Gingras, the company’s Global Vice President for News, acted as game masters. They decided who could speak, who had to stay silent, who lived, and who died. The editors participated enthusiastically. Some had flown in on Google’s dime. Many had received grants from the Google News Initiative, the company’s billion-dollar program to support journalism innovation. All of them depended on Google’s algorithms to surface their journalism to readers. I played one round, but felt so uncomfortable I decided to watch from the edge of the room, struck by how the whole scene looked like performance art: a dramatization of the actual relationship playing out in the real world beyond this ballroom. Publishers were going broke trying to survive in an ecosystem Google had architected. Google decided what lived and what died in its search rankings, in ad auctions, in the fundamental infrastructure of digital publishing. The parallels seemed too obvious to miss. But in Athens, everyone was laughing, playing along, bonding over cocktails and clever game theory.

  Six years later, in October 2025, I finally got to ask Richard Gingras if it had occurred to him that Google executives commanding blindfolded editors in a game of power and deception might be a metaphor for the actual relationship between Google and journalism.

• Is Global Technocracy Inevitable Or Dangerously Delusional?

  The bewildering truth behind human technological enslavement is that it is impossible without the voluntary participation of the intended slaves. People must welcome technocracy into their lives in order for it to succeed. The populace has to believe, blindly, that they cannot live without it, or that authoritarianism by algorithmic consensus is “inevitable.” For example, the average person living in a first world economy voluntarily carries a cell phone everywhere they go at all times without fail. To be without it, in their minds, is to be naked, at risk, unprepared and disconnected from civilization. I grew up in the 1980s and we did just fine without having a phone on our hip every moment of the day. Even now, I refuse to carry one.

  I have a lot of problems with futurists, but one thing that bothers me the most is their habit of ignoring the human factor in their technocratic theories. AI running the world is not inevitable, it is contingent on voluntary human compliance, just as everything about technocracy relies on human compliance. I’m not saying we should be “anti-technology”, just that we can and must be masters of technology. We determine the future, not AI. Technology is peripheral and ultimately irrelevant in comparison to the human experience. If a piece of tech doesn’t actually make our lives better and more free and instead makes our existence a misery, then it should be turned to ashes along with the globalist institutions that demand we “own nothing and be happy.”

  • No one sees a route to co-existence; the people that want to be "slaves to God" (spiritual / mechanical / whatever) tend to demand everyone else join their lifestyle. Those that want to follow a different God (or even none at all) somehow will interfere with the realization of the Utopia. That makes it difficult to live with them.

Musk

• Tesla Sued Over Another Fatal Crash in Growing Scrutiny of Doors

• X.com Is Gonna Snitch You Out to the Public If You Use a VPN

• Major Foreign Propagandists Utterly Exposed After X Glitch Reveals Account Locations

  Days prior, Head of Product Nikita Brier had announced a new feature revealing the origin and current location of users. When it rolled out, though, only account owners could view it. That all changed on Friday night, though. In what is assumed to have been a mistake, everyone’s origins and current locations were made public for about an hour before disappearing.

• Foreign Rage Farmers Exposed by X in Major Update: X just revealed the location of every user on the platform, triggering chaos among foreign rage farmers and slop peddlers — the massive ranks of which have shaped our culture now for years.

• X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect

• U. Texas professors ponder exit due to academic freedom worries: ‘unbearable,’ ‘unwelcoming place’

  Nault, a “scholar of grassroots queer transmedia art and activism” according to his (new) faculty page, said the shuttering of the UT Gender and Sexuality Center showed the school “was becoming an unwelcoming place for thinking critically about gender and sexuality.” With Nault’s exit, U. Texas will be without an academic whose “work on subcultural media formations brings LGBTQ+, feminist, trans and BIPOC theories—and the possibilities they conjure—to bear on the cultural artifacts, practices and politics of D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) communities and creativities.”

• The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore

  • The last 40 years of more spending, more central control, and ever tighter limits on students have brought us to the brink of disaster! We must double our efforts and spend more money to tighten our grip!

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• As an X11 user I suppose I dont care: Gnome Plans New Donation Reminder Pop-Up in Upcoming Release

• Americans' Social Media Use 2025

  • Pew's latest social media report shows X's staying power in the U.S., despite competition | TechCrunch

  Threads and Bluesky still have quite a way to go to catch up with X in the U.S., according to data from Pew Research Center’s latest report released this week. The research firm asked about these smaller services for the first time and found they’re each used by just under 1 in 10 U.S. adults or fewer. While X is not one of the largest social networks in the U.S., it’s still the one to beat within the smaller market of social apps that focus on short, real-time text posts that appear in a vertical feed. In addition to the growth seen by decentralized, open source networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, other startups launched would-be Twitter rivals like Spill, Post, T2 (Pebble), and Hive. Many of these have since shut down, however.

• A Swath of Data Was Hacked from a Leading Real Estate Banking Services Company

• A CrowdStrike employee has been fired after being caught sharing company information with hackers.

• Apple iOS 27 to Be No-Frills 'Snow Leopard' Update, Other Than New AI

• 'We're basically pushers': Staff at Meta compared their platforms to drugs

  • Court filings allege Meta downplayed risks to children and misled the public

• SEC drops SolarWinds lawsuit that painted a target on CISOs everywhere

• TikTok tests feature that will let users request to 'see less' AI generated slop

• Public IPv4 addresses are now valuable loan collateral and can be worth millions

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic

  The 386's standard cell circuitry contains a few circuits that I didn't expect. In this blog post, I'll take a quick look at some of these circuits: surprisingly large multiplexers, a transistor that doesn't fit into the standard cell layout, and inverters that turned out not to be inverters.

• cr.yp.to: 2025.11.23: NSA and IETF, part 2

  I blogged last month about NSA and its partner GCHQ trying to have standards-development organizations endorse weakening ECC+PQ down to just PQ. Today the PQ story is even more exciting, with a critical deadline just a few days from now.

  • cr.yp.to: 2025.11.23: NSA and IETF, part 4

  On 17 October 2025, they posted a "Notice of Moderation for Postings by D. J. Bernstein" saying that they would "moderate the postings of D. J. Bernstein for 30 days due to disruptive behavior effective immediately" and specifically that my postings "will be held for moderation and after confirmation by the TLS Chairs of being on topic and not disruptive, will be released to the list". Do IETF procedures allow WG chairs to censor a participant for unspecified "disruptive behavior"? No. The procedures cited by the chairs, RFC 3934, do allow censorship by chairs, but only for behavior that the chairs claim is "disruptive to the WG process". There has been no such claim, nor would such a claim be defensible. The IETF WG procedures say that conflicts "must be resolved by a process of open review and discussion". Filing objections is following this process, not disrupting it. Sure, NSA is unhappy whenever any of its efforts to sabotage standards are disrupted, but RFC 3934 doesn't allow chairs to retaliate for that.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Gemini 3 Just Made Larry Page Third Richest Man

• Life after chatbots: Meet the 'AI vegans' refusing to accept a virtual reality

• AI Ignites the Return of Bezos the Inventor

• Meta Looks to Power Trading to Support Its AI Energy Needs

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Blue Origin reveals variant of New Glenn rocket that is taller than a Saturn V

• Longshot's Space Cannon Wants to Slash Launch Costs

• Interstellar Space Travel Will Never, Ever Happen

  The logistics of the fantasy make no sense because it was never about that, it was always about nerds like me daydreaming of just getting away, because the world as we know it is messy and crowded and boring. But the solution to that isn’t to imagine a better, accessible planet somewhere out there in the void. There isn’t one. If it depresses you to imagine humans still confined to Earth 1,000 years from now, it’s your imagination that has gone wrong because that is, inarguably, the best case scenario.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon cut more than 1,800 engineers in record layoffs

• Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US Department of Transportation unveils first female-modeled crash test dummy

Trump

• Scott Bessent: Senate Republicans should end the filibuster

Democrats

• WA takes step toward leniency for child-sex sting offenders

  This move was part of a strategic goal of Democrats to destigmatize child sex perverts as part of their far-left criminal justice reforms.

• Socialism Comes to Congress: 98 House Dems Vote Against Measure To Condemn Far-Left Ideology

  The resolution passed 285-98, with only 86 Democrats voting in favor. Two Democrats voted "present." No Republicans opposed the resolution. The measure states that "Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States," characterizing socialism as an ideology that "necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships."

Left Angst

• Nearly 200k Ukrainians in US thrown into legal limbo by immigration crackdown

• The cyberattacks are coming. Will anyone be there to stop them?

• Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Actors

• Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter

  • The Doge Succession Drama Elon Musk Left Behind

  • 'Suddenly exposed' DOGE employees fear prosecution after Musk abandoned them

  Current and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers are growing increasingly concerned that the work they did slashing government programs and eliminating jobs will come back to haunt them with the possibility of criminal prosecutions. As Politico’s Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippmanis are reporting, in June, a handful of so-called DOGE “tech bros” packed up their possessions and departed the sixth-floor of the General Services Administration (GSA) building where they had been living to look for new lodgings.

  • "we haven't seen any necrophilia or cannibalism; we're just reporting it"

  • DOGE Disbanded: Elon Musk's Cost-Cutting Project Ended Ahead of Schedule

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Chicago’s Revolving Door Of Doom: 72 PRIOR ARRESTS Revealed For Train Torcher

  The 50-year-old predator accused of dousing a 26-year-old woman with gasoline and igniting her on a Blue Line train this week had racked up at least 72 prior arrests before this horrifying crime. Lawrence Reed, a lifelong felon whose decades-long rampage should have landed him a life sentence eons ago, was finally ordered detained Friday by federal Judge Laura McNally—following the November 18 attack near Clark and Lake station. “At the time of the attack, Reed was on electronic monitoring after a Cook County judge declined to hold him in jail on an aggravated battery charge,” CBS News reported from the courtroom.

  • Man accused of setting woman on fire on CTA Blue Line had just been released after aggravated battery charge - CBS Chicago

• Inmates at a Mississippi jail were ordered to do the guards' bidding

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The Failed Crusade to Keep a Rare-Earths Mine Out of China's Hands

• The Dayton Peace Accords at 30: ugly peace prevented a return to war over Bosnia

World

• South Africa declares gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster

• EU plans minerals stockpile centre to stop US snapping up supplies

• EU bends to US pressure again by changing AI Act

• The European startup market is ready for the limelight

• Japan suffered deadliest month of bear attacks in history, with 7 deaths and 88 maulings in October.

• Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year

• AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

• Germans Are Going Off Beer. That's Forcing Brewers to Adapt or Go Bust

Israel

• X rolls out location tool, unmasks fake Gaza influencer network

• Unmasking Gaza's digital facades

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's drone revolution heaps pressure on Ukrainian defenses

China

• Japan, China, Fukuyama, and the Oxford Union

  Claire and I dove into a story almost invisible in Western media but blaring across China’s state-controlled outlets: an escalating rhetorical and strategic confrontation between Beijing and Tokyo that could reshape the security landscape in East Asia. The spark was a series of coordinated editorials in the Global Times and People’s Daily—China’s propaganda organs—devoted almost entirely to denouncing Japan’s “dangerous strategic shift.” That alone was unusual. But the ferocity of the messaging was what caught our attention: accusations of Japanese warmongering, warnings to Chinese citizens about traveling to Japan, and heavy-handed reminders of the “post–World War II international order.” What triggered this? Japan’s new prime minister stepped outside decades of carefully curated ambiguity on Taiwan and stated openly that Japan might have to respond militarily if China blockades the island. That single sentence caused something resembling a nervous breakdown in Beijing, noted Claire.

• China's Economy Stumbles After Unprecedented Slump in Investment

• China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice

Health / Medicine

• Gum disease and tooth decay hit men harder – and now we know why

• Weight loss drugs are bringing down the country's obesity rate, a survey shows

• Stick with the real thing. A Nicotine Analogue I Had Known and Didn't Love: 6-Methylnicotine

• Scientists Say Garlic Mouthwash Works As Well as Popular Antiseptics.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Airborne: a Bird Flu Outbreak in America's Heartland

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• A Startup's Bid to Dim the Sun

  • Bastards stole my idea: TP the Planet

• The carbon cost of reality TV shows like The Traitors

• Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air