2025-11-26

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• Rebuilding milestone: First home rebuilt after Palisades Fire receives certificate of occupancy | FOX 11 Los Angeles

  Ten months after the Palisades Fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures, the first rebuilt home officially received its certificate of occupancy, the final step in the rebuilding process. Thomas James Homes built the property as a showcase home, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company is building homes for 30 families in the Palisades and expects to build 100 more in 2026, the Times reported.

  About 2,376 applications for rebuilding projects have been received; 1,064 projects are in review and 1,069 permits have been issued in Los Angeles, according to a state dashboard

  • Truth About Mayor’s Email: Clarifying Rebuilds in Palisades

  It’s a Thomas James home submitted to plan check before the fire and already planned for construction well in advance.

• The Great Downzoning

  In 1890, most continental European cities allowed between five and ten storeys to be built anywhere. In the British Empire and the United States, the authorities generally imposed no height limits at all. Detailed fire safety rules had existed for centuries, but development control systems were otherwise highly permissive. Over the following half century, these liberties disappeared in nearly all Western countries. I call this process ‘the Great Downzoning’.1 The Great Downzoning is the main cause of the housing shortages that afflict the great cities of the West today, with baleful consequences for health, family formation, the environment, and economic growth. One study found that loosening these restrictions in just five major American cities would increase the country’s GDP by 25 percent. The Downzoning is one of the most profound and important events in modern economic history.

Horseshit

• Adolescence lasts into 30s – new study shows four pivotal ages for your brain

  • Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s

• The Airport-Lounge Wars

• Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world

• The Valley of Death: Why $100k Is the New Poverty

• Real-world Nausicaa Ghibli anime glider completes its final flight in Japan

• Campbell's Boss Taped Saying Soup Is 'Bioengineered,' Lawsuit Claims

• Symbol of LA Modernism, the Stahl House Hits Market for First Time, Asking $25M

• CPSC issues battery safety warning after Rad Power said it can't afford a recall

• Teen dies after co-workers insert high-pressure hose up rectum in 'prank' | New York Post

  A teenage wood shop apprentice in Turkey died after his co-workers inserted a high-pressure air hose up his rectum as a horrific “prank” — the latest incident in which the power tool has killed a young man by exploding his intestines.

• Erdoğan rings alarm bells on demographic crisis

• Which is why depopulation has been the fondest goal of the Left since the 1960's: Ageing Populations Will Lead to Lower Living Standards, Warns Study

• Mary Beard: Hollywood Lied to You About Ancient Rome. Here's the Truth

  • Say it ain't so! .. and as to "here's the truth": I doubt it.

• Tips on being a kinder neighbor and fostering a sense of community

• Thai woman's cremation stopped as knocking on coffin heard

• Headless bodies hint at why Europe’s first farmers vanished

  Known as the Linear Pottery culture (or LBK, after their German name, Linearbandkeramik), these early agriculturalists were direct descendants of the people who began to domesticate plants and animals in the hills of Anatolia around 9000 B.C.E. By 5500 B.C.E., they had reached today’s Hungary. Then they spread westward, farther into Europe. The LBK farmers flourished for more than 400 years, eventually occupying a 1500-kilometer belt of fertile land stretching as far west as the Paris Basin. Then something went terribly wrong. Vráble and other mass graves across Europe attest to a wave of brutality around 5000 B.C.E., about the same time as hundreds of LBK settlements across the continent abruptly vanished. In the aftermath, parts of the continent remained empty for centuries. Other settlements transitioned peacefully into something else, with people living in the same place and continuing to farm, but building houses and decorating their ceramics in a different way. “The LBK were the first farmers, the first large pan-European culture, and the first time we see these repeated finds of violence,” says Christian Meyer, an independent osteoarchaeologist who has studied human remains from multiple LBK mass graves. The finds at Vráble and other LBK sites challenge a long-held notion that prehistory was more or less peaceful, with isolated cases of interpersonal violence but no large-scale conflicts or wars. It may also shed light on one of prehistory’s great vanishing acts. “It’s one of the most interesting questions in history,” Fuchs says. “What led to the disappearance of an entire culture?”

  Perhaps thanks to its rapid expansion, LBK society remained remarkably uniform across an estimated 700,000 square kilometers of Europe, judging from artifacts and, more recently, ancient DNA. Extracted from LBK skeletons, the DNA shows these pioneers were directly descended from early Anatolian farmers, and mostly avoided mingling with local hunter-gatherers they may have encountered as they spread across Europe.

• 'A fire, a dog, and the starry sky': the teens overcoming phone addiction

• Enough with the Brussels Sprouts Already

Epstein

• Why Did Democrats Suddenly Go Quiet On Epstein Files? | ZeroHedge

  According to Bloomberg data, the headline count in MSM for "Epstein" erupted on the day when President Trump signed a spending bill to reopen the federal government after Democrats caved. This was nothing more than a headline deflection by Democrats. But in recent days, the Epstein story count in MSM has fallen off a cliff. You don't hear much from the Democrats who chanted "release the files" every day ...

Obit

• Viola Ford Fletcher, survivor of 1921 Tulsa Massacre, dies age 111

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Indigenous candidates face less bias than parties might think: New research

• Busy doing nothing: why politicians implement inefficient policies

Musk

• Musk Accidentally Proves Most MAGA Accounts on Twitter Live in Russia

• X blew up its own platform with a new location feature

• Elon Musk's zeal for truth reveals the X frauds aiming to divide us | New York Post

  on Friday Elon Musk, having figured out that a lot of influential X accounts weren’t what they claimed to be, activated an X feature showing where users were actually posting from — and uncovered (at least) a million lies. Turns out a lot of users claiming to be disillusioned Trump voters, or anti-Israel Americans, are actually foreign frauds.

  It’s ironic, of course, that the 2016 screams of “foreign influence” on the Trump campaign have now been replaced by actual evidence of foreign influence — mostly aimed against Trump. But there’s a bigger story here. The United States, for all its size and power, is prone to the whims of public opinion — and its communications are largely open to outsiders. It’s hardly surprising that some of those outsiders will seek to take advantage of our nation’s freedom of expression. For many years, and continuing today, that external influence has been manifested in foundations, grants, donations, lobbying and — hello, Biden family! — outright bribes.

• X's new location feature exposed big US politics accounts

• X erupts after the platform reveals the locations where accounts are based

• Elon Musk Drove 3% of Women Off Twitter - by Kevin Munger

• French authorities investigate alleged Holocaust denial posts on Grok AI

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Who will win the trillion-dollar robotaxi race?

• Waymo gets California DMV's approval to test robotaxis in more areas

• When Will the US Get $15K EVs?

  • We have many under $500

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Humanoid robot walked 66 miles in 3 days, right into the Guinness World Records

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Architecture no longer considered a "professional degree" in US

• NZ's draft science curriculum favours rote learning over critical thinking

• New limits on school loans could narrow physician and nurse pipeline, they warn

• The New Must-Have College Admissions Skill: Tolerating Other Viewpoints

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy

• Meta knows how bad its sites are for kids, say lawyers

• GrapheneOS leaves OVH: "France isn't safe for open source privacy projects."

• Rust for Linux Kernel Co-Maintainer Formally Steps Down

• Four Top Contenders at Apple to Succeed Tim Cook

• Lenovo Stockpiling PC Memory Due to 'Unprecedented' AI Squeeze

• Apple's iPhone Fold is expected to sell for around $2399.

• CNN pulls stories from Apple News feed

• Arduino's new terms of service worries hobbyists ahead of Qualcomm acquisition

• $2B Counter-Strike 2 crash exposes a legal black hole

• ‘Destroyed’ Usenet Provider NSE and BREIN End 16-Year Battle With Secret Settlement

  The Supreme Court ordered BREIN to pay the legal costs. For NSE, however, the victory was bittersweet, as the company had already thrown in the towel well over a decade earlier. In a final effort to recoup some of its claimed losses, NSE sued BREIN for damages last December. Exact details were not revealed, but the claim could’ve easily reached millions of euros. This latest lawsuit could’ve easily added a few more years to the legal battle. However, it won’t come to that, as NSE and BREIN have decided to settle their differences once and for all. Last Friday, the parties issued the same brief press release. This effectively confirms the end of the 16-year legal battle without adding any further detail.

  • No one dares try to provide a Usenet-like service anymore; the job is done.

• He Hunted Alleged Groomers on Roblox. Then the Company Banned Him

• RAM prices are so out of control that stores are selling it like lobster

  Micro Center is apparently doing the same: “Due to market volatility, we ask that you please see a Sales Associate for price,” reads an in-store message captured by Redditor CassTexas (via Tom’s Hardware). It’s hard to overstate just how quickly the RAM crunch is changing the affordability of computers — and it might soon impact other realms as well, as everything from game consoles to smartphones require RAM to function. Three months ago yesterday, I bought 32GB of memory for my gaming PC and the price of that exact kit has more than tripled since then. It now costs $300 more. ($440 vs. $130, in case you’re curious; a more common version of the same kit went from $105 to $400.) Some prices have doubled since October, and while you can still find some 32GB kits for as low as $230, a 64GB DDR5 kit can easily run you $700, $800, even $900.

• AMD could cancel RX 9070 GRE 16 GB due to explosive increase in memory prices

• Plex's crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• World's Most Stable Raspberry Pi? 81% Better NTP with Thermal Management

  This post details how I achieved an 81% reduction in frequency variability and 77% reduction in frequency standard deviation through a combination of CPU core pinning and thermal stabilization. Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we solve problems that 99.999% of people (and 99% of datacenters) don’t have.

• NVMe driver for Windows 2000, targeting both x86 and Alpha AXP platforms

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Teens Are Saying Tearful Goodbyes to Their AI Companions

• Jony Ive and Sam Altman say they have an AI hardware prototype

• ChatGPT insists that Musk's DOGE never existed

• Google Further Encroaches on Nvidia's Turf with New AI Chip Push

• Is OpenAI putting the 'AI' in too big to fail?

• Meta and Google Discuss Deploying TPUs in Meta Datacenters Starting 2027

• The AI Invasion of Knitting and Crochet

• Major insurers move to avoid liability for AI lawsuits

  • AI is too risky to insure, say people whose job is insuring risk

• "Genesis Mission" to boost AI research

• A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse

• Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free'

• Large language mistake: Cutting-edge research shows language is not intelligence

• Is This How the AI Bubble Pops?

• Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide

• The State of AI: don't share your secrets with a chatbot

• AI Can Help Reduce Wildfire Risks

• Google, the Sleeping Giant in Global AI Race, Now 'Fully Awake'

• In leaked recording, Nvidia CEO says its insane managers aren't using AI enough

• Walmart Is Exploring Bringing Ads to Sparky, Its New AI Shopping Agent

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Blue Origin to Build a "Super Heavy" Rocket to Compete with Starship

• NASA and Boeing Scale Back Starliner Missions After Fumbled Astronaut Flight

Crypto con games

• Video posted by Garry Tan shows suspect who robbed his friend of $11M in crypto

• Texas Buys $5M in BTC ETF as States Edge Toward First Government Crypto Reserves

• Hamas Victims' Families Sue Binance, Accusing It of Aiding Terrorism

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Nvidia Says It's Not Enron in Private Memo Refuting Accounting Questions

  • Nvidia's 'I'm Not Enron' memo has people asking a lot of questions

  • Nvidia's rebuttal to Michael Burry's criticism

• Nvidia stock falls 4% on report Meta will use Google AI chips

• Justice Department to Settle Lawsuit over Apartment Rental Pricing

• How the K-Shaped Economy Is Hurting Everyone but the Rich

• An Auto Holy Grail: Motors That Don't Rely on Chinese Rare Earths

• The 'S&P 493' reveals a different U.S. economy

• Why investors are increasingly fatalistic

• Rare Layoffs at Apple Impact Dozens in Sales Roles

• TSMC in a tight spot: demand for high-end chips exceeds capacity by factor of 3

• 'Friends block you': NW Mutual sold grads a dream job that left them ruined

• Economists get cold feet about high minimum wages

• Private Credit's Sketchy Marks Get Warning Shot from Wall Street's Top Cop

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Atlanta's First Government-Funded Supermarket

• CA spent over $450M on a new 911 system. It's now scrapping the flawed design

Trump

• China's Xi Jinping Raises Future of Taiwan in Call with Donald Trump

Democrats

• Tennessee Dem Candidate Aftyn Behn: ‘I Don’t Want Children. I Want Power!’

  “My therapist always asks me to transcribe my dreams when they happen, and the recurring dream I’ve had is standing up in a cafeteria full of women – I don’t know why I was there or whatever – and saying, ‘I don’t want children. I want power!’ And just screaming it at the top of my lungs,” Behn can be heard saying.

  Behn, currently serving as a state representative in Tennessee, has a history of controversial comments that have undermined her campaign to represent Tennessee’s 7th District in the U.S. Congress. In another clip discovered and posted last week, the Democratic candidate said she hated the city she is running to represent. "I hate the city, I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music, I hate all of the things that make Nashville apparently an ‘it’ city to the rest of the country. But I hate it,” she said.

  • This woman is apparently the craziest person to ever live

Left Angst

• Trump Cancels Release of Crucial Economic Report to Hide His Failures

  The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced Monday that it had officially canceled releasing the advance estimate on gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter of 2025. The Trump administration had previously delayed the release, which was initially slated for October 30, due to the government shutdown—but now it seems to have been abandoned altogether.

• Trump's plan to end protections for Somalis in Minnesota sparks fear | AP News

  In a Truth Social post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries. The Trump administration has until mid-January to revoke the legal protection for Somalis nationally. But that move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at just 705 nationwide. advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia. “This is not just a bureaucratic change,” said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric.”

  The protection has been extended 27 times for Somalians since 1991, with U.S. authorities determining that it was unsafe for people already in the United States to return there.

• Judge dismisses cases against James Comey and Letitia James | AP News

  A federal judge on Monday dismissed the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges at President Donald Trump’s urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

• ‘Sedition’? Democrat bid to foment Trump resistance inside U.S. military draws blowback | Just The News

  A local Colorado news outlet, The Denver Gazette, reported last week that Crow wouldn’t specify what “unlawful” or “unconstitutional” orders they were referring to. Crow’s office didn’t respond to key questions and said Crow wouldn’t be available for an interview. “We’re not talking about specific orders,” Crow replied. “We’re talking about the general obligation of uniformed service personnel to follow the Constitution and follow the law.”

  Slotkin said on Sunday on This Week on ABC “to my knowledge, I — I am not aware of things that are illegal” that had been ordered by Trump, “but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela.”

  Goodlander argued on Thursday on CNN that the deployment of American troops on American soil could constitute an illegal order. When asked directly for a specific example of an illegal order under the second Trump administration, however, she did not give one. When asked if she had heard from U.S. troops or members of the national security community who believe they had been given unlawful orders, she replied, “I have heard from service members … What we see is an uptick of concern from the men and women who are serving in uniform about the legality of orders that are being given, and they want clarity, and they want to know that the country has their back — and we absolutely do, because we live under the rule of law.”

• Documents show Pentagon preparing to sever ties with Scouting : NPR

  U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning for the military to sever all ties with Scouting America, saying the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces," according to documents reviewed by NPR. In a draft memo to Congress, which sources shared with NPR but which has not yet been sent, Hegseth criticizes Scouting for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

  • Wouldn't that be in line with the Left's vision for the organization formerly known as "Boy Scouts"? Separate them from the awful militarism and masculinity of the military? More time for struggle sessions and gender exploration.

• Nicolas Guillou, French International Criminal Court Judge Sanctioned by the US

• Larry Ellison Met with Trump to Discuss Which CNN Reporters They Plan to Fire

• ICE Offers Up to $280M to Immigrant-Tracking 'Bounty Hunter' Firms

• Pregnant women and their babies endure inhumane conditions in jails

• Not good news: The FDA is conducting fewer foreign inspections

• Doge May Be Dead, but Its Crimes Live On

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Tampa men charged with smuggling Nvidia chips to China

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US demands digital concessions in return for EU steel tariff relief

• Navy Cancels Constellation-Class Frigate Program

• Witkoff Advised Russia on How to Pitch Ukraine Plan to Trump

World

• Saudi Arabia's Prince Has Big Plans, but His Giant Fund Is Low on Cash

• Total bill for Australian bureau of meteorology new website came in at $96M

  • US$60M wasted on Australian Govt Meteorology website redesign

• Suspected Russian sonobuoy found by scuba divers off the Pembrokeshire coast

• Jakarta Is Now the Biggest City in the World

  • Jakarta overtakes Tokyo as largest city, according to UN

• DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping

• Japan weighs extending 5-year residency requirement for naturalization

• Rachel Reeves plans £7.5B tax rise in budget after U-turn on income tax rates

• Germany wants to build Europe’s strongest army – a new conscription bill is moving that closer.

• Germany wakes up to US tech dominance

• UK digital bank Revolut sees value jump £23B in a year

• German 'hammer gang' trial for seven accused of extreme-left violence

  German prosecutors say the group, founded in late 2017 or early 2018, carried out violent attacks on people they considered to be part of the right-wing scene. The attacks took place in Germany and in the Hungarian capital Budapest. The six men and one woman who are on trial face charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault, and property damage.

  Antifa Ost was designated as a terrorist group in the US earlier this month, as part of President Donald Trump's crackdown on extreme-left activists. The designation makes group members ineligible to enter the US, freezes any assets they may have in the world's largest economy and makes it a crime to provide material support to them. The move was welcomed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

• Spanish court orders Meta to pay nearly half a billion euros in damages

• Finland clings to happiness crown as economic gloom deepens

• Former MI6 Chief Warns of the Security Risks of the UK's Proposed Digital IDs

• MercadoLibre Tries to Woo Brazil's Online Shoppers as Amazon, Shein Close In

• Jury trials set to be axed for most crimes under major shake up

  • UK intends to scrap jury trials for majority of court cases

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Unique Russian A-60 Laser Testbed Jet Destroyed in Ukrainian Attack

• Russian Gerbera drone crashed into a house in Moldova

China

• China launches Shenzhou 22 spacecraft to return 3 stranded astronauts

  • China launches an emergency lifeboat to bring three astronauts back to Earth

• To help kids 'climb the ivy,' Chinese uproot families for Silicon Valley schools

• Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy

• Return to China not an option for Taiwan's people, premier says responding to Xi

• Car influencers love Chinese EVs – and China loves them back

Health / Medicine

• ADHD: Pharma, schools, & parents helped medicalize childhood restlessness

• Skip short strolls – a longer daily walk is better for your heart, says study

• Cheetos and Doritos to offer "no orange dust" variations starting December 1

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The 30-foot sea cow quickly hunted to extinction because of its tasty meat

• Ethiopian volcano erupts after 12000 years

  • A dormant volcano erupted in Ethiopia sending ash plumes toward Yemen and Oman

• 'The narwhals stop calling': how noise from ships is silencing wildlife, Arctic

• How I talk to whales

• The price of gold: In Venezuela, mining threatens Indigenous Pemón

• Fighting for 'The Right to Night' Under Starry, Rural Skies

• A decade-long chimp war ended in a baby boom for the victors

• Why is climate action stalling, not ramping up as Earth gets hotter?

• Its very difficult to milk a seal: Seal Milk Is the Cream of the Molecular Crop

• Removing dead trees will not save us from fast-moving wildfires

• Mountains Warming Faster Than Lowlands

• Europe's Cold Snap Puts New Heat Pumps to the Test

• One of the Greatest Polar-Bear Hunters Confronts a Vanishing World

• The Death Rattle of Apocalyptic Environmentalism