2026-06-18

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• America Lost the Art of Association

  “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville after touring Jacksonian America. The French writer had seen that Americans seemed particularly good at forming civic associations that incorporate both freedom and responsibility; in doing so, those associations formed citizens who were capable of governing themselves and flourishing in every domain of human life, without being consumed with the kind of political zero-sum games that threaten not only life and happiness, but progress, too. Nearly two centuries later, do we Americans retain the talent for association? The signs aren’t promising. We belong to fewer congregations, clubs, unions, and lodges than our grandparents did. We report fewer close friends, and a rising share of us claim none at all. Time spent alone has reached record highs, and the Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health emergency. The genius for association that Tocqueville admired has not been abolished, so much as left to atrophy.

• Business jet crashes on Texas highway and catches fire, killing one person

  • Capital Factory CEO Joshua Baer killed in plane crash near Laredo, TX

  The crash happened shortly before 10 p.m. on Loop 20 in Laredo after the aircraft reported mechanical problems while attempting to reach Laredo International Airport, authorities said. Five other people aboard the plane survived and were transported to a local hospital for treatment. Authorities said the aircraft also struck a moving vehicle as it descended, though details about possible injuries in that vehicle were not immediately available.

  • Joshua Baer, godfather of Austin's startup scene, dies in plane crash

  • Austin, TX Incubator Capitol Factory founder Joshua Baer dies in a plane crash

Horseshit

• Designing the Dream House of an 87-Year-Old Tech Visionary

• Using the stars and paddles, indigenous Taiwanese recreate risky sea journey

• Personal taste fell out of fashion

• The Death of the Starter Home

• The Demise of Real Neighborhoods Is a Story of Finance

• Sealed Super Mario Bros. sells for a record $3M

• Western Men Are Going Abroad to Find Traditional Wives

• Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

• Italian noble investigated over Sarajevo 'human Safari' killings

• How Does One Brain Speak Two Languages?

Epstein

• Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with trying to take down Trump before suicide, report says.

  Epstein became fixated on the president after he was arrested in 2019, as his lawyers tried to hammer out a deal with prosecutors if the disgraced financier could provide helpful information about other defendants, according to the New York Times. During his many marathon meetings with his parade of lawyers while he was locked up in a federal jail in Lower Manhattan, Epstein often had his nose buried in a legal pad scrawling disjointed one-liners about the commander-in-chief, such as “Trump is a total con artist — smoke & mirrors” and “Never had money.”

celebrity gossip

• Jeremy Clarkson reveals prostate cancer diagnosis on farming show

  • Jeremy Clarkson Reveals Prostate Cancer Diagnosis in Clarkson’s Farm Season Finale

• Valve Boss Gabe Newell Buys $70M Mansion with Its Own Tunnel to the Beach

• Jackie Gleason's Paranormal Activity

Musk

• DOJ claims xAI's gas turbines are a matter of 'national and energy security'

• Pentagon used Elon Musk's Grok AI to fire 2k missiles at Iran, official says

  • Pentagon says Grok has been used to launch missiles at Iran

• Not having an opinion on SpaceX is going to cost you

• 'Passive' investors who dodged BTC, forced to own SPCX which is 3x more volatile

• With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Uber will bring its premium robotaxi service to Houston in 2027

• Why Porsche Added a Fake Gearbox to Its New $111,900 Electric Vehicle

• The Slate Truck's price may have leaked, starts at $24,950

  When Slate broke cover in 2025, it was targeting a price of around $20,000, assuming the $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit would remain in effect, but it was abolished later that year.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Federal Trade Commission sues leading transgender health group

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Harvard Students Are Twice as Mentally Ill as the General Population Amid Ivy Psychological Meltdown: Young and left-wing are part of ’emerging mental health political identity.’

• UChicago freezes PhD admissions to most humanities programs

• French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Florida AG sues TikTok in latest move against tech giants

• People are abandoning news sites for social media

• Judge Rules Blacked.com Can Sue Meta for Scraping Its Porn

• SanDisk's new PlayStation 5 SSD will cost more than three PS5 Pros

• Google Made a Sad Boomer Mark Out of Me and There's Nothing I Can Do About It

• California says AT&T lied to FCC in attempt to shut off old phone network

• FTC Sues to Stop Sprawling Enterprise Operating Unlawful Subscription Schemes

• License Plate Cameras Will Soon Track Phones, Wearables, Infotainment and Pets

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Courting "persecution by the Administration" has proven to be an excellent promotional strategy for Anthropic. They've got more talk about themselves than they could have paid for, in two rounds now.

  • Anthropic's latest feud with the Trump admin may help it, sales data suggests

  • The Hacker Sent by Anthropic to Calm the Government's Nerves About AI Safety

  • European leaders meet with the Trump and Amodei over Fable 5

  • Anthropic Is Still at Odds with the White House over Claude Fable 5

  • Anthropic Employees Accuse Trump Administration of Targeting Them

  • The White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks. It May Not Be Possible

• The AI Boom's Hunt for Cash Hits a New Corner of the Bond Market

• AIs on their own found ways to exploit regulations and evade current safeguards

• Companies question cost of AI as tokenmaxxing spending adds up

• Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

• TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds

• Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress

• Estonia to Grant AI Bots Digital IDs to Control Access

• OpenAI spending hit $34B last year ahead of planned IPO

• AI Use by the Government

• Canadian pension giant joins race to fund India's AI-fueled data center boom

• Meta Employees Hate Zuckerberg's Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon

• Tokenmaxxing Losing Its Appeal, Companies Scrambling to Curtail Soaring AI Costs

• US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek and more than 100 firms deemed security risks

• AI will lead to labor shortages, Bezos says in optimistic talk

• Meta head of product for 'AI for work' transformation is leaving company

• AI Is Taking over Hospitals

• Trump officials discussed structuring government equity stakes in AI companies

• Bernie Sanders unveils plan to give the public direct ownership of AI companies

• Summoning the Demon

  AI is simply a reflection of our society, it doesn’t contain a destiny. We are summoning the demon because we have demonic desires.

• ARM Never Made a Chip. Dolby Never Built a Speaker

  For a decade the working assumption in AI has been that the prize goes to whoever builds the biggest brain. I think that’s the wrong race, or at least the wrong finish line. The biggest brain is going to get cheaper every year, the way the fastest chip and the cleanest sound did before it. The durable money — the ARM money, the Dolby money — is going to belong to whoever owns the standard that everyone else has to license in order to be believed. Trust is going to be the most valuable thing in artificial intelligence. And trust, it turns out, is something you license, not something you sell.

• The Mom Who Runs a Household with a Staff of AI Agents

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Binance set to lose permission to operate in EU

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US approval of Paramount/Warner Bros. deal surprised DOJ lawyers, report says

• Uber, Lyft riders often see different fares for the same trip

• Farm Bankruptcies Hit Six-Year High in April

• Robinhood CEO Says 'Business Has Never Been Stronger' Then Cuts 10% of Workforce

  • Robinhood's 10% layoffs note shows blaming AI isn't cutting it

• Pizza Hut restaurant chain to be sold for $2.7 billion.

• SPACs are back, thanks to Wall Street's mega-IPO frenzy

• Dealer fees are adding thousands to the price of a new car

• America's bull market has entered its manic phase

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Illinois' New Social Media Tax Is a Shambles

  • Illinois legislature passes bill with new digital taxes and social media fee

Democrats

• Virginia relinquishes Electoral College votes

  Governor Abigail Spanberger officially signs a bill handing over Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to whoever wins the most votes across the whole country… even if Virginians vote the other way.

  • Think this means Virginia's EC votes will actually go to a Republican candidate? ... Me neither.

• “Stupid, Stupid, Stupid”: Justice Department Memo Further Tarnishes Record of Merrick Garland

  Internal emails were uncovered recently that cast a new, negative light on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s record in targeting parents over school board controversies. The communications show that various Justice officials raised alarms over the effort pushed by Democratic allies and the National Association for School Boards. Career officials condemned the Biden Administration proposal by objecting that “If they do this, they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.” As parents organized against COVID and woke policies being implemented by school boards, Democratic allies and the National Association for School Boards called upon the Biden Administration to crack down. Garland agreed and implemented a plan detailed in an October 2021 memo to treat these parents as engaged in potential “domestic terrorism.”

Left Angst

• U.S. Science Is in Chaos

• Peter Thiel's private society attendance list leaked via hard-coded HTML

• FBI arrests 5 people in connection with drone attack plot against White House UFC Freedom 250 event.

• ICE Appears to Be Buying Immigrants' Tax Identifiers from a Data Broker

• Asian Chicago college student admits to burning cross as part of Trump protest.

• How Did the Feds Get into Anti-ICE Activists' Signal Messages?

• Death rate in ICE immigrant detention centers more than doubles under Trump

• Trump administration to pay $765M to scrap four more offshore wind leases

  • Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• A $40M Gold Heist Risks Exposing CIA's Top-Secret Spy Programs

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Trump invokes Defense Production Act for munitions, supply chains

• The Dangerous Tech Found Aboard 'Dark-Fleet' Tankers Captured by the U.S.

• Trump and world leaders joined by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google at G7

World

• UK unveils social media ban for users under 16

  • How the UK Plans to Keep Children Off Social Media

• (PDF) The Rape Gang Inquiry Report

  The scale of the crimes committed is staggering. It has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma.1 The true number is probably higher. The perpetrators bear primary responsibility, yet the institutional failures that enabled them for decades must also be confronted. In court records and official inquiries, around 87% of those convicted in these group-based child sexual exploitation (‘CSE’) cases bore distinctively Muslim names.2 The vast majority of men involved in these gangs were not convicted. Dr. Taj Hargey, an imam with the Oxford Islamic Congregation, believes the true proportion of gang members who are Muslims to be around 95%.3 This figure far exceeds the Muslim share of the overall United Kingdom population. The overwhelming majority of the rape gang networks consisted entirely of men from Muslim backgrounds – predominantly of Pakistani heritage, although smaller groups from Somali, Iranian, Syrian, Turkish, and other Muslim origins were also involved.

  • The Rape of Britain

  In fact, it's so grim, so vile, and so dark that I can't in good conscience recommend reading the graphic details directly (even just a summary of the accounts is traumatizing). But at the same time, you can't look away either. The report estimates that 250,000 British girls have been victims of these rape gangs over the decades. It's an unimaginable scale of horrors. The closest comparison to these accounts is the atrocities committed during times of war, but somehow this seems worse: The terror did not come as a result of losing an armed conflict, but aided and abetted by the national institutions sworn to serve and protect.

• Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

• India temporarily bans Telegram over exam paper leak concerns

• €31B drug trade, 7,600 deaths: How the EU plans to tackle the drug crisis

• Europe's housing shortages are worse than America's

• Japan raids ice cream giants over price-fixing allegations

  • Alleged ice-cream cartel in Japan investigated as sweltering summer looms

• Sri Lanka sees rise in cybercrime as scam networks relocate from south-East Asia

• Canada's population drops in first quarter of 2026

Iran / Houthi

• Trump's Iran deal gives the Islamic Republic big wins upfront — and America nothing

  As best we can tell, the deal does nothing to achieve the aims America started the war with — but does hand Tehran a whole series of gains. Iran gets at least a few billion in immediate funds and can start selling oil right away, with at least some other sanctions dropped as well. More, Tehran wins unprecedented authority over the Strait of Hormuz and likely locks in Hezbollah’s dominance of Lebanon.

• It All Boils Down to Trusting Trump; MOU Released

  No wonder the White House said, "You shouldn't read too much into the MOU." Because if this is all there is, then, well, it looks pretty bad. As with Trump's seeming endorsement of an Iranian missile program, Trump seemingly endorses the idea that Iran should have a nuclear energy program, and thus enrichment capabilities. He also seems lukewarm in getting the "nuclear dust" any time soon.

• US releases official agreement with Iran. Read the 14-point text

• After Months of War, Trump Says Iran Has Right to Nuclear Program

Israel

• Status of Jerusalem holiest site threatened as Israeli nationalists flout rules

China

• A Chinese rocket breaks apart dangerously close to the Starlink constellation.

• 'Student Geng' ignites China research-integrity scandal calling out sr academics

• Beijing's New Message to Its Citizens: Your Money Belongs at Home

• 'China's Instagram' Readies Hong Kong IPO That Could See It Valued over $70B

Health / Medicine

• Should nicotine be regulated like a narcotic?

• Scientists Find Intriguing Link Between Ozempic and Violent Behavior

  In people currently taking GLP-1s, they found, the link between being impulsive and being more prone to violence was noticeably weaker. Though the team’s findings are far from certain proof that GLP-1s can reduce violent behavior, they do warrant follow-up research, the authors say.

• Certain Ultra-processed Foods more Addictive than Others

• Sex after menopause: The remedies no one’s talking about.

• I Tried Daily Olive Oil Shots for Two Weeks: Here’s What I Learned About Its Benefits.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• California's tectonic systems at highest levels of stress in 1k years

• Monsoon has vanished: Satellite images of rain collapse, India faces 64% deficit

• Yellow spaceship machines used to prevent algae

  The machines - called an Equilibrium Modulating Fluids Device - are designed to emit a very low-power signal (less than one watt) that changes how the water behaves at the surface. This can double the rate of gas transfer between the air and water, helping to moderate the pH. It creates conditions that favour the production of algae-eating zooplankton.

• El Niño is here, so what does it mean?

• The coming El Niño could be the strongest ever recorded

• Cockroaches scurry around with pieces of bacterial genomes

• Treasure Hunting: Trillions of dollars of critical minerals sitting on sea floor

• Al Gore: Scientists were dead right: 20th anniversary of 'An Inconvenient Truth'

  When asked by ABC News chief meteorologist and chief climate correspondent Ginger Zee whether the film and its predictions on global warming hold up, Gore responded, "Unfortunately, yes." "The scientists were dead right on all the important elements of it, and it really is insane that we are continuing to use the sky as an open sewer and we're trapping so much heat every day it's equal to the amount that would be released by 800,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the earth," Gore said during an interview with ABC News at his family farm in Tennessee.

• Deep learning discovers Antarctic earthquakes coming from an unlikely location