2026-07-05
Horseshit
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How to invade planet Earth: An alien’s guide to bringing the human race to its knees.
- In sum: don't use movie plot lines. Good advice for many situations, honestly.
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Boston Is Drinking Like It's 1776. The Founding Fathers Would Be Proud
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Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time
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As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers
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(2023) Native Americans corralled Spanish horses decades before Europeans arrived
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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In recent weeks, a drumbeat of revelations—often from Hamas itself—that slain "journalists" on the list were active combatants, has thrown the New York-based CPJ into turmoil and infighting. This week the board expelled anti-Israel heiress Nika Soon-Shiong after a heated meeting centered on a Washington Free Beacon article on the group’s woes, according to Soon-Shiong’s public tweets. The CPJ declined to comment on the board’s vote or provide any information on which members opposed altering the organization’s criteria, only telling the Free Beacon that it "cannot comment on board deliberations and [has] no further comment" beyond a Wednesday evening statement. None of the major media outlets that sit on the CPJ’s board—including the New York Times, Fox News, Reuters, NBC News, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times—responded to Free Beacon questions about their position on the vote or whether they, too, consider "organizations affiliated with militant groups" to be legitimate journalistic actors.
Musk
Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers
- Sexbots or bust! The Quest to Make Humanoid Robots Safe Enough for Humans
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Private space pilots are flying orbital missions for the US Space Force
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Space startup Katalyst launches orbital rescue for aging NASA observatory
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Teams Make Contact with Spacecraft Set to Boost NASA's Swift
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A martian rock has lots of carbon on it, and it's not clear why
- Prolly was used in a fire pit.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Midjourney Seeks to Reveal Studios' Use of AI in High-Stakes Copyright Battle
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Scientists decry conference's use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews
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Thieves Are Now Targeting AI Data Center Construction Sites for Copper
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How America's 250th birthday became a test of AI-powered collective intelligence
Neo Gambling / Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Chip Industry Urges US to Avoid Moves That Distort Memory Market
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Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics
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The Founder Who Got Fired for Ignoring His Own Return-to-Office Rules
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America imports 99% of its fireworks from China
It’s a trade that Americans should be happy to make: many fireworks must be made by hand by specialists trained in handling explosive materials that are sensitive to friction. (It’s exactly the kind of process that doesn’t work well with modern manufacturing methods, where density and speed usually go hand in hand: when making explosives, it’s risky to have a high density of explosives together in the same building.) And with the industry requiring so much work to be done handling explosives by hand, “fireworks manufacturing” is not an enviable job for anyone who wants to keep all ten of their fingers.
- Implicit racist / colonial assumption: risks in China are preferable to risks in the USA. I'm blessed to have enjoyed the skill demonstrated in the Chinese pyrotechnics I have enjoyed for decades... But there's no reason America couldn't make our own. there are many reasons we should.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Left Angst
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Did the founders of the United States intend to create a Christian nation?
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DOGE self-deletes on July 4th. The grand experiment fell apart long before that
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On the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.
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EPA approves pesticides that may be considered forever chemicals
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I’ve just realized that my key ask re cultural drift, namely let’s try to save cherished parts of our culture from being discarded by successor civs, violates key modern taboos! While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future. To most, this seems tribal, anti-universalist, nationalistic, exclusionary, anti-progress, and like wanting to control future people. I thought: this seems another way that the topic of culture has moved me to the right. In addition to my agreeing with traditionalists who complained that we were changing culture too fast. And my wanting more capitalism. Am I more typically conservative now?
- "The machine doesn't lie" is an article of faith apparently unexamined by those who are promoting it. "Conservative == bad" is a tenet that triumphed 40 years ago thanks to monolithic media pressure.
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Nearly a Million Investors Lost a Total of $3.8B on Trump Crypto Coin
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More than 425,000 children in ICE immigration courts are representing themselves
- Maybe the "immigrant rights" groups should hire lawyers instead of riots?
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'All men are created equal': America has lost its values. It's time to go back
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In what would be major news except for all the other disasters happening, Donald Trump has declined to renew the USMCA — the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement — which he himself negotiated. This puts businesses on notice that tariff-free shipments within North America, which NAFTA supposedly made permanent, may go away.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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US warns Russia may stage attack in Poland to test NATO
One Polish intelligence source said an extreme scenario could involve a "hybrid attack in the border region," including Russian or Belarusian soldiers crossing into Polish territory. Moscow could portray such an incursion as accidental, claiming troops crossed the border because of a GPS failure or entered Poland to retrieve a malfunctioning helicopter, according to the report.
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Most House Mice Tested Now Carry Mutations That Beat Common Rodent Poison
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Terraforming Warfare and International Law
International humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law (ICL) have long struggled to account for environmental destruction during armed conflict. Environmental harm has been doctrinally marginalised, treated as secondary to civilian casualties or property damage, and constrained by legal thresholds that are rarely operationalised in practice. At the same time, debates on “ecocide” and other ecocentric crimes remain largely prospective, with limited traction in existing accountability mechanisms. These limitations are starkly illustrated by the ongoing hostilities in Gaza, where environmental harm has reached levels that far exceed what international law typically treats as incidental collateral damage.
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Super villain origin story: Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets