2026-07-04

Horseshit

• A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator

• Why Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About 'Universal Basic Capital'

• Social Media Recalibrates How the Brain Values Mental Effort

• The Luddite festival harnessing Gen Z's rage against Big Tech

• Dad Books Are a Dying Breed

• The wine made by British monks that's making bank

• Jensen Huang's signed leather jacket could fetch up to $60K in charity auction

• Heineken’s newest Beer has zero alcohol and sugar

Obit

• David Potter, founder of Psion, dead at 82

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Declaration of Independence offers a forgotten argument for facts

• A Third Party Breached the Intercept's Signal Tip Line

  • Many examples exist of people who regret their trust in this publication: Reality Winner - Wikipedia

Musk

• Elon Musk categorically denies SpaceX is making an AI device with proprietary OS — says rumors of a handheld thinner than an iPhone are 'utterly false'

• Musk's X poses "serious risk to Americans' privacy," advocates warn FTC

  The initial order came as a penalty after the FTC found that a coding error had caused then-Twitter to improperly share users’ contact information for ad targeting that had initially been submitted for two-factor authentication. Under the order, X is subjected to costly independent audits, and the FTC has authority to demand documents to ensure compliance with data privacy laws without taking additional legal action. According to X, the order imposes burdensome costs and should be terminated, partly because the company has completely rebranded since Musk took over Twitter.

• Tesla stock sinks 7% despite strong deliveries report, worst day in nearly 1y

• Africans Are Turning to Starlink

• Charged with manslaughter over Tesla crash initially blamed on self-driving mode

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Soft-yet-firm robohand assesses the ripeness of produce that it picks

• Robotic elephants are replacing live ones at Kerala temple festivals

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Peter Thiel in Aspen: The pope is 'working for the Chinese Communists'

• 'Techno in a monastery – are you ready?' Greek priest's doom metal album

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• America Is Having MacBook Sticker Shock

• Amazon's Mechanical Turk to stop accepting new customers

  We checked with Amazon, and the cloud colossus told us that notice means Mechanical Turk will stop accepting jobs for SageMaker and all other tasks. The end of the OG crowdsourcing platform is therefore in sight.

• BitTorrent's disastrous, legendary, and controversial story

• Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

• Plex debuts 5-year membership pass for $250

• Congressman says hack of his Signal account proves app is unsecure. Is it true?

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• A Special Wireless-Free Nikon Camera Is Publicly Available for the First Time

  It may seem odd at first glance that a camera with fewer features can cost considerably more than the default camera, but it’s important to consider the impact of specialized, limited manufacturing on production costs. While yes, the Z6 III (No Wireless Connectivity) has fewer parts than its normal counterpart, making it requires more work. Nikon has to actually change how it makes cameras, remove all wireless connection hardware components from the normal assembly process, and disable all related features at the software level. Counterintuitively, it can cost more to offer less. The Z6 III (No Wireless Connectivity) camera is identical to the standard Z6 III, except it lacks a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips and is completely incapable of wireless communication with any device, including a smartphone. That means no Nikon SnapBridge, GPS metadata tagging, or wireless image sharing.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Sun unleashes powerful X-class solar flare and Earth-bound CME that could spark northern lights for July 4 weekend.

• NASA launches robot to save Swift telescope falling to Earth

• Amazon has enough satellites to launch its Starlink competitor

• NASA inspector general suggests Boeing's Starliner will now be a decade late

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Claude Fable relaunch disappoints users with nerfed performance

• Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

• Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

  • Alibaba bans staff from using Claude Code over Anthropic spyware concerns

• Google's AI buildout drove 37% increase in electricity use in 2025

• Anthropic moves to close loopholes that allow Chinese access to Claude

• AI is 'not smart' so what's next in artificial intelligence?

• The World's Top Economists Are Sounding the Alarm on AI

• Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected

• My Students Hate AI. But They Can't Stop Using It

• AI Data Centers Use More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report

• Battery startups see 'crazy' demand to smooth power surges in data centers

• Blackstone Sells Northern Virginia Data Centers In $3.5 Billion Digital Realty Deal

  • Can't find good numbers, I think these were either part of a "$40 billion" or a "$100 billion" deal in Oct 2025.

• Economists Are Sounding the Alarm on AI

• Token prices collapsing, regulation rising, AI's pricing power looks fragile

• Patagonia Vests Are "Out" with AI Crowd

• Jersey Mike's IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

• US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

• Meta AI chief says their coming LLM has caught up with OpenAI's flagship model

• Independent Studio Buys Movie About OpenAI That Amazon Dropped

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Spotify deletes streams of chart-topping song after suspicious Kalshi bets

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics

• Nearly 1M people worldwide became millionaires in 2025, UBS report finds

• Private Credit Keeps $14B Trapped in Bid to Outlast Storm

• Blue Owl hit by $4.7B of redemption requests as investor exodus persists

• How the great wealth transfer is rattling Wall Street

• Stock market boom runs on a 'large deficit model'

• What Happened in Fuel Markets When Trump Lifted the Century-Old Jones Act

• My Dad Helped Build North America’s Oat Supply Chain: Can It Be Remade?

  Long overlooked in favor of more profitable and prolific row crops like corn and soybeans, demand for oats is growing, thanks in part to the popularity of oat milk. In Minnesota, Green Acres Milling is building a new oat mill, the U.S.’s first new mill in decades. It’s the brainchild of a cadre of upper Midwest farmers colloquially known as the “Oat Mafia.”

• Labor Market Tightens Despite Tepid Job Growth as Labor Force Declines Further

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (PDF) Manson murders 'were linked to CIA mind control experiments', Congress told

• The 400,000 USAID Deaths That Nicholas Kristof Will Not Tell You About. How USAID Built the South Sudan, Watched It Collapse, and Then Allowed China to Take Over.

  Then USAID contracted Deloitte for $92.7 million to construct a functioning government from scratch. Deloitte consultants didn’t advise; they governed. They built the central bank’s payment system, executed $3.3 billion in first oil sales, and managed the fiscal crisis when Kiir shut down oil production in 2012. A midterm evaluation found “ten people were doing 80 percent of the work while the rest were just ‘drinking tea.’” DynCorp built the SPLA’s military headquarters at Bilpam with State Department money — the base for the army that would turn its weapons on the population within just a few years. USAID funded continuous election preparation across over a decade of independence. Elections were postponed from 2015 to 2018 to 2021 to 2023 to 2024 to December 2026. Over a decade of election infrastructure produced zero elections.

• Thomas Paine: The Founding Father Worth Celebrating

• America used to be exceptionally patriotic. Now we're below average

  congratulations to the United States on its 250th birthday, which the country will celebrate tomorrow. It’s really quite an accomplishment if you’ve spent any time studying the rise and decline of empires. And I hope you’ll have a fun and restful July 4 weekend, readers. I very much don’t want it to rain on the parade. I’m also relatively optimistic about the future of the country. I’m a big defender of the complicated national project we’ve undertaken over the past two-and-a-half centuries. I love the United States, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be here for the rest of my life. However, an increasing number of Americans don’t agree with me, to a degree that I found frankly surprising. We assigned this story to Eli in our weekly planning meeting, and I expected the data to show that, while American patriotism had declined, it remained relatively high as compared to the rest of the world. Some informative content that was a little on the lighter side, if we’re being frank. But that isn’t the case. Compared to most countries, we’re now a little below average in patriotism.

Democrats

• FBI infiltrated Gavin Newsom's inner circle by convincing governor's ally to wear a wire: lawyer

  The FBI had a mole inside Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political orbit before the agency’s corruption probe expanded into the governor and his wife, The Post has learned. Democrat insider Alexis Podesta, 45, secretly recorded conversations during the criminal probe into Newsom’s then-chief of staff, Dana Williamson, 53, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud and tax charges in May, according to Williamson’s attorney. The revelation she was wearing a wire as far back as June 2024 explains why a swath of Sacramento political insiders and lobbyists were stunned to receive FBI letters last fall informing them that their phone calls had been intercepted during the investigation — despite many having little or no connection to Williamson.

Left Angst

• Three Hundred Fifty-Four Fireworks per Second

  This Saturday night, the capstone of America’s 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall will close with what its organizers bill as the largest fireworks display in history: 850,000 shells launched from ten sites — the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, eight barges anchored in the Potomac, and West Potomac Park — in a show running approximately 40 minutes. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported this week that the National Park Service’s own internal modeling expects the show to produce hazardous air pollution around the Mall and “very unhealthy” conditions across downtown D.C., Arlington, and Capitol Hill.

• What Would Mark Twain Think of America at 250?

• Trump Jr.'s 'Amazon of guns' could make millions under new proposed firearm rule

• Trump's Windfall Has Few Known Global Precedents

• Trump portfolio tracker account suspended one day after launch

• DOE Deletes Webpage Instructing People to Lower Thermostat to 78

• All Men Are Created Equal, but What Does Equal Mean?

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Recording reveals accused Vegas trans terror plotter’s sinister threats

  An accused transgender terror plotter who allegedly planned a massacre at a Las Vegas-area casino had threatened a mass shooting years earlier, according to chilling audio recordings released by police. Allison Howlett, 36, who was born male but lives as a woman, was arrested Saturday with a massive cache of guns and ammunition in a casino parking garage in Henderson just outside Las Vegas. The suspect’s former spouse had called police to report that Howlett intended to commit “suicide by cop” or carry out a mass shooting, Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader said. After the arrest, authorities revealed that Howlett threated of a mass shooting as far back as 2024, playing an audio recording of the suspect unleashing a frightening foul-mouthed rant.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Tibetan man dies after setting himself on fire outside UN in New York

World

• Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives

  • 'Vanishingly rare' copy of US Declaration of Independence found in UK archives

• EU Parliament temporarily defies Chat Control

• India asks WhatsApp to pause username feature rollout over fraud concerns

  • After WhatsApp, Indian govt sends notices to Telegram, Signal over usernames

• Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, BBC finds

• Domain seller Godaddy fears India's fake site crackdown could damage internet

• Why Europe doesn't have a Tesla

• Poll: Europeans are torn between America and China

• Google loses fight against record €4.1B EU antitrust fine

• 'Humanity is a privilege': Umar Khalid on his six years in a jail without trial

• North Korea patents soybean-based chocolate to bypass cocoa and sanctions

• Politician who investigated spyware abuses had his phone hacked with Pegasus

  The researchers at the University of Toronto’s digital rights unit The Citizen Lab say the confirmed phone hacking of Greek journalist and former politician Stelios Kouloglou during 2022 and 2023 marks the first time that a member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, tasked with investigating phone spyware attacks by European governments, has been publicly identified as a victim of spyware.

• How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

• Canada unveils plans for new oil pipeline to break dependence on US

• Special forces ban Volvo/Chinese electric cars over spying fears

• The UK's Latest "Debanking" Scandal Should Give Everyone Pause

  The latest victim of the debanking trend is the left-wing news website The Canary, which has accused the Lloyds Banking Group of “withholding a substantial amount of our money” after nearly a decade of use. The news outlet — which brands itself as “radical working-class media” — says “Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action… despite multiple communications from us”.

Iran / Houthi

• Hormuz Ship Transits Quadruple as Trump Plan Works.

Israel

• Australians have more negative view of Israel than of China

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia planning attack on Poland to test NATO resolve, US warns

• Tests suggest Russian satellites can jam GPS on a continental scale

• Russian fuel crisis prompts rush for Chinese electric cars

China

• China boosts prestigious grants for young scientists, will it ease competition?

Health / Medicine

• US life expectancy on track to reach record high

• Recall of potato chips upgraded to highest level reasonable probability of death

  Utz Quality Foods, LLC issued a voluntary recall in the US of certain varieties of Zapp's and Dirty potato chips in May after Utz learned that a seasoning used in the chips containing dry milk powder may contain the bacteria salmonella. The dry milk powder was sourced from California Dairies, Inc. and supplied by an unspecified third-party vendor.

  The recall upgrade applies to more than 684,000 chip bags, including: 1.5-ounce plastic bags of Zapp's Bayou Blackened Ranch Kettle Chips; 2.5- and 8-ounce plastic bags of Zapp's Bayou Blackened Ranch Potato Chips; 1.5- and 2-ounce plastic bags of Dirty Brand Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips; 2-ounce plastic bags of Dirty Maui Onion Chip; 1.5- and 8-ounce plastic bags of Zapp's Big Cheezy Potato Chips; and 2-ounce plastic bags of Dirty Sour Cream and Onion Potato Chips.

• FDA to discuss easing restrictions on peptides.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• WHO declares cruise-linked hantavirus outbreak officially over.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• June heatwave may have killed around 20k people in Europe

  • Four graphs to visualize the unprecedented scale of France's June 2026 heatwave

• Relocating 6M Singapore bees and counting, one nest at a time

• "Existential threat" to optical astronomy: warning about satellite plans

• The Fall and Rise of Screwworm

  Until now, the US has been free of screwworm not due to luck, but because of a decades-long program to eradicate the parasite by breeding it out of existence. By dropping millions of sterile male screwworm flies in an infested area, agricultural agencies can overwhelm the native, fertile male screwworms. Female screwworm flies, who only mate once in their life, will mostly mate with sterile males, producing no living offspring. Drop sterile flies for long enough, and eventually there will be no viable offspring at all, and the pest will be eliminated. Over the course of several decades, this “sterile male technique” was used by the USDA to eliminate screwworm from the US, Mexico, and Central America. Since the early 2000s a joint US-Panamanian organization, COPEG, has maintained a “screwworm barrier” at the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama. Every week, millions of sterile male screwworm flies are dropped over the gap, preventing the screwworms from spreading north from South America (where it remains endemic). Sometime around 2023, the barrier at Panama failed, and for the last several years screwworm has been marching north.

  It’s not 100% clear what caused the breach, and most sources point to a confluence of different factors. The disruption caused by COVID-19 seems to be partly to blame: during the pandemic livestock inspectors were forced to stay home, vehicles broke down and couldn’t be repaired due to a lack of replacement parts, and power outages in the screwworm plant killed millions of sterilized flies. Another issue seems to be large-scale movement of both people and livestock. Starting in 2021, the number of migrants passing through the Darien Gap skyrocketed. Illegal cattle trafficking also likely played a role.

• Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches

• Fireworks May Pollute the Air and Water More Than You Think.