2021-08-16

etc

• Wikipedia temporarily defaced by vandal who edited template to show Nazi flag

• U.S. opens formal safety probe into some 765,000 Tesla vehicles | Reuters

• Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational?

• The Duke Mansion Mystery

• Dog AI powered by a deep language model

• Swiss researchers calculate pi to new record of 62.8tn figures

Horseshit

• Scoop: Investigation finds fired Tennessee vaccine official mailed dog muzzle to self - Axios

  A Tennessee investigation found evidence that the state's fired vaccine chief, Michelle Fiscus, purchased a dog muzzle that she previously claimed someone had mailed in an attempt to intimidate her. Fiscus, who denied sending herself the muzzle in a Monday tweet, has characterized her firing as a political move driven by Republican state officials after she shared a memo citing state law about whether adolescents can seek medical care, including a COVID vaccine, without their parents' permission.

• Ford targeted older salaried employees during 2019 layoffs

• Near-Death Experiences Can Scar Animals for Life

• Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

• Is the Gym going the way of Blockbuster?

• Afghanistan will be Asia's first narco-state

  Shifting from harvesting opium poppy to ephedra would require some changes in how the Taliban does business, but they are challenges that can be surmounted — especially when $3 billion could be in the balance.

celebrity gossip

• Woman sues Bob Dylan for allegedly sexually abusing her in 1965, when she was 12

• Michael Burry Reveals a Bet Against Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• Gettr Has a Child Abuse Problem

• A ’00s College Debate Team Predicted Today’s Culture Wars

• OII | Tackling online hate speech one emoji at a time

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• Publishers Blast Internet Archive’s Demand for 10 Years of Sales Data

  Lawyers state that "an analyst for one Plaintiff estimated that it would take his entire team several weeks or months working full time to compile the requested information" which would amount to "hundreds of millions, if not billions" of rows of data.

• Facebook bans publication of original historical documents

• Oversight Board overturns Facebook decision: Case 2020-005-FB-UA | Oversight Board

• Taliban Spokesman Gives Updates On Twitter, Trump Remains Suspended – OutKick

TechSuck

• Discontinuing FlickType Keyboard for iPhone | Hacker News

• MasterCard to start phasing out magnetic stripes in 2024

• Court Orders Popular ROM Website to “Destroy” Its Unauthorised Nintendo Games

• TikTok is the new Facebook – and it is shaping the future of tech in its image

• Culture Change and Conflict at Twitter

• Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Sues NASA for a Moon Lander Contract

• Why Your Dev Board Won’t Catch On: A Retrospective of Arduino’s Popularity

• T-Mobile Confirms It Was Hacked

Economicon

• August child tax credit payments issued: Here’s why yours might be delayed | WGN-TV

• Hindenburg Research: A Skeptical Stock Analyst Wins Big by Seeking Out Frauds

• Frisco kids are making $32,000 a month mining Ethereum

• Close to 50% of US Workers Can’t Afford to Rent One Bedroom Housing

• U.S. job openings hit a record 10.1M in June

• Inflation wiped out America's pay raises

• The strange summer land rush in Peoria’s dying south end

Poilitcks

• We are no longer a serious people - by Antonio García Martínez - The Pull Request

  the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything—goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan. The reason for this sudden silence is that in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?

• President Biden To Address The Nation About Afghanistan At 1545ET | ZeroHedge

• President Biden expected to address nation regarding Afghanistan in the next few days

• Pelosi Statement on Afghanistan

  The President is to be commended for the clarity of purpose of his statement on Afghanistan and the actions he has taken.

• A defiant Biden mostly silent amid Afghanistan criticism as WH weighs response.

• White House weighs response as Biden faces mounting criticism over Afghanistan

• Impeach Joe Biden Calls Grow After Taliban Seize Power in Afghanistan

• Final Failure in Afghanistan Is Biden’s to Own

• Biden’s Handling of Afghanistan Pullout Draws Bipartisan Criticism

• Republicans blame Biden for the US's chaotic withdrawal but are glossing over how Trump's Taliban deal set up the disaster

Crime / Police

• International scam artists pulled off an epic theft of Covid benefits

• FBI dodged Ilhan Omar-‘bro’ wed probe: Devine

• Dallas Police Dept. Loses 8 Terabytes of Crime Data

Security / Militaria

• Secret terrorist watchlist with 2 million records exposed online

Afghanistan

• President Biden Remarks on Afghanistan | C-SPAN.org

  We Are Taking Over Air Traffic Control. We Have Safely Shut Down Our Embassy And Transferred Our Diplomats. Our Diplomatic Presence Is Now Consolidated At The Airport As Well. Over The Coming Days, We Intend To Transport Out Thousands Of American Citizens Who Are Living And Working In Afghanistan. We Will Also Continue To Support The Safe Departure Of Civilian Personnel. The Civilian Personnel Of Our Allies Who Are Still Serving In Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refugee Which I Announced Back In July Has Already Moved 2000 Afghans Who Are Eligible For Special Immigration Visas And Their Families To The United States. In The Coming Days, The U.S. Military Will Provide Assistance To Move More Eligible Afghans And Their Families Out Of Afghanistan. We Are Also Expanding Refugee Access To Cover Other Vulnerable Afghans Who Work For Amnesty. And Afghans Who Are Otherwise At Great Risk In U.S. News Agencies. I Know There Are Concerns About Why We Did Not Begin Evacuating Afghan Civilians Sooner. Part Of The Answer Is Some Of The Afghani Did Not Want To Leave Early. Still Hopeful For Their Country. Part Of It Was Because The Afghan Government And Its Supporters Discouraged Us From Organizing A Mass Exit This To Avoid Triggering A Crisis Of Conflict.

• Biden must rescue thousands of U.S. citizens trapped in Afghanistan

• WaPo publisher urges White House to help evacuate journalists in Afghanistan | TheHill

  "Urgent request on behalf of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post is to have our 204 journalists, support staff and families transported by US Military from the civilian side of the Kabul airport to the military side of the airport where they can be safe as they await evacuation flights," Fred Ryan wrote to national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Monday in an email obtained by The Hill. "They are currently in danger and need the US government to get them to safety. Please advise as to how best to proceed."

• A C-17 Packed with 640 Afghans Trying to Escape the Taliban

• Biden Refuses Responsibility And Blames Trump And Afghans For Taliban Takeover

• Biden acknowledges Afghanistan collapse 'did unfold more quickly than we anticipated' | Just The News

  [Biden] added that he could only either follow through with Trump's May 1 deadline to evacuate or he could go back fighting the Taliban in the spring fighting season. If Afghan forces can't resist Taliban now, there's no chance they would down the road or that U.S. forces would help, Biden said.

• Turkey offered to guard the Kabul airport back in June

• I Was Involved in War in Afghanistan. Here's What We Must Learn

• Biden Was Right

• Afghanistan Is Your Fault

  The soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major operations soon felt forgotten. “America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”

• The Afghanistan occupation and the Japan occupation - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

• The Taliban’s terrifying triumph in Afghanistan

• WaPo: Why didn't Biden plan to get female activists out of Afghanistan? – HotAir

• The US Government Lied for Two Decades on Afghanistan

  • (Jul 13 2021) “A Big Money Funneling Operation” — Afghanistan Vet Reflects On Withdrawal Of US Forces - by Michael Tracey - Michael Tracey

• President's situation room photo has wrong times sparking conspiracy theories

• A British 4channer went to Kabul for lulz. Now he’s stuck there.

• President Biden Orders 7,000 US Troops To Protect Kabul Airport After Horrific Scenes | ZeroHedge

• Afghanistan: We Never Learn

  As the Taliban waltzes into Kabul, the look of surprise on the faces of top officials should frighten us most of all

  Every image coming out of Afghanistan this past weekend was an advertisement for the incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing nature of American foreign policy leaders. Scenes of military dogs being evacuated while our troops fire weapons in the air to disperse humans desperate for a seat out of the country will force every theoretical future ally to think twice about partnering with us:

• Fall of Saigon | Hacker News

• US Troops Kill Two Armed Men Attempting To Breach Kabul Airport | ZeroHedge

• Ousted Afghan President Fled Country With Cars, Helicopter "Stuffed Full Of Cash" | ZeroHedge

• (July 5 2021) US left Bagram without telling new commander: Afghan officials | Conflict News | Al Jazeera

  • $800B scrapyard: Bagram Air Base pillaged after US troops abandon it

• Afghanistan's All-Girls Robotics Team Tries to Escape Country

• We Once Waltzed in Kabul - by Kathy Gilsinan - Common Sense with Bari Weiss

• The Fall of Afghanistan shows the Failure of Democracy – Outlook Zen

  This was a tremendous missed opportunity for both Afghanis and for the world. With the amount of money and manpower invested into the country, it could have been a beacon for excellence in a region that badly needs it. It could have been the South Korea of South Asia. Unfortunately, this was entirely botched by an obstinate belief in the miraculous powers of democracy.

• 1842 Retreat from Kabul

• Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home

• "Utter Desperation" - Body Count Rises As Terrified Afghans Mob Tarmac At Kabul Airport, Cling To Departing Planes | ZeroHedge

• Taliban Declare Victory in Afghanistan

• Costs of the Afghanistan War, in Lives and Dollars

• Taliban Holds Press Conference From Presidential Palace While Biden Hides From Public | The Daily Wire

• Don’t Ignore the CIA’s Intelligence Failure on Afghanistan - 19FortyFive

• How America Failed in Afghanistan

• U.S. completes evacuation from American embassy in Kabul Afghanistan

• 20-Year U.S. War Ending as It Began, with Taliban Ruling Afghanistan

World

• China claims Olympics win by imcluding Taiwan and Hong Kong medals

• The US should be held accountable: Gitmo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

• Seizing on U.S. Weakness, China Warns Taiwan U.S. Will Not Defend Them

• Afghan abandonment a lesson for Taiwan’s DPP

• China ready for ‘friendly relations’ with the Taliban

• China has secret jail for Uighurs – in Dubai

• George Soros: Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State - WSJ

Health / Medicine / COVID

• America's Covid-Reporting Breakdown

• 'We are on fire:' Five U.S. states set new records for Covid cases as hospitalizations rise

• The FDA and CDC Standards on the J&J Vaccine and the Immunocompromised are Unintelligible

• EGCG, a green tea polyphenol, inhibits human coronavirus replication in vitro

• A New Antibody-Dependent Enhancement Hypothesis | In the Pipeline

  they should also refer to the massive amount of real-world evidence now available. We have hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated to produce antibodies against the non-Delta coronavirus protein domains and are who are now being exposed to the Delta variant. To reiterate, there is (to the best of my knowledge) no evidence whatsoever of ADE in this situation. In fact, we see the opposite: people who have been vaccinated are far less likely to become infected with the Delta variant, and if they become infected, they are far less likely to experience severe disease. These trends have been seen over and over in different populations, and they are the exact opposite of what you would see if ADE were operating.

• How the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare America’s diabetes crisis

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Thanks to climate change, supply chain disruptions will be the new normal

• It’s now or never: Scientists warn time of reckoning has come for the planet

• Asian Giant Hornet Update from the Washington State Dept. Of Agriculture

• They fought for clean air. They didn’t know they were in a gas industry campaign

• Rewilding: Should we bring the lynx back to Britain?

• “to grow that ounce of almonds, the process demands 97 gallons of water”

• Climate change: Top 10 tips to reduce carbon footprint revealed