2021-10-31

Cool

• Northern lights might be seen across large parts of the U.S. this weekend

• PumpkinCTScan

Worthy

• "Meltdown": How "Hope and Change" led to MAGA - by Matt Taibbi - TK News by Matt Taibbi

  What’s less obvious, but really important, is that if people keep voting for change and you, the Democratic Party, keep promising change, and then you get into power and you shield for your corporate donors who don’t want that change, and you choose your corporate donors and you betray your promises to voters — what you’re saying to voters is democracy doesn’t matter.

etc

• Ad Astra: The coming battle over space

• Chinese live streamer does $2bn of sales in one day

• Did Vikings and their stowaway mice beat Portugal to the Azores?

  • A feature of all the "Vikings were in America exactly 1,000 years ago" stories was that there was no biological exchange from that visit, no diseases certainly fer sure! ... Perhaps that will be reconsidered sometime.

• How to bring sex work out of the shadows

Horseshit

• Handwriting Robots Are Sending Snail Mail | Hackaday

celebrity gossip

• The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery at Its Most Transparent

• Cyrano: Peter Dinklage film explores 'human need for connection' - BBC News

COVID / VaxCult

• The CDC hits a new low - by Alex Berenson - Unreported Truths

  the CDC used some magic statistical analysis to turn inside raw data that actually showed almost four times as many fully vaccinated people being hospitalized with Covid as those with natural immunity - and FIFTEEN TIMES as many over the summer.

• 26 FDNY firehouses out of service over vaccine mandate staff shortage

• 17 More Reasons I Won't Be Getting a Covid Vaccine

• Next time, manage risk instead of closing border, task force urges Canada, U.S.

• surely, like Southwest, this has nothing to do with vaccine mandates. American Airlines cancels more than 1500 flights over the weekend

  The airline has now canceled more than 1,500 flights since Friday, as it deals with weather issues and staffing shortages that started last week. "With additional weather throughout the system, our staffing begins to run tight as crew members end up out of their regular flight sequences," American said in a statement to CNN on Saturday.

  • American Cancels 1,500 Flights On Halloween Weekend, Denies Any Relation To Vaccine Mandate

• CDC says unvaccinated young foreign travelers do not need to quarantine

• Bill Maher rails against Covid restrictions: It's time to admit pandemic is over

• Definition of 'fully vaccinated' could change, CDC chief says

• “The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.”

• Covid-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status

• Heart attacks among youngsters on the rise

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• Harvard segregates the audience for a theatrical performance

• AT&T's Racial Reeducation Program | City Journal

• Smelling Salts Rushed in After 'Reporters,' 'Profs' Go Nuts Over Southwest Airlines 'Let's Go Brandon' Story – RedState

• The Views That Made Me Persona Non Grata at MIT

• Germany debates how to form gender-neutral words out of its gendered language

Edumacationalizing

• More than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications

• German Academic Freedom Is Now Decided in Beijing

• New schools are rising across the U.S. that look like charters but aren’t

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• it was not "difficult to make out" How 'Let's Go Brandon' became code for insulting Joe Biden

  It started at an Oct. 2 NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver, had won his first Xfinity Series and was being interviewed by an NBC Sports reporter. The crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. The reporter suggested they were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: “F—- Joe Biden.”

  • Taibbi: The "Let's Go, Brandon!" Freakout Goes Next-Level | ZeroHedge

• What Happened to Matt Taibbi?

• Roblox has been down for over 48 hours

  • Roblox has been down for days and it’s not because of Chipotle

• The Vox Formula: Telling Privileged People What They Already Believe

• Climate crisis is real but you wouldn’t know from watching Fox Weather

• Billionaires back new media firm to combat disinformation

• Supply-Chain Crisis Has Companies Asking: Should We Still Advertise?

Facebook

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sunsetting science research platform meta.org

• Tech giants try distancing themselves from Facebook

• Facebook's problem isn't its brand – it's Mark Zuckerberg

• But, Mr. Zuckerberg, How Do You Play Basketball Against a Hologram?

TechSuck

• Apple’s Privacy Changes Hurt Snap and Facebook but Benefited Google

Economicon

• Big Hires, Big Money and a D.C. Blitz: A Bold Plan to Dominate Crypto

• Deere, UAW reach tentative pact; strike continues for now

• U.S. Prices, Wages Rise at Fastest Pace in Decades

• Supermarkets Play Supply-Chain ‘Whack-a-Mole’ to Keep Products on Shelves

• Tether’s bad month: CFTC, Bloomberg, Reggie Fowler – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

• Zillow has listed 93% of the hundreds of Phoenix homes it owns at a loss

Poilitcks

• U.S. in Talks to Pay Hundreds of Millions to Families Separated at Border

• Ricardo “Monkey” Morales told sons he knew Lee Harvey Oswald | Miami Herald

Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• (Oct 22) China’s hypersonic vehicle test a ‘significant demonstration’ of space technology - SpaceNews

• Requiem for the Afghan “Fabergé Egg” Army: Why Did It Crack So Quickly? - Modern War Institute

  Western advisors, meanwhile, often didn’t trust the Afghan troops they were training. Unlike in Iraq, where Iraqi security forces rarely attacked US and coalition advisors, the green-on-blue problem in Afghanistan hobbled US and coalition forces. By 2017, 157 US and coalition personnel and 557 ANDSF members had been killed by insider attacks, driving already risk-averse Western military forces to take extra precautions in their dealings with Afghan troops. For instance, most advisors were assigned “guardian” personnel to act as security overwatch when training the ANDSF. The consequences of this distrust deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when virtual advising replaced almost all face-to-face advising. Some advisors admitted to me that they knew their Afghan partners were deviating from rules and procedures and only “behaved” during these video calls.

World

• China is ramping up coal imports from Russia – but not Australia

• Courts in England and Wales 'close to collapse over police disclosure failures’

• Large-Scale Russian Troop Movements Along Ukraine Border Spark Alarm In US & Europe | ZeroHedge

• A cyberattack paralyzed every gas station in Iran

• Haiti’s Powerful Gangs Hold Country Hostage Over Fuel - WSJ

Health / Medicine

• NIH, FDA and 15 organizations join to accelerate development of gene therapies

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• How You View Climate Change Might Depend on Where You Live

• All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

• JCB digs up a green future with hydrogen engines

• Hitting 1.5C climate target ' tough' – COP26 chief

• Capitalism Is Killing the Planet

• Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tackle climate change

• University leaders call for ‘Great Transition’ of society for ‘planetary health.’

• Fossil fuels doomed in New York as regulator blocks new gas power plants