2022-03-30

Cool

• (2003) Borax or Baking Soda Rectifier and the glow

Worthy

• Who Gets Self-Determination? - by Scott Alexander

  I find all of this unsatisfying. It’s like we’re debating whether a certain region has enough history and culture to “deserve” independence. But any such debate is inherently subjective. Does Texas qualify? Kurdistan? Scotland? Palestine? How should we know?

• The Uselessness of Phenylephrine | Science | AAAS

  here in the US, if you go to the drugstore and purchase an over-the-counter nasal decongestant (as a single agent or a combination of drugs that includes a decongestant), you will in every single case be buying phenylephrine. Which does not work. It is found (according to the paper linked above) in 261 different OTC products, and it is a useless bait-and-switch on the consumer in every one of them. I have always told friends and family members to avoid these products if at all possible, and to go back to the pharmacy counter to get something that actually works.

  • HN thread

etc

• Why NASA Will Be Keeping Many Details of This Weekend’s Megarocket Test Secret

• Russian cosmonaut hands over space station command, NASA astronaut bids farewell

• How to Grow Kale and Which Varieties to Choose - The New York Times

Horseshit

• Dyson’s bizarre new headphones have a built-in air purifier

• Can our duties set us free? A review of Obedience Is Freedom

• Why People Are Acting So Weird

Hunter Biden

• Matt Gaetz Confronts FBI Official On Whereabouts Of Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Enters It Into Congressional Record | The Daily Caller

  Gaetz also announced Tuesday he added the hard drive into the Congressional Record.

  • But there was an immediate objection so it may not happen.

• Watch 'em squirm. "Russian Disinformation" but... the DKIM signature were verified within days of the original story. Here's how the Washington Post analyzed Hunter Biden's laptop Archive link

  Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.

  The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.

  The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Biden properly reported income from business dealings.

  • (Oct 30 2020) GitHub - robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim: Discusses how to verify DKIM signatures in old emails, namely one of the Hunter Biden emails in the news

COVID / VaxCult

• NIH Deleted Info From Wuhan Lab on CCP Virus Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog’s FOIA Finds

• What will the end of subsidies mean for uninsured Covid care?

• Humoral and cellular immune memory to four Covid-19 vaccines

• The tragic folly of lockdown

• Italian study shows ventilation can cut school Covid cases by 82%

• Passengers positive for COVID on cruise billed as ‘fully vaccinated’

• A new wave and a new booster?

• For red and blue America, a glaring divide in COVID-19 death rates persists 2 years later

• CDC recommends fourth Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccine doses for people age 50 and older

• Covid vaccines: head-to-head comparison reveals how they stack up

• Florida, 20 other states sue Biden Administration over travel mask mandate.

Culture War / Tribal / Re segregation

• White outrage about Will Smith’s slap is rooted in anti-Blackness. It’s inequality in plain sight

• Southern Poverty Law Center Is Racist, Employees Say.

• Today’s blacklisted American: TV reporter fired for covering protest objectively – Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

• Jon Stewart's all-white panel goes off the rails — and gets interesting

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Yale employee admits she stole $40M in electronics from the university

• Kids Are Learning History from Video Games Now

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Rumble, the Right’s Go-To Video Site, Has Much Bigger Ambitions

• Elliott and Brookfield to Buy Nielsen for $10B

• Facebook paid strategy firm to malign TikTok

  • Meta Paid GOP Operatives to Smear Tik Tok

  • Facebook Reportedly Funded Republican-Led Anti-TikTok Campaign

• Google cuts racy results by 30% for searches like 'Latina teenager'

TechSuck

• Verizon blames ‘bad actors’ for the spam text you got from your own number

• Ubiquiti is suing Brian Krebs for his reporting on their breach | Hacker News

• CCC | Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

• KA-SAT Network cyber attack overview

  a ground-based network intrusion by an attacker exploiting a misconfiguration in a VPN appliance to gain remote access to the trusted management segment of the KA-SAT network. The attacker moved laterally through this trusted management network to a specific network segment used to manage and operate the network, and then used this network access to execute legitimate, targeted management commands on a large number of residential modems simultaneously. Specifically, these destructive commands overwrote key data in flash memory on the modems, rendering the modems unable to access the network, but not permanently unusable.

  Viasat has conducted an exhaustive analysis of impacted modems and confirmed no anomalies or impacts to any electrical components, no impact or compromise of any modem physical or electronic components, no evidence of any compromise or tampering with Viasat modem software or firmware images and no evidence of any supply-chain interference. The modems can be fully restored via a factory reset. To date, Viasat has no evidence that standard modem software or firmware distribution or update processes involved in normal network operations were used or compromised in the attack.

  • I believe the "sactory reset" requires using the USB port on the individual modem.

Crypto con games

• $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network | Hacker News

  people lent over half a billion dollars of their 'real' fake money (ETH) to a game studio so they could transact on the studio's sidechain because gas fees are prohibitively expensive on ETH, and then the game studio got hacked and lost it all?

  • Hackers Steal About $600M in One of the Biggest Crypto Heists

  • How did a hacker steal over $600M from a crypto gaming blockchain?

  • The Infinite Exploitation Of Cryptocurrency

  In the meantime, the users are the losers. There is no FDIC to protect them, no government body to aggressively pursue the totally decentralized authority that fumbled their life savings into the literal and figurative ether. There is nobody for them to sue, no criminal prosecution to pursue, and no path to compensation. The Ronin Network, despite both holding and transacting with people’s “currency,” has no banking charter nor legal responsibility to act as one. Hell, there clearly isn’t even someone watching the damn thing to make sure nobody walked off with $600 million dollars, because it took Sky Mavis six days to notice.

• When NFTs came to roller derby, roller derby put up a fight

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Red Wedding for Rural Pharmacies - BIG by Matt Stoller

• FedEx Names Raj Subramaniam as CEO, Replacing Founder Fred Smith

• The ‘coasting’ workers who’ve checked out of their jobs

• Is a recession coming? The Fed has made it invevitable

• We're nearing a recession, if this always-accurate indicator is right again

• There's never been such a severe shortage of homes in the U.S.

• 45% of Gen Z and millennials don’t see the point of saving for the future

• Modern Economics Is Not an Illuminati Conspiracy

• Robinhood adds four additional hours to extended trading for clients

• Biden Administration Renews Pushback Against Stock Buybacks

• Apple’s stock is having its best winning streak since 2003

• Inflation will clobber “entitled generation”, BlackRock president says

  we have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice,

• Iowa to kill 1.5M more hens, turkeys because of bird flu

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Ex-Google CEO funneled money into the White House science office

• Senators Release Receipts Showing Direct Payments From Foreign Oligarchs To Hunter Biden

• New Documentary by Frontline and ProPublica Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth

• Satire, at the moment. Psaki Reminds Reporters That Biden Doesn’t Speak For The President Of The United States

• Blistering New Report Takes Down Media's Gas Price Narrative, Reveals 81 Ways Biden Has Sent Prices Sky High

• Biden Poised to Invoke Cold-War Powers to Boost Battery Metals

• Imagine an America with Steep Billionaire Taxes. No Amazon, Pixar, SpaceX, Tesla

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• US Preps for Possible Spike in Border Crossings When COVID Curbs Lifted

• Can Chatrooms Replace Courtrooms? – The Markup

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The US Marines Got Rid of Their Tanks. Is Ukraine Making Them Look Smart?

• FBI says Russian hackers scanning U.S. energy systems and pose 'current' threat

• Britain’s loudest bird is back! How the once extinct bittern is booming

• Former Obama and Biden Admin Envoy to Israel Quits Iran Team

• Russian warplanes that violated Swedish airspace were armed with nuclear weapons

  According to TV4 Nyheter, the two planes carried nuclear weapons on board, something the pilots were in full knowledge of. The Swedish government later confirmed this as they summoned Russian officials over the act of aggression, demanding they answer for what happened.

World

• The Prospects for Democracy in Hungary

• Massacre in western Mexico leaves 20 people dead

• Palestinian Gunman Kills 5 in Israel’s Fifth Attack in Recent Days

• Secret trial held in Quebec violates fundamental principles of justice

• 'We see the queue for food growing day by day' - BBC News

Health / Medicine

• Use of antibiotics by women in midlife linked to later cognitive decline

• A physician didn’t shower for 5 years. Here’s what he found out.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Have economists led the world’s environmental policies astray?

• Some progressives look to change the conversation about nuclear power Minnesota

• A gallon of gas = 20 pounds of CO2

  he total atomic weight of a molecule of CO2 is 44, which is 3.7 times more than the carbon atom alone weighs (44 divided by 12). Next, we need to know how much of the weight of the gasoline is just the carbon. Gasoline is about 87% carbon and 13% hydrogen by weight. So the carbon in a gallon of gasoline (weighing 6.3 pounds) weighs 5.5 pounds (.87 x 6.3 pounds = 5.5 pounds). So, multiply the weight of the carbon times 3.7, which equals 20 pounds of carbon dioxide!

• EarthSky | Tornado Alley is shifting toward Dixie

Ukraine War

• Ukraine's Military Says Russia Now Partially Withdrawn From Kiev; Pentagon Calls It Deceptive "Repositioning" | ZeroHedge

• Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 29

• Russia Has Fired ‘Multiple’ Hypersonic Missiles Into Ukraine, US General Confirms

• Ukraine appears to have begun shelling Russian territory.

etc

• What Foreign Fighters Are Seeing in Ukraine

• Russia has killed civilians in Ukraine. Kyiv’s defense tactics add to the danger

• The invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war, but is the most viral

• A saboteur hunter in Kyiv remembers his victims

• What happened to that 40 mile long Russian invasion convoy.

• Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin

• Russian Crude Continues To Flow Despite Harsh Sanctions

• You Will Pay In Rubles! No?

• No Breakthroughs From Talks, Limited Russian Pullback Near Kiev Amid "Colossal Attack" On Chernihiv | ZeroHedge

• Russian forces struck Chernihiv 'all night long' hours after vowing to scale down attacks, governor says

• Satellite Images Show Food Lines in Mariupol, Ukraine

• "The Russians really f---ed this up" – HotAir

  Putin’s campaign has gone so unexpectedly poorly that U.S. officials have begun reviewing their own intelligence assessments to determine how they could have so badly misjudged the strength of the Russian military.

• Sanctioned or not, Russians abroad find their money is 'toxic'

• Chernobyl employees say Russian soldiers had no idea what the plant was