2022-08-29

etc

• NASA, Boeing announce Starliner crewed test mission pushed to February.

• Belgian F1 Fans Stunned By Man Flying Over Track; Could This Be Mysterious 'Jetpack Man'? | ZeroHedge

• The ‘wild, Wild West’ of Virginia’s marijuana market

• The missing pandemic innovation boom

• U.S. – Smoking marijuana is more frequent than tobacco

• The Up-Goer Five Text Editor | Hacker News

• Google opens public tests of chatbot that ex-engineer claimed is ‘sentient’

• Fear of Landing – Post-Pandemic Mystery at Heathrow

Artemis

• Artemis Launch Scrubbed

• NASA Artemis I Launch Attempt Scrubbed

  • HN comments

• Artemis 1 launch delayed until September

  • ‘Zero hour’ for Artemis 1: NASA’s most powerful rocket to launch risky moon mission test flight.

  “Liftoff of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission is set for Aug. 29 at 8:33 a.m. EDT.”

• After years of setbacks, NASA’s SLS moon rocket is ready to fly | Hacker News

• Fuel leak interrupts launch countdown of NASA moon rocket

• Fuel leak interrupts launch countdown of NASA moon rocket

• NASA's – Artemis 1 Moon Mission – Live Updates

• NASA’s newest rocket is a colossal waste of money

Horseshit

• It's now illegal for anyone under 21 to buy canned whipped cream in New York

• The Pitfalls of Closed-Source Whistleblowing Software

Obit

• E. Bryant Crutchfield, 85, Dies; Gave the World the Trapper Keeper

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The zigzags of politically correct opinion in communist regimes

• Google is trying out ‘pre-bunking’ to counter misinformation

• Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

• Rights, Laws, and Google – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Musk

• Elon Musk Is Bringing Cell Service to the Backcountry

• Elon Musk aims to have self-driving Teslas ready by year-end in the U.S.

• Judge orders more document production in Musk-Twitter suit

• A Who’s Who of Silicon Valley Lawyers Up for the Musk-Twitter Trial

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Inventing Anna: The tale of a fake heiress, Mar-a-Lago and an FBI investigation

• Trump's social media app facing financial fallout

• Lawyer: January 6 Clients Are Being Tortured.

• Donald Trump Is Increasingly Cornered, and Yes, This Should Terrify You

• Sen. Graham says if Trump is indicted, there will be 'riots in the street'

• Marjorie Taylor Greene swatted for a third time in less than a week.

• THE COLUMN: What's the Constitution Among Friends? | The Pipeline

• Rorschach Redactions: What Did Not Happen with the Release of the Mar-a-Lago Affidavit – JONATHAN TURLEY

• DOJ seeks 17 years for eye-gouging ex-NYPD officer who swung flagpole at police

• When an election denier becomes an election chief

Pestilence / Pox / COVID / VaxCult

• Could long Covid be linked to herpes viruses? Early data offer a hint

• Monkeypox vaccine debacle shows how little we have learned from Covid

• Rockefeller Foundation Wants Behavioral Scientists To Come Up With More Convincing COVID Vaxx Narratives | ZeroHedge

• Fauci’s Covid Disaster: A Summary ⋆ Brownstone Institute

• (Oct 2020) Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data

• Video of Chinese Citizens Kneeling as Vaccine Passports Scanned Goes Viral

• Excess mortality in Germany 2020-2022

  • HN comments

• How Fauci Fooled America

• Another week with deaths far above normal in Europe

  I will keep saying this until someone pays attention: NO ONE EXPECTED DEATHS TO REMAIN ABOVE NORMAL ONCE COVID DEATHS FELL.

  In fact, demographers and scientists generally assumed the opposite would occur. Covid deaths typically occur in people near the end of their lives, either from advanced age, morbid obesity, or other severe comorbidities. So demographic experts generally imagined deaths would run below average for months or years after Covid ended or nearly nearly ended.

  There are possible reasons that don’t include a seven-letter word that starts with the letter v, but they are becoming less plausible as the trend goes on week after week. As bad as the deaths are, the reluctance by governments or public health authorities even to discuss them is worse.

  If they are afraid that talking about this reality will “fuel conspiracy theories” or hurt demand for the mRNA shots, I have news for them. Demand for the shots has flatlined and isn’t coming back, and failing to discuss something as basic as the number of people who are dying is only going to fuel the conspiracists. Death counts were the sine qua non of the Covid epidemic; to pretend they do not matter now is bizarre.

  • HN comments

• Biden administration to stop sending free at-home Covid tests Friday

• The Psychology of Totalitarianism

• Survey shows gay men cutting back on sex to avoid monkeypox.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Scientists, not doing science - by Noah Carl

  The reason I want to congratulate the editors of Nature Human Behaviour is that they are being open and honest about a policy that most social science journals already have. While many commentators have rightly criticised the absurd editorial, they seem to be operating under the illusion that it’s a one-off. It isn’t. Many journals follow exactly the same policy – they just don’t say so, or if they do, they hide it in the small print.

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Author finds WaPo too authoritarian: The Bias of the Washington Post

• Zuckerberg avoids Cambridge Analytica deposition as Facebook agrees to settle

TechSuck

• The silent majority

  • HN comments

Crypto con games

• Inside ‘crypto Woodstock,’ where technologists plot a utopian future

Economicon / Business / Finance

• We didn't plan on doing anything effective anyway, so these folks can take some blame: Fed tackles inflation with its most diverse leadership ever

• Everyone’s a Landlord–Small-Time Investors Snap Up Out-of-State Properties

• 'Inflation fever' finally breaking. Central banks should stop hiking interest

• U.S. Stock Futures, Global Markets Fall After Powell's Hawkish Remarks

• The Sellers Strike and Housing Inventory

• SoftBank’s losses reveal Masayoshi Son’s broken business model | Hacker News

• Next year's food crisis will be different from this year's

• Speech by Chair Powell on monetary policy and price stability

  • HN comments

• Real estate tech startup Reali to shut down after raising $100M one year ago

• North American companies send in the robots, even as productivity slumps

• American Real Estate Was a Money Launderer’s Dream. That’s Changing

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Beto O'Rourke is off the campaign trail for a while due to a bacterial infection

• Whoa, Did Biden Admit Elections Have Been Stolen? – PJ Media

  For nearly two years now, the left has insisted that elections are safe and secure. Anyone who even suggested otherwise was a dangerous election denier—a threat to democracy! If you said the 2020 election was stolen or rigged, then you might have found yourself banned from social media. So, why did Joe Biden say, during a rally Thursday, that Democrats have a plan to make sure no one ever steals an election “again”?

• Interesting perspective: My Summer of Nixon and Watergate - by Albert Cory

Student Loans

• Black Swan’ Author Taleb Says Colleges Should Bear Student Debt Forgiveness

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• "Defund the police": Curbing violent crime is an all-hands job

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists

  • HN comments

• US Coast Guard cutter is denied entry into the Guadalcanal port in the Solomon Islands stoking fears over China’s growing influence in the Pacific.

• Dutch Soldier Shot in Indiana Dies

• D-day tribute or theme park? Battle rages over Normandy plan

• Iraq Presidential Palace Stormed, US Embassy Helicopter Evacuation.

World

• Bike protest takes over German motorway

• In the Taliban's Afghanistan the near-broke central bank somehow still functions

• Moldova ships in one million iodine pills amid fears of nuclear disaster

• Rising energy costs ‘will force thousands of corner shops to close’

• Xi Jinping’s Vision for Tech Self-Reliance in China Runs into Reality

• China spends more on controlling its 1.4bn people than on defense

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia, Ukraine trade claims of nuclear plant attacks

• Ukraine says it has begun counter-offensive to retake Russian-held south

• Kherson Counteroffensive Finally Begins.

Health / Medicine

• This Teen Was Prescribed 10 Psychiatric Drugs. She’s Not Alone

• Startups are pushing Adderall on TikTok

• The evolution of mucus: How did we get all this slime?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Rewetting dried wetlands could stop 100B tons of CO2 emissions

• Pakistan pins deadly floods on climate change

• Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable’

• ‘Zombie ice’ from Greenland will raise sea level 10 inches