2024-06-13
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Horseshit
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Woman sues Cold Stone Creamery over lack of pistachios in pistachio ice cream
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No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn - The New York Times (Archive)
Over the past week, more than 100 websites around the world have published headlines that falsely claim the Marubo have become addicted to porn. Alongside those headlines, the sites published images of the Marubo people in their villages. The New York Post was among the first, saying last week that the Marubo people was “hooked on porn.” Dozens quickly followed that take.
“These claims are unfounded, untrue and reflect a prejudiced ideological current that disrespects our autonomy and identity,” Enoque Marubo, the Marubo leader who brought Starlink to his tribe’s villages, said in a video posted online Sunday night. The Times article had overemphasized the negatives of the internet, he said, “resulting in the spread of a distorted and damaging picture.”
- (Original NYT story from Jun 2) Elon Musk’s Starlink Connects and Divides Brazil’s Marubo People - The New York Times
Alfredo Marubo, leader of a Marubo association of villages, has emerged as the tribe’s most vocal critic of the internet. The Marubo pass down their history and culture orally, and he worries that knowledge will be lost. “Everyone is so connected that sometimes they don’t even talk to their own family,” he said.
He is most unsettled by the pornography. He said young men were sharing explicit videos in group chats, a stunning development for a culture that frowns on kissing in public. “We’re worried young people are going to want to try it,” he said of the graphic sex depicted in the videos. He said some leaders had told him they had already observed more aggressive sexual behavior from young men.
Alfredo and Enoque, as the heads of dueling Marubo associations, were already political rivals, but their disagreement over the internet has created a bitter dispute. After Ms. Dutra and Ms. Reneau delivered the antennas, Alfredo reported them for lacking proper permission from federal authorities to enter protected Indigenous territory. In turn, Ms. Dutra criticized Alfredo in interviews and Enoque said he was not welcome at the tribal meetings.
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Boeing's Urgent Mission to Train Rookies How to Build an Airplane
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Obit
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Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 86
- Everybody seems to find the gender thing more significant than any professional work. Watching reporters fumble at "why is this person important other than being trans?" is the show here.
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NBC News analyst Howard Fineman, 75, dies after brave cancer battle
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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The Warsaw-Based “Ukraine Communications Group” Is The New “Disinformation Governance Board”
The US and Poland reached two agreements earlier this week to establish the Warsaw-based “Ukraine Communications Group” (UCG). Its explicitly stated goal is “to coordinate messaging, promote accurate reporting of Russia’s full-scale invasion, amplify Ukrainian voices, and expose Kremlin information manipulation.” Despite being directed against Russia, it’ll likely also be aimed against the West’s conservative-nationalist opposition and could easily grow to involve more subjects than just Ukraine. The Department of Homeland Security’s infamous “Disinformation Governance Board”, which was briefly established for several months in 2022 with essentially the same mission, was forced to shut down under public pressure due to legitimate concerns that its mandate risked violating Americans’ civil liberties. Its masterminds learned their lesson not to set up another similar institution at home, however, and that’s why they’re finally replicating its functions through the UCG and basing it in Warsaw instead of DC.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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How Q Became Everything. Goal was to convince people world is run by pedophiles
You can track QAnon’s arc, like most things in America, through its relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook and YouTube, where its lore envisioning Donald Trump fighting an elite cabal of liberal pedophiles was honed and refined. When Covid came in 2020, QAnon ballooned under lockdowns, putting it in the mainstream, but leaving it short of actually being mainstream.
Call it the Wayfair era. In July 2020, followers of QAnon began spreading a particular pedophilic panic: the absurd notion that the online furniture retailer was selling children for sexual abuse via armoire orders. Non-Q masses took the bait: “Mentions of Wayfair and ‘trafficking’ have exploded on Facebook and Instagram over the past week,” the Associated Press wrote at the time, noting that related TikTok hashtags “together amassed nearly 4.5 million views.” A national human trafficking hotline issued a press release warning that a flood of calls about the conspiracy had distracted them from genuine work.
Calling LGBTQ teachers “groomers” strikes a nerve, and claiming that trans indoctrination or critical race theory is getting in the way of learning important subjects like math and science strikes another at a moment of ever-increasing inequality, and as class struggle plays out on the field of college acceptances. If trans vitriol leveled at high school athletics hit in a broader way than the original bathroom-ban bills did, it may be because a kind of person would go crazy over the idea (however unlikely) of a woman losing an athletic slot at an elite college or a sports scholarship to a man they thought was indoctrinated into being a trans woman. To the white reactionary, it is the destruction of gender binarism, the sanctity of sports, and the myth of meritocracy all at once.
Fighting acceptance of trans people offers the potential to turn the clock back on traditional gender values and retreat toward the traditional nuclear family-based society that the right values—and that values them—and the free female labor that came with it. And it provides a field of argument where conservatives don’t have to baldly argue a system that operates on women’s unpaid labor should persist for the benefit of men. While DeSantis, Rufo, and the like railed against elites they detested, the elites that they do like stand to benefit from socioeconomically isolated families and strained social ties of weakened labor power. If QAnon might have looked like a movement toward some bizarre future, it and the mainstream version that came after are, in truth, attempts to return to the past.
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The 'Intellectual Dark Web' has become yet another failed right-wing rebrand
Just over six years ago, the New York Times published a splashy essay by staff editor and writer Bari Weiss hailing an “alliance of heretics” called the “Intellectual Dark Web” whose members supposedly existed apart from the traditional left and right political spectrum. The article received a fair amount of attention, but few noticed that Weiss’s paean to internet personalities like podcasters Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein was a recapitulation of a profile that the Times’s inhouse magazine had published in 1995 of a “Counter Counterculture,” a new generation of reactionaries who were supposedly different from their predecessors.
The similarities between the two pieces are too numerous to list here, but perhaps the most striking is that the women who were photographed in both were dressed in leopard-print apparel. In the earlier package, future Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham was foregrounded in a group shot wearing a miniskirt bearing the great cat’s distinctive rosettes, while in 2018, author Christina Hoff Sommers donned a jacket that appeared to be made of leopard fur. It’s unknown whether the Times intended the sartorial parallelism. Likewise, it’s unclear that Weiss and her predecessor, James Atlas, were aware that they were being used in a process that had already repeated itself several times before the late nineties.
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In Trump, Silicon Valley's crypto grifters see an ally–and a kindred spirit
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Can a Return to Traditional Discipline Save Schools?
After another year of disarray in many urban public schools, with the vast majority of teachers reporting that behavior issues were their biggest challenge, proponents say No Excuses charters provide an example of how to restore order and learning. Instead, they have been banished to the sidelines of public education. Progressive educators who have embraced “anti-racism” as their guiding principle over the last five years have assailed the charters, claiming they single out students of color for stern discipline. The rhetoric has been inflammatory, alleging that the charters “control black bodies” and prepare students for prison, despite the high rate of No Excuses graduates who go on to college.
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Keeping Up With Fakery | Science | AAAS
A look at over 11,000 papers in the genomics literature from 2007 to 2018 found that over seven hundred of them had at least one mis-identified gene sequence in them. Likewise, taking >13,000 reported sequences and trying to verify those found over 1500 of them were wrongly identified, mostly in sequences of targeting reagents for protein-coding genes and noncoding RNAs alike. The fact that these papers had collectively been cited over seventeen thousand times was not reassuring. But the rot doesn't stop there. In that earlier paper, the authors looked at one of those noncoding RNAs in particular, miR-145, which had been widely published on. Out of 163 papers on that subject, 31 of them (19%!) had incorrect nucleotide sequences in them.
Deploying software to look for this sort of thing has turned up thousands and thousands of conference-proceedings papers, which must also be assumed to have been mostly generated by paper mills. These folks had previously been looking at "tortured phrases" generated by such language models (such as "glucose bigotry" used instead of "glucose intolerance", which I will admit gave me a rueful laugh), and now they have an ever-growing "tortured acronym" list and software that makes detecting them easier. When you find papers using these, a closer look is highly likely to find other things wrong with them - fake author identities, reviewer chicanery, faked results and references, and so on.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Firefox Browser Blocks anti-censorship add-ons at Russia's request
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Is the New York Times bestseller list politically biased?
The fairness of the New York Times list is not merely a question of politics. Bestseller status helps an author sell more books, generate speaking fees and negotiate better contracts for future book deals. As other newspapers have done away with their lists and bookstores have closed in recent decades, the New York Times list is even more important. It is supposed to function as a reflection of what the public is reading—and influences what consumers might want to. A more transparent list would also be more useful. If Alex Jones, a controversial far-right conspiracy theorist, was indeed the second-place bestselling author in America—as Bookscan says he was in August 2022, with a title that was omitted from the New York Times list—people should probably know that. His enduring popularity says a lot about the country and its readers, who are not willing to close the book on him.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Turkish student arrested for using AI to cheat in university exam
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SEC Charges Founder of AI-Powered Hiring Startup Joonko with Fraud
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Large Language Models' Detection of Political Orientation in Newspapers
Over a woldwide dataset, articles in newspapers are positioned strikingly differently by single LLMs, hinting to inconsistent training or excessive randomness in the algorithms. We thus raise a warning when deciding which tools to use, and we call for better training and algorithm development, to cover such significant gap in a highly sensitive matter for democracy and societies worldwide.
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Photographer Disqualified from AI Image Contest After Winning with Real Photo
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: Science openness to concealed earthly UAP
Recent years have seen increasing public attention and indeed concern regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Hypotheses for such phenomena tend to fall into two classes: a conventional terrestrial explanation (e.g., human-made technology), or an extraterrestrial explanation (i.e., advanced civilizations from elsewhere in the cosmos). However, there is also a third minority class of hypothesis: an unconventional terrestrial explanation, outside the prevailing consensus view of the universe. This is the ultraterrestrial hypothesis, which includes as a subset the "cryptoterrestrial" hypothesis, namely the notion that UAP may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the moon), and/or even "walking among us" (e.g., passing as humans). Although this idea is likely to be regarded sceptically by most scientists, such are the nature of some UAP that we argue this possibility should not be summarily dismissed, and instead deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Survey shows "Over 60% of drivers are OK with anti-speeding tech in vehicles"
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"The Gubmint tells us what to say, and we say it" How The Economist's presidential forecast works
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Silicon Valley's Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind
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If the newly leaked pages are authentic – this is the second time that part of the journal found by MNPD in the shooter’s car has been leaked. It comes after the judge in the case, I’Ashea Myles, warned against further leaks, threatening contempt of court for anyone who did it again. However, Judge Myles was unaware of the supposed leak, until WSMV4 Investigates’ Stacey Cameron called the court asking for a reaction to the leak, wanting to know if she was considering holding the Star or anyone else in contempt. On Monday night, Judge Myles set a court hearing for next Monday morning, ordering the Star and Michael Leahy, to appear before the judge and show cause why she should not hold them in contempt for their alleged publication of the documents in violation of her order.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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EU expected to impose import tariffs of up to 25% on Chinese electric vehicles
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YouTube prankster Fidias, 24, wins a seat in the European Parliament
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Don’t bother voting in European election – POLITICO
“Vote in the European election!” read a homemade banner that pro-European activists hoisted above one of Berlin’s busiest thoroughfares last week. “The far right is on the rise. Democracy is at stake!” No it isn’t. In fact, European democracy might be better served by not voting and putting an end to the charade. That this sounds like sacrilege testifies to the success of the Parliament’s lobby in pulling the wool over our eyes. But the propaganda doesn’t change the fact that the European Parliament isn’t a parliament in any conventional sense of the word. It may boast the trappings of a real parliament, with not just one but two chambers, in Strasbourg and Brussels, not to mention its countless committees and subcommittees, bloated staffs and labyrinthine bureaucracy. Europe’s Potemkin parliament has even had its share of graft and scandal, just like a real parliament. Despite all that, the European Parliament doesn’t possess the one power that is the lifeblood of any real legislature: the power to legislate. Proposing laws is the sole privilege of the European Commission.
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Germany gets informal EU go-ahead to support gas-fired power, sources say
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The last best hope against populism is to expose it to government
In the first-rate Stendhal novel that we call Emmanuel Macron’s life, the protagonist grows bolder and bolder as he rises through France. He marries who he likes, thanks. He joins Rothschild even as a banking crash turns public opinion against financiers. He sets up a party, gives it his own initials and wins the biggest directly elected office in Europe after jilting his mentor. His latest decision — to give the hard right an early shot at power — will be filed alongside those headstrong acts. It is no such thing. It is a work of cool logic.
The last best hope against populism in Europe is to expose it to government. The pressure of office might force anti-establishment parties to moderate, as Giorgia Meloni has done somewhat in Italy. Or it might reveal their incompetence and turpitude, as happened to Boris Johnson in Britain. Sometimes, of course, it will do neither: power will neither tame nor shame. (See Viktor Orbán.) But even then, these parties should at least become subject to the pendulum of politics. Time spent in government is time spent alienating voters with tangible decisions. Right now, in much of Europe, populists have a goldilocks level of success: enough to foul the atmosphere, to spread the idea that simple answers to big problems exist if governments would but enact them, but not enough to have to prove this in office. The establishment has a record, and all records are flawed. Its enemies get to travel lighter. The contest between the two sides is, in Pentagon argot, asymmetric.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Scientists engineer human antibodies that could neutralize black widow toxin
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Plant-based ultra-processed foods linked with risk of cardiovascular disease
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A London Hospital Is Asking Its Own Workers for Blood After Hack
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Prevalence of microplastic contaminants in general human seminal fluid
- Just in time to take over for the "declining sperm counts" emasculation propaganda effort.
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WHO identifies four sectors responsible for 2.7M deaths in Europe
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A 50 year old medication may halt the rise in syphilis and chlamydia
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Test used to assess concussion in athletes may be useless, research shows.
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New Obesity Drugs Come With a Side Effect of Shaming - The New York Times
Wegovy and other drugs expose a social tension between a quest to medicate illness and a stigmatizing belief that obese people lack sufficient willpower to lose weight.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Disturbing 'Light Paintings' Show All That Crap We're Breathing In
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Oil demand set to peak by 2029, major supply glut looms, IEA says
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Harmful gases destroying ozone layer falling faster than expected, study finds
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Major world economies seek to halt new private sector coal financing
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The big British bamboo crisis: 'It invaded my beautiful home'
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Jury finds Just Stop Oil supporters not guilty in petrol pump case
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The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy
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New bill could bail out US farmers ruined by 'forever chemical' pollution
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Wildfire Smoke Killed More Than 50k Californians over a Decade
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Formula 1 Tires Made with More Sustainable Rubber Still Only Last Half a Race