2024-07-03
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The Cyclist Who Uncorked a Historic Victory at the Tour de France
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The Rubik Cube Turns 50 - The New York Times
In March 1981, with the Cube having been renamed for Rubik and populating American toy stores, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter diagnosed the craze as “cubitis magikia” — “a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips, which can be relieved only by prolonged contact with a multicolored cube,” he wrote in his column for Scientific American. He added: “Symptoms often last for months. Highly contagious.” By November 1982, the mania had subsided — “Rubik’s Cube: A Craze Ends,” declared a headline in the The New York Times. But it was resurrected in the 1990s by the World Wide Web. In 2023, Spin Master, the toy company that now owns the brand, globally sold 7.4 million units, including both the classic Cube and related twisty puzzles. Ben Varadi, a Spin Master co-founder, noted that Rubik’s has “95 percent brand awareness” — virtually everyone has heard of it. Rubik’s lore also holds that one in seven people on Earth have played with the Cube. “It gives me hope about the world,” Mr. Rubik told his audience in San Francisco. “It brings people together.”
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Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows
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Analysis | How accurate is the weather forecast where you live? Look up your city. - Washington Post
Coastal regions can be easier to forecast because the ocean acts like a giant thermal regulator, absorbing the sun’s warmth during the day and gradually releasing it over time. Similarly, the southwest desert is relatively predictable because its arid conditions discourage the formation of disruptive weather systems. The vast middle of the country lacks these moderating factors. Instead, air masses frequently converge with one another: A warm, moist air mass from the Gulf of Mexico, for example, might surge northward and meet a cold, dry mass sweeping down from Canada. Such interactions can cause rapid, unpredictable temperature swings that throw off the forecast’s accuracy.
Horseshit
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The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific
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Forget about the gym Chicken-sizing will keep you fit
At the same time, I was reporting on global health for NPR, and I started to realize that exercising per se was a strange phenomenon. Around the world, people don’t necessarily go out and move their bodies with the intent to burn calories and tone their thighs (mmmm … chicken thighs). Instead, they embrace a revolutionary idea: They move — and move quite a bit — with a clear purpose in mind beyond the movement. They move to reach a destination. They move to hunt or forage. They move to take care of animals or tend crops. Or build a structure. Or gather firewood.
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If you care about someone, show them – and put away your phone
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Advanced Meditation Alters Consciousness and Our Basic Sense of Self
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Why refrigerators and other kitchen appliances break so easily now (Archive)
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San Francisco couples are using tech tools to optimize marriage
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Woman "howling in pain" before death at slapping therapy workshop
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
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Judge orders surprise release of Epstein transcripts
A judge in Florida has ordered the surprise release of graphic transcripts from the state's 2006 prosecution of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein - a probe that ended with the millionaire financier receiving a legal slap on the wrist. When prosecutors made that deal, they knew he had sexually assaulted teenage girls two years before, according to the transcripts.
On Monday, Circuit Judge Luis Delgado ordered the 16-year-old documents released, writing that "details in the record will be outrageous to decent people". "The testimony taken by the Grand Jury concerns activity ranging from grossly unacceptable to rape — all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, disgusting, and criminal." Referring to Epstein as "the most infamous pedophile in American history", the judge added that the state's leniency in the case "been the subject of much anger and has at times diminished the public's perception of the criminal justice system". "Epstein is indeed notorious and infamous and is widely reported to have flaunted his wealth while cavorting with politicians, billionaires, and even British Royalty," he continued. "It is understandable that given those reports the public has a great curiosity about what was widely reported by news (agencies) as 'special treatment' regarding his prosecution."
The investigations uncovered Epstein’s close ties to former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew, as well as his once friendly relationship with former President Donald Trump and numerous others of wealth and influence who have denied doing anything criminal or improper and not been charged.
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They always got away with it': new book reveals Kennedys' treatment of women
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Rapper BG ordered to have all future songs approved by US Government
A US federal judge has refused prosecutors’ request to prohibit the maker of the 1990s rap classic Bling Bling “from promoting and glorifying future gun violence/murder” in songs and at concerts while on supervised release from prison, saying such a restriction could violate his constitutional right to free speech. But the artist known as BG must provide the government with copies of any songs he writes moving forward, ahead of their production or promotion – and, if they are deemed to be inconsistent with his goals of rehabilitation, prosecutors could move to toughen the terms governing his supervised release.
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Opinion | How Steve Bannon Sees the Future - The New York Times
I felt like I was talking with Leon Trotsky in the years before the Russian Revolution. I decided to check in with Bannon again about a week ago. This year, populists have scored yet another string of triumphs and a second Trump victory is possible or even probable this November. I found Bannon, currently the host of the podcast “War Room,” to be embroiled and embattled as usual. He’s going to prison Monday, to begin serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. If anything, he is more confident than ever. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length — and to remove the F-bombs that Bannon dropped with machine gun regularity. I should emphasize that I wasn’t trying to debate Bannon or rebut his beliefs; I wanted to understand how he sees the current moment. I wanted to understand the global populist surge from the inside. What he told me now seems doubly terrifying, given Joe Biden’s performance at the first presidential debate.
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Things Got Weird: On the Early ‘90s Crack-Up - The Millions
As a scholar of chaos and the right, Ganz also shares much with historian Rick Perlstein (whose exhaustive, spectacular Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980 shows the planting of the seeds that sprouted in early 1990s America), though using a less pointillist approach. Ganz is drawn to big characters: “the gang of ‘paleoconservative’ malcontents, Patrick Buchanan, the billionaire-populism of Ross Perot, survivalist cranks in the Rocky Mountains, the transformation of John Gotti into a folk hero.” It’s a rich tableau. But the star of this show is Perot and the fractured milieu that tossed him into the spotlight.
It can be hard to recall, at a time when a Kennedy reeling off cracked theories on raw milk and 9/11 barely rates a headline, what a gobsmackingly odd, only-in-America phenomenon Perot was. Termed “Little Caesar” by Maureen Dowd, Perot was a reedy, runty, and wildly wealthy Texas businessman who presented as a down-market Barry Goldwater-style bootstraps libertarian with all the usual contradictions (though talking big about small government, he built his computer-business fortune on Medicare contracts).
An eager and quippy performer always yammering away on Larry King Live, Perot picked up on the country’s angry disquiet with the status quo. He cunningly let himself be drafted for a third-party presidential campaign while on air. Ganz quotes Rush Limbaugh, another big talker channeling the country’s garrulous id, describing Perot as a kind of on-air insurgent: “Talk media is to the dominant media institutions what Ross Perot is to the dominant political institutions.”
- After having sold a couple of generations on orthodoxy and "stand behind your government" in the Cold War, there was a breif period where people began to ask "why do we need to stand united on everything if there's no more Great Enemy?" So the propagandists began working overtime to provide more Enemies that required a unified response.
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Trump Moves to Overturn Hush-Money Conviction, Citing Immunity Decision - The New York Times
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Manhattan Prosecutors Agree to Delay Trump’s Sentencing - The New York Times
Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday agreed with Donald J. Trump’s request to postpone his criminal sentencing so that the judge overseeing the case could weigh whether a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling might imperil his conviction, new court filings show. It is up to the judge to determine whether to postpone the sentencing, though with both sides in agreement, it seems likely he would do so. Mr. Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his cover-up of a sex scandal during his 2016 presidential campaign, was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He faces up to four years in prison, though he could receive as little as a few weeks in jail, or probation.
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Trunp sentencing date rest to Sep 18 "if such is still necessary"
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Trump Suggests Electric Planes Can't Fly When It's Not Sunny
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Imperial U.S. presidency looms with Trump's 2025 vision
Trump promises an unabashedly imperial presidency — one that would turn the Justice Department against critics, deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally, slap 10% tariffs on thousands of products, and fire perhaps tens of thousands of government staff deemed insufficiently loyal.
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Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani Disbarred In New York – One America News Network
An appeals court on Tuesday ruled that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is barred from practicing law in New York. “Rudolph William Giuliani, is disbarred from the practice of law, effective immediately, and until the further order of this Court, and his name stricken from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law in the State of New York,” the First Department appeals court wrote in a decision released on Tuesday. The judges claimed Giuliani “flagrantly misused” his position as an attorney for former President Donald Trump and his campaign to make “intentionally” false statements to courts, lawmakers and the public.
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In Trump Immunity Decision, Supreme Court Boosts Imperial Presidency - Bloomberg
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberals, condemned the decision in the harshest terms. “In every use of official power,” she wrote,” the president is now a king above the law.” This result would be deeply disturbing to the nation’s founders. Nothing in the Constitution’s text or original public meaning supports the immunity rules the court crafted. To the contrary, as Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the Constitution specifically anticipates criminal prosecution of a president, noting that after impeachment, a president removed by the Senate “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
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No, President Biden, the Supreme Court Did Not Remove All Limits on the Presidency – JONATHAN TURLEY
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Teachers don’t have time to be therapists, cops, nurses and social workers.
Administrators leave disruptive students in class because suspensions lower a school's performance rating, the teachers said. They called for decoupling student behavior from school accountability. "That feedback was critical to recent passage of a state law," said Brumley. After three suspensions, disruptive students are sent to “alternative sites where they can get the support that they need — academically, behaviorally, socially, mentally — to eventually return to the general school setting and function among their peers.” Brumley presented the recommendations to 7,000 teachers at the state’s annual teacher summit in New Orleans a few weeks ago, he said. “After sharing the first recommendation, I struggled getting to the next recommendation due to teacher applause.”
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The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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OnlyFans vows it's a safe space. Predators are exploiting kids there.
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3M iOS and macOS apps were exposed to potent supply-chain attacks
Vulnerabilities that went undetected for a decade left thousands of macOS and iOS apps susceptible to supply-chain attacks. Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday. The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on.
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Dating Apps Once Ran on Novelty. For Some Users, the Fun Is Over
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Amazon's international unit on track to swing into annual profit
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Is Organic Produce Worth the Higher Price? - The New York Times
with today’s high grocery bills, even some committed organic shoppers are agonizing over which blueberries to buy and wondering: Is organic really worth the cost?
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To Hike Prices, Companies Are Refreshing Old Products For New Uses - Bloomberg
Procter & Gamble Co. is charging $14 for all-over body deodorant — double the cost of a standard stick. Gillette sells a $15 intimate razor specifically for “tricky areas” for $5 more than the regular Venus. And Carefree’s newest pads are meant to catch all sorts of leaks. Those cost more than the old version, too. The spate of new uses for old products is a somewhat awkward attempt by some of the world’s biggest packaged goods-makers, including P&G, Unilever Plc and Edgewell Personal Care Co. to claw back sales in the US’s more than $100 billion personal care and beauty market. In the high-inflation, post-pandemic years, cost- and waste-conscious consumers have cut back on what were once essential items. P&G, Unilever, Edgewell and most every other packaged good company has posted multiple quarters of slow or declining sales volumes.
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America's startup boom around remote work and technology is still going strong
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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"According to the Supreme Court, Biden could now send in Seal Team 6 to take all of them out."
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The Corrupt Supreme Court Is the Logical Result of Neoliberalism
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Biden administration provides $504 million to support 12 technology hubs nationwide | AP News
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Biden administration proposes new heat protections for workers
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer warns Michigan isn’t winnable for Biden after debate.
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Biden's family urges him to 'keep fighting' as donors look for alternatives
During a tense call with a group of about 40 of Biden’s top financial backers, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez laid out what could and could not be done with the campaign’s infrastructure if Biden were to step aside while emphasizing throughout the call that he had no intention of doing so. Most of the campaign’s significant war chest would fall to Vice President Kamala Harris, Chavez Rodriguez said, according to two people familiar with the discussion. Only a smaller pool of money would be kept by the Democratic National Committee.
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Grab the Popcorn: Tucker Reveals What ‘Unusually Good Source’ Shared About Obama/Biden Relationship.
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DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held a Saturday afternoon call with dozens of committee members across the country, a group of some of the most influential members of the party. They largely ignored Biden’s weak showing Thursday night or the avalanche of criticism that followed. Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted — that they were being asked to ignore the dire nature of the party’s predicament. The call, they said, may have worsened a widespread sense of panic among elected officials, donors and other stakeholders.
“I was hoping for more of a substantive conversation instead of, ‘Hey, let’s go out there and just be cheerleaders,’ without actually addressing a very serious issue that unfolded on American television for millions of people to see,” said Joe Salazar, an elected DNC member from Colorado, who was on the call. “There were a number of things that could have been said in addressing the situation. But we didn’t get that. We were being gaslit.”
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Biden’s Paths Forward, According to Manifold
I have a confession to make. When I watched the debate, I didn’t think that Biden was underperforming that much. Maybe it’s because I was watching at 1.5x speed, or because I was going back and forth between Manifold TV and a Sarah Cooper reaction lipsyncing livestream (which is sadly now unlisted), or because I’d seen clips of Biden in the last year, or because Trump lied so much, or because this election has been atypically stagnant and normal and I feel like nothing matters anymore. But when the debate ended, and the livestream turned to the CNN panel, I watched in shock as the normally Democratic-aligned panelists were unanimous: they thought Biden should be replaced.
Anyway, let us all take a moment to appreciate the irony that it didn’t help Trump’s chances (yet). And for someone like me who is very worried about the implications of a second Trump presidency, this debate fiasco is surprisingly net-neutral.
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Prominent Never Trumpers Set to Meet With Biden Campaign
mong those on the list to attend the gathering in Washington are former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, lawyer George Conway, veteran Republican operative Mike Murphy, commentators Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes, and strategist Sarah Longwell. In recent days, several of these Never Trumpers have publicly called on Biden to either drop out of the race or consider doing so.
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Orange Man BAD Takes New Meaning After Bronzed Biden Appearance
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Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome - The New York Times
in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome. The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule. In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides. Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals. The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Ex-Billionaire Gets 7 1/2-Year Sentence for Defrauding Investors Goldman, Google
Rishi Shah, 38, the co-founder of Outcome Health, which provided ads on TVs in doctors’ offices, was convicted of more than a dozen fraud and money laundering charges by a federal jury last year. He and two other Outcome executives were sentenced last week in Chicago by US District Judge Thomas Durkin, the US Attorney’s Office said in a statement Monday. Prosecutors had sought a 15-year sentence, describing Shah as the “driving force behind a dizzying array of lies to clients, lenders, investors and an audit firm.” He and the other executives were accused of lying to pharmaceutical company clients and taking money for ads that were never placed, and then misrepresenting the health of the company to investors.
Before the fraud was revealed in a 2017 Wall Street Journal article, Shah was a budding star in Democratic circles. Shah got the idea for Outcome — then known as Context Media Health — in 2006 while he was a student at Northwestern University just north of Chicago, and the company’s rapid rise over the next decade boosted his public profile. Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared at a company press conference, “as Outcome goes, so goes Chicago.”
World
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World Bank Group country classifications by income level for FY24
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SAS war crimes inquiry obtains cache of new evidence, BBC reveals
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Young Men Are Swinging Hard Right in Korea. It Could Be a Preview for America.
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Grandparents can now get paid to take care of grandkids in Sweden
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Brazil data regulator bans Meta from mining data to train AI models
Israel
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Israel releases Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital chief, sparking fury from lawmakers.
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Israeli Ah-64 Apache Commanders Describe Brutal Reality of October 7 Missions
Immediately clear in their account is the degree of surprise that the Hamas militants achieved, when around 3,000 militants invaded the south of the country after a rocket barrage early on October 7.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Survival and Adaptation of Tourist Destinations in the Face of Climate Change
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True scale of carbon impact from long-distance travel revealed
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Market for Carbon Credits Faces Fresh Blow as Offsets Slammed
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Yes, you should be a little freaked out about Hurricane Beryl
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How bad will hurricanes get? Scientists look for answers in ancient storms
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Study Finds Alaskan Ice Field Melting at an 'Incredibly Worrying' Pace
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Erasing Impure Thought takes energy Google falling short of important climate target, cites electricity needs of AI