2024-07-27
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There’s no such thing as a tree
for instance, the common ancestor of flowering plants is theorized to have been woody. But we also have pretty clear evidence of recent evolution of woodiness – say, a new plant arrives on a relatively barren island, and some of the offspring of that plant becomes treelike. Of plants native to the Canary Islands, wood independently evolved at least 38 times!
Horseshit
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Cars Are Now Computers, So How Long Will They Get Updates? Automakers Can't Say
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This is the new dwarf free remake i guess: Lisa Kudrow Brings Her Daffy Charm to ‘Time Bandits’ - The New York Times
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Pilots said nothing as Southwest plane flew dangerously low over Tampa Bay
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The Dirty Secret of Olympic Swimming: Everyone Pees in the Pool
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The Paris 2024 Olympics Cauldron's flame is created using water and light
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
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Coast-to-coast in a solar-powered car — and a new Cannonball Run record - The Verge
three friends who built and drove a solar-powered car across the country in a record-setting 13 days, 15 hours, and 19 minutes. While that’s more than 300 hours longer than the 25-hour record set in 2020 in a modified internal combustion vehicle, it’s the first time that a solar-powered car has completed the route.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Google halts its 4-year plan to turn off tracking cookies by default in Chrome
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Why global tech meltdowns such as the CrowdStrike outage are the new normal
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Chrome will now prompt some users to send passwords for suspicious files
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Microsoft's LinkedIn settles lawsuit claiming it overcharged advertisers
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Stellantis ready to kill brands and fix U.S. problems, CEO Tavares says.
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Short seller Andrew Left charged with fraud by prosecutors, SEC
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SEC Charges Andrew Left and Citron Capital for $20M Fraud Scheme
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Short seller Andrew Left charged with fraud by prosecutors, SEC
It took a while, and many readers who shorted the stock presumably lost money, but was Left … right? In general the SEC does not pay much attention to that question. Maybe it is not important? In the government’s telling, Left lied about a lot of stuff — his independence, his credentials, how he got paid, and most crucially whether he was still long or short the stocks he was writing about — that probably was material to his readers, and if he had been more honest about those things he might have moved the stocks less. He made money through dishonesty, the government alleges, and that’s probably enough for their case.
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US economy has now been in an expansion for 51 months with annualized real GDP growth of 4.5%
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Champagne sales down worldwide in 2024, industry executives cite lack of 'cheer'
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
TBA 2024 / Democrats Demonstrate "Our Democracy"
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Some people really had opinions about my brief flash of unhappiness over the process through which Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president - a coronation which did not require her to receive a single vote from an actual, normal Democratic voter. (It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) I remain disgusted but not surprised by the Democratic party and its machinations, where not even the smallest fig leaf of democratic process survived Harris’s blitzkrieg approach to the nomination. (That is, having it handed to her by her friends in elite Democratic circles.)
Primaries are the immune systems of political parties. You know how we’re in this big terrible mess because Joe Biden looked too infirm and compromised to win a presidential election? You know how everybody’s been freaking out for a month about it? Well, there was one way that we could have averted this disaster: holding an actual fucking primary. Had there been a primary, Biden’s weakness would have been made apparent months ago. Had there been debates, Biden’s vulnerability in that format would have been unmistakable.
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Obamas endorse Kamala Harris for president
Former President Obama endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee Friday morning. All the biggest names in Democratic politics are now officially backing Harris, who is cruising to the nomination just days after President Biden dropped out and endorsed her.
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Inside Kamala Harris’s Plan To End Cash Bail and ‘Transform The Criminal Justice System.’
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Kamala Harris would bring a lifelong familiarity with science
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Opinion | Making Peace With the Kamala Nomination - The New York Times
Looking back, that column was not wrong, but it was limited. We’ve seen a lot more of Harris in the ensuing years. Today, as she seemingly cruises to the Democratic nomination, I find myself experiencing a dizzying range of emotions. Some moments, I share the jolt of enthusiasm many are feeling. Other moments, I think the Democrats are suffering from a mass hypnotic delusion, nominating a candidate who is seriously flawed. In order to make sense of this mishmash of thoughts, I thought I’d put together a report card of her strengths and weaknesses.
Trump / Right / Jan6
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Whistleblowers Detail Why Drones Weren’t Used at Trump’s Butler Rally.
"According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally. This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. Secret Service said no," Senator Hawley wrote in a letter Thursday to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. "The whistleblower further alleges that after the shooting took place, USSS changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack."
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J. D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family | The New Yorker
if J. D. Vance had his way, citizenship in the United States would be conferred not solely by birthright but by marriage and children. He has spoken admiringly of efforts made by Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, to boost his nation’s marriage and birth rates, including a policy that offers subsidized loans to couples who wed before the bride’s forty-first birthday: if the couple has two kids, a third of the loan is forgiven; if they have three kids, the loan is zapped entirely.
It was immediately apparent that, for Vance, fertility is a Republican. He lamented the “childless left,” who have no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” In conversation with Tucker Carlson, he despaired that the U.S. was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance cited several Democrats as having no meaningful interest in the nation’s continued prosperity, including Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, and whose stepchildren famously call her Mamala.
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Trump tears into FBI Director Christopher Wray who questioned bullet strike
Wray was answering questions during a House Judiciary Committee meeting on Wednesday when he said there was uncertainty about what caused the Republican presidential nominee’s ear wound. “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” he said. He was responding to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who had asked about the eight bullets fired by 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks at the Butler, Pa., campaign rally on July 13.
But the ex-president maintained that he had been struck by a bullet while standing at the podium during the outdoor rally. “There was no glass, there was no shrapnel. The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was,” he wrote.
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DNC talking points may as well have been an instruction manual for the media.
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Full Bodycam Footage From Trump Assassination Attempt Released - modernity
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Opinion | J.D. Vance is dreaming when he says ‘economics is fake.’ - The Washington Post
To see what I mean, consider a talk that Vance gave last February in which he suggested that “economics is fake” — based on his experience owning a 40-year-old refrigerator. “The refrigerator we had,” he told the audience, “you would put lettuce in the icebox and it would be good a month later. … You cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that.”
During Vance’s more recent convention speech, the Lettuce Fountain of Youth surfaced on social media to much giggling — because it sums up both the hazy appeal and the implausibility of “Make America Great Again.” Yet there is some truth in Vance’s remark, which is more than a lament for the country’s lost manufacturing might. It’s also a complaint about the way society has become monomaniacally focused on consumer prices, to the detriment of many other things that make our lives better.
This complaint comes not only from MAGA America but also from left-leaning thinkers such as Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. It resonates on both the right and left because the government and corporations do pay more attention to prices than to other things that are harder to measure, but no less important. People also care about quality, about having things that last. And they care about their identity as producers, as well as consumers.
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Gov to pay ex-FBI agent $1.2M in settlement over release of anti-Trump texts
Ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok reached a settlement with the Justice Department that includes a $1.2 million payout in the lawsuit over the department’s 2018 release of his text messages, his lawyers said Friday. According to court filings Friday, both Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page have finalized their settlements with the Justice Department after alleging the department violated the Privacy Act by releasing to the media texts they exchanged criticizing Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Page’s attorneys said they were pleased the DOJ agreed to settle her claims, but did not provide the amount of the settlement. “While I have been vindicated by this result, my fervent hope remains that our institutions of justice will never again play politics with the lives of their employees,” Page said in a provided statement.The Justice Department did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
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The Republican National Convention and the Iconography of Triumph | The New Yorker
If you asked me what happened at the Republican National Convention, I would have to reply, “Nothing.” It was not a show about nothing, like “Seinfeld,” and there was no want of cacophony, but almost no shocks were delivered in either word or deed. The least surprising surprise was the arrival of Trump in the Fiserv Forum on Monday night—not to speak but to behold a portion of the evening’s proceedings and, more important, to be beheld. Even his fiercest detractors will concede that he is a maestro of the image, and of the means by which that image can most efficiently be burned into the public retina. Once he had evaded the Grim Reaper on Saturday, in Pennsylvania, it was inevitable that he would turn up in Wisconsin, two days later. Simply by making his presence known, and by keeping his silence, he said it all: “I will not be scythed.”
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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FBI searches Long Island home of former staffer to N.Y. Gov. Kathy Hochul
The basis for the search at the $3.5 million home of Linda Sun, the former deputy chief of staff, and the crimes under investigation remain unclear. Neither Ms. Sun, 40, nor her husband, Chris Hu, 41, have been accused of wrongdoing. Neither could be reached for comment and they did not respond to voice mail and text messages.
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Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border