2024-09-28

NC/TN border floods, Feds made UFOs, used trains forsale, defamation settlement, more fake science, Cuban: "media leans right", DOJ charges NeoNazis, USA no longer scary, Navy bought bad welding

etc

• The Fight to Save Chile's Glorious White Strawberry

• Near Asheville, NC Evacuations ordered as Lake Lure Dam failure 'imminent,' officials say (Archive)

  The failure of a dam in a western North Carolina town is “imminent,” emergency officials said just before 11 a.m. Friday. In a Facebook post, Rutherford County Emergency Management said anyone below the Lake Lure Dam needed to evacuate to higher ground as quickly as possible.

  In an update around 1:30 p.m., emergency management said water was cresting the dam and flowing around the side walls. While the structural supports have been compromised, the dam wall was holding. Evacuation sirens were sounding downstream and emergency officials went house to house to make sure everyone left the area.

  • water overtopping, about to break

  • wikipedia entry

  • 1927 private hydro project, 720ac lake. I thought it looked sketchy in the pics; but no, for the time and place that was as good as anyone could ask. Our standards have changed over the last century.

  • North Carolina flooding: Lake Lure Dam overtops, remains in tact

  • North Carolina dam at risk of failure forces evacuations after heavy rain

• In East TN: Waterville Dam bursts

• Chimney Rock NC downtown is gone

Horseshit

• The 1963 Ford Cardinal: Too Radical to Compete with the VW Beetle

• Vehicles Could Be Hacked and Tracked Thanks to a Simple Website Bug

• 1950s Psychological Warfare, Intel Collection, UFOs and Fascism

  It's time to accept the past, absent confirmation bias and cherry-picking. It's time we accept where we've been and what it means; what it means about U.S. intelligence agencies, what it means about the United States as a nation, what it means about UFOs and many of those who investigate them, and what it means to each of us as individuals. It's time to stop ignoring the material that is available for the asking and it's time to read it and integrate it into our assessments of our pasts and the world we live in. Doing so is the most effective defense against those obstructing and spinning the past in order to exploit the rest of us in the present and future.

• Hawaii man's home fell into the ocean. Now, he's being sued

• OceanGate Titan implosion left a 30k-square-meter debris field

• In defense of the washing machine

• (emphasis mine) Caltrain EMD F40PH-2 Locomotive (Used) — Caltrain Store

  The used Caltrain EMD F40PH-2 Locomotives will be available for sale around October 2024. Locomotive engine must be disabled per a state grant funding agreement. Buyer is responsible for the costs of storage and transport following the sale as part of an Invitation for Bids (IFP) procurement process.

• Make: Magazine and Maker faire open a community round

  Today I am the sole owner of Make and Maker Faire; I have supported the business when it needed help. I have no interest in selling the business to another entity, who may or may not understand the value of what we do. The people who understand it the best and value it the most are members of the maker community. What I would like to see happen is that over time, the community itself, the community that has grown out of Make: and Maker Faire, will come to own more and more of this organization. As part of this initiative, we have just launched a community investment round, giving you the opportunity to own a stake in Make: and Maker Faire. For as little as $100, you can become a part-owner of Make: and participate in our future growth. It is an investment in the next generation of the maker movement.

• When You Know You're Impressive, Just Be Impressive. Please

  for people in Gen X, the Millennial cohort, and Gen Z, there’s the eternal question of how to both reach impressive heights of aspirational success while appearing not to try or to care. That youngerish people would often prefer to maintain a certain affective distance from their success is a well-worn notion. I take it as given, though of course plenty of people maintain an unapologetic attitude towards the grind.

  There are few things that annoy me more than a particular species of striver: the ones who hustle and grind white-knuckled through the early part of their lives, striving to get into the best college and then to get the best internship and then to get the most enviable job and then to get the most fuckable partner and to make the most money and earn the most accolades, and as soon as that status is secured, to act as though it was all a joke, no big deal, not something worth taking seriously. It’s a type of weaponized self-deprecation that ultimately does the exact opposite of deprecating the self. All of it is done in the service of being not just successful, but also with it, cool, laid back, sensible, with a good head on one’s shoulders. In other words, it’s a deeply perverse exercise because it’s the habit of denying the importance of success or one’s interest in achieving it as just another way to achieve success. It’s continuing the grind by pretending to reject the grind, advancing in meritocracy by denying the legitimacy of meritocracy, striving by insisting that you’re not into that whole striving thing. The point is to end up looking not just rich and stylish and successful and Instagrammable but also wise and approachable. To have it all while pretending to be the kind of person who would never try to have it all.

celebrity gossip

• Hail Zuckus Maximus Master of the metaverse is finally sorry for being sorry

Obit

• Maggie Smith, beloved 'Downton Abbey' and 'Harry Potter' star, dead at 89

  • Actress Dame Maggie Smith dies at 89

  • Maggie Smith, Star of 'Downton Abbey,' 'Harry Potter,' Dies at 89

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Newsmax settles Smartmatic defamation suit over 2020 false election claims 

  Newsmax Media reached a confidential settlement of a lawsuit by Smartmatic, the voting machine maker that had alleged it was defamed by the news outlet's false claims that its machines were rigged to help steal the 2020 U.S. presidential election from Donald Trump, the companies said Thursday. The agreement came on the eve of a four-week jury trial, with opening arguments scheduled to begin in Wilmington on September 30.

  • Newsmax, Smartmatic settle 2020 election defamation lawsuit : NPR

  The presiding judge, Eric M. Davis, had already ruled that Fox News had knowingly and repeatedly defamed Dominion before the settlement. The only question before the jury was to determine actual and punitive damages. Davis also oversaw the Smartmatic case against Newsmax. He earlier ruled that Smartmatic could not seek punitive damages beyond any direct losses it could show as a result of being defamed. “There is no evidence that Newsmax acted with evil intent towards Smartmatic,” the judge wrote.

Musk

• X suspends journalist Ken Klippenstein after he published J.D. Vance dossier

• Musk says he'll ban all Apple devices if OpenAI is integrated at the OS level

• Musk's X Blocks Vance Dossier, drawing parallels to Hunter Biden flap (Archive)

  Elon Musk’s X suspended an independent journalist on Thursday for sharing an unverified dossier on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance containing his personal information, with the billionaire CEO calling the spread of the document “one of the most egregious, evil doxing actions we’ve ever seen.” The incident hearkened to another moment, just weeks before the 2020 election, when the social media platform took the unusual step of restricting a story based on documents purported to be lifted from the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. The company, then Twitter, initially cited its policies against sharing hacked materials in doing so but later similarly blamed the publication for disclosing private information. Musk’s reaction to that episode was notably different. Top Republicans and the tech billionaire railed against the decision regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop as an attempt to suppress a potentially compromising story and alter the campaign. The mogul later bought the company in a bid partly to prevent such acts, vowing that he would run the company as a “free speech absolutist.”

  • Musk's X blocks links to JD Vance dossier and suspends journalist who posted it

• Elon Musk’s Week on X: Deepfakes, Falsehoods and Lots of Memes - The New York Times

  Experts who monitor falsehoods and conspiracy theories have long feared that Mr. Musk would use his ownership of X to further pollute the online ecosystem. Since he bought the platform known as Twitter in 2022, he has shown a willingness to elevate unfounded claims as he has embraced a more conservative political posture, including by endorsing Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in July. Nearly a third of his posts last week were false, misleading or missing vital context. They included misleading posts claiming Democrats were making memes “illegal” and falsehoods that they want to “open the border” to gain votes from illegal immigrants. His misleading posts were seen more than 800 million times on X, underscoring Mr. Musk’s unique role as the platform’s most-followed account and a significant source of its misleading content. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The yellow school bus is in trouble

  This year, because of budget cuts, her school district no longer provides bus service to students who live within two miles of their school. For Trisha, who lives 1.9 miles away, walking an hour by herself each way — in a place where temperatures topped 100 degrees the first week of school — wasn’t an option. Now, she has a long wait in the sun every afternoon as her parents slowly inch through an interminable line of cars to pick her up. Her experience is part of a growing trend: the yellow school bus is becoming an endangered species as districts cut routes and more families drive their kids to school. In 2022, for the first time ever, the majority of American students got to school in a private car. In Chicago, bus service to magnet schools was canceled just before the 2023-24 school year began. And in Louisville, Kentucky, this year, students recorded a song to protest the disappearance of their bus routes.

• Fraud, So Much Fraud

  Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story yesterday morning, and if you haven't read it yet, you should. It's about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.

• 1 in 7 scientific papers is fake

• Academic publishers face class action over 'peer review' pay, other restrictions

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• You're probably not vulnerable to the CUPS CVE

• ByteDance to sign US$10.8B corporate loan in Asian record

• The WordPress vs. WP Engine Drama Explained

• Steam Changes to the Subscriber Agreeement

• Sony, Ubisoft scandals lead to California ban on deceptive digital goods sales

• Sonos Botched an App and Infuriated Its Customers

• Wukong's global success sparks government embrace of video games as soft power

• CA law means stores can't say you're buying a game if you're merely licensing it

• Meta prohibited from monitizing youth data

• CNN will start locking some articles behind a paywall

• Microsoft's more secure Windows Recall feature can also be uninstalled by users

  • "Off" means off, right? pinky swear?

• The Internet Archive's Fight to Save Itself

• US Trademark Office cancels Marvel, DC's 'Super Hero' marks

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Nobody knows what happened within the MMC Association in 1998

• Create 2D CAD drawings with Blender

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• FTC Announces Crackdown on Deceptive AI Claims and Schemes

• HP printers apparently have AI now, because of course they do

• OpenAI as we knew it is dead

• Turning OpenAI into a Real Business Is Tearing It Apart

• TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

• The Internet's AI Slop Problem Is Only Going to Get Worse

• OpenAI is closing in on raising $6.5B. Largest VC raise in history

• AMD Unveils Its First Small Language Model AMD-135M

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA confirms space station cracking a “highest” risk and consequence problem | Ars Technica

  a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part of the station, essentially a tunnel that connects a larger module to a docking port, which is leaking.

Crypto con games

• Consumers Would Prefer to Use Money over CBDCs: Deutsche Bank

• Binance founder 'CZ' leaves prison on Friday–along with his $60B fortune

Economicon / Business / Finance

• A Chatbot Is Now Cleared to Give Buy, Sell Investment Advice

• Most Amazon workers considering job hunting due to 5-day in-office policy

• France's role as one of Europe's safest bond markets is at risk

• Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard

• US personal saving rate was 4.8 percent in August

• America's dairy farms are down 95% since the 70s–milk price rules are one reason

• Fidelity Slashes Mobile Deposit Limits Following Fraud Wave

• Intel is on track to receive its $8.5B CHIPS Act award by year-end

• Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them

Harris / Democrats

• Mark Cuban: "The Mainstream Media Truly Leans Right" | ZeroHedge

  Billionaire tech chap Mark Cuban sauntered on to CNBC's morning show set this morning to remind America just how bad Trump is and just how awesome the 'new' Kamala is.

• Harris will campaign on Arizona's border with Mexico in attempted show of strength on immigration 

  A Harris aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a trip that was still being planned, said the vice president plans to speak about border security and how, as a former attorney general of California, she took on international gangs and criminal organizations who traffic drugs, guns, and human beings. She also has long believed that the country needs an immigration system that is secure, fair, orderly and humane, the aide said.

Biden Inc

• White House agonizes over UN cybercrime treaty

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world - The Washington Post

  In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.

• Trump calls for prosecution of Google over search results he says favor Harris

  Former President Donald Trump on Friday called for Google to be criminally prosecuted for what he called the company’s bias toward his election opponent Vice President Kamala Harris in online search results. Trump in a social media post wrote that if the Department of Justice does not prosecute Google “for this blatant interference of Elections” he would request its prosecution “when I win the election and become President of the United States!” The Republican seemed to be reacting to a new study by the right-leaning Media Research Center, which purportedly found that Google search engine results tended to show news articles that supposedly were positive to Harris ahead of Trump’s own campaign website when a user searched for “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”

  • Is there any law that says Google (or others) can't be completely partisan in editorializing the presentation of anything they offer? Could it count as donated advertising? They offer this service commercially for nonpolitical purposes, so is there any difference? Is this just a matter of "they haven't paid as much for the keywords"?

• Justice Dept. charges three men in alleged Iran hack of Trump campaign - The Washington Post

  Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri and Yasar Balaghi “prepared for and engaged in a wide-ranging hacking campaign” targeting current and former U.S. officials, political campaigns, members of the media, and others, the indictment charges. The Washington Post previously reported the Justice Department was preparing to bring charges in the case. “Such activity is part of Iran’s continuing efforts to stoke discord, erode confidence in the U.S. electoral process, and unlawfully acquire information” that could be used to help Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the indictment alleges. The Iranian hackers wanted such information as part of their efforts to “avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani,” the former IRGC commander, the filing says.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• It Was Supposed to Be a Sting Operation. Did ICE Traffic Drugs Instead?

• Neo-Nazi leader and Maryland woman allegedly plotted to ‘completely destroy’ Baltimore, Justice Department says

  The Justice Department has charged Brandon Clint Russell and Sarah Beth Clendaniel with conspiracy to damage energy facilities, alleging that the Maryland-focused plot was driven by ethnically or racially motivated extremist beliefs. They “conspired to inflict maximum harm on the power grid,” Tom Sobocinski, who heads the FBI’s field office in Baltimore, said during a news conference Monday. “The accused were not just talking, but taking steps to fulfill their threats and further their extremist goals.”

  The FBI also obtained a document allegedly written by Clendaniel that authorities say resembles a manifesto. In it, she allegedly references Hitler, as well as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the perpetrator of the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway. Russell, according to the the charging documents, ascribes to having neo-Nazi beliefs and had started his own local National Socialist Group.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• America’s Crisis of Deterrence | Foreign Affairs

  The United States and its allies are facing a crisis of deterrence. China is menacing Philippine vessels in the South China Sea and possibly readying its military for an invasion of Taiwan. Russia shows no sign of giving up its war in Ukraine. In the Middle East, Iran is threatening retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Hezbollah is ramping up its rocket strikes into Israel, and the Houthis continue to attack—and occasionally sink—commercial ships in the Red Sea. The compounding risks of Iranian missiles killing U.S. military personnel, of a Houthi strike on a U.S. Navy vessel, or of another sinking of a shipping vessel grow with time. Any of these events would force Washington to either get involved in a larger war or back down. Either option would reflect a failure of deterrence.

• How the U.S. Military Plans to Tackle Its 'Forever Chemical' Problem

• DoJ Notified of Suspected Faulty Welds on Subs, Aircraft Carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding - USNI News

  HII reported to the Navy that welds on new construction and in-service submarines and Ford-class aircraft carriers were made not following welding procedure, according to a Tuesday memo. Guertin told SECNAV and CNO the workers did not follow proper techniques to weld the suspect joints with an early indication that some of the welding errors were intentional. Based on the Newport News assessment of the welds, the shipyard notified the Department of Justice over the issue.

• Everything we know about spies is wrong (Archive)

  When the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was established in haste at the outset of WWII, the spies tapped to join were librarians, professors, and researchers quite literally pulled from college campuses.

World

• VW labor clash spotlights Europe's car factory problems

• What Can Land You in Jail for Sedition in Hong Kong

• Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world

• Campaigners call for unlimited 'climate card' UK rail pass

• Argentina's poverty rate soars above 50% under Javier Milei

  • Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei's austerity measures hit hard

Israel

• One map to visualize 70 years of targeted assassinations by Israel

• Israel concealed explosives inside batteries of pagers, Lebanese officials say

• Google Listed as Sponsor, Host of Israeli Military Tech Conference

• Israel Takes Out Hezbollah Headquarters

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Putin outlines new rules for Russian use of nuclear arsenal

China

• China's New Nuclear Submarine Sank During Mysterious Incident in Wuhan

  • China's newest nuclear-powered submarine sank earlier this year, officials say

• China's silence on US TikTok ban speaks volumes

Health / Medicine

• US Crackdown Targeted Silicon Valley 'Pill Mill.' It Had Already Moved to China

• AI and Biology

  for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon. What advances we might see will also stick very close to the areas where the above problems are mitigated as much as possible, and that leaves an awful lot still out there.

• A faulty iron hormone in the skin may be the root cause of psoriasis

• 10th person dead in Listeria outbreak linked to Boar's Head meats

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid Brain

• Possible Cluster of Human Bird-Flu Infections Expands in Missouri

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Zillow will now show climate risks for property listings in the US

• Edible insects show promise as sustainable nutritional source

• US Government-funded 'private social network' attacking pesticide critics

• Just stop oil protesters sentenced 2years for throwing soup on Van Gogh painting

• Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

• Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Fossil fuel pollution.

• Larvicidal Activity of Hemp Extracts and CBD Against the Yellow Fever Mosquito