2024-11-03
buy a Batmobile, Notre Dame fees, kids fake nonprofits, teen h4x0rs, SpaceX safety, election integrity depends on censors, voting has never been more secure, Neely died later, backdoors opened wide
Horseshit
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Swapped at birth: Two women discovered they weren't who they thought they were
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As road rage rises, aggressive drivers in Texas try to understand their anger
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The Guy Behind the Fake AI Halloween Parade Listing Says You've Got It All Wrong
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Wayne Enterprises is selling a $3 million Batmobile
Wayne Enterprises—an actual, licensed company dedicated to billionaire-appropriate luxury accessories—has announced it is accepting pre-orders on the Tumbler, aka the Dark Knight’s military-grade Batmobile. Made from Kevlar, carbon fiber, and sheet metal fiberglass, the roughly 5,511-lbs vehicle includes a 525 horsepower, 6.2L LS3 V-8 engine, “advanced software upgrades,” and a two-seat interior. Although the jet engine and gun turrets featured in the Nolan films are non-functioning replicas on the real Tumbler, it does feature an actual smokescreen system for your inevitable evasive getaways.
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Super-sized doggy door helps North Vancouver family coexist with local bear
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Save Democracy From Informed Voters: Vote Censorship!
Grant’s story garnered huge pre-buzz thanks to conservative targets pre-empting his “scoop” with colorful early responses. “I do hope… you’ll note that I told you to fuck off,” was the acid reply of Tucker Carlson, accused of participating in one of “286 videos containing election misinformation” reaching “more than 47 million views.” Ben Shapiro ripped Grant’s exposé as an “October surprise,” saying the purpose was to “pressure YouTube to demonetize and penalize any and all conservatives” a week from Election Day.
Musk
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Some have truly become unable to tell reality from movies: Robert Downey Jr Speaks Out About Elon Musk "Cosplay" of Tony Stark
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Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms | WIRED
Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa and later emigrated to Canada before eventually settling in the US and becoming a citizen, has spent more than $100 million to support Donald Trump and his nativist presidential campaign, and has personally demonized immigrants. A recent Bloomberg analysis found, for example, that Musk has posted around 1,300 times on X this year about immigration and voter fraud. Many of those posts promote the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely holds that Democrats seek to replace white voters with unauthorized immigrants whose votes they control, and depicts immigrants as dangerous lawbreakers. Earlier this week, though, The Washington Post reported that Musk was himself an immigrant who had apparently broken the law. In the 1990s, he worked illegally in the United States, according to the Post, which cited “former business associates, court records and company documents.”
In 1995, according to the Post, Musk was admitted to graduate school at Stanford but didn’t enroll in classes, instead working on an online services startup that would eventually be known as Zip2. (Stanford did not reply to requests for comment.) In 1996, the Post reported, investors made a funding agreement contingent on Musk and his brother Kimbal—who has stated that the brothers were “illegal immigrants”—obtaining authorization to work in the US within 45 days. “Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the US,” Zip2 board member Derek Proudian told the Post.
- Will WIRED be advocating the same penalty for everyone who has violated this law? Odd that they've never turned this up before now, in all their previous reporting on Musk and his enterprises.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Should Notre Dame charge admission?
The government wants to charge visitors five euros, but the Church is opposed. The commercialization of churches has some major downsides — but an admission fee can be a partial antidote to commercialization, not its apogee.
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Understanding the Spirit Animal Meaning of the Spider: Embrace Your Inner Weaver
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Ghost nonprofits and the manufacturing of virtue » Anand Sanwal
For students, community service is less about serving the community and more about serving their college applications. And one way to highlight your community service and leadership credentials is to start a non-profit or what is actually a “ghost nonprofit.” Like ghost kitchens that exist only on delivery apps, these nonprofits exist primarily on college applications.
- presumably they're careful about names: IRS targeting controversy - Wikipedia
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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As it ever was The biggest underestimated security threat of today? Advanced persistent teens
Meet the “advanced persistent teenagers,” as dubbed by the security community. These are skilled, financially motivated hackers, like Lapsus$ and Scattered Spider, which have proven capable of digitally breaking into hotel chains, casinos, and technology giants. By using tactics that rely on credible email lures and convincing phone calls posing as a company’s help desk, these hackers can trick unsuspecting employees into giving up their corporate passwords or network access.
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Security flaws found in all Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Update drivers ASAP! | PCWorld
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Voyager 1 starts up a radio transmitter it hasn't used since 1981
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Astronauts Aboard International Space Station Told to Prepare for Urgent Evacuation.
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NASA Tells SpaceX to Focus on Safety After Astronaut Hospitalizations
The recent anomalies, however, might be the result of the company’s commitment to launching missions at an increasingly faster pace and to maintain its lead in the industry. “When you look at these recent incidents over the last handful of weeks, it does lead one say that it’s apparent that operating safely requires significant attention to detail as hardware ages and the pace of operations increases,” Rominger is quoted as saying. “Both NASA and SpaceX need to maintain focus on safe Crew Dragon operations and not take any ‘normal’ operations for granted.”
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 recently returned from the ISS, riding on board a Dragon spacecraft. Following the spacecraft’s splashdown off the coast of Florida on Friday, all four astronauts were transported to a hospital and one crew member was kept for an overnight stay. NASA did not release any further information about why the crew was hospitalized or whether it was related to the Dragon splashdown.
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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House Speaker Johnson says GOP may try to repeal CHIPS Act, then walks it back
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U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is behind two new fabricated videos that appeared on social media this week falsely claiming that Haitians illegally voted in Georgia and that Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband received a $500,000 bribe from the performer Sean Combs. The U.S. government issued a new warning about the fabrications on Friday, a week after blaming Russia for another video that falsely claimed that ballots in Pennsylvania were being destroyed.
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What Does It Mean to Ensure Election Integrity in 2024?
Yet it can be difficult for these fact-checks to break through on an increasingly fragmented and opaque social media ecosystem: According to NPR, the fake video received hundreds of thousands of retweets, while the corrections posted by the Board of Elections and the county GOP received orders of magnitude fewer. And a close reading of the ODNI statement shows hints of how the federal government has pulled back from the assistance it offered in 2020. Compared to that year, when CISA leaned forward on addressing election falsehoods originating both domestically and abroad, the agency is now focused on foreign disinformation. In communicating to the public whether something is true or false, it’s also relying more heavily on election workers themselves—hence that closing note that Bucks County officials had already evaluated the fake video.
To understand where things stand today, it’s necessary to recall what they looked like in 2016 and 2020—and why they’ve changed. The systems built to protect the 2020 election were in many ways a response to the Russian election interference of 2016. Russia’s successful use of social media platforms like Facebook and X to distribute incendiary messages highlighted the lack of coordination between these platforms and the federal government—and both Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. were determined to prevent similar shortcomings. The years following 2016 saw the development of a network of collaboration between technology companies, government agencies, and independent researchers that worked to identify and respond both to foreign influence campaigns and to election rumors originating within the U.S. itself. That network wasn’t perfect—among other things, it failed to adequately respond to the growing belief in the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud that would curdle into the violence of Jan. 6—but on the whole, it notched a great number of successes.
After the 2022 midterms, though, this work came under attack from the political right, which increasingly characterized such efforts as censorship. The standard-bearer of this campaign is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his Republican-led House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government, which has deluged scholars with harassing subpoenas and worked to transform their research into something politically toxic. In court, a group of Republican attorneys generals brought a lawsuit challenging government communication with platforms as unconstitutional “jawboning”—that is, government pressure on private entities—forbidden by the First Amendment. At the same time, social media platforms, led by Elon Musk’s X, began to pull back from moderating their platforms and laid off many of the employees who had worked on these efforts.
The result was that, when we reviewed the state of play in February, the systems built to protect the 2020 election from harmful falsehoods had been largely dismantled or frozen in place. According to Meta, the FBI-run Foreign Influence Task Force stopped communicating with the company entirely as of July 2023. CISA, too, went dark as far as outreach to social media companies was concerned. CISA Director Jen Easterly also indicated that the agency was reorienting away from misinformation and disinformation and focusing more exclusively on cybersecurity issues. And the hits kept coming: in June, Stanford University pulled the rug out from under the university’s flagship Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of researchers that provided a clearinghouse for reporting and responding to election falsehoods and rumors in 2020.
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- "We won't even know who won for a couple of weeks!"
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The Election Information Hub by Perplexity
- "hallucinations" are so much better than "disinformation"
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Voting Has Never Been More Secure Than It Is Right Now (Archive)
the act of voting itself has been unfairly tarnished, most notably by former president Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That claim is especially preposterous because modern voting procedures are only becoming more robust—and those casting ballots by mail or machine in this year’s presidential election can, in fact, be more confident than ever that their votes will be tallied accurately. One reason for that confidence is the adoption of voting technology that combines machine efficiency with the verifiability of a paper trail. This is the result of a shift that began two decades ago, after system jams and punch-card fragments—Florida’s infamous “hanging chads”—led to a fiasco that left the 2000 election results unclear for five weeks. Congress’s response, the 2002 Help America Vote Act, phased out the use of punch-card ballots and lever machines in federal elections. Most Americans now vote with optical scanners, which process marked selections on paper sheets. In the 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s polling sites used hand-fed optical scanners; an audit of the nearly five million votes cast in the state, the largest hand count of ballots in recent U.S. history, confirmed that President Joe Biden won. County error rates were 0.73 percent or less, and most had no change in their tallies at all.
- When no one has "standing" to question the results, the results stand "unchallenged".
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AllVote, a low-profile super PAC launched this summer, has sent false information via text message to voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and other states about their voting status, CNN, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other outlets reported this week. Some messages inform voters who have already gone to the polls that they have yet to cast their ballots. Others have been provided inaccurate information about their polling places or drop-box locations. The Illinois Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Center said AllVote was behind "confusing text messages" about the election. Officials in McLean County, Ill., said voters were worried that their votes "hadn't counted" after receiving text messages stating that they had not cast their ballots. An official in the New Mexico secretary of state's office, which fielded complaints about AllVote messages, said last week the mass texts were "something that the feds really need to look at and crack down on."
Beyond legal concerns about AllVote, its antics have stoked interest in its financial backers. While AllVote has gone to extensive lengths to mask its employees and donors, the Free Beacon can trace it back to the group Rapid Resist Action, formed in 2017 by Obama administration official Yoni Landau. The key clue, the Free Beacon found, is a legal disclaimer at AllVote's website that redirects to a Rapid Resist Action web address.
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Somewhere in America... - Richard Hanania's Newsletter
To many rightists, there is something deeply unappealing about the ignorant masses deciding who gets to rule. Trump gets on stage in Michigan with Muslim community leaders, who seem to be completely unaware of his first term record on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, at the same time that the most ethnocentric Jews look forward to him coming back into office so Bibi can have a free hand to finish the job. RFK says Trump will take on the corporations and Make America Healthy Again, as he ends up on the same side as food industry and corporate lobbyists who want government to get off the backs of business. People disgusted with public opinion should rest easy, because in the end elites are the ones actually in charge, with swing state voters being called upon to occasionally decide between rival blocs of the ruling class. Having good elites is therefore more important than a public with rational political views. But to be allowed to rule, elites must humble themselves before the voter.
Elon Musk has therefore spent the last several months taking time away from building rockets and instead thinking about how to get brain dead schlubs in rural Pennsylvania off their asses long enough to color in a circle with a pen. The Harris campaign is thinking about how to do the same for the Philadelphia ghetto, as Republicans consider what kinds of commercials they can run and which podcasts Trump can go on to peel off enough men from that community to make a difference. The vast majority of the voters of whichever candidate wins won’t be paying all that much attention to the policy choices of the next administration, but they’ll be back in four years to go through the whole process again.
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Dead-heat poll results are astonishing – and improbable, these experts say
Harris / Democrats
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The Democrats’ Insanity Defense - Tablet Magazine
The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.” That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement”—in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.
Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.
The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback. “All of it,” said a Republican congressional staffer, “is insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it’s now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it’s now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people’s pronouns.”
aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”
Trump / Right / Jan6
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Bombshell Revelations in Daniel Penny Trial Turn Entire Prosecution on Its Head.
That question has now been answered thanks to newly released bodycam footage. Not only was Neely breathing when the police arrived, but they refused to give him mouth-to-mouth, instead sticking him with Narcan assuming a drug overdose was involved. Would Neely be alive today if the police had taken immediate action to save his life? Did the shot of Narcan contribute to his death? Questions like those are going to complicate the prosecution's attempt to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Penny was directly responsible for Neely's death.
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Americans, your calls and texts can be monitored by Chinese spies (Archive)
The so-called lawful-access system breached by the Salt Typhoon hackers was established by telecom carriers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to allow federal law enforcement officials to execute legal warrants for records of Americans’ phone activity or to wiretap them in real time, depending on the warrant. Many of these cases are authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is used to investigate foreign spying that involves contact with U.S. citizens. The system is also used for legal wiretaps related to domestic crimes.
“Right now, China has the ability to listen to any phone call in the United States, whether you are the president or a regular Joe, it makes no difference,” one of the hack victims briefed by the FBI told me. “This has compromised the entire telecommunications infrastructure of this country.”
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Illinois), the ranking Democrat on the committee, told me during an interview that Congress and the federal government spent years working to keep Chinese technology out of the U.S. telecom system for fear Beijing might use it to spy on Americans. Now, Chinese intelligence might have outmaneuvered them by breaking in through the back door, he said. There’s no evidence yet that Beijing plans to use any information collected to interfere in U.S. politics or Tuesday’s presidential election, though it remains a concern, Krishnamoorthi told me.
- From before the PATRIOT Act, actually: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act - Wikipedia
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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For some elite athletes, neurodivergence can be a super strength
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Anti-Aging Enthusiasts Are Taking a Pill to Extend Their Lives. Will It Work?
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NHS pilots new iPhone adapter to check patients for throat cancer
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Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life
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Investigation Update: E. Coli Outbreak, Onions Served at McDonald's
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Brazil's Farmers Are Plowing over an Ancient Amazon Civilization
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Mount Fuji snowless at end of October for first time in 130 years
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Ratting on wildlife crime: training rats to detect illegally trafficked wildlife
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At Mexico's school for jaguars, big cats learn skills to return to the wild
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'Welfare for the rich': how farm subsidies wrecked Europe's landscapes
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Urban green spaces have vital role in cutting heat-related deaths, study finds