2024-12-14
rural idjits, whistle blower "suicide", CIA Time Life, chirality apocalypse, McKinsey pays, Broadcom soars, Korean election denial, Britain to go dark, captagon seizures, loving factory farms
etc
Horseshit
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The dirty secret about OnlyFans: it's not hot to be a prostitute
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The truth about dating as an indie hacker in 2025: Why 30% won't even try
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NYC Wants You to Stop Taking Traffic Cam Selfies, But Here's How to Do It Anyway
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Crystal Mangum admits to fabricating 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal accusations
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Rural Identity as a Contributing Factor to Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.
a significant and overlooked factor contributing to anti-intellectualism is rural social identification—a psychological attachment to being from a rural area or small town—because rural identity in particular views experts and intellectuals as an out-group. Using 2019 ANES pilot data (N = 3000), original survey data (N = 811) and a separate original survey experiment, I find that rural social identification significantly predicts greater anti-intellectualism. Conversely, anti-intellectualism is not significantly associated with rural residency alone, as theoretically speaking, simply living in a rural area does not capture the affective dimension of rural psychological attachment. These findings have implications for health and science attitudes, populist support, and other relevant political matters.
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Have you ever tried putting lotion on one? Why are crocodiles so bumpy? A dermatological mystery has been solved
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How the internet perverts desire: Online longing is quasi-pornographic
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Investigation of Maillard reaction products in plant-based milk alternatives
celebrity gossip
Obit
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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” said a spokesperson in a statement to TechCrunch.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Steven Bartlett sharing harmful health misinformation on Diary of CEO podcast
Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett is amplifying harmful health misinformation on his number-one ranked podcast, a BBC investigation has found. Recent claims from guests - including that cancer can be treated by following a keto diet, rather than proven treatments - were allowed by the Dragons' Den star with little or no challenge. Experts have told us failing to question these disproven claims is dangerous because it creates a distrust of conventional medicine.
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The CIA and Time Magazine: Journalistic Ethics and Newsroom Dissent
This article provides evidence for the first time of a systematic policy of direct collusion between the Time Inc. media empire and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). For the first two decades of the Cold War, both Time and Life magazines established policies that provided the CIA with access to their foreign correspondents, their dispatches and research files, and their vast photographic archive that the magazines had accumulated to accompany their stories. Hugh Wilford once wrote that during the Cold War it was sometimes “difficult to tell precisely where [Time and Life’s] overseas intelligence network ended, and the CIA’s began.” As Wilford and other historians have shown, a number of high profile Time Inc. journalists, including the company’s president, Henry Luce, maintained close contact with senior CIA officials, and even helped them with their propaganda efforts abroad.
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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'Unprecedented risk': Scientists call for halt on 'mirror life' research
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Leading scientists urge ban on developing 'mirror-image' bacteria
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Mirror Bacteria Research Poses Significant Risks, Scientists Warn
Chirality is baked into all life; our DNA is formed of right-handed molecules while our proteins are left handed. The “mirror” organisms would reverse either or both of these, and could in theory be used to improve biochemical production processes. The concern is that these organisms would evade both the immune systems of all natural life forms, and any human defences such as antibiotics, thus posing an existential risk to life. It’s estimated that the capacity to produce such a life form lies more than a decade away, and the scientists wish to forestall that by starting the conversation early. They are calling for a halt to research likely to result in these organisms, and a commitment from funding bodies not to support such research.
- These efforts worked so well at preventing possible disasters forseen from "gain of function" research...
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ou are two Harvard professors; you published an article in an academic journal, leveraged the reputation of academic economics to make policy recommendations to the U.S. congress, and then you talk about “academic kerfuffle”! If you don’t want “academic kerfuffle,” maybe you should just write op-eds, maybe start a radio call-in show, etc. It’s Harvard this, an’ Harvard that, when all is going well. But then when some pesky students and faculty at faculty at the University of Massachusetts check your data and find that you screwed everything up, then it’s academic kerfuffle! UMass, can you imagine? The nerve of those people!
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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The optical disc onslaught continues, with LG quitting Blu-ray players
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YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours
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Epic Games' App Store Will Be Preinstalled on Android Phones
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AT&T Won't Upgrade Millions Of DSL Users To Fiber Despite Billions In Subsidies
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Microsoft kills off Skype credits and phone numbers in favor of subscriptions
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Consulting firm McKinsey to pay $650M to resolve US opioid probe
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Adobe shares suffer steepest drop in over two years on disappointing guidance
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Broadcom stock soars 20% post-earnings on AI demand to $1T market cap
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Amazon workers threaten strike in New York ahead of holidays
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Inside Boeing's struggle to make its best-selling plane again
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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DOJ IG: Dozens of FBI Confidential Sources at Capitol on January 6.
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- "That's Journalism": ProPublica Pats Itself On Back After Hegseth Hitpiece Humiliation | ZeroHedge (Archive)
“We asked West Pt public affairs, which told us twice on the record that he hadn’t even applied there,” Eisinger wrote on X. “We reached out. Hegseth’s spox gave us his acceptance letter. We didn’t publish a story. That’s journalism.” Despite Eisinger’s attempt to save face, Hegseth’s defenders said the real story ProPublica should have published was that West Point had incorrectly discredited Hegseth.
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Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos are the latest billionaires to donate $1M to Trump
Democrats / Biden Inc
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A former Pa. judge involved in the 'Kids for Cash' scandal is granted clemency
A former Pennsylvania judge who was convicted of sending children to jail while receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks from the facility’s operator in the early 2000s was one of the nearly 1,500 people whose sentences were commuted Thursday by President Joe Biden. Michael Conahan had been sentenced to 17½ years in federal prison after being convicted of racketeering conspiracy for his role in the so-called Kids for Cash scandal in Luzerne County. Conahan pulled funding from a county-owned juvenile detention center there and agreed to send juveniles to a for-profit facility in exchange for payments, a scheme that netted him and fellow jurist Mark Ciavarella nearly $3 million. Conahan, who was convicted in 2011, had been serving his sentence in a Florida facility and was due to be released in 2026. But he was placed in home confinement in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Left Angst
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You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear. You got a flurry of tweets from every major C.E.O. in America — every major tech C.E.O., every bank C.E.O. — fawning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to work well with him. I think that this is a very sad development that’s happened. It’s not entirely because of Trump. But we have politicized the economy in America. All this industrial policy, these tariffs, these bans. What that does is it suddenly makes Washington a very crucial arbiter to the success of business. You add to it Trump, who personally loves the idea of fining Caterpillar for doing this and Harley Davidson for doing that and Chase for doing — he views it as his job as president to literally dole out rewards and punishments to companies, depending on whether they do what he regards as the right thing or the wrong thing. It’s deeply saddening to me as somebody who grew up in India, where this is business as usual.
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A Very Brief Introduction to the New Right - by TR
The following is meant to explain the theoretical foundations of “new Trump” and the competing ideologies which are the now the backbone of the intellectual MAGA movement. If you’re confused why there are so many Catholics in the Federalist Society at Yale Law School, or why some portion of Silicon Valley has swung towards cultural Christianity in addition to supporting Trump, I believe the below anthology is a good starting point for developing context.
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Trump transition wants to scrap crash reporting requirement opposed by Tesla
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To Save Democracy, We Need to Rebuild Trust in Our Institutions
People have stopped trusting the experts even on mundane objective factual matters like the GDP or the inflation rate. Much less prescriptive recommendations such as vaccinations. Political disagreements and differences of opinion are inevitable and unavoidable. But it is impossible for us to thrive as a society when we cannot even agree on objective factual statements about the world around us. It is impossible for us to productively resolve contentious discussions on topics like immigration, when we cannot even agree on the basic facts, like the impact immigrants have on the economy and crime rates. It is easy to blame all of the above on idiots wearing tinfoil hats who are “doing their own research” via social media. I’ll admit it – my patience with them has certainly run thin after the past few years. The evidence against things like flat-earth-theory is overwhelming, and you really have to wonder about the mental competence of people who still stubbornly hold on to such ideas.
I myself am a supporter of both immigration and masking up during a pandemic. I also believe that Trump is indeed a danger to democracy. You can feel passionately about all these things, and still understand the reasons why others may be skeptical. And how our past actions have partially fueled their skepticism. Trust is hard earned, but easily lost. When we tell white lies or one-sided truths, we may do so with the best of intentions. But in the long run, this road leads only to distrust in the institutions that our society relies on.
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Unfair and Impolite Tweets Aren't Defamatory-Flynn v. Wilson - Technology & Marketing Law Blog
The court says that “Flynn has a complicated relationship with the QAnon movement,” a line that most of us would prefer not to see written in a court opinion… The court says that Wilson’s actual malice is required for this defamation claim, and Flynn didn’t properly allege it. The court then bizarrely says Flynn might actually be Q:
although the record persuades us that most QAnon adherents believe that there is at least one Q (and maybe more), we cannot discern much else about that person or persons, whether inadvertently or by design…If Flynn is not Q (or one of the Qs), then it presumably would not have been hard for him to have filed an affidavit with the trial court to that effect…. if, as the record suggests, the identity of “Q” poses an intractable proof problem—due perhaps to the very nature of QAnon—that is Flynn’s problem and not Wilson’s.
Flynn’s legal lackeys at the Binnall Law Group—MAGA’s go-to squad for weaponized litigation—have built quite the cottage industry around threatening critics and trying to muzzle free speech. Like everything else basking under the dim, flickering bulb of the MAGA Sun King, their incessant whining about “lawfare” is pure projection. Donald Trump wasn’t indicted and convicted on a whim; he was neck-deep in actual criminal activity. That’s the law, not lawfare.
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Trump wants to stop Tesla having to report Autopilot, Full Self-Driving crashes
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In the Trump Administration Crosshairs: Cell Phone Radiation
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Kennedy's Lawyer Has Asked the FDA to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Full Text of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's Address to the Nation
I stand here today to clarify my position regarding the declaration of martial law. The opposition parties are currently going berserk, claiming that the declaration of martial law equates to insurrection. Is what they claim true? Who are these forces paralyzing state affairs and disrupting the constitution in the Republic of Korea? Over the past two and a half years, the opposition parties controlling the National Assembly have refused to recognize the President elected by the people and have continued agitating to remove and impeach the President. It means that they refused to accept the results of the presidential election.
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Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts — see how it would look
Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists. But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain. Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.
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TikTok influencers flee Romania amid tax probe into their election role
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Syrian rebels seize haul of banned drug captagon, country's largest export
Maher al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s brother, was a military commander and is now presumed on the run. He is widely accused of being the power behind the lucrative captagon trade. Syrian politician Khiti was placed under sanction in 2023 by the British government, which said he “controls multiple businesses in Syria which facilitate the production and smuggling of drugs”. In a cavernous garage beneath the warehouse and loading bays, thousands of dusty beige captagon pills were packed into the copper coils of brand new household voltage stabilisers. “We found a large number of devices that were stuffed with packages of captagon pills meant to be smuggled out of the country. It’s a huge quantity. It’s impossible to tell,” Shami said.
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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences
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Switzerland plans revamp of Cold War-era nuclear bunker network
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Switzerland seeks to ban Nazi symbols amid surge in antisemitism
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Wrong trees in the wrong place can make cities hotter at night, study reveals
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Why Denmark is embarrassed by the Paul Watson affair
Paul Watson, the founder of the NGO Sea Shepherd, has been incarcerated in Nuuk prison, Greenland's capital, for over five months. The 73-year-old American-Canadian whale defender has been waiting five months for his fate to be decided. Will he be extradited to Japan, where he faces up to 15 years in prison for his involvement in an anti-whaling operation against a Japanese whaler in Antarctic waters in 2010, causing "damage and injury," according to the international arrest warrant issued by Tokyo against him in 2012; or will he be allowed to join his wife and their two children in France, where he intends to seek political asylum?
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Saving bluefin tuna: The sushi delicacy threatened by climate change
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Opinion | We’re Going to Have to Learn to Love Factory Farms - The New York Times
Agriculture in general does have real environmental downsides. It’s the leading driver of water pollution and shortages, deforestation and biodiversity loss. It generates one-fourth of the greenhouse gases that heat up the planet. And it’s eating the earth. It has already overrun about two of every five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050. That would be a disaster for nature and the climate, because the carbon dioxide released by converting wild landscapes into farms and pastures is already the most damaging source of agricultural emissions, worse than methane from cow burps or nitrous oxide from fertilizer. But industrial agriculture in particular has one real upside: It produces enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of land. And that will be agriculture’s most vital job in the coming decades. The world will need even more enormous amounts of food by 2050, about 50 percent more calories to adequately feed nearly 10 billion people. The inconvenient truth is that factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the atmosphere.
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TikTok's annual carbon footprint is likely bigger than Greece's, study finds
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How Much Cleaner Energy Could Save America, in Lives and Money
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Has nuclear power entered a new era of acceptance amid global warming?