2024-12-27
CIA "astral travel", vexing disinfo, Musk manufacturing, NYT blasphemes, video game angst, J. Edgar's rectitude, more Baltic cable cuts, Russia did it, FDA tests, Pfizer "blocked" weight loss drugs
etc
Horseshit
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Middle children grow up to be more honest and cooperative than only children
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The retro hobby that can help boost your happiness
The 500 people who turned out - some from as far afield as Mongolia and Canada - were taking part in an activity less known for drawing in crowds: the Rubik's UK Championship in "speedcubing," or racing to solve puzzle cubes at terrific speed. Rows of tables were laid out in the arena and 15 events took place over three days. Some involved solving the puzzle one-handed, others while blindfolded. Teenager James Alonso won the tournament's biggest event - solving the classic 3x3 cube at speed with an average of 6.3 seconds. Speedcubing has been popular since the 1980s and the world record for a single solve in that event is currently held by Max Park from the US, with a time of just 3.13 seconds. It is a far cry from the initial speed of Ernő Rubik, an architecture professor, who invented the Rubik's Cube in 1974 and took around a month to solve it.
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The report, 'Mars Exploration May 22, 1984,' details how the agency used astral projection—the idea that a person's spirit can travel through the astral plane—to transport a 'subject' to Mars approximately one million years BC. The study was part of Project Stargate, a secret US Army unit established in 1977 that focused on anomalous phenomena, including remote viewing, telepathy, and psychokinesis. The experiment's 'subject' was transported to the planet during the specified year, reporting an 'oblique view of a pyramid' and a 'very large road' with a monument similar to those known among ancient Egyptians on Earth, the report claims. The vision then shifted to a population of 'very large people' searching for 'a new place to live because their environment was corrupted.'
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Our Sun may once have had a twin. What happened to this stellar sibling?
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Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins
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Graphene at 20: Is the 'miracle' material living up to the hype?
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Flying Was Already the Worst. Then America Stopped Using Headphones
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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In November 2020, shortly after Donald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election, Barack Obama observed that America risked entering “an epistemological crisis”. The prospect of Mr Trump’s return to the White House in January validates his predecessor’s premonition. r Obama was talking about media fragmentation and polarisation: different segments of society existing in discrete information spaces; arguments no longer drawn from a common reservoir of facts; no shared reality, no foundation of truth. “Then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” he said. “And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” t isn’t only American democracy that is imperilled. Chaos and malicious falsehood in the information arena have disrupted politics in every country where governments are chosen in free elections. Political discourse has coarsened and consensus unravelled wherever constitutional frameworks and informally recognised codes of decency once maintained healthy pluralism.
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Jonathan Rauch on Disinformation
we should think of disinformation as engaging in tactics to mess with our minds, to manipulate us. It is more like a verb. Bad actors use lies, half-truths, and propaganda to gain power or achieve other goals. Such misbehavior is not unique to social media, although with low cost and weak guardrails, the apps do invite bad actors. onsider what we are learning about how President Biden’s entourage hid his age-related impairment. I regard this as a prime example of disinformation activities that relied very little, if at all, on social media.
Even if populism suffers from the ignorance of the masses, I do not think that is our worst problem. I think that our society suffers primarily because of the shortcomings of the elites. Their intellectual fads, conformity, and arrogance do much more damage than MAGA.
Musk
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Elon Musk followers turn on him as he backs importing super talented engineers
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The Musk-Led Manufacturing Revolution Nobody Is Talking About | ZeroHedge
When most analysts discuss Tesla, they focus on new vehicles or the electric vehicle company’s advancements in autonomy. Yet, according to Launch i/o CEO Jeff Lutz, one of the most significant—and under-discussed—developments at Tesla is happening not in its design studios or on the road, but in its factories. Lutz, a former executive at Google and Motorola, argues that Tesla’s true innovation isn’t just the electric vehicles or robots it’s building, but how those products are being made. The company’s first-principles approach to manufacturing is a radical departure from the industry norm, focusing not just on cheap labor or existing models, but on rethinking the entire production process. Tsla is creating factories that are the product—designing, testing, and perfecting every element just as they do with their cars. This focus on manufacturing efficiency, Lutz believes, will lead to a dramatic reduction in production costs, potentially bringing them closer to zero. And this shift in how products are built—rather than merely assembled—could set a new standard for the entire manufacturing world.
Electric / Self Driving cars
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CATL launches the "world's first ultra-safe" EV skateboard chassis
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EV sales set to overtake traditional cars in China years ahead of west
China is set to smash international forecasts and Beijing’s official targets with domestic EV sales — including pure battery and plug-in hybrids — growing about 20 per cent year on year to more than 12mn cars in 2025, according to the latest estimates supplied to the Financial Times by four investment banks and research groups. The figure would be more than double the 5.9mn sold in 2022. At the same time, sales of traditionally powered cars are expected to fall by more than 10 per cent next year to less than 11mn, reflecting a near 30 per cent plunge from 14.8mn in 2022. Meanwhile, EV sales growth has slowed in Europe and the US, reflecting the legacy car industry’s slow embrace of new technology, uncertainty over government subsidies and rising protectionism against imports from China.
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If your Tesla starts to stink like cheesy feet, this is what you have to do
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Hertz is asking EV renters if they want to keep it, permanently
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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The birth of Jesus would probably have been forgotten if it wasn't for a plague
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Opinion | The Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t - The New York Times
So let’s go back to the Nativity. Of the four gospels, two describe the virgin birth of Jesus and two don’t mention it. The Gospel of Mark has people of Galilee referring to Jesus as the son of Mary, when the norm was to describe somebody as the son of his father. So did the neighbors growing up with Jesus regard him as fatherless? We don’t know. Mark is the earliest gospel written; Matthew and Luke are basically just revising it. Mark has no suggestion of a virgin birth. Instead, he says that neighbors called Jesus “son of Mary.” In an intensely patriarchal society, this suggests that Jesus had no father that anyone knew about, even one deceased. Yet even without a partner, Mary has lots of children: In Mark, Jesus has four other brothers, and some sisters, with no recognized father and no genealogy.
You note that Matthew and Luke both borrowed heavily from Mark’s account but also seem embarrassed by elements of it, including the paternity question. Is your guess that they added the virgin birth to reduce that embarrassment? Yes, but this is not just my guess. When Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark, each added an elaborate birth story — two stories that differ in almost every detail. Matthew adds a father named Joseph, who, seeing his fiancée pregnant, and not with his child, decides to break the marriage contract. Luke, writing independently, pictures an angel astonishing a young virginal girl, announcing that “the Holy Spirit” is about to make her pregnant.
this is the classic “no independence” assumption—that Matthew and Luke are just riffing on Mark (and perhaps the hypothetical Q gospel) without offering any independent historical insight. But here’s at least one problem: Luke explicitly claims to have done his homework, gathering information from eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-4). nd if Luke traveled with Paul, as the evidence strongly suggests (see the “we” sections of Acts), he would’ve had opportunities to talk to people in Jerusalem who knew the story firsthand, including James, Jesus’ own brother. (See Acts 21:8) Mary herself could have still been alive and available for interviews. Why treat Matthew and Luke as mere copy-paste jobs and totally fictional where they diverge from Mark?
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Hackers are using Russian domains to launch document-based phishing attacks
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Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good - The New York Times
One way to understand the video game industry’s current crisis is by looking closely at Spider-Man’s spandex. or decades, companies like Sony and Microsoft have bet that realistic graphics were the key to attracting bigger audiences. By investing in technology, they have elevated flat pixelated worlds into experiences that often feel like stepping into a movie.
“It’s very clear that high-fidelity visuals are only moving the needle for a vocal class of gamers in their 40s and 50s,” said Jacob Navok, a former executive at Square Enix who left that studio, known for the Final Fantasy series, in 2016 to start his own media company. “But what does my 7-year-old son play? Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite.”
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Boox devices now ship with a Chinese propaganda AI assistant
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Bogus Pirate IPTV Portals Run by Law Enforcement "Entrap Hundreds"
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Americans are exhausted by political news
- News would be great. Advocacy and propaganda mostly telling us how bad we are for not embracing the destruction of our society got tiring in the 1980s.
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Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law
Trump
Democrats / Biden Inc
Left Angst
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Tech Makes an Economic Case for Skilled Immigrants. Will Trump Bite?
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Mapping Trump's connections to tech's right-wing brotherhood
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The New Yorker Reinvents J. Edgar Hoover To Attack Kash Patel
The outlet shared an article — headlined, “How would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?” — via X with the following caption: “J. Edgar Hoover made the F.B.I. into a powerful but nonpartisan colossus. Kash Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the Bureau to protect Donald Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies.”
World
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Finland-Estonia power cable hit in latest Baltic Sea incident
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Undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia suffers damage
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Finland boards oil tanker suspected of causing internet, power cable outages
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Estlink cable disruption: Finnish Border Guard detains tanker linked to Russia
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Finland boards ship suspected of causing internet, power cable outages
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Finland Boards Tanker After Power and Data Cables Go Offline
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Vessel Suspected of Cutting Undersea Cable May Be Part of Russia’s Shadow Fleet
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From Nuremberg to now: a war crimes trial in Sweden is changing legal history
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What is Captagon, the addictive drug mass-produced in al-Assad's Syria?
Iran / Houthi
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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A Woman with a Rare Gene Mutation Fights to Avoid Her Mother's Fate
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Dementia in the Ancient Greco-Roman World Was Minimally Mentioned
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A Single One-Hour Daily Walk Could Add Six Hours to Your Lifespan
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The New FDA and the Regulation of Laboratory Developed Tests
Lab developed tests have never been FDA regulated, except briefly during the pandemic when the FDA used the declaration of emergency to issue so-called “guidance documents” saying that any SARS-COV-II test had to be pre-approved by the FDA. Thus, the FDA reversed the logic of emergency. In ordinary times, pre-approval was not necessary but when speed was of the essence it became necessary to get FDA pre-approval. The FDA’s pre-approval process slowed down testing in the United States and it wasn’t until after the FDA lifted its restrictions in March that tests from the big labs became available.
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An intervention to reduce child mortality may accelerate drug resistance
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Scientists explore longevity drugs for dogs that could also 'extend human life'
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Opinion | Pfizer Stopped Us From Getting Ozempic Decades Ago - The New York Times
Researchers identified the key breakthrough for GLP-1 drugs nearly years ago, it turns out, long before most Americans had even heard the phrase “obesity epidemic.” his summer, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, published a long personal reflection that doubled as an alternate history of what may well be the most spectacular and impactful medical breakthrough of the century so far. In 1987, Flier co-founded a biotech start-up that pursued GLP-1 as a potential treatment for diabetes, not long after it had first been identified by researchers who’d also found that the hormone enhanced insulin secretion in the presence of glucose. he startup obtained worldwide rights to develop GLP-1 as a metabolic therapy from a group of those researchers, based at Massachusetts General Hospital. They even generated clinical results that suggested it might have promise as a weight-loss drug as well — only to have Pfizer, which had agreed to fund the research, withdraw its support, without providing the researchers with an especially satisfying explanation. Instead, Pfizer told Flier and his partners that the company didn’t believe there would be a market for another injectable diabetes treatment after insulin. Well, Flier tells me, “they were wrong.”