2025-02-15
"gargled by whale", we was warned about politics in science, Delphi at 30, 75k Fed buyouts, Bidenomics re-examined, 40% ain't great, "regime change" aka "election", Chernobyl droned, recycled lies
etc
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Kayaker who survived being swallowed by whale 'thought he was dying'
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Humpback whale swallows and then spits out kayaker off Chile coast
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Imagine if we reported other events with this slant: every prostitution bust would be "attempted cannibalism".
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Pilot fatigue, accidental switch press blamed for plane going off runway
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Robots have trouble walking in mud. Giving them hooves helps
Horseshit
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Cristiano Ronaldo was the highest paid athlete in 2024, no women in the top 100
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Lovesick Brazilians Turn to Sorcerers and Chicken Feet to Fix Relationships
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My sex doll is mad at me: A fiction story | MIT Technology Review
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Uncontacted Brazil indigenous tribe man emerges; villagers demonstrate a lighter
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'I've had it': JP Morgan boss rails against Gen Z in expletive-laden outburst
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With Los Angeles in need of housing, downtown's empty office towers have appeal
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A Libertarian Island Dream in Honduras Is Now an $11B Nightmare
celebrity gossip
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Inside the Murdochs’ Succession Drama - The New York Times
For months, Rupert and his firstborn son, Lachlan, had been working on a secret plan to amend the family’s trust to strip three of his other children — Prue, Liz and James — of their power to influence the direction of the family business. Their lawyers had named it Project Family Harmony. The trust, which holds the shares that control the Murdochs’ global media empire, gives Rupert authority over his two companies until his death. After that, the voting power is distributed equally among his four oldest children. It is irrevocable, but it includes a provision that gives Rupert the ability to make changes as long as he is acting solely in the best interests of his beneficiaries. This was the provision that he intended to exploit in order to consolidate control in Lachlan, the most politically conservative of the four.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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A free speech dispute over a New England pastry shop painting heads to trial
The mural atop the bakery, which was founded over 45 years ago, is a creation of local high school art students. When it went up in June 2022, the painting attracted a lot of compliments and visitors, including one from a town zoning officer. he zoning board decided that the painting was not so much art as advertising. The board determined it was a sign, and so it could not remain as is because of its size. At about 90 square feet (8.6 square meters), it’s four times bigger than the local sign code allows. f the painting didn’t show what’s sold inside — baked goods — it wouldn’t be considered a sign and could stay, board members said.
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Zuckerberg's rightward policy shift puts Meta staffers on edge, targets Apple
Musk
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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I worried I didn't belong in science–until I discovered many feel the same way
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We Tried to Warn You - by Lee Jussim - Unsafe Science
For decades, dissident academics had been trying to warn the rest of academia that their infusion into their professional responsibilities of left-to-radical politics, including but not restricted to “social justice,” was a slow-moving trainwreck. In academia, and for many outside of it, those who criticized DEI or BLM, or who simply ran afoul of social justice sacred narratives risked being mobbed, ostracized and punished, up to and including losing their livelihoods. So of course they came after my paper. And of course, their thundering hallucinations of racism rendered them incapable of even hearing, let alone heeding, the warning.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Please Insert Disk 3 of 42,361 | Marios Fasold's Website
he size of those updates is remarkable; I think a recent one was slightly above 61 GB. As a result, he usually cannot play Fortnite on those days.
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Amazon is closing USB access in Kindle that made it easy to remove DRM
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Final Fantasy iOS Game Shuts Down Due to Curious In-App Purchase Bug
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Steve Jobs resurrected live on stage with heavenly choruses and a message of universal love for Apple Customers: What to Expect from the 'Apple Launch' Next Week
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TikTok returns on Apple, Google US app stores as Trump delays ban
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RTX 5070 Ti retail listings appear in EU and US – Some models nearly double MSRP
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Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says
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3DBenchy Sets Sail into the Public Domain
- after all the lawyer time doing takedowns, too...
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Mastodon is "stealing" this feature X has had for more than a decade
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Delphi turns 30 – The dead live longer | heise online
30 years ago today, Borland released Turbo Pascal for Windows as Delphi. Many owners have changed since then, but an active community has remained.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Expert shares key facts about asteroid that could hit Earth in 2032
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So, deflection in just under 4 years? Around the time of the next US presidential election. Not long. The irony of all this would be if we’re able to reallocate sufficient global GDP for a rush mission to deflect a planet-killer asteroid in 2028 ONLY BECAUSE the world’s largest economy has been hijacked by a space-fixated profit-motivated hyper-authoritarian industrialist. Don’t know about you but I’d take that as solid proof of interfering benevolent time travellers, nothing less.
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
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Returning to the office? Focus more on practices and less on the policy
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Arm to launch its own chip in move that could upend semiconductor industry
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Energy demand in datacenter 'capital of the world' VA nearly doubled in 2024 2H
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TSMC considering running Intel's US factories after Trump team request
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Number of Americans seeking jobless benefits falls, employers hold on to workers
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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JD Vance torches European leaders for ‘criminalizing’ free speech in extraordinary Munich speech
Vice President J.D. Vance took his culture war to Europe on Friday, warning that its greatest threat came not from China or Russia but from within as he delivered a blistering attack on what he said was the continent’s retreat from its traditional values. Vance said free speech and democratic institutions were being eroded in an address to the Munich Security Conference. He accused European politicians of forcing people to shut down social media accounts and urged leaders to do more to stem illegal immigration. Vance reserved particular scorn for America’s closest ally, and the case of a British man arrested after praying near an abortion clinic. ‘Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making,’ he said.
Democrats
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The Post-Neoliberal Delusion | Foreign Affairs
the Biden administration’s post-neoliberal turn, the predicted economic transformations of which prompted comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, fell considerably short of its lofty goals. In some respects, the macroeconomic outcomes have been impressive. The U.S. economy has bounced back much faster than it did after previous recessions, and its post-pandemic performance has also outpaced that of many peer countries in terms of economic growth. But the recovery has been uneven, frustrated by inflation at least partly induced by the administration’s own policies. Inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and government debt were all higher in 2024 than they were in 2019. From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose. Even before inflation doomed Biden’s chances for reelection, it undermined the administration’s goals. Despite efforts to raise the child tax credit and the minimum wage, both were considerably lower in inflation-adjusted terms when Biden left office than when he entered. For all the emphasis he placed on American workers, Biden was the first Democratic president in a century who did not permanently expand the social safety net. And despite signing into law an infrastructure bill that committed over $500 billion to rebuilding everything from bridges to broadband, skyrocketing costs of construction have left the United States building less than it was before the law’s passage.
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In final days, Biden awarded $50 million to self-dealing charity leader
Left Angst
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Impeachment articles being drafted for judge who ordered grant freeze injunction
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Judges blocking Trump government efficiency moves have history of liberal activism.
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Billionaire Airbnb Co-Founder Is Said to Take Role in Musk's Doge
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Bristling at 'Gulf of Mexico' name change on maps, Mexico says might sue Google
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DOGE software approval alarms Labor Department employees
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has received approval from the Labor Department to use software that could allow it to transfer vast amounts of data out of Labor’s systems, according to records seen by NBC News and interviews with two employees. The approval for Musk’s team to use the remote-access and file-transfer software, known as PuTTY, has alarmed some of the Labor Department’s career employees. Musk, the head of DOGE, has dispatched subordinates throughout the government to radically overhaul or dismantle federal agencies with the backing of President Donald Trump.
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ICE Wants to Know If You're Posting Negative Things About It Online
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Only About 40% of the Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers. Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact.
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Justice Department spent $100 million pushing DEI in schools, watchdog finds.
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Trump and Musk Are Pushing for Regime Change - The Atlantic
Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.
- from "There is no Deep State" to "The Deep State must be preserved"
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Once-Private Government Networks Are Now Exposed, Making Cyber-Espionage Easier than Ever
Beginning on January 8, 2025, a surge of U.S. government ? infrastructure began appearing on what’s known as “the search engine of Internet-connected devices,” Shodan.io. Federal agencies typically secure their systems behind multiple layers of protection, ensuring that critical services – such as mail servers, directory services, VPNs, internal IP addresses, and remote access gateways – remain isolated from public access. The scope and severity of exposed government networks is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s hard to even have a baseline to compare it to. But one thing’s for sure–adversaries such as Russia and China are dancing for joy.
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Federal layoffs start with huge number of probationary workers
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Sweeping US energy department layoffs hit nuclear security, loans office
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US Treasury watchdog begins audit of DOGE access to federal payment system
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White House Says Will Continue to Punish Associated Press Due to Gulf of Mexico
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Researcher Captures Contents of 'DEI.gov' Before It Was Hidden Behind a Password
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Inside the 'unprecedented' crackdown on US consumer watchdog
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National Park Service erases some words from Stonewall National Monument site
The monument in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village section is based in a tiny park across the street from the Stonewall Inn, a bar that became ground zero for the gay rights movement on June 28, 1969, when gay and transgender patrons and neighborhood residents fought back against a police raid. The park service website on Friday was still filled with information about the uprising, including photographs of noted transgender activists. But the words “transgender” and “queer” had been deleted from text that had been on the site. “They’re trying to literally cis-wash, if you will, LGBTQ history by taking trans folks and saying they didn’t exist then and don’t exist now,” said Stacy Lentz, CEO of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and a co-owner of The Stonewall Inn. “It is very alarming.”
- "trans" was explicitly excluded from "Queer" into the late 80's, per the cultures I observed. Tribalism was much stronger in the subcultures then: there was flavors of "gay" that didn't mix.
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Trump administration adds anti-trans notices to restored websites
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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An Oregon woman’s nude photos ended up the topic of conversation in her small town after a prosecutor looked through her sensitive cellphone data and told the county sheriff what he found despite no warrant, no consent and no suspicion that she had committed a crime. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-to-1 that Grant County District Attorney Jim Carpenter’s actions amounted to “a troubling example of the intrusion on Fourth Amendment rights” against illegal searches. But all three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Europe's Ailing Defense Industry Faces a Reckoning as Russia Threat Looms
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Clive Myrie: What I saw during my 24 hours at London's Royal Free Hospital
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Germany says its warships were sabotaged
German police were investigating an incident at a Hamburg shipyard where several dozen kilograms of metal shavings were dumped into a corvette-class vessel's engine system.
Kaack also said there had been attempted break-ins at German naval bases via land and sea, and he spoke of "attempts to approach" uniformed personnel while they were heading home.
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Centrefolded: Japan's 'porn disposal' boxes phased out amid rise of the internet
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European Parliament urges lawmakers to use encrypted messages after China hacks
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N Ireland police charges suspected terrorists using FoI data • The Register
Two suspected New IRA members were arrested on Tuesday and charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 after they were found in possession of spreadsheets containing details of staff that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) mistakenly published online. The spreadsheet data would have orginally come from the August 2023 FoI own goal when personal information – including real names and ranks – of nearly 10,000 PSNI staff members were published in a document that was publically accessible online for several hours.
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Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself
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10 Days From Natl Elections, Another ‘Immigrant’ Drives Another Car Into a German Crowd.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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A whole new world of tiny beings challenges fundamental ideas of life
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Opinion | I’ve Seen the World Our Trash Makes, and It’s Terrifying - The New York Times
In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries. If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success, the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I’ve been traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making. What I saw was terrifying.
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Conservation strategies to preserving Asian horseshoe crab populations
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Scientists have a new explanation for the last two years of record heat - The Washington Post
Two new studies offer a potential explanation: fewer clouds. And the decline in cloud cover, researchers say, could signal the start of a feedback loop that leads to more warming.
- No mention of big volcano.
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High fertiliser use halves numbers of pollinators, longest study finds
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Restored habitat in wealthy nations may drive extinction in species-rich regions
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Salmon farms under fire on U.S. East Coast after being shuttered on west coast