2025-03-12

banned botox zombies, Musk hate, driverless safety, dis PhD, undoc ESP32, COBOL GCC, currywurst, USAID destroying records, migrating home, Duterte rendered to ICC, Ukraine cease fire, risky sex drugs

etc

• NTSB Preliminary report on January 29 PSA airlines crash

  • (PDF) NTSB Preliminary report on January 29 crash of PSA Airlines

  • NTSB says DCA midair collision part of 'serious safety issue'

Horseshit

• Microsoft quantum computing 'breakthrough' faces fresh challenge

• How to boil great eggs 80% of the time

• As AI agents multiply, IT becomes the new HR department

• Volkswagen Bringing Back Physical Buttons, Says Removing Them Was a Mistake

• Pets Can't Stop Watching 'Flow,' the Oscar-Winning Cat Movie

• How Parents Transfer Generational Wealth to Kids

• Comedy club bans audience members with botox after ‘numerous complaints’ | The Independent

  Top Secret Comedy Club has hosted some of the biggest names in comedy, with star acts Jack Whitehall, Amy Schumer and Dave Chappelle gracing the stage in their Drury Lane and Kingsway clubs. In a drastic move, those with botox will be unable to see similar stars live at the London venues after stand-up acts shared concerns that audience members with frozen faces aren’t reacting to their jokes.

• Michael Sheen on paying off £1M of his neighbours' debts

• Why Are Cats Such a Medical Black Box?

• Why LA Has Streets That Are So Steep

• Loneliness in the Financial Independence, Retire Early Movement

• Pokemon shaped cheeto sells for $90k

• Record Judgement Against HOA, $1.8MM, in Santa Clara Suit over Abandoned Well

• Judge Uses D&D's Failure to Make Him Satanist to School Florida on Moral Panics

celebrity gossip

• Gambling With the Law: How SCOTUSblog’s Goldstein Risked All

  It grew into a go-to resource for journalists, lawyers, and students across the country, winning the Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media in 2012. (Bloomberg Law provided support for SCOTUSblog for several years; more recently, much of its backing has come from Goldstein’s law firm.) Retired NBC reporter Pete Williams said Goldstein and SCOTUSblog were invaluable to his reporting on the US Supreme Court over the years. “He was a real asset to us and helped us make coverage richer and more understandable,” said Williams, who considers Goldstein a good friend. Goldstein’s love for high-stakes poker was no secret. In 2011, he was already betting in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. His gambling supported his law practice, and vice versa. His clientele at the time included online gambling businesses such as PokerStars and the Poker Players Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for poker enthusiasts. But that work likely hastened his 2011 departure as co-head of litigation and Supreme Court practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, where he’d gone in 2006. He told Above the Law that client conflicts were a big part of the reason he left.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Spitefulness in Conspiracy Ideation and Covid-19 Conspiracy Beliefs

• Psychological 'booster shots' can strengthen resistance to misinformation

Musk

• Elon Musk points finger at Ukraine for X cyberattack

  • Elon Musk blames X outages on "massive cyberattack"

  • Musk blames Ukrainians for cyberattack on X. Experts aren't convinced

  • What Happened with the DDoS Attacks That Took Down X

• The Tesla protests are getting bigger – and rowdier

• As protests hit Tesla, battle rages over if they're unfair to SF car owners

• Steal My Tesla

• Tesla CFO sells $1.7M more in stock

• Carlos Slim Cancels $22B in Starlink Orders

Electric / Self Driving cars

• A Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a Michigan town

• Waymo is now offering 24/7 robotaxi rides in Silicon Valley

• Zoox robotaxis do not meet federal safety standards, agency says

• UC Irvine shines headlights on consumer driverless vehicle safety deficiencies

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why Are Girls Less Likely to Become Scientists?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• ‘A no thank you to the person who assumed I was the coffee lady’ - Delta

  Dr Rachel Los recently did something completely new. Apart from the required acknowledgements, she added ‘anti-acknowledgements’ to her TU Delft PhD thesis. These were aimed at everyone who had made it clear to her, implicitly or explicitly, that there was no space for her as a woman in the sciences. ‘We have to deal with this undermining’ she writes

• More state colleges are admitting students – before they apply

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple, Meta likely to face modest fines over DMA breaches, sources say

• Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

• Sony Music says over 75,000 items removed in battle against AI deepfakes

• Disc Rot in Old Warner Bros DVDs

• Apple Readies Dramatic Software Overhaul for iPhone, iPad and Mac

• Photographers Are on Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits

• ABC News staffers crying and upset amid layoffs that shuttered FiveThirtyEight

• Bluesky gets three-minute videos and a filter to help with DM spam

• Espressif's Response to Undocumented Commands in ESP32 Bluetooth by Tarlogic

  Of note is that the original press release by the Tarlogic research team was factually corrected to remove the “backdoor” designation. However, not all media coverage has been amended to reflect this change. Espressif would like to take this opportunity to clarify this matter for our users and partners. The functionality found are debug commands included for testing purposes. These debug commands are part of Espressif’s implementation of the HCI (Host Controller Interface) protocol used in Bluetooth technology. This protocol is used internally in a product to communicate between Bluetooth layers. Please read our technical blog to learn more.

• Global Smartwatch Shipments in 2024: Market Declines for First Time

• Cerebras to start datacenters in N. America, France packed with AI accelerators

• Reconsidering Debian's Inclusion of Non-Free Firmware – A Call for Discussion

• COBOL Language Front End Merged for GCC 15 Compiler

• Ryzen 9 9950X3D review: AMD irons out nearly every single downside of 3D V-Cache

• Google Chromecast users' fury at second day of TV streaming issue

• Verizon and Its Cloud Vendor Must Face Lawsuit for Reporting "CSAM" That Wasn't

• Allstate Insurance sued for delivering personal info in plaintext, to anyone

• TP-Link routers have been infected by a botnet to spread malware

• Are Family Vloggers Leaving California to Avoid Paying Their Kids?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court

• ChatGPT Search is now free for everyone – is it time to ditch Google?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• X-37B Returns to Earth, Space Force Won't Commit to Buying More

• UK Greenlights Amazon Kuiper, Starlink Faces New Rival

• Emerging launch companies see strong demand but look for government support

• What's behind the recent string of failures and delays at SpaceX?

• Jeff Bezos brings Amazon work culture to Blue Origin

Economicon / Business / Finance

• A look at some of the creative ways companies try to dodge high tariffs

• Nasdaq halts high-speed trading service after regulatory pressure

• US stock market loses $4T in value as Trump plows ahead on tariffs

• Amazon steps up use of robotics in warehouses

• A Hong Kong firm sell its Panama port stake to BlackRock, shifting U.S. control

• Oracle misses on earnings and issues weak revenue guidance

• The Walgreens Billionaire Watching His Empire Come Apart

• Southwest Kills Bags Fly Free

  • Southwest Airlines to start charging for bags

  • Southwest Airlines will charge to check bags

  • Southwest Airlines to End Free Checked Bags for First Time in 54-Year History

• "Report it right" How the US economy went from booming to a recession scare in only 20 days

• Why data on the economy doesn't match our feelings

• Eggflation Is Excuseflation

• Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is well positioned to withstand downturn

• Protector lets you hire armed body guards like you would an Uber

• Major U.S. airlines warn consumers aren't spending

• Volkswagen enjoys surprise bestseller amid financial woes: the VW currywurst

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Prop K opponents to sue San Francisco, 5 supervisors over Great Highway closure

• Doge Dataset

Trump

• Trump raises Canadian steel, aluminum tariffs to 50% in retaliation

  • Trump Says He Will Raise Canada Steel and Aluminum Tariffs to 50%

• Trump says he's buying a Tesla to support Musk and counter 'illegal' boycott

  • White House prepares high-profile purchase of Tesla auto

  • Trump burnishes Tesla at White House in show of support for Musk

Democrats

• Dems threatening government shutdown over Elon Musk hate, Republicans say.

Left Angst

• DOGE's Plans to Replace Humans with AI Are Already Under Way

• What the world needs now is more fossil fuels, says Trump's energy secretary

• Mississippi Passes Bill Banning Lab-Grown Meat

• Wall Street Fears Trump Will Wreck the Soft Landing

• Musk's DOGE 'whiz kids' flew to California to try and release water themselves

• Judicial Independence May Require Confrontation | Lawfare

  it would be a mistake for the courts to make decisions on the assumption that a ruling against the administration will inevitably provoke a clash between the branches. Threats to ignore a court decision are designed to elicit such behavior. The intent is to intimidate the courts into reaching for dubious procedural or substantive excuses not to find constitutional impediments to executive branch actions. Yet, if these legalistic gymnastics lack legitimacy, the constitutional crisis will not have been avoided, even if it is less theatrical. The role of the Court in maintaining the constitutional framework of checks and balances and serving as an independent interpreter of the Constitution—calling balls and strikes—still will have been ceded, along with the public’s trust.

• GSA to reduce tech services arm by 50%, eliminate non-statutory work

  In his remarks, Shedd pointed wholly to metric-based reasoning for shuttering the office, saying that 18F “was not and has not been fully cost coverable.” He stated that in fiscal 2024, the program was short approximately $18 million and in fiscal 2025, 18F lost $5 million due to a shortfall in recoverable dollars from partner agencies. “Despite the losses the team was incurring, 18F with their recent hourly prices were on the very high end of the technology consulting market,” Shedd said. He continued: “With a planned hourly price increase to get closer to break even, 18F would have been some of the most expensive technology consultants in the United States and cost partner agencies far more than they would spend by using external consultants.”

• 18F Transformed Government Technology and Why Its Elimination Matters

• Trump Admin Repurposes App Used by Migrants to Request Asylum to Track Them Down

• House Republican support grows for keeping clean energy tax breaks.

  The growing pushback against eliminating the IRA’s hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and other incentives — which have largely benefited GOP-controlled districts — will complicate efforts by House Republicans to slash federal outlays without shrinking Medicaid spending as they seek to offset the tax cuts in their budget bill.

• Opinion | This Is the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare - The New York Times

  On Saturday, immigration agents showed at the apartment building of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and told him his student visa had been revoked and that he was being detained. Khalil is married to an American, and his lawyer, speaking to the agents by phone, informed them that he had a green card, but they said that had been revoked as well. He was taken away, and as of this writing appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana. the fact that it was easy to see this ideological crackdown coming shouldn’t obscure how serious Khalil’s detention is. If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration. “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threats to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years,” said Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a direct attempt to punish speech because of the viewpoint it espouses.”

  • Didn't the ACLU give up on "Free Speech" during COVID because it wasn't convenient? They care again now? Or is it that "Kill all Jews" is the only speech they're willing to defend?

• Saving U.S. Climate and Environmental Data Before It Goes Away

• The Aeneid, a 2000-year-old poem, reads like a playbook for U.S. politics today

• Trump FCC Boss Harasses Google for Not Carrying Right Wing Religious Programming

• Mahmoud Khalil's treatment should not happen in a democracy

• USDA cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks

  • I assume this is the source of the "peanut flavored roasted soybeans" that no one ever ate

• Trump ends Fauci security detail, he'd feel no responsibility if harm befell him

• Trump administration slashes division in charge of 26,000 U.S. artworks

• Tuberculosis resurgent as Trump administration cuts funding for global treatment

• Kennedy Rattles Food Companies with Vow to Rid Food of Artificial Dyes

• USAID official tells remaining staffers: Shred and burn all your documents - POLITICO

  A senior official at USAID instructed the agency’s remaining staff to convene at the agency’s now-former headquarters in Washington on Tuesday for an “all day” group effort to destroy documents stored there, many of which contain sensitive information. The materials earmarked for destruction include contents of the agency’s “classified safes and personnel documents” at the Ronald Reagan Building, said an email sent by USAID’s acting executive director, Erica Carr, and obtained by POLITICO. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” the email said. Carr instructed staff to label the burn bags with the words “SECRET” and “USAID/B/IO/” (agency shorthand for “bureau or independent office”) in dark Sharpie. The email didn’t provide any reason for the document destruction.

• Trump's War on Education

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia University anti-Israel agitator detained by ICE for deportation, claims feds acted ‘unlawfully’ as he makes bid for release.

• Money laundering plays a key role in every part of the illegal drugs industry

• FTC's $25.5M scam refund treats victims to $34 each

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The F-35 'Kill Switch': Separating Myth from Reality

• How the United States could devastate China by quickly decoupling

• Why the U.S. Keeps Losing to China in the Battle over Critical Minerals

• Stricken Oil Tanker in North Sea Smolders With Hole in Side - Bloomberg

• Blocked From Reaching the U.S., Migrants Begin the Reverse Journey South - WSJ

  As President Trump’s migration policy begins to bite, growing numbers of people are heading back through Panama and Colombia. ‘What else can you do?’

  The shifting pattern can be seen in Panamanian government figures tracking migrants who pass through the 70-miles of jungle path of the Darién Gap, a remote swath separating Colombia from Panama, to get to the U.S. In 2023, a record 520,000 migrants forged through en route to the U.S., nearly 1,500 a day. Ahead of President Trump’s inauguration, 4,849 migrants crossed in December, an 80% decline from December 2023. In January, 72 people made the daily passage. Last month, just 14 a day trekked through, a 99% drop from the same month last year.

World

• NHS job cuts: Up to 7k posts to go as Wes Streeting takes charge

• Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

• Neom is reportedly turning into a financial disaster, except for McKinsey and Co

• Rodrigo Duterte: Philippines ex-leader on plane to the Hague after arrest

  A plane carrying the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has left Manila, hours after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity over his deadly "war on drugs". The 79-year-old was taken into police custody shortly after his arrival at the capital's international airport from Hong Kong on Tuesday morning. Current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr confirmed Duterte had left Philippine airspace, en route to The Hague in the Netherlands, where the ICC sits. Earlier, his daughter Sara - who said she would accompany him to the Hague - said he was being "forcibly" sent there. Duterte has offered no apologies for his brutal anti-drugs crackdown, which saw thousands of people killed when he was president of the South East Asian nation from 2016 to 2022, and mayor of Davao city before that. Upon his arrest on Tuesday, he questioned the basis for the warrant, asking: "What crime [have] I committed?" in a video posted online by his daughter Veronica Duterte. "If I committed a sin, prosecute me in Philippine courts, with Filipino judges, and I will allow myself to be jailed in my own nation," he said in a later video.

• As trade war simmers, Canadian province bans U.S.-made gaming equipment

• Ponzi and pyramid schemes dressed in startup clothes rampant in the UAE

• Will $100B Be Enough to Save Europe's Heavy Industry?

• The £8B plan to break BT's broadband grip that struggled to connect

• European rival to Starlink satellites tests stomach for cross-border champions

• Pakistan Separatists Hijack Train with 400 Onboard and Give Ultimatum

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine agrees to accept immediate, 30-day ceasefire -US-Ukraine statement

  Ukraine has agreed to accept a U.S. proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire and to take steps toward restoring a durable peace after Russia's invasion, according to a joint U.S.-Ukraine statement on Tuesday. The two sides, meeting in Saudi Arabia, also agreed to conclude as soon as possible a comprehensive agreement for developing Ukraine’s critical mineral resources, the statement said.

• Trump administration to resume military aid to Ukraine and intelligence sharing

China

• Why Argentina’s military is surveilling hundreds of Chinese fishing boats

• China Made a Spy Camera That Can See Faces from Space

Health / Medicine

• Many life-saving drugs fail lacking funding. The solution: desperate rich people

• Doctors didn't warn women of 'risky sex' drug urges

  Patients prescribed drugs for movement disorders - including restless leg syndrome (RLS) - say doctors did not warn them about serious side effects that led them to seek out risky sexual behaviour. Twenty women have told the BBC that the drugs - given to them for RLS, which causes an irresistible urge to move - ruined their lives. A report by drugs firm GSK - seen by the BBC - shows it learned in 2003 of a link between the medicines, known as dopamine agonist drugs, and what it described as "deviant" sexual behaviour. It cited a case of a man who had sexually assaulted a child while taking the drug for Parkinson's.

• Hantavirus: You need to know about the infection that killed Gene Hackman's wife

• Why Older People May Not Need to Watch Blood Sugar So Closely

• Beneficial genetic changes observed in regular blood donors

  • Bloodletting is good again?

• Ozempic's New Frontier: The War on Aging

= 60% of adults will be overweight or obese by 2050, study says

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• A Clearer Picture of Covid's Lasting Effects on the Body

• 5 years later, long Covid still a medical mystery: What scientists have learned

• One Year Later-"It Has Been Determined" that Retrospective Infected Dairy Herd Serology can be Disclosed

  Early outbreaks with dramatic clinical signs of mastitis with huge viral loads in affected quarters in up to 20% of lactating cattle misled investigators into postulating an exclusive udder-based milk-based type of disease transfer as the primary mode of infection for H5N1 in lactating dairy cattle. The USDA-dairy industry establishment quickly latched onto this as the consensus theory for an exclusive H5N1 2.3.4.4b B3.13 spillover into dairy cattle, which could be controlled with affected lactating cow movement controls and increased biosecurity practices, leading to eventual exhaustion and elimination of the infection. This disease transmission theory conveniently avoided involvement of other classes of cattle in the outbreak, simplifying disease containment challenges from a regulatory and management standpoint. As a result, federal-state-industry collaborators rapidly developed an animal movement and voluntary clinical illness surveillance program based on this flawed milk-udder transmission-based influenza virus spread model in dairy cattle. Since the beginning of the H5N1 dairy outbreak, many of us called for systematic serological surveys in infected, recovering, and neighboring dairy and beef herds to better understand the epidemiology within and between infected and susceptible herds. While research-focused serological assay work has been done outside of NAHLN-NVSL official testing under the Federal Order, research testing results can only be reported with the approval of the appropriate state animal health official(s) where work is originated. The practical effect is that USDA-APHIS has expected that serological testing will not be reported in non-lactating dairy cattle for any purpose other than case diagnostics, under the review of NVSL without prior approval, and state animal health officials have concurred with that expectation.

  • "the Science is Settled" (TM)

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists Find a Hidden Climate Tracker in Starlink's Signals

  By using the Doppler effect, scientists have found a way to analyze signals from Starlink and similar networks, revealing insights into climate, sea levels, and weather patterns. Precision is still a challenge, but the potential for global observation is enormous.

• Greenhouse gases reduce the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit

  • Study: Climate change will reduce the number of satellites that can safely orbit

  • this will not impede the panic mongering about "Kessler syndrome" when they want to run "the sky is falling" stories.

• Scientists genetically modify Victorian lizard to fight climate change

• Monterey Lithium-Ion Battery Fire: Reports of Illness and Contaminated Soil

• First Ammonia-Fueled Ship Hits a Snag

• 'Whale Conveyor Belt' Moves Tons of Nutrients Across the Ocean–Through Urine

• Permian mass extinction linked to 10°C global temperature rise

• California Pension Fund Labels Chevron and Saudi Aramco as Climate Investments

• Lawmaker seeks ban of toxic fuel at Portland racetrack after Guardian story

• Octopuses Use Venom for Safe Sex, Biologists Reveal

  • Male octopus poisons its mate to avoid becoming post-sex snack.

• Only seven countries worldwide meet WHO dirty air guidelines, study shows

  • Only seven countries met WHO air quality standards in 2024, data shows

• Equal distribution of wealth is bad for the climate, expert argues

• Extreme Heat Linked to Accelerated Aging in Older Adults, Study Finds