2025-03-14

lunar eclipse, feminist horseshoe, Meta book promo, parental roblox, cheap animation can be good, eggs and jobs, Massie vs. Trump, democrat disarray, Greenland elections, Putin rejects, truffle shuffle

Cool

• Where will the 'Blood Worm Moon' total lunar eclipse be visible tonight?

etc

• Humans Have Been Perfecting Avocados for 7,500 Years

Horseshit

• Cheating scandal shocks ski jumping, topples Olympic champions

• The End of Children – The Population Implosion

• Listen to leaked audio of DEI activist SHARING air traffic controller exam answers with minority candidates | Daily Mail Online

  Exactly how many applicants were able to capitalize on Snow's brazen offer to secure coveted controller jobs responsible for the safety of millions of fliers remains a mystery. But one former NBCFAE member, Matthew Douglas, told DailyMail.com: 'I know several people who cheated and I know several people who are controlling planes as we speak.'

celebrity gossip

• Eric Schmidt Joins Relativity Space, a Rocket Startup, as CEO

Obit

• Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

• Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva dead at 77

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Testing Begins for Community Notes on Facebook, Instagram and Threads

• Foreign bloggers help China spread propaganda, analysis finds

Musk

• JPMorgan's prediction: Tesla will report worst quarterly deliveries in 3 years

• As Elon Musk makes thousands of workers jobless, pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

• Testimony Reveals Doors Would Not Open on Cybertruck That Caught Fire

  • College Kids Burned to Death Inside a Cybertruck Because the Doors Wouldn't Open

• Kia: Didn't approve an ad saying drivers bought its EV 'after Elon went crazy'

• Elon Musk targeted me over Tesla protests. That proves our movement is working

• Tesla products now excluded from B.C. Hydro rebates in response to U.S. tariffs

  • Tesla Rebates Axed in Canadian Province as Trade War Widens

Electric / Self Driving cars

• You can film your BYD on the move with this on-vehicle drone launcher from DJI

• Toyota Confirms an Electric Truck Is Coming

• Mercedes Unveils Entry-Level Electric Sedan in Swipe at Tesla

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Review of Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power by L. Olufemi

  The most striking feature of the book before us is that it is difficult to find a way to approach it. A sociological study and a political pamphlet still have something in common: they have a goal. The goal is to convince the reader. The methods of convincing can be quite different, involve data and logic and authority. But in any case, something is needed. As you start reading Feminism Interrupted you are bound to find that this something is hidden very well. Indeed, as I just counted, one of the first sections Who’s the boss has as many claims as it has sentences (some claims are in the form of rhetorical questions). There, as you see, was no space left for any form of supporting argumentation. Because it is not immediately obvious how to analyse a text with such a (non-)structure, let me start the same way as Ms. Olufemi starts in Introduction and just read along, jotting down notes and impressions, gradually finding our way through the book, forming a conception of the whole.

  Ms. Olufemi’s feelings toward organised religion are clearly ambiguous. On one hand, she presumably understands that organised religion is the core institution of patriarchy that maintains and perpetuates values and structures that she finds so odious. On the other hand, she obviously cannot stop expressing her admiration of the austere faith of Mohammed, comparing it favourably with the decadent secular societies of the West.. Ms. Olufemi cannot decide whether she wants to abolish the state or expand it tremendously. Often in the course of the same period she registers her conviction that the state is evil and should be abolished, only to proceed to point out how unjust it is that the state does not sufficiently help the dispossessed and to request enlargement of welfare. As was noted on many occasions, many of Ms. Olufemi’s positions echo ones of far-right conspirologists. Her distrust of science and NGOs makes one reconsider the “horseshoe theory” favourably.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Umass is rescinding all grad positions for this year

• Teenagers Say Girls Are Equal to Boys in School, or Are Ahead

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Meta goes to arbitrator to prevent whistleblower from promoting tell-all book

  • Meta's Response to Explosive Tell-All Is Ripped from a Familiar PR Playbook

  • Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee's Scathing Memoir

  • Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook

  • Meta is trying to block ex-employee's book alleging misconduct and harassment

  • Meta stops ex-director from promoting critical memoir

  • Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee

• "Adopting the rule urged would turn the entire music industry on its ear"

• ICANN moves to retire Soviet-era .SU country domain name

• ABC Shuts Down FiveThirtyEight, and Pulls the Plug on Its Website

• Keep kids off Roblox if you're worried, its CEO tells parents

  • Parents should stop children gaming on Roblox if they are worried, says CEO

• Mozilla pleads with Uncle Sam to not turn off that sweet Google search money

• Mozilla Likely Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data with Advertisers Since 2017

• Strava Bans User for Running in North Korea

• Meta is trying to offload kids safety onto app stores with new bills says Google

• Chromecast outage drags on and a fix could be weeks away

• Google is bringing every Android game to Windows in big gaming update

• The Auteur, The Cat, and The Flood of GPUs - by Ned Twigg

  When he turned 24, Zilbalodis released a feature-length movie called “Away”, which is currently streaming free on Amazon Prime. He wrote and animated the entire thing himself, even wrote the music. Having shown that he could make at least some kind of movie literally by himself (6.7 out of 10 on IMDB with 1,800 voters), he was able to secure a small amount of funding to expand his old “Aqua” short into the feature length movie that just beat Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks. This was the first time Zilbalodis had ever worked with anybody else in a professional setting! Four million dollars is ~50x too little to make a feature-length animation, but also 100x too much to give to a never-had-a-job 24 year-old! How did he get it? In his own words, “maybe they thought if there’s a big catastrophe and we run out of budget, I might still finish the film myself in some way.” There was no catastrophe, but it wasn’t a one-off miracle either. Zilbalodis is going to be able to do this over and over, and other people are too. The first thing to know is that his first feature-length movie, Away, was rendered in realtime! He basically just screencapped the preview window in Maya! And it’s beautiful!

• Nvidia shows misleading comparison between 50-series and 40-series GPU launch

• The Super Nintendo is somehow getting faster with age

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Hexagon spiral coordinates

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic CEO says spies are after $100M AI secrets in a 'few lines of code'

• OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

• OpenAI Asks White House for Relief from State AI Rules

  • OpenAI urges Trump administration to remove guardrails for the industry

• Gemini gets personal, with tailored help from your Google Apps

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA, SpaceX delay flight that was to retrieve stuck astronauts

  • NASA, SpaceX delay flight that was to retrieve stuck astronauts

Crypto con games

• Sam Bankman-Fried is serving 25 years; how is he conducting a media blitz?

• Trump Family Has Held Deal Talks with Binance Following Exchange's Guilty Plea

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Citigroup plans to slash IT contractors, hire staff to improve controls

• The Curious Surge of Productivity in U.S. Restaurants

• Chicken Genetics Barons Created the Egg Crisis

• Soaring egg prices are affecting New York's most famous sandwich

• Palantir's Alex Karp vaults to near top of best-paid US tech executives

• 1.1M Homeowners with Negative Equity in Q4 2024

• Inside Intel, CEO Pat Gelsinger fumbled the revival of an American icon

• Older Americans Taking Blue-Collar Jobs, White-Collar Hiring Slowdown

• On Tech Layoffs

  Jobs aren’t disappearing. Employment is. Employment is a steady paycheck, a stable position, a comfortable spot on a large team. But comfort isn’t always productive. At companies like Google, they earn almost all their money from just a few products: Search, Ads, Maps, Android, Google Suite, and increasingly YouTube. Yet they employed tens of thousands of people who didn’t significantly move the needle. AI isn’t reducing the amount of work—it’s just exposing what really matters and what’s excess.

• Why "labour shortages" don't exist

• Deutsche Bank's highest-paid employee in line to earn twice as much as chief

• Young Professionals Are Increasingly Turning to Boring Small-Business Niches

• A European Starlink rival's shares skyrocketed 390% in a week – here's why

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FTC to pursue Amazon Prime case after delay request due to constraints

  • FTC can't afford to fight Amazon's allegedly deceptive sign-ups after DOGE cuts

• Deleted messages, disappearing chats, and a firestorm of L.A. controversy | KTLA

• North Dakota Legislature close to asking SCOTUS to undo gay marriage ruling

• Judge Orders Federal Workers Reinstated

  • Judge orders Trump administration to reinstate most fired probationary staff

• Government shutdown looms as DOGE cuts spending

• EPA Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History

Trump

• Massie Donations Pour In - Jewish Group Vows To Help Trump Oust Him | ZeroHedge

  President Trump's social-media tirade against hard-line deficit-hawk Thomas Massie has had a big effect -- but not exactly the one Trump wanted. Since Trump's late-night tantrum in which he called for the Republican congressman to be ousted via a primary challenge, the Kentucky congressman has raked in more than $200,000 in donations. That huge and growing windfall comes as the Republican Jewish Coalition promised to help make Trump's dream of a Congress without Massie come true. Massie provoked Trump's wrath on Sunday, when he vowed to vote against a continuing resolution (CR) that would fund the government through Sept 30 -- but without spending cuts. "Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DOGE has found?" wrote Massie on X. "We were told the CR in December would get us to March when we would fight. Here we are in March, punting again!" Eventually, the CR passed 217-213; thanks to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, it's currently dead in the Senate. However, the follow-on effects of Trump's political attack on Massie have continued -- mostly in ways that add up to a big net-positive for Massie.

  • Rep. Thomas Massie reveals campaign cash haul since Trump targeted him

• Trump threatens 200% wine tariff if EU does not remove whiskey tariff

Democrats

• The "Ridiculous Political Puppet Show" Part 2 | ZeroHedge

  X user Leftism identified 49 Democratic Congress members who posted nearly identical tweets in the last 12-plus hours about the looming shutdown.

  House Democrats stand united for a four-week funding extension that stops harmful cuts, keeps government open to serve the people, and allows Congress to reach a bipartisan funding agreement. I'm ready to vote tomorrow or Friday to pass a four-week extension.

• Hey Democrats, wake the f—k up

  The sky is falling. The United States federal government is being illegally dissolved before your very eyes. The workers you rely on to ensure that you don’t eat ground beef tainted with paint chips are being laid off en masse. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided your office last week and asked for your papers, even though you were born in Fremont. A fire tornado is due to touch down in your backyard next Tuesday. Your parents are terrified to board an airplane. Your gay nephew is terrified to go to school. Your 401(k) is in the toilet. MEASLES. Measles have returned and want to eat your baby. Every day you look at the news, and you’re told that the president would like to bring back cockfighting. You and I need reassurance. You and I need to know that someone out there is trying to put an end to all this madness. Instead, we get this. I hate you, Democrats. I hate you so, so much. Yes, I hate Trump and Elon and all of the s—t-for-brains voters out there who were like DURRR THESE FELLAS ARE JUST WHAT WE NEED TO CLEAN UP WASHINGTON DURRR. But I reserve a special place in my black heart for you, Democrats. You are the representational equivalent of being put on hold by customer service. All you do is let me down. It’s like being a Browns fan if every time the Browns lost, a Tesla ran over my dog. You guys make voting feel pointless.

  Speaking of head injuries … John Fetterman! I’m a fellow brain injury survivor alongside John. So when this man suffered a stroke during his Senate race against Dr. Oz, I was like, “Do NOT discriminate against this man just because he had a brain injury.” Little did I know that Fetterman’s blood clot would turn him into the second coming of Joe Manchin. I just got rid of Joe Manchin, and now I have to deal with a taller, weirder one? These are just some of the people I was foolishly hoping would put a stop to the meme-ocracy that’s currently eating the world. Democrats keep responding to our cries for help with, “Get out and vote!” Who am I even voting for? Is it you? Is it some asshole company on your donor roll? Is it shrink-wrapped skull James Carville, whose electoral acumen has aged even worse than he has? I’ve gotten more results voting on a new flavor of Lay’s potato chip.

Left Angst

• DOGE Makes Its Latest Errors Harder to Find

• Republicans Quietly Ceed Power to Cancel Trump's Tariffs, Avoiding Tough Votes

• The FAA's Troubles Are More Serious Than You Know

• The US wants its stock market to crash

  US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent believes that under the Biden administration, economic policies favoured the top 10% of Americans or those wealthy enough to fuel spending and drive consumption. But the bottom 50% haven’t gained much. So while everything might look great on paper, in reality, half of America could still be struggling. This imbalance paints a misleading picture, and the Trump administration wants to flip that script. And their way of doing it? Create as much economic chaos as possible.

• US tech firms feel pinch from China tariffs

• What a Mar-a-Lago accord could look like

  the Aberdeen investment group recently told clients: “There has been speculation about a new Plaza Accord — dubbed the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ — to depreciate the US dollar.” Indeed, some traders expect it this year. Most mainstream observers might consider this utterly mad — or, as Mark Sobel, a former top US Treasury official, says, a touch more diplomatically, “far-fetched and implausible”. No wonder. Viewed through the prism of recent mainstream economic thinking, there are huge headwinds. First, joint currency interventions are at odds with free market ideas and in recent years as unfashionable as flares. Second, history suggests that intervention works best with trusted allies. That was on display in the Plaza Accord. But French leaders are already indicating their resistance at doing Washington’s financial bidding. China could be far more truculent.

• Chinese nationals banned from US student visas under new House GOP proposal

• Federal student loan site down, a day after layoffs gutted Education Department

• Both Left and Right Are Wrong About Mahmoud Khalil

  • US relies on rare foreign policy provision to try to deport Mahmoud Khalil

  • Trump is bringing back McCarthyism to go after Mahmoud Khalil | The Verge

  “The secretary of state has the right to revoke a green card or visa for individuals who are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. Khalil, she claimed, had “organized group protests” that disrupted classes and harassed Jewish American students. On top of that, she said, he had “distributed pro-Hamas propaganda: flyers with the logo of Hamas.” Contrary to Leavitt’s statement, Rubio can’t just snap his fingers and order someone’s deportation. But the provision of the law she cited, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), is very real. It’s an obscure McCarthy-era statute passed at the height of Cold War paranoia — meant to help root out “subversives” from every area of public life.

• Antifascism is now controversial: Director Joe Wright on his Mussolini series

• Doge's 'villain' fantasy is wrong about public service

• Inside CISA as It Reels from Trump's Purge

• Musk, Trump, and Your Boss Learned to Hate Democracy

• U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer deported to Mexico

• NIH cuts funding for vaccine hesitancy research

• They flew into hurricanes for NOAA, until they got caught up in DOGE firings

• The United States of Elon Musk Inc

• You Need Regulators to Deregulate

• Trump faces fight over 'biggest' environmental deregulatory action in US history

• Top IRS Lawyer Set to Be Demoted Amid Taxpayer Data-Sharing Clash

• Elon Musk Made Secret Visit to NSA

  • Musk makes secret visit to NSA after saying agency needs overhaul

• Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash into Golf Courses

• Citibank got caught in a $20B climate fight

• Trump's Big Bet: Americans Will Tolerate Downturn to Restore Manufacturing

• Johns Hopkins to Cut More Than 2k Workers Funded by Federal Aid

• Trump's EPA insists climate change isn't a danger

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• More than 1600 sex assault cases vs. Uber merged in far-reaching court ruling

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• White House has asked U.S. military to develop options for the Panama Canal

• Migrant crossings through Panama’s Darien Gap drop 99% after Trump takes office.

• What is space war-fighting? The Space Force's top general has some thoughts

World

• Pakistan Train hijack ends in bloodshed and slaughter as 21 hostages are killed

• AI should replace some work of civil servants, Starmer to announce

• Fehmarnbelt tunnel will carry two rail lines and a highway under the Baltic Sea

• A top Romanian court upholds the ban on far-right Georgescu's presidential bid

• Australia moves to arm troops with anti-ship missiles as China threat looms

• Code Name Caesar: The Man Who Photographed Assad's Torture Victims

• 6,000 Syrians work as doctors in Germany. Some weigh whether to stay or go. - The Washington Post

  Germany opened its doors a decade ago to nearly 1 million Syrians, taking in more than any other country in Europe. Today, some 6,000 Syrian doctors make up the single largest group of foreign-born physicians, filling vital gaps in care at hospitals and clinics from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. That is especially true in rural areas, where attracting doctors can be hard. But even in big cities, Syrian doctors now make up the majority of attending physicians at some medical practices. “Whole areas in the health sector would fall away if all the Syrians who work here now were to leave our country,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said.

• Greenland's opposition wins election dominated by independence and Trump

  The Democratic party, which favours a gradual approach to independence from Denmark - achieved around 30% of the vote, near-complete results show. Greenland - the world's biggest island, between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans - has been controlled by Denmark, nearly 3,000km (1,860 miles) away, for about 300 years. Greenland governs its own domestic affairs, but decisions on foreign and defence policy are made in Copenhagen. Five of the six main parties in the election favour independence from Copenhagen, but disagree over the pace with which to reach it.

• Why Europe is going 'car free'

• Estonia's Startups See Opportunity in Europe's Rush to Rearm

• Germany's once-mighty car industry is in crisis. What will it take to fix it?

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia says it has recaptured key Kursk region town

• US arms flow to Ukraine again as the Kremlin mulls a ceasefire proposal

• Putin agrees in principle with proposal for Ukraine ceasefire

  “The idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it,” Putin told a news conference in Moscow. “But there are issues that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to talk about it with our American colleagues and partners and, perhaps, have a call with President Trump and discuss it with him.”

  • Putin rejects Trump-proposed cease-fire ahead of Witkoff meeting in Moscow

  • Putin Rejects Immediate Cease-Fire in Ukraine

  • Putin aide rejects Trump's Ukraine ceasefire plan : NPR

  • Putin backs ceasefire idea for Ukraine in principle, suggests it needs reworking

China

• Taiwan Stock Market Hit by Largest Foreign Investor Sell-Off in History

Health / Medicine

• They Wanted a Quick Fix for Hair Loss. Instead, These Young Men Got Sick

• Large study shows drinking alcohol is good for your cholesterol levels

• Married men three times more likely to be obese than unmarried men, says study

• A brain-eating amoeba preyed on a 6-year-old. That was just the beginning

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Post-Covid inflammatory shock in children traced to Epstein-Barr virus

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• UK GHG emissions fall 3.6% in 2024 as coal use drops to lowest since 1666

• Replacing butter with plant-based oils cuts premature death risk by 17 percent

• Plastic pollution leaves seabirds with brain damage similar to Alzheimer's

• Powerhouse storm moves into US, prompting evacuations in California

• The end of capitalism – or the end of civilisation? The choice could be that stark

  the choice between capitalism and civilisation really does seem to be either/or – and the end will probably come a lot sooner that we thought. Anyone who isn’t alarmed about the rapid and well-documented decline in the global environment, upon which we and our atypically comfortable lifestyles depend, really hasn’t been paying attention. You may not enjoy reading a book like this, but you really should read it – if only for your children’s sake.

• $800 a Pound: The Rush Is on for Oregon Truffles

• Frack to the future? Geothermal energy pitched as datacenter savior

• Why it makes sense for wealthier nations to help others decarbonize

• Bill Gates' Climate Group Lays Off US and Europe Policy Teams