2025-03-17
Horseshit
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Bonobos and chimps offer clues to how our ancestors had sex for social purposes
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Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire
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Origami measuring spoon incites fury after 9 years of Kickstarter delay hell
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Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology
both East Asians and the Inuit exhibit notably high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion and subdomain unassertiveness, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/endurance. The same traits have been identified by decades of research in polar psychology (i.e., psychological research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel living and working in the Arctic and Antarctic) as being adaptive for, or byproducts of, life in polar environments. I interpret this as indirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits in modern East Asian and Inuit populations primarily represent adaptations to arctic climates, specifically for the adaptive challenges of highly interdependent survival in an extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and isolated environment, with frequent prolonged close-quarters group confinement, and exacerbated consequences for social devaluation/exclusion/expulsion.
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Police officer steps in when alligator blocks pizza delivery in Florida - UPI.com
Florida police officer ended up delivering a pizza to a resident's back door after the delivery driver arrived to find an 8-foot alligator in the driveway.
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Microsoft quantum breakthrough labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'
Obit
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Bob Flexner, Crusader for Truth, 1940-2024
When I traded in daily newspaper journalism for woodworking journalism, it was a shock. Ethics that had been burned into my fingers at journalism school were easily discarded (or mocked) by the magazine editors around me. Everyone around me accepted gifts and free tools from manufacturers. It was just part of the job: Free stuff landed in the mailroom every day. And so you wrote nice words about the free things. Not Bob.
Last week, I learned that Bob had died in December (how did we not find out sooner?). The woodworking world has lost a giant. If you don’t own his book “Understanding Wood Finishing,” this is a good time to remedy that.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Amid baton incident, I.C. Norcom star gets support
The I.C. Norcom student and track star who faces an assault and battery charge after her baton struck and injured another runner during a track race last week reiterated Thursday that the incident did not happen on purpose and thanked people for supporting her and believing in her. “Thank you all for supporting me,” said I.C. Norcom track star Alaila Everett through tears during a community meeting and rally to support her. “There’s nobody else who wanted to hear my story except for people that know me and people that know I would never do anything like that. I would never harm anybody. I’m not a fighter. I’m not confrontational. I wouldn’t even do that on purpose.”
Everett faces the misdemeanor charge after her baton struck Brookville High School junior Kaelen Tucker during the 4×200 meter relay at the Virginia High School League’s Class 3 indoor track state championships. Tucker has said she suffered a concussion and a possible skull fracture as a result of the incident, and the Everett family has been served with court papers as the Tuckers seek a protective order, even as they express a desire to have Everett apologize. Everett has maintained that the incident was an accident, and had attempted to reach out to apologize to Tucker on social media, but was blocked.
- The video looks like it was no accident.
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Gnome betrayed the entire FOSS movement by using Adobe software
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Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously | Scientific American
At the broad level, we have traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. But when you look at the specific facets of each of these broad factors, you realize that there are some traits that males score higher on (on average), and some traits that females score higher on (on average), so the differences cancel each other out. This canceling out gives the appearance that sex differences in personality don't exist when in reality they very much do exist
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Scientists Take on Scholarly Journals With Walkouts, Scathing Letters and Delistings - WSJ
In December, nearly every member of the editorial board of the pre-eminent Journal of Human Evolution walked out on Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific papers, because of changes the staff said jeopardized the quality of the 53-year-old publication. A couple of months earlier, in October, nearly two dozen scientists excoriated Scientific Reports, the largest individual journal, in an open letter that accused its publisher, Springer Nature, of failing to “protect the scientific literature from fraudulent and low quality” research. And in the past two years, Web of Science, an influential index of scholarly literature, delisted at least four high-volume journals for not meeting quality standards and placed four more on hold while it investigates their work. These are some of the latest signs of scientists’ mounting concern over the quality of research. Altogether, editors at nearly 40 journals have quit in the past decade over differences with their publishers, according to the website Retraction Watch.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging the agency to establish a clear, industry-wide transition plan for the full deployment of Next Gen TV (ATSC 3.0).
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How the Disney remake of Snow White became 2025's most divisive film
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Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by | Hacker News
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The Russo Brothers Upended Hollywood Once. Now They Aim to Do It Again
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Apple's iPhone 17 'Air' Is a Step Toward a Slimmer, Port-Free Era
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Animation breakthrough makes it possible to better illustrate Black hair
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)
The 1982 DEC Professional 350 had the same F-11 ("Fonz") CPU as the bigger PDP-11/23, though that's where the similarity ends, as it implemented a new bus with completely different option cards and an incompatible interrupt system making it all but impossible to run unmodified PDP-11 programs. It had really nice graphics for 1982, but instead of the usual choices its intended system software was the laughably named Professional Operating System, or P/OS — execrated for its sluggish menus and limited feature set, of which people were only too quick to make the obvious joke. You could get CPU option cards like the DECmate II's to also make it into a weak PC or a weak CP/M machine, but they ran through P/OS too, and they weren't cheap. At the same time, however, in order to be the most inexpensive PDP-11 system ever, the low-binned DEC Professional 325 didn't even have a hard disk.
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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
there’s a 2,560 KB partition of type Apple_Recovery almost at the end of the drive, just after the main partition named “Hard Disk”. This was promising at first glance, but the partition was empty! Further testing revealed that the custom Performa-specific version of Apple HD SC Setup (7.2.2P6) bundled on the CD was responsible for creating it, but didn’t actually populate it with any data. Apple Backup also didn’t put anything onto the partition, despite what the book said. I even looked through my past disassemblies of the Apple Backup and Apple Restore code and confirmed that there was nothing related to creating a recovery partition. The conclusion at the time was that someone needed to get ahold of a Performa 550 that still had its original hard drive and had never been reformatted. That’s where this story sat for 3 years. A few months ago, I remembered this whole situation and decided that I really wanted to try to find this partition. After all, the clock had always been ticking. The longer we waited, the fewer and fewer original Performa 550s would be out there in the wild. Not to mention that hard drives go bad and people throw them out without knowing that it’s usually possible to recover data from drives of this era.
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Super Flower’s beastly 2800W power supply lands at $899
This item requires a specially designated medical grade power cord, therefore, please refer to the following term: Please purchase the PSU from Super Flower official seller store (Medical grade power cord included).
- And requires a special circuit to plug that cord into. Reminds me of my big SPARCs that fed from 230v/30A.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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U.S. Justice Department Rejects Russell Moore’s Slanderous SBC “Criminal Conspiracy” Claim
Earlier today, Baptist Press reported that the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and its entities is now closed—with no sexual abuse-related charges filed. As Denny Burk put it, “here’s bottom line on the SBC abuse ‘crisis.’ There wasn’t one. A federal investigation closed after making one arrest—not for abuse but for making false statements under oath. An independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions found no systemic problem with abuse at the SBC Executive Committee. We have spent about 14 million dollars in legal fees as a result of investigations that uncovered no systemic problems with abuse.”
Trump
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Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua
A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked an effort by President Donald Trump to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang he has accused of “unlawfully infiltrating” the country. He also ordered any deportation flights carrying those subject to the presidential proclamation to return to the United States. Trump on Saturday invoked the rarely used wartime authority, accusing Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of “infiltrating” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime, including its “military and law enforcement apparatus”; perpetuating “irregular warfare” within the United States and using drug trafficking as a weapon against American citizens. Hours before the White House published Trump’s proclamation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit accusing the White House of preparing to imminently deport five Venezuelan men under the Alien Enemies Act.
The ACLU asked Boasberg to block the use of the law, though Trump has yet to invoke it. Boasberg, of course, complied, granting a restraining order Saturday morning that prevents the administration from removing the five Venezuelan nationals for two weeks so the judge can hold a hearing on their challenge.
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Trump’s DOJ Speech: A Reckoning for the Deep State and a Media Meltdown › American Greatness
In fact, the FBI was part of the biggest political scandal in the history of the United States: the effort by highly placed—exactly how highly placed we still do not know—members of one administration to mobilize the intelligence services and police power of the state to spy upon and destroy first the candidacy and then, when that didn’t work, the administration of a political rival. Reporters like Alan Feuer, and his counterparts elsewhere in the wards of anti-Trump hysteria don’t like it when Trump calls bad people “bad people,” but that is just too bad. Feuer says that the “sole offense” of those Trump singled out was trying to hold Trump accountable. In fact, Trump’s real tort was having had the temerity to be elected in the first place. It was that outrage that provided the only predicate for the weaponization of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the intelligence agencies.
Democrats
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Hunter Biden fled last week to South Africa for a luxury vacation — with round-the-clock Secret Service protection — avoiding a grueling deposition scheduled for this week in a California lawsuit. California District Court Judge Herman Vera granted Hunter’s motion to dismiss the case Thursday after the former first son claimed he was too broke to continue suing former Trump staffer Garrett Ziegler and his nonprofit Marco Polo. But photographs show Hunter was already in Cape Town the day the case was dismissed, staying in a $500-a-night beachfront villa described on its website as an “ultra-luxurious designer home with spectacular 180 degrees unobstructed views of the sea.” Ziegler’s lawyers alleged to the court last week that Hunter had fled to South Africa to potentially “avoid his deposition in this case,” which was set for this week, after originally being planned for February. “He was in South Africa before the judge even decided the case,” Ziegler said Friday. “That means he is assuming his daddy’s appointee is gonna rubber stamp what he wants.”
Left Angst
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Here’s how many billions Elon Musk’s companies are making from U.S. taxpayers
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Medicaid cuts could devastate elderly in Florida nursing homes
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Starlink seems to be getting preferential treatment by the Trump administration
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Young scientists' career pathways vanish as schools adapt to federal funds cuts
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Trump admin deports migrants even as judge orders removals stopped
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Nervous international tourists scrap their U.S. travel plans
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Trump Calls to Jail Opponents, Says Negative Press Coverage Should Be 'Illegal'
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
China
Health / Medicine
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Generation Xanax: The Dark Side of America’s Wonder Drug - WSJ
Over the past six decades, hundreds of millions of people have taken Xanax (the brand name for alprazolam) or one of its cousins in the benzodiazepine family—Klonopin (clonazepam); Ativan (lorazepam); and Valium (diazepam)—to lull them to sleep or deliver instant calm in an age of abiding anxiety. Psychiatrists and primary-care doctors regularly prescribe the drugs for everything from mild anxiety to insomnia, making benzodiazepines some of the most commonly prescribed psychiatric medications in America. The pills’ omnipresence has left a mark on pop culture, turning up in Lil Wayne songs and HBO’s “The White Lotus” as bearers of chemical tranquility. But as concerns increase about potential adverse effects of these drugs, some patients who try to quit are suffering what amounts to a hangover they can’t escape.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Opinion | We Were Badly Misled About Covid - The New York Times
in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization. So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax. Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right? Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.
I loved my old life and I’d spent more than 3 decades building it and it was taken from me because I dared say “open the public schools.” Yes, it was taken from me by a bunch of psychotic covid alarmists and authoritarian censors. Which was almost everyone. I’ll never forgive them. I don’t care what they say about letting go of anger and how it poisons you to hold it. Those who targeted and cancelled dissenters deserve for our rage to be trained on them. They deserve it and I hold it in a place, I make room for it to exist, while building joy around it with my family, my new city, my new start up, my new friends. But it’s there, make no mistake.
As philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke famously said in 1795: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” All those who did nothing are also responsible for the global human rights violations of the covid era. And of course the covid enthusiasts who acted as snitches, and joyfully targeted friends and neighbors for punishment deserve our ire. Beyond that you have those directly responsible, the media which utterly failed in their duty as the 4th estate resorting instead to publishing Big Pharma and government issues talking points as “news”; the medical community, with few exceptions; the academics; the teachers; I could go on. The vaccine (and of course mandates — which people lost jobs over) have disappeared from public consciousness. I mean does anyone actually get that thing anymore? We are still reminded of masks, as any good leftist protesting about anything — from Teslas and DOGE to "freeing Palestine" to protesting in favor of kids taking mutilating, life-altering hormones to “become” the opposite sex — dons one, still. It is the uniform of "good lefties" or what I would call the "unhinged." Which it always was really.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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The Wasp That Lays Eggs Inside Caterpillars and Turns Them into Slaves
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A river died overnight in Zambia after an acidic waste spill at a Chinese mine
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Animal poo can be used to save endangered species from extinction
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Earth’s orbit is filling up with junk. Greenhouse gases are making the problem worse.