2025-04-03

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• After Crash FAA Change Requires All Aircraft at Reagan to Broadcast Positions

Horseshit

• Has Wales found the solution to Autocracy?

  In stark contrast, Wales is implementing a legal solution so simple it’s almost shocking no one thought of it sooner:

  “Seven days to clarify, correct or retract a statement of fact if challenged. Or choose to defend it in court.”

  That’s it. No censorship. Just a legal obligation for politicians to correct the record—or stand by it, under legal scrutiny. This mechanism, currently moving through the legislative process in Wales, does something vital: it reintroduces consequence into political speech. Not for opinions, but for facts. The difference is crucial. Politicians remain free to argue, spin, and debate. But if they claim a hospital has closed, a crime rate has surged, or a rival is guilty of fraud, they must be prepared to prove it—or retract it.

  • "What is Truth?"

Obit

• Val Kilmer: Top Gun, Batman and The Doors actor dies aged 65

  Kilmer died of pneumonia on Tuesday in Los Angeles, his daughter Mercedes told US media.

  • Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and The Doors, dies aged 65

  • Val Kilmer has passed away

  • RIP Val Kilmer: Celebrating cult classic Real Genius is now a moral imperative

• Dave Täht Has Died

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

  Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences. Foreign actors do the same, microtargeting divisive content to fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines. Outlawing advertising would help protect and reinvigorate our minds and democracy. Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs. Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.

  When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state, and advertising is propaganda for the private. Same thing.

• Advertising Makes You Unhappy – By Design | naked capitalism

Musk

• The Proud Boys and Militias Come to Tesla's Defense

• The flaws in Musk's Mars mission

• "Evil People": Organized 'Bankrupt Tesla' Group Tied To Formerly USAID-Funded Disinfo Queen | ZeroHedge

• Elon Musk goes full propaganda mode to distract from Tesla's delivery numbers

• Tesla suffers worst quarter since 2022 as deliveries tumble

• Tesla (TSLA) announces 336,681 deliveries, far worse than expected

• Tesla's Global Vehicle Deliveries Sank 13% in First Quarter

Electric / Self Driving cars

• How You Get a Chinese EV into the United States

• What Tesla's image problem means for the transition to EVs

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Discord Is Trying to Burrow Deeper into the Fabric of Gaming

• New Windows 11 trick lets you bypass Microsoft Account requirement

• Mozilla is looking to challenge Gmail with "Thundermail"

  • Firefox maker Mozilla prepares Gmail-like Thundermail

  • Mozilla launching "Thundermail" email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365

• VMware says Siemens pirated "thousands" of copies of its software

• Crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects

  • Wikipedia is struggling with voracious AI bot crawlers

• Nintendo to unveil Switch 2 details as release date, price to be announced

  • Nintendo Switch 2

  • Switch 2 preorder process requires 50 hours of gameplay on the original console

  • Nintendo Switch 2 Launches June 5 at $449.99

  • The Nintendo Switch 2 arrives on June 5th for $449.99

• Apple Announces 'Find My' Network Availability in South Korea

• US labour watchdog halts Apple cases after US picks group's lawyer for top job

• OnlyFans hit with lawsuit from men claiming fake chats

• Oracle faces Texas-sized lawsuit over alleged cloud snafu and radio silence

• HP printers try to send data back to HP about your devices and what you print

• Apple Hit with $5B Class Action Lawsuit over EBooks Availability

• Scandal-hit creative writing website NaNoWriMo to close after 20 years

  • NaNoWriMo, the Nonprofit Organization, Is Shutting Down

• Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S.

  • Amazon Submits Bid for TikTok with US Sale Deadline Nearing

• 23andMe is potentially selling personal survey data, etc., beyond genetic data

• Open-source tool designed to throttle performance based on electricity pricing

• WordPress maker Automattic lays off 16% of staff

• Steam On Linux Shows A Wild Swing Back Up For March 2025 - Phoronix

  results published a few minutes ago show a 0.88% increase to the Linux marketshare, taking it up to 2.33% overall.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• What Happened to Procomm Plus

  Procomm started out in 1985 as a shareware program, initially called TERMULATOR, written to fill the gap left by the shareware program PC-Talk when its author, Andrew Fluegelman, died in 1985. Shareware Procomm featured a built in phone directory, file transfer protocols for uploading and downloading, and automatic redial. It became popular enough to grow into a commercial product, Procomm Plus. The commercial ProComm Plus included a scripting language, more terminal types, additional file transfer protocols, context sensitive help, support for 8 COM ports, and a professionally written manual.

  • It really could talk to almost anything that you'd find answering a phone. Several big companies stretched their core mainframe systems another decade with that ability, putting off upgrades until the early 90s.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Robinhood Billionaire's Solar Space Firm Raises $50M

  • Orbital power sounds great: how do you get that power back to Earth? Any method that seems possible at present will also serve as a strategic weapon of such capability as to make the rest of the world unite against whoever controls it from sheer necessity. Then there is the question of transmission efficiency.

• FAA closes investigation into SpaceX Starship Flight 7 explosion.

• Amazon to begin deploying rival satellites to Starlink this month

Crypto con games

• Fidelity Files for OnChain U.S. Treasury Fund, Joining Asset Tokenization Race

• Stablecoins Are Growing Up

• Stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Economicon / Business / Finance

• CoreWeave has $7.5B in looming debt repayments

• Underlying Labor Market Dynamics Still Tight Despite Highest Gov Layoffs

• Policies, not price gouging, to blame for California’s soaring gas prices, study finds.

• Visa Offers Apple Roughly $100M to Take over Credit Card from Mastercard

• Blue-collar workers are less satisfied at work, less attached to their jobs

• Deel CEO personally orchestrated his company's alleged spy scheme

  • Rippling Employee Admits to Sharing Company Information with Competitor Deel

  • The affidavit of a Rippling employee caught spying for Deel

• Goldman Opens Up Private Equity Deals to Rich Individuals

• Arm aims to capture 50% of data center CPU market in 2025

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Miss. governor signs typo tax overhaul bill into law to phase out income tax

  Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill to overhaul Mississippi’s tax system — one that many lawmakers inadvertently voted for because of typos — into law on Thursday. This sets Mississippi on a path to become the first state to eliminate an existing income tax, when the tax is phased out in about 14 years.

  House leaders have long pushed to eliminate the state personal income tax in relatively short order. The Senate had urged a longer-term approach, arguing it would be unwise to slash a third of the state’s revenue in uncertain economic times. Senators last week had conceded to eliminate the income tax, but only with economic growth “triggers” as safeguards — the tax wouldn’t phase out unless the state saw robust economic growth and controlled spending. It would have likely taken many years. Or so they thought. The Senate bill had typos that essentially nullified the growth triggers and would eliminate the income tax nearly as quickly as the House proposed. The House passed the flawed bill on to the governor, who signed it into law Thursday. In a social media post last week, Reeves, who did not mention the bizarre series of events that helped send the bill to his desk, said “liberal activists” were “making claims of errors, omissions, mistakes, and changes.” Since then, both House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov Delbert Hosemann, both Republicans, have acknowledged the legislation signed into law Thursday contained errors. Hosemann downplayed the typos at the ceremony.

• A judge has blocked Arkansas' online age verification law for infringing on free speech and being overbroad.

• Federal Judge Rejects FDA Power Grab

  …FDA’s asserted jurisdiction over laboratory-developed test services as “devices” under the FDCA defies bedrock principles of statutory interpretation, common sense, and longstanding industry practice.

• Judge Ends Eric Adams Case, but Says U.S. Cannot Use Charges as Leverage - The New York Times

  A judge on Wednesday dismissed federal corruption charges against Eric Adams, ending the first criminal case against a New York City mayor in modern history and underscoring how prosecutorial power is being used to advance President Trump’s agenda. In his ruling, the judge, Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, refused to allow the government to keep open the option of reinstating the charges, as the Justice Department had sought. Even so, the ruling underscores the remarkable power that Mr. Trump’s administration has to terminate cases, regardless of the rationale.

  • Federal judge drops corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams

Trump

• Elon Musk reveals DOGE's new target — members of Congress who got 'strangely wealthy'

  “They’ll [the government] send the money overseas to one NGO [non-governmental organization], then they’ll go through a bunch of them, and then I’m highly confident that a bunch of that money then comes back to the United States and lands in the pockets of the people you just mentioned,” Musk replied. “But it is a circuitous route. It doesn’t go directly, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress where I’m trying to connect the dots of, ‘How do they become rich?'”

• Nikola founder says $2M he gave to Trump had nothing to do with his pardon

• Another Take on Tariffs

• Trump makes history by pardoning a corporation

• How Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Are Set to Reshape Global Trade | The Epoch Times

  The president will reveal the long-awaited details of his tariff plan at a White House Rose Garden event, set to take place after stock markets close.

• Trump Announces Reciprocal Tariffs

• Trump announces 10% tariff on all imports, with higher rates for some countries

• Trump introduces sweeping reciprocal tarrifs

• China will now face a 54% tariff on goods shipped to the US

• US tariff rate rockets to 22%, highest since 1910, Fitch economist says

Democrats

• Cory Booker Aide Booked for Carrying Gun Into Capitol

• Cory Booker sets a record with marathon Senate speech. Will it rally anti-Trump resistance?

  • The Physiology of Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Senate Speech

• FBI Employee Confirmed the Authenticity of the Hunter Biden Laptop in October 2020

  An FBI official admitted to House investigators that an FBI employee had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop to Twitter on a conference call the morning of October 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published a story about it. In the chat, the FBI officials showed awareness that the laptop may have contained evidence of criminal activity.

• Susan Crawford Wins Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, Defying Elon Musk

  • Out-of-state billionaires fuel Wisconsin Supreme Court election - WPR

• Revealed: Pro-Kamala Social-Media Millions That Couldn't Sync 'Brat' With 'Democrat'

  As it turns out, the tidal wave of enthusiasm was not entirely genuine. Much of the content, including Montooth’s videos, was quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters. RealClearInvestigations obtained internal documents and WhatsApp messages from Democratic strategists behind the influencer campaign. Way to Win, one of the major donor groups behind the effort, spent more than $9.1 million on social media influencers during the 2024 presidential election. The effort supported over 550 content creators who published 6,644 posts across platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and X. Way to Win coached creators on phrases, issue areas, and key themes to “disseminate pro-Kamala content throughout the cycle,” a post-election memo from the group noted.

  • That's $10mil of $1.5 Billion. with a "B".

• there's "far-left" and then there's different orbits: Ocasio-Cortez promotes “economic populism” led by CIA Democrat Jared Golden as future of Democratic Party - World Socialist Web Site

  Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are not fighting oligarchy. Rather, they are fighting to preserve the Democratic Party and the capitalist system. They are safety valves deployed by the ruling class to block the development of an independent socialist movement in the working class aimed at abolishing oligarchy and its source, the capitalist system. To this end, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, speaking on behalf of a ruling class terrified of socialism and turning to fascism in anticipation of immense class battles, are shedding any talk of “socialism” and instead adopting the language of “populism” to mask the right-wing nationalist and pro-war agenda of the Democratic Party.

• New San Francisco program backed by Newsom will issue speeding tickets based on income

  Violations for speeding range from $50 to $500, but individuals with a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level are eligible for a 50% discount, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Indigent persons, or individuals who are homeless, are eligible for an 80% discount on the speeding ticket. San Francisco officials launched the program on March 20 with a total of 33 speeding cameras around the city, but only around half of them are operational. For the first 60 days of the pilot program, the cameras will only be used to send warnings to speeding drivers, and will issue fines after. Violations start when an individual drives their car more than 11 mph over the speed limit.

Left Angst

• Opinion | What I Saw in China on the Eve of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ - The New York Times

  I even agree with Trump that additional — targeted — tariffs on China’s back doors into America via Mexico and Vietnam could be useful, but only as part of a larger strategy. My problem is with Trump’s magical thinking that you just put up walls of protection around an industry (or our whole economy) and — presto! — in short order, U.S. factories will blossom and make those products in America at the same cost with no burden for U.S. consumers. For starters, that view completely misses the fact that virtually every complex product today — from cars to iPhones to mRNA vaccines — is manufactured by giant, complex, global manufacturing ecosystems. That is why those products get steadily better and cheaper.

• Trump expanded the presidential pardon power to include corporations

• Schooled by Trump, Americans are learning to dislike their allies

• Changes to a $42B broadband program could be a win for Musk's Starlink

• The Doge Axe Comes for Libraries and Museums

• Mass General Brigham loses millions in grants

• Denmark, Netherlands React to Trump's DEI Ultimatum

• America's Most Shocking Economic Defeat in 40 Years

• Doge official at DOJ bragged about hacking, distributing pirated software

• Trump and Musk have ushered in the era of cataclysm capitalism

• Mass layoffs hit workers at HHS: CDC, NIH, FDA

• Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived

• Ellie Mystal Claims All Laws Pre-1965 Are ‘Unconstitutional’

  “One of my premises for the book is that every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be presumptively unconstitutional,” Mystal explained. “Because before the 1965 Voting Rights Act we were functionally an apartheid country!”

• America is going through its every-80-year reinvention

  remarkable parallels between today’s America and the nation during each of its previous periods of fundamental reinvention. It will compare our pivot year of 2025 to the previous pivot year of 1945 and the end of World-War II, and then to the end of the American Civil War in 1865, exactly 80 years prior. It will then go back another 80 years to 1785, just after the Revolutionary War as the founders were gearing up for the Constitutional Convention.

• Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon

  • This “scoop” is garbage

  Elon Musk and President Trump have both publicly stated that Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete.

  • White House Spox Denies Musk Is Stepping Back | ZeroHedge

  Shares of Tesla rose on Wednesday following an anonymously sourced Politico report (keeping in mind Musk just yanked millions in government 'subscriptions' from them) that President Trump has told his inner circle that Musk would be stepping back from his advisory role in the coming weeks.

• Trump team has weighed deal to save TikTok, leaving algorithm in Chinese ownership

  • How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul

  • White House close to approving sale of TikTok's US unit to investors

  • Andreessen Horowitz in talks to help buy out TikTok's Chinese owners

  • White House reviewing TikTok proposal to lease algorithm from China

• In Alien Enemies Case, Many with Open Asylum Claims Allegedly Removed

• Tornado Season in light of US NWS cuts

• House Democrat wants to drug test Musk and DOGE staff

  • Lets test the entire Federal workforce, Congress, and the Judiciary as well. Not even to fire people; just list the chemicals they're on in public. Prescriptions too.

• Signalgate’s “Classified” Texts Stump Media

  No one involved in the Signal text affair comes out looking good. Not Trump’s top national security officials discussing an imminent U.S. military strike on a public app, outside of the secure channels that taxpayers shelled out billions to set up. Not the rest of the government (including Congress) that can’t seem to explain or even understand the basic rules of the secrecy regime it put in place and is supposed to oversee. Not Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who explicitly waited for President Trump’s permission to report on the texts, even though the attack on the Houthis had already taken place over a week prior. And not the news media overall that showered Goldberg with praise for deferring to the government while propagating the falsehood that publishing what the government deems “classified” is illegal. This is how our democracy dies: in deference.

  • Deference, or deceit? They did not want to show the molehill after so much publicity about a mountain.

• Waltz's team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world

• Trump's antitrust agency blasts EU digital rules as 'taxes on American firms'

• Trump Tariffs Hit Antarctic Islands Inhabited by Zero Humans and Many Penguins

• RFK Jr.'s bloodbath at HHS: Blowback grows as losses become clearer

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• American shakedown: Police won't charge you, but they'll grab your money

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Ford carrier group equipped with new anti-drone weapons for possible Mideast deployment.

• US officials object to European push to buy weapons locally

World

• Only known gay prison now listed on NSW Heritage Register

• U.S. tourist arrested after bringing a handgun into Japan

• Meiji says sayonara to bottled milk, a staple of Japan's bathhouses

• Global scam industry evolving at 'unprecedented scale' despite recent crackdown

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• If negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, US collapse, what’s next?

China

• China's complex social credit system evolves with 23 new guidelines from Beijing

• China Restricts Companies from Investing in US as Tensions Rise

• China drills in Taiwan Strait risk to region's security: US

• Yes, some of China's educated youth just asserted sovereignty over Australia

• China's New Barges Could Make a Tough Task Easier: Invading Taiwan

Health / Medicine

• Lowering bad cholesterol may cut risk of dementia by 26%, study suggests

• Study finds strongest evidence yet that shingles vaccine helps cut dementia risk

• Antidepressant medication linked to increase in risk of sudden cardiac death

• An ADHD diagnosis at 42 helped me get my career back on track

• Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds

• World Autism Awareness Day – 2nd April 2025

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• A new COVID variant is on the rise. Here’s what to know about LP.8.1

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Nuclear power is officially a clean energy source in Colorado

• Coffea stenophylla: A forgotten bean that could save coffee from extinction

• Sensing sickness: Study supports new method for boosting bee health

• Making food from our organic waste may not be as good an idea as first thought

• The secret to finding one of the most endangered bumblebees in the US? Dogs

• Rampant pollution caused manatees to starve. Florida waters are getting worse

• Scientists consider cross-breeding to save Australia’s orange-bellied parrot from extinction.