2025-05-03

Horseshit

• Mummy mystery solved: 'air-dried' priest was embalmed via rectum

• American dads are spending more time with their kids since Covid

• Few people mind when others invite themselves to group activities

• Ancient horse hunts challenge ideas of 'modern' human behavior

• Sea snail teeth top Kevlar, titanium as strongest material

• Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit

• Why men are shaving off their eyelashes

• Head-bobbing sea lion proves animals can keep a beat better than humans

celebrity gossip

• Mark Twain was the original American celebrity

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Social networks found ineffective at mobilizing vaccination uptake

• Threat of tech bros, foreign interference & disinformation to press freedom

Musk

• Neil Young Slammed For New Anti-Tesla Song: ‘Peak Washed-Up Hippie Cringe.’

• Tesla Sales Plummet 80.7% in Sweden

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Betting Markets Take on Formidable Challenge of Predicting Next Pope

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Miscalculations of Covid School Closures

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Epic Games is launching online stores to allow developers to bypass fees

• Polygon sold to GameRant owner Valnet

  • Polygon, a gaming news website that everyone forgot within a year of its creation, has been sold off to a content farm upstate.

  • Polygon Sold to Valnet and Hit with Mass Layoffs

• Apple notifies new victims of spyware attacks across the world

• Space Invaders on your wrist: the glory years of Casio video game watches

• Mark Zuckerberg says ads will soon be handled by AI

• Apple says most US-bound iPhones no longer made in China as tariffs bite

  • Apple Says Most of Its Devices Shipped into US Will Be from India, Vietnam

• Apple Updates U.S. App Review Guidelines Following Epic Games Ruling

• Microsoft is making accounts passwordless by default going forward, moving to newer and less secure methods.

• Microsoft Announces Xbox Console Price Hike, Xbox Games to Cost $80

• Google Places Ads Inside Chatbot Conversations with AI Startups

• Meta's Reality Labs Has Now Lost over $60B Since 2020

• The Telegraph jumps the gun on World War III • The Register

  Users browsing the news on the Google smartphone app found themselves presented with the alarming headline, "China invades Taiwan: Japan steps in." the headline was changed from "China invades Taiwan: Japan steps in" to "If China invades Taiwan, what could Japan do?" but not before the alarmist original had circulated online.

• Telegram Adds Secure Group Calls

• Taxes and fees not included: T-Mobile's latest price lock is nearly meaningless

• Rockstar delays Grand Theft Auto 6 to 2026

• Meta and Blumhouse Create Chatbot That Encourages Phone Use During Movies

• Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive

• DOJ confirms it wants to break up Google's ad business

  • US asks judge to break up Google's ad tech business after requesting Chrome sale

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Printable Pegboard PC Shows Off The RGB

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Doubts about exogenous planet biogenesis

• FAA grounds Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket until failure investigation is complete.

• NASA snaps detailed photos of 'strikingly complicated' asteroid

• Images of Soviet Venus lander falling to Earth suggest its parachute may be out

Crypto con games

• UK preparing to ban consumers from buying crypto with borrowed funds

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Temu Blocks US Shoppers from Seeing Products Shipped from China

• Payroll employment rises by 177,000 in April; unemployment unchanged at 4.2%

• Bezos discloses plan to sell up to $4.8B in Amazon stock

• Winding down our carsharing service in the U.S.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• NIH to update policies and practices guiding subawards

• DOJ Files False Claims Act Complaint Against Aetna, Anthem and Humana

• Florida passes bill to change constitutional amendment petition process

Trump

• Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media

  nlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence. At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage. No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize. The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality: the CPB may not “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.” 47 U.S.C. 396(f)(3); see also id. 396(e)(2). The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS. Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.

  • Corporation for Public Broadcasting Statement Regarding Executive Order

  “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government. In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”

  • Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking to End Federal Funding for NPR and PBS

  • Executive order directs federal funding cuts to PBS and NPR

• Trump to Rename Veterans Day as 'Victory Day for World War I'

• Elon Musk and the DOGE Team Do Group Interview – What Big Balls Has Uncovered Will Infuriate You.

• Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Doge View Social Security Data

Left Angst

• Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals App Govt Uses to Archive Signal Messages

  • The day he was fired, Mike Waltz used Israeli app to archive Signal messages

• Trump says Harvard will lose tax exempt status

  • Trump says he will revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status

• 'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

• The digital countermove to Trump tariffs

• USPS law enforcement assists 'mass deportation' effort, sources and records show

• Ukraine minerals deal is largely symbolic – but that's enough for Donald Trump

• Universal Vaccines Elude Scientists. RFK, Jr., Is Betting This Will Succeed

  • RFK Jr. Invests $500M in Universal Vaccines Project

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr will require all new vaccines to undergo placebo testing

• De minimis: US small parcels loophole closes pushing up Shein, Temu prices

  • Temu halts shipping direct from China as de minimis tariff loophole is cut off

• The Case for American Reindustrialization

  Beyond the short term, US deindustrialization, ironically, could be an advantage for its industrial rebirth. After the second world war, Europe saw the most fantastic industrial turnaround ever recorded. Decimated economies such as France and Germany, where industrial towns were bombed to smithereens, suddenly emerged as manufacturing powerhouses. How? The destruction of their old factories gave them a fresh start. Industrial policy-makers didn’t have to deal with stubborn institutional inertia or outmoded infrastructure. While British firms struggled after the war, unwilling to build new plants, French and German manufacturers, with a clean slate upon which to build, surged ahead.

• Trump kills rural sewage fix as 'illegal DEI'

• Autism evaluations are being canceled over fears about a national registry

• Wyze Labs imported $167k of floodlights and then paid $255k in tariffs

• NIH to end billions of dollars in foreign research grants

• White House budget seeks to end SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway programs

• Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

• MAGA's War on Science

• America Is Handing China a Victory

• Depressed tech workers can't stop talking about Zuck and Musk, therapists say

• Medical journals hit with threatening letters from Justice Department

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Alleged leaders of child exploitation cult known as 764 arrested, charged

• Three Brits charged over 'active shooter threats' swattings in US, Canada

  "They relate to the online activities of an internet-based group between October 2022 and April 2023, which planned, advertised, and carried out calls to emergency services and internet celebrities reporting fabricated serious, life-threatening incidents, 'active shooter threats' to prompt an emergency response."

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Army made a tank it doesn't need and can't use. Now it's figuring out what to do

• North Korea has been secretly placing young IT workers inside Western companies

World

• Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with Є530M fine over data transfers to China

• Apple ordered to pay $502M to a patent troll by UK courts

• Liverpool fans' celebrations caused earth tremor

• Solar panels to be fitted on all new-build homes in England by 2027

• AfD classified as extreme-right by German intelligence

  Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution. "The ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order," the domestic intelligence agency said in a statement. The AfD came second in federal elections in February, winning a record 152 seats in the 630-seat parliament with 20.8% of the vote. Bundestag Vice-President Andrea Lindholz said that as a designated right-wing extremist group the AfD should not be treated as other parties, especially in parliament. Because of their large number of seats, AfD members could be eligible to chair parliamentary committees, but Lindholz said that idea was now "almost unthinkable".

Israel

• Activists say ship aiming to sail to Gaza was attacked by drones

  • So was thew US "humanitarian supply floating pier"

China

• Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge: the tallest bridge will open in China

• China's machinery of repression – how it crushes dissent around the world

• Trade War Exposes China's Dependence on U.S. for Auto Chips

Health / Medicine

• Snake collector's immunity quest opens path towards universal antivenom

  • Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 100s of Times

  • Blood of man who's had 200 snake bites helps make a potent antivenom

  • Snakes have bitten this man Hundreds of times

• Alzheimers could be linked to a common virus

• Colibactin, the bacterial genotoxin implicated in colon cancer in young adults

• Texas goes after toothpaste in escalating fight over fluoride

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• 2016 bird flu variant was one mutation away from binding to human receptors

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Underwater volcano off US west coast is set up erupt 'any day'

• World's largest '100 per cent electric' ship launched

• Skin wounds in humans found to heal nearly 3x slower than those in primates

• Climate change threatens eye health

• Incinerating thousand of Satellites in the atmosphere releases toxic pollutants

• Screwworms have breached the U.S.-maintained barrier in Panama