2025-05-06
Worthy
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CBS Nominated for Emmy for the Editing of Controversial Harris Interview
The 46th News & Documentary Emmy Awards nominations are out, and it seems that everyone is talking about just one of them. The “Outstanding Edited Interview” category is hardly a common draw for public or even industry attention. However, one of this year’s nominees is CBS for its primetime special featuring then-Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The interview is the basis for a $20 billion lawsuit by President Donald Trump against CBS News and its parent company, Paramount Global, alleging election interference due to the biased editing out of an embarrassing answer by Harris. The nomination seems clearly designed to push back at Trump and rally around CBS. (For the record, I opposed this lawsuit on both legal and policy grounds.) However, it sends precisely the wrong message for the media at this time.
the threats of harassing lawsuits destroy any moral high ground for Trump. It is also entirely unnecessary. As I will address this week at the Library of Congress, the public is leaving mainstream media en masse in favor of new media. Revenue and readers/viewers are dropping for many media outlets. That includes CBS, which has continued to struggle with ratings while refusing to offer more balanced coverage, including a recent controversy over pushing the “baby hoax.” CBS was wrong in the editing of the interview and the nomination of the network for the interview only magnifies that error. However, the Administration should leave this matter to the public and the market to sort out.
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I took that 2% number from a 2024 article in the Economist:
Last year American blood-product exports accounted for 1.8% of the country’s total goods exports,
So 0.5298% of goods exports almost certainly use blood, and my best guess is that another 0.1569% of exports also include blood, for a total of 0.6867%.
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Possibly a serious possibility
This wasn’t just a one-off problem. It was a structural flaw in how intelligence was being communicated at the time. Reflecting on the experience, Kent categorised intelligence assessments into three categories:
- Near-indisputable facts, like the length of a runway visible in a satellite image.
- Judgement or estimate of something knowable, like whether the runway belongs to a military airfield.
- Judgement or estimate of something unknowable, like whether the airfield will be expanded into a strategic base. Even the adversary may not yet know what they’re going to do with it.
Kent noted that most intelligence work tends to sit in the second and third categories, where uncertainty dominates. But Kent realised that even among professionals, the language of such uncertainty was wildly inconsistent. Photo interpreters would use ‘possible’ where he would use ‘probable’. And they used ‘probable’ where Kent would say ‘almost certain’.
Horseshit
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The fantasy of playing Final Fantasy | The Verge
You are a negro bunny bound for greatness in the New World, as if the old were simply a mistake. You can’t stop thinking about Sylvia Wynter and something like New World natives; you stall, with everyone else, rather than negotiate a true critique of the present, rather than pause Final Fantasy XIV as ordered by necessity and place your twin boys in the bath. No, the little fuckers berate each other and bash plastic dinosaurs against wood drawers, the floor, and on too many occasions, each other’s faces; a waterlogged mosasaur with a missing fin lay wrecked beside the tub. You understand that, unlike NPCs, the children will die if left unattended, which you’ve had waking dreams about since the moment they were born, boring ones mostly, for seven years now.
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The Death of Daydreaming: What we lose when phones take away boredom
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Sweetgreen CEO on Robots, MAHA and Why Salads Are So Expensive
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We're having sex inside Moby Dick! The wild architecture of Japan's love hotels
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With Shake Shack in First Class, Airline Food Is No Longer a Joke
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It's the End of Cheap Flying as Americans Tire of Budget Airlines
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Conservatives may self-rate as having better 'mental health' because of stigma
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Everything Is the 'Twitter Files' Now - The Atlantic
A high-ranking member of the Trump administration is turning federal-government data—in this case, State Department communications—into a political weapon against perceived ideological enemies. The individuals Beattie has singled out (Bill Gates, the former FBI special agent Clint Watts, and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who had a short and somewhat disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, to name a few) are familiar targets for the far right’s free-speech-defender crowd. The keywords Beattie has asked his department to search for (which also include “Alex Jones,” “Glenn Greenwald,” and “Pepe the Frog”) are ones that seem likely to produce a juicy piece of correspondence, but who knows? This is a fishing expedition—a government agency using a kind of grievance-politics Mad Libs in an effort to find anything that might make it appear as if vestiges of the “deep state” were biased against the right.
Beattie himself has reportedly told State Department officials that this campaign is an attempt to copy Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” playbook. Shortly after purchasing Twitter, Musk picked a few ideologically aligned journalists to comb through some of the social network’s internal records in an attempt to document its supposedly long-standing liberal bias—and moreover, how political and government actors sought to interfere with content-moderation decisions. The result was a drawn-out, continuously teased social-media spectacle framed as a series of smoking guns. In reality, the revelations of the Twitter Files were much more complicated. Far from exposing blanket ideological bias, they showed that Twitter employees often agonized over how to apply their rules fairly in high-pressure, politicized edge cases.
The Twitter Files did show that the company made editorial decisions—for example, limiting reach on posts from several large accounts that had flaunted Twitter’s rules, including those of the Stanford doctor (and current National Institutes of Health head) Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Not exactly breaking news to anyone who’d paid attention. But they also showed that, in some cases, Twitter employees and even Democratic lawmakers were opposed to or pushed back on government requests to take down content. Representative Ro Khanna, for example, reached out to Twitter’s executive leadership to express his frustration that Twitter was suppressing speech during its handling of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
- in the spirit of "damning with faint praise" we have "denial with muttered confession." The Feds told Twitter to silence people and they did; regardless of the objections within the company and even among elected officials. Further evidence of who and how must be "pre-bunked" before it comes out.
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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sachi Schmidt-Hori has never played Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but facing an onslaught of online harassment from its fans, she quickly developed her own gameplay style: confronting hate with kindness. Set in 16th century Japan, the game features Naoe, a Japanese female assassin, and Yasuke, a Black African samurai. Furor erupted over the latter, with gamers criticizing his inclusion as “wokeness” run amok. They quickly zeroed in Schmidt-Hori, attacking her in online forums, posting bogus reviews of her scholarly work and flooding her inbox with profanity. Many drew attention to her academic research into gender and sexuality. Some tracked down her husband’s name and ridiculed him, too.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?
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UN Ditches Google for Form Submissions, Opts for Open Source 'CryptPad' Instead
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Physical Release of Black Myth Wukong Performed So Well That It Saved Businesses
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Dating App 'Raw' Accidentally Rawdogs Users' Location Data, Personal Info
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Meta and Blumhouse Create Chatbot That Encourages Phone Use During Movies
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Ubisoft Reveals Post-Launch Road Map for Assassin's Creed Shadows
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Facebook Allegedly Detected When Girls Deleted Selfies to Serve Them Beauty Ads
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Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a 'Persistent' Risk to the US | WIRED
That includes Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides and the CEO of VK Group, which runs VK, Russia’s Facebook equivalent that has increasingly shifted towards the regime’s repressive positioning. Now cybersecurity researchers are warning that a widely used piece of open source code—which is linked to Kiriyenko’s company and managed by Russian developers—may pose a “persistent” national security risk to the United States. The open source software (OSS), called easyjson, has been widely used by the US Department of Defense and “extensively” across software used in the finance, technology, and healthcare sectors, say researchers at security company Hunted Labs, which is behind the claims. The fear is that Russia could alter easyjson to steal data or otherwise be abused.
“You have this really critical package that’s basically a linchpin for the cloud native ecosystem, that’s maintained by a group of individuals based in Moscow belonging to an organization that has this suspicious history,” says Hayden Smith, a cofounder at Hunted Labs.
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Yelp Is a Full Featured, Unhinged Boomer Social Media Platform
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SolarWinds Security Chief Tim Brown Hopes the SEC Will Dismiss Charges
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Shades of Parler: Messaging app used by Trump official suspends operations after reported hack
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Zuckerberg states that Meta could create ads directly, eliminating ad agencies
TechSuck / Geek Bait
- Extensive and useful: Design for 3D-Printing
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
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Carnegie Mellon staffed a fake company with AI agents. It was a total disaster
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Meta, Amazon and Google accused of 'distorting' key AI rankings
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A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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SpaceX pushed “sniper” theory with the feds far more than is publicly known - Ars Technica
SpaceX pursued the sniper theory for more than a month. ...
last week, to my great surprise and delight, I got a response from the FAA. It was the very letter I requested, sent from the FAA to Tim Hughes, the general counsel of SpaceX, on October 13, 2016. And yes, the letter says there was no gunman involved.
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Have They Been Here? Why We are searching for alien tech in solar system
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Ashli Babbitt's estate settles with DoJ in $30M wrongful death suit
The Department of Justice and the estate of Ashli Babbitt have reached a preliminary settlement in a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit tied to her fatal shooting during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Babbitt, an unarmed Air Force veteran and staunch Trump supporter, was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to breach the Speaker’s Lobby.
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US lawmaker targets Nvidia chip smuggling to China with new bill
Trump
Democrats
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Thirty-five Democrats joined the GOP to repeal California's EV mandate
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Fetterman's brain triggered the Left's hit piece
In 2022, when John Fetterman had a stroke while he was running for his Senate seat, the Democrats and their media allies were insistent that to even question his fitness to serve was ableist and unacceptable. My, how times have changed. This week, New York magazine, as reliable a Democrat organ as there is, ran a scathing hit piece on Fetterman in which current and former staffers all but suggest that not only should he not be Pennsylvania’s senior senator, he belongs in an assisted living facility.
But why, one wonders, two years after waiving away similar behavior is a liberal news outlet suddenly parading the senator’s alleged diminished capacities? What changed? Well, the article itself gives us a big hint with this line, "The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen."
Left Angst
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New Oklahoma curriculum includes pro-Trump conspiracy theories
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White House budget seeks to end SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway programs
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Doge recruiter is staffing a project to deploy AI agents across US Government
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Donald Trump raises doubt over Americans' right to due process
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How golden ages really start—and end
Previous golden ages all ended like Rome’s did, jinxed by a mix of bad luck and bad leadership. Many thriving societies isolated themselves or suffered a “Socrates moment”, silencing their most rational voices. “Peak Human” does not mention Donald Trump; it was written before he was re-elected. America’s president will not read it, but others should. The current age of globalisation could still, perhaps, be saved. As Mr Norberg argues: “Failure is not a fate but a choice.”
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'Slippery slope to eugenics': advocates reject RFK Jr's national autism database
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Hurricane forecasts are more accurate than ever – NOAA funding cuts change that
- Who cares what is forecast? All that gets reported is "this will be the worst hurricane season ever!"
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Europe Makes a Pitch to Attract Scientists Shunned by the U.S.
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New Religious Liberty Commission. Progress or Prophecy? | AF Blog | Amazing Facts
Only time will tell whether Trump’s actions bring to life the “image to the beast.” A Sabbath-keeper is currently co-chair of the Commission, and there are Sabbath-keeping Jews in prominent positions around Trump. These people may help to slow the development of a Sunday law in the near future. Yet things could easily shift if we get a new pharaoh who does not know Joseph. There is no question that Satan is doing his best to orchestrate things for the final showdown between right and wrong, love and hate. “Given what we know about Bible prophecy, the development of this Religious Liberty Commission on the eve of the Catholic Church choosing a new Pope is especially intriguing,” comments Pastor Doug. “So keep looking up, friends. Jesus is coming!”
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Elon Musk Would Be Deported If He Was an International Student Under Trump
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Trump Administration Considers Pulling CBS Broadcasting License
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The Tech Right is not succeeding
, I see the return to small private forums as a healthy development for public discourse; public discussions almost always devolve into shouting matches between tribes of strangers, exacerbating social divisions. Filter bubbles aren’t so bad.
But like the conservative businessmen who railed against the New Deal in the 1930s, the Tech Right seems to be making little headway on their policy objectives. This might be because tech people are just bad at politics.2 But I think the Tech Right’s objectives simply didn’t align very well with the mood of the nation — or the priorities of Trump’s loyalists and his activist base. What the nation wants doesn’t appear to be that similar to what the Tech Right wants, and those differences are proving more important as the euphoria of Trump’s victory fades.
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A Gutted Ed Dpt's New Agenda: Roll Back Civil Rights, Target Transgender Students
- Imagine if the Feds required schools to teach "humility before God" as they have been demanding "gender fluid" be taught.
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Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race
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Former Palantir workers condemn company's work with Trump administration
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A militarized conspiracy theorist group believes radars are 'weather weapons'
The group Veterans on Patrol, which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as an anti-government militia organization, views the NWS’ network of Doppler radars as “weather weapons,” according to an internal NOAA email sent Monday and seen by CNN. A previous email informing the NWS workforce of general, non-specific threats was sent May 1. Monday’s email was more action-oriented, with the NOAA security office noting they are aware of “several encounters,” physically or virtually, with Veterans on Patrol.
- At first glance, this is less credible than the "Patriot Front".
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Hegseth Used Multiple Signal Chats for Official Pentagon Business
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Trump Administration Disqualifies Harvard from Future Research Grants
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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MTA wants AI to flag 'problematic behavior' in NYC subways
- Wasn't no trouble "flagging" the dude raping a corpse the other day...
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Teenage Terrorists Are a Growing Threat to Europe's Security
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Explosive sex toys and cosmetics: the story behind the DHL parcels plot | Russia | The Guardian
Bezrukavyi’s arrest was part of a Polish-led operation targeting a suspected Russian-backed criminal network. The cell is accused of sending parcels containing camouflaged explosives on cargo planes across Europe, triggering fires at three locations. Polish prosecutors believe Bezrukavyi was part of a plot to send shipments with explosives to the US and Canada, a brazen plan that would have marked a major escalation of a sabotage campaign that western security officials believe Moscow has unleashed over the past three years across Europe. Western security officials believe the exploding parcels could have led to a plane crash and mass casualties. When intelligence about the alleged plot reached Washington, it caused so much alarm that top officials in Joe Biden’s administration had called their Russian counterparts to demand that Vladimir Putin call it off.
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Cash-strapped Maldives to build $9B blockchain hub in bid to lure investors
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Facebook and Instagram in Nigeria: Meta threatens to cut access over fines
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More British households struggling with bills will resort to energy theft
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Cable Theft in Spain Disrupts Train Travel for Thousands, Officials Say
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The many possible reasons there are so few U.S. cars in Japan
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Hard-right candidate George Simion emerged as the clear victor as Romanians cast their votes Sunday in a closely watched presidential election. He will now face centrist Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan in a runoff on May 18 that will determine whether Romania becomes the latest EU country to lurch dramatically to the right.
“Believe me, there will be a Simionization as well,” he told POLITICO last November, shortly before Romania’s annulled presidential election, in which he placed fourth. In the months since that election result was scrapped — far-right shock winner Călin Georgescu was disqualified and a new vote ordered by the country’s constitutional court after the Romanian authorities alleged Russian interference propelled him to victory — Simion’s profile has soared. Vigorously denouncing the cancelation of last year’s election, he has framed the do-over as a battle for “democracy, the people’s will, the rule of law and the constitutional order,” and vowed to appoint Georgescu to a top role if he is elected.
Israel
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"Forgive me, cousin, now I'm writing down your name with the dead."
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Israel plans to occupy and flatten all of Gaza if no deal by Trump's trip
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Israel vows to strike Yemen 'without restrictions' following Ben Gurion airport strike
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Houthi ‘hypersonic’ missile hits Israel’s Ben Gurion airport
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Israel launches air strikes on Yemen a day after Houthi attack
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Biden's Attempt to Oust Netanyahu After October 7
“At a time when Israel was battling for its very survival against genocidal terrorism, the Biden administration, according to Goldenberg’s account, was actively seeking to leverage the crisis for political ends, rather than offering unconditional support to an ally under siege.” I suspect we can expect more details to emerge of how the former president – and his fellow Democrats – aggressively tried to subvert America’s biggest democratic ally in the Middle East.