2025-05-09

Horseshit

• Investigating Shrimp Fraud Is an Urgent Matter on the Gulf Coast

• Reborn in the USA: has cricket cracked the American market?

• How the Most Remote Community in America Gets Its Mail

• Newark, still: How Lost Radar and Silent Radios Have Upended Newark Air Travel

• Man admitted to Japan's 2025 World Expo with 85-year-old ticket

• Cringe! How millennials became uncool

• Gender's influence the price of an oil change in America

• Why Germs Love Our Collective Amnesia

• These authors were sold a romantasy convention. Instead, they got the Fyre Festival of the book world

  Imagine getting dressed up in your finest for a fantasy-themed ball, only to find yourself standing on the concrete floor of a massive, nearly empty convention hall, decorated only with a few rose petals. Welcome to A Million Lives Book Festival. What was billed as a romantasy BookTok convention for indie authors and book fans is now being compared to infamous event flops like Fyre Festival and DashCon , after a flood of social media posts from attendees painted a picture of a confusing and disappointing event.

• The Enduring Joy of American Hitchhiking

• More people are getting their tattoos removed

• Engineers create a robot that can jump 10 feet high–without legs

celebrity gossip

• Prince Harry is being blackballed by royal family because none of them trust him — or Meghan Markle

• Former Royal Advisor Filmed Saying Prince Andrew Was a Pedo – PJ Media

• Bill Gates pledges 99% of his fortune to Gates Foundation

  • Bill Gates to give away fortune by 2045, $200B for poorest

  • Bill Gates Explains His Plans to Close the Gates Foundation in 2045

  • Bill Gates to give away $200B over 20 years

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• A Russian fake news ring was struggling. Then it targeted USAID.

  Posts that pushed “extravagant lies” such as fake assassination plots and pedophilia accusations seemed to go mostly ignored, the report found, even though X has removed less than 20 percent of them.

  It was a less flashy fake that ultimately got traction. The video, which purported to be a clip from the cable TV channel E! News, falsely claimed that USAID had paid millions of dollars for a series of celebrity Hollywood actors, such as Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, to travel to Ukraine in hopes of boosting President Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity. On Feb. 5, it was posted by a right-leaning anonymous X account with more than 700,000 followers, then reposted by Musk, whose 220 million followers make him the platform’s loudest voice.

  The video was later debunked by users X’s crowdsourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, who pointed out the both E! News and Stiller had declared it bogus. Nonetheless, it remained on X as of Monday, having garnered more than 4 million views. X did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk

• Elon Musk's AI, Grok, Accused of Undressing Women in Public on X

• X Blocks Jailed Istanbul Mayor Imamoglu's Account

• Tesla confirms it has given up on its Cybertruck range extender

• Tesla Cybertruck inventory goes through the roof

• Elon Musk: A Case Study in Hype, Power, and the Illusion of Genius

  A closer look at Musk’s history reveals a pattern: grand claims, shaky execution, and a remarkable ability to convince investors and governments to fund his ventures while avoiding accountability. His success is as much about marketing as it is about innovation, and his rise raises important questions about the nature of power, perception, and the way society rewards those who appear to break boundaries, even when they repeatedly fail to deliver.

  • I've never been a Musk fanboi; but I have to point out that his accomplishments seem to elude others. Feds squashed PayPal's competition; and also failed to squash Tesla as they had so many other car companies.

• Why do so many people hate Elon Musk?

• BYD Sealion 7 surpass Tesla Model Y to be Australia's best-selling electric car

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Vatican Financial Mess Pope Francis Couldn't Fix

• White Men in the Minority as US Boardrooms Enter New Era

  • The prophets of DEI assured us the world would be made so much better when white men were not responsible for as much... can we see the improvement yet?

• My Interview With Galen Strawson

  Let me give you what I see as the kind of the basic argument for panpsychism, if you're already a materialist or a monist. It goes like this. 1) Materialism is true — everything in the universe is wholly physical. 2) Consciousness certainly exists. (The first two premises are the same as before). 3) No radical emergence: Consciousness could not possibly arise from something that was in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-conscious. So, conclusion: Consciousness must in some way be already there at the bottom of things. And that's pretty much the standard panpsychist view: That consciousness is already intrinsically part of the nature of physical stuff, from the start. (That’s not to say it’s anything like human consciousness.)

• New pope chosen, white smoke from Sistine Chapel signals | PBS News

  • White smoke rises as new pope elected by conclave | CNN

  • White smoke! Conclave chooses new pope : NPR

  • Chicago native Cardinal Prevost elected pope, takes name Leo XIV

  • Pope Leo XIV, Born in Chicago, Is the First American Pontiff

  • Robert Prevost has been elected the first American pope in history

  Aged 69 and originally from Chicago, Prevost has spent most of his career as a missionary in Peru and became a cardinal only in 2023. He has given few media interviews and rarely speaks in public.

  • MEET POPE LEO XIV: Cardinal Robert Prevost becomes first-ever American pontiff

  • Robert Prevost elected the first American pope

  • Pope Leo XIV Is a Sox Fan, Despite the Hope from Cubs Fans, Brother Confirms

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• USF Divests from Defense Companies Tied to Israel After Pressure from Students

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• WhatsApp provides no cryptographic management for group messages

• Official Google response to Apple's May 7 press reports about Search traffic

  • Apple Tries to Save $20B Google Search Deal by Saying It's Unnecessary

• Gmail will soon stop support for the 3DES encryption cipher for incoming SMTP

• Apple Asks Court to Pause Order That Would Upend Its US App Store Business

  • Apple pushes to halt App Store overhaul as Epic Games appeal moves forward

• After the 2024 Windows fiasco, CrowdStrike has a plan – jobs cuts, leaning on AI

• Bungie vaulting Destiny 2 content backfires with the latest lawsuit court ruling

• Android's splashy new paint job won't yank Gen Z from iPhones

• Don't make Google sell Chrome

• Linux drops support for 486 and early Pentium CPUs: 20 years after Microsoft

• Siri listened in on private conversations, Apple pays out $95M in lawsuit

• Consumer Watchdog Halts Google Payment Supervision

• Law Enforcement Seizes 9 DDoS-for-Hire Webpages as Part of Global Crackdown

• Amazon's closing yet another Kindle loophole to back up your purchased e-books

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Agatha Christie, Who Died in 1976, Will See You in Class

• Mistral launches chatbot for companies, triples revenue in 100 days

• Instacart CEO Fidji Simo Is Joining OpenAI

  • OpenAI Expands Leadership with Fidji Simo

• AI-Generated Slop Is Quietly Conquering the Internet

• Zuckerberg's Dystopian AI Vision

• Figma launches premium Figma Make 'vibe-coding' AI software designer

• AI chatbots are 'juicing engagement' instead of being useful, Instagram co-founder warns | TechCrunch

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Ground track map: COSMOS 482 DESCENT CRAFT (ID 6073)

Crypto con games

• X402: a new standard for internet-native payments

• SoftBank, Tether, Cantor Bring Financial Muscle in Crypto Gambit

• Coinbase acquires crypto derivatives exchange Deribit for $2.9B

• Standard Chartered apologizes for $120K Bitcoin price call, 'may be too low'

• Crypto founder faked own death. We found him alive at his dad’s house

• Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky sentenced to 12 years in crypto fraud case

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Alphabet's share price plunges on traffic drop testimony

• WeightWatchers files for bankruptcy as fat-loss jabs boom

• Shipments are cut in half carrying Chinese goods with 145% tariff arriving in LA

• Nvidia's CEO pay swells to $49.8M; firm reveals younger Huangs on the payroll

• High tariffs become 'real' with our first $36K bill

  we’re buying from a vendor, not a factory, so we can’t second-source the items (and these particular products we couldn’t manufacture ourselves even if we wanted to, since the vendor has well-deserved IP protections). And the products were booked & manufactured many months ago, before the tariffs were in place. Since they are electronics products/components, there’s a chance we may be able to request reclassification on some items to avoid the 125% ‘reciprocal’ tariff, but there’s no assurance that it will succeed, and even if it does, it is many, many months until we could see a refund. We’ll have to increase the prices on some of these products, but we’re not sure if people will be willing to pay the higher cost, so we may well be ‘stuck’ with unsellable inventory that we have already paid a large fee on.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US FDA names agency critic Vinay Prasad as top vaccine official.

• Senators revive bill to restrict TSA facial recognition at airports

• The IRS plans to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Trump

• US to Rescind Global Chip Curbs, Prep New AI Restrictions

• Trump Executive Order Restricts 'Gain of Function' Research on Pathogens

• Trump to pitch sweeping Medicare drug price plan

Left Angst

• Derek Lowe: The Continuing Crisis, Part XIV

• "We Are Betrayed": Parents of Green Card-Holding Son Who Now Faces ICE Detention

• Donald Trump taps wellness influencer close to RFK Jr. for surgeon general

• Latina Who Voted for Trump Burst into Tears Learning Her Family Will Be Deported

• US scraps Biden-era rule that aimed to limit exports of AI chips

• A Politically Neutral Military Is Not Always Obedient

• Trump's NIH Axed Research Grants Even After a Judge Blocked the Cuts

• Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class

  How are the American middle class and working class prospering, if the good manufacturing jobs of yesteryear are all gone? Talmon Joseph Smith scoffs at “service economy jobs”, and Autor et al. find that manufacturing workers displaced by Chinese imports often took crappier, lower-paid jobs in the service sector. But that describes the 2000s. The 2010s and 2020s have been very different. Deming et al. (2024) show that over the last 15 years, the boom in low-skilled service-sector jobs has gone into reverse, and Americans are instead flooding into higher-skilled professional service jobs

• This is Vindication???

  Joe Nocera has a strange piece in the Free Press arguing that the “godfathers of protectionism” have been vindicated. It begins with a story about how Dani Rodrik couldn’t get a famous economist to endorse his book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? because doing so would arm the barbarians. Well give that reluctant economist a Nobel! because they were obviously correct.

  Well the far left and the far right agree that America has become fractured and hollowed out, the Bernie Sanders-Donald Trump horseshoe. But both are wrong. For the rest of us in the happy middle, consider this–Hickory, North Carolina, once known as the furniture capital of the United States, did face some hard times. But in 2023 Travel and Leisure magazine named Hickory the most beautiful and affordable place to live in the United States!

• Now’s Not the Time to Eat Bagged Lettuce - The Atlantic

  Americans aren’t suddenly falling sick en masse from romaine lettuce, or anything else. “There’s just millions of these bags that go out with no problem,” David Acheson, a former FDA food-safety official who now advises food companies (including lettuce producers), told me. But what’s most disturbing of late is the government’s lackadaisical approach to alerting the public of potential threats. Consider the romaine-lettuce outbreak last year. Americans became aware of the outbreak only last month, when NBC News obtained an internal report from the FDA. The agency reportedly did not publicize the outbreak or release the names of the companies that produced the lettuce because the threat was over by the time the FDA determined the cause. The rationale almost seems reasonable—until you realize that Americans can’t determine what foods are, or aren’t, safe without knowing just how often they make people sick. (A spokesperson for the FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

  • (Apr 19 2025) A deadly E. coli outbreak hit 15 states, but the FDA chose not to publicize it

  An E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce ripped across 15 states in November, sickening dozens of people, including a 9-year-old boy in Indiana who nearly died of kidney failure and a 57-year-old Missouri woman who fell ill after attending a funeral lunch. One person died. But chances are you haven’t heard about it. The Food and Drug Administration indicated in February ...

  • Trump's destruction of the government goes back in time to before the election, even...

• Elon Musk is responsible for "killing the poorest children," says Bill Gates

  • Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of 'killing' children with USAID cuts

  • Bill Gates tears into Elon Musk for 'the deaths of the poorest children'

  • Bill Gates Accuses Elon Musk of 'Killing Children' by Cutting Foreign Aid

• Thanks to DOGE, Gumroad's founder has a second job with the VA

• Doge-led software revamp to speed US job cuts even as Musk steps back

• Trump admin ends extreme weather database (tracked cost of disasters since 1980)

• How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Navy finds something the LCS is good at: Stopping drug smuggling

• US-UK trade deal announced

World

• India-Pakistan war: A chilling 2019 study predicted a nuclear war in 2025

• 'Nuclear war could break out at any time' warns Pakistan defence boss

• Wikipedia challenging UK law it says exposes it to 'manipulation and vandalism'

• Mushroom meal - murder trial begins in rural Australia

• Bulgarian spies nabbed for feeding information to Russia facing UK jail

• Why the rich paid less tax in the 1970s – despite 98% tax rates

• Bargain Hunt expert charged as part of investigation into terrorist financing

  Oghenochuko 'Ochuko' Ojiri, 53, is accused of eight counts of "failing to make a disclosure during the course of business within the regulated sector", the Met Police said. The force said he was the first person to be charged with that specific offence under the Terrorism Act 2000.

• Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's first mini nuclear power plant

Israel

• Unexploded Israeli Bombs in Gaza Gift Hamas Firepower Worth Millions – and Cost Soldiers' Lives

  The Israeli Air Force is aware of at least 3,000 unexploded bombs in Gaza. After tens of thousands of airstrikes, the IDF ran low on reliable fuses and turned to outdated ones – some decades old. 'Tens of tons of explosives are lying in Gaza, waiting for Hamas,' said one officer

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine considers shift from dollar to euro amid geopolitical realignments

China

• Thoughts on Sinofuturism

• Xi Fortifies China Economy Before First Trade Talks with US

• China is laughing at the West's lack of 'stamina'. It has a point

• Huawei unveils laptop running self-developed HarmonyOS as Windows licence expire

Health / Medicine

• Lining medical stents with hairlike fuzz could fend off infections

• Parts of our DNA may mutate far faster than previously thought

• Wegovy Could Treat Another Chronic Disease

• I Don’t Need Ozempic. But I Want It. GLP-1s are looking more and more like a miracle drug. Are we ready for miracles?

  “The side effects are different for everyone, but for me,” I say, “I’m prettier, happier, more confident, my clothes look better, and more men take notice of me.” I was never obese, or approaching it. I didn’t have diabetes, or prediabetes.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Efforts Grow to Thwart mRNA Therapies

• Bird flu in cats points to risk of another pandemic

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Lianas are taking over the rainforests, and it's visible from space

• Experiments to 'dim the Sun' one step closer in the UK - BBC Weather

  Controversial experiments exploring the science around reflecting sunlight with an aim to bring about global cooling have been announced. As part of the Exploring Climate Cooling programme, projects in Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) will involve trying to thicken Arctic sea ice and make clouds more reflective. But, critics have real concerns about the impact of SRM on weather patterns and our health, seeing it as a distraction to drastic de-carbonisation.

• Will U.S. Push on Seabed Mining End Global Consensus on Oceans?

• Scorpions 'taking over' Brazilian cities with reported stings rising 250%

• All of the Biggest U.S. Cities Are Sinking

  • Land under the country's largest cities is sinking. Here's where – and why

  • Land subsidence risk to infrastructure in US metropolises

  • All Major U.S. Cities Are at Risk of Sinking, Not Just Coastal Urban Areas

• 'Beyond comprehension'; Chainsawed trees in L.A. hint at city core's decline

• Humans still haven't seen 99.999% of the deep seafloor

• High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes