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2025-06-08

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Horseshit

  • LeCabot, a $135 open-source alternative to Spot by BostonDynamics

  • Sports betting seems to be spurring a rise in gambling addiction

  • Out of Stock - The New York Times

    Every style of underwear I have ever loved has been discontinued, occasioning yearslong searches for any remaining pair I can sweet-talk a kindly Dillard’s department store salesperson into unearthing from cold storage. I once wrote so desperate a love letter to the manufacturer of a discontinued lip balm that the company sent me the last remaining dregs of the product from the lab, scraped into a jar. There are many good reasons for a company to stop making a product. Just because you love it doesn’t mean it’s selling well. But still, when you find the perfect specimen — what on beauty-product discussion boards they call your “holy grail” or “HG” — the manufacturer discontinuing it feels like a personal betrayal. You’ve been unfailingly loyal to a hand soap or a style of wool crew socks and have been repaid with, well, it’s probably melodramatic to call it “abandonment,” but it’s definitely inconvenient, if not a little rude. How dare they mess with your carefully calibrated skin care routine!

    We have a lot of decisions to make each day. It’s a relief to lock in on a makeup shade or moisturizer or style of underwear that just works: Here’s one thing I don’t have to decide, here’s a problem that’s already been solved, some friction eased. We expect that we’ll change before the product does, that we’ll outgrow it and only then turn our attention to the wilds of the marketplace to find a new brand, a new HG.

  • Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn't drink milk

  • The power of olo, a color created by science

  • Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages

Obit

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

  • (Sep 2024) Matti Friedman: When We Started to Lie

  • (Video) The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future

  • The Case Against Planetary Governance

    Wolfgang Streeck believes that the future of democracy lies not in newfangled structures of planetary governance, but in a recuperation of the nation state’s lost capacities. In Taking Back Control?, published by Verso last year, the German sociologist and former director of the Max Planck Institute methodically traces the quiet transfer of authority over economic life from elected parliaments to technocratic institutions beyond democratic reach. Streeck’s project warrants attention as a distinctly non-right-wing flavor of protectionism that cuts through the priors of the American political landscape.

    From the inflation crisis of the 1970s onwards, Streeck argues, national governments have ceded ever-larger swaths of policy to an extraterritorial network of treaties, courts, and market watchdogs. The neoliberal turn, in his telling, did not emancipate markets from the state; it re-cast the state—above all the United States—as the enforcer of a single, border-spanning market regime. The promise of friction-free trade rests on an imposed economic uniformity that ultimately strips democracies of their sensitivity to citizens’ “collective particularism.” This enforced uniformity, Streeck shows, generates the discontent that authoritarian movements in turn exploit.

    Streeck’s history helps us think about the origins of reactionary disquiet without conceding to its rhetoric. It also helps us think about the necessary conditions for an alternative populism. Drawing on thinkers including Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, and Herbert Simon, Streeck argues that the complexity of the global economy can only be democratically addressed by the downward delegation of sovereign powers. Against both planetary technocracy and reactionary nationalism, Streeck envisions an international order of small, democratically empowered states capable of shaping economic outcomes in response to the public good.

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

  • College Students Are Using 'No Contact Orders' to Block Each Other in Real Life

  • The Field of Education is Due For a Copernican Revolution

    There exist learning strategies that have been scientifically shown to improve student learning, such as mastery learning, spaced repetition, retrieval practice (the testing effect), and varied practice (interleaving). These learning strategies have been researched extensively since the early to mid 1900s, with key findings being successfully reproduced over and over again since then. Yet, when I completed my teaching credential from 2020-21 and attended numerous professional developments (PDs) from 2019-23, not once did I hear any mention of these learning strategies!

    Instead, the focus was 100% on diversity, equity, & inclusion: readings (and an essay) on hegemonic heteronormativity, anti-racism training, “sharing circle” training, and even a presentation on the gender unicorn, complete with an extraordinarily complex gender classification flowchart, just to name a few examples. Forget the science of learning – even the most obvious practical skills that a teacher would need to exercise on a daily basis, such as managing a rowdy classroom, communicating with parents, holding students accountable for their work, and dealing with academic dishonesty, were not covered at all in teacher credentialing nor PD. However, there was no shortage of pointless activities.

  • House vs. NCAA settlement approved, allowing schools to pay college athletes

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

  • Can Florida Eliminate Property Taxes?

  • Cruz bill: States that regulate AI will be cut out of $42B broadband fund

  • Social Security for 200-Year-Olds?

    Elon Musk and DOGE later announced they’d identified -- and cancelled -- 3.2 million obsolete Social Security numbers for people over 120 years old. They later updated that amount to 7 million. Those broadly conflicting figures leave the door wide open to confusion and worry from Americans and criticism from a media struggling to verify DOGE claims in real time. More careful, consistent communications from across the administration could mitigate at least some of this risk. Open the Books auditors were already working to retrieve and analyze data about the age distribution of Social Security recipients, so we’re sharing what we’ve found so far – and more importantly, what the Social Security Administration cannot or will not provide to the public.

Trump

Left Angst

  • Buyer with Ties to Chinese Communist Party Got VIP Treatment at Crypto Dinner

    • Can we talk about Hunter's work for China, and everyone else? No? Then this is bullshit.

  • Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

  • The Plastic Surgery Procedure Booming Among Washington Men

    The surgeons and dermatologists who treat the D.C. power class will never share their patients’ secrets; some doctors strategically time surgeries during congressional recess, and many go out of their way to make sure their clients aren’t even seen entering the office, using a spy-movie-like web of hidden entries and secret back doors. But they will also tell you that, among the political power set, jaws are currently hot. “Strong jawlines and prominent chins are de rigueur in Washington,” says Dr. Tina Alster, a dermatologist who treats high-powered patients at her K Street practice. In the past couple of years, she says, the portion of her male clients who come in seeking well-defined jaws has more than doubled, from about 20 percent to 50 percent.

  • Is Jordan Peterson Just Making It Up as He Goes?

    The incredible thing about Peterson is that, in writing and speech, he somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook. He is a master of faux-Confucian aphorisms—“There is no being without imperfection”—and spouts kindergarten morality with the self-serious gravitas of a bearded prophet who has just been handed stone tablets by the Almighty. But he’s long been equally prone to deconstructive cul-de-sacs and conceptual negations that save him from ever having to explain what he actually thinks or means.

  • Trump thinks Americans consume too much. He has a point

  • Trump revokes digital identity actions in new cyber executive order

  • Analyzing the Trump Bullet Photo

    Lines up perfectly with what we see in the photo. For me at least, the case is now closed. We have one more piece of evidence that this was indeed a real assassination attempt. Or at least we have evidence that it was a real AR-15 bullet passing very close to Donald Trump’s head, photographed by a real camera. Or, I messed up somewhere in my calculations or thought patterns above, in that case let me know! In the process of getting to the bottom of this, we have also learned a lot about how the shutter of a modern camera functions.

  • White House security staff warned Musk's Starlink is a security risk

  • After His Trump Blowup, Musk May Be Out. But Doge Is Just Getting Started

  • Musk’s outbursts reveal a deeper rift in MAGA - spiked

    MAGA is a coalition based largely on a shared detestation of the ‘progressive’ agenda, but it has little else in common. It includes people concerned about free speech and anti-Semitism, as well as Christian humanists. And it also contains deeply troubling elements that appeal to a stew of authoritarian, nativist, racist and anti-Semitic ideas – tropes long peddled and platformed by Trump supporters such as the pro-monarchist Curtis Yarvin and the ubiquitous, ever-ugly Tucker Carlson. Not surprisingly, the broader base that elected Trump is now fracturing into its constituent parts. This is not to say that there has been a shift to the self-righteous and rightfully ignored ‘Never Trumpers’ in the GOP. Nor have Republicans suddenly embraced the leftist meme that Trump is a ‘fascist’ with a plan. He is nothing of the sort: he lacks any real ideology or disciplined movement capable of advancing a particular programme. In essence, Trump is a grifting narcissist with a keen sense of how to take advantage of the sustained imbecility of his opponents. But there is no fixed core to Trumpism – only impulses more expected from a toddler with ADHD than a presidential administration. He may have been a builder in his past career, but he appears clueless when it comes to constructing a clear policy agenda beyond revanchism and grift.

  • The great poaching: America's brain drain begins

  • Trump administration takes aim at Biden and Obama cybersecurity rules

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • Proud Boys Sue DOJ For $100 Million Over Jan. 6 Prosecutions | ZeroHedge

  • Working with the EPA to Secure Exposed Water HMIs

    The reality is much more nuanced than this; sure, around fifty thousand hosts may be running a well-known ICS protocol like Modbus, but that doesn’t make all of the hosts running Modbus “critical infrastructure”. For all we know, those services may just be some person’s Lego Mindstorm project connected to an Arduino via a serial adapter. To classify a host with an ICS service as critical infrastructure, one needs context regarding that service. Context can be any number of things, but it’s often not found in the specific ICS protocol, as those datapoints rarely have any discernible information; instead, you would look for hints in the TLS certificates, service banners, metadata in HTML on a webserver, or even the screenshots of any exposed remote desktop service. To be quite frank, discovering critical infrastructure exposed on the internet is far less common than sensational blogs and press releases may have you believe. It’s super easy to uncover hosts running protocols like Ethernet/IP or BACNet, but it’s much harder to assess whether those systems pose a real risk, or if they even qualify as critical infrastructure in the first place.

  • California AG vows crack down on copper wire thefts in the state

  • TSA urges people to stop trying to use a Costco card as a sufficient Real ID

  • ACLU sues Sonoma County, alleges illegal drone surveillance program

  • FBI stops teen’s plot to bomb and shoot shoppers at WA mall

    The FBI thwarted an improvised explosive attack and a potential mass shooting that was intended to take place at Three Rivers Mall in Kelso last month. A teenager, whose name will not be released due to an effort to limit public disclosure of a minor, was arrested May 22 by Columbia County Sheriff’s Office deputies after his plans to set off an explosive at a shopping mall in Washington and shoot people as they fled the movie theater there were reported to the FBI on May 19, law enforcement leaders said Thursday. The mall is approximately 50 miles north of Portland off I-5. “This plot was as serious as it gets,” FBI Portland Special Agent in Charge Doug Olson stated. “We, along with our partners, moved swiftly to interrupt this violent plan and to protect our community.” The teenager arrested for planning the attack is a Columbia County resident who, according to the FBI, shared nihilistic, violent extremist ideology and the plans in online chats. The suspect was placed under court-authorized surveillance for public safety concerns.

  • Hack of SEC's Edgar System Exposed Flaws in US Financial Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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