2025-06-18

Horseshit

• Psychopaths thrive in societies with more corruption, poverty, and violence

• The most liveable cities in 2025

• The collapse of complex societies

  humanity can post­pone—though not avoid—its big global collapse by collec­tively choosing to make massive economic sacri­fices to fund the devel­op­ment of trans­for­ma­tional energy tech­nology.

• What's Happening to Reading?

• I supercommute 5 hrs from LA to SF: 'one of the best career decisions I've made'

• Billionaires are not like us

• The teen who filmed the Air India crash video the world saw

celebrity gossip

• Wartime codebreaker Alan Turing's scientific papers sell for £465,000 at auction

  • Saved Alan Turing papers sold at auction for £465k

• Venice activists plan to disrupt Jeff Bezos's wedding

Obit

• William Langewiesche, the 'Steve McQueen of Journalism,' Dies at 70

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Ferrari delays second EV model to at least 2028 because of weak demand

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The West has stopped losing its religion

  The long rise of secularism, which Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University calls “a dominant trend in demography of recent decades” has shaped many aspects of Western society. These range from more liberal attitudes towards gay marriage and abortion to prospects for economic growth. Its sudden stall—and possible reversal in some places—is unexpected. The most plausible explanation for the changing trend is the covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns, social isolation and economic shocks affected almost all countries and age cohorts at about the time that the data on religious belief hit an inflection point. This is especially the case for Gen Z, whose years of early adulthood were disrupted, leaving many young people lonely or depressed and looking for meaning. The pandemic really was a catalyst” for becoming religious, says Sarah, a 20-year-old student at Liberty University, who grew up outside the church but converted after joining a Bible-study group on Zoom during the lockdowns. “Probably over 75% of my friends who are Christians became Christian since the pandemic.”

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• matrix is cooked — Alexia

  Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made. Element's “re-focusing” on “establishing a level playing field” means hostile takeover of all important projects that were under the Matrix Foundation banner and to stop running and managing the Matrix.org homeserver despite it still being the default option in Element today. The results of this are, as one may expect, devastating. I don't think I've seen the Matrix Foundation ring the alarm bells any more than today that they need funding to keep the foundation going. Unfortunately, all the money is being swept up by Element instead.

• Social media overtakes TV as Americans' top news source

• Has Signal usage collapsed? It seems so

• Certificate authorities booted from the good graces of Chrome

• Two-Factor Authentication Codes Take Insecure Path to Users

• Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

• It's Official: Streaming Is Now the King of TV

• Apple must face consumer lawsuit over iCloud storage, US judge rules

• Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training

• Facebook announces that all videos on its platform will soon be shared as reels

• Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

• Duracell sues rival Energizer over 'misleading' battery life claims

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Arma 3 – An analysis of recent multithreading improvements for a smoother game

• Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre!

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Defense Department signs OpenAI for $200M 'frontier AI' pilot project

  • OpenAI awarded $200M US defense contract

• AI threatens to raid the water reserves of Europe's driest regions

• The Drawbridges Go Up

• Hack the Planet: 90s Hacker Culture vs. Today's AI Devs

  Where 90s hackers were allergic to authority, today’s AI devs speak of alignment—but not in the political sense. AI alignment is about making sure your chatbot doesn't turn into Skynet or say something HR-inappropriate on Slack. It's less "hack the planet" and more "please don't make my startup liable." And the irony? Much of the hacker ethos—curiosity, autonomy, subversion—is now guarded by the very companies it once targeted.

• Where AI Provides Value

• AI Use at Work Has Nearly Doubled in Two Years

• Google, Scale AI's largest customer, plans split after Meta deal, sources say

• OpenAI weighs "nuclear option" of antitrust complaint against Microsoft

• Musk's XAI Burning Through $1B a Month as Costs Pile Up

• Amazon says it will reduce its workforce as AI replaces human employees

  • AI will shrink Amazon's workforce in the coming years, CEO Jassy says

  • Amazon CEO Says AI Will Lead to Smaller Workforce

• There's a '10% to 20% chance' that AI will displace humans completely

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• ULA launch delayed for Amazon’s 2nd batch of 27 ‘Project Kuiper’ satellites.

Crypto con games

• Senate Passes Stablecoin Bill in Win for Crypto, Trump

• US Senate passes stablecoin bill in milestone for crypto industry

• Senate passes GENIUS stablecoin bill

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Battle for Starbucks' Coffee-Making Crown

• Helsing valued at €12B to become one of Europe's most valuable tech groups

• Costco tests the waters with a stand-alone gas station for members

• Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its factory workers, memo says

• Private Equity Has Peaked, and It's About Time

• The Big Stay: Keeping, Not Quitting, a Job Is Better for Wage Growth

• More of Us Are Putting in Extra Hours After the Workday

• Crude Below $65 Squeezes U.S. Shale, Even as Drivers Celebrate

• I’ve eaten Subway for decades. Today’s offering is a joyless abomination of its former glory | David M Green | The Guardian

• Canada-wide class-action suit against McKinsey for alleged opioid promotion

• In U.S. opioid crisis, states say yes to $7B Purdue Pharma settlement.

• Nasdaq-traded Chinese herb stock with no revenues rallies 58,000%

• Electronic Labels Have Not Led to Surge Pricing in US Grocery, Despite Concerns

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Congress is making more than 250M acres of public lands available for sale

  On the heels of the disastrous House reconciliation bill’s passage, Senate Republicans have unveiled their own poisonous version of the bill that will fund President Trump’s agenda—a bill that calls for the outright sale of public lands as a key element. he provision in question mandates the disposal of between 2 million and 3 million acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service across 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Alarmingly, the provision contains very limited exemptions—Wilderness Study Areas, Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, roadless areas and critical habitat are all considered eligible for sale. Based on those limited restrictions, more than 250 million acres of public lands will be eligible to be sold to "any interested party."

Mostly Peaceful Riots

• California bill targets masked officers

• 1 man dead after being shot during ‘No Kings’ protest in Salt Lake City

  A 39-year-old man, identified as Utah resident Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, died Saturday after being shot during a large “No Kings” protest in downtown Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd said Sunday. Three people also believed to be part of the incident were taken into custody, one of whom, identified as 24-year-old Utah resident Arturo Roberto Gamboa, was shot as everything unfolded, according to Salt Lake police. He was transported to a hospital in serious condition.

  Redd said preliminary investigations show that Folasa Ah Loo was not the intended target but an “innocent bystander participating in the demonstration.” With witnesses-provided information, officers pursued Gamboa to the area of 200 East 100 South, where he was apprehended, taken to the hospital and later booked into the Salt Lake County Metro Jail for investigation of murder, police said. Gamboa had a minor gunshot wound and was “hiding in a group of people,” Redd said. Officers also recovered a backpack Redd said was removed from Gamboa by bystanders that contained an “AR-15 style rifle,” black clothing and gas mask.

  Two other armed individuals wearing high-visibility vests who were “possibly part of the event’s peacekeeping team” were also detained initially, Redd said. “Based on early witness statements, these men saw Gamboa separate from the crowd during the march and move behind a wall, where they noticed him pull out a rifle and begin manipulating it. Gamboa was then confronted by these two men. Witnesses say Gamboa raised the weapon in a firing position and began running toward the crowd. One of the individuals fired three rounds, striking Gamboa and tragically striking the man who later died,” Redd said, adding that Gamboa never fired a shot. Redd added that the two peacekeepers are not in custody and the one who fired the rounds is cooperating with police. “We did not take any actions last night on those two individuals,” Redd said.

• This was Seattle. This is Seattle. Mostly peaceful? You be the Judge. – Calling-all-RushBabes

• Taxpayers Are Helping Fund Anti-ICE Riots; Capitol Hill Probes Launched

  Information compiled by Open the Books, the Illinois-based, tax-exempt government watchdog group with the biggest database ever constructed of government spending at all levels, shows five far-left activist outfits involved with the rioters received more than $73 million in grants from the state of California in 2023 and 2024. All five of the groups include multiple programs aiding and defending illegal immigrants against deportation efforts.

Trump

• Trump returns early from G7 meet, convenes Situation Room re: Iran-Israel war

• Trump-47 and the Vacant Article III Judicial Posts

• Donald Trump in the Situation Room: What We Know

  President Donald Trump reportedly directed his national security staff to convene in the Situation Room at the White House as he left the G7 summit in Canada to return to Washington D.C. early. Trump denied on Truth Social that his early departure was connected to a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, saying it was "much bigger than that." He told reporters as he left Canada that he would be monitoring developments in the Middle East from the Situation Room on Tuesday morning, according to CBS News. He said that he needed to be at the White House where he can be "well versed" on the situation and not have to rely on phones. Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email outside of regular business hours.

Left Angst

• The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible

  • Trump's T1 Mobile off to a rocky start with messy pre-orders

  • I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed

  • Trump takes down Trump Mobile coverage map that includes "Gulf of Mexico"

  • Trump's Smartphone Can't Be Made in America for $499 by August

  • Trump Mobile Would Track Users Through AI

• GOP hawks vs. Maga isolationists: Internal war could decide Trump Iran response

• National parks ordered to police 'negative' history under presidential directive

• Opinion | How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create this RFK Jr. wreck - The Washington Post

  In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent. Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

  I’ve thought a lot about that meeting as I’ve watched the havoc Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wreaking as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services — including, most recently, firing all the members of the ACIP panel and replacing them with advisers more to his liking. That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives. This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories. That’s not to say that public health experts deserve all of the blame. They don’t even deserve most of the blame, which properly belongs to Trump, who appointed Kennedy to curry favor

• President now profits immensely from crypto sector he once said seems like scam

• There’s an elephant in the room at the Royal Society – and for once, it’s not (just) Elon Musk

  But as for the politics that threaten NASA in Trump’s second administration, Parker was silent. This silence continued throughout the morning. All told, 19 speakers filed on and off the stage at the Royal Society’s London headquarters without so much as mentioning what the Nobel-Prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess called an “almost extinction level” event for research in their field.

• Trade and Tax Policies Start to Stall U.S. Battery Boom

  • Lack of demand has nothing to do with it, no its all Trump's fault...

• Trump tariff turmoil hurting global smartphone market, but hitting US hardest

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Alleged shooter found Minnesota lawmakers' addresses online, court docs say

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pentagon pizza monitor predicted 'busy night' ahead of Israel's attack on Iran

World

• British Airways flight to India turned back midair after suspected flap failure

• Rules, Not Renewables, Might Explain the Iberian Blackout

• Fragmentation, Centralization, and Civil War in the Japanese Ultra-Left

  internecine violence between revolutionary groups during the 1960s and ’70s grew out of a “maximal tension” between the two opposed dynamics of centralization and fragmentation. Far from being an isolated case, Abe argues that this tension constitutes a central aporia that any insurrection must confront in advancing toward revolution: given that the insurrectional impetus detotalizes and fragments existing socio-political orders, it has long been assumed that in order for it to expand into a revolutionary opening there is a need for a party formation that can enact a supplementary political process introducing revolutionary ideas and institutionalized platforms into the insurrectionary masses. However, as Abe shows, it was precisely this effort to enact a pivot from the “larval" party of revolt to the “actual" party of revolution that led to the tragic massacres between the new left sects, leaving a hundred comrades dead and over five thousand wounded. If they wish to avoid reproducing such deadly failures, any effort to resurrect the party-form in the 21st century must reckon not only with this history, but with the abiding impasse it exposes.

• B.C. man acquitted of sexual assault after blaming 'automatism' on magic mushrooms

  On a Friday night in March 2019, Leon-Jamal Daniel Barrett concluded that humanity was corrupt and his only means to save it was by having "sexual congress" with a woman chosen by God. The fact Barrett took magic mushrooms in the hours before coming to this realization would later prove pivotal to his being found not guilty for what happened next. Instead of a woman chosen by God, Barrett encountered a terrified stranger, who fought him as he knocked her to the ground, tried to kiss her and "smashed" her left breast before removing his clothes, pushing her down a set of steps and trying to pull her jeans off. In a decision delivered in March but posted last week, Hinkson acquitted Barrett of sexual assault, breaking and entering, and wilfully obstructing a police officer after he argued the magic mushrooms put him in a state of automatism that rendered him not criminally liable for his actions.

• End of free hand luggage on EU flights approaching

• Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars

  India’s space programme has always had to work with a tight budget in a country with conflicting needs and demands. Photographs from the 1960s and 70s show scientists carrying rockets and satellites on cycles or even a bullock cart. Decades later and after several successful interplanetary missions, Isro’s budget remains modest. This year, India’s budgetary allocation for its space programme is 130bn rupees ($1.55bn) - Nasa’s budget for the year is $25bn. Mr Das says one of the main reasons why Isro’s missions are so cheap is the fact that all its technology is home-grown and machines are manufactured in India.

• Oxford Street to be pedestrianised as quick as possible, London Mayor says

• Radio 4 Longwave will NOT go quiet at the end of June, BBC suggests

• Two Tankers Catch Fire After Colliding Near Strait of Hormuz - Bloomberg

  Two giant ocean-going tankers collided and caught fire near the Strait of Hormuz energy chokepoint, rattling global oil and shipping markets that have been on high alert since Israel attacked Iran. The Front Eagle, an 1,100-foot (335-meter) supertanker known as a very large crude carrier, and a smaller vessel called the Adalynn, crashed into each other off the coast of the United Arab Emirates at 00:15 local time on Tuesday, Frontline Plc, owner of the first vessel said by email. The incident was “navigational” and “unrelated to the current regional conflict,” it said. UK-based maritime security agency Vanguard Tech said in an alert seen by Bloomberg that there was no initial indication of “foul play” regarding the collision, with fires contained and crews reported safe. According to a social media post from UAE’s national guard, 24 crew members on the Adalynn were rescued. Frontline confirmed its crew was safe too.

• Spain's government blames blackout on grid regulator and private firms

= MI6 gets its first female chief, years after Judi Dench played Bond's boss

Iran / Houthi

• Missiles That Destroyed Air Defenses from Inside Iran Were Remotely Operated

• "Why is Iran targeting apartments?": Sulaiman Ahmed on X: "IRAN TARGETED BUILDINGS IN TEL AVIV USED BY ISRAEL TO STORE F-35 JETS AND SUBMARINES

• Iran leader Khamenei sees his inner circle hollowed out by Israel

• Israel said Iran racing toward a nuclear weapon. US Intel says it was years away

• Regime change emerges as unstated goal of Israel's war in Iran

• Iran Bans Officials from Using Internet-Connected Devices

• Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

• Report: Ayatollah Khamenei Is Not Making Decisions ‘Due to His Poor Mental State.’

• Trump Tells Khamenei: We Know Where You’re Hiding and ‘Our Patience Is Wearing Thin.’

• Iran plunged into an internet near-blackout during deepening conflict

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Telegram Messenger's Ties to Russia's FSB Revealed in New Report

China

• Taiwan bans exports to Huawei, who tricked TSMC into making 2M AI processors

• How Apple turbocharged China's development

• China conducts pad abort test for crew spacecraft, advancing moon plans

• China can become a biotechnology superpower

Health / Medicine

• Reasons you should give up alcohol if you're recovering from an injury

• The Secret Gamble at the FDA That Exposed Americans to Risky Drugs — ProPublica

  The FDA has given more than 20 foreign factories a special pass to continue sending drugs to the U.S. even though they were made at plants that the agency had banned. The medications came mostly from plants in India where inspectors found contaminated drugs, filthy labs and falsified records. The agency did not proactively inform the public when drugs were exempted from import bans, and it did not routinely test the medications to ensure they were safe.

• The grim reality of assisted dying

• The Catch of Catching Cancer Early

• Worm-inspired treatments inch toward the clinic

• Kraft Heinz promises to eliminate all chemical food dyes within two years

• Weed legalization more dangerous for road safety than previously believed.

  • Great. Can we also address the impairment caused by the dozens of prescriptions people are on and their interactions? The continuously medicated are more likely to be functional than those who have changed their dose recently; whatever the cocktail of drugs thy on.

• Cannabis use could double risk of heart deaths, study suggests

• Black coffee, longer life: The science behind your morning perk

• Just as with tonsils, people still have them now: Rare Appendix Cancers Are Increasing Among Millennials and Gen X

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• New Covid variant swiftly gains ground in US; concern looms for summer wave

• New 'razor blade throat' Covid subvariant quickly gains ground in California

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Abbott signs law permitting use of fracking wastewater in agriculture

• People wrecked the climate 140 years ago – we just lacked the tech to spot it

• Finland warms up the world's largest sand battery, the economics look appealing

• EPA Plans to Reconsider a Ban on Cancer-Causing Asbestos

  • Trump’s EPA to “reconsider” ban on cancer-causing asbestos

• NASA data reveals dramatic rise in intensity of weather events

• Planetary waves linked to wild summer weather have tripled since 1950

• RNA as a Replacement for Chemical Pesticides

• Is Fake Grass Safe? A Manufacturer Sues to Stop a Discussion

• Ethereum co-founder is personally responsible for carbon crime

• Scientists are dropping live mosquitoes out of drones in Hawaii to protect birds

• Queen of Trash: Sweden convicts 10 people in its biggest environmental trial

• Permafrost in Swiss Alps at Record Warmth