2025-06-22
Worthy
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The Coward's Bargain - Joshua Stylman
We've created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they're confessing crimes.
I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son's football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall's Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: "You know, I'm a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point." Here's a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he's afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts. After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I'd said it. When the company didn't want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What's maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.
We're creating a generation of psychological cripples—people who are practiced at reading social cues and adjusting their thoughts accordingly, but who have never learned to form independent judgments. People who mistake consensus for truth and popularity for virtue. People who have been so thoroughly trained to avoid wrong-think that they've either lost—or never developed—the capacity for original thought entirely. But here's what's most disturbing: the kids are learning this behavior from us. They're watching adults who whisper their real thoughts, who agree privately but stay silent publicly, who confuse strategic silence with wisdom. They're learning that authenticity is dangerous, that having real convictions is a luxury they can't afford. They're learning that truth is negotiable, that principles are disposable, and that the most important skill in life is reading the room and adjusting your thoughts accordingly.
Horseshit
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Yoga is the pause button that humanity needs to be whole again
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Social success not about who you know – it's about knowing who knows whom
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Northland man's restoration work connects him to famous football brothers
He made the move from Minntac mechanic to full-time antique refrigerator restoration a year ago after a brush with fame involving famous football brothers sent his social media into the stratosphere.
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Work on Branson's island. My day: 9-to-5 or partying with guests until 4 a.m
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Controversial Plant Propagation Hack That Has Gardeners Divided
The plant world has a controversial new buzz word: "Proplifting." A combination of “propagate” and “shoplifting," the term describes the practice of collecting discarded plant parts from stores, nurseries, and public spaces and propagating them to grow new plants. Fans of the practice—like the nearly 300,000 members on a proplifting Reddit forum—say making new plants out of pieces that would otherwise go in the trash is a harmless form of guerilla gardening. Critics say proplifting could be considered vandalism or even theft.
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The Tangled Past and Unsettled Future of Greyhound Racing in West Virginia
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'Solitary Gardens' Aims to Change How We Think About Prisons
celebrity gossip
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Liquid Death Is Selling Empty Iced Tea Cans Containing Ozzy Osbourne’s DNA
Liquid Death, purveyor of canned water, has announced that it’s selling 10 empty cans of iced tea that were drank by Ozzy Osbourne and were then sealed to contain his DNA. Dubbed “Infinite Ozzy,” these 10 cans are valued at $450 apiece and are being sold via the Liquid Death website to anyone lucky enough to snag one. Each was laboratory sealed and signed by Ozzy himself, with their timely arrival coming just weeks ahead of Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s final concert on July 5th in Birmingham, England.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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First, most lawmakers are surprised to learn that the tests change at all. They are then flabbergasted to learn what the most recent changes to the SAT were. The most noticeable changes were to the structure of the exam. The paper exam was scrapped, and in its place the College Board implemented a computer-based test that is adaptive, meaning students are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.
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As attention spans get shorter, so does the SAT – and soon the ACT
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Apple Executives Have Held Internal Talks About Buying AI Startup Perplexity
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Cloudflare's CEO says virtually nobody clicks on Google's AI source links
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Zuckerberg spent billions on an AI 'dream team,' has to deliver for shareholders
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'It destroys the purpose of humanity': Customers are saying no to AI
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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US leading indicators slip in May, triggering recession signal
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PG&E power shutoffs start for parts of Northern California, outages expected
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Rippling spy says men have been following him, and his wife is afraid
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How Housing Bubble No. 2 Bursts
Note that the number of owner-occupied homes was flatlined for 12 years--from 2005 to 2016. Then it suddenly leaps up by 10 million in a few years--from 76 million to 86 million. Did 10 million households all win the lottery, or is the bulk of this astounding increase the result of fraudulent investors posing as owner-occupant buyers?
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Intel will outsource marketing to Accenture, laying off many of its own workers
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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A man who allegedly ran Rep. Max Miller "off the road" in Rocky River, Ohio, showed a Palestinian flag and threatened the congressman has turned himself in, police said Friday. The Rocky River Police Department identified the driver as Feras Hamden, 36, from Westlake, Ohio. They obtained a warrant for his arrest after Miller signed a criminal complaint for aggravated menacing, and filed a motion for a criminal protection order against the driver.
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American data center tax exemptions "out of control," according to report
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There was pretty clearly an agenda not just to cut contracts, but to do so by bringing some software development in house, which is actually very wise — and long overdue. I know of a few teams that have quietly gotten more staff since the start of the Trump term, and are delivering better results by firing poor-performing contractors and writing the software themselves. But those teams are in the minority. For most teams, their contracts have been canceled without much of a plan. Similarly, software (insourced or not) was supposed to replace people, but the people are gone without the software. They cut the workforce without cutting the work. This rhymes eerily with what happened during the National Performance Review, which most people will recognize as the efforts around Reinventing Government under Al Gore in the 90s. John Kamensky was on Statecraft recently, and when asked about the staff cuts in that era, which mostly resulted not in a smaller workforce overall, but rather a “dark matter version of the federal workforce,” in Santi’s words (the same workers but now off the feds books and onto the contractors’).
What DOGE should get credit for is moving the Overton window for civil servants on risk aversion. Some of DOGE’s work has been marked by enormous (and sometimes heartbreaking) carelessness, but in an environment that’s too often been careful to the point of negligence. Now I hear stories of teams who would previously have crossed every t and dotted every i pushing to JFDI, so to speak, in ways that balance the need to adhere to our nation’s laws with the need to deliver for the American people. As much as I wish the impetus had been different, the bureaucracy needed a bit of a push, and I hope those who read DOGE as a signal to move a bit quicker will win out over the reactionary forces.
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Of Course We Should Privatize Some Federal Land (but probably won’t)
The Federal government controls a ridiculous amount of land in the West including more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map. The vast majority of this land is NOT parks!!! It is time for a sale to raise some funds and improve the efficiency of land allocation.
Left Angst
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Is Iran close to building a nuke?
"My intelligence community is wrong." With those words, Donald Trump waved away the advice of the entire US spy infrastructure — from the CIA, to the Defence Intelligence Agency, to the intelligence arms of the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force — and its assessment that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear weapon. That assessment was presented to the US Congress in March by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's hand-picked director of National Intelligence. "The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon," Ms Gabbard said. "Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised a nuclear weapon program that he suspended in 2003." On Wednesday, Donald Trump said simply, "She's wrong."
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I was turned back at the US border after a 12-hour interrogation
I turned back and was met by a Customs and Border Protection Officer I found disquietingly polite. He asked me to follow him, and we walked together past that long line, down a special queue where my passport was quickly scanned, and then into a room some passengers will know as “secondary processing”.
I posted reports to my Substack, Kitchen Counter. I wrote plainly about what I observed: from Jewish and Muslim students holding hands, singing together for peace, to faculty mounting their own protests opposing university administration. In the end, it was how militarised police used siege vehicles to storm the campus. All of this I watched with my own eyes, and reported as a witness, and a journalist. I wrote, too, about my best guesses for why the university, and the NYPD, were making choices disproportionate in their fierce violence to the peaceful behaviour of the students. I wrote against the swirl of misinformation that rose rapidly, driven from powers a long way from campus. Because the university went into lockdown, professional media were not on the ground. I realised then that my first-person accounts were as important for describing what I saw as they were for describing what I did not see. And what I did not see, in my time observing the protests, were instances of antisemitism from Columbia student protesters. That was why I was detained at LAX. I didn’t need to guess the reason – Officer Martinez had told me. As he sat down for the first interrogation, he said, “We both know why you’re here”. I was there because of what I “wrote online about the protests at Columbia”.
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Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted. In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.” Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.” At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades. The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award.
- Hasn't the NYT lauded people for making the argument that the Constitution is a racist document designed for the benefit of White Males? Is their objection that this person doesn't think that invalidates the basis of our whole government?
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Boelter’s letter to FBI says he needed to kill Klobuchar for Walz
In a rambling, conspiratorial letter addressed to the FBI, alleged assassin Vance Boelter claimed Gov. Tim Walz instructed him to kill U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate, according to two people familiar with the contents of the letter. The letter is the clearest evidence yet of Boelter’s mindset after the targeted violence against Minnesota politicians last week. It is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents. It includes Boelter alleging he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books, and that Walz, who is not running for Senate, had asked him to kill Klobuchar and others.
Mustian and Biesecker began digging into Boelter’s background within minutes of learning he was the focus of a multistate manhunt. Their reporting quickly revealed that Boelter was an evangelical pastor with increasingly strident religious and conservative views. He had attended rallies for President Donald Trump, denounced abortion in a sermon delivered overseas, and registered to vote as a Republican. Their story also pushed back on misinformation that had spread online, including claims that Boelter was a liberal based on a past appointment to a workforce development board by former Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton. Interviews with Boelter’s associates helped clarify that perception, offering a more accurate picture of the suspect’s ideology.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Telecoms Tell Employees to Stop Looking for Evidence of Salt Typhoon Intrusion
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US strikes three Iranian nuclear sites, Trump announces
US President Donald Trump is hopeful the strikes he ordered on three Iranian nuclear sites will propel Tehran back to negotiations, and doesn’t currently plan additional US actions inside Iran as he presses its leaders to “agree to end this war,” according to sources familiar with the matter. Trump had come to believe over the last several days that US forces were necessary to taking out Iran’s highly fortified nuclear facilities, and made the decision when it seemed clear that diplomacy remained deadlocked. While Trump continues to hold out hope that diplomacy will now be able to proceed, American forces in the region are prepared for Iranian retaliation.
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US has struck three Iranian nuclear sites, Trump says, joining Israel
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U.S. strikes Iran's nuclear facilities
The U.S. military conducted airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on Sunday morning local time. President Trump, who announced the "very successful attacks" on Truth Social, said he would deliver an address to the nation at 10pm ET.
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Trump says US has bombed Fordo nuclear plant in attack on Iran
We have now got our first reaction from Iran. The deputy political director of Iran’s state broadcaster, Hassan Abedini, has appeared live on state TV just now. He says Iran evacuated these three nuclear sites a “while ago”. He also says that even if what Trump says is true, Iran “didn’t suffer a major blow because the materials had already been taken out”.
World
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Norway plans temporary ban on power-intensive cryptocurrency mining
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Why is Latin America so violent? - Vodou Economics
Why is Latin America and the Caribbean so much more violent than the rest of the world? Homicide rates are significantly higher in this region, and the top 6 highest homicide rates are in the Caribbean Basin. Latin American institutions are too weak, so the drug trade thrives. But the drug trade also has some important fundamentals that are being ignored. Latin America’s climate not only has a comparative advantage in producing high-value drugs, its location next to high-paying customers gives it a comparative advantage in trading high-value drugs. And because the rents from the drug trade are high, they are protected through violence. This then leads into Blattman’s explanation, that “once you had people prove that it could be done and it could be profitable, then you had this relatively small group who professionalize it and do it. And now it becomes a thing, and it’s entrenched.” But empirically demonstrating the drug trade’s contribution to violence is difficult. Since the trade is illegal, we don’t have good data on who is producing it, when production has changed, or how it is connected to violence. There’s also the reverse causation problem: maybe cultures that are more violent are willing to enter the drug trade; maybe inequality drives violence and the drug trade; etc.
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Microsoft suspended the email account of an ICC prosecutor at The Hague
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New EU rules for energy-efficient and repairable smartphones and tablets
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Europol: Teen encrypted chat recruiting for 'violence as a service' murder ring
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A Decade On, Has Japan's Corporate Revolution Worked Too Well?
Iran / Houthi
China
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That is why China is actually importing more Rare Earth than it exports. What it exports is mainly not the raw rare earth or even refined rare earth, but the magnets as you can see above.
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China tightens internet controls with new centralized form of virtual ID
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China's property sector in an extended slump, shrinking population worsening it