2025-07-03

Horseshit

• Florida beachgoer finds nearly half a million dollars of cocaine wrapped in “Yosemite Sam” packaging

• Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?

• Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair

• The cryptic symbolism of Van Gogh's Sunflowers – and what they mean

• Scientists reconstruct 10,500-year-old woman's face using DNA

• Maybe you're not Actually Trying – On selective agency in capable people

• Are Young People Having Enough Sex?

• I tried to make new friends in my 30s

• Saudi sports investor Surj goes extra mile for $20M triathlon stake

• Learn to love the Moat of Low Status - by Cate Hall

  Fear of being temporarily low in social status stops human beings from living richer lives to an unbelievable degree. It happens on the micro scale, when a dance party doesn’t get started because nobody wants to be the first person on the dance floor. It’s fascinating: When I see someone alone on a dance floor, letting loose, it’s clear that they’re not doing anything wrong. Even if they’re not dancing well, they’re doing a public service by inviting other people to join them. But most of us hesitate to be that person. It happens on the scale of decades, when somebody dreams of becoming a songwriter but doesn’t ever write a full song, because they’re afraid of confronting their current lack of skill. They would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting — talented in their imaginary world — than actually bad on the way to being actually good_._

• The Map Rating Restaurants Based on How Hot the Customers Are

• TikTok discovered scenic Eagle Falls; then 12 people drowned

• Colorado comedian heals from trauma with 'tromedy'

• The Origin of the $80 Popcorn Bucket

• Experts help older Coloradans downsize their possessions

celebrity gossip

• Sean 'Diddy' Combs Found Not Guilty of Sex Trafficking

Obit

• James Maas, professor who popularized the term 'power nap,' dies at 86

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Rural purge - Wikipedia

  The "rural purge" refers to the mass cancellation in the early 1970s of rural-themed television programs by American networks, in particular CBS. The term was coined within the entertainment industry, although its exact provenance is unclear. The majority of these cancellations occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season.

Musk

• GOP wants EV tax credit gone; it would be a disaster for Tesla

• X rolls out pilot for AI-generated Community Notes

• X, India spar over lawyer's 'Tom, Dick, and Harry' remark for officials

• Elon Musk’s big win over Australia

• Tesla reports 14% decline in deliveries, marking second year-over-year drop

• xAI faces legal threat over alleged Colossus data center pollution in Memphis

• Tesla's energy storage business gets sucked into the company's downward spiral

• Tesla's Global Vehicle Deliveries Plunged in Second Quarter

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Dalai Lama confirms he will have a successor after his death

• Hymn of Babylon pieced together using AI

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

= A 17-year-old teen refutes a mathematical conjecture proposed 40 years ago

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Nintendo faces legal action over ability to brick Switch 2s whenever they want

• Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

• Zero-day: Bluetooth gap turns headphones into listening stations

• Qantas confirms cyber-attack exposed records of up to 6M customers

  • Qantas discloses cyberattack amid Scattered Spider aviation breaches

• Apple's Craig Federighi on the long road to the iPad's Mac-like multitasking

• Apple Accuses Former Employee of Stealing Vision Pro Secrets

• Jury says Google must pay California Android smartphone users $314.6M

• Kal is Out at The Sun

  I am disappointed to announce that after 31 years of award-winning cartoons in The Baltimore Sun, I was abruptly dismissed from the paper on Friday. It was just a matter of time. In February of 2024, David Smith, the conservative owner of the Sinclair Broadcasting group purchased the struggling paper. As my politics do not align with the new owners, I assumed my days were numbered.

• iPhone Satellite Functionality Saves Denver Mountaineer

• Bought sneaker proxies by mistake, did science with them anyway

  Sneaker bots are just scalpers with a foot fetish. More precisely, they’re bots built to buy limited-edition sneakers the moment they drop, only to flip them for a profit on marketplaces like StockX or Goat. Scalping in general isn’t exclusive to sneakers.

• Chuck E. Cheese Launches Chuck's Arcade

• Seminal William Gibson cyberpunk classic Neuromancer to become Apple TV+ show

• What's wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers

• Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections

  I agree with this trade-off. These attacks are hard to get working, and it’s not easy to exfiltrate useful data. There are way easier ways to attack systems.

• Three Ubisoft chiefs found guilty of enabling culture of sexual harassment

• You will own nothing and be happy (Stop Killing Games) | Jeff Geerling

• 23andMe's new owner says your DNA is safe this time

• Google Ordered to Pay $315M for Taking Data from Idle Android Phones

• Nintendo locked down the Switch 2's USB-C port and broke third-party docking

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Flightradar24 uses MLAT to counter GPS jamming

• The Amiga 3000 UNIX and Sun Microsystems: Deal or no deal?

  Could Sun and Commodore have discussed a joint workstation venture years before the launch of the A3000UX, leading to rumors later on? If a deal between Sun and Commodore is to make any kind of sense, I believe it should have taken place some time during 1988, when Commodore announced the A2500UX. As a UNIX offering it could certainly have been competitively priced for the low-end market at this point in time, especially coupled with the A2024 monitor which was capable of displaying four grayscales in 1024x800. Alas, the Sun-Commodore saga hinges on the A3000UX which, in my mind, makes it rather unrealistic.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• USA AI-Related Export Controls

• Swedish AI 'vibe-coding' startup Lovable valued at almost $2B

• 'Europe is not the US': Tech insiders call for smarter AI rules

• How Do You Teach Computer Science in the A.I. Era?

• People are using AI to 'sit' with them while they trip on psychedelics

• Anthropic Annual Revenue Reportedly Reaches $4B

• A.I. Frenzy Escalates as OpenAI, Amazon and Meta Supersize Spending

• What Mark Zuckerberg Is Offering Top AI Talent

• A man says ChatGPT sparked a 'spiritual awakening.'

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• U.S. Air Force Releases New UAP Video Depicting Metallic-Looking Sphere

• Opinion | Did the ‘Deep State’ Invent the U.F.O. Craze? - The New York Times

  Eighteen months later, as you may have noticed, no Lockheed Martin employees have brought forward detailed plans of the alien spacecraft hidden in their corporate vault, and no former heads of the Department of Energy have confessed to keeping a great bureaucratic secret hidden since the dawn of the atomic age. Instead we’ve had more interviews and first-person accounts but no actual disclosure — even of the Jeffrey Epstein or J.F.K. files variety — from a Trump administration that includes a few U.F.O.-curious figures in its ranks. And now, in a pair of articles last month by two Wall Street Journal reporters, we’ve been given one of the more comprehensive attempts at a non-E.T. explanation of where some of the weirdness originates. Relying heavily on interviews with Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a Pentagon task force investigating the U.F.O. evidence, the reporters reveal several possible mythology-forging projects inside the military-industrial complex: a combination of deliberate psychological operations aimed at covering up top secret technologies, possible bureaucratic pranks and hazing rituals that accidentally made midlevel personnel into U.F.O. believers, and top secret experiments that the government allowed its own personnel to interpret as possible close encounters.

• Interstellar Object Spotted Hurtling Through the Solar System

Crypto con games

• Crypto Assets left unclaimed in California could soon be seized by the CA state

• Palmer Luckey leads group of tech billionaires launching new crypto-bank

Economicon / Business / Finance

• They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers

• Big Tech is crushing middle managers

• Intel's new CEO explores big shift in chip manufacturing business

• Xerox just bough Lexmark for $1.5 billion.

• Fired Nomura Trader Turns to 'Toilet Graffiti' to Argue His Case

• Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

  Private sector hiring unexpectedly contracted in June, payrolls processing firm ADP said Wednesday, in a possible sign that the economy may not be as sturdy as investors believe as they bid the S&P 500 back up to record territory to end the month. Private payrolls lost 33,000 jobs in June, the ADP report showed, the first decrease since March 2023. Economists polled by Dow Jones forecast an increase of 100,000 for the month. The May job growth figure was revised even lower to just 29,000 jobs added from 37,000. “Though layoffs continue to be rare, a hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers led to job losses last month,” Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist, said in a press release published Wednesday morning.

• Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs

  • Microsoft to lay off as many as 9k employees in latest round

  • Microsoft laying off about 9k employees in latest round of cuts

  • Microsoft to cut about 4% or 9000 jobs amid hefty AI bets

  • Microsoft announces another mass layoff impacting 9k workers

  • Microsoft cutting jobs with largest layoff in years

• High cocoa prices drive smuggling surge, alarming traders

• Intel's new CEO explores big shift in chip manufacturing business

• Peter Thiel joins backing new lender Erebor to rival Silicon Valley Bank

• BlackRock Bitcoin ETF Drives More Revenue Than Its S&P 500 Fund

• The airline seat industry crisis delaying jet deliveries

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Ted Cruz plan to punish states that regulate AI shot down in 99-1 vote

• What did and didn't make it into Senate's final 'big, beautiful bill'

• House GOP Faces Rebellion As Johnson Scrambles To Salvage Trump Tax Bill | ZeroHedge

  The legislation, a multi-trillion-dollar tax-and-spending overhaul, is the product of months of backroom dealing between House and Senate Republicans. If passed, it would represent the most significant domestic achievement of Trump’s presidency to date. But GOP leaders now face resistance from both flanks of their party, from hardline conservatives warning of fiscal betrayal, and moderates fearing political blowback over health care cuts. "We’re working through everybody’s concerns and letting them know this is the best possible product we can produce,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday morning, conceding that he does not yet have the votes to pass even the procedural rule required to begin debate on the bill.

• Latest iteration of big, beautiful bill to limit gambling loss deductions to 90%

• Water found to be wet: Tax breaks for tech giants' data centers mean less income for states

• Baywatch Pay Watch: $500k checks, 6 figure overtime for LA lifeguards

Trump

• Paramount to Pay $16 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit Over ‘60 Minutes’ Interview - WSJ

  Paramount Global has agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with President Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, the company said Tuesday.

• RFK Jr. Says AI Will Approve New Drugs at FDA ‘Very, Very Quickly’

• Trump's Handwritten Message to the Fed: Why Startups Should Pay Attention

Democrats

• Democrats, Animated by Loathing of Trump, Are Driving Their Party to Self-Destruction

  The great Democratic party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and even up to a point Clinton, has given way to an unfeasible ragtag of superannuated tyros, influence peddlers, decayed servitors, and now completely unacceptable extremists personified by the likely nominee to be mayor of New York City, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, an economic Marxist who does not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and expresses sympathy for calls to globalize the intifada. The Democrats have no plausible opponents to Mr. Trump, no policy except Trump-hate, and have carried to its logical extreme the great liberal death wish. Having failed by an unprecedented series of illegalities to defeat Mr. Trump, they have practically destroyed themselves.

Left Angst

• ICEBlock has launched to the top of the App Store

  • ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it

• Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Who Threatened Police Joins Justice Dept

• Don't forget what Silicon Valley tried to do

  The 10-year ban on state AI laws may be dead, but let's not forget that OpenAI and big tech tried to subvert democracy.

• The first American 'scientific refugees' arrive in France

• The White House took down nation's top climate report. Here it is

• RFK Jr.'s health department calls Nature "junk science," cancels subscriptions

• The GOP's spending bill could kill renewable energy projects.

• The Plot to Get RFK

  On the eve before the US Senate reconvenes, a detailed secret trade-association memo plotting the removal of US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has leaked. It reads like a coup attempt against regulatory reform—and they are spending millions to make sure Kennedy is out of office by September. It seems that the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), whose membership includes Pfizer, Merck, Novavax, Vaxcyte, and hundreds of biotech firms that profit from regulatory insulation, has a mole. This article critiques the documented lobbying behavior of the trade group BIO, not the internal operations or clinical data of its member corporations. When the nation’s leading pharmaceutical trade group convenes a closed-door strategy meeting and openly discusses the need to “go to The Hill and lobby that it is time for RFK Jr. to go,” the issue is no longer health policy—it is democratic integrity.

• Trump global aid cuts risk 14M deaths in five years, report says

• Only a problem for Democrats when they're not in power: FCC chair decides inmates and their families must keep paying high phone prices

• 14 Million People Could Die in Next 5 Years Due to USAID Cuts, Study Finds

• The Surprising Reason Rural Hospitals Are Closing

  This apocalypse is happening throughout rural communities across the country. More than 100 rural hospitals have closed in the past decade, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR), a national policy center that works to improve health care payment systems and whose data have been cited by the Bipartisan Policy Center. About one-third of all rural hospitals in the country are at risk of closing because of financial problems. In Alabama, 23 rural hospitals—about half of all of them in the state—are at immediate risk of closing, according to CHQPR. Even more rural hospitals might be in trouble if Congress passes the huge piece of legislation before it, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes significant cuts that would slash Medicaid spending in rural areas by $119 billion over 10 years, according to KFF. Thom Tillis, the U.S. Senator from North Carolina who said he couldn’t support the bill in its current form, said in a statement on June 28 that Congress needed to achieve the tax cuts and spending in the bill “without hurting our rural communities and hospitals.” People often blame rural hospital closures on poor reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medicaid. There’s a reason for that assumption: Just about every hospital loses money on Medicaid and Medicare, since reimbursement rates are low nationwide. But hospitals like the one in Thomasville are struggling not because they serve a large share of poor patients or elderly people on these plans. “When you look at the data, what you see is that Medicare and Medicaid are not the problem,” says Harold Miller, president and CEO of CHQPR. “The problem is private insurers.”

• Pentagon may put SpaceX at the center of a sensor-to-shooter targeting network

• Being Forced to Use Rec.gov Just to Go Camping Is Psychological Warfare

  Every time I try to book a campsite on Recreation.gov, I end up closer to a mental breakdown than a backcountry getaway. I start off dreaming of a quiet weekend off the grid—and end up rage-refreshing tabs like I’m trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets in 2022. Booking on Rec.gov feels like your camp neighbor is playing acoustic guitar at 11 p.m. while you’re wearing ski boots with no socks and getting a bug bite you can’t reach on top of a sunburn.

• Republican Budget Bill Signals New Era in Federal Surveillance

• The Trump administration is trying to eliminate proof of climate change

  • Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down

• DOJ looking at denaturalizing American citizens convicted of certain crimes

• Top F.D.A. Official Overrode Scientists on Covid Shots - The New York Times

  The new documents offer a window into Dr. Prasad’s vision for the agency and his thinking on vaccine policy. The records reveal that F.D.A. staff members concluded that the vaccines were safe and effective based on clinical trials of the shots tested in thousands of people. But Dr. Prasad wrote that there could still be vaccine-related injuries that have yet to be discovered.

• The Bleach Community Is Ready for RFK Jr. To Make Their Dreams Come True

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• CISA warns the Signal clone used by natsec staffers is being attacked

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US drops sanctions on second Russian bulletproof hosting vehicle this year

• US pauses some munitions shipments to Ukraine, including air defense missiles

• How a nuclear attack on the U.S. might unfold, step by step

• I Was Hacked Because I Work on Russia

World

• 90-degree turn brings bridge project to a screeching halt

  This week, however, the engineering talent behind a new bridge in the central Indian city of Bhopal has attracted national attention for all the wrong reasons. A nearly 90-degree turn was built into the railway over-bridge, leaving drivers aghast as they were expected to screech to sudden halts before taking what critics have said are dangerously sharp turns.

• UK eyes new laws as cable sabotage blurs line between war and peace

• Spain and Brazil push global action to tax the super-rich and curb inequality

• Cuba's Power Grid Nears Total Failure

• South Australian Parliment Enacts World-First Political Donations Ban

• Snake Captured on Passenger Plane

  The reptile was found as passengers were boarding Virgin Australia Flight VA337 at Melbourne Airport bound for Brisbane. Snake catcher Mark Pelley said he thought it could be venomous when he approached it in the darkened hold. But it turned out to be a harmless 60cm green tree snake.

• A French region has banned tap water. Is it a warning for the rest of Europe?

• Canada's "Strong Borders Act" Contains Four Mass Surveillance Trojans

• The Eiffel Tower is closed to tourists due to searing heat

• 'We have been mistaken for terrorists': Italy's most controversial rap group

• UK bonds, sterling selloff sharply as worries build over finance minister

• Heathrow substation fire 'caused by fault first identified seven years ago'

• At least 180 aircrew pursuing MoD after cancer diagnoses

Iran / Houthi

• Iran halts cooperation with UN nuclear watchdog

  Tehran has suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian announced Wednesday, according to state media reports. The move marks a significant stepback in Iran's international cooperation after Washington’s dramatic June 21 strikes on its nuclear enrichment facilities. Iranian lawmakers passed a bill to freeze cooperation on July 25. The extent of the bill — and what exactly it contains — remains unclear, but state media said IAEA inspectors will need permission from Iran's Supreme National Security Council to visit Iran's nuclear facilities which will be dependent on "the security of the country's nuclear facilities and that of peaceful nuclear activities" being guaranteed.

Israel

• Removing Hamas from power a condition for Saudi normalization

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• 'They took shrapnel from my heart' – the magnets saving lives in Ukraine

• Russia blocks internet and phones of foreigners who do not submit biometric data

• Researchers home in on origins of Russia's Baltic GPS jamming

China

• Chinese spacecraft begin rendezvous and proximity operations in geostationary orbit.

Health / Medicine

• Adult ADHD is becoming more inclusive, but not overdiagnosed

• WW2 veteran, 106, puts long life down to custard

• As wave of dementia cases looms, Law School looks to preserve elders’ rights

• Novo Nordisk misread the US market for Wegovy, its weight loss sensation

• Higher temperature yoghurt production saves costs and improves shelf life

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Hydrogen sulphide gas restricts SARS-CoV-2 replication in host cells

• Moderna says mRNA flu vaccine sailed through trial, beating standard shot

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• (2013) The End of the Arctic? Ocean Could Be Ice Free by 2015

• Explorer searching for a human-made problem in areas largely untouched by humans

• How to not get eaten by a shark, explained by professional divers

• New toxic metal has been found in homes after L.A. fires: beryllium

• Lantern flies: A Plague of Pests Is Coming for California

• Air pollution linked to lung cancer-driving DNA mutations, study finds

• US to breed billions of sterile screwflies and dump them out of aircraft

• Killer whales, kind gestures: Orcas offer food to humans in the wild

• We've all had parties like that, haven't we? Penguin turns up on beach in Rio de Janeiro, alone and far from home