2025-07-12

etc

• Denver Museum finds dinosaur vertibra under its parking lot

Horseshit

• Hertz and Other Rental Car Agencies Turn to AI for Damage Detection

• Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?

  • 50+ years of religious proselytizing, and social opprobrium towards reproduction? Just a guess.

• Little videos are cooking our brains: How do we reclaim our attention?

• Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just early

• What's going on at Sun Valley, the 'summer camp for billionaires'?

• Trainspotting's Irvine Welsh: We've become 'dumbed-down machines'

celebrity gossip

• 'Hand To God, I Know The Names': Alan Dershowitz Says He Knows Who's On The Epstein List | ZeroHedge

  "Let me tell you, I know for a fact documents are being suppressed. And they're being suppressed to protect the individuals. I know the names of the individuals. I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them. But I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But I - hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong."

• Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos’ ‘edited’ wedding photos send internet wild: ‘How many thumbs you got, girl?’

Musk

• Why Grok Fell in Love with Hitler

  • Musk's Chatbot Started Spouting Nazi Propaganda. That's Not the Scariest Part

  • Tests reveal Grok 4 answers appear to align with Elon Musk's personal opinions

• France launches criminal investigation into Musk's X over algorithm manipulation

• Elon Musk's Tesla to open first India store in Mumbai on July 15

• xAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

• Musk says Robotaxi coming to CA, but no one other than shareholders believe him

Electric / Self Driving cars

• China's biggest car rental company now offers autonomous cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• It's Time to Let Go of 'African American'

  I’m no fan of performative identity politics, and I think racial preferences are long past their expiration date. Yet I don’t think the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani did anything wrong when, as was reported last week, he checked off “Black or African American” on a college application. As a man of South Asian descent who spent the first part of his life living in Uganda, he was within his rights to call himself African American. The problem is that the term appeared on the application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It’s time to let it go.

• Namaste, fascists! The racist history of yoga

  It was never Indian and was loved by white supremacists. Fascist Yoga, is Stewart Home’s spirited debunking of the middle class’s favourite exercise

  Those around D’Annunzio in Fiume formed a group called YOGA, Home says. They were mystics and nudists who danced and hugged trees and believed in a spiritual hierarchy based on the Hindu caste system. The group emblazoned its shortlived weekly paper with swastikas — they believed the swastika to be a symbol of their Aryan ancestors after it was discovered scrawled on ancient artefacts. The Nazis used it for the same reason. Like YOGA, the Nazis also twisted Hinduism. They tried to use it to justify the Holocaust. Home shows how Heinrich Himmler, the chief planner of the Final Solution, was influenced by a German Indologist called Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who was enchanted by Hinduism. Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, which sought to promote a new religion, a fusion of paganism and Nazi ideas. When writing in 1934 about the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text, Hauer said it called on men to meet the hereditary or “innate duty” demanded of them by their caste and fate, even if that deed is steeped in guilt. Himmler believed that his caste — the SS — were called upon by fate to exterminate Jews.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Research-integrity sleuths say their work is being twisted to undermine science

  • "Science" wants us to trust that is omnicognizant and omnibenevolent.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple Bug Prevents You from Telling People About Dave and Buster's

• Intel CPU owners might be crashing "because of the summer heat" says Firefox dev

  • Intel Raptor Lake Crashing from EU Heat Wave

• AMD identifies Transient Scheduler Attacks affecting data-centre, consumer CPUs

• Subnautica studio co-founder says he's suing parent company Krafton

  • Krafton slams ex-Subnautica 2 execs – who now say they're suing

• JPMorgan Tells Fintechs They Have to Pay Up for Customer Data

• Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff

• Wikimedia Foundation considers closing Wikinews

• FBI Atlanta Seizes Major Video Game Piracy Websites

• McDonald's 'McHire' chatbot records accessed via '123456' password

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Tandy Corporation, Part 3 Becoming IBM Compatible

• All Trains in the USA are vulnerable to wireless RF command injection

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• At Amazon's Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I

• Study: Apple's newest AI model flags health conditions with up to 92% accuracy

• Coding is dead: UW computer science program rethinks curriculum for the AI era

• A.I. Can See You in Ways You Can't See Yourself

• Anthropic Is Bleeding Out

  Though I recommend you go and read the previous analysis, the long and short of it is that Anthropic increased the costs on its largest customer — a coding startup — about 8 days (on May 30 2025) after launching two models (Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4) specifically dedicated to coding.

  In simpler terms, CCusage is a relatively-accurate barometer of how much you are costing Anthropic at any given time, with the understanding that its costs may (we truly have no idea) be lower than the API prices they charge, though I add that based on how Anthropic is expected to lose $3 billion this year (that’s after revenue!) there’s a chance that it’s actually losing money on every API call. Nevertheless, there’s one much, much, much bigger problem: Anthropic is very likely losing money on every single Claude Code customer, and based on my analysis, appears to be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per customer.

  In my research, I have found more than thirty different reported instances of users that have spent in excess of the amount they pay Anthropic by a factor of no less than 100%. For sake of your sanity, I will split them up by their paid subscription, and how much more than it they spent.

• AI Running on a Gaming GPU Now Classifies and Values Ancient Chinese Ceramics

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Bold Mission to Hunt for Aliens on Venus Is Happening

• China Has Attempted What Might Be First-Ever Orbital Refueling of a Satellite

• Astronomers race to study interstellar interloper

Crypto con games

• Hubble Is Getting Old. Should We Try to Save It?

• Binance Aided Trump Crypto Firm Before Founder CZ Sought Pardon

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Florida AG Probes Robinhood Crypto

• America's fastest-growing suburbs are about to get expensive

• Delta Strips Engines Off New Airbus Jets to Overcome US Shortage

• Does working from home kill company culture?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• "A heist": Senator calls out Texas for trying to steal shuttle from Smithsonian

• 'Click-to-cancel' rule is blocked

  • How Big Business killed the 'click-to-cancel' FTC rule, which would have saved

• L.A. became the epicenter of America's homeless crisis

• EPA Promises 'Total Transparency on the Issues of Geoengineering and Contrails'

  This acknowledges that contrails can create artificial cloud cover, but the EPA downplays the scale and impact, calling it a “small net warming effect” and avoiding mention of sunlight obstruction or sky whitening, terms commonly used by critics. The EPA has also created an online resource “focused specifically on solar geoengineering activities, which involve cooling the Earth by reflecting sunlight back to space, usually through injecting gases, like sulfur dioxide, into the upper atmosphere where they form reflective particles.” Administrator Zeldin said his EPA “shares the significant reservations many Americans have when it comes to geoengineering activities.”

• US customs duties top $100B for first time in a fiscal year

Trump

• Republican Attorney General is investigating why AI chatbots don't like Trump

Democrats

• How up to 300k migrant children have disappeared in the US

  Insiders have exposed the “conveyor belt” of rape and abuse of vulnerable migrant children in the US under President Joe Biden’s border free-for-all to The Post, now being cleared up by President Trump. Following federal “border czar” Tom Homan’s recent revelation on Miranda Divine’s “Pod Force One” podcast that children had been trafficked across the country with little oversight before Trump took office, whistleblowers have exposed how the terrifying scheme works. Between 2019 and 2023, 448,000 unaccompanied minors were encountered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to its figures, who were then transferred into the US.

  “Once they get there, non-government contractors [private companies] look at the paperwork and say, ‘This is their sponsor, this is where they are to be delivered,’” Morgan Lerette, a former Blackwater contractor and Army intelligence officer, told The Post. “But they weren’t confirming that it was a real person, family, or addresses that was given — some addresses were storage units or strip clubs. “The officers were literally handing the kids right back off to the other side of the smuggling rings in the US,” he alleged.

Left Angst

• The US's New Shipbuilding Strategy Is Unlikely to Work

• Freed from ICE detention, Mahmoud Khalil files $20M claim against Trump admin

• The Big Beautiful Bill will kill one profession: Gambling

• CNN and MSNBC Completely Ignore Attack on ICE Agents

  On the Fourth of July, 11 left-wing activists mounted a domestic terror attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. If you hadn’t heard about it yet, you might just be a CNN or MSNBC viewer; neither network has devoted a single minute of airtime to covering the attack, though CNN managed to devote a sentence to it in an online story about another attack on immigration authorities. Should that not strike you as unusual, imagine this scenario: 11 members of a right-wing militia group open fire on an FBI field office on a major holiday, and a responding police officer is shot in the neck. This glaring omission is particularly notable given the two news organizations’ relentlessly critical coverage of ICE and persistent warnings about right-wing extremism and violence.

• Got Raw Milk? Before MAHA and Goop, There Was 'The Milk Guy'

• Rust Belt Voters Are Sick of Both Parties

• Sea Ice Data Cut-Off: Climate Alarmists Panic, but Is It a Crisis?

• U.S. abandons hunt for signal of cosmic inflation

• How a US mission to push a deal in Congo unravelled

• Surge in U.S. Concern About Immigration Has Abated

• Why tariffs haven't raised inflation much (yet)

• Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff

• Households will pay an average of $2,400 more for goods this year

• NIH suspends pathogen studies over 'gain-of-function' concerns

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Security Guard convicted after shooting man for failing to comply with Covid protocols

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• America is coming after Chinese it accuses of hacking

World

• At least 13 may have killed themselves over UK Post Office wrongful convictions

• UK Online Safety Act 'not up to scratch' on misinformation, warn MPs

• Three years after Abe's shooting, where do things stand?

• Overtourism in Japan, and How It Hurts Small Businesses

• Afghan taxi drivers beat the heat with handmade air coolers

• Baby bust: Why the French want fewer children – or none at all

• The double-edged sword of a strong euro

• Air India Probe Puts Early Focus on Pilots' Actions and Plane's Fuel Switches

  • Air India Crash Report Confirms Fuel Was Cut Off Before Accident

• Jamie Dimon has a blunt message for Europe: 'You're losing'

• Scrap the asylum system—and build something better

  Rich countries need to separate asylum from labour migration

• EU backs down on digital taxes

Iran / Houthi

• Iran expels half a million Afghans in 16-day stretch

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• European leaders announce new equity fund for Ukraine and urge investment

• It's hunting season in orbit as Russia's killer satellites mystify skywatchers

Health / Medicine

• Genetic testing of critically ill adults can yield surprises

• Woman takes 10x dose of turmeric, gets hospitalized for liver damage

  • Comments point out she was taking concentrated distillate of tumeric.

• Anxiety drug pregabalin killed my son – and hundreds more are dying from it

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• FDA: Full approval for Moderna's Covid vaccine for children, limited eligibility

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate science in a rapidly changing world

• Moa hype: Giant, flightless bird is next target for de-extinction company Biosciences

• How Hot Can It Get? Scientists Are Struggling to Find an Answer

• Offsetting fossil fuel reserves by planting trees is not a viable strategy

• The Future of Health on a Damaged Planet

• Datacenters feeling the heat as climate risk boils over

• Texas ignores climate change at our own peril

• 'It's cheap but it's not disposable': why fast tech is a growing waste problem