2025-07-29

etc

• American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX Evacuated at DEN After Landing Gear Collapses

Horseshit

• Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

• 'We want Starlink': from isolation to integration – the Korubo after contact

• The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care

  Everyone talks about the soaring cost of child care (e.g. here, here and here), but have you looked at the soaring cost of pet care? On a recent trip, it cost me about $82 per day to board my dog (a bit less with multi-day discounts). And no, that is not high for northern VA and that price does not include any fancy options or treats! Doggie boarding costs about about the same as staying in a Motel 6.

• Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of 'Mankeeping' (Archive)

  Much of the time, Mr. Lioi said, his straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists, he said, “doing all the emotional labor.” hat particular role now has a name: “mankeeping.” The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.

• What Happened When Hitler Took on Germany's Central Banker

• Neanderthals were not 'hypercarnivores' and feasted on maggots

• 'College hazing' or training? Amid shortage, air traffic recruits wash out

• Use a Password Manager for All Your Secrets, Not Just Logins

  • Centralized blackmail as a service is a growth market

Obit

• Tom Lehrer, mathematician and singer-songwriter known for colorful satire, dies

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Quintessential Urban Design of 'Sesame Street'

• Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler exits amid buyouts | Fox News

  "After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout," Kessler wrote on his Facebook page. "Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss."

  • WaPo's Lead 'Fact-Checker' Is Reportedly Departing and Here Are a Few Doozies Being Left Behind – Twitchy

Musk

• Tesla has signed a $16.5B chip contract with Samsung

  • Musk's Tesla signs $16.5B chip supply deal with Samsung

  • Samsung bags $16.5B next-gen chip build contract with Tesla

• Waymo has blocked off access to the Tesla Diner

• Tesla Readies a Taxi Service in San Francisco–But Not with Robotaxis

• SpaceX employee claims he was fired for flagging 'despicable' safety practices

• Elon Musk's Starlink Is Keeping Modern Slavery Compounds Online

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The Country Where 76% of Cars Sold Are Electric

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Vatican Observatory Looks to the Heavens

• Money, sex and a Buddhist monk: Head Shaolin Temple under investigation

  China’s famed Shaolin Temple announced on Sunday that its abbot is under investigation for suspected embezzlement and “improper relationships” with women, reviving decade-old allegations against the controversial, high-profile monk. hi Yongxin, known as “CEO monk” for his entrepreneurial endeavors that transformed the Buddhist monastery into a commercial empire, is suspected of criminal offenses including embezzlement and misappropriation of project funds and temple assets, the temple’s authority said in a statement.

• In Cameroon, truth-telling spiders untangle the future

• More Women Than Expected Are Genetically Men

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Middle School Cheerleaders Made TikTok Portraying School Shooting, Face Felonies

  By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident. idespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source. n many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate.

  • Unhappy students are supposed to just do it, not talk about it. Having these jerks tell everyone why they did it interferes with the Narrative.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Nearlyfreespeech.net: A quick note to our queer members

  • They were not as welcoming when it came to 2020 election concerns or to doubts about COVID response.

• Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship

• EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google

• The AOL hacking tool that invented phishing

• Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

• Minification Doesn't Matter Much

• 'Quishing' scams dupe millions as cybercriminals turn the QR code bad

• Apple's 'F1: The Movie' Surpasses $500M Box Office Earnings

• Sony sues Tencent for allegedly ripping off 'Horizon' video games

• Google Maps Is Going to Be Less Social Starting in September

• Another Google Pixel 6a catches fire after battery-nerfing update

• Tea app leak worsens with second database exposing user chats

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User

• Programmers Aren't So Humble Anymore–Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You

• Copyright Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Pirating Adult Films for AI Training

  • $350M lawsuit: Meta allegedly used torrents of 2,600 adult films for AI

  • Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says

• AI intensifies battle for talent, housing and investments in San Francisco

• Google rolls out new Gemini model that can run on robots locally

• Mistral's new "environmental audit" shows how much AI is hurting the planet

• Lawyers for Chicago Housing Authority used ChatGPT to cite nonexistent case

• Believers in Manifestation Are Using A.I. To Visualize Their Dream Lives

• Grok and Groupthink: Why AI Is Getting Less Reliable, Not More

• AI will soon be able to audit science – what will that mean for public trust?

• New usage limits for Claude Code

• Is SoftBank Still Backing OpenAI?

  You can weasel-word all you want about how nobody has directly reported that SoftBank was or was not part of Abilene. This is a deliberate, intentional deception, perpetrated by OpenAI and SoftBank, who deliberately misled both the public and the press as a means of keeping up the appearance that SoftBank was deeply involved in (and financially obligated to) the Abilene site.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline

• A secretive space plane is set to launch and test quantum navigation technology

• Ars spoke with the military's chief orbital traffic cop–here's what we learned

• Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas: What We Know Now

  The Rubin observations also show hints of a dusty tail, but oddly this elongation points directly toward the Sun. Typically, the push of the Sun’s radiation moves dust in comet’s tails so that it points away from the Sun. Bolin suggests that this may indicate “that massive particles are being ejected in the solar direction, and they’re too heavy to be blown by the solar radiation at the distance the comet is from the Sun, so they’re continuing to go forward a little bit toward the Sun.”

  As Comet 3I/ATLAS continues on its way, it will pass relatively close to Jupiter (0.36 au), Mars (1.5 au), and Venus (0.7 au), but its closest approach to Earth later this year is farther away, at 1.8 au. It’ll therefore be relatively faint in our skies come December. oreover, when the comet reaches its closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, it will be almost directly behind the Sun as seen from Earth. That will prevent Earth-based observations just when interesting behavior might be occurring. For example, Comet 2I/Borisov shed a small fragment at about the time of its perihelion passage; such fragmentation around perihelion is not uncommon among comets.

Crypto con games

• Crypto lenders dial up risk with 'microfinance on steroids'

• PayPal to Roll Out 'Pay with Crypto' Feature for Merchants

Economicon / Business / Finance

• JPMorgan spooks fintechs with plans to charge for access to customer data

• MicroStrategy Sells $2.5B of Preferred Stock

• Welcome to the Grocery Store Where Prices Change 100 Times a Day

• How the diamond industry lost its sparkle

• Over 2 Trillion Dollars are Wasted on Blue-chip Memes

  These days, the media is struggling to keep up with WallStreetBets' latest meme stock of the day, whether it is OpenDoor, Kohl's, Krispy Kreme, GoPro, or Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle. The bigger story of the trillions in acceptable speculations sucking most of the capital out of the market is being ignored. The result is a massive imbalance in capital allocation.Traditional meme stocks are simple: Reddit picks a target, chaos ensues. But there's another breed of inflated assets I call 'Blue-chip meme stocks'. hese aren't your cousin's YOLO plays. They're respectable companies with boardrooms and everything, except they're riding massive speculation waves based on compelling future stories. he money flooding into these stocks is staggering. We're talking trillions of dollars that could be going elsewhere, but instead are chasing the next big narrative.

  Take Circle, the stablecoin company. They're not even the market leader, yet their stock is up 600% since going public two months ago. The kicker? They're trading at 23 times sales with gross margins that are worse than my local supermarket.

• The Bull Market for Economists Is Over. It's an Ominous Sign for the Economy

• JPMorgan says fintech middlemen like Plaid are 'massively taxing' its APIs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Bill Would Fine Social Media Companies $5M per Day for Not Fighting 'Terrorism'

  The idea that the federal government even talked to social media platforms about their moderation was a major scandal. After the Twitter Files leak revealed that the Biden administration was privately leaning on one platform to suppress "misinformation," the courts blocked officials from communicating with social media companies for several months on free speech grounds. bipartisan bill, however, would make it mandatory for social media companies to work with the federal government. The Stopping Terrorists Online Presence and Holding Accountable Tech Entities (STOP HATE) Act would require companies to provide triennial reports on their moderation policies—and violations they catch—to the U.S. attorney general. he bill requires companies to issue specific policies for groups the federal government designates as terrorists and the director of national intelligence to also begin reporting on terrorist usage of social media. Companies would be fined $5 million per day that they fail to comply. eps. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) and Don Bacon (R–Neb.) had first proposed the bill in November 2023. It died in committee at the time. Gottheimer and Bacon announced that they would be reintroducing the bill at a press conference on Wednesday alongside Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

• FCC Paramount/Skydance Decision Redoes Broadcast Journalism by Bureaucratic Fiat

Trump

• Trump reduces Russia deadline to end Ukraine invasion to ‘10 to 12 days’ from original 50: ‘No reason to wait that long.’

• Trump Administration Weighs Patent System Overhaul to Raise Revenue

Democrats

• DNC Tweets, Then Deletes, Chart Showing Soaring Grocery Prices Under Biden

  The Democratic National Committee on Thursday posted a chart blaming President Donald Trump for high grocery prices—a chart that actually showed prices soaring during Joe Biden's presidency and plateauing under Trump. The committee soon deleted the post following widespread mockery on social media.

• Democrats' Rating Collapses To Generational Low As Midterm Cycle Nears; New Poll Finds | ZeroHedge

  Democrats are entering the early stages of the 2026 midterm cycle in a state of full-blown crisis mode. New polling shows the party's support continuing to implode, as top party leaders double down on their commitment to the far-left woke ideology. At the same time, an increasing share of the party is openly embracing socialism, Marxism, and the destruction of America's foundational values - not viable messaging to connect with law-abiding working-class citizens. A new Wall Street Journal poll shows the Democratic Party's image has sunk to its lowest point in over three decades. About 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the party, the highest level since the survey began in 1990, while only 33% view it favorably.

Left Angst

• What Happens When Doctors Can't Trust the Government?

• ‘Sexile’ in the United States: Hundreds of transgender Americans seek refuge from Trump in Canada | U.S. | EL PAÍS English

  many American citizens have considered fleeing to their northern neighbor. The avalanche of aid requests received by Rainbow Railroad represents “the largest number received in a single day from a single country,” Chan notes. To put this in perspective, at the height of the Afghanistan crisis (in August 2021), the peak number of daily requests was 119. “So far in 2025, we have received 3,524 applications from U.S. residents; a 994% increase compared to the same period last year,” Chan emphasizes. To give an idea of the scale of the crisis, the organization receives an average of 10,000 applications annually from around the world. Kreager’s passport and birth certificate don’t reflect her name or gender: “I started hearing stories of trans people with X markers [indicating that a person does not identify as male or female] on their documents — like me — who were getting their passports returned shredded when they tried to update them,” she says. A rumor about the possible implementation of martial law, which began circulating on social media in April, led her to decide to leave the country, as the idea of living in a police state without proper documentation did not seem like a viable option.

• The Great Canadian Rights Grab

  To keep the US happy, Mark Carney’s Liberal government is pushing Bill C-2 — expanding surveillance, limiting refugee protections, and eroding privacy in the name of national security. It’s Canada’s own PATRIOT Act, minus the excuse of an actual attack.

• The Federal Reserve Is Right

  According to multiple news sources, the Republican administration has recently considered removing Chairman Jerome Powell from his position at the Federal Reserve. This recent rise in tension between the government and the Federal Reserve stems from the idea that the Federal Reserve should lower interest rates in the US in order to stimulate the economy. The main disagreement between the Federal Reserve and the government revolves around the effects of tariffs on the economy and the appropriate response of a central bank. Let’s discuss why the Federal Reserve is right.

• NASA faces brain drain as thousands exit under voluntary resignation scheme

• Doge builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations

• Harvard Is Said to Be Open to Spending Up to $500M. To Resolve Trump Dispute

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Delta Pilot Is Arrested in Cockpit After Flight Lands in San Francisco

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US-EU Deal sets 15% tariffs on most goods

  • EU and US agree trade deal, with 15% tariffs for European exports to America

  • EU-US tariffs: five key takeaways from the trade deal

  • US-EU trade deal reached: EU drops tariffs on US to zero, US to tariff EU 15%

• Papering over strains, US and allies prep for Taiwan war

  • Britain 'ready to fight' over Taiwan, Defence Secretary suggests

• Air Force rolls out sex and age-neutral fitness test for EOD techs

• U.S. Coast Guard Responds to Chinese Research Vessel Off Alaska

• National security experts urge US admin to restrict Nvidia H20 sales to China

World

• Google failed to warn 10M of Turkey earthquake

• People are using Sam's face in Death Stranding to bypass UK age restrictions

  • VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

  • UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

  • VPNs top App Store charts as Online Safety Act age checks kick in

• Naval Group Suffers Cyberattack: Hackers Claim Access to French Warship Systems

• Commission preliminarily finds Temu in breach of the Digital Services Act

• Meta's grand WhatsApp fintech experiment in India has fizzled

• How Spain's Blackout Sparked New Political Currents Online

• The Caribbean islands that give you a passport if you buy a home

Iran / Houthi

• Iranian Supreme Leader sleeps and gets 'high on substances' all day

Israel

• Gazans Are Finished with Hamas

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Silent Crow claims to have hacked Aeroflot

  • Russia's Aeroflot cancels flights after pro-Ukraine hackers claim cyber-attack

  • Cyberattack on Russia's Aeroflot

  • Cyberattack on Russian Airline Aeroflot

  • Cyberattack of Russian airline Aeroflot causes chaos – 100 flights cancelled

• Telegram responds to investigation linking them to Russian security services

• Russia Counters Ukrainian Drones by Turning Off Russians' Mobile Internet

• Moscow cancels Navy Day parade in St. Petersburg as nearly 100 drones reportedly downed across western Russia.

• Brutal punishments meted out to Russian soldiers unwilling to fight for Putin

China

• Big Brother gets new powers in China with digital ID system

• Can China become a defender of free trade?

• How A Chinese Border Town Keeps Russia's Economy Afloat

• China adds new satellites to Guowang constellation, eyes accelerated launch rate

Health / Medicine

• Can zebrafish help humans regrow hearing cells?

• New neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull

• Even megastars like Venus Williams get the health insurance blues

• You Don't Remember Being a Baby, but Your Brain Was Making Memories

• Sight of someone potentially infectious causes immune response

• CDC Ties 85 Cases of THC-Related Symptoms to Wisconsin Restaurant

• The one, big unanswered question about Ozempic

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Measles isn't just dangerous, it may erase your immune system

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Drying Planet

• Listening to the Nonhuman World: On Strategies for Saving the Biosphere

• The man spending $1B on climate action

• A change in the Southern Ocean structure can have climate implications

• Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

• New DNA Map of the Pistachio Could Create Better Varieties

• Researchers planned a test to dim sunlight. Wanted to 'avoid scaring'

• Ancient river landscapes under Antarctica may stabilize ice sheet

• Tampa FL hits 100 degrees for first time in recorded weather history