2025-09-08

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• Near-Complete Mammoth Skeleton Discovered in Natural Trap Cave

Horseshit

• As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

• I was a chess prodigy trapped in a religious cult

• The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life

• Forget love triangles. Meet the 'polycule' with 80 people in it

• How the Brain Tells Imagination from Reality

• Why the Airbus A350 Has That Black Mask Around the Cockpit Windows

• The U.S. town with a pumpkin-based economy

• Neurons that drive sociable behavior in children and teens turn off in adulthood

• A Six-Story Apartment Building Is Tearing This Small California Town Apart

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• More and more people are tuning the news out: 'Now I don't have that anxiety

• Russia Invaded Wikipedia

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Robot lawnmower designed to also pick fruit and throw your dog a ball

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Teen gamer who 'performed miracles' set to become first millennial saint

  • Teen coder made first millennial Catholic saint

  • Teen 'God's influencer' has become the first millennial saint

  • Carlo Acutis, nicknamed 'God's influencer' becomes the first 'millennial' saint

• One of the most sacred places is being turned into a luxury mega-resort

  For years, visitors would venture up Mount Sinai with a Bedouin guide to watch the sunrise over the pristine, rocky landscape or go on other Bedouin-led hikes. Now one of Egypt's most sacred places - revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims - is at the heart of an unholy row over plans to turn it into a new tourism mega-project. Known locally as Jabal Musa, Mount Sinai is where Moses is said to have been given the Ten Commandments. Many also believe that this is the place where, according to the Bible and the Quran, God spoke to the prophet from the burning bush. The 6th century St Catherine's Monastery, run by the Greek Orthodox Church, is also there - and seemingly its monks will stay on now that Egyptian authorities, under Greek pressure, have denied wanting to close it. However, there is still deep concern about how the long-isolated, desert location - a Unesco World Heritage site comprising the monastery, town and mountain - is being transformed. Luxury hotels, villas and shopping bazaars are under construction there.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Northwestern's Contract with Qatar Forbids School from Criticizing Regime

• Larry Ellison Is Spending Billions to Reshape Oxford and His Own Legacy

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Burger King security issues DMCA-ed and taken down

• Google is facing a $425 million fine, not from Europe for once but from a federal court in California, for continuing to track millions of people for years after they had turned off the tracking feature.

• EU Fines Google $3.5B; Must Divest Part of Ad-Tech Business

• Whatever happened to ¡No Pasarán!?

• RTX 5090 128 GB GPU Spotted At $13,200 Per Piece

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• I’m done after 2 dead Intels

  The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s current CPUs just are not stable.

• VIC 20 Ultima I

  The original game was created in 1980 by Richard Garriott a.k.a. Lord British, with Kenneth W. Arnold contributing the assembly-language routines for the map view built of graphic tiles. This VIC 20 version is based on the 1986 full-assembler remake for the Apple II and Commodore 64, which upgraded the visuals and gave the game a look more in line with Ultima IV, the latest release in the series at the time. An Atari 800 conversion had appeared earlier, in 1983, with slightly different graphics style. Because of the VIC 20’s hardware limitations, this version borrows some stylistical choices from the Atari and the original 1980 Apple II release.

• Splitting a long string in lines efficiently

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• We risk a deluge of AI-written 'science' pushing corporate interests

• Google AI Mode to Become Default for Google Search Soon

• New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

• FTC to Review AI Chatbot Risks with Focus on Privacy Harms

• Business Insider yanked 40 essays with suspect bylines. Are they related?

• Zuckerberg: If AI progress keeps accelerating, our investment may exceed $600B

• Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction?

• AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It's the end of the career ladder

• 'Existential crisis': how Google's shift to AI has upended the online news model

  • Yes, its "online" and now "AI" that's the cause of the "news crisis".... nothing to do with the total subsumption of the media and advertising industries into a vast propaganda machine pushing "you will own nothing and like it" nihilism to the exclusion of all else.

• Fantasy or faith? One company's AI-generated Bible content stirs controversy

• Copyright threats force AI firms to consider stronger deals with publishers

• Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

• ASML becomes Mistral AI's top shareholder

• What if the AI stockmarket blows up?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• JetBlue chooses Amazon's Project Kuiper for faster, free in-flight Wi-Fi

Economicon / Business / Finance

• How–and Why–U.S. Capitalism Is Unlike Any Other

• Facing stiff competition, remote workers up their game

• Barnes and Noble to acquire Books Inc, saving 174-year-old store from bankruptcy

• Is the US already in a Recession?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• With no federal facial recognition law, states rush to fill void

• Industry Groups Call on Congress to Renew Cybersecurity Law Before Expiration

• Treasury Secretary warns of massive refunds if Supreme Court voids Trump tariffs

Trump

• President Trump Was an FBI Informant Against Epstein

  House Speaker Mike Johnson made a stunning revelation Thursday in response to questions from CNN’s Manu Raju about President Donald Trump’s use of the term “hoax” to describe the ongoing controversy surrounding the Epstein files. In defending the president, Johnson disclosed that Trump had once acted as an FBI informant against Jeffrey Epstein—a fact that has never before been publicly acknowledged by a sitting congressional leader. “What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said. “He has never said or suggested or implied—I’ve talked to him about this many times, many times. He is horrified. It’s been misrepresented. He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself.” “When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” Johnson said, appearing to confirm for the first time that Trump had assisted federal authorities in building a case against Epstein.

• Trump Says He Will Sanction Russia After Largest Air Attack of the War

Left Angst

• Postal traffic to U.S. fell 80% after gov stopped exemption on low-value parcels

  • Postal traffic to US down by over 80% amid tariffs, UN says

  • Postal traffic to US down by 81% amid tariffs

• South Korean workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home

  • South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

• US to target more businesses after Hyundai raid

• Trump Tried to Kill the Infrastructure Law. Now He’s Getting Credit for Its Projects. - The New York Times

  the new signs “are a voluntary Amtrak initiative, updating outdated signage posted at the project locations listed previously, following the change in presidential administrations earlier this year.” The signs note, in a smaller font, that the projects in question are “funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” the official name of the legislation that Mr. Trump tried to derail.

• Sean Duffy orders NASA employees "do not let safety be the enemy of progress"

• Detroit's Carmakers to Save Billions in Emissions Rollback

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

World

• India's honk-happy drivers are switching to even louder horns

• Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube

• Undersea cables cut in Red Sea, disrupting internet access in Asia and Mideast

  • Microsoft cloud services disrupted by Red Sea cable cuts

• Warsaw opens metro station 'express' library to get commuters off their phones

• Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death

• Czech police catch up with 'phantom racing car driver'

Israel

• Takeaways from Israeli strike on Gaza hospital killing journalists and medics

• Homeless and Hungry, Gazans Fear a Repeat of 1948 History

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Second known tanker carrying sanctioned Russian Arctic LNG berths in China

• Inflatable tanks and flat-pack guns – inside Ukraine's decoy war

• Russia Created a Mothership Drone Controlled via Starlink

China

• Chinese Hackers Pretended to Be a Top U.S. Lawmaker During Trade Talks

Health / Medicine

• Americans face biggest increase in health insurance costs in 15 years

• Breaking a sweat: Using chloride in sweat to help diagnose cystic fibrosis

• Why more old people are dying after falls

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Tropical deforestation is associated with considerable heat-related mortality

• Time for a Demotion - The American Scholar

  Much of what we “know” about comparisons between animal and human minds comes from the equivalent of comparing apples and meteorites. Webb points out that most laboratories studying animal cognition use intellectually handicapped subjects. From beagles to monkeys to rats, lab animals are typically raised in boring, stressful, sterile environments—conditions proven to cause physical damage to any brain. Often these poor animals aren’t fed properly. Webb worked in a primate lab, where animals are often kept at 85 percent of their normal body weight—supposedly to motivate them to perform for a food reward. “Imagine depriving a child of food or water before subjecting them to a series of math tests,” Webb writes.

• Eden Project wildflower centre issues climate warning as it marks 25th year

• Repeated heatwaves can age you as much as smoking or drinking

  • Heat Waves Make People Age Faster

• When Australian scientists almost brought back the extinct gastric brooding frog

• Macaws learn by watching interactions, a skill never seen in animals before

  • "never seen?" watch a litter of puppies

• Air pollution directly linked to increased dementia risk

• This is the world's biggest animal migration: Few outsiders have seen it

• A new mega-earthquake hotspot could be forming beneath the Atlantic

• Opposition to energy transition driven by local concerns rather than populism

• Floods Kept Coming. He Needed to Grow a Crop That Would Thrive in Water –Or Quit

• The words we use to talk about nature are disappearing. Here's why that matters

  • what does "species" mean? How many human species are there if you use the same standard applied to spotted owls or kangaroo rats?

• Dark-Colored Cars Can Raise Urban Air Temperatures by Several Degrees