2025-09-14

Horseshit

• The Mythical Creatures of London

• Why author John Grisham is chronicling the life of Robert Roberson in 'SHAKEN'

• Living in a tiny electric van for three years

• Company That Bought Publishers Clearing House Won't Pay Past Prize Winners

  • Publishers Clearing House bankruptcy leaves lifetime winners without payments

• Zodiac Sign Is 2k Year Out of Date

• Strategies to make family dinners stress-free every night

• America's Largest Homebuilders Shift the Cost of Shoddy Construction to Buyers

• 'Someone must know this guy': four-year wedding crasher mystery solved

• Does Society Have Too Many Rules?

• Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think

• Jef Raskin's cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer

• Are Highway Miles Any Better for Your Car?

• Did a Brooklyn couple kill a neighbor's trees for a better view in Maine?

• First telepathy device lets people communicate without speaking

• Prosopometamorphopsia Is a Rare Disorder Where People See Other Faces as Dragons

• Giant lenses in the sky

  Scientists at BAE Systems are researching future technology which would enable aircraft to use lasers to create ‘virtual lenses’ in the sky which could be used for long-distance reconnaissance and for deflecting attacks from high-energy laser beams. However, the potential uses for the system are not limited to defence. Scientists at BAE Systems are working on research to develop a military airborne system which could be used to greatly increase over the horizon surveillance range and to deflect enemy laser attacks. Called the Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens (LDAL) concept, the system has been developed by technologists at the BAE’s military aircraft facility in Warton, Lancashire. The system works by simulating naturally occurring phenomena and temporarily - and reversibly - changing the Earth’s atmosphere into a lens-like structures to magnify or change the path of electromagnetic waves such as light and radio signals.

• Speculation grows on Satoshi Nakamoto's return as quantum threatens Bitcoin

celebrity gossip

• The Untold Story of Mike Lynch's Tragic Boat Sinking

  • I'm pretty sure I've linked at least a dozen stories over the last couple years, dunno how "untold" it is.

• UK fires ambassador to US Peter Mandelson over Epstein links

• Larry Ellison, the tech world's great survivor

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Extremism and Radicalisation in the Manosphere: Beta Uprising

• Why people embrace conspiracy theories: It's about community, not gullibility

• How to avoid seeing disturbing content on social media

• The Bluesky-ization of the American left

  The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors. Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity. Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)”, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.

  Practically all the important progressives — academics, commentators, activists, politicians — are on Bluesky, talking to a much smaller audience than they used to have on Twitter. But what they say just doesn’t seem to matter at all. “They’re dragging your ass on Bluesky” is a statement that strikes fear into the heart of practically no one. A mob denouncing you as transphobic, racist, misogynist, etc. on Bluesky will have essentially no chance of negatively impacting your career. And yet the progressives on Bluesky have retained all the habits of speech, thought, and behavior that characterized the high cancel-culture era of the late 2010s. For most of my life, liberals were known as the nice guys of American politics.

  Within this little hothouse world that American progressives have created for themselves, there’s not much to do except try to cancel each other. Meanwhile, the broader country is moving on without them, and not in a good direction. One of the reasons opposition to Donald Trump’s executive overreach and harmful policies has been weak in his second term in office is that progressive writers are hanging out on Bluesky trying (and failing) to cancel Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver. Progressives need to snap out of it. They need to realize that the late 2010s were a very special time that will not be repeated again in our lifetime, and that they need to go back to the older tools of persuasion, compromise, organization, and effective governance, instead of sitting around saying nasty things about each other until the country collapses around our ears.

Musk

• SpaceX Starlink satellite photobombs orbital view of secret Chinese air base

• XAI lays off 500 workers from data annotation team

• Elon Musk calls for dissolution of parliament at far-right rally in London

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Shell develops EV fluid tech that enables sub-10-minute charging

• Are EVs causing car sickness – and what can be done?

• How Ethiopia is becoming an unlikely leader in the electric vehicle revolution

• Used E.V. Sales Take Off as Prices Plummet

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Inventor says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying'

• Humanoid robots showcase skills at Ancient Olympia

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Vatican gathers big thinkers ahead of first-ever pop concert

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Children learn video gaming skills at school

• "Learning how to Learn" will be next generation's most needed skill

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths

• Employee Who Leaked 'Spider-Man' Blu-ray Sentenced to Nearly 5 Years Prison

• Account for Externalities | Matt Mullenweg

  My plea to investors in open-source businesses is this: when a business is built on top of open source, incorporate a restorative investment percentage back into the projects critical to the end-user experience of what you’re offering customers. In WordPress, we call this Five for the Future, but it doesn’t have to be five percent; it could be 0.1%. Plan for it when modeling your expected IRR hurdle from an investment. Then, a few years down the line, when the small percentages start to add up, you won’t face a big catch-up or gap. This underinvestment is itself an externality. It doesn’t appear on the balance sheet, but it can manifest in black swan events, such as security breaches or remote code exploits. Technical debt is one of the largest unaccounted-for externalities in the world today. Engineering, in the long run, is primarily a craft of maintenance rather than creation. The bulk of the cost of something comes from its upkeep over time.

• Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

• Facebook's settlement payments are going out. Here's what to expect

• Video games are taking longer to make, but why?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI's spending spree powers the tech industry. Oracle is the latest winner

• 'It feels like, almost, he's here': How AI is changing the way we grieve

• How 'overworked, underpaid' humans train Google's AI to seem smart

• Why OpenAI's solution to AI hallucinations would kill ChatGPT tomorrow

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• James Webb Space Telescope reveals something strange on comet 3I/ATLAS

  The telescope's initial observations suggested that 3I/ATLAS has one of the highest carbon dioxide (CO2) to water (H2O) ratios ever recorded in a comet. This unusual chemistry, if confirmed, could shed light on 3I/ATLAS' mysterious origins beyond our solar system.

• NASA punts decision on Mars sample return to next administration

• CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space | Jeff Geerling

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Big Brands Play Down Their Americanness Abroad

• Fitch strips France of its 'double A' rating

• Microsoft mandates return to office by 2026

• The Starbucks Turnaround That Has Baristas and Customers Steamed

• Casey's convenience stores are among America's largest pizza chains

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Tobacco-style warning labels for social media move closer to California law

• CISA program gave out $20k+ payments to unqualified employees, auditor says

  The OIG said that the systemic failure to comply with federal regulations and CISA's own requirements for the Incentive program led to around $1.41 million in unallowed back payments to 348 recipients between fiscal years 2020 through 2024. The program paid out more than $138 million in total during those years.

• California lawmakers pass landmark bill that will test Gavin Newsom on AI

• California advances effort to check kids' ages online amid safety concerns

Trump

• Five Republican factions jostle for the President's favor

Democrats

• Mamdani, If Elected Mayor, Pledges to Order N.Y.P.D. To Arrest Netanyahu

Left Angst

• People lost jobs for saying "Lockdowns are a bad idea"; because of organized Leftist conformity drives... People are losing jobs due to social media posts about Charlie Kirk

  • NBC News Reports Teachers Are Being Fired Just for ‘Sharing Opinions’ About Killing of Charlie Kirk

  • Several people fired after clampdown on speech over Charlie Kirk shooting

  • Mass Firings for Charlie Kirk Comments Appear Coordinated

• Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme

  According to law enforcement, the messages on the bullet casings believed to have belonged to Robinson were equally politically confusing. The bullet that struck and killed Kirk had "Notices bulge OwO whats this?" written on its casing. A reference to a longtime internet joke that originally comes from text-based furry roleplay. It is not proof, however, that Robinson was a furry. The meme has long since become part of the extremely online canon.

  In 2017, Robinson appears to have dressed up in a costume of President Donald Trump, with the Trump’s face painted green. A possible reference to the Pepe the Frog edit of Trump that the president first shared in 2015. And in 2018, Robinson appears to have dressed up as a “squatting slav” Pepe meme. As easy as it is to point to these costumes as proof that Robinson was a far-right extremist radicalized online by 4chan posts, it’s just as likely that he was a teenage boy dressing up as memes he saw online. This kind of content is basically the water young people swim in now.

• The Left Doesn't Want You to Know the Truth About Charlie Kirk's Killer – PJ Media

• Tyler Robinson’s roommate who tipped off FBI is identified as family refuse to deny transgender motive for Charlie Kirk assassination

  A 22-year-old wannabe professional gamer who lived with Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin gave cops incriminating text messages leading to his arrest. Lance Twiggs turned over Tyler Robinson, who lived with him in a three-bedroom apartment in Saint George, Utah, the Daily Mail can reveal. Twiggs showed police texts from Robinson about stashing a gun linked to Wednesday’s shooting of the prominent conservative activist at Utah Valley University (UVU), a law enforcement affidavit said. His identity was revealed as separate reports emerged from Fox and the New York Post which stated that Robinson was living with a ‘transgender partner’ who is co-operating with the investigation.

  • Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson lived with transgender partner: source

• Charlie Kirk Was Shot and Killed in a Post-Content-Moderation World | WIRED

  Researchers tracking the spread of the shooting videos on social media say that major social platforms are falling short in enforcing their own content moderation rules, at a moment when political tensions and violence are flaring. And the video of Kirk being fatally shot is somehow falling into a policy loophole, threading the needle between allowable “graphic content” and the category of “glorified violence” that violates platform rules. Over the past two years, social platforms like X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have scaled back their content moderation efforts—in some cases eliminating the work of human moderators who previously acted as a crucial line of defense to protect users from viewing harmful content.

• Cox: 'Social media is a cancer on our society '

• There is no surge in politically motivated killings

  • Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States

  Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. The definition here of right-wing terrorists includes those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists include those motivated by black nationalism, anti-police sentiment, communism, socialism, animal rights, environmentalism, anti-white ideologies, and other left-wing ideologies.

  • Leftists killers aren't "political" and don't count. Right wing criminals are unavoidably political.

• Vandals spray-paint ‘Kill all Charlie Kirks’ on Seattle Central College sign.

• Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right

• RFK Jr's vaccine advisers will soon review four shots: what's at stake

• Feds try to dodge lawsuit against their bogus climate report

• The American dream is ending in a psychotic breakdown

• At what point are we going to clue in to the President's stroke?

  • Didn't the last administration demonstrate that the actual President is an optional accessory and can be kept in the basement while the real ruling is handled by competent, anonymous professionals? These folks were assuring us Trump would be the end of the world, aren't they happy if he's not actually in charge?

• The tech powering ICE's deportations

= U.C. Berkeley Gives Names of Students and Faculty to Government for Antisemitism Probe

• Fox News host suggest killing mentally ill homeless people by lethal injection

• Swatch sells watch lampooning Trump's 39% tariffs on Switzerland

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• A U.S. Icon Loses Out to European Rival in Rush for Air Defenses

• Billion-dollar coffins? New technology could make oceans transparent

World

• Nepal's Gen Z chose interim Prime Minister via Discord vote

  • Nepal picks a new prime minister on a discord server days after social media ban

  • After Arsons, Nepal Reckons with Its Future

  • Nepal turns to Bitcoin and stablecoins as protests rock the nation

• Japan sets record of nearly 100k people aged over 100

• A £1 pay rise could leave you tens of thousands worse off in Britain

• The abandoned Nazi underground city hidden beneath beautiful countryside

• tourists are returning to Iraq to see ancient Babylon

• Are Scam Compounds the Real Cause of Thailand-Cambodia Fighting?

• Colombian court rules Meta was wrong to bar porn star's Instagram account

• France and Britain are in thrall to pensioners

• Denmark to buy $9B air defense systems as tensions with Russia grow

Israel

• Universities around the world cut ties with Israeli academia over Gaza war

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's Arctic LNG 2 Hits Record Output as Ice Conditions Ease

China

• The City Leading China's Charge to Pull Ahead in AI

• do not eat: Dinosaur eggs from China found to be around 86M years old

Health / Medicine

• CTA on brain health as dementia is leading cause of death in Australia

• Diagnosing diabetes may soon be as easy as breathing into a bag

  • Diagnosing illness is very simple now: "Can you afford this pill? Then you need this pill!"

• Specialization Saved Medicine. Now It's Holding Us Back

• Alternate-day fasting reduces fat more than time-restricted eating for non-obese

• What nicotine does to your brain

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2

• Rush to get the new Covid booster

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• New Zealand's plan to save birds? Kill invasive animals

• Panama's ocean lifeline vanishes in 40 years

• An Annual Blast of Pacific Cold Water Did Not Occur, Alarming Scientists

• If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We're Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes

• The climate case for planting trees has been overhyped – but it's not too late