2025-09-18

Horseshit

• Some Publishers Clearing House winners are facing the end of 'forever' prizes

• Evidence of cosmic impact discovered at classic Clovis archaeological sites

• The inventor of the web says we can recapture its magic. Is he right?

• F1's Summer Break Is Over. Who Will Rule the Second Half?

• Stone-Skimming Contest in Scotland Is Infiltrated by Cheaters

• Ben and Jerry's co-founder quits, accusing Unilever of silencing social mission

  • Jerry quits Ben & Jerry’s, saying its independence on social issues has been stifled

• Moon helium deal is biggest purchase of natural resources from space

• My weird week of wearing shoulder pals

• U.S. sees 5.7M more childless women than expected

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Propaganda by any other name: 'Prebunking' false claims can increase public trust in elections

Musk

• An interesting Social Media thread. Cat people leave X – Calling-all-RushBabes

• Tesla Model Y door handles now under federal safety scrutiny

• Tesla's 'self-driving' software fails at train crossings

• Tesla Is Redesigning Door Handles That Drew Safety Scrutiny

  • I only heard about "Doors won't open without power" after Mitch Mconnels' relative died; I'm gobsmacked that this design was allowed to be sold and is only now being even discussed. apparently it's not just Tesla, now.

• Tesla is trying to hide 3 Robotaxi accidents

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo to offer autonomous rides in Nashville on Lyft ride-hailing network

  • Lyft and Waymo Launch Partnership in Nashville

• California’s driverless taxis transport passengers for more than 4m miles/month

• Uber, Cabify will slowly disappear in Barcelona due to new taxi law

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Meditation And Mindfulness Have a Dark Side We Don’t Often Talk About.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Giant Subterranean Neutrino Detector Is Taking on the Mysteries of Physics

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• TikTok to Be Acquired by Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen

  • "China keeps the algorithm": Critics attack Trump's TikTok deal

  • TikTok users in the US will have to move to a new app with new American owners

  • What We Do and Don't Know About US TikTok Deal with China

• StarCraft successor Stormgate tanks; industry is blamed

• Consumer Reports asks Microsoft to keep supporting Windows 10

• Internet Archive vs. Music Labels: Copyright Battle Ends with Settlement

• Against Steve Jobs' wishes, Apple may be working on a touchscreen MacBook Pro

  • Latest round of credible touchscreen MacBook rumors point to a 2026 launch

• Ads are coming to a Samsung smart fridge near you

• Fyre Festival Sold to Limewire for $245,000

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• American Science And Surplus Ends Online Sales

  Earlier this week, American Science and Surplus had to make the difficult decision to shutter their entire mail order division. It’s no secret that the company as a whole had been struggling over the last few years. Like many small businesses they were hit hard during the COVID-19 years, and while they made it through that particular storm, they faced skyrocketing operational costs. Earlier this year, the company turned to crowd funding to help stay afloat. That they were able to raise almost $200,000 speaks to how much support they had from their community of customers, but while it put the company in a better position, the writing was on the wall. The warehouse space required to support their mail order operations was simply too expensive to remain viable.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures Sue Chinese AI Company

• OpenAI: Models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

• AI Podcast Start Up Plans 5k Shows, 3k Episode a Week

• How to Prevent Our First A.I. President

• How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society

• Galactica, the doomed model launched two weeks before ChatGPT

• Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use

• AI's ability to displace jobs is advancing quickly, Anthropic CEO says

• Meta's Reported Billion-Dollar AI Poaching Attempt Failed

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• What's Lost When Stars Disappear from View

• A record supply load won't reach the International Space Station as scheduled

  A problem with the main engine on Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL spacecraft will keep it from delivering 11,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station as scheduled on Wednesday. In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, NASA said ground teams are evaluating backup plans that might still allow the Cygnus spacecraft to reach the space station, just not on schedule. The problem arose early Tuesday when the spacecraft's main engine shut down earlier than expected during two burns to boost the ship's orbit for its rendezvous with the ISS, according to NASA.

• What's the Deal with U.F.O.s?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Fed Divisions Thrust Powell into Uncharted Territory

  • Federal Reserve cuts interest rates by quarter point

  • Fed Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals More Are Likely

  • Fed delivers normal-sized rate cut, sees steady pace of further reductions

  • Fed approves quarter-point interest rate cut and sees two more coming this year

  • As U.S. jobs disappear, the Federal Reserve returns to rate cuts

  • Federal Reserve cuts US interest rates for first time since December

• Electricity prices are outpacing inflation across the US

• Don't Take the Auditor to the Strip Club

• Gen Z Leads Biggest Drop in FICO Scores Since Financial Crisis

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FBI Has Overseen Terminations, Resignations Tied to Anti-Catholic Activities, Director Reveals.

• Bessent made mortgage claims similar to ones Trump cited to fire Fed's Cook

• CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, Reddit Invited to Testify on User Radicalization

  • Steam, Discord, Twitch, Reddit to testify before Congress over 'radicalization'

  • ooboy. We get to see them all repeat the COVId era performance of "of course we don't do this thing everyone sees us doing"

Left Angst

• Texts from Suspect in Charlie Kirk Shooting Offer Insight into a Motive

  • ABC’s Gutman: Alleged Kirk Assassin’s Texts With Trans Lover Were ‘Intimate,’ ‘Touching.’

  “I don’t know if we have seen an alleged murder with such specific text messages about the alleged murder weapon, where it was hidden, how it was placed, what was on it, but also it was very touching in a way that I think many of us didn’t expect,” Gutman declared. But, wait, there was more: “A very intimate portrait into this relationship between the suspect’s roommate and the suspect himself, with him repeatedly calling his roommate, who is transitioning, calling him ‘my love’ and ‘I want to protect you, my love.’”

  • ABC news star makes groveling APOLOGY after gushing over Charlie Kirk assassin’s ‘very touching’ texts to his trans lover

• The "Debate Me Bro" Grift: How Trolls Weaponized the Marketplace of Ideas

  Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him. There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

  • The socialist pablum fed to college students is so ludicrous they cannot abide any exposure to alternative ideas.

• Total epistemic divorce

  These accounts of the shooter’s motivation couldn’t be further apart, but they are the default views among liberal and conservative camps respectively. As of Sunday the 14th, only eight percent of Democrats polled thought the shooter was a fellow Democrat, and 41 percent thought he was a Republican. By contrast, 40 percent of Republicans thought he was a Democrat and only 13 percent thought he was a Republican.

  For the online boomer left, trusted sources telling them authoritatively about Helldivers II and groypers and Nick Fuentes was sufficient. None of them had heard of Nick Fuentes or groypers or the Fuentes v TPUSA “groyper wars” before the shooting, but it allowed them to shrug off shared responsibility for the shooting. The interpretation was a cognitive salve, enabling them to avoid grappling with the fact that this was, by all accounts, yet another act of antifa/trans-adjacent leftist political violence. The consequence of a couple days of misinformation is that, because liberals had an urgent psychological need to reject the apparent facts as they existed – that a radicalized leftist killed Charlie Kirk because he didn’t like what he had to say – they simply hallucinated an entirely alternative interpretation, and came to believe it, almost uniformly. The fact that some left-leaning news outlets later came to their senses and realized that the evidence for the groyper hypothesis was incredibly flimsy, or effectively nonexistent, did nothing. The narrative had been set. The most beloved conservative influencer and organizer was killed by one of his own, implausibly because he wasn’t far right enough. This whole brouhaha? Simply an internecine right-on-right dispute. Nothing to trouble the left about. Conscience clear.

• WaPo: More US employers fire workers over Charlie Kirk posts as pressure from right mounts

• ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel's show 'indefinitely' after remarks about Charlie Kirk

  • ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Live from the Air 'Indefinitely'

  Conservative cancel culture has come for Jimmy Kimmel: Walt Disney–owned ABC has announced it’s pulling new episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely” following right-wing outrage over comments he made on his September 15 show about the reaction to the killing of right-wing podcaster and provocateur Charlie Kirk. Disney’s decision follows a move by one of its major affiliate groups, Nexstar, to preempt the show in response. While Nexstar didn’t say exactly what Kimmel had said that it objected to, and ABC offered no further explanation of its move, FCC chairman Brendan Carr earlier on Wednesday denounced this part of the host’s Monday monologue, per Deadline: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”

  • ABC pulls 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' off air 'indefinitely' over Charlie Kirk comments

  • ABC suspends Jimmy Kimmel's show indefinitely over remarks about Kirk's death

  • the Leftist site comment threads are full of "this shows the Right was behind cancel culture all along" and "Kimmel was speaking truth". To question the shooter's Right wing politics is to be heretic and anathema. Like saying COVID was a cold.

• EPA delay threatens fenceline communities near steel and coke plants

• Trump's Son-in-Law Jared Kushner Co-Founds Brain Co. Partnered with OpenAI

• Trump DOJ erases report showing far-right violence outpaces 'all other types'

• Airbnb co-founder and DOGE associate to head new federal design office

• US officers tied us up and pointed guns at us, South Korean engineers tell BBC

• NASA Is Now Primarily an Intelligence and National Security Agency

  • They'd rather it be yet another antihumanity propaganda effort.

• Led By Donkeys attacks 'Orwellian' arrests after Trump Windsor projections

• $320 camera lens buyers hit with $2,000 delivery fee in tariffs fight — some sellers implement exorbitant shipping costs to dissuade US customers | Tom's Hardware

  This change most heavily affected online shoppers, especially those who are used to purchasing cheap goods from abroad. This has caused some retailers to take extreme 'countermeasures,' often to dissuade Americans from purchasing their products. Some sellers, particularly on eBay, have resorted to charging exorbitant shipping fees to deter Americans from purchasing their items. 404 Media reports seeing several listings of lightweight items from across the globe with high delivery costs. For example, there’s a camera lens from Japan priced at around $320, which only costs $29 to ship globally — except for the U.S., which has a $2,000 delivery fee. Other sellers charge more than $500 to ship their items to the U.S., far more expensive than the actual price of the product. According to the report, this is much easier than taking down hundreds of listings and excluding the U.S. from them.

• What It's Like to Work Inside a Broken CDC

  • Who told them to change the definition of "Vaccine"?

• Trump administration retreats on combating human trafficking, child exploitation

  Under Trump, key initiatives for fighting human trafficking have been cut back at the US Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Guardian found. Senior officials and other staffers have been forced out, workers shifted to other priorities and grants delayed or cancelled.

  • In other words, they cut grants to the NGOs that import and distribute slaves...

• Not buying American anymore

  I come from a place where I believe regulation needs to be employed to protect the weaker party in any economic relation. If you don't agree with this probably this rant isn't for you. I also come from Brazil, a country that, for better or worse, is arguably a strongly regulated market. For worse I guess because it makes all transactions that bit more bureaucratic, for better because I am sure to be able to buy something and have it too, without fear that corporations will swoop in and take away my rights after purchase. We can't and we don't need to be able to see the future to make informed decisions. Ten years ago there was no reason not to buy American. There is now and that's the end of it. If I start buying European and they start behaving like the US does now, then this rant will just as easily apply to them. A good, informed decision doesn't require knowledge of the future. It just need to be grounded in solid contemporary facts, and the fact is there is no reason we can trust American companies anymore.

  • Why would you have ever "trusted American companies" in the first place?

• Tariff threat plays havoc with US PC market, economy not helping

• Social Security admin denies DB data leak, DOGEs questions about a copy

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pentagon Moves to Replace Weapons It Used in Operation Midnight Hammer

• US drops Colombia as drug war partner, puts it on rogue nation list

• US Faces Global Free Speech Showdown with Brazil

  A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has issued an arrest warrant for Flávia Magalhães, a naturalized U.S. citizen residing in Florida, over social media posts critical of Brazil's president and judiciary. Her posts violated neither U.S. law nor platform rules, yet Justice Alexandre de Moraes has ordered her preventive detention "to guarantee public order." Flávia Cordeiro Magalhães is a Brazilian-born U.S. citizen who has lived in Pompano Beach, Florida, with her 18-year-old son for the past 22 years. The dispute arises from posts she first made in 2022 while in Florida, criticizing Brazil's judiciary.

  In December 2023, after entering Brazil through Recife Airport with her U.S. passport, Magalhães alleges she was informed her Brazilian passport was under restriction and flagged as "irregular." She says Justice Moraes treated this as use of a "false passport," worsening her legal status. In February 2024, the Brazilian Supreme Court decreed her pretrial detention. She was represented in Brazil by lawyer Paulo Faria, the same attorney who defended former congressman Daniel Silveira, a staunch ally of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Faria argued that Magalhães' detention was politically motivated, noting that repeated defense requests for access to the case files were denied. Brazilian Federal Police records later confirmed that she had entered Brazil legally. Despite the Supreme Court's detention order, she managed to return to Florida in early 2024, where she currently resides.

  The U.S. government has formally warned Brazil that foreign judicial orders have no legal force inside the United States. At the heart of the conflict is litigation in a Florida federal court brought by Rumble Inc. and Trump Media & Technology Group challenging Moraes's orders as unconstitutional and unenforceable on U.S. soil. In May 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to Moraes stating that such directives, when aimed at U.S. persons or platforms, cannot be enforced under U.S. law.

World

• Why are so many Americans moving to Portugal

• Alberta first province to add citizenship marker to driver's licences

• Details on how Australia's social media ban will work are finally becoming clear

• Liam Byrne MP fears JLR hack could see thousands laid off

• Alarming number of Aus landlords abandoning rental market

• Software owned by Australian banks being tested for social media ban

• 'Privatisation premium': billions from UK energy bills paid to shareholders

• Government gestures leave roots of Indonesia protests intact

• The Quiet Triumph of King Charles III

Israel

• Israeli spies control your VPN and Social Media

• Netanyahu's 'super-Sparta' vision braces Israel for isolated economic future

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Poland Is Slowly Preparing For The Unthinkable: War With Russia

China

• China bans its biggest tech companies from acquiring Nvidia chips

  • China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia's AI chips

• Chinese dissident who led pro-democracy group in NYC guilty of spying for CCP

• China is sending its world-beating auto industry into a tailspin

Health / Medicine

• Permanent Standard Time Could Cut Strokes, Obesity Among Americans

• Repeat creepy meat problems at Boar's Head plants draw congressional scrutiny

• Major health insurer group says members will continue to cover vaccines

• Over-the-counter overdose reversal drug Naloxone fails to sell.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Global wildfire paradox: Human impacts worsen even as total burned area declines

• New 'sieve' detects the smallest pieces of plastic in the environment

• Scientists claim they've made 'pivotal step' in bringing back the dodo

  • Startup Working to Bring Back Dodo Bird Raises $120M

• The Plastic Chemicals Hiding in Your Food

• Human-made global warming caused two in three heat deaths in Europe this summer

• Methane leaks at California oil facilities are also spewing toxic chemicals

• Strong winds at Mount St. Helens stirs up ash from 1980 eruption

• Nestle unveils method to boost cocoa yields as climate change hits

• Chimps likely ingest equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day

• Microplastics May Trigger Alzheimer's-Like Brain Damage