2025-09-24

Horseshit

• Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea more than 43M years ago

• How working class culture became an elite game

• Deep-Earth Diamonds Reveal 'Impossible' Chemistry

• Are We in a Crisis of Rudeness?

• Four phones, three weeks: Everything we saw on teen TikTok

• I didn't want sex with my husband after having our baby

• Coins of Desire: The Erotic Currency of Parisian Brothels

• Accidental COVID wealth

  pinged every entrepreneurial friend I had for new trendy western products I could try to sell in Hong Kong. One of my friends, Scott, always believes the world is ending. From famine, from a plague, from droughts. He told me a hedge fund he worked with in Hong Kong was clamoring for face masks. I’ll give it a shot I figured. I googled “facemask supplier” and called every website for the first 10 pages. It was the start of 2020. We didn’t yet know about Covid. Within the first hour of putting masks on our online store we sold out. One of the directors said he had a little cell phone signal on the base of the mountain and saw 200 notifications in our slack purchase channel. What followed was a whirlwind of of businesses around Hong Kong begging us to bring more facemasks. The orders get kept getting bigger and bigger as word spread.

• Why Boeing Pilots Can't Fly Airbus Jets Without Being Retrained

• Hundreds plunge into Chicago River in first open-water swim in nearly a century

• Japanese city passes ordinance to limit smartphone use to 2 hours/day

• High-tech greenhouse brings fresh strawberries year round to Arctic Inuit hamlet

celebrity gossip

• MrBeast Failed to Disclose Ads and Improperly Collected Children's Data

Obit

• Louise Vincent, 49, Drug User Who Led Harm Reduction Movement, Dies

Musk

• Behind Grok's 'sexy' settings, workers review explicit and disturbing content

• Elon Musk's Utterly Mundane Vision of Dining

• Elon Musk's Father Accused of Child Sexual Abuse

  • Elon Musk's father accused of sexually abusing his children and stepchildren

• NASA panel fears a Starship lunar touchdown is more fantasy than flight plan

• Tesla's robotaxi push is confusing the hell out of regulators

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Porsche shares plunge after announcing EV rollout delay

• Europe's EV sales surge 26% in 2025 while Tesla faces decline

• The new, unusual solution to EV fires: High-speed battery ejection

• Mirror-Based Lidar Spoofing for Autonomous Vehicle Deception

• Why Electric Truck Sales Are Accelerating Quickly

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Sex tests for athletes are too little, too late

• The Catholic Church Has a Manpower Problem: Fewer Priests Every Year

• Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

• Pope Leo refuses to authorise an AI Pope

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Awash in revisionist histories about Apple's web efforts, a look at the evidence

• Apple Stops Signing iOS 18.6.2, iOS 26 Downgrades Now Impossible

• Open Source Initiative's executive director and OSAID debate

• Disney/ABC plan a price increase for Disney+

• Major Cyber Threat Detection Vendors Pull Out of Mitre Evaluations Test

• Have you already scratched your hugely expensive iPhone 17 Pro Max?

• New Bang and Olufsen earbuds cost $1,500

• Search traffic to the FT down 25-30%, Daily Mail down 89%

• SolarWinds Makes Third Attempt at Patching Exploited Vulnerability

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• We're living in a golden age of affordable mechanical keyboards

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Medical startup uses LLMs to run appointments and make diagnoses

• Chatbait is taking over the internet: how chatbots keep you talking

• LinkedIn set to start to train its AI on member profiles

• Want to Know Your Future Breast-Cancer Risk? Just Ask AI

• Meta launches super PAC to fight AI regulation

  • Meta launches super PAC to fight AI regulation as state policies mount

• If A.I. Can Diagnose Patients, What Are Doctors For?

• How AI slop is clogging your brain

• Microsoft rolls out AI tools to tackle $85B technical debt crisis

• Anthropic bans companies majority-controlled by China, Russia, Iran, North Korea

• The AI Kids Take San Francisco

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The Moon is rusting – thanks to 'wind' blown all the way from Earth

• NASA plans first crewed Moon mission in 50 years for February

  • NASA targeting early February for Artemis II mission to the Moon

Crypto con games

• Steam Game Block Blasters Steals $150K in Crypto from Players

• NFTs for combating deepfakes and fake metaverse digital contents

• Crypto Giant Tether Seeks $500B Valuation in Major Raise

• SEC Chief Eyes Rule Exemptions for Crypto Trading by December

• Acting Chairman Pham Launches Tokenized Collateral and Stablecoins Initiative

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What Wall Street Sees in the Data Center Boom

• Oura ring maker raising $875M Series E, bringing valuation to $11B, report says

• Amazon faces off against FTC over 'deceptive' Prime program

• Amazon UK to close grocery stores as high-tech retail experiment fails

  • Amazon is closing all Fresh grocery stores in the UK

• Workers fear for their jobs as Jaguar Land Rover's latest shutdown extended

• The WSJ Got Quarterly Reporting Wrong: A Corporate Executive's Response

  James Mackintosh's recent Wall Street Journal piece defending quarterly earnings reporting reads like a textbook example of why academic analysis often misses the mark when it comes to understanding corporate behavior. As someone who lived this reality for years as Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett-Packard—the world's largest technology company at the time by revenue with massive R&D investments—I can tell you the quarterly reporting system creates perverse incentives that systematically undermine long-term innovation. Mackintosh's central argument rests on flawed premises and cherry-picked data that ignore the lived experience of corporate executives who actually make investment decisions under quarterly pressure. His dismissal misses a critical opportunity to address one of America's most significant competitive disadvantages.

• Powell: Slowing labor market prompted rate cut, 'challenging situation' ahead

• Volvo to expand production at Ridgeville plant with new hybrid model

• Larry Ellison, a Media Mogul Like No Other

  • Oracle gets to store US users' TikTok data

• Uber launches prepaid passes for frequent routes

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Full U.S. Constitution Is on Display

• DHS Tells Gavin Newsom, California What They Can Do With Their ‘Unconstitutional’ ICE Mask Ban

• FCC Demands Repayment of $1.18M for Overbilling of Tablets in Covid-Era Programs

• Judge lets construction on an offshore wind farm resume

Trump

• DHS Calls for Media and Far Left to Stop the Demonization of President Trump

  “Following the evil act of political violence in the country this week and two brutal assaults on our brave ICE law enforcement last week, we are once again calling on the media and the far left to stop the hateful rhetoric directed at President Trump, those who support him, and our brave DHS law enforcement,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “This demonization is inspiring violence across the country. Our ICE officers are facing a more than 1000% increase in assaults against them. We have to turn down the temperature before someone else is killed. This violence must end.”

• Trump on record-setting deregulation pace, ‘lowest ever.’

• (Video) 2025-09-23 Trump Address to United Nations General Assembly

  • 'Your Countries Are Going to Hell': Trump Airs His Grievances at the U.N

• Trump Says Ukraine Can Take Back All Lost Territory

  • Trump believes Ukraine can win back all lost territory with NATO's help

  • Kyiv can win all of Ukraine back from Russia, Trump says

Democrats

• Google Admits Censorship Under Biden

  • Google offers reinstatement for YouTube accounts banned over COVID-19 | Fox News

  "Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect," the lawyer representing Google wrote.

  • Google Admits Censorship Pressure from Biden Admin, Pledges to Reinstate Accts

  • YouTube will let users booted for violations of COVID, elections policies rejoin

Left Angst

• Kirk & Kimmel:

• Sinclair Will Preempt Jimmy Kimmel's Show When It Returns to ABC

• Grindr outage reports coincide with Kirk memorial service in Arizona

  Rightwing personality Charlie Kirk's memorial service took place in Glendale, Arizona, on Sunday. And, surely by complete coincidence, Grindr experienced outages in the area around the same time. In completely unrelated news, there were over 168 reports of Grindr outages on Sunday evening, a staggering increase from the baseline number of two. A heat map showed a large concentration of those problems taking place in the Glendale area. The outages have continued through Monday morning, at one point reaching over 200 reports. Despite these two events clearly having absolutely nothing to do with one another, social media users are, for some unfathomable reason, drawing a link between them.

  • (Jul 2024) Grindr Dating App Crashes in Milwaukee During RNC

  • Apparently it is a point of Faith (worth explaining) that all Republicans are gay, and thus whenever they gather together "the app" for arranging anonymous gay hookups is over stressed. So both the Right and Left now have a "Gay Illuminati taking over the World" mythos. Dunno how that works for the hierarchy of oppression. If this isn't true, aren't the Leftists engaging in anti-gay hate speech here? And if it is, the same? ..."Leftist unity" was more important than electric vehicles, has it killed "gay pride" too?

• (Sep 12) Something Is Very Wrong Online - The Atlantic

  Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Charlie Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident—let alone details about the shooter or a motive. Yet there was plenty of blame to go around: Elon Musk posted on X that “the left is the party of murder,” even before Kirk’s shocking death had been confirmed. Others blamed the shooting on the media, NGOs, and billionaire Democrat fundraisers. If one thing has united the discourse in the past 48 hours, it has been a desire for certainty—a drive to know exactly why Kirk was killed. He was a political figure, of course, which makes his horrific death inherently an act of political violence.

• Autism / Tylenol:

• Does Acetaminophen During Pregnancy Increase Autism Risk? A Look at the Evidence – Braxford Journal

• Trump makes unproven link between autism and Tylenol

• Did The HHS Just Explain Autism? - Cremieux Recueil

  The answer here is “no”. We know this because of an incredibly strong research design applied to an incredibly large sample: a sibling control study applied to a population register including nearly 2.5 million births

• Anti-vaccine groups melt down over RFK Jr. linking autism to Tylenol

• What is autism and what are Trump's unproven claims about a Tylenol link?

• FDA takes action to make a treatment available for autism symptoms

• H1B / Slave Tax:

• Trump administration to get tough on companies that misuse the H-1B visa

• I run an AI company and I'd happily pay $100K for a H-1B hire

• >70% H1B holders are Indian – won't US tech just hire in India for remote work?

• Trump's $100k Visa Fee Puts Many Tech Startups in a Bind

• Silicon Valley hiring in turmoil after new H-1B fees, move spurs offshoring talk

• $100k Vigorish for an H1B

• US Plans H-1B Lottery Overhaul to Prioritize Higher Earners

• everything else wrong with the world because of Trump today:

• 6 in 10 Europeans say von der Leyen should quit after trade deal with Trump

• China Floods World with Record Amount of Cheap Goods After Trump's Tariffs

  • we're poisoning the world by failing to absorb of China's toxic output. think about that.

• One step closer to bombing civilians

  If a boat full of drug-runners can be blown up instead of arrested, what’s to stop the same from being done to unarmed migrants? To asylum-seekers trying to reach U.S. shores for a better life? Or perhaps to political dissidents labeled as “terrorists” by a vindictive regime?

  • Or innocent enemy combatants?

• USDA Puts Food Researchers on Leave

• Pro-Trump Billionaires Are Consolidating Media Control

• NIH's new head rose to fame on the Covid backlash. Can he fix medical funding?

• Nintendo Alerted After DHS Uses Pokémon to Promote ICE Raids

• Most Canadians think Trump would break any new trade deal

• Italy's 'anti-vax' movement is galvanized by Kennedy Jr

• US border patrol collected DNA from 1000s of US citizens for years, data shows

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• US Secret Service dismantles imminent telecommunications threat NY tristate area

  • Cache of Devices Capable of Crashing Cell Network Is Found Near U.N

  • Secret Service dismantles telecom threat around UN

  • The Secret Service found 300 servers capable of crippling NYC's cell system

  • Massive Telecom threat stopped at UN headquarters in NYC

  • Secret Service takes down network that could have crippled New York cell service

  • US authorities seize illicit electronics in New York during UN General Assembly

  • Secret Service dismantles network capable of shutting down cell service in NYC

  • US Secret Service disrupts telecom threat near UN GA with 100K SIM cards

  • U.S. Secret Service disrupts telecom network that threatened NYC during U.N

  • US uncovers 100k SIM cards that could have "shut down" NYC cell network

  • 'SIM Farms' Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in NY Threatened US Infrastructure

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US ready to support Argentina's currency with 'large and forceful' action

• Air National Guard F-15C Eagle makes emergency landing with tail hook at PDX

World

• Singapore Became Obsessed by Shade

• Copenhagen and Oslo airports closed for hours after large drone sightings

  • Danish police investigate after drones flew over Copenhagen Airport for hours

  • Copenhagen and Oslo airports forced to close temporarily due to drone sightings

  • Denmark links drones at Copenhagen airport to hybrid attacks across Europe

• Japan's most sacred Shinto shrine rebuilt every 20yrs for more than a millennium

• Great Britain's electricity grid fortified against blackouts after Iberian crash

• All in on US big tech: why the UK's "£150B AI investment" may never arrive

• Apple fails with DMA exception clauses

• How Far Will The German Elite Go in Resisting The Winds Of Change?

  Banning the AfD, more “statistically conspicuous” deaths of its candidates, and even a repeat of the Romanian scenario can’t be ruled out as the nationalist opposition continues growing in popularity.

• Saudi pact puts Pakistan's nuclear umbrella into Middle East security picture

• 13-year-old Afghan boy lands in Delhi by hiding in plane's landing gear

Iran / Houthi

• Iran-backed attackers targeting European aerospace sector with novel malware

Israel

• Pro-Palestine violence spreads across Europe as leaders gather at the UN to debate two-state solution: Macron joins Starmer in recognising Palestine despite wrath of Trump | Daily Mail Online

• Gaza protests in Italy block ports, clashes erupt in Milan

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Poland to Russia: 'You have been warned' so don't 'whine' if jets shot down

• UK chancellor Putin the blame on Russia for cyber chaos, but evidence says not

• Russia's Cancer Vaccine Shows 100% Efficacy in Trials, Is It a Breakthrough Yet?

• Ukraine destroys giant radio telescope in Crimea

China

• China Showcases Electromagnetic Carrier Catapult for First Time

  • China's Aircraft Carrier Capability Just Made a Leap Forward

  • China's Aircraft Carrier's New EM Launch System

• China LEOsats in holding pattern due to lack of reusable rockets

• China tells AI to stop emoting online; cracks down on malicious pessimism, ennui

• A restaurant scandal sticks in China's throat

• The rapid scale- up of overseas Chinese clean-tech manufacturing investments

• China to launch K-Visa for global talent as US slaps $100k H-1B fee

• China Courts Foreign Gold Reserves to Boost Global Clout

Health / Medicine

• Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

• Carbon dioxide may drive lung damage in obstructive pulmonary disease

• Oral bacteria linked to Parkinson's via the gut-brain axis

• Is modern life fueling the rise of cancer in millennials?

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• 'Nightmare bacteria' cases are increasing in the US

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Indoor surfaces act as sponges for harmful chemicals

• Researchers Just Developed a Tasty New Tomato Called the Scarlet Sunrise

• The World Needs Peasants

• Apple launches new project to protect and restore a California redwood forest

• First known wild 'grue jay' hybrid spotted in Texas

• To Save Bears from Florida Hunts, Activists Are Buying Up Bear Tags