2025-10-05

etc

• Treasure hunters discover $1M in silver and gold coins off Florida coast

Horseshit

• The dystopian place 'sex work is work' takes us

• Frankenstein’s Sheep: The Scapegoating of a Montana Farmer

  The way the federal agents swarmed Jack Schubarth’s ranch in Montana on a late-spring day in 2021, it seemed they could have been taking down an anti-government militia.

  In September 2024, Schubarth pleaded guilty to smuggling in the genetic material that he used to make MMK and later selling the cloned sheep’s offspring to other ranchers; he was sentenced to six months in a federal prison for violating the Lacey Act, which prohibits trafficking illegally sourced wildlife. Argali, it turns out, were also specifically prohibited in the State of Montana, meaning he’d broken state law, too. “A single escaped specimen from Mr. Schubarth’s ranch could have not only altered the genetic makeup of bighorns in Montana, but it could have resulted in a large-scale die-off,” the federal prosecutor said in court. The cloning itself wasn’t technically illegal, but it didn’t win Schubarth any favors. By the time he was charged, MMK’s genetics had spread all over the U.S. His own farm was rife with MMK offspring too; he had spent years interbreeding the sheep with other wild species.

  Schubarth, whose formal education ended with a high-school diploma, is one of only five people or teams in the world ever to successfully clone an endangered species. If he’d played by the rules, MMK could have been celebrated as a scientific achievement. Schubarth is someone who likes sheep more than he does most people. “These sheep are my confirmed socialism family. They depend on me for everything, food, protection and sex,” he posted on Facebook in October 2020.

  Schubarth had experience with creative sheep breeding. For years, according to court filings, he’d been paying wilderness guides to harvest the testicles of freshly killed native bighorn sheep shot in the Montana outdoors by wealthy hunters. Then he’d extract that wild semen to impregnate his own sheep — a process the Feds later said was also illegal, even though the ball sacks would otherwise just go in a gut pile.

• The Tech Jester Who Pranks San Francisco

• What Will U.S. Capitalism Look Like in 50 Years? Seven Experts Weigh In

• Luxury jet replaces cabin windows with video screens

• A 102-Year-Old Yoga Teacher's Simple Approach to Aging Well

celebrity gossip

• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sentenced to more than 4 years in prison after salacious trial exposed mogul’s reign of terror

• 15-Year-Old Girl's Decomposed Body Found in Pop Star D4vd's Tesla After Weeks of Mystery

  In a chilling discovery on September 8, 2025, the badly decomposed body of 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez was found in the trunk of singer-songwriter D4vd's impounded Tesla, revealing she may have been dead for several weeks. Los Angeles police responded to a foul odor at Hollywood Tow in LA, leading to the unprecedented find inside the vehicle registered to David Burke, D4vd's real name. The Tesla had been parked and towed weeks earlier, deepening the mystery around the teen's death, which remains undetermined by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.

• Ex-NFL star Mark Sanchez stabbed in horror attack leaving him with severe injuries

Obit

• Yardbirds Co-Founder Chris Dreja Dead at 79

Musk

• Who'd want to be a trillionaire? Elon Musk, of course

• Elon Musk being 'incredibly busy' not enough to relocate case to Texas

• Man buys used Tesla only to discover it's banned from Supercharger network

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• 'Delivery robots will happen': Skype co-founder on fast-growing venture Starship

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• First-time job hunters' college degrees don't unlock opportunities they once did

• Stephen King is the most banned author in US schools

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Called "Cashing in before they cool"? Jane Goodall's Death Initiated Netflix's Newest Show

• High-performance mice can be used as a microphone to spy on users

• Have we passed peak social media?

• Bay Area university issues warning over man using Meta AI glasses on campus

  • People driving etc with Apple headsets was "cute" but this is creepy... 'cuz "Meta" ... Brands have become religions too.

• Amazon Is Digitally Erasing Guns from James Bond Posters

• Opera wants you to pay $19.90 per month for its new AI browser

• Microsoft lays off thousands and jacks up Game Pass prices

• Unity discloses a years-old security exploit – urges developers to update games

• Amazon's Ring plans to scan everyone's face at the door

• 'A force for alienation': How The Social Network predicted the future of tech

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• How Do The Normal People Survive? | Hackaday

  “How do the normies even get by?” were the exact words that went through my head. And let’s face it: we’re not entirely normal. Normal people don’t have a soldering setup just sitting around ready to get hot 24/7, or a scope to diagnose a garage door RF transmitter at the drop of a hat. But these things seem to happen to me all the time. How do the normal people survive? Maybe they all know someone with a scope?

  • Geeks are the hedge witches, who make the magic work for our neighbors.

• X-ray scans reveal the hidden risks of cheap batteries

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI data centers are swallowing the world's memory and storage supply

• OpenAI is now worth $500 billion, making it the world's most valuable startup.

• AI wrote nearly a quarter of press releases in 2024

• Walmart to Offer Employees Training Through OpenAI Certification

• AI Sam Altman and the Sora copyright gamble: 'I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us'

• OpenAI's Sora Soars to No. 1 on Apple's US App Store

• OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias

• Relatively few Americans are getting news from AI chatbots like ChatGPT

• BlackRock Group Hunts a $20B Deal to Get in on the AI Boom

  • Oh dear God no plz. If we're only now entering the "foolish money" phase of this one ugh.

• OpenAI launch of video app Sora plagued by violent and racist images

Crypto con games

• What the Hell Happened to NFTs?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Consulting Crash Is Coming

• GDP Hides Industrial Decline

• Aftermarket Car Parts May Be Harder to Find: Major Supplier First Brands Bankrupt

• The uranium plant at the center of U.S. plans to expand nuclear power

• SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Poverty is much more abundant! Don't Tax Wealth

• New California law restricts HOA fines to $100 per violation

Trump

• US unveils design for $1 Trump coin to mark 250th independence

• Could tariff revenue fund $2k stimulus checks? Trump thinks so

Left Angst

• Law enforcement was forced to deploy their weapons and fire defensive shots at an armed US citizen who drove herself to the hospital to get care for wounds.

  Thankfully, no law enforcement officers were seriously injured in this attack. Pritzker’s Chicago Police Department is leaving the shooting scene and refuses to assist us in securing the area. There is a growing crowd and we are deploying special operations to control the scene.

  • US Border Patrol agents shoot woman in Chicago after being 'boxed in' by cars

  U.S. Border Patrol agents shot an armed woman in Chicago Saturday after an angry mob tried to attack the law enforcement officers. The group of agents were conducting their routine patrol near 39th Place and South Kedzie Avenue in the city’s South Side “when they were attacked and rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars,” the Department of Homeland Security said. “The officers exited their trapped vehicle, when a suspect tried to run them over, forcing the officers to fire defensively,” according to DHS, which called the incident “an evolving situation” and noted FBI agents were currently on the scene.

  • ICE Agents Ambushed In Chicago As Trump Deploys National Guard | ZeroHedge

  • The Insurrection Act.

  Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.

• Lessons from Russia: Silicon Valley Needs to Start Speaking Out About Trump

• How Free Is Free Speech? | The New Yorker

  The President and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a “60 Minutes” interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being “anti-Trump” and “radical,” coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word “diversity” from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that “promote gender ideology.” What We’re ReadingDiscover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump’s political movement.

• Complying with 'Demand' from Trump Admin, Apple Removes ICEBlock from App Store

  • Apple pulls US immigration official tracking apps

  • Google removes ICE-spotting app following Apple's ICEBlock crackdown

• Trump officials discussed sending elite Army division to Portland

• ‘It’s not a good place right now:’ CBS News staffers are ‘literally freaking out’ about Bari Weiss taking over newsroom

• Portland Police Detain Journalist, Not Antifa Soldiers, Spurring White House Probe  | ZeroHedge

• Immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling

• Seniors lose access to telehealth services in wake of shutdown

• CDC's cruise ship inspectors laid off amid bad year for outbreaks

• ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+

• Weaponized uncertainty in science and in public health puts people in harm's way

  this proposed action from the US drug regulator does not accurately represent the spectrum of research findings, nor the consensus among researchers. That consensus must be expressed with nuance, because of the uncertainty that always exists in scientific research. By making definitive statements such as “Don’t take Tylenol” and “Fight like hell not to take it”, Trump risks weaponizing that uncertainty to the detriment of public health.

  • Remember "For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm"? or "If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die"? But those don't count, it's different when "they" do it.

• Why Conservatives Are Attacking 'Wokepedia'

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 'MeToo' Accuser Raided – PJ Media

  Unraveling in Maricopa County, Ariz., is one of the most important stories in the last decade of “MeToo” injustice, when false accusers destroyed lives without consequence. And just when it looked like false accusers were going to win it all, Johnny Depp won his defamation suit against Amber Heard that cracked the towers of power and rattled the foundation of the insidious ideology of “believe all women.” But the Laura Owens case in Maricopa County is the case that will light the fuse and obliterate the remains of the MeToo narrative. Not only did her victim, Clayton Echard, former Bachelor star on ABC, win his case in family court against her, but the judge also referred Owens to the prosecutor for perjury, tampering with evidence, and fraud. Owens is facing seven felonies for pretending to be pregnant with twins and trying to destroy Echard’s reputation.

• Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices

• 300K SIM cards: plot to cripple NY cell service bigger than first thought

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Anduril and Palantir communication system 'high risk,' says US Army memo

World

• Why I'm Not Optimistic About Democracy in Syria

• Germany to Build Uncrewed Missile-Toting Arsenal Ships for Its Frigates

• Keeping track of the crimes the Portuguese far right party

• UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

• Who Is Sanae Takaichi? Conservative Set To Be Japan’s First Female Leader

  • Sanae Takaichi set to become Japan's first female prime minister

• Tipping in Japan remains taboo as tourism takes off

• The Czech Trump wins an election, again

• Egypt reopens Amenhotep III's tomb after more than 20 years of renovations

  • Egypt opens one of its largest tombs to public after epic restoration

Iran / Houthi

• UN experts condemn 'staggering scale' of executions in Iran

  UN human rights experts have said they are appalled by a "dramatic escalation" in the number of executions in Iran, with more than 1,000 people killed during the first nine months of 2025. "The sheer scale of executions in Iran is staggering and represents a grave violation of the right to life," the five special rapporteurs warned in a joint statement. They noted that half of the known executions were for drug-related offences and that nine hangings per day on average had been documented in recent weeks.

Israel

• Hamas accepts Trump's plan to end the war in Gaza, but with conditions

• Donald Trump orders Israel to stop bombing Gaza as Hamas agrees to free hostages

  • Gunard has to pick between who they hate worse here

• Israel accused of detaining Thunberg in infested cell and making her hold flags

  • Greta Thunberg detained, dragged by hair, beaten and forced to kiss Israeli flag

  • I'd like to make a bulldozer joke, but that would be rude an intemperate. Bad things will happen to people who wander into a war zone to do performative stunts for the wrong side.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's Hybrid War Against NATO Ramping Up: Danish Intelligence

China

• China tests underwater data centres to reduce AI carbon footprint

• I learnt to stop worrying about China's surplus

Health / Medicine

• Motherhood Flips Brain Switch That Triggers Aggression

• Costco to sell Ozempic and Wegovy at a discount for people without insurance

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Millions could be living with hidden smell loss after COVID without knowing

  • Considering the money spent on deodorants and so on I suspect many consider it a blessing

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Ancient mammoth remains yield the oldest host-associated bacterial DNA

• We know how the Venus fly trap turns touch into traps

• We would not be so lucky as to drop both into the ocean at the same time: Cascadia megathrust earthquake could trigger San Andreas fault

• Marineland asks Canada for emergency cash to feed whales or euthanasia imminent

• Are Cattle Good for the Environment?

• Scientific updates to global report targeted by pro-meat misinformation campaign

• Canis familiaris? Maybe Less Than You Think - bioGraphic

  that familiarity obscures the fact that dogs (Canis familiaris) are much more than pets. Dogs are one of the most successful animals on Earth. They thrive in diverse habitats and climates, from densely populated Indian metropolises to rural Chilean villages. Of the world’s billion or so dogs, somewhere around 80 percent are not pets restricted to households, but are what scientists call free-ranging dogs. These dogs are not strays, because that implies they were once pets. But they’re not entirely feral, either. Free-ranging dogs—that is, most dogs—rely on scavenging or begging for food from humans, though some also hunt for wild prey. They’re most prevalent in warmer climates, like parts of the Indian subcontinent and across Africa, but they also dwell nearly everywhere else in the world that people call home. They tend to have a similar look—medium-sized with a light brown coat—though there are local variations. While free-ranging dogs remain closely related to modern pet dogs, different populations of free-ranging dogs have distinct genetic lineages that can be traced back thousands of years.

  • I do not think 80% of canines are "free ranging"; I'd be shocked if its 50% worldwide and 15% in the USA. these people probably consider dogs not locked indoors as "wild" and are the type to kidnap herd dogs from pastures and proclaim they "rescued" them.