2025-10-20

Worthy

• the solution is simple but you aren’t demoralized enough yet

  The big question: are most people in America productive or unproductive? If it’s the former, why can’t we solve this with democracy? Jail for the cronies and rent-seekers, wireheading city for the homeless, and no more medicare or social security. But I fear it’s the latter: 73.9 million people are on social security. There’s 258 million people over 18 in the US, so 28% of voters are on the take. And that’s just one group of the unproductive. There’s everyone who is working in made up fake systems where both sides ratchet up complexity when really the whole thing should go away. I think the most people are unproductive ship has sailed.

  A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

  Can we get a good dictator and not a South America style one? America (people like Elon and Jensen, who are both first-generation immigrants btw) can rival China, partically if we can attract talent from all over the world, but not if this clown show continues. Everyone does understand that productive capacity is how wars are won and lost, right? Would you bet on 100 CNC machines or 100 lawyers?

etc

• Watching 25,000 Dice Neatly Arrange Themselves Shouldn't Be This Fascinating : ScienceAlert

• The beauty of batteries

  Until recently, the only substantial physical buffer in the grid was pumped-storage hydropower. It works by using surplus electricity to pump water uphill from a lower reservoir to an upper one; when electricity is needed, the water is released back down through turbines, generating power. This is efficient, scalable, and dispatchable on demand, but it’s geographically limited. Viable sites require two large reservoirs at different elevations, close enough together to manage efficiently, and with sufficient water. Even with these constraints, pumped-storage still provides 96 percent of all utility-scale energy storage in the US.

• Alaska Air Guard Evacuates Typhoon Victims

  In the wake of an intense storm, Alaska Air National Guard Airmen evacuated more than 500 residents by C-17 Globemaster III aircraft this week as heavy storm surges flooded many villages in the state’s western region. The remnants of Typhoon Halong hit Alaska’s western coast, leaving one dead and two people missing by Oct. 13, according to multiple news outlets.

Horseshit

• Did Space Debris Hit A United Flight Over The Rockies Thursday?

• Monkeys "pay" for images of female peers

• How to Watch the Olympics of the Piano World

• What chefs and doctors eat when they're sick or hungover

• Climbing Gyms Took over the World

• A Tower on Billionaires' Row Is Full of Cracks. Who's to Blame?

• I Tried to Toughen Up My Son. Things Didn't Go as Planned

• Social media usage linked to lower cognitive performance in preteens

• Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom

• Postcard from California: Why the top US farming region is sinking

• The Zipper Is Getting Its First Major Upgrade in 100 Years

Obit

• Susan Stamberg, NPR's "founding mother", dies at 87

• Limp Bizkit announces death of bassist Sam Rivers aged 48

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• TED gets new bosses and changes direction

• The White House is already one of the most blocked accounts on Bluesky

Musk

• Grok has become an Elon clone spewing dense jargon and never conceding points

• SpaceX's Starship still missing orbit, refueling, landing

• How Elon Musk Ruined Twitter

• SpaceX lofts 10,000th Starlink satellite to orbit on record-tying 132nd Falcon 9 launch of the year.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Brussels opens the door to reviewing the ban on ICE vehicles from 2035

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• (Aug 2025) In Ireland, Catholic nuns buried babies in mass grave under mother and baby home : NPR

  • How does this score compare to any Planned Parenthood facility? Is folks upset about dead babies here, or is that a convenient emotional hook for the point they wanted to make?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Journals and publishers crack down on research from open health data sets

• With deadline looming 4 of 9 universities reject Trumps pact to remake higher ed

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Happy birthday to the NES, companion to Nintendo childhoods

• Big week for unions at Blizzard as Hearthstone team also votes to unionize

• Hackers Had Been Lurking in Cyber Firm F5 Systems Since 2023

• Teen sues to destroy the nudify app that left her in constant fear

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Gemini in Google Home Keeps Mistaking My Dog for a Cat

• San Francisco's new AI school

• Companies are blaming AI for job cuts. Critics say it's a 'good excuse'

• OpenAI researcher announced GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened

• The Future of AI Isn't Just Slop

• Who will rule Cloud 2.0 in the AI era? It might not be Amazon

• South Korea's AI textbooks fail after rushed rollout

• Is Sam Altman a Psycho CEO?

• The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust

• Job Interviews Are Broken

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Space junk falls on Western Australian minesite

• Something from "space" may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah

• Astroimmunology: The effects of spaceflight and its stressors on the immunity

• Sake brewing to be tested on International Space Station

• A Sunward Jet from 3I/ATLAS, Imaged by the Two-meter Twin Telescope

  As soon as the Hubble image was publicized, comet experts cheered that 3I/ATLAS behaves as a comet. But their enthusiasm neglected the fact that the image revealed an anti-tail pointing towards the Sun. Realizing this is as shocking as photographing an animal in your backyard which your family members identify as a common street cat, while the image shows a tail coming out of the animal’s forehead. The only attempt to explain this unique quality of 3I/ATLAS was made in the paper I wrote with Eric Keto (accessible here).

  • I'm looking forward to the excuses when it shows course changes.

Crypto con games

• The Chinese have worked it out: stablecoins are the privatisation of money

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Natural Gas Goes Negative in Canada After LNG Plant Issues

• The Risk That Built America

• Nexperia's Long History, Tangled Present, and Uncertain Future

• Stock Market Leverage Blows Out

• GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries

• Uber Giving Some US Drivers Option to Earn Money from Digital Tasks

  • Uber will offer gig work like AI data labeling to drivers while not on the road

• Jobs Often Go Overseas. One Company Is Bringing Them to Rural America

• Novo Nordisk shares fall 5.6% after Trump vows weight-loss drug price cut.

• The week private credit's 'golden' narrative got a little less shiny

• First Brands' Blowup Puts Trade Finance in Spotlight

• First Ford, Now Jeep. Automakers Are Hit by Lack of Parts

• US-China dispute over chipmaker could halt car production, send prices higher

Democrats

• Mamdani Poses With WTC-Linked Imam Whose Son Ran 'Decomposing Child' Terrorist Compound | ZeroHedge

  In a post to X, Mamdani can be seen posing with Imam Siraj Wahhaj and City Councilmember Yusef Abdus Salaam in Wahhaj's Bed-Stuy mosque in celebration of the weekly Muslim prayer. In August 2018, not one. Not two. But three of Wahhaj's children were charged with terrorism and felony child abuse for running a 'terrorist training camp' in the New Mexico desert that was allegedly meant to train child school shooters, and where the remains of Wahhaj's abducted three-year-old son were found by police.

Left Angst

• The A-List Turned on Marc Benioff. Now He's Sorry

• Anthropic's Jack Clark is drawing White House ire

• Fourth Street Barbecue in Charleroi to close, lay off workers

  Immigration attorney Joseph Murphy pointed out that Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants, many of whom he said work at Fourth Street Foods, is set to expire in February. “From the perspective of the company itself, it’s not a bad move. There’s a whole bunch of workers in there that are on temporary programs that are slated to end, and they’ll become, by operation of law, effectively full of illegals, a giant target for immigration enforcement. Who would want to be in that position?” Murphy said. Aside from the loss of jobs from this plant alone, Murphy says the upcoming end of Temporary Protected Status will impact hundreds of families and be tough on the area. “It’s, among other things, just a plain old humanitarian disaster right here. Eight hundred families just like that, turned off, no legal status, no ability to work, thousands of miles from home in some foreign city in western Pennsylvania in February. This is just not a pretty picture,” Murphy said.

  • Brink Of A "Humanitarian Disaster": 800 Migrant Families Set To Be Stranded In Pennsylvania Town Amid Factory Closure | ZeroHedge

  For the mainstream, Charleroi hit the radar in late September 2024, when President Trump warned that the small Pennsylvania town had been swamped by Haitians, with some reports suggesting the population was more than 50% Haitian, many of whom were employed at local factories, including the meatpacking plant. To the local politicians, nonprofits, churches, and everyone else involved in the funneling of migrants into Charleroi: Was it worth destroying a small town for short-term gain? Residents did not vote for Haitians to replace them at factories nor drive up housing costs. While the Haitians created an artificial revival of the small town, at the local pizza shop and second-hand shops, most of the paycheck money was sent overseas via a network of Western Unions in the town. Charleroi was strip-mined, left with no long-term investment. Local politicians, companies, churches, and nonprofits that enabled this labor scheme chased short-term profits - or maybe even state and federal grants to support migrants - instead of building a sustainable community.

• The U.S. Is Tiptoeing Away from Many of Trump's Signature Tariffs

• No Kings Rally Was SO Organic They Literally Handed Out Instructions on HOW to Protest

  Democrats bought, paid for, and scripted the No Kings rally, which is far more ironic than they realize. The kings told the people HOW to protest. Wonder when they'll figure that out.

  • 'Anti-Fascist' Demonstrator Admits on Newsmax to Being 'Trained' | Newsmax.com

  "We've all been told to be peaceful," she told Austin with her back to the camera. "We've had training on how to be peaceful and to deescalate."

• America’s rare earth delusion

  US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said last week that China’s leveraging of export controls on the minerals was the result of “rogue” trade actions in advance of a planned Trump-Xi summit, and that Beijing “couldn’t be trusted”. Perhaps, but the reality that China had this card to play is down to the fact that the US has, for the past 30 years, allowed it to slowly but surely take over the entire industry.

  Until the late 20th century, the US was the world’s leading producer of rare earth minerals, mainly through the Mountain Pass mine in California, which opened in 1952. Stricter environmental standards, lower productivity and a lack of support for industrial policy in the US led to its closure in 2002. Mountain Pass was eventually reopened in 2012, but by then the Americans had no domestic refining capacity and had to ship their raw materials to China for processing.

  Last year, Bessent derided President Joe Biden’s support for strategy sectors as “central planning” (aside from bolstering semiconductors and clean tech, the Biden administration provided funding to Noveon Magnetics, the only rare earth magnet manufacturer in the US). This year, the Trump White House is doubling down on that approach, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and loans into jump-starting critical mineral mining and production in the US.

• Further Cuts at the Department of Education

• The UPS chaos shows tariffs have arrived on our doorsteps

• Inside The Republican network behind big soda's bid to pit Maga against Maha

• The Shutdown Is Stretching On. Trump Doesn't Seem to Mind

• Xi preparing to go toe to toe with Trump, there will only be one winner

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• The traffickers are winning the war on drugs

• Judge says body cameras for Chicago officers "was not a suggestion"

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Artillery exploded prematurely over California freeway during marine celebration

World

• Louvre Closed After Robbery

  • Chainsaw-wielding robbers flee Louvre with jewellery

  • Louvre robbery shuts down Paris museum for a day, French culture minister says

  • Louvre museum in Paris closed after robbery

  • 'Priceless' jewellery stolen from Louvre in raid by 'experienced' thieves

  • Louvre shut down today after thieves steal historical jewels at 9:30 am local

  • Louvre Museum closes after brazen theft of jewels with 'inestimable' value - ABC News

  • Thieves steal crown jewels in 4 minutes from Louvre Museum

• BoE chief: Brexit impact on UK economy negative for foreseeable future

• The first digital veteran ID card launches today

• Canada: The Court has declared aboriginal title to your property

• Coffee liberated her life, then she used it to liberate the lives of other women

• Japan aims to tighten rules for business manager visas from October

Israel

• Greta Thunberg: I was tortured, beaten and starved by Israel

  • they should have given her to the Gazans, those folks really know how to treat a young woman, and are fond of producing videos showing their hospitality.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Finland proposes €200B Russian asset transfer to Ukraine

China

• China accuses US of cyberattack on national time center

• Chinese tech giants pause stablecoin plans after Beijing steps in

• China Is Already Winning the Trade War America Wanted

• A New Challenge for China's Economy: 'Involution'

Health / Medicine

• 'Girl Take Your Crazy Pills ': Antidepressants Recast as Hot Lifestyle Accessory

• Transparent wearables gives real-time warnings about overexposure to sunlight

• 95% of kids with "bubble boy" disease cured by one-time gene therapy

• "biological sex isnt real, gender is a social construct" Men's brains shrink faster than women's: what that means for Alzheimer's

• Vaginal condition treatment update: Men should get treated, too - Ars Technica

  BV is a common condition affecting nearly 30 percent of women worldwide. Still, it’s potentially stigmatizing and embarrassing, with symptoms including itching, burning, a concerning fishy smell, and vaginal discharge that can be green or gray. With symptoms like this, BV is often described as an infection—but it’s actually not. BV is an imbalance in the normal bacterial communities that inhabit the vagina—a situation called dysbiosis. This imbalance can be especially difficult to correct; of the women who suffer with BV, up to 66 percent will end up having the condition recur after treatment.

• Ibuprofen May Have Anti-Cancer Properties

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid mRNA vaccine sparks immune response to fight cancer

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Three Women in Alaska Collaborate on an Exhibit About Climate Change

• Orcas Sink Sailing Yacht with Family of Five Off Portugal

• Orca-trackers harness telecoms cable network

• Should scientists be allowed to edit animals' genes? Yes say conservation groups

• No 10 blocks report on impact of rainforest collapse on food prices

• Abandoned land drives dangerous heat in Houston, Texas A&M study finds

• From Hollywood to horticulture: Cate Blanchett on a mission to save seeds