2026-01-06

Horseshit

• Taco night: A Bizarre Seven-Hour Gamma-Ray Explosion From Deep Space Has Left Astronomers Puzzled.

• The Most Expensive Lettuce in Hawaii? Larry Ellison's $24/Lb Experiment

• Americans Choosing Cremation at Historic Rates, NFDA Report Finds

• Bluefin tuna sells for record $3.2M at year-opening auction at Tokyo fish market

• Polymarket rocked by perfectly timed $630k bets on Maduro's arrest

  • Someone made a profit betting on Maduro's capture

  • A Mystery Trader Made $400k Betting on Maduro's Downfall

• Americans in 1998 tried to predict 2025. Here's what they got right

• Where's My Orbital Habitat?

• Forget Willpower. If You Want to Resist Temptation, You'll Need Something Else

celebrity gossip

• Evangeline Lilly reveals she has brain damage after hitting her head in fall

  The 46-year-old Canadian actor, known for her roles in Lost, The Hobbit films and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared the “bad news” video on her Instagram, one of many updates she has shared since she suffered the traumatic brain injury (TBI) in May, when she fainted on a beach and hit her head on a rock.

Obit

• David Rosen, co-founder of Sega, has died

  • Sega's Dave Rosen Passes on Christmas Day in L.A.

  • Sega co-founder David Rosen dies aged 95

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Fragile Foundations of the Intelligent Age

  Beneath a surface of political volatility and technological acceleration lie two quietly deteriorating foundations: truth and trust. Their erosion is reshaping the global landscape more profoundly than the events that dominate headlines. no society, no institution, no technological system can stand for long on foundations that are no longer believed. Truth and trust remain the indispensable pillars of modern civilization—and the degree to which they can be restored or reimagined will determine the contours of our future.

  • Mr "You will own nothing and be happy" hisself.

• UNESCO adopts global standards on 'Wild West' field of neurotechnology

Musk

• Starlink goes dark in Uganda just days before elections

• Starlink offers free internet to Venezuela following Maduro capture

• SpaceX lowering orbits of 4,400 Starlink satellites for safety’s sake.

• India gives Musk 72 hours as X floods with obscene images generated using Grok

• Musk's ex 'horrified' by Grok creating fake sexualised images of her

• Ofcom asks X about reports its Grok AI makes sexualised images of children

• X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM; no fixes announced

• European Commission calls Grok's sexualised AI photos 'illegal'

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Self-driving cars could prevent over 1M injuries across the US by 2035

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Elon Musk– and Mark Zuckerberg–faced robotic dogs shown at Art Basel Miami

• Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind Form New AI Partnership

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Pope Leo calls for Venezuela to remain an independent country

• How examining our regrets can make for a more meaningful life

• Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites during hacker conference

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Anna's Archive Loses .Org Domain After Surprise Suspension

• LG's Wallpaper OLED TV returns to CES, and it's wafer thin

• Reviving ReBoot With A Tape Deck Repair | Hackaday

• How GitHub monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

  Starting this year, students will be forced to contribute to a project they use, care about or, at the very least, truly want to use in the long term. Not one they found randomly on Github. If they think they don’t use open source software, they should take a better look at their own stack.

• Can a social app fix the 'terrible devastation' of social media?

• Cloud costs are the #2 expense at midsize IT companies. Is this sustainable?

• Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold: This Is the Phone-Tablet Hybrid You're Looking For

• Lego's Smart Brick Gives the Iconic Analog Toy a New Digital Brain

  • Lego unveils a technology-packed Smart Brick

• Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

• Gnome and Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste by Default

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Cool project, will you actually maintain it?

  • No. I scratched my itch; and released the code so that others could do the same. Sharing code is not something that creates "responsibilities to customers" that this person assumes. If they want that kind of responsiveness from their developers, they should consider paying for it.

• The Story of a Perfect Exploit Chain: Six Bugs That Looked Harmless Until They Became Pre-Auth RCE in a Security Appliance

  I start by mapping the appliance’s request flow (two Nginx layers and a split between host Python services and Docker-based Java microservices). From there, the chain forms step by step: exposed internal routes lead to auth primitives, a hard-coded signing secret enables forged access, leaked internal API credentials unlock higher privilege inside the microservice world, an SSRF pivot reaches host-only Python endpoints to mint an admin session, and finally, a rule-engine eval() sink becomes reachable by bypassing validation via a static AES encryption key in imported alert-rule packages. Each section shows the evidence, the reasoning, and how one weakness becomes the leverage for the next, until the final trigger executes code on the appliance.

• The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Yann LeCun confirms Meta's Llama 4 benchmarks were "fudged a little bit"

• AI's Innate Bias Against Animals

• Watching myself say things I would never say. Deepfake menace we must confront

• Big Tech's plans for data centers running into stiff community opposition

• The AI debt boom does not augur well for investors

• Samsung to double AI mobile devices to 800M units this year

• Why Didn't AI "Join the Workforce" in 2025?

• Hospitals Are a Proving Ground for What AI Can Do, and What It Can't

• 40M Americans turn to ChatGPT for health care

• Microsoft is slowly turning Edge into another Copilot app

• The great AI hype correction of 2025

• Murder-suicide case shows OpenAI selectively hides data after users die

• Science fiction warned AI could end humanity. We may soon learn if it's possible

• A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT for drug advice. He died from an overdose

• Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence

• That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam

• Tech companies increasingly defeated by communities opposed to data centers

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Proposed Space Station Could Be Deployed in a Single Launch

Crypto con games

• Vitalik Says Ethereum Just Solved Crypto's Biggest Problem

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Chevron and Other Energy Stocks Jump After U.S. Captures Venezuela's Maduro

• US-based multinational companies will be exempt from global tax deal

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• New redesigned coins marking nation's 250th birthday begin circulating today

• Congestion pricing after one year: How life has changed

• Here's how much members of Congress raked in on their stock portfolios in 2025

  Long Island Rep. Tom Suozzi led all Democrats with the best stock portfolio performance of 2025, beating even the She-Wolf of Wall Street, Nancy Pelosi, data obtained by The Post shows. Suozzi’s 35% windfall easily outpaced every major index, including the Dow’s 14% return, 17% for the S&P 500, and 21% for the Nasdaq, according to exclusive data provided to The Post by Quiver Quantitative, which tracks Congress members’ stock trades.

  On the GOP side, Rep. Tim Moore (R-NC) had the best year — with a whopping 52% stock portfolio return. Moore — who was once accused of planting cameras outside his mistress’ house — actively day traded Cracker Barrel after the stock was decimated following the “woke logo” controversy last month. The House freshman has already become one of its most prolific traders — with an eyewatering 200 transactions made in 2025.

• NFA $200 Tax Stamps On Most Popular NFA Items Relegated to the Ash Heap of History.

  the repeal of the $200 tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles and shotguns and “any other weapons” officially took effect on January 1.

• Los Angeles Ends Rite of Passage with New Fridge Law

• Kennedy Scales Back the Number of Vaccines Recommended for Children

  • CDC Pares List of Recommended Childhood Vaccines

  • Federal health officials slash recommended childhood vaccinations

  • US will overhaul childhood vaccine schedule to recommend fewer shots

  • US to slash routine vaccine recommendations for children in major change

  • US cuts childhood vaccines recommendation from 17 to 10

  • US cuts the number of vaccines recommended for every child

Trump

• Trump Says Cuba Is 'Ready to Fall'

Democrats

• Tim Walz likely to drop out of 2026 MN governor’s race: report

  • Tim Walz to Drop Reelection Bid Amid Fraud Scandal

  • Tim Walz abruptly drops out of Minnesota governor’s race in wake of alleged billion-dollar fraud scandal

• Biden’s ‘extravagant’ pension is largest of any president in history – and even more than what he earned as prez.

  Former President Joe Biden’s long career in politics allowed him to retire with the largest taxpayer-funded pension of any ex-prez in US history — $417,000, or more than his presidential salary, an expert says.

• the listed location of the auditing firm that performed the audits for both the Minnesota and Ohio

• Pentagon moves to punish Democratic senator over 'seditious video'

  The Pentagon says it is taking steps to demote Democratic Senator and former Navy Captain Mark Kelly, with a reduction in pension, over a video the department described as "seditious". "Senator Mark Kelly - and five other members of Congress - released a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline," Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X. The Arizona senator was one of six Democratic lawmakers who released a video urging military members to refuse unlawful orders, following US strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats.

Left Angst

• One in custody after incident at Ohio home of JD Vance – 95.5 WSB

  In a statement to ABC News, the U.S. Secret Service said, “An adult male was taken into custody by the Cincinnati Police Department after being detained by U.S. Secret Service personnel for causing property damage, including breaking windows on the exterior of a personal residence associated with the Vice President.”

• (Mar 2025) The Old World Is Dying and the New One Is Struggling to Be Born

  In short, we are in another Gramscian interregnum, where the old world is collapsing but the new one remains undefined. The critical question remains: What kind of order will emerge from this instability, and at what cost?

• A "bridge month" cost to run Venezuela:$1.5B–$3.0B/month

• Why I Cold-Called President Trump at 4:30 in the Morning

• How does a president becomes a dictator? By executive order

• ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people

• Trump, and Most Americans, Do Not Understand the Monroe Doctrine

  All US presidents in the 20th Century — including Trump — believe that the Monroe Doctrine gives the US a veto over political or economic relations that any country outside the Western Hemisphere can have with Canada, Mexico, and the countries of Central and South America. But Monroe’s focus was on European colonial imperialism. President Monroe did not declare that the US would be the final arbiter in deciding whether a country in Central or South America can voluntarily form a political or economic alliance with another country, such as China or Russia. Monroe’s specific concern was to keep the US out of the wars that were ravaging Europe in the 19th Century.

  • Isn't "Keeping the US out of Euro wars" antithetical to modern Leftism as well?

• Denmark Tells Trump to 'Stop the Threats' About Greenland

  • Trump serious about wanting to take over Greenland, says Danish prime minister

• America the Rogue State

  The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy. Our democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain our ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its Constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago. It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through Executive Orders. The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezula, and the pillage by the billionaire class. Our money-saturated elections are a burlesque. The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by courageous judges, including blocking National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, are lackeys to corporate power and overseen by a Department of Justice whose primary function is silencing Trump’s political enemies.

• The F. Around-and-Find-Out Presidency

• (Dec 2025) Notes from the Left’s Waiting Room

  The right, for all its fantasies, does at least offer doors – crooked ones, leading back into basements and oubliettes, but doors nonetheless. “Make X great again,” “take back control,” “defend Western civilisation”: awful slogans in the service of awful projects, but they are projects. There are five‑point plans, budgets, think‑tanks, and model legislation. The reactionary imagination is baroque in its detail: fortresses, walls, school curricula, birth rates, pipelines. Its future is a hallucinated past projected forward, but it is a future with furniture in it. Rooms. Occupants. A plot. My side’s imagination, meanwhile, often stops at renovation. We will regulate, we will restrain, we will de‑platform, we will “ensure,” “safeguard,” “fence off.” We will resist, defend, mitigate, expose. All necessary verbs; without them, things get worse faster. But they are not, on their own, a horizon. A horizon is a place you walk towards, not just a line you invoke while insisting that everything currently visible is intolerable.

• In Trump's America, the Oligarchy Is Done Pretending to Care About You

• Trump's great Venezuelan oil gamble

• Americans split on operation in Venezuela to capture Maduro, Post poll finds

• Donald Trump's Approval Rating on Maduro Capture, According to Polls

• FEC Obstructed from Enforcing Campaign Finance Laws for Last 250 Days

• Trump's Assault on the First Amendment

• What I Learned in Venezuela

• Justice Department Drops Claim That Venezuela's 'Cartel de Los Soles' Exists

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Shut Down After 58 Years

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• CIA & Palace Insiders: How The Surprise Raid On Maduro Went Down | ZeroHedge

  Elite forces had trained for months, which even involved rehearsals at a mock-up of Maduro's compound built from intelligence reports, and troops practiced utilizing "massive blowtorches" in the event they would have to breach steel barriers protecting Maduro’s safe room. One theme of the new reporting on the secretive operations was just how few in the US administration knew about it. The operation was strictly held to only the highest officials. Even Pentagon officials were unaware of the exact timing until Friday night, two US officials told NBC News.

• Cuba says 32 Cuban officers were killed in US operation in Venezuela

• Who's in charge of Venezuela and what happens next?

• New York Times, Washington Post held off on reporting Venezuela raid | Semafor

  The decisions in the New York and Washington newsrooms to maintain official secrecy is in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions — even at a moment of unprecedented mutual hostility between the American president and a legacy media that continues to dominate national security reporting. And it offers a rare glimpse at a thread of contact and even cooperation over some of the highest-stakes American national security issues.

• Trump Threatens Venezuela's New Leader with a Fate Worse Than Maduro's

• UN Says US Raid on Venezuela Violated International Law

• America's raid on Venezuela reveals the limits of China's reach

• Federal Council freezes any assets held in Switzerland by Nicolás Maduro

• U.S. plan to 'run' Venezuela clouded in confusion

• Tempest Future Fighter Aims for "Extreme Range," Twice F-35 Payload

• Germany eavesdropped on some Obama calls from Air Force One, book says

• 'Our minerals could be used to annex us': why Canada doesn't want US mining

• America's Drone Dilemma

• US planning to intercept oil tanker that Russia has claimed jurisdiction over

World

• About a dozen loaded oil tankers left Venezuela in dark mode

• Paris court finds 10 guilty of cyberbullying France's first lady Brigitte Macron

• The French university where spies go for training

• Manifesto claiming responsibility for terror attack on energy infrastructure

  • Berlin power outages after left-wing anarchist attack on power cables

  • Berlin power outage affecting 45,000 homes blamed on ‘politically motivated’ attack.

• ECB’s digital euro project faces decisive vote in 2026

• Kashmir Police Crack Down on VPN Use

• Ireland Makes a Program Offering Basic Income for Artists Permanent

• Europe Saw Record Surge in Negative Power Prices in 2025

• UK: Newborns could be assigned digital IDs alongside health record book

• Could a German startup disrupt Europe's arms industry?

• Europe must unite or it’s ‘finished,’ Poland’s Tusk warns as Trump salivates over Greenland – POLITICO

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Why No One Is Winning in Ukraine

China

• China Revealed a Motion Controlled Military Robot for Remote Combat

• China's Russian Town Has Log Cabins and Cyrillic Signs, but No Russians

• China has invented a whole new way to do innovation

• China's Trade Surplus, Part II

• People of dubious character are more likely to enter public service in China

Health / Medicine

• Expensive food makes children fat

• Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'

• Silicon Valley Is Flirting with a Stupid New Way to Die

  Peptides are legal and relatively harmless. Habitually injecting yourself with mysterious powders though?

• A San Diego startup's universal flu shot sold for $9B

• First US at-home depression kit on its way after trial shows relief in weeks

• Novo Nordisk launches Wegovy weight-loss pill in US, triggering price war

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Healthy 18-year-old welder nearly died of anthrax—the 9th such puzzling case: “Welder’s Anthrax” was first coined in 2022, when seven cases had been identified.

  The case occurred in September 2024 in an otherwise healthy 18-year-old male in Louisiana. He had no underlying health conditions or even any risk factors, such as smoking, vaping, or heavy alcohol use. But, just a week after developing a cough, the teen was admitted to an intensive care unit with severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation. Blood tests were positive for a bacterium in the Bacillus cereus group—which includes the species that causes classic anthrax—and his doctors quickly put the finding together with his work. For six months prior to his cough, he was working as a welder’s apprentice, doing shielded metal arc welding in the shipbuilding and repair industry.

  Doctors suspected it was a case of welder’s anthrax and quickly got access to an anthrax antitoxin from the US Strategic National Stockpile—where it’s kept in case of a bioterror attack. Along with a tailored antibiotic regimen, the teen rapidly improved and was off ventilation 72 hours later. The doctors’ quick thinking likely saved his life; of the previous eight cases of welder’s anthrax, six were fatal. Of the six cases where a specific Bacillus species was identified, B. tropicus was the culprit, including in the newly reported case. Environmental sampling of his workplace found anthrax-toxin-producing Bacillus in 28 of 254 spot samples. Other investigations of welder’s anthrax cases have found similar results. So far, all nine cases have been detected in either Louisiana or Texas.

• MHRA approves self replicating mRNA Covid-19 vaccine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• We Come to Know Earth

• Coexisting with Humans: Genomic and Behavioral Consequences in Bear Population

• Jurassic Park Was Right: Mosquitoes Can Carry Libraries of Animal DNA

• Why Does Life Keep Evolving These Geometric Patterns?

• How Wolves Became Dogs

• Insurers Said They Could Return Home. Our Tests Found Neurotoxins in Their Bodies

• Most corn seeds planted in Colorado are coated in neonics; restrictions proposed

• IEA: Declining coal demand in China set to outweigh Trump's pro-coal policies

• Where the Smart Green Tech Money Is Heading in 2026

• Farms and data centers contribute to a water pollution crisis in Eastern Oregon