2026-01-25

etc

• Almost 12,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across US

Horseshit

• Women filmed in secret for TikTok content – and then harassed online

• What's so special about the find of a Roman panther?

• Couple Receive $200k Settlement After 'Pungent' Indian Food Complaint

• Top tech titans' dominance wanes in 2025

• Gen Z Gamblers Are Putting the Fun Back into Online Gaming

• Europeans Can Turn 2 Car Seats into 4 Child Seats, but It's Illegal in America

• “Let people help” – Advice that made a big difference to a grieving widow

• The influencer World Cup: FIFA and TikTok deal targeting an avalanche of posts

• Tech is Fun Again: The Tech Monoculture is Finally Breaking

  Our devices lost their unique personalities. Phones became our alarm clocks, flashlights, calendars, watches, cameras, GPS units, music players, radios, journals, and gaming devices—all at once. We betrayed our focus in the pursuit of convenience, and the personality of our devices for homogeneity. The benefits were clear to us, but the costs weren’t.

• Mountains of evidence proving causatively social media affects mental health

• Why "read more" may be the most underrated thinking advice we have

  • I agree but then ive read other shit these people said and it was not conducive to healthy thought; so i have doubts.

• Notes on Afghanistan – Matt Lakeman

  My incentives are aligned with the Taliban’s. The Taliban want tourists, so if I were a tourist, they would treat me (an American) well, because if they didn’t, it would be an international news story (because I’m American), and then the Taliban would get fewer tourists, and they would get less money. I had to take the Taliban at their word that they don’t want to run a weird pariah state again. They may have won the war against the US and Western forces eventually, but it cost 20 years, tens of thousands of lives, and pretty much all that remained of Afghanistan’s wealth. So this time, the Taliban wants to build a very marginally more cosmopolitan society, and part of that process involves attracting international tourists with their sweet, sweet dollars, Euros, rubles, and RMB. The Taliban wants tourists, so if I am a tourist, they are unlikely to arrest and/or kill me.

• Female dogs evaluate levels of competence in humans

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• I've seen assertions that the policies aren't changed since 2024. Perhaps its merely permissible to object to them now.

  • TikTok users freak out over app's 'immigration status' collection

  Specifically, the policy states that TikTok could process information from users’ content or what they may share through surveys, including information about their “racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.” It’s not surprising that Americans would find this type of language troubling, especially given the current political climate.

  • TikTok Updates Its Terms and Conditions in the U.S.

  • TikTok US venture to collect precise user location data

  • What TikTok's new ownership means for your feed.

  • TikTok US venture to collect precise user location data

• The World Economic Forum Doesn’t Think It Rules the World. That’s the Problem.

  No one gives orders. No one needs to. A set of ideas is floated. The same language gets repeated across panels. The same concepts get picked up by consultants, NGOs, and corporate strategy teams. Eventually, those ideas harden into frameworks, metrics, and expectations that shape real-world behavior, without anyone ever feeling responsible for the result. We saw this clearly when we asked people what had happened to the intense focus on climate change. Most responded with blank or puzzled looks. That was the moment it clicked. They had never truly believed in climate change as a fixed commitment. Those were yesterday’s topics. Today’s topic is AI. In their minds, there is no contradiction here, because none of these ideas were meant to be taken literally in the first place. The WEF, to them, is just a platform. But when the same platform sets the agenda year after year, its “conversations” become policy, whether anyone claims ownership or not.

• Elon Musk at Davos 2026: why technology could shape a more 'abundant future'

Musk

• We Are Witnessing the End of Tesla's EV Empire

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Electric cars won't fix sitting: health costs of designing cities around cars

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• 'The robot never gets tired': Hyundai explains its Boston Dynamics Atlas robot

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Genetic Data from over 20k U.S. Children Misused for 'Race Science'

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• NIST is rethinking its role in analyzing software vulnerabilities

• Malicious AI extensions on VS Code Marketplace steal developer data

• PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

• Asus announces 'immediate internal review' of 800-series motherboards following string of 9800X3D failures — users report multiple chip failures in recent days | Tom's Hardware

• MS confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked

• Health trackers know you didn't sleep well. Does that help or hurt?

• Apple turning to Intel for future iPhone chips, analyst reaffirms

• The Secretive VIP Programs That Keep Gamers Spending

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Forgotten Polygons: Multimodal Large Language Models Are Shape-Blind

• A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect

• First chatbot creator dedicated his life to publicizing the threat posed by A.I

  Joseph Weizenbaum realized that programs like his Eliza chatbot could “induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people”

  • Today we have people who believe that they must ensure the new AI God is trained in proper dogma, as it will be their tool for controlling the rest of the human race. They're quite open about how religion will finally be completed.

• We posted a job. Then came the AI slop, impersonator and recruiter scam

• AI is reshaping police detective work, starting with cold cases

• DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis warns AI investment looks 'bubble-like'

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Startup will send 1k people's ashes to space, affordably, in 2027

  • This outlet is one of those happy to push "Kessler syndrome / space junk apocalypse" stories..

• Killing some folks will be good for the budget allocation, they think. It worked before. NASA about to send people to the moon – in a spacecraft not everyone thinks safe

  • NASA's Artemis 2 moon rocket is on the launch pad: What's next?

Crypto con games

• Caroline Ellison Former Alameda CEO Released from Prison After 440 Days

• The $6T fear behind the US stablecoin yield ban

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Apple Cash is making instant transfers more expensive soon

• Qualcomm CEO pockets 15% pay rise as profits fall 45%

• India offloads US bonds, piles up gold in pivot away from dollar assets

• How Intel Came Crashing Back to Earth After Its Trump Bump

• Toilet Maker Toto's Shares Get Unlikely Boost from AI Rush

  Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto Ltd. gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto’s electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that’s tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory.

  • Japanese toilet maker Toto is seeing its share price rise for an unexpected reason.

• U.S. Automakers' Foreign Troubles Now Extend to Canada

• Speculative frenzy catapults silver above $100/oz

• Gold tops $4,900/oz; silver and platinum extend record‑setting rally

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Speaker Johnson Backs Efforts to Impeach Judges over Rulings

Left Angst

• Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning

  • ICE has killed another person in Minneapolis

  • Armed Suspect Shot By Border Patrol Dies; Tear Gas Deployed As Protesters Swarm Area | ZeroHedge

  Odds of a shutdown just spiked on Polymarket - as DHS legislation that funds ICE at current levels without policy restrictions is now in the Senate and needs 60 votes to pass by next Friday. With today's shooting, it's going to be an uphill battle to say the least.

  • Video shows ICE taking phones from witnesses after execution

  • Man is shot and killed during Minneapolis immigration crackdown

• Detained MN women help ICE agent having a seizure

• Everybody's at each other's throats': James Cameron left the US permanently

  Avatar director, who moved to New Zealand after the Covid pandemic says he will soon be a citizen of a country where people ‘are, for the most part, sane’

  • ... so he's spent years becoming a legal citizen of his new country? Isn't that a violation of his human rights and an unconscionable burden to ask of immigrants? Or is it different when they do it?

• Gold and Silver Signal the End of American Financial Dominance

• Trump Administration Pushes Out Key Officials Focused on China Tech Threat

• FBI agent who investigated fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis has resigned

• US Vaccine Panel Chair Says Polio and Other Shots Should Be Optional

• The US Is Losing Top Tech Talent to India in the Wake of Trump's H-1B Chaos

• Trump administration unlawfully suspended EV charger program, U.S. judge rules

• Mark Carney Takes on Donald Trump and Emerges as a Global Political Star

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• The FBI claims that illegal Chinese airbags have killed many Americans

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• China no longer Pentagon's top security priority

• US Army Poorly Prepared for Arctic: Finnish Forced Surrender During Exercise

• Trump reveals to The Post secret ‘discombobulator’ weapon was crucial to Venezuelan raid on Maduro

  President Trump told The Post that a secret new weapon he calls “The Discombobulator” was essential to the daring US raid that captured Venezuela’s drug-dealing dictator Nicolas Maduro. Trump boasted that the mysterious weapon “made [enemy] equipment not work” when US helicopters swooped into Caracas on Jan. 3 to arrest Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on federal drug and weapons charges — without losing a single American life. “The Discombobulator. I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Trump said during an exclusive interview in the Oval Office.

World

• Apple accuses Europe of 'delay tactics' following alternative app store collapse

• Repatriate the gold': German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults

• Europe Prepares for a Nightmare Scenario: The U.S. Blocking Access to Tech

• Asbestos found in children's play sand sold in UK

• Digital liberation: EU Parliament calls for detachment from US tech giants

• Canadian woman euthanized 'against her will' after husband fed up caring for her

• EU groupthink manifests itself as polite silence

Greenland

• Is Greenland in danger of being overrun by Russia and China?

China

• Is China winning the AI race?

• China shuts down Elon Musk's claim that Tesla FSD will be approved next month

Health / Medicine

• Health insurance execs shift blame for costly, confusing health care system

• Superiority of flu vaccines that generate "mucosal immunity"

• A brain glitch may explain why some people hear voices

• I Was Diagnosed with ADHD in My Forties. It Explained Everything

• Nurses in New York City Say They Deserve $200k a Year. Here's Why.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Ancient giant kangaroos could hop when they needed to

• Shark attack truth: Why experts won't admit population boom

  The experts conspicuously err on the side of caution, saying the number of sharks over the years has either flatlined or is decreasing. If they said otherwise, the lucrative grants financing their research into shark biology and behaviour would dry up overnight. It’s difficult to know how long they can continue to spin this line. Great whites, for example, have been protected in all Australian waters since July 2000. The stated aim of the protection was to increase the great white population.

  The best estimate of the total east coast population the CSIRO has come up with since then, published in 2018, is somewhere between 2909 and 12,802. In other words, they don’t have a clue and aren’t in a hurry to really find out. Stranger still, the experts weren’t this vague in the late 1990s, when they were arguing in favour of implementing protection. Back then, the numbers were in precipitous decline, and human intervention was necessary to save the species from extinction. The government believed them, which is how an entire field of scientific research — into all types of lethal sharks, not just great whites — was born.

• Mann's $9M Jury Lie: Court Sanction Against Mann Upheld

  • The Mann Who Sold The World

  Climate Scientist Michael Mann is a data fiddler—a DC judge has announced (again). Mann is finally reaping the hypocrisy he has sewn. He was fined over $28,000 for presenting misleading financial data during his defamation trial, where he accused journalist and broadcaster Mark Steyn and scientist Rand Simberg of falsely accusing him of data manipulation to create the “Hockey Stick” graph. Mann appealed, but today Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., denied Mann’s motion to reconsider the sanctions, labeling the incident “bad-faith trial misconduct” and ordering payment to the defendants within 30 days.

• Long-term exposure to a common pesticide speeds up aging in fish, study finds

• UN Declares That the World Has Entered an Era of 'Global Water Bankruptcy'

• (2014) An Illustrated Guide to Hippo Castration

• The western US is in a snow drought, and storms have been making it worse

• As the Arctic warms up, the race to control the region is growing ever hotter

• Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study