2026-05-31

etc

• Boston Mystery Boom

  • Meteor explodes off coast of Massachusetts, causing loud boom

  • Meteor explodes over Boston as sonic boom rings out

Horseshit

• Cathy Tie's mission to genetically modify babies

• Sonic Boom shakes S Carolina, rattling Columbia and raising questions about the cause

• The next frontier of the luxury airline arms race might be waged in the toilet

• Goldman's Model Shows Spain as 26% Probable World Cup Winner

• Nike World Cup Uniforms Made of Recycled Textiles Won't Solve Fashion Waste

• Meet the UK's Own LeBron James

• How the Enhanced Games tripped over its own shoelaces

• Original 'Star Trek' Enterprise Model Resurfaces Decades After It Went Missing

• Too much time with colleagues can sour social interaction

• Gen Z Is Bringing Tanning Back. Dermatologists Are Alarmed.

• People Keep Damaging Garbage Trucks by Throwing Car Batteries in the Trash

  • The ID requirements for selling to a scrap metal recycler are onerous now.

• Looking Back at Lewis and Clark

• Professional Sports Are Banning Smart Glasses over Betting Concerns

• Exotic prime numbers could be hiding inside black holes

celebrity gossip

• Viral OnlyFans Model Kamryn Renae Rescued Off Mount Whitney Hike

• Stephen Hawking's father worried his son 'does not study much', diaries reveal

• Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina

Obit

• Marcia Lucas, Oscar-Winning Star Wars Editor, Dies at 80

  • Oscar-winning Star Wars editor Marcia Lucas dies aged 80

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Grifters, cynics, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents

Musk

• Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation

• Driver, 87, dies after Tesla on Autopilot mode crashes into pond

• Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' fraud lawsuit gets first hearing in China

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Sleuths uncover 100 suspicious images in Thermo Fisher antibody catalogue

• Missouri cut Dolly Parton's book program because lawmakers don't know its value

• Yes, scientists can be hostile to new ideas. So should you

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• What Is a Dickover?

  The homepage for every single blog hosted by Substack shows a particularly pernicious dickover on its homepage. The Substack dickover doesn’t even look like a panel. It’s a full-screen curtain designed and worded to suggest, strongly, that you need to sign up for the blog’s email newsletter just to read anything. The dismissal button for the Substack dickover is a small text link — that doesn’t look anything like a button — that says something like “No thanks” (e.g. Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias) or something that adds insult to injury with a cloyingly saccharine label like “Just gimme that content!” (e.g. Volts).

  If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

• We're starting to see some PC makers respond to Apple's MacBook Neo

• Acer's launching a Linux handheld for streaming your PC games

• Microsoft is under fire for threatening a "security researcher" with criminal investigation.

• "Indexing Crisis" 40% of Web Content Remains Invisible to Google

• Meta has struggled at selling anything other than ads. Will AI be different?

• Cooler Master is bringing active cooling to DDR5 RAM

• Social Media Giants to Pay $27M in School Suit Accord

• AI demand absorbs wafer capacity, crushing budget PC segment

• Wikipedia editors plot strike and banner sabotage after Wikimedia layoffs

• First Windows PCs powered by Nvidia chips to debut next week

• Downdetector and Speedtest sold to Accenture for $1.2B

• Nikon weaponizes lower prices to break ASML's lithography monopoly

• After more than two decades Paint.NET finally owns the domain paint.net

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange

  The 8087's microcode ROM contains 26,368 bits, specifying 1648 16-bit micro-instructions. At the time, this was a very large ROM; in order to fit it on the die, Intel used a special type of ROM that held two bits per transistor, twice the capacity of a standard ROM. This ROM is semi-analog, using four sizes of transistors to produce four voltage levels. Comparators convert the voltage level to a pair of bits.

• Navier-Stokes fluid simulation explained with Godot game engine

  • More accessible than many of the Godot tutorials I've looked at.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Blue Origin investigates, public is warned re: possible wreckage washing ashore

  • Blue Origin rocket explodes ahead of launch, in major setback for space company

  • Why the failure of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is so catastrophic

  • Blue Origin warns of rocket explosion debris after failed New Glenn test

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Researchers find all big-name bots bomb EU compliance tests

• Microsoft wants you to share your health symptoms with its new Copilot tool

• A $2k AI-generated film will make its debut at Tribeca

• Company Blew $500M on Claude AI in One Month Due to No Usage Limit on Licenses

• The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI

• Meta plans AI pendant, 'wearables for work' in hardware boost

  • Meta is reportedly developing an AI pendant

• US judiciary asked to adopt rule to curb fake AI-generated cases in filings

• The Pope Disrupts Silicon Valley

• A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It

• Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets

• More State Data Laws Signal Companies to Act on AI and Privacy

• Open-source spectre haunts the AI feast

• AI Billionaires Brace for Pitchforks

• Researchers let AI models run a simulated society; Claude safest, Grok extinct

• Tech companies desperately want to film you doing chores

• 'Solve all diseases,' you say?

• A.I. Doesn’t Have to Mean Layoffs - The New York Times

• Mistral says Europe has two years to build its own AI infrastructure

• The First A.I. High School in the U.S. Is Surprisingly Human

• The Billionaire Coding Genius Making the Tough Decisions at OpenAI

• Everything We Know About OpenAI's Planned iPhone Rival

• Amazon Thinks Future of Data Centers Depends on a Technical Problem It Solved

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• 'He's full of s–t': JPM's Dimon rips Coinbase CEO, escalates crypto bill fight

• Coinbase, Kalshi bring regulated perpetual crypto futures to US investors

• Gamification, memes lure young to sports wagering apps and prediction markets

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What ever became of Microsoft's $150M investment in Apple?

• BP's annual report shows you shouldn't believe what you read

• Walmart receipt from 2006 goes viral for its shockingly low prices: ‘I just fell to my knees’.

  Cereal has seen some of the steepest inflation. While it cost the 2006 shopper $1.86, most of the cereals for sale at Walmart today would set a shopper back between $5 and $6. A bag of sweet peas cost 33c in 2006. Today a bag is $2.48. Ketchup has risen from $1.94 to nearly $5 — a rise of 158%

  • 20 years of "transitory" inflation and "the longest economic recovery in history"

• Why the U.S. cattle herd is at a 75-year low

  U.S. beef production has remained strong, though, because even though the herd size has shrunk in recent decades, cattle themselves have grown.

• Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates

• Software stocks wrap up best month since 2001; talk of 'SaaSpocalypse' subsides

• Citadel loses challenge to SEC approval of new options exchange

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US to Appeal Judge's Order for Broad Refund of Trump Tariffs

• Powerful A.I. Super PACs Duel over the Midterms: 'This Is a War'

Trump

• Trump Accounts Jumpstart the American Dream

• Trump to cancel America's 250th birthday concert as artists drop out

• The Case for California's Billionaire Wealth Tax

Democrats

• CA Union Hilariously Mocks Gavin Newsom by Weaponizing Climate Excuse to Dodge Return-to-Work Order

  The California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment (CASE) earlier this week fired off “exhaustion” letters to over 100 state agencies, claiming that forcing 90,000+ state workers to commute four days a week would contribute to the global warming crisis.

Left Angst

• Congress moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries

  Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948. Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation.

• ICE to keep an eye on your eyes under $25M biometric scanner deal

• Records Show UC Sharing Data with US Customs and Border Protection

• US strike campaign against drug boats tops 200 deaths

• WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

  • Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time

  • Republicans are trying to kill science in this country

• British Ofcom Investigates Airing of Trump Interview Calling Climate Change a “Hoax”

  Ofcom is investigating GB News for failing to challenge Trump’s characterization, even though many people share his views on climate change.

• White House's Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

• US plans to halt immigration, customs processing at 'sanctuary city' airports

  • DHS says it's 'drawing up plans' to ban international arrivals at SFO

• Pratt Summer

  Let the screaming and crying commence. With recent polling now in rough alignment with the betting markets, it looks like former reality television villain Spencer Pratt has taken second place in the race for mayor of Los Angeles. While on some level I don’t think many Americans are surprised — there’s just something in the air these days, like the burning stench of Karen Bass’s smoldering Palisades, that has us all bracing for oddities in government — the panicked punditry, from our nightly news circus to the rotting carcass of Rolling Stone, is wondering: what’s driving the popularity of a professional 21st Century clown like Pratt, with no experience in government, over a thoughtful, if imperfect, standard issue Democrat like Bass, in her nice professional pantsuit? In Los Angeles?

  Well, I think it’s basically something like this: there really still just is tremendous political alpha in getting on stage and telling the truth. But in local politics it also matters what you’re telling the truth about, and a soccer mom of two will never care about Donald Trump while a meth addict’s shitting in her driveway.

  Red tape continues to hamstring rebuilding throughout the Palisades, and the city still has no coherent plan to prevent another fire of the magnitude that took the Palisades out, or anything even remotely resembling an honest account of what led to the single most destructive fire in the city’s history. Nonetheless, our story here, according to the professional bootlickers who circle machine Democrats like those little suckerfish that live off the dead skin of a blue whale, is moderate, reasonable, experienced Karen Bass vs. radical, populist, Trumpian Spencer Pratt.

  Probably the most fascinating aspect of the Pratt campaign is how angry his opponents have become in the face of the unbelievable controversy that is the mere existence of a Pratt campaign, with, from what I can tell, no actual controversial statement from Pratt. How is he “MAGA-coded” (Daily Beast)? What, specifically, makes him a “cosplaying” “everyman” racist (ESPN)? And does anyone in the press truly believe their message — that the city is “safer than it’s been in decades” — is going to resonate (LA Times)?

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Mercedes-Benz may be shut out of U.S. market due to Chinese ownership

• US, UK and Australia to develop underwater drone technology

• UK military looks at allowing lethal strikes without human approval

World

• Brazilian court orders restoration of Fordlandia, Henry Ford's Amazon ghost town

  • Henry Ford's Amazonian city, Fordlandia, to be restored

• Meta tool to track employee mouse clicks collision course with EU privacy rules

• After decades risking arrest, South Korea's tattoo artists step into limelight

• Naphtha shortages in Japan

• New York City-style air conditioning rules for London rejected by City Hall

• Leaked Files from Putin's Troll Factory: How Russia Manipulated EU Elections

• Viral stardom saves 'Trump' buffalo from sacrifice in Bangladesh

• Mumbai's famed dabbawalas fed millions for over 100 years

Iran / Houthi

• Treasury Sec Bessent says US Government has seized $1B of Iran's crypto

• U.S. has not confirmed that Iran placed mines in the Strait of Hormuz, sources say

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Putin's $26B Quest for Longevity

• Robots are redefining the war in Ukraine – and forcing Russia onto the back foot

China

• Nvidia says it has largely conceded China's AI chip market to Huawei

• China's world-beating solar industry is in turmoil

• Durex sales hit by China's condom crackdown

• China building ASAT launchers to defend against Elon Musk's Golden Dome

• Huawei thanks US for restrictions that supercharged China semiconductor industry

Health / Medicine

• Poor sleep linked to rising cancer risk in under-50s

• Genomic test could spare millions of breast cancer patients chemotherapy

• What Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs do to the body

• VA launches MDMA-assisted mental health therapy trial

• Memory decline after menopause linked to loss of estrogen production in brain

• Replimune's Drug Got Third Chance After White House Intervention

• Cancer jab can eradicate tumours in patients, trial shows

• Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or surgery

• Soon, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States with Legal Aid in Dying

• China's Rise in Drug Development Looms over U.S.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The deadly Ebola outbreak is proving difficult to control

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Millions of Bees Have Thrived Under a New York Cemetery for More Than a Century

• New charter gives River Wye the right to be free from pollution

• Iron-rich immune cells help homing pigeons navigate

• As floods get worse, Britain tries a new solution: beavers

• Bean plants call for aerial reinforcements when caterpillars attack

• Not just bad for your lungs; air pollution damages your brain

• Impossibly rare tropical bird swooped over California. Experts fear a trend

• Could nature itself hold the solution to climate change?

• An Elephant Who Demonstrated That Her Species Might Be Self-Aware, Dies at 55