2026-06-21

Horseshit

• A Chin-Stroking Mystery: Why Are Humans the Only Animals with Chins?

• Lawsuit against Amazon over suicides linked to chemical can go to trial

• A Monolith Designed to Record Civilization's Downfall Is Finally Taking Shape

• The terrifying world of the 'TikTok Farlands'

• Smokey Yunick's Hot Vapor Engine Was Equally Genius and Horribly Unsafe

  what could the Hot Vapor engine actually accomplish in practice? Well, Smokey took a Pontiac Fiero's four-cylinder and dramatically transformed its capabilities. From less than 100 horses and barely 125 pound-feet of torque to start out with, the Hot Vapor power plant bumped output up to 250 horsepower and 250 pound-feet of torque. Suddenly, this Fiero could post 6.5-second zero-to-60 mph times while also enhancing fuel economy by an additional 16 miles per gallon over stock (with premium fuel).

  • Those cars were known to be firebombs when new. I saw several dozen that had obviously had engine fires in junkyards in the years when they were made, and I haven't seen hardly any since then.

• World Cup tourists aren't leaving tips – and NYC restaurants are fighting back

• Not just books: renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy

celebrity gossip

• 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

Obit

• James Burrows, legendary director of Cheers and Friends, dies aged 85

• Doom Composer Bobby Prince Has Died

• Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot has died in a plane crash

  • Claude Guillemot Ubisoft Co-Founder Dead in Plane Crash

  • Ubisoft's co-founder Claude Guillemot dies in plane crash

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Eternal Allure of the Rabbit Hole

Musk

• A Trillion Dollars Isn't Worth It If You Have to Be Elon Musk

• Before SpaceX IPO, Investors in China Acquired Stakes

• Tesla's self-driving safeguards fooled by $30 doll heads

• The Myth of SpaceX

• Tesla allegedly in autopilot mode crashes into Texas house, woman killed

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Trapped in a Waymo: SF passenger recounts terrifying construction zone ordeal

• A Humble 3-Wheel Electric Vehicle Lands Toyota in Federal Court

  In the case, filed in federal court, an organization called Mobility for Africa asserts that Toyota Mobility Foundation, a nonprofit created by Toyota and managed by its executives, stole its technology and plans for the three-wheeled vehicle and handed it to a for-profit company operating in Kenya. The Toyota foundation’s conduct, the lawsuit says, has made it difficult for Mobility for Africa to raise money and expand its vehicles beyond Zimbabwe where it operates.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Tutor who charged thousands to sit exams for students jailed

• Georgia teacher accused of sex with 6 students had OnlyFans account, was recorded in ‘Jesus Loves You’ sweater: cops.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple patches high-severity eavesdropping vulnerability in Beats Studio Buds

• Microsoft discovers new lightweight backdoor that steals cryptocurrency

• Gizmodo breached, hosting malware and no action taken for hours

• Why People Ditch Smartwatches for Something Simpler

• There's an unpatchable security bug in the iPhone 11.

• FCC Seeks Comment on Enhanced Know-Your-Customer Requirements

• AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via BIOS update in July

• Linux Eliminates the Strncpy API After Six Years of Work, 360 Patches

• SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

  SMPTE®, the home of media professionals, technologists and engineers, has announced that its entire Standards catalog is now freely available to the global media technology community. This includes all published SMPTE Standards, Recommended Practices, Engineering Guidelines and Registered Disclosure Documents (RDDs), as well as all future releases. For more than a century, SMPTE Standards have helped enable the interoperability that underpins the entertainment technology industry. By removing barriers to access, this milestone is expected to accelerate adoption and implementation, strengthen interoperability, and help drive the next generation of innovation.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• 'Politically naive': The fight behind Anthropic's export controls

  • Did Anthropic talk its way into an AI export ban?

  • Trump says he no longer views Anthropic as a threat after G7 meeting

• Secretive Wall Street Powerhouse Jane Street Seizes the AI Spotlight

• AI AlphaFold pioneer who won a Nobel Prize leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

• Taste and Judgement are lies we tell ourselves

  While we are drowning in monocultures of code, writings, ideas, even scientific research, I see writings about taste and judgement everywhere. Blogs, X, poorly organized Linkedin posts sent to bots to fix. Even companies being formed on the premise that slop sucks and taste is what matters. The premise is AI cannot do taste and judgement better than us. Not even in the future. This is what separates us from them.

• Google, Microsoft offer specs to help you prove your AI is behaving nicely

• Who Owns the Code Claude Wrote?

• Why the Human Genome's Tangled Physicality May Confound AI

• US Scientist John Jumper to Leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic

• Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds

• Granta stops publishing short story award winners over AI controversy

• The Market's AI Fanfare Is Running into a Harsh Political Reality

• The Giant Test Kitchen Where Cooks Battle A.I. Slop

• UK Home Office launches £75M 'PoliceAI' to capitalise on artificial intelligence

• Adobe adds its AI assistant to Premiere, Illustrator, and InDesign

Economicon / Business / Finance

• (PDF) Dallas Fed: 30% of housing cost increase driven by unauthorized immigration

  From early 2021 to early 2024, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration, followed by a rapid slowdown beginning in mid-2024. We provide the first systematic empirical assessment of the labor- and housing-market effects of this episode. Using newly available administrative microdata on individual immigrants, we construct measures of net unauthorized immigration at the national and local levels and exploit plausibly exogenous variation across local markets. We find that unauthorized immigrant worker flows (UIWF) increased local employment approximately one-for-one, without significant declines in local wages. These inflows also raised local house prices and rents without expanding housing supply, consistent with a housing demand shock in the face of short-run inelastic supply. Lastly, we find that UIWF reduced labor income per capita, consistent with downward wage composition of the local workforce, and strongly reduced government transfers.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

• America's Founders helped create a world they were not yet ready to live in

  People rightly marvel at the miracle that Jefferson and his longtime rival-turned-friend John Adams both perished on July 4, 1826. Less remembered is that the two otherwise ideologically and dispositionally opposed torchbearers for the flame of '76 had each soured on the fruits of their precious Revolution. "Oh my country," Adams wrote in 1806 to Benjamin Rush. "How I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecility, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!"

  Founder disgruntlement was the rule, not the exception (and the exception to that rule was James Madison). "Those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought," wrote the historian Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. "Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned." Added the historian Dennis C. Rasmussen in Fears of a Setting Sun, about the only book-length treatment of the subject: "Most of the other leading founders—including figures such as Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush—fell in the same camp." Some of the sources of their souring were one-offs: 18th century conditions that could not be replicated now, such as Napoleon marching through Europe, or just the concentrated creativity of the Founding itself. Others, though, resonate with the political anxieties of today.

Left Angst

• Trump administration reverses decision to scrap ocean monitoring system

  • Admin ditches plan to close critical ocean monitoring system after backlash

• Trump administration to phase out HIV funding

• Trump administration to pay £765M to cancel 4 more wind projects

• Study: Conservatives are dying at higher rates than liberals

  “2010 is the last year in which we can say fairly clearly that there is not this gap,” Elizabeth Elder, a coauthor of the study, tells Fast Company. “By 2020 we have pretty clear evidence of a gap in which conservatives are less healthy than liberals.” The authors argue in the study that the divide cannot be explained away by COVID-19 deaths, demographic differences, geography, or the simple fact that some groups are older than others. Instead, they point to a widening ideological divide in trust toward doctors and the broader medical system.

• Trump Conquered the Republican Party

  Trump’s election in 2016 and return to power in 2024 are one of the most important stories in American political history. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to think about it through a historical/political science lens instead of the latest breaking news chyron on CNN. Trump has also benefited from not exactly always playing within the rules. Seth’s previous book, “Learning from Loss”, covered how Democrats responded to the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Parties rarely want to renominate losing candidates, for one thing. But those learning mechanisms are fundamentally broken when you falsely claim that the election was stolen from you. Trump has also frequently behaved like a “mob boss”, relying on threats and coercion, and Republicans sometimes even fearing for their physical safety by opposing Trump.

  • Seeking an answer that pleases the Epstein friends without mentioning them means you won't find the truth. People don't like Trump; they just see him hated by the people they also dislike and distrust. In a field of toadies, sycophants, and demented narcissists, that makes him the standout choice.

• Trump DOJ Outlines Dubious Path to Force People into Psychiatric Institutions

• Not just one: Turns Out, There Is a Cabal of Elite Crazies Trying to Control the World

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• A $40M Gold Heist Risks Exposing CIA's Top-Secret Spy Programs

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Data Center Warfare: Defending AI Infrastructure

• Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

• It Sounds as If There's a Turnaround in Military Food Service in the Works

World

• VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

• India Calls in Military, Blocks Telegram App to Lock Down College-Entrance Exam

• South Korea’s experiment with State-Sponsored Romance

• The Surprising New Arms Dealer to the World

• South Korea Could Build Nuclear Submarines, but It Shouldn't

• Power shortages force Cuban churches to ration Communion wafers

• Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

  • "Silence is violence" and it has been brought to everyone's attention that evil wins when good people do nothing to oppose it.

• Venice proposes hiking entry fee to €50

• Cuba to Privatize State Companies

• India's foremost court declares safe footpaths a constitutional right

• Unauthorized alert sent to cell phones across Brazil

• Europe's Making Fewer Cars and Lots of Them Are Chinese

• Europe swelters under heatwave, France restricts alcohol consumption

• UK PM Starmer expected to resign on Monday and set out orderly exit, Observer newspaper reports

Iran / Houthi

• Iranian Guards' business empire to win big if U.S. sanctions lifted

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Just Declared the Strait of Hormuz Closed.

• US-Iran memorandum of understanding in full

• Wanted: War-Zone Divers to Scrape Barnacles from Ships in Persian Gulf

• Iran says it's closing Strait of Hormuz, accusing Israel, US of violating truce

• Trump and Netanyahu Have Stepped in It Now

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• UK unveils prototype missiles for Ukraine with no US components

• How Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to live forever

• How Russia's Skyfall Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile Works

• Russia Wants AI Sovereignty. It Has a Chip Problem

China

• As China gorges on homegrown foie gras, France faces a new rival

• China will have a Fable 5-class AI model before next year

• Xi Jinping wants China to boost demand. Why isn't it working?

• GoPro and Roomba were U.S. pioneers. Chinese rivals now dominate

Health / Medicine

• Cancer Myths and Falsehoods Can Be Deadly

• World first, a man living with HIV received transplant from HIV-positive donor

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists warn 'Godzilla' El Niño could intensify climate impacts worldwide

• How animals communicate to work together across species boundaries

• How to move a beluga across the world

• Ancient 'Robin Hood' tree is dead, experts say

• Marathon Petroleum Company Is Making Diesel from Soybeans

  • Ethanol was gonna be the great savior and render petroleum obsolete; until the greens decided "food isn't fuel" in the early 1980s. I think ADM was paying to hype ethanol; until they made corn syrup and then paid for hype against it.

• Termination shock: trust our expert warnings on geoengineering's planetary risks

• Plants keep tabs on the competition, and adapt growth patterns