January 2, 2025

Stuttering Lede, January 2nd, 2025

Welcome to the new year

Welcome to 2025

I keep procrastinating with writing anything substantial even though I have at least 8 drafts in my main blog and probably a dozen notes for new ideas in my Google Keep. I will get there. This year even.

Professors shouldn’t be allowed to use the internet unsupervised, Hari Kunzru‬ ‪documented how a student somehow accidentally emailed the entire NYU faculty and the reply-all carnage is like a freeway pile-up, including the now infamous Onions puppy:

The Age of Terrorism

• Soldier shot self in head before Cybertruck exploded outside Trump’s Las Vegas hotel.

  

• The man who allegedly detonated fireworks inside a Tesla Cybertruck in front of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, was reportedly a supporter of President-elect Trump.

• Malfunctioning security bollards were removed from Bourbon Street before truck attack.

• Man arrested after driving on grass near Capitol amid heightened concerns over vehicle attacks.

• Trump falsely links New Orleans terror attack to migrants after erroneous Fox News report.

Today in History

'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' by Wham was released nearer to the end of the Second World War than to today.

US

• Jimmy Carter has died. Here is my obituary on a good man, but a really terrible president who was the closest thing to an actual libertarian that we've had as a president.

• The MAGA Civil War.

• The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here.

• America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal.

• We should remember Jimmy Carter as a good man whose life after office was an example of mutual aid while also recognizing his presidency ushered in Neoliberalism and the modern Democratic president who promises reform and becomes a capitalist custodian.

• Has The Right Won the Culture War?

• President Musk Declares War on American Workers.

• 70% of Americans who receive food stamps and Medicaid work full time, with Walmart one of the worst offenders as the country’s single largest employer. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize corporations who get away with paying poverty wages, especially not while raking in record profits.

• How insurers, like United, rely on the same doctors to deny mental health care, even as judges repeatedly question their calls: “puzzling,” “disingenuous”, “dishonest, “baseless.”

• More than 70 percent of California’s dairy cow herds are infected with bird flu.

• When Families Need Housing, Georgia Will Pay for Foster Care Rather Than Provide Assistance.

• US homelessness up 18% as affordable housing remains out of reach for many people.

• Wall St. Is Minting Easy Money From Risky Loans. What Could Go Wrong?

• Best Served Cold: Luigi Mangione and The Age of Breach.

• China unveils the future of high-speed rail with a next-gen prototype. The new train will connect Beijing and Shanghai in just 3 hours and 20 minutes. Here are some US city pairs that are a similar distance apart:

  • NYC-CHI

  • CHI-ATL

  • DC-ATL

  • ATL-NYC

  • ATL-MIA

  • ORL-DC

• MacKenzie Scott’s game-changing philanthropy still mystifies nonprofits: ‘Her gifts are super generous, but unfortunately, they don’t provide long term sustainability.’ It's the time of year when the Philanthropy Industrial Complex (Big P for short) seeds negative stories about Mackenzie Scott because everything about the way she gives money undercuts their entire model...

• Former FBI and CIA head prods Senate to reject Patel, Gabbard.

• US Senate report finds CIA mishandled employee cases of Havana syndrome.

Leave a comment

• Self-Checkout Machines Taking Over Grocery Stores. Yup. Been meaning to write about this for a while…

EUROPE

• Emmanuel Macron was the great liberal hope for France and Europe. How did it all go so wrong? Shorter version, it was all a lie?

• The best and the brightest…

• Reuters identified five chemical companies, in which five Western-sanctioned billionaires hold stakes, that provided more than 75% of the key chemicals shipped by rail to some of Russia’s largest explosives factories from the start of the war until September 2024.

MIDDLE EAST

• The Taliban say they will close all NGOs employing Afghan women.

• Israel orders remaining residents of Beit Hanoun to leave.

WOMEN RIGHTS

• 4 Reasons Why Single Women Are Happier Than Single Men.

• At least 15 men in Gisèle Pelicot rape and assault trial appeal against convictions.

• Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt reach divorce settlement after eight years.

LGBTQA+ RIGHTS

• New progressive chair says Dems don’t have to abandon trans folks to reconnect with working class.

TECH

• OpenAI has announced o3, here's the underlying math, each task consumed approximately 1,785 kWh of energy—about the same amount of electricity an average U.S. household uses in two months.

• 41% of Americans now live in states where the government forces you to upload an ID and/or submit to a face scan to access parts of the internet.

• Meta is creating AI users to “boost engagement.”

• Meta confirmed that the company will allow AI-generated users on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The AI-generated users will be labelled as AI and look and act like any other users.

• "For Project Maven, Google hired hundreds of gig-economy workers to solve numerous CAPTCHAs at an incredibly low cost (roughly $1/hour). The results of these completed CAPTCHAs were then used to develop a classification program for the use of US Military drone applications." Workers had no idea.

Subscribe now

• Elon Musk has been staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage at Mar-a-Lago, giving him easy access to President-elect Trump.

• Elon Musk changes his name to Kekius Maximus on X.

• The best secure browsers for privacy: Expert tested.

• Florida is happily next on the Pornhub chopping block.

• OpenAI says it needs ‘more capital than we’d imagined’ as it lays out for-profit plan.

• Meta is overhauling its global policy team, replacing President Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, his deputy and the company’s most prominent Republican.

Leave a comment

• Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M. This is not justice, if you ask me, more like a handout…

EDUCATION

• Women are now 60% of college enrollment.

• Arizona Regulators Closed a Failing Charter School. It Reopened as a Private Religious School Funded by Taxpayers.

• Student Evaluations Can’t Be Used to Assess Professors.

CLIMATE CHANGE

• Air pollution in India linked to millions of deaths.

GUN VIOLENCE

• 16-year-old with hands up shot to death by cops during ‘no-knock’ raid in AL.

MISC.

• Alan Moore on the "science fiction wank dreams" of Musk, Bezos, Branson, et al.

• I knew that Audrey Hepburn was gorgeous and talented but didn’t know she was also brave and principled. What a woman!

• India closed 2024 with yet another mob lynching of a Muslim man, after which the police filed a case against the lynching victim for allegedly slaughtering a cow (they deigned to take him to a hospital to die). New year, same ethnostate.

• A List of Predictions Made in 1925 About 2025.

• Björk : "After plagues and pandemics there will be new modes of existence."

• Pornhub is now banned in almost all of the American South. Porn is just the test case. They're going to add real ID requirements for viewing abortion info, LGTBQ+ issues, etc. The thought police tracking everyone's waking move, online and offline.

Subscribe now

• Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

• The 43-year-old son of Republican Senator Kevin Cramer was sentenced to 28 years for killing a police officer in a 100mph meth-fueled chase after escaping a hospital and stealing his mom's car. Cramer has frequently attacked President Biden by invoking his son, Hunter.

• Cannabis could help people cut down or stop opioid use.

• Squirrels Are Displaying ‘Widespread Carnivorous Behavior’ for the First Time.

• Smell is chemistry, and the chemistry of old books gives your cherished tomes their scent.

• Alleged Delta stowaway who lives in Philly arrested again for trying to flee US.

• Is Mikhail Baryshnikov the Last of the Highbrow Superstars?

HUMOR