THIS IS WHAT WE GET AFTER THE MURDER HORNETS FIZZLED: The Cicadapocalypse Is the Next Thing to End the World.
Archive for 2024
January 22, 2024
I THINK THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN FULLSIZE A COUPLE OF DECADES AGO: Best midsize trucks for 2024.
I HOPE IT STOPS: What happens when you trigger a car’s automated emergency stopping?
SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Russia Pushes For Law To Seize Property Of Citizens Who Criticise Putin’s Invasion Of Ukraine.
Criticising what Moscow calls its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine has effectively been a crime in Russia from the day it began almost two years ago, but the new bill aims to make penalties for that even tougher.
The move has drawn comparisons with the witch hunts of the 1930s under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with their ‘enemy of the state’ rhetoric and could affect thousands of Russians who have spoken out against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to Mail Online, the speaker of the State Duma lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, has dubbed the new bill ‘the scoundrel law’.
Volodin while announcing the submission of the new bill at the weekend also said everyone who tries to destroy the country must be punished accordingly and pay for the damage caused in the form of their property.
For all of Putin’s talk about Russia de-Nazifying Ukraine, there’s so much more re-Sovietizing going on in Russia.
GROOMING, STRAIGHT UP: Texas State University Library Pushes Graphic Trans Content for Teens, Kids.
WELL, GOOD: Survival rate for pancreatic cancer improves.
SCIENCE MARCHES ON: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of Six Papers by Top Researchers: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is reviewing more than 50 papers, including work of the hospital’s CEO.
The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, is seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 other papers as part of a probe involving four of its senior cancer researchers and administrators.
More than 50 papers, including four co-authored by Chief Executive and President Dr. Laurie Glimcher, are part of a continuing review, according to Dr. Barrett Rollins, the cancer institute’s research-integrity officer. Some requests for retractions and corrections have already been sent to journals, he said. Others are being prepared. The institute has yet to determine whether misconduct occurred.
Also under investigation are papers co-authored by Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn; Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial; and Dr. Kenneth Anderson, program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center.
All four researchers have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, making it the latest tranche of misconduct allegations leveled at Harvard researchers. Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president early this year, facing allegations of plagiarism. Last year, Harvard Business School placed Prof. Francesca Gino on administrative leave after accusations that her work contained falsified data.
Glimcher and the other researchers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dana-Farber’s disclosure about its probe arrived after a data sleuth pointed to irregularities in the researchers’ papers.
In early January, molecular biologist Sholto David published a blog post describing what he said were signs of image manipulation in papers by the Dana-Farber researchers. David contacted Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School with his concerns, submitting a list of papers he said contained problems.
The most serious, he said, had to do with images of experimental results that had signs of copy-and-pasting by software such as Adobe Photoshop. “Those are pixel-perfect matches for the same area, but it’s supposed to be a different sample,” he said.
It’s a bad year for Harvard’s brand.
WHEN CITY FOLK RUN ROUGHSHOD OVER RURAL DWELLERS: Colorado Parks and Wildlife announces plans to release up to 15 more wolves. “Under the wolf management plan, Parks and Wildlife could release another five wolves this season. But by holding off, the state agency says it will have more time to assess the releases in December and let staff adjust to any increased workload related to having wolves in Colorado.”
Gee, thanks, fellas.
READER FAVORITE: KINGSMITH Electric Height Adjustable Memory Standing Desk. #CommissionEarned
DEMOCRATS CRUCIFIED NIXON FOR 18 MISSING MINUTES BUT THEY DELETED TWO TERABYTES: Republicans Recovered More Than 100 Encrypted Jan. 6 Files, but There’s a Catch
POP QUIZ: Remembering Lenin—the First Great Communist Mass Murderer.
Let’s take a little history quiz. Which of the following features of the Soviet state were first introduced under Lenin, and which by Stalin:
1. The Gulag system of slave labor camps
2. The Cheka (secret police agency eventually known as the KGB)
3. Collectivization of agriculture leading to mass famines
4. Mass executions with little or no due process
5. A one-party state, with bans on all opposition parties (including socialist ones)
6. Suppression of freedom of speech and religion
7. Confiscation of private businesses, including even small businesses
8. Invading other nations in order to spread communism there
9. State control of the media for purposes of promoting regime propaganda, and preventing distribution of opposition speech
If you answered Lenin, you were correct in every case!
Read the whole thing.
THEY FEAR THE TRUTH:
I've been on social media in its current incarnations and its precursors (like dial-up AOL chat rooms) on-and-off since the mid-'90s.
I have learned one consistent lesson over and over and over, and it has never not happened. Here it is:
Anywhere online that conservatives are…
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) January 21, 2024
And evil hates to be mocked.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: In-N-Out To Close Crime-Plagued Oakland Location.
In a statement confirmed by an ABC7 reporter and obtained Sunday by The Standard, In-N-Out Chief Operating Officer Denny Warnick spoke plainly about the company’s “repeated steps to create safer conditions,” saying “our customers and Associates are regularly victimized by car break-ins, property damage, theft and armed robberies.”
The company said the store’s last day of business would be Sunday, March 24.
In-N-Out thanked the community for its 18 years of support before acknowledging the impact the sudden closure would have on workers and their families, stating that “this location remains a busy and profitable one for the company, but our top priority must be the safety and well- being of our Customers and Associates – we cannot ask them to visit or work in an unsafe environment.”
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*** THINGS UP: Here Comes the Houthi War (and How Biden Will Screw It Up).
JUST FOUR EASY PAYMENTS MANY PEOPLE NEVER PROPERLY ACCOUNTED FOR: The buy now, pay later holiday debt hangover has arrived, as consumers wonder how they’ll pay bills. “In an era where persistent inflation and record-high interest rates are shaping financial decisions for many shoppers, the service helped fuel a boom in overall online spending that topped out at $222 billion from Nov. 1 through the end of December. During the season, buy now, pay later usage hit an all-time high, rising a staggering 14% from the prior year and contributing $16.6 billion to online spending.”
And now comes the inevitable hangover.
49ERS TO HOST LIONS IN NFC CHAMPIONSHIP:
The San Francisco 49ers are hosting the Detroit Lions in next Sunday’s NFC Championship with a trip to Super Bowl LVIII on the line. The winner will punch their ticket to Las Vegas.
After edging out the Packers in Saturday night’s thriller, the 49ers are back in familiar territory in their third consecutive NFC title game.
The 3-seeded Lions, however, are more in unfamiliar territory as they will be playing in their first NFC Championship since the 1991 season.
Detroit surprised many people with its 12-5 record in the regular season, defeating the Los Angeles Rams and then the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to punch its ticket to Levi’s Stadium.
49ers-Lions will be on Jan. 28 with a 3:30 p.m. kickoff in Santa Clara.
Both cities have been the subject of mid-1960s documentaries that serve as inadvertent time capsules, shortly before the lights went out. First up, from 1965, Detroit: City on the Move:
Democrat Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh narrated in the documentary in the hopes that the city would be selected to host the 1968 Summer Olympics. Needless to say, in the interim, there was a rather large iceberg that sank the city, perhaps permanently.
Meanwhile, a mid-1960s documentary about San Francisco, whose title, “Baghdad by the Bay,” would take on an increased irony in the past twenty years:
UPDATE: Some are going much more old school in their search for tangentially NFL-themed documentaries:
SURE, THAT’LL WORK: Anti-Israel protesters at Columbia demand divestment, threaten tuition strike.
ELON MUSK VISITS AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU CONCENTRATION CAMP WITH BEN SHAPIRO:
Elon Musk, accompanied by his son and notable figures including Ben Shapiro, Rabbi Menachem Margolin and Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on Monday.
The visit, which included a wreath-laying ceremony at the Wall of Death and a service at the Birkenau memorial, was reported by The Forward.
This visit aligns with Musk’s attendance at the European Jewish Association’s annual conference in Krakow, taking place ahead of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. Rabbi Margolin, chair of the Brussels-based organization, had extended the invitation to Musk during a livestreamed ‘Spaces’ call on X focused on antisemitism and free speech. During the call, Musk tentatively agreed to the visit, recognizing its significance in understanding the impact of the Holocaust.
Even in 2024, some still need plenty of help in that effort:
“Allegedly.”
LOL, YALE STUDENTS SKIPPING CLASS: Yale students walk out of class on first day of semester to protest school’s ‘complicity in genocide.’
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE METAVERSE BEING THE NEXT BIG THING? Mark Zuckerberg Shifts Focus to AI, Investing Billions in High-End Chips.
Zuckerberg’s plan entails a significant financial commitment, with Meta gearing up to acquire a staggering 350,000 of Nvidia’s high-end AI chips. These chips, notably expensive, play a pivotal role in powering large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Each Nvidia H100 chip carries a hefty price tag of approximately $30,000. Consequently, Meta’s procurement of these chips may translate into an expenditure exceeding $10.5 billion.
But the expenditure doesn’t stop there. In addition to the 350,000 Nvidia H100s, Zuckerberg also aims to obtain nearly 600,000 H100 equivalents, further amplifying the financial magnitude of this endeavor.
Rather than merely chasing after the next ChatGPT-like language model, Mark Zuckerberg has set his sights on a loftier goal – the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI represents a concept often discussed among Silicon Valley’s elite, signifying the hypothetical point where AI achieves human-level intelligence. While not everyone in the field is convinced that current AI technology can reach this level, Meta’s commitment to this vision positions the company as a significant player in the race for AGI, potentially overtaking rivals like OpenAI.
…
After enduring a staggering loss of $46.5 billion associated with the Metaverse, Zuckerberg’s decisive pivot towards AI demonstrates his determination to stay at the forefront of technology.
Meta shares have enjoyed a nice rebound due to cost-cutting — but now this?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats Say (and Do) the Dumbest Things. “Keep it up, Dems. The more you say and do dumb things, the more people will be hip to the truth behind your agenda.”
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: The Coldest Place. And the survival power of bitching.