THE NEW SPACE RACE: China completes landing and takeoff test for crewed moon lander.
Archive for 2025
August 8, 2025
BANNED IN BOSTON: Kash Patel Slams ‘corrupt’ Sanctuary City Sheriff Indicted for Cannabis Company Extortion.
Boston’s sanctuary sheriff was arrested Friday on federal charges after allegedly leveraging his elected position to extort $50,000 from a cannabis executive who was seeking state approval to open a dispensary—a scheme FBI Director Kash Patel called a betrayal of public trust.
Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins, 67, who oversees more than 1,000 employees in the Boston-area, was handcuffed Friday morning in the Southern District of Florida after a federal grand jury indicted him on two counts of extortion under color of official right, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
“When someone entrusted with enforcing the law is accused of breaking it for personal gain, it undermines the public’s trust in every honest officer who wears the badge,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “The FBI will pursue corruption at every level, because no one is above the law. The people of Suffolk County, and the country, deserve leaders who serve them, not themselves.”
Tompkins was appointed sheriff of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department (SCSD) in 2013, elected in a 2014 special election, and later re-elected to serve successive six-year terms.
He made headlines in 2019 after booting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents out of the county jail, signing an eviction notice that required hundreds of illegal immigrant detainees to be moved out within 60 days, according to a report from the Boston Herald.
He also made headlines in June of 2020: Sheriff Tompkins: ‘This is our Rosa Parks moment.’
Before members of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office took a knee Friday in solidarity with protesters seeking an end to racial injustice, Sheriff Steven Tompkins delivered an impassioned speech about how systemic racism has affected the incarcerated population.
“The criminal justice system isn’t broken. The criminal justice system was built to be punitive. It was built to punish people that committed crime. And I’m not saying that’s a wrong thing. What I am saying, though, is when you have arrogance, and ignorance, and racism matched up with any punitive endeavour, bad things happen,” Tompkins said.
“As all of you know, 65% of our inmate population is black or brown. That’s in this commonwealth where that same demographic is 18%. How do you get 65% out of 18%? Ignorance, arrogance, racism. We can’t have that as a people,” he said.
Six years earlier, Tompkins was championing BLM: ‘Black lives matter’ protests sweep Boston, US cities.
The phrase “black lives matter” was a rallying cry in Boston as in other cities adorning signs and shouted as a rallying cry as the marchers made their way through the city.
Passing through the crowd gathered at the South Bay jail, Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins expressed support for the protest.
“It’s one heck of a display of civic engagement,” he said. “As long as it remains peaceful, I certainly do not have a problem with it. We can’t live in a country where young men of color are killed indiscriminately. These types of incidents have to stop.”
Spoiler alert: BLM protests were mostly peaceful, but with a fiery soupçon in 2020: Here’s How Violence Erupted in Boston After Peaceful George Floyd Protests.
IF SKYNET CRASHES, IT’S TAKING US ALL WITH IT: If the AI Bubble Pops, It Could Now Take the Entire Economy With It.
AI companies are pouring so much money into AI, experts are starting to warn that it may be propping up the entire US economy.
As investor Paul Kedrosky told the Wall Street Journal, spending on AI infrastructure has already eclipsed spending on telecom and internet infrastructure during the dot-com crisis over two decades ago, raising the specter of a massive bubble.
I’m not sure that’s the doomsday warning it’s intended to be, as the 2000 dot-com bubble really wasn’t the end of the world for the rest of the economy: “A Nasdaq sell-off in March 2000 marked the end of the dot-com bubble. The recession that followed was relatively shallow for the broader economy but devastating for the tech industry. The Bay Area in California, home to tech-heavy Silicon Valley, experienced a sharp rise in unemployment.” But unemployment throughout the US remained quite low in 2000 and 2001, prior to 9/11.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FURTHEST REACHES OF THE PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE:
Watch 'The Atomic Bowl,' @GregMitch's incredible documentary about an all-star military football game played in Nagasaki just months after 80,000 perished and the city was flattened by a US atomic bomb. This is a bizarre, dark memory of the immediate postwar era, one we'd all do… pic.twitter.com/Xi2My1QLpv
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) August 8, 2025
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE: Europa’s Bizarre Hotspot: Scientists May Have Solved a Long-Standing Space Mystery.
THE TROUBLING DECLINE IN CONSCIENTIOUSNESS:
Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.
Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.
Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. An industrious student who is not deterred by a challenge might use a large language model as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their less conscientious counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether.
All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.
Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.
While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.
The result sadly, isn’t An Army of Davids, but instead, An Army of Gretas:
Related: Capitalism Isn’t Why You’re Unhappy.
UPDATE: While the Financial Times article is paywalled, you can read most of John Burn-Murdoch’s conclusions in this Twitter/X thread:
NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?
Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.
This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵 pic.twitter.com/cBAgrLWKi5
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) August 8, 2025
More:
Understanding what happened to kids during these years in the U.S., mostly thanks to Covid *policies* NOT Covid, will be very important to understanding this generation as it ages. So, so many bad decisions. https://t.co/LeSbRR0pOX
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) August 8, 2025
ANOTHER FAILURE FOR OUR EXPERT CLASS:
I spent a bunch of time today reading recent economics papers on tariffs. Every single one assumes retaliatory tariffs. None—not a single one—correctly models what happened, which is a big hike by the U.S. in exchange for lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers.
Academic…
— John Carney (@carney) August 7, 2025
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
THE QUESTION ON EVERYONE’S LIPS: Could GPL-1 weight loss soon come in pill form? What we know.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ONLINE CONTENT: How did a new War of the Worlds movie get a 0% critical rating?
In a novelty that turns into a hindrance almost immediately, most of this unfolds on Will’s [played by Ice Cube] computer screen at his mostly empty office, where he’s working what’s described as a “graveyard” shift despite it being, you know, daytime. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it unfolds near Will’s computer screen. Unlike past “screenlife” movies like Unfriended, War of the Worlds is not exactly rigorous about adhering to its self-imposed limitations. Though Will’s face is often display on screen as part of various video calls (which is how Unfriended and others have worked actors’ faces into a screen-only framework), the movie also flat-out cuts away to traditional shots of Will that are framed vaguely like a Zoom call but clearly take place outside of Will’s computer. This makes sense. After all, when you’ve got an actor as expressive as Ice Cube, you want unmotivated closeups that can capture every single cocked-eyebrow scowl. How will the audience know how to feel if they can’t see Ice Cube scowling at his computer screen?
That’s probably not fair to Cube, who has been quite good in plenty of other movies. The man has presence. What he does not have is the kind of subtlety or emotional range that benefits from de facto solo occupation of the screen. Really, every actor in War of the Worlds feels like they’re performing in a Zoom-style vacuum – and seemingly not as a commentary on the coldly disconnected world of digital communication. In fact, quite the opposite: in this movie, everyone video-calls everyone all the time, to better show off some of the worst visual effects ever seen in a movie bearing the Universal Pictures logo out front*. No amount of handheld phone-camera or grainy news footage can disguise how terrible the alien ships look. They wouldn’t pass muster on a whimsical Snickers ad.
So how did this happen? How did this D-grade reimagining of a public-domain property wind up going from major studio to major streaming service to the top of the charts?
The pitch meeting must have been incredible:
SEE BETTER: Glocusent 57 LED Super Bright Music Stand Light. #CommissionEarned
RIP:
We are saddened by the passing of Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13 and a four-time spaceflight veteran.
Lovell's life and work inspired millions. His courage under pressure helped forge our path to the Moon and beyond—a journey that continues today. https://t.co/AjT8qmxsZI pic.twitter.com/jBlxzgrmSk
— NASA (@NASA) August 8, 2025
PERHAPS AN UNFORTUNATE TURN OF PHRASE: Why Hydrogen-Powered Cars Have Yet to Blow Up.
JON CALDERA: The three different ways Coloradans are being taxed.
Here’s one:
The untold story of the Jared Polis years is the explosion of Colorado’s regulatory state. The Mercatus Center released a report on regulations throughout the states. And congratulations, Colorado, we have skyrocketed to No. 12 in the number of regulations.
As of 2023, we have 165,994 regulatory restrictions. By contrast neighboring Kansas and Nebraska have around 75,000. Idaho clocks in at only 31,497 — five times less than us.
Colorado has 53,550 environmental restrictions, while the national average is close to half that. How much of your health care costs are from regulations? We have 13,719 restrictions on health care services, while the national average is only 4,673.
It’s not just that there are so many more regulations here. It’s that authorities to create even more regulations is growing like a cancer.
Take the Air Quality Control Commission. Just a few years ago, it was called the Regional Air Quality Council and had no real authority other than making recommendations. The legislature mutated it into a “commission” on par with the likes of the omnipotent Public Utilities Commission.
It now has near unlimited authority to regulate the state out of business. From banning gas-powered tools to forcing companies to require their employees to carpool, this unelected star chamber is working to make Colorado unaffordable.
Previously: ‘F’ Is for Democrat: Colorado’s Collapse Under One-Party Rule.
FUN GIFT: PANCKY Metal Detectors for Adults Waterproof. #CommissionEarned
MIDDLE EAST: Israel’s security cabinet approves plans to take over Gaza City. “Israel’s security cabinet has approved taking control of Gaza City, located in the north of the enclave, in another escalation to the war. Netanyahu earlier noted that Israel planned to take over the entirety of the enclave and eventually hand it off to ‘friendly Arab forces’ instead of Hamas.”
NANCY PELOSI MAKES SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO 2026 GOP MIDTERM ELECTIONS! Pelosi Working on Sex Changes for Children ‘at the National Level.’
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is positively devastated by attempts to halt child mutilation — performed under the guise of “gender affirmation” — and made it clear that she is still working to do something about this “at the national level.”
Pelosi made the remark this week, responding to an inquiry of how she is dealing with recent attempts to stop such procedures, particularly in her state of California. For instance, one of California’s largest healthcare providers, Kaiser Permanente, is expected to stop transgender surgeries — specifically for individuals under the age of 19 — beginning August 29.
“After significant deliberation and consultation with internal and external experts including our physicians, we’ve made the difficult decision to pause surgical treatment for patients,” they wrote in a statement. “All other gender-affirming care treatment remains available.”
Stanford Medicine is another major healthcare provider in the Golden State that announced it is pausing sex change surgeries on patients under the age of 19.
“That is something I’m working for at the national level, and we are hoping we can have gender-affirming care for our trans kids,” the 85-year-old congresswoman said, deeming the challenge a “sad thing for us.”
“I don’t know what effect we can have nationally with what we have going on in the White House and in Congress,” she concluded.
This clip seems likely to appear in numerous GOP candidates’ ads next year:
JUST IN 🚨 Nancy Pelosi: "We are hoping that we can have gender-affirming care for our trans kids" pic.twitter.com/aXYeRQQeYD
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) August 7, 2025
MORNING IN AMERICA? It’s beginning to feel like the 80s in America again.
QED:
Greatest Tito’s ad ever, and maybe the greatest ad for America ever. ♥️ https://t.co/kzgSMHR67I
— AnnaZ (@AnnaZ) August 8, 2025