Posts tagged “Pentagon”

• Please enjoy watching this 45-second clip of a group of penguins meeting a kitten for the first time in their lives.
• Alzheimer’s Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say
• If You Give A Crocodile A Kawasaki Ultra 310LX
• I’m excited to build this Andor LEGO MOC of the Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) Covert Resistance Art Gallery with my son.
• America’s Most Reliable Public Transportation Subway Belongs To A Thriving East Coast City – via my dad
• A Little Good News on a Saturday Night
• Pioneering Olympic snowboarder Ueli Kestenholz dies in Swiss avalanche
• Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
• None of This Is Normal:
  • “It’s shameful that the government can come out and lie about what happened when there’s video and witnesses who have all come out and disputed what the government is saying.” – Golden State Warriors Head Coach Steve Kerr – via @benross
  • The laws of armed conflict forbid combatants from feigning civilian status, a war crime called perfidy. The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first boat attack off the coast of Venezuela. – via @kylegriffin1
  • Jonathan Gerlach was arrested as he walked back toward his car with a crowbar and a burlap bag in which officers found the mummified remains of two small children, three skulls, and other bones.
  • Six federal prosecutors quit amid the Department of Justice push to investigate the wife of Renee Good, the mother killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week. – via What A Day
  • ICE detention has expanded rapidly under the current administration, both in terms of the number of facilities and people held.
  • I Was Kidnapped by Idiots

• T-shirt Worn by Taylor Swift Sparks a $2M Windfall for Sea Otters
• “It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive,” is the catchy lede of this article on editing genes with CRISPR, Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures, that everyone I follow has already posted.
• Got a few hours to kill? Check out the Space Exploration Logo Archive. – via kottke
• Imagine getting burned by the Pope.
• Kohler Wants to Put a Tiny Camera in Your Toilet and Analyze the Contents
• Score one for the good guys: Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules
• Research on 6,000 older adults reveals that optimistic people are up to 50% less likely to develop weak grip strength and lose mobility.
• Any golfer should be able to relate to this essay by Gabby Herzig: I made a 12 during the biggest golf tournament of my life. Here’s what I learned.
• Who doesn’t love a good story about a cursed Egyptian mummy? (Related: The Met is having its first Egyptian exhibit in over a decade.)
• It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on. – from The Majority AI View, a fantastic essay by Anil Dash.
• The beatings will continue until morale improves:
  • Top US Army general says he’s using ChatGPT to help make key command decisions
  • There is a special place in hell for those who use children as pawns in their quest for power.
  • I don’t understand why the headline on this article about a convicted felon isn’t simply Maliciously Incompetent, Aggressively Ignorant, Lying Buffoon Lies Again.
  • North Carolina Elections Chief Demands Voters’ Full Social Security Numbers from DMV

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning. – Winston Churchill

• Even in his darkest time, Van Gogh was able to capture, with eerie accuracy, one of nature’s most complex and confusing concepts a century before scientists had the technology to do so. – via my dad
• The Los Angeles Rams will hold a minicamp in Maui this June; players will also help build four Habitat for Humanity homes in Lahaina, a historic town destroyed by wildfires in 2023.
• Self-styled prophets are claiming they have “awakened” chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.
• And now: The Nations of the World, brought to you by Yakko Warner!
• The Death of the Screenplay Industrial Complex – via The Dailies
• People with the lowest LDL levels are less likely to develop dementia. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• Good News for People Who Like Bad News:
  • Trillion-dollar Pentagon budget proposal cuts competitors out of NASA budget and could add billions to SpaceX defense contracts.
  • The new president of the University of Florida is slated to make up to $3M/year, more than any other public university president in the country and more than twice what he made at the University of Michigan, and all he has to do is be a boot-licking sycophant. I am terribly disappointed in my alma mater and fearful of what this portends.
  • Senate Democrats chose not to use the leverage they had to deal with the latest POTUS crypto scam, effectively allowing politicians to speculate personally in perhaps the most fraud-riddled financial market in human history. Pathetic.
  • ICE efforts in Washington, D.C. thwarted by solidarity.
  • God help us all, but I <gasp> agree with Laura Loomer, regarding the POTUS nomination of Casey Means – who has no government experience and dropped out of her surgical residency program: “[W]e can’t have a pro-COVID vaccine nepo appointee who is currently embroiled in a medical malpractice case and who didn’t go to medical school in the US,” as the surgeon general.
  • I cannot believe this has happened three times now: More Troops Injured as U.S. Planes Keep Plunging into Red Sea

• If you can’t get excited about Jack Black as Steve, you really need to spend more time interacting with elementary school children.
• We need to work on bringing the phrase, “the whole megillah,” back into regular use. I feel like abandoning this wonderful expression was a bad idea, even though I’ll freely admit that I thought it was spelled “magilla” until about ten minutes ago.
• I have started listening to the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast and really love it. Of course, the three episodes I’ve heard so far were ones featuring interviews with Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and Jeff Goldblum, three of my favorite actors, so my opinion may be biased. But all three had me laughing out loud at one point or another and it’s nice to hear Conan’s voice again.
• A month after the death of his mother, Tiger Woods says he’s recovering after surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles, likely ending his 2025 season.
• An 11-year-old boy who pulled the Paul Skenes MLB Debut Patch card will likely sell it for more money than Skenes will make from his 2025 Pirates base salary. – via @jacksongagne.com
• Tim Walz to launch national tour of town halls in Republican House districts. (Go get ’em, Tim!)
• Madness:
  • The Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash Into Golf Courses – Even As [Administration] Slashes Government Spending
  • USDA ends program that helped schools serve food from local farmers
  • Department of Justice Official Says She Was Fired After Opposing Restoring Mel Gibson‘s Gun Rights
  • Pete Hegseth is expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict. – via @jamellebouie.net
  • NIH officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. – via @kwcollins.bsky.social