I'm going to start updating this newsletter again, but I don't know how often. What I'm going to do today, and probably in the future, is do less punditry and analysis, and more link blogging. I read a lot of horrible things, and you should know about them and suffer along with me.
If you shared this story on Twitter, they flagged it with a big warning "This material may have been obtained by hacking." If you just wanted to retweet it, you had to go through a scary pop-up warning to confirm your intention. Also, your social credit score went down.
Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs
Democrats in 2019: No more children in cages!
Democrats in 2021: No, more children in cages!
First migrant facility for children opens under Biden (WaPo, WWW)
The Onion is extremely accurate, as always.
Boston Dynamics is very concerned that you might call their uncanny-valley-ass robot war dogs "war dogs". Their feelings might be hurt, much like your fingers, if you don't keep them clear of those joints.
Heedless of the feelings of Boston Dynamics, the NYPD is deploying robot war dogs on the Bronx. Fortunately, the current version have a big battery release handle on the underside, towards the front.
The NYPD Sent a Creepy Robotic Dog Into a Bronx Apartment Building
Merry pranksters MSCHF arm one with a paintball gun and put it through its paces.
So, as those of us on the left have been expecting, the Biden administration is jumping back into foreign military adventurism with both feet, since they're able to do so without generating the kind of controversy that the Trump administration doing it did. And, as fits the abuser playbook, they're claiming to be doing it in self-defense.
US Bombs Syria and Ridiculously Claims Self Defense (Caitlin Johnstone, WWW)
What the liberals are saying on Twitter (image, 123K)
Here are a few things that aren't news, but serve as... I don't know; a digestive? to it.
Involuntary park is a neologism coined by science fiction author and environmentalist Bruce Sterling to describe previously inhabited areas that for environmental, economic, or political reasons have, in Sterling's words, "lost their value for technological instrumentalism" and been allowed to return to an overgrown, feral state.
Wikipedia; Involuntary Park (WWw)
And you don't like it.
One good (?) bit of news? It looks like Yuggoth, the "strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system" may yet be a reality. Gravitational influences on the clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects suggest that there's a super-Earth or mini-Neptune out there, in the blackness, between 400 and 800 AU.
More recent news suggests that this evidence may be an illusion, but I hope not. I hope the strange, fungoid crustaceans are waiting out there, watching. And perhaps one day, they won't be waiting any longer.
