On this day:
1972Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex
2009
During the Iranian election protests, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video and spreads virally on the Internet, making it “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.
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Nobody is needy in the market economy because some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody. The process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.--von Mises
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AI must be a worry; the NYT is quoting the Pope about it.
Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI—that is, discredit “the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”
Nobody is needy in the market economy because some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody. The process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.--von Mises
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AI must be a worry; the NYT is quoting the Pope about it.
Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI—that is, discredit “the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”
Man's relentless quest for incomplete knowledge?
Can AI paper over our faults, order our moral chaos, solve our 'original sin' in a technologically inspired spiritual dictatorship?
Is AI the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge or just another branch?
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From a recent article in City Journal:
Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met in person for the National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing body. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
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China may soon be the world's biggest producer of foie gras. The French are worried.
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SatSats
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that the Justice Department is investigating more than 8,000 fraud cases, which he said represent over $1 trillion in taxpayer funds potentially stolen each year by "increasingly sophisticated and opportunistic fraudsters."
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Last year, executives at Swiss bank UBS spoke of the beginnings of the "largest private wealth migration in history," during which 44% of their billionaire clients under age 55 had moved once or more within the previous 12 months.
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11% of marriages in the US are between Blacks and Whites, yet Black-White couples in TV ads would make you think that mixed racial marriages were much more common. Since identification of the audience with the ad is a basic, that peculiarity is hard to explain.
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A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer’s risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable
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Of all 46 chromosomes contained in most human cells, the Y chromosome is the only one that can be lost without the cell dying.
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Ozempic may increase human lifespan by 3-5 years.
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New York City’s $125 billion budget is that it is bigger than the $115 billion expected to be spent this year by the entire state of Florida. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.
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Mobile phone theft in London:
- An estimated 90,000 mobile devices were officially reported stolen to the Metropolitan Police over the previous calendar year.
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- The successful recovery rate for stolen electronic hardware currently languishes at an abysmal margin of under 2 percent.
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- Cybersecurity experts estimate the secondary extortion market generates tens of millions of dollars in untraceable cryptocurrency revenues annually.
- Ransom demands typically range from $500 to $2,000, depending on the perceived financial status
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