I spotted different breed of street preacher. He was ranting at the top of his lungs about “the Tao” and something about kundalini.
How refreshing, I thought.
Then he started raving about the Jews are an abomination
and predicting the Pope will die in 48 hours
.
I decided not to bother debating him.
It was right near the Mary Tyler Moore statue, if someone else has more fortitude than I do.
This old atheist found it to be an encouraging day.
Shortly, I’m going to retrieve my phone charger, maybe have breakfast, and then go off to a bunch of social justice talks. This should also be a good day.
I’m about to drive to Minneapolis for the American Atheists conference. I’m not as enthused as I ought to be.
Atheism is an important topic, especially given the ascendance of destructive Christianity in this country, but so much of the atheist movement has become orthogonal to everything else I value — somehow people can be libertarian atheists or conservative atheists without feeling any conflict with the movement, and that bugs me.
I’ve paid for it, and there are some good people there I’d like to see, so I guess I’m going to go anyway. Maybe I’ll be revitalized.
In the big cities, crosswalks are equipped with those little buttons pedestrians can press to request a light change, and that also have speakers to announce which direction is safe to cross, a safety feature for blind people. Even little Morris has a set of these at one intersection, at 4th and Atlantic, if you’re ever in the area and want to gawk at our advanced technology.
It turns out that some nefarious people have figured out how to hack the message that comes out of the speakers.
On April 12, 2025 the top story on the Palo Alto (California) online news site was “Silicon Valley Crosswalk Buttons Apparently Hacked to Imitate Musk, Zuckerberg Voices” It told the story, covered by other media too, of how someone hacked into audible pedestrian signals so they broadcast messages such as “From undermining democracy, to cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop, to making the world less safe for trans people, nobody does it better than us – and I think that’s pretty neat..”
The Palo Alto Online story continued by sharing that “City employees determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted and have disabled the voice announcement feature on the crosswalks until repairs can be made.”
There’s a glaring hole in this story and in all the reporting I’ve seen about this “hack.” The missing piece is this: Those signals have a voice announcements (and capability for audible output) because they are accessible signals that the blind community across the country have advocated and fought for for decades.
Can you tell which street is safe to cross from that message?
I’m ashamed that that sounds like an anti-Zuckerberg message that a Leftist might make. Don’t do that, people. It’s insensitive and hurts the innocent.
Elon Musk does not dream of colonizing distant worlds. His dream is to milk the federal government of every penny he can get, and his real goal is about tapping into lucrative defense contracts.
• SpaceX is leading a bid to build Golden Dome with startups Anduril and Palantir, six people said
• The SpaceX-led group is pitching the Pentagon on a ‘subscription model’ for missile defense, sources said
• SpaceX proposes a constellation of 400 to more than 1,000 missile defense satellites, sources said
Picture Musk controlling a military spacecraft…
“Golden Dome” is just another Trump boondoggle, an excuse to throw away more money. It’s in contradiction to his claim to be improving government efficiency, which is code speak for starving the poor and throwing more money to the top 1% and to defense contractors. He’s going to pick who those contractors get to be.
One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”
SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.
I bet the defense industry is deferential — they want more money.
Because he’s actually an evil villain, Musk has another devious plan to unfold.
In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a “subscription service” in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.
The subscription model, which has not been previously reported, could skirt some Pentagon procurement protocols allowing the system to be rolled out faster, the two sources said. While the approach would not violate any rules, the government may then be locked into a subscription and lose control over its ongoing development and pricing, they added.
He’ll be an obscenely wealthy man who possesses total control of a thousand military satellites floating above the United States! This sounds like the plot to a James Bond movie.
This is also how Nazis talk.
In a press conference Wednesday morning that surely delighted his allies in the anti-vaccine movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a report about apparent rising autism rates with a vow to look at “environmental factors” as a possible cause. While Kennedy didn’t explicitly discuss vaccines, his remarks made it clear, again, that he’ll likely use the power and money of the federal government to prop up the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. He also repeatedly made crude and stigmatizing references to people with profound autism (which he calls “severe” autism, an outdated term) painting a picture of such people as a burden on society and to their families.
“These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.”
“The epidemic,” Kennedy said at another point, “is real.” Autism, he added, “destroys families and more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, our children.” Many children, he claimed, were “fully functional” and “regressed.”
Vaccines do not cause autism. I repeat, vaccines do not cause autism — this bogus claim has been tested repeatedly and in depth. This is a red herring, one that RFK jr will pursue at great cost to our country and to the health of our children. He does not actually care about children, his priority is defending his delusions.
The world has gone down this road before. This talk is a prelude to first institutionalizing autistic children, then sterilizing them, and then quietly, and no doubt painlessly at first, exterminating them. They’re useless, a drain on society, so why not get rid of them?
Furthermore, look at this chilling gem from the CDC report: white kids aren’t afflicted as much as black and hispanic kids. We already know this administration is racist as fuck, so here’s more fodder for the white nationalists.
RFK Jr. called today’s press conference to discuss new findings published this week in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found an increase in apparent autism rates, from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31. The report, based on 2022 data, found that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder was higher in 8-year-old children than in previous years, and higher in Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific Islander children than in white children.
Knut
I’ve mentioned before that my grandson is autistic. He has learning and language disabilities, but he’s going to a special school and his language is getting much better.
He loves playing with his father’s phone — he has figured out how to call me, so every once in a while I’ll get a surprise FaceTime call, and he’ll say “Hi, grandpa,” and then be at loss for words for a while, and he’ll close by saying “I love you, grandpa,” and go back to playing. He likes playing music on the phone, and has somehow figured out how to send his playlist in a text message to me. He seems to be on an Elton John kick right now, and he’s a fan of the Bee Gees.
He’s a human being, and his family loves him. How dare this incompetent, over-privileged fantasist dehumanize him?
My calendar is set up to pop up a message every 16 April: “Call your mother.” I think I’ll keep that alert despite the fact that I can’t call her anymore.
She’d be 86 years old today.
He has a new book coming out, The War on Science. It does not look promising. Here’s a list of the contributors:
Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson
I don’t know all of those names, but the ones I do are just the worst. Krauss dredged the slime from the bottom of the grievance-obsessed academic shithole. I’m not going to read this trash, so I’ll let Genetically Modified Skeptic discuss what is in it.
It’s a collection of essays by people who are triggered by DEI. Screw that.
Really, I don’t blame you.
Can I move in with you, instead?
Jeff Bezos launched Katy Perry into space for 11 minutes.
That’s it. That’s our big news today. Woo hoo.
You can find a most excellent summary of the whole thing in the Guardian.
Given the mixture of freebie rides and seats sold to the super-rich, the thing people always say about Blue Origin tickets is that prices range from zero to $28m dollars. A bit like a seat on a RyanAir flight to Tallinn. But these spots were all personally gifted by Bezos and Sánchez because this was an Important Mission. Which also meant the whole thing was exclusively documented by Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel. Here, the anchors and reporters kept explaining that – unlike when men went to space in the past – this mission was all about emotions. But look, it’s great that we’re valorising emotions above all things, because it gives me permission to say how very much I hated this entire, hilariously vacuous spectacle.
