Lobsty Klawfman

Pete Hegseth has proposed routine testosterone testing for U.S. soldiers. I am not making this up.

In 2012, Chris Kubasik was president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin, which makes fighter jets and various other things that governments purchase when they would prefer to make a point from a significant distance. He was expected to become its next chief executive. The board of directors learned about a personal relationship he had developed with a subordinate employee. He left the company. He did not become CEO of Lockheed Martin.

In 1770, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing machine for the Empress of Austria. He called it the Turk. It wore robes and a turban and sat at a cabinet containing gears and levers, visible through glass panels. It played chess against Napoleon. It beat Benjamin Franklin. It toured Europe for decades, defeating everyone it sat across from, because it was not a machine. Inside the cabinet, behind the gears (which were real but decorative), a small person sat in a carefully arranged space and moved the chess pieces using a system of magnets. The Turk was a human pretending to be a machine.

Avengers: Endgame will be re-released this fall as Avengers: Endgame Encore. The re-release will include new footage and corrected color grading. The original film was released in 2019. It made $2.793 billion at the box office.

The price of artificial intelligence, measured as the cost to the person using it, is collapsing. This is the good news. The cost of building it, measured as the money required to run the servers and buy the chips and keep the lights on in buildings that cannot be allowed to get warm, is not collapsing. This is the other news.

Ryan Gosling is developing a live-action movie about Bamm-Bamm Rubble. This was announced this week, and it was announced in the normal way that film projects are announced, which is to say through a trade publication, with an agent, as though it were a reasonable thing that was happening.

Andy Burnham became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in May. He has not been to many countries yet. He has been to Ukraine.

SoftBank is raising $6.3 billion dollars from Japanese retail investors. These are ordinary investors — the pension-holders, salary workers, and retirees who make up the kind of audience that attends financial planning seminars and leaves with a folder of material and renewed uncertainty about the future.

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing this weekend, a robot named Lightning ran one hundred meters in 9.39 seconds. I am not making this up.

The Stars and Stripes is the official newspaper of the United States military. It has been published continuously since 1861. Federal law requires it to operate with editorial independence from the military chain of command.

MacKenzie Scott announced this month that she is publishing an 80,000-word serialized novel for free on Substack. (I am not making this up.)

Merck and Moderna announced this week that their personalized cancer vaccine has shown significant success in patients with melanoma. The vaccine works. (I am not making this up.)

David Morens, a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty this week to conspiring to evade federal public records laws. (I am not making this up.) He admitted, in a federal courtroom, to a criminal conspiracy. The official, documented, federal-court description of what he did is: conspiring.

FIFA announced this week that Chief Operating Officer Kevin Lamour has "departed" the organization. (I am not making this up.) The announcement came weeks after Lamour publicly criticized FIFA President Gianni Infantino's plan to sell a commercial stake in the World Cup and other FIFA tournaments to private investors.

In October 2014, Lockheed Martin announced they were building a compact fusion reactor. This was not a vague announcement about investing in fusion energy. This was a specific announcement about a specific device that Charles Chase and his team at Skunk Works had been developing in secret, and were now ready to tell the world about.

A team of researchers at A Security has built a program that can silently take control of every device in a Zoom meeting. They called it Zoomsday.

Jane Street took a fifteen billion dollar loss in July on a strategy called "Situational Awareness."

On Friday, Venezuela announced that 131 political prisoners had been granted what the government called "alternative liberty restriction measures." (I am not making this up. This is the phrase that appeared in the official announcement. I read it three times. It said the same thing all three times.)