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- Facebook, the social media giant founded by Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend. Transitioning from a college dorm project to a dominant force in the tech industry, the platform is under scrutiny over a number of controversies, including data harvesting. It also faces a decline in user engagement, especially among younger audiences who now favor trendier platforms like TikTok or X. These days, Facebook has become more of a reminder service for birthdays or a medium for WhatsApp communication than the vibrant social hub it once was.
- In twenty years, the company has grown into a major tool for manipulation, social engineering and control by the deep state, big business and Western intel agencies. Formally launched on February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg’s future empire started out as a modest “directory of information for college students,” with Zuckerberg and several of his Harvard classmates assembling the initial platform in about two weeks, and the company taking just four short years to surpass rival Myspace to become the world’s number one social media platform. But beneath the surface of these ebullient, heartwarming stories is a darker story of manipulation and social programming, censorship and shameless attempts at narrative control by Western governments, major corporations, and intelligence services. As Americans, Europeans and others around the world signed up, logged on and voluntarily offered up private information that companies and intel agencies would have paid a fortune to get their hands on just a few short decades ago, powerful forces quickly realized the importance of collecting and engineering this new form of online human interaction. A 2021 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory entitled “Combating Information Manipulation: A Playbook for Elections and Beyond,” which plainly outlines tools the company uses to “remove the spread of malign information” from social media.
- Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been taking illegal drugs for years, on many occasions alongside the board members and directors of his companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing sources who claimed to have either witnessed the drug use or had knowledge of it. According to the report, Musk has attended a number of social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, where he recreationally took ketamine, an anesthetic commonly used to euthanize house pets. Other directors, Antonio Gracias, Kimbal Musk and Steve Jurvetson, have reportedly consumed drugs like ecstasy and LSD with him at several parties, including those held at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in Mexico allegedly known for its drug-fueled events. Musk’s drug problems, it could put SpaceX’s federal contracts and Musk’s security clearance at risk, the report notes.
- Latvia has been persecuting its Russian-speaking residents for many years. Today, thousands of of them face deportation. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that these actions pose a threat to his state’s national security. Latvia intends to punish residents who have not learned the national language by deporting them. To remain in the country, they must pass a test. The requirement also applies to those with ‘non-citizen’ status – people who permanently reside in Latvia (sometimes from birth) but don’t have the same rights as others. The Latvian authorities have recently tightened their policy with regard to national minorities, supposedly due to concerns that arose after the start of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. However, the trend towards further restricting the rights of the Russian-speaking population in Latvia has been developing for a long time.
- The US House of Representatives is set to vote on a “clean, standalone” Israeli aid package next week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced on Saturday. The bill will include $17.6 billion in aid for Israel and will not include any other funding or offsets. A previous Israeli aid bill passed by the House included $14.3 billion for Israel and offset that with a corresponding cut to the IRS. That bill stalled in the Senate, with Democrats in the upper chamber complaining that the cuts to the IRS would actually increase the deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office. Johnson hopes that removing that offset will push Democrats into supporting the bill. “During debate in the House and in numerous subsequent statements, Democrats made clear that their primary objective to the original House bill was with its offsets,” the Speaker wrote in a letter to colleagues on Saturday. “The Senate will no longer have excuses, however misguided, against swift passage of this critical support for our ally.” Republicans previously demanded that any bill including funding for Ukraine would have to include major concessions from Democrats on border security.
- Europe is afraid to be left alone with Russia: NATO countries discussed the future without the United States. Things are turning out so that Donald Trump may enter the White House again in the fall. And he has repeatedly stated that he is not at all eager to invest in strengthening the North Atlantic Alliance, in which, in his opinion, the allies ride on the neck of the United States. And in his last term, Trump caused a stir among American vassals by giving them an ultimatum: either increase defense spending or remain without American help. NATO members (not all, but those who could) strained and fulfilled the requirement. But the favorite of the presidential race does not let up, threatening to withdraw the United States from the alliance altogether. What is worth is the phrase he threw at one rally: “if NATO is dead, we will leave it,” And the intention of Trump and the Republicans behind him to stop financial and military assistance to Ukraine, focusing on the internal problems of the United States.
- While libertarian president Javier Milei slashes spending in Buenos Aires to tackle Argentina’s severe economic crisis, 600 miles away the northern province of La Rioja is trying a different approach: printing its own currency. In an effort to pay public workers, La Rioja’s state legislature, dominated by Quintela’s left-leaning Peronist movement, has approved a plan to issue 22.5bn pesos ($28mn) worth of so-called “bocades”. These provincial government bonds can be used to pay local taxes, bills for public services such as energy and water and — in theory — to buy goods from private companies. Bocades — nicknamed a “quasi-currency” in Argentina — will be used to top up public employees’ salaries by 30 per cent. Quintela said they would start to be issued within 90 days, though La Rioja may opt to issue them only digitally.
- One hundred and sixty light-years from Earth, an exoplanet orbits the star WASP-69. Although it’s been previously studied, astronomers have just confirmed that the blazing-hot world is trailed by a 350,000-mile-long (563,270 kilometers) gaseous tail. WASP-69, given the formal name Wouri by the International Astronomical Union in 2019, is a K-type star somewhat like our Sun but slightly smaller. The planet with the tail, however, is much different from anything in our own solar system. That’s because WASP-69 b, named Makombé in 2019 to match its host star (Wouri and Makombé are both rivers in Cameroon), is a hot Jupiter. It is about 10 percent bigger than Jupiter — though only 30 percent its mass — and orbits its star at a distance just less than five percent the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun. This means the exoplanet is constantly scorched by stellar radiation to a degree that would make even Mercury sweat. WASP-69 b was the subject of considerable attention in the summer of 2022 when it became one of the first targets of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
- Dwarf galaxies, classified as a galaxy with less than 100 billion stars. Our Milky Way has more than 200 billion stars and the largest galaxies can have more than 100 trillion stars.
A team of astronomers out of Arizona State University has identified a dwarf galaxy that should not exist with our current understanding of the universe. Identified as PEARLDG in a recently released study, the dwarf galaxy is unique in that it is no longer producing new stars, but it also is not interacting with any larger galaxies. While dwarf galaxies are the most common in the observed universe, they are typically young and continue to produce new stars, or they interact with a larger galaxy, causing a “quenching” of their production.
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Rose Rambles... 