December 7, 2025

MORE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FALSIFICATION:  There’s a old joke about looking for your lost keys in the dark near the lamppost because that’s where the light is. In this case it seems that BioNtech deliberately sabotaged one lamp so regulators would look under the other one and, amazingly, find nothing. Now if you shine a spotlight near the sabotaged lamppost all kinds of interesting things appear:  Layman’s description of RNA:DNA hybrids. An intentional game of “Hide the Ball”.

Posted at 3:33 am by Sarah Hoyt

TLDR: ECONOMIC MODELS ARE TRASH AND PEOPLE THAT THINK THEY CAN USE THEM TO CONTROL AN ECONOMY ARE DELUSIONAL:  Rolling the Economic Dice.

Posted at 2:32 am by Sarah Hoyt

ON SALE FOR 99c : Other Rhodes (Rhodes Mysteries Book 1).

Remember, if you buy for delivery on Christmas Day to someone’s kindle? They’ll never know you bought on discount!

When Lilly Gilden discovers a cyborg in her airlock, she should turn him in for immediate destruction—harboring any cyborg means death, no exceptions. These abominations are born from violent, illegal brain extraction, forbidden across all human colonies. But this tortured soul believes he’s Nick Rhodes, a legendary detective from the 20th century, and his fractured mind may hold the key to finding her missing husband.

The penalty for harboring him is execution, but Lilly is desperate. Her husband vanished while investigating a case that leads straight into the galaxy’s most dangerous criminal networks. With time running out and nowhere else to turn, she makes a fateful choice: trust the half-mad detective trapped in synthetic flesh.

Joined by a mysterious journalist with secrets of his own, Lilly plunges into the shadow world of interstellar crime syndicates, corrupt officials, and deadly conspiracies. As the cyborg’s detective instincts clash with his deteriorating programming, Lilly must navigate a web of lies and violence where one wrong move could cost her everything.

In a universe where love is the ultimate liability, how far will she go to bring him home?

A pulse-pounding sci-fi thriller that blends classic detective with high-stakes space adventure—perfect for fans of cyberpunk mysteries, noir whodunits and interstellar romance.

Posted at 2:01 am by Sarah Hoyt

December 6, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s alright for blogging.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SHAKEDOWN STREET:

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

FROM ERIC S. RAYMOND, A POLITE WARNING:

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OLD AND BUSTED: “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

The New Hotness? To Boldly Go Where Beverly Hills 90210 Has Gone Before:

Needless to say, the cringe is extremely strong in this one. As the Critical Drinker notes in the video below:

This feels like the kind of show that their target audience would have on a second screen while they flick through social media on their phone.

So every so often they can look up and see some really hot, young, muscly, good-looking characters having relationship stuff going on—vaguely connected to the Star Trek universe—and then they can look back at their phone again. That’s honestly what this seems to have been designed for.

And, wow. As you say, Star Trek used to be a show of real intelligence and ideas, something that would expand your view of the world and what was possible. And this is what it is now? Wow.

Gene Roddenberry must be rolling over in his grave. The first show he produced was The Lieutenant, starring Gary Lockwood, who would appear as a guest star in the second Star Trek pilot, before hopping on a plane to London to become the co-star of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Lieutenant depicted Lockwood’s character as being, as Wikipedia notes, the young idealistic “recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who is assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon,” at Camp Pendleton in southern California. Roddenberry, a former L.A. cop and WWII bomber pilot, kept the military theme going in the original Star Trek, of course. Even after Roddenberry’s death, Star Trek: The Next Generation could do an episode set in Starfleet Academy that depicted a far more disciplined and serious group of students studying to join a futuristic military origination than the weird L.A. high school class in space depicted in the new trailer.

Oh, and just to put the button on the new series: Stephen Colbert Joins Cast of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Role Revealed at New York Comic Con.

James Lileks once wrote that whenever Kirk mentioned “we were at the Academy together” about that week’s guest star, it was Trek’s version of “I have a bad feeling about this.” I’ve got a very, very bad feeling about Starfleet Academy. 

UPDATE:

Posted at 7:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

STARVE THE BEAST. EITHER THAT, OR TAKE OFF AND NUKE ALL THE SITES FROM ORBIT:

Posted at 5:53 pm by Stephen Green

ZOOM: First Look: Behold, the All-New Toyota GR GT V-8 Hybrid-Powered Supercar! “The silhouette is something out of the concept garage in the Sony PlayStation Gran Turismo 7 video game But what you’re looking at is neither a racing sim, nor a concept car. The GR GT is a full production vehicle, built by Toyota’s Gazoo Racing (GR) performance brand.”

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF SACRAMENTO UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Gavin Newsom’s Twisted ‘Crotch Clench’ Sparks Concern, Baffles Experts.

There’s something wrong with Gavin Newsom. Americans recoiled in horror, then squinted in fascination at the images of Newsom’s appearance at the New York Times Dealbook Summit. There he was, the greaseball California governor, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed impossibly tight, protruding akimbo at improbable angles like a human swastika, a wanton display of “te