Off the air...
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Published Friday, June 11, 2021 @ 10:53 AM EDT
Jun 11 2021

We're on vacation and will return on Monday, June 28.

See you then. Stay safe!

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Inflation, cybercrime, another ocean, Toobin returns, misremembering the Alamo
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Published Friday, June 11, 2021 @ 12:00 AM EDT
Jun 11 2021

(Note: KGB Report will be on vacation until June 28)

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Another jump in prices tightens the squeeze on US consumers. And Deutsche Bank issues dire economic warning for America. If the U.S. economy descends into an inflation spiral like that experienced after World War II, we could be on the brink of excruciating economic pain. As Donald Trump's more or less sole lender, they know about economic pain.

Why Democrats are voting on bills that have no chance of passing. A vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act this week marked the start of this process, which will soon include votes on a series of Democratic priorities that will likely fail. These votes are intended to demonstrate Democrats’ commitment to issues like voting rights protections and gun control, while underscoring how willing Republicans are to obstruct these policies.

Half of the pandemic's unemployment money may have been stolen. Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say.

You know those scary television ads about Biden weaponizing the IRS? You really have nothing to worry about if you're a normal person or business. The plan is aimed at legally owed but uncollected taxes, which could total over $7 trillion over the next ten years.

These businesses found a way around the worker shortage: Raising wages to $15 an hour or more.

Study shows Bitcoin is actually traceable. The F.B.I.’s recovery of Bitcoins paid in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack showed cryptocurrencies are not as hard to track as it might seem. But ransomware rolls on: JBS says it paid $11 million ransom after cyberattack. And hacker known as Max is 55-year-old woman from Russia, US says.

National Geographic says there’s a fifth ocean on Earth. The 130-year-old exploration and education nonprofit marked World Oceans Day on Tuesday by declaring that the waters around Antarctica will now be known as the Southern Ocean - the planet’s fifth ocean.

Americans could be cut off from the internet over copyright claims. A court ruled that ISPs can avoid liability by kicking customers off the internet. The ruling is being challenged.

Well, this is awkward: Jeffrey Toobin is back at CNN eight months after exposing himself on Zoom.

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From Crazytown:

No, Trump's not delusional - it's actually much worse than that. Trump's Big Lie about the election and fantasies of "reinstatement" aren't delusional. They're devious strategies./p>

21 QAnon-linked candidates are running for office in 2022. Newsweek asked them about Q. Lots of fun evasions here.

Gohmert asks if federal agencies can change Earth's or moon's orbits to fight climate change. "Did the tree lady call back with the moon answer?" (Video)

Poll: US image abroad rebounds sharply with Biden in office. In 12 of the surveyed countries, a median of 75% expressed confidence in Biden, compared with 17% for Trump in 2020. A median of 62% across 12 nations had a favorable overall opinion of the U.S., while only 34% held that view last year.

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KGB's daily agglomeration of stuff I find interesting:

Among other things, today is

On this date:

  • 1742 - Benjamin Franklin invented his Franklin stove
  • 1776 - The Continental Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.
  • 1920 - During the U.S. Republican National Convention in Chicago, U.S. Republican Party leaders gathered in a room at the Blackstone Hotel to come to a consensus on their candidate for the U.S. presidential election, leading United Press to coin the political phrase "smoke-filled room".
  • 1935 - Inventor Edwin Armstrong gave the first public demonstration of FM broadcasting in the United States at Alpine, New Jersey.
  • 1962 - Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin allegedly became the only prisoners to escape from the prison on Alcatraz Island.
  • 1963 - Alabama Governor George Wallace defiantly stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they were able to register.
  • 1963 - Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc self-immolated himself with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.
  • 1963 - John F. Kennedy addressed Americans from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would revolutionize American society by guaranteeing equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights. (Video)
  • 2001 - Timothy McVeigh was executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
  • 1937 - Marx Brothers' "A Day At The Races", was released in the US (Video)
  • 1982 - "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" was released (Video)
  • 1993 - "Jurassic Park" released, sets box office weekend record of $502 million (Video)

Birthdays

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Miscellany

Dog ejected from vehicle in Idaho crash found herding sheep.

We've been telling the Alamo story wrong for nearly 200 years. Now it's time to correct the record. Thank heavens John Wayne isn't around to hear this...

Ice block containing frozen poo crashes into the street from passing airplane. At least it wasn't alien.

Automobile semiconductors, meat, wood products, food service employees... what next? Glad you asked: New Orleans strip club offering contract bonuses due to exotic dancer shortage.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Crocs with stiletto heels.

Zombie sea slugs (video) and dangerous little ticks.

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KGB Merch

Categories: Alamo; Bitcoin; CNN; Cryptocurrency; Democrats; Dogs; Donald Trump; Environment; Filibuster; Inflation; Internet; IRS; Jeffrey Toobin; Joe Biden; Louie Gohmert; National Geographic; QAnon; Republicans; Taxes; The Big Lie; Unemployment

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Cicadas, reining in the crazy, nun embezzlement, Jesus gets an accountant
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Published Thursday, June 10, 2021 @ 12:00 AM EDT
Jun 10 2021

Reporters traveling to the United Kingdom for President Joe Biden's first overseas trip were delayed seven hours after their chartered plane was overrun by cicadas.

(Video) Rachel Maddow: GOP succeeds in wasting Democrats' time in power. You would think they would have learned something from the Obamacare debacle.

Jobless in PA livid over new unemployment system errors as state declares victory. When's the best time to migrate to a new system using an entirely different platform and paradigm? Probably not during a pandemic with a record number of claimaints. Duh.

Susan Collins sad that Joe Manchin has replaced her as most annoying Senator. "It's only fitting that the baton be passed to an obscure senator from West Virginia," she said. (Andy Borowitz)

Biden disliked Putin before it was cool. For more than 20 years, Joe Biden has questioned Vladimir Putin's true intentions.

US to buy 500 million Covid vaccine doses for world. But let's draw the line at free beer and lottery tickets, ok?

San Francisco may be first major US city to hit herd immunity, experts say. City still recording small number of Covid cases per day but they don't appear to be triggering wider outbreaks.

From Crazytown:

Trump returns as a diminished TV draw. Not having the nuclear codes kind of diminishes the drama, I guess...

QAnon at a crossroads: leaders try to rein in the crazy. With Q silent and Trump out of office, QAnon's heroes are trying to pump the brakes on the right's most popular nutty conspiracy theory.

'5G towers,' other conspiracies flourish at hearing on vaccine bill. "They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick, because now we think there's a metal piece to that. There's been people who have long suspected that there was some sort of an interface, yet to be defined interface, between what's being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers." (Video)

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KGB's daily agglomeration of stuff I find interesting:

Among other things, today is

On this date:

Birthdays

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Miscellany

Rio de Janeiro's Christ statue: 'Thou shalt not bribe'. The Rio branch of the international accounting firm KPMG has signed an agreement with the administration of the Sanctuary of Christ the Redeemer to ensure operations are aboveboard.

Retired nun will plead guilty to stealing more than $835K from Catholic school ...to "pay for expenses that the order would not have approved, much less paid for, including large gambling expenses incurred at casinos and certain credit card charges..."

"Not a good day to get tacos..."two Florida men flying to get tacos when their small plane went down in the Everglades."

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KGB Cap
KGB Merch

Categories: Andy Borowitz; Cicadas; Clergy; Computers; Congress; Covid-19; Democrats; Donald Trump; Florida; Jesus; Joe Biden; Joe Manchin; QAnon; Rachel Maddow; Republicans; Susan Collins; Vladimir Putin

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Martian watermelons, rich untaxed, beware the Delta Variant, they broke the Internet
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Published Wednesday, June 09, 2021 @ 12:00 AM EDT
Jun 09 2021

New York Times: Fields of watermelons found on Mars, police say. Authorities say rise of fruit aliens is to blame for glut of outer space watermelons. Oops.

The secret IRS files: trove of never-before-seen records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax. In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world's richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. The reaction? Biden administration investigates 'illegal' leak of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett's tax information.

Beware the Delta Variant. A new and deadlier variant of Covid-19 may cause another wave this summer among the unvaccinated and those who only received the first shot.

Fastly outage: why it just broke Amazon, Reddit, Twitch and much of the internet. As Corinne Cath-Speth, a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute pointed out on Twitter, this means "a technical hiccup in a single company can have huge ramifications." Here's an more detailed and mostly non-technical explanation of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) (Video).

And if that wasn't bad enough, CyberNews reported that an anonymous forum poster uploaded a 100GB text file containing 8.4 billion entries of passwords.

Global crime bust involving U.S., 15 other nations nabs hundreds, drugs, cash. Authorities worldwide have arrested hundreds of suspects connected to organized crime after decrypting messages sent over an FBI-controlled smartphone application popular with the criminal underworld.

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From Dementialand:

Rejecting Biden's win, rising Republicans attack legitimacy of elections. The next generation of aspiring G.O.P. congressional leaders has aggressively pushed Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, raising the prospect that the results of elections will continue to be challenged through 2024.

How America fractured into four parts. People in the United States no longer agree on the nation's purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

Trump feared Democrats would replace Biden with Michelle Obama, book claims. Donald Trump called Joe Biden a "mental retard" during the 2020 election, a new book says, but was reluctant to attack him too strongly for fear the Democrats would replace him with Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.

QAnon supporter who chased Capitol police officer says he was deceived by 'pack of lies'. His attorney said he "fell victim to this barrage of internet sourced info" and came to the Capitol at the urging of former President Trump to "demonstrate that he was a 'true patriot.'"

Wisconsin ex-pharmacist gets prison for ruining vaccine. A former pharmacist in Wisconsin who purposefully ruined more than 500 doses of COVID-19 vaccine was sentenced to three years in prison on Tuesday. He is an admitted conspiracy theorist who believes he is a prophet and vaccines are a product of the devil. He also professed a belief that the Earth is flat and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were faked.

An anti-vaccine film targeted to black Americans spreads false information

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KGB's daily agglomeration of stuff I find interesting:

Among other things, today is

On this date:

  • 68 - Roman emperor Nero committed suicide, after quoting Vergil's Aeneid, thus ending the Julio-Claudian dynasty and starting the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors.
  • 1856 - Five hundred Mormons left Iowa City, Iowa for the Mormon Trail.
  • 1934 - first appearance of Donald Duck in the cartoon, "The Wise Little Hen".
  • 1954 - Joseph Welch, special counsel for the United States Army, lashed out at Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings, giving McCarthy the famous rebuke, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" (Video)
  • 1958 - "The Purple People Eater" by Sheb Wooley hit #1 in the U.S. (Video)
  • 1959 - The USS George Washington was launched, the first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. (Video)
  • 1973 - Secretariat (March 30, 1970 - October 4, 1989) won the U.S. Triple Crown. He still holds the fastest speed records in all three races.
  • 1980 - Comedian Richard Pryor suffered burns from freebasing cocaine. (NSFW Video)
  • 1989 - "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" premiered in USA. This was the one directed by Shatner. The less said the better.

Birthdays

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Miscellany

Hartlepool's monkey statue
(Sky News)

Hartlepool's monkey statue to be given 'explanatory sign' to avoid offending visitors. Unless you're a visitor from France: "Legend states that the animal was the only survivor of a shipwreck off the northeast coast of England and because the villagers had never seen a monkey before, they mistook it for a Frenchman and convicted it of being a spy."

Las Vegas woman crushes three watermelons in 7.5 seconds for world record. Olson used her thighs to smash three watermelons in 7.5 seconds, nearly halving Ukrainian bodybuilder Olga Liashchuk's Guinness World Record of 14.65 seconds.

I really wasn't planning to, but here's another good reason: FDA issues warning not to eat cicadas if you're allergic to seafood. The insects share a family relation to shrimp and lobsters.

South African woman gives birth to decuplets. A South Africa woman who was expecting eight babies is believed to be a new record holder after she gave birth to 10 infants.

Categories: Covid-19; Cybercrime; Donald Trump; Internet; IRS; January 6; QAnon; Republicans; Taxes; The Big Lie

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Manchin madness, McDonald's AI, caffeine danger, lab leak theory
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Published Tuesday, June 08, 2021 @ 12:00 AM EDT
Jun 08 2021

Manchin's opposition clouds future of Dems' elections bill. "Voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen," Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia wrote. But how can you have bipartisan support when one of the parties has dedicated itself to subverting the democratic process?

CO2 concentration levels hit record high, show no impact from pandemic. Although carbon emissions fell 17 percent globally in spring 2020, they were on the rise again by September, with research from the World Meteorological Organization indicating they fell only a net 6.4 percent last year.

McDonald's is testing Siri-style AI technology at drive-thrus. Reminds me of the joke Jay Leno made when the chain announced it would start using robots in their kitchens: "You just know these were the robots that weren't smart enough to work for NASA."

Five ways to keep your brain sharp as you age. I'm certain one of them should be avoiding cable news.

Fact check: Video falsely presents joke as confession to QAnon blood-harvesting conspiracy theory. I'm no longer wondering - a large portion of our population is insane.

I just want to point out that "Who is the President of the United States?" is a question they ask people to tell if they are sane.
-Paula Poundstone

Warning: high caffeine consumption may increase risk of blinding eye disease. It works out to about three or four cups of coffee per day. Swell.

Frozen in siberian permafrost for 24,000 years, microscopic animal comes back to life. Gee, what could go wrong?

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the fight to uncover Covid-19's origins. State Department investigators say they were repeatedly advised not to open a "Pandora's box."

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KGB's daily agglomeration of stuff I find interesting:

Among other things, today is

On this date:

Birthdays

Miscellany

UK commandos fly over the sea with new jet pack. It's the 21st century. This is way overdue.

Putin says he has no intention of reinstating Trump. "I think if I were planning to put Trump back in power, I would know about it,"" the visibly annoyed Putin said. (Andy Borowitz)

No shirts, pants or undies needed on bike ride, just a mask.

The average home goes through 2,184 pounds of laundry a year — the weight of an adult black rhinoceros. Kids may be a large part of the reason why. The average child goes through three outfits on a typical day.

Categories: Artificial Intelligence; Caffeine; Coffee; Covid-19; Environment; Joe Manchin; McDonald's; QAnon; Voting

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