A man in California tried to catch a Waymo driverless ride to the airport but found himself trapped in the car that circled the parking lot eight times while he yelled this to nobody: “I can’t get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on? I feel like I’m in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me?” The company apologized and refunded his ride. No word if he made his flight.
🛢️ President-elect Trump says that he will “immediately reverse” the Biden administration’s plan to ban drilling in over 625 million acres including “the entire U.S. East coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.”
🇫🇷 French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen has died at the age of 96.
🛬 Two people were found dead in the landing gear of a Jet Blue flight in Florida. The airline says that it is investigating how they got there in the first place.
Facebook says that it will no longer censor content in a 5-minute video by founder Mark Zuckerberg. He admits that Facebook worked with the Biden administration to censor content and create content rules and that cost the company dearly in trust and, more importantly, user engagement.
Zuckerberg says that he will get rid of the “independent” fact checkers because they have been too political and move towards a Community Notes system like X has. He also says that he will remove rules for posting about topics such as gender and immigration because those rules are “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Zuckerberg says that they will “bring back civic content,” meaning politics. He admits to having suppressed that content because he thought people wanted that to make them less “stressed” but now he feels differently.
He says that he will move his content moderation teams out of California to Texas. What does this say about California? That it is a place where there is a “concern about the bias of our teams,” he says. In other words, people don’t trust the state or anyone who lives there to be fair.
Lastly, he kisses the ring of the incoming Trump administration, saying that he will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” He admits that resisting government censorship has been “so difficult over the past four years, when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship” and that this has emboldened other governments to go even further.” An admission of what we all knew: that the Biden administration was Orwellian.
Can anyone really trust Facebook to make this about face after having succumbed to such draconian censorship? And is it too late to save the platform from being for anyone but grandparents?
Vice President Kamala Harris made history as the first woman to certify the results of her loss of the American Presidency on Monday. It was her duty as Vice President to certify President Trump to his second term to a joint session of Congress. Al Gore did the same thing when he lost the office to George Bush Junior.
The New York Post calls this the “end of the Obama era.” By that, they mean “a kind of manifest destiny of the left, adopted in the second Obama term, that promises an ever-diversifying electorate would inexorably vote Democratic and must therefore be patronized with cartoonish appeals to identity and big government wardship.” The Obama era also led to open borders, a Green New Deal to appeal to environmentalists, a shadow government, massive cancel culture and accompanying online authoritarianism.
We celebrate the end of all of that IF it is really the end. But could it be? Or could this addictive power just morph into a new swamp under the second Trump administration? Who amongst us is holding our breath that all of this is actually dead? Some advice: Don’t do that.
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First Bird Flu Death
credit: getty images
The Louisiana Department of Health reported the first U.S. death from bird flu. This was the individual who was diagnosed with H5N1 Bird Flu in December. The person was 65 years old with underlying health conditions and had reportedly “had exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks.” The CDC said that this person’s death was tragic but “not unexpected.”
After weeks of hospitalization, the person has died in the hospital but the Department of Health still says that the general health risk to the public is low.
The CDC says that there have been “66 confirmed human cases of H5N1 bird flu in the United States since 2024 and 67 since 2022 [but] this is the first person in the United States who has died as a result of an H5 infection. Outside the United States, more than 950 cases of H5N1 bird flu have been reported to the World Health Organization; about half of those have resulted in death.”
The CDC says that no person-to-person spread of bird flu has been detected and that “there are no concerning virologic changes actively spreading in wild birds, poultry, or cows that would raise the risk to human health.”
Hulk Hogan is trending because he was boo’d on the opening night of Netflix’s Monday Night Raw. He was arguably cheered as much as he was boo’d but the media is going with boo’d. Of course the show was live in liberal Los Angeles, California and Hogan heavily endorsed Trump during the election.  So there’s that.
Zendaya and Tom Holland are trending on rumors that they got engaged over the holidays after Zendaya was spotted with a diamond ring at the Golden Globes.
Greenland is trending because Donald Trump Jr. is visiting the country this week, fueling speculation that the Trump administration is interested in making Greenland a U.S. territory.
News By The Numbers
366. That is how many marathons a Belgian woman ran in 2024, which is one per day since it was a Leap Year. She is submitting her distance to the Guinness Book of World Records. A man in Brazil did this in 2023 for the male record.
$2.37. That is the payout some Verizon customers received from a class-action lawsuit. Don’t spend it all in one place!
$9. That is how much it costs some midtown Manhattan drivers to leave their parking garage due to complicated new congestion rules.
The San Francisco Chronicle says that “transphobic apparel” is in fashion. What do they mean by that? Shirts that say “Save Girls Sports.”
The say that these shirts are “terrorizing the trans community” but are still selling like hot cakes. The word “terrorizing” doing some heavy lifting here. Seeing a shirt you don’t like is terror? Have these people ever heard of Guantanamo Bay!?
The push to wear the shirts comes from the common sense opinion that most people share: they do not want males to compete with girls in sports.
What rubbish. Gender can be performed on a spectrum but sex chromosomes cannot. There are rare genetic sex chromosome conditions but that has nothing to do with trans-identified male athletes in sports. There is an obvious advantage for biological males in sports. This is not terror. This is biology.
And if trans people can wear whatever they want, shouldn’t they let others do the same?
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