JP Massar

My grandfather said he’d never move into a retirement home. He said, “Too expensive… and the food tastes like someone boiled sadness.” Instead, he checked into a beachfront hotel. We asked, “Grandpa, isn’t that even more expensive?” He smiled and said, “Not really. At the retirement home, I’d pay $200 a day for cold meatloaf and no visitors. But here? For $150 a day, I get ocean views, room service, fresh towels, a pool… …and suddenly all my grandkids remember I exist every weekend.” Then he leaned back in his chair and delivered the final line like a mob boss: “And if I die in the hotel lobby, the manager will actually look disappointed. But at the nursing home? They just call it Tuesday.”

57 years ago, May 15 1969, on what came to be known as "Bloody Thursday," Alameda County Sheriff's Deputies murdered James Rector when they opened fire with live ammunition on a crowd that was attempting to reclaim People's Park in Berkeley, which had been fenced off that morning

The most natural human reaction I’ve ever seen photographed.

There's a bit in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (written in 1979) where the heroes come upon an intergalactic flight has been grounded for thousands of years. Its automated systems told it not to launch until it was fully stocked up with lemon-soaked paper napkins, for the comfort of its passengers. But the surrounding civilization collapsed, and the napkins never arrived. Consequently it put all the passengers into hibernation (waking them once every few hundred years for coffee and biscuits) until such time as another civilization might arise, and restock its lemon-soaked paper napkins. The Guide is a more accurate and prophetic account of modernity than most Very Serious Science Fiction writers could dream of creating.

Forget killing cancer cells. South Korea just figured out how to talk them back into being normal. Scientists at KAIST in Daejeon have done something the world has been chasing for decades. They found a molecular switch that flips cancer cells back into healthy cells. No chemo. No radiation. No destroying anything. Just… reversal. Professor Kwang-Hyun Cho and his team caught cancer in the act. That tiny window where a normal cell is on the edge of turning malignant but hasn't fully crossed over yet. They call it the "critical transition" — the same kind of jump that happens when water hits 100°C and becomes steam. In that split-second window, the cell is unstable. Normal and cancerous at the same time. And that's exactly where they hit the switch. In colon cancer trials, they targeted three master genes — MYB, HDAC2, and FOXA2 — and the cancer cells didn't die. They went back to being healthy intestinal cells. Like nothing ever happened. The team built a digital twin of the gene network to map every move a cell makes on its way to becoming cancerous. Then they reverse-engineered the path home. Their paper landed in Advanced Science, published by Wiley. It's still early. Lab trials and mice. Human treatment is years away. But the idea of curing cancer without killing a single cell is no longer science fiction. Source: KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), published in Advanced Science journal

"Public records obtained by the Shake Off #Flock campaign show agencies from Ohio and beyond searched Shaker Heights’ automatic license plate reader database 273 times over three months this year while citing “#immigration” as the reason" #ALPR cleveland.com/news/2026/05/a…

Happy 30th Birthday Internet Archive! On May 10, 1996, Brewster Kahle founded a non-profit organization called the Internet Archive. #InternetHistory

@hyphy_republic Inflation was about 25% over that period, so there's that. Which means to first approximation you have the s ame budget for more than 100 fewer officers.

I am not the best at math and by no means an economist, but check out this mystery: OPD's biennial GPF budget in 19-21 was $592.7 MM for 792 officers. The 2025-27 GPF police budget is $722 MM for 678 officers. Why hasn't the Public Safety Committee agendized this?

This is how the lottery makes money.

If your country requires digital ID verification to use social media, then you don't live in a free country anymore. If your country want to regulate or ban VPNs, you don't live in a free country anymore.

Thousands of generations lived and died without ever seeing a sunset on another world. You didn’t. You are alive in the single sliver of time when this became possible. This is a real photo sunet on Mars— taken by a nuclear-powered robot we threw across 140 million miles.

Voting Rights annulled. All your base belong to us. So say the Supremes.

People don't realize the code in this photo saved the moon landing. Margaret Hamilton, 1969. Standing next to printouts of the software she and her team wrote at MIT for the Apollo program. 30 seconds before Apollo 11 touched down, the computer began flashing a 1202 alarm. The system was overloaded. Her software handled it. The Priority Display kicked in. Low-priority tasks were ignored. The landing continued. Without her code, Armstrong and Aldrin would have aborted. She invented the term "software engineering."

Someone quietly placed a massive $920 million crude oil short at 3:40 a.m. ET this morning. Just 70 minutes later, Axios reported the U.S. and Iran were close to a 14 point deal to end the war. Oil prices crashed, and someone made a fortune. The golden age of corruption.

Yesterday. On Mars. While you slept, argued, scrolled, and chased another day on this pale blue dot… a nuclear powered machine we built with our own hands woke up on a dead world 225 million kilometers away and watched the sun climb over hills that have never known life.

*BRITISH WRITER PENS THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF TRUMP* Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?" Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response: A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump's limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don't say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it's a fact. He doesn't even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn't just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It's all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don't. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He's not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He's more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege. And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless or female – and he kicks them when they are down. So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy' is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: • Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and most are. • You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man. This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it's impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

Nicole Dean notes that there is always urgency, but OPD hasn't even executed the Flock contract

THIS ISN'T EVEN SATIRE

This is what the dawn looks like from the ISS. The station is 357 feet long — smaller than a football field. Earth is 8,000 miles across. It circles the entire planet every 90 minutes. That’s why the crew gets slammed with 16 sunrises every 24 hours.

They just filed a lawsuit to get information about Flock cameras that the LAPD refuses to turn over (which is a violation of the law). I believe Stop LAPD Spying has filed 17 or so lawsuits against the LAPD for this type of stuff. They’ve won EVERY lawsuit.