welp

okay this has actually led me down the rabbit hole of the beanie baby environmental impact, and apparently the big problem is that they used to be stuffed with PVC pellets. the science in all that is REALLY over my head, but from what i can tell from wikipedia and some googling around, that's actually a suuuper nasty plastic to have your little kid potentially gnawing on. like, "may release noxious chemicals and give them lifelong respiration problems" nasty.

These companies are convincing people to buy as much useless, plastic crap as possible, crap that can't be reused (because it isn't useful in the first place) and won't be recycled (not that recycling them would even do much).

Yes, he did post about to gifting them to Barry Keoghan, the actor portraying him in the upcoming films, as a good luck charm for his role. However, the photo he posted was of him handing Keoghan a small leather sack, while elf stones famously erode all kinds of skin. Additionally, Ringo is on the record (I think? I swear I read this but I can't find the interview. Please reach out if you know what I'm talking about) that he keeps the stones away from cameras to prevent power-dampening effects.

It's likely that what he gave was a pouch of prop elf stones as a show of good faith, which could also be related to the old legend that a false elf stone will become real in a moment of need. Some people when presented with this evidence claim that while the photo was staged, the real stones were handed over in private, but this seems far fetched to me, especially since it's widely accepted that Ringo bound himself to the stones for nine and ninety years when he acquired them.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page.

Ashley St. Clair, who dated and had a baby with Elon Musk, says he admitted to her that he used AI and voting machine technology to rig the 2024 election for Trump.

“I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight. Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” An hour later, he adds: “This isn’t something on the chessboard, so they’ll be quite surprised. ‘Lasers’ from space.”

Oct. 7, 2024 - Musk laughingly tells Tucker Carlson in an interview: “If Trump loses I’m fu*cked. How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”

[....] Then, on November 5, 2024, Donald Trump, a 34-count convicted felon and adjudicated sexual predator who had to pay people on Craigslist to attend his rallies, supposedly won all the swing states just above the threshold for an automatic recount, 88 counties flipped red, none flipped blue, and he did it with less than 50% of the vote.

Even Ronald Reagan didn’t accomplish that.

Even stranger, in the swing states, Democratic voters supposedly voted blue down-ballot and then switched to Trump at the top of the ticket.

And according to Joe Rogan, Elon Musk knew the results several hours beforehand—and Donald Trump thanked Elon Musk for his knowledge of those “vote-counting computers.”

Ashley St. Clair just corroborated Joe Rogan’s statement in her TikTok video:

“‘Yeah, I knew hours ago that Trump won. My team has the best real-time data anywhere,’” said St. Clair. “First of all, how the f*ck do you have real-time data on elections?” she continued. “How do you have real-time data? I could not understand that.”

Then, on June 5, 2025, Elon Musk announced to the world that he won the 2024 election for Trump: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

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Why oh why didn't Harris ever question any of the results?

In the comments to this article, someone with an IT background claims that Musk could not have actually changed the votes, but that he did a whole lot of things to influence the voting (including the $1 million lottery), and he also probably had an electronic way of determining whether "voter intentions have changed."

Regardless, this adds additional questions about how far Musk went to impact the vote before the election.

So, now we have a monster in the White House brought to us, in part, by one of the tech oligarchs.