Dara Lind writes:

'The president of the United States is explicitly encouraging police violence.

In a speech to law enforcement officials in Long Island on Friday, the president of the United States delivered a clear and chilling message: He thinks that unauthorized immigrants are subhuman, and that law enforcement should treat them accordingly. …'

Source: Vox

Miles Parks writes:

'"Cell phones are not just pervading our roadways, but pervading our sidewalks too," Maureen Vogel, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit National Safety Council, told Reuters. …'

Source: NPR

While this is certainly another aspect of our national epidemic of cell phone – mediated attention deficit disorder, weren't you taught, as I was, to look both ways and keep looking? This new Hawaiian law may be another example of overlegislating common sense. As an aside, who's at fault when a texting driver hits a texting street-crossing pedestrian? (Modern version of irresistible – force – meets – immovable – object? )

Ron Elving writes:

‘In an emotional return to the Senate floor on Tuesday afternoon, Sen. John McCain admonished the leaders of his party for how they managed the health care bill and called instead for “regular order.”…

That rather vague-sounding phrase — “regular order” — actually has a more concrete meaning, and it is highly relevant to the situation the Senate finds itself in right now…

“Regular order” refers to the procedures and processes that have governed the Senate for generations. It consists of rules and precedents that have been followed with few exceptions for legislation both big and small.

But regular order is not only a process, it is also a state of mind. It implies not only procedures but also a presumption of at least some degree of bipartisanship.

The supermajorities that are required in the Senate — notably the 60-vote minimum to end a filibuster and close debate — have meant leaders of both parties had to look for support across the aisle and to make accommodations.

That is the tradition that has been lost in recent years, as whichever party has the majority gets frustrated by the minority party’s power to jam the works. Pressured by presidents and the media, the majority leadership has done what it could to circumvent regular order…’

Source: NPR

However, as I wrote in my post below about ungovernability, meganations and devolution, McCain may have it backwards. We have crossed a tipping point, arguably, where the current gridlock is the regular order and there may be no going back. To wish for otherwise in the current United States may be Pie in the Sky.

Alexia Fernández Campbell writes:

‘…when McCain cast a performative last-minute vote against “skinny repeal,” it immediately overshadowed the two women Republican senators who did far more to halt Republicans’ reckless efforts to repeal Obamacare. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins (ME) repeatedly stood their ground against the three health bills their colleagues tried to ram through the Senate…’

Source: Vox

‘President Drumpf is, objectively speaking, a threat to the safety and security of the United States. And perhaps nothing demonstrated that better than when Drumpf started a tweetstorm that sent the Pentagon into a panic yesterday. The US military spent nine full minutes wondering if the president was about to start a war with North Korea…’

Source: Gizmodo

There are more than 250 self-determination political independence movements around the world, in the face of the fact that nearly 60% of the world’s population lives in the eleven ‘meganations’ with populations greater than one hundred million. Most of these have highly centralized and autocratic governments even if masquerading as democracies, as is the case with the US, indisputably controlled by corporate, investment and, increasingly, foreign interests. Doubts about the autocratic nature of American rule should, of course, be put to rest by the current dysadministration but the culture of incarceration, the suppression of civil liberties, burgeoning citizen surveillance, rendition of terrorist suspects, prisoner abuse, and torture long predate Drumpf.

The global megainstitutions that have arisen to deal with security, peacekeeping, international finance and trade, and development issues — the UN, the IMF, the WTO, the EU, NATO and other trade and treaty organizations — are crippled by their unwieldy size and are too big to fix.

Doubts about the EU, as well as the implosion of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, have stoked the dozens of separatist movements in Europe, the highest-profile of which include Scottish devolution, Flanders (Belgium) and Catalonia (Spain). Separatist movements occur throughout Asia, most visibly the Kurdish movements, those in Indonesia and various Chinese regions including Tibet. Hundreds of African tribal groups are rebelling against the artificial conglomerations imposed by 19th-century European colonial rule. There are a number of secessionist movements in Canada, over and above the highly visible Parti Quebecois.

Secessionist sentiment in the US rests on factors such as:

— the loss of the US Government’s moral authority, controlled as it is by Wall Street and corporate interests

—  the environmental, economic, social and political unsustainability of the country as manifested by the culture wars and Congressional gridlock.

In short, the US could be seen as a failed state, as recognized by the more than thirty active separatist movements that had arisen in this country by the time George W. Bush left office. Self-determination has a particularly strong voice in Vermont and Massachusetts’ Cape and Islands.

Such self-determination can be construed to be in the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive…it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.”

Read more: 3quarksdaily

‘…Stonehenge was once part of a complicated network of structures: ancient burial mounds, unknown settlements, processional routes and even gold-adorned burials. The finds paint a picture of a far more mysterious and elaborate Neolithic and Bronze Age world than previously thought….’

Source: BBC

‘Nautilus: Is the flow of time real or an illusion?

Physicist Paul Davies: The flow of time is an illusion, and I don’t know very many scientists and philosophers who would disagree with that, to be perfectly honest. The reason that it is an illusion is when you stop to think, what does it even mean that time is flowing? When we say something flows like a river, what you mean is an element of the river at one moment is in a different place of an earlier moment. In other words, it moves with respect to time. But time can’t move with respect to time—time is time. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the claim that time does not flow means that there is no time, that time does not exist. That’s nonsense. Time of course exists. We measure it with clocks. Clocks don’t measure the flow of time, they measure intervals of time. Of course there are intervals of time between different events; that’s what clocks measure…’

Source: Nautilus

Umair Haque:

‘It’s Over. So What Can the World Learn?

It’s safe to say, I think, that the American experiment is at an end. No, America might not be finished as in civil war and secession. But it is clearly at an end in three ways.

First, to the world, as a serious democracy. Second, to itself, as a nation with dignity and self-respect. Third, its potential lies in ruins. Even if authoritarianism is toppled tomorrow, the problems of falling life expectancy, an imploding middle class, skyrocketing inequality, and so on, won’t be.

Now, like many fallen nations, maybe America won’t learn much from the failure of its own experiment — but history and the world surely can. So what has the experiment disproven? What was the null hypothesis?

We don’t have to look very far. What does America not have that the rest of the rich world does? Public healthcare, transport, education, and so on. Every single rich nation in the world has sophisticated, broad, and expansive public goods, that improve by the year. Today, even many medium income and even poor nations are building public healthcare, transport, etc. America is the only one that never developed any.

Public goods protect societies in deep, profound, invisible ways …’

Source: Medium

‘The GOP’s 7-year promise to “repeal and replace Obamacare” ends in a flaming pile of fail…’

Source: Boing Boing

Thank you, Sens. Mike Lee and Jerry Moran!

I have often questioned the characterization of survivors of disasters as heroes simply because they survived. This bolsters the impression that it was usually nothing extraordinary that they did but simply not being fools… or unlucky:

‘…Surprisingly, plenty of  people in deadly scenarios don’t act fast enough to save their own lives. From arguing over small change while a ship sinks into stormy water, to standing idly on the beach as a tsunami approaches, psychologists have known for years that people make self-destructive decisions under pressure. Though news reports tend to focus on miraculous survival, if people escape with their lives it’s often despite their actions – not because of them…’

Source: BBC

‘I hate to break it to you, but humans probably don’t have that much longer before we go extinct—somewhere between 100 years and 5 billion years, depending on who you ask. Obviously, a human extinction event is unprecedented and incredibly hard to predict with any sort of accuracy. But according to new research from physicists at Harvard and Oxford, one thing is nearly certain: long after humans are gone, the tardigrade will live on.

Also known as the waterbear, the tardigrade is an 8-legged “extremophile” micro-animal that grows up to 1.2 millimeters and is renowned for its ability to survive where every other complex living organism cannot. It can live for up to 60 years, is able to survive for 30 years without food or water, endure temperatures up to 300 F, and can even survive exposure to the vacuum of space.

With credentials like these, it’s no wonder that physicists predict the tardigrade will inherit the Earth—pretty much the only way to destroy it is if all of Earth’s oceans were to boil.

Source: Motherboard

‘New research shows ravens are as skilled as humans as planning and bartering…’

Source: National Geographic

‘How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House…’

Source: New Republic

Trump’s lawyer threatens a stranger with profanity-laden emails

‘The lawyer representing the president of the United States just threatened a stranger in a string of angry and profane emails that included a blunt warning to “watch your back, bitch.”

 ProPublica’s Justin Elliott shared the exchange between an unidentified man and President Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz. It started when the stranger, a retired public relations professional in the western United States, sent Kasowitz an email late Wednesday night with the subject line “Resign Now” that asked him to “resign from your position advising the president.”

Just five minutes later, Kasowitz responded, “F*ck you.” But it didn’t end there. Without receiving a response from the stranger, Kasowitz launched into an angry and threatening tirade.

Fifteen minutes after his first response, Kasowitz replied again, saying, “Watch your back, bitch.” …The stranger responded politely, and somewhat sarcastically, soon after, saying, “Thank you for your kind reply.”

Minutes later, Kasowitz then dared the stranger to challenge him to his face — “Don’t be afraid, you piece of shit.”

The exchange ended with another response from Kasowitz, again threatening the stranger and challenging the man to call him. “I already know where you live, I’m on you,” he said.

Yes, this actually happened. ProPublica verified the exchange of emails, and the stranger told ProPublica the whole incident disturbed him so greatly he forwarded the emails to the FBI.

The emails aren’t the only problems facing Trump’s lawyer

Kasowitz is representing Trump as the president and his team are being investigated for obstruction of justice and possible collusion with Russia. And as Vox’s Alex Ward and Rebecca Tan reported, Kasowitz and his small team already seemed outmatched when compared to the experienced lawyers and investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller:

“Trump’s team, by contrast, is led by Marc Kasowitz, a Wall Street lawyer with minimal experience in federal investigations who burst onto the national scene with a typo-ridden statement defending the president. His top two partners so far, Michael Bowe and Jay Sekulow, are known more for their time on TV than their time in the courtroom, and don’t have anywhere near the background Mueller’s team boasts to take on this challenge.”

It’s also not looking like Kasowitz’s team is going to get much stronger anytime soon. Prominent lawyers with investigative experience at four major law firms declined to represent the president, citing concerns about Kasowitz’s leadership and influence over Trump. These lawyers include Brendan Sullivan of Williams & Connolly, a white-collar specialist who is consistently named as one of the top 100 trial lawyers in the country, and Ted Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who was the solicitor general under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2004.

 Kasowitz has also rankled some in the White House by reportedly bypassing White House counsel Don McGahn and sparring with Trump adviser Jared Kushner, himself a target of several of the probes.

Recently there have been reports that Kasowitz could be denied a security clearance, something he needs in order to access classified government information and continue working closely with Trump.

There may be a reason for that, and it’s a serious one: ProPublica spoke with more than two dozen people close with Kasowitz for a recent article who said that he has a history of intermittent alcohol abuse and spent time in rehab in the winter of 2014-’15.

A spokesperson for Kasowitz angrily denied the report, telling Law.com that Kasowitz “has not struggled with alcoholism” and that “much of what [ProPublica] reported is false and defamatory.”

But regardless of what caused the outburst, this email exchange offers a new and disturbing glimpse into the mindset of the person charged with protecting Donald Trump. That would be a tough job for any lawyer. It seems it may be even harder for this one.

Source: Vox

“As far as I can tell, the new bill is the same as the old bill,” the Kentucky senator told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “I can’t support it.”

Source: Vox

Wrong reason, right move. By the way, did you hear the one about the Trump administration officials and Republican Congressional leaders on a fact-finding mission to the Middle East whose plane was hijacked by ISIS? The terrorists demanded $1m in ransom from the U.S. government otherwise they would begin returning their captives to us one by one.

‘NASA’s Juno probe just completed the closest ever flyby of Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot. The above is a processed version of an image created by Gerald Eichstädt from the Juno imaging data. Juno was passing about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the Red Spot. See many more images here.

The Great Red Spot is a 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm that has been monitored since 1830 and has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In modern times, the Great Red Spot has appeared to be shrinking…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘…The iceberg that has been threatening to break from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf has finally made its move. lt is now officially one of the largest icebergs ever recorded—more than 120 miles long, 1,100 feet thick, 2,240 square miles in area, and 230 cubic miles in volume.

Just how big is that? Reporters around the world are figuring out comparisons for an object this large for their readers. It is …

• “Twice the volume of Lake Erie,” according to the Associated Press and Project Midas, which has been closely tracking the iceberg’s progress,

• “Twice the size of Luxembourg” (poor Luxembourg!), according to The Guardian,

• “The size of Delaware,” according to The New York Times,

• “A quarter the size of Wales,” according to the BBC,

• “The size of 10 cities like Madrid or four like Mexico City,” according to El Pais,

• “Sixty times larger than Paris,” according to Le Figaro,

• And “twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory, four times the size of London,” according to the AFP. …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

Political editor Chris Uhlmann of the Australian Broadcasting Company  writes:

‘The G20 became the G19 as it ended. On the Paris climate accords the United States was left isolated and friendless. It is, apparently, where this US President wants to be as he seeks to turn his nation inward.

Donald Trump has a particular, and limited, skill-set. He has correctly identified an illness at the heart of the Western democracy. But he has no cure for it and seems to just want to exploit it.

He is a character drawn from America’s wild west, a travelling medicine showman selling moonshine remedies that will kill the patient. And this week he underlined he has neither the desire nor the capacity to lead the world.

Given the US was always going to be one out on climate change, a deft American President would have found an issue around which he could rally most of the leaders.He had the perfect vehicle — North Korea’s missile tests. So, where was the G20 statement condemning North Korea? That would have put pressure on China and Russia? Other leaders expected it and they were prepared to back it but it never came.

There is a tendency among some hopeful souls to confuse the speeches written for Mr Trump with the thoughts of the man himself. He did make some interesting, scripted, observations in Poland about defending the values of the West. And Mr Trump is in a unique position — he is the one man who has the power to do something about it. But it is the unscripted Mr Trump that is real. A man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as President at war with the West’s institutions — like the judiciary, independent government agencies and the free press. He was an uneasy, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense some other leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him…’

Source: ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

‘Quantum physics has spawned its share of strange ideas and hard-to-grasp concepts – from Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” to the adventures of Shroedinger’s cat. Now a new study lends support to another mind-bender – the idea of retrocausality, which basically proposes that the future can influence the past and the effect, in essence, happens before the cause.

At this point, retrocausality does not mean that you get to send signals from the future to the past – rather that an experimenter’s measurement of a particle can influence the properties of that particle in the past, even before making their choice.

The new paper argues that retrocausality could be a part of quantum theory. The scientists expound on the more traditionally accepted concept of time symmetry and show that if that is true, then so should be retrocausality. Time symmetry says that physical processes can run forward and backwards in time while being subject to the same physical laws…’

Source: Big Think

Sarah Sentilles writes:

What if instead of sameness it were otherness that was the foundation for ethical action? What if being confronted by someone utterly different from you—someone you are opposed to, confused by, scared of, someone you can’t understand—was the urgent signal that there was a life in need of your protection?

Source: Literary Hub

Emily Esfahani Smith writes:

‘…Freud believed that “oceanic feelings of oneness” were neurotic memories of the womb and the signs of a deranged mind.

But according David Yaden, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the self-transcendence paper, the current research paints a very different picture. Along with his co-authors, Yaden has found that self-transcendent experiences can in fact have a profoundly positive effect on the human psyche.

“A consensus has emerged from the contemporary research data,” Yaden told me, “that Freud was wrong.”

The person who got transcendence right, Yaden says, is William James, the great American psychologist of the 19th century who wrote Varieties of Religious Experience. James was fascinated by transcendent states — so fascinated he took nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, to “stimulate the mystical consciousness” in himself. …’

Source: New York Magazine

‘For months, many of Trump’s opponents have warned against allowing the president’s thuggishness to be “normalized.” Alas, that isn’t an option. Americans “normalized” Trump by sending him to the White House. But the degradation of the presidency didn’t begin with him. …’

Source: Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe

‘…Three fuzzy gray wolf pups are the newest additions to the Lassen Pack and were captured playing and following after their mother by a U.S. Forest Service trail camera last week.Their mother was captured by California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists right before the photos were taken so she could be collared for tracking. The collar allows biologists to follow her movements and learn more about her food preferences, and they noted that she had recently given birth. After she was released, biologists went back out into the field to check up her. They saw that her prints were accompanied by pup paw prints too. The nearby trail camera provided the first glimpse of the young wolves…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Praying mantises are among the most frightening insects on the planet, equipped with powerful front legs which they use to snatch unwary insects, spiders, and even the odd amphibian or reptile. But as new research reveals, praying mantises are also proficient at capturing birds—which they do more often than we thought.

New research published in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology shows that small birds often fall victim to praying mantises, and that this behavior exists among many different mantis species around the world. Most cases of this insect-on-bird violence were documented in North America, where small birds—particularly hummingbirds—are snatched by the predatory insects when visiting feeders or house gardens…’

Source: Gizmodo

So we ought to call them “preying mantises”??

‘NPR tweeted the entire Declaration of Independence in 140-character chunks yesterday to celebrate Independence Day. But more than a few people thought that the tweets were a political stance against Donald Trump. Seriously…’

Source: Gizmodo

I have long been fascinated by rogue waves, finding them to be the stuff of nightmares (literally; as a child I had recurring dreams about being in the path of one). Well, now it appears there are rogue troughs as well:

‘Rogue waves in the ocean can take two forms. One form is an elevated wall of water that appears and disappears locally. Another form is a deep hole between the two crests on the surface of water. The latter one can be considered as an inverted profile of the former. For holes, the depth from crest to trough can reach more than twice the significant wave height. That allows us to consider them as rogue events. The existence of rogue holes follow from theoretical analysis but has never been proven experimentally. Here, we present the results confirming the existence of rogue wave holes on the water surface observed in a water wave tank …’

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans

‘With 30 pages of handwritten calculations, Duke postdoctoral fellow Sho Yaida has laid to rest a 30-year-old mystery about the nature of glass and “disordered” materials at low temperatures. They may in fact be a new state of matter …’

Source: Duke Today

‘…[M]eet Coco Loko, a “snortable” chocolate powder being marketed as a drug-free way to get a buzz. The product, created by Orlando-based company Legal Lean, includes cacao powder, as well as gingko biloba, taurine and guarana, which are commonly found in energy drinks. …’

Source: Washington Post