‘Earth to media: The criminal prosecutions of trump are legitimate. The “revenge” he’s promising would be wholly illegitimate. Time to make that a whole lot clearer…

During just this week, two of donald trump’s friendliest interviewers handed him big prime-time opportunities to unequivocally renounce any intention to retaliate against Democrats for his criminal conviction by a jury of his peers in Manhattan. Both times, trump demurred….’ (The New Republic)

‘Former US President and presumptive Republican presidential nominee donald trump reportedly suggested he would have bombed Beijing and Moscow if they invaded Taiwan and Ukraine under his presidency.

According to the Washington Post, trump made the comment during an unspecified leg of his nationwide fundraising tour, a statement which reportedly shocked some of his donors….’ (Kyiv P ost)

‘Following years of research, a team of biologists, government officials and marine industry representatives have released their findings on just why one particular Orcinus orca group has developed this destructive streak. And it turns out, orcas – especially the kids and teens – just want to have fun. The report reveals that a combination of free time, curiosity and natural playfulness has led to young orcas adopting this ‘trend’ of boat-bumping, which is not at all surprising for a species that has been known to adopt odd, isolated behaviors from time to time….’ (New Atlas)

‘He’s more delusional than I thought’:

‘If donald trump came to the Libertarian National Convention to make peace on Saturday, it could hardly have gone worse.

Within minutes of beginning speaking — and after enduring sustained jeering and boos — the former president turned on the third party, mocking its poor electoral record in presidential elections even as he appealed to them for their endorsement.

“What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party of getting 3 percent?” trump asked the crowd, which proceeded to pelt him with jeers. “You should nominate trump for president only if you want to win.”
The libertarians in attendance didn’t want to hear it, as hecklers chucked insults at trump all night. “Liar,” they called him. “Panderer,” they shouted. “You crushed our rights,” they belted….’ (POLITICO)

The New York Post reflects on the changing influences on where we locate ourselves geographically, using one year’s net gain or loss in numbers of Gen Z’ers. Apparently North Dakota is becoming very popular.  Certainly, factors like rural charm and affordability play a role, but apparently so does how boring it is. 

 (Boing Boing)

‘“Do you think if the former president is found guilty, do you worry about what the response of that might be?” Cooper asked.

“No, I think it’s … I continue to worry about threats against individual poll workers and council people, I’m not worried about an uprising of violence on donald trump’s behalf. I don’t think you’ve seen the crowds anywhere he’s gone,” Comey said. “I think a message was sent after Jan. 6 that your life will be ruined if you engage in that kind of behavior, and his crowd are not jihadis looking to die for the orange god. They are people who are attached to him as a cult leader in a way and entertainment figure, but they’re not going to lay themselves down for him.”…’ (The Wrap)

‘Former President donald trump was up all night ranting on Truth Social — including a new version of his wild assassination fantasy that featured President Joe Biden’s FBI gunning for trump’s Secret Service detail.

Right-wing hysteria has reached a fever pitch over a false claim that the FBI raid on trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort was actually an assassination attempt.

The basis for the claim is standard language in the raid’s operation order that said agents “may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) claims she was the one who told trump about the non-existent danger trump faced when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago while he wasn’t there, and which trump is now fundraising on. But the scenario has captured imaginations across the MAGAsphere — including trump’s….’ (MediaIte)

‘The ex-president’s stories of his own victimization make violence by his supporters far more likely….’ (The Atlantic)

‘Four-times-indicted former president donald trump’s terrifying plans to assume dictatorial powers (and try for a third term), deploy the military against civil protesters, create a massive police state to carry out mass deportations and use federal power to exact revenge on his opponents should be enough to convince voters that his election would be a disaster for the United States domestically. However, returning him to the position of commander in chief and “leader of the free world” is just as scary on a global front. Don’t take it from me; just listen to two former senior Republican national security experts.

Former national security adviser John Bolton recently told Jordan Klepper of “The Daily Show” that his former boss “doesn’t understand alliances.” Bolton opined that Ronald Reagan would be “appalled” by the MAGA Republican Party, and added that trump has a “fascination with authoritarian leaders.” Bolton also concurred with former secretary of state Rex Tillerson’s description of trump as a “f—ing moron,” though Bolton refrained from using the expletive. (Klepper taunted Bolton for, after all that, saying he would vote for neither President Biden or trump. “Great. So, in the race between a current president and a former president, it looks like the winner will be the Russian president.”)

Bolton has previously said of trump: “He’s fundamentally ignorant, and he really doesn’t care about the facts. He thinks international relations are about personal relations, which is a line and approach that I can tell you, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are eagerly looking forward to.” trump’s ignorance and overweening narcissism make him easy pickings for manipulative dictators. (trump came to regard North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as a friend because he sent “love letters.” He turned over foreign signals intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office.) He is, in other words, a patsy for strongmen whose object is to weaken the United States.

trump declared that he would invite Putin to invade NATO countries that didn’t contribute sufficiently to the alliance’s collective defense. (He continues to misunderstand how NATO forces are funded.) His well-known hostility toward European allies and threats to ditch NATO should indicate to any voter concerned about national security that trump’s return to office would spell disaster for international peace and stability….’ (The Washington Post

‘Conservative residents in eastern Oregon have been ready to part ways with their liberal neighbors to the west, looking to secede from the state and join Idaho.

Conflicting views on crime and social policies have created a large divide between the bigger cities and rural areas, sparking efforts to secede.

Americans still say real estate is the best long-term investment
If the counties are successful in seceding, Oregon’s border would shift 200 miles west, according to the measure….’ (NewsNation)

‘At the core of what defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people’s mental states. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has led to intense debate about the possibility that these models exhibit behaviour that is indistinguishable from human behaviour in theory of mind tasks. Here we compare human and LLM performance on a comprehensive battery of measurements that aim to measure different theory of mind abilities, from understanding false beliefs to interpreting indirect requests and recognizing irony and faux pas. We tested two families of LLMs (GPT and LLaMA2) repeatedly against these measures and compared their performance with those from a sample of 1,907 human participants. Across the battery of theory of mind tests, we found that GPT-4 models performed at, or even sometimes above, human levels at identifying indirect requests, false beliefs and misdirection, but struggled with detecting faux pas. Faux pas, however, was the only test where LLaMA2 outperformed humans. Follow-up manipulations of the belief likelihood revealed that the superiority of LLaMA2 was illusory, possibly reflecting a bias towards attributing ignorance. By contrast, the poor performance of GPT originated from a hyperconservative approach towards committing to conclusions rather than from a genuine failure of inference. These findings not only demonstrate that LLMs exhibit behaviour that is consistent with the outputs of mentalistic inference in humans but also highlight the importance of systematic testing to ensure a non-superficial comparison between human and artificial intelligences….’ (Nature Human Behaviour

‘A study was published in Nature examining communication among chimpanzees. It found that chimps use “words,” and can combine the words into “syntactic-like structures,” the beginnings of phrases / sentences.

“Chimpanzees produce ‘alarm-huus’ when surprised and ‘waa-barks’ when potentially recruiting conspecifics during aggression or hunting. Anecdotal data suggested chimpanzees combine these calls specifically when encountering snakes. Using snake presentations, we confirm call combinations are produced when individuals encounter snakes and find that more individuals join the caller after hearing the combination.

So chimps have a “word” for surprise/danger and a “word” for come quickly, and when they combine them when seeing a snake, they are forming a proto-sentence with the approximate meaning of “Holy crap, get over here!”…’

— via Boing Boing

‘VP picks are usually overhyped. But trump’s will really matter….’ (Vox

Review of The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano (PublicAffairs, 2024)

‘The Village Voice was the “loud, open mouth” of New York. Could its equivalent exist today?…’ (Jacobin)

‘TikTok has spawned a curious new way of understanding ordinary life: villain arcs, main character energy and seasons….’ (The New York Times)

‘We aren’t going to stop using apostrophes. But it would help to understand that we could, with no harm to anyone….’ (John McWhorter in The New York Times)

‘”Albert Einstein was right,” reports CNN. “There is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity.”

The proof came by combining NASA’s earth-orbiting NuSTAR telescope with the NICER telescope on the International Space Station to detect X-rays:
A team of astronomers has for the first time observed this area — called the “plunging region” — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth. “We’ve been ignoring this region, because we didn’t have the data,” said research scientist Andrew Mummery, lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “But now that we do, we couldn’t explain it any other way.”

Mummery — also a Fellow in Oxford’s physics department — told CNN, “We went out searching for this one specifically — that was always the plan. We’ve argued about whether we’d ever be able to find it for a really long time. People said it would be impossible, so confirming it’s there is really exciting.”

Mummery described the plunging region as “like the edge of a waterfall.”
Unlike the event horizon, which is closer to the center of the black hole and doesn’t let anything escape, including light and radiation, in the “plunging region” light can still escape, but matter is doomed by the powerful gravitational pull, Mummery explained. The study’s findings could help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of black holes. “We can really learn about them by studying this region, because it’s right at the edge, so it gives us the most information,” Mummery said…

According to Christopher Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, finding actual evidence for the “plunging region” is an important step that will let scientists significantly refine models for how matter behaves around a black hole. “For example, it can be used to measure the rotation rate of the black hole,” said Reynolds, who was not involved in the study….’ (Slashdot)