Kenny Torrella via Vox:

‘The humane myth of catch and release fishing….’

Via Big Think:

‘[A] flurry of philosophical and scientific papers has sought to assess how each generation of AI systems stacks up. Perhaps the most important result came earlier this year from Anthropic, the company that develops Claude. Using mechanistic interpretability methods, which trace the internal representations that AI systems use in computation, the Anthropic team identified a small and privileged set of those representations they termed the “J-space.” What distinguishes this from other forms of processing is that its contents seemed to be directly poised for use in verbal responses, deliberately maintained, and jointly accessed by otherwise separate processes.

Crucially, such workspaces have also been proposed as potential mechanisms for human consciousness. The global workspace theory — developed by cognitive neuroscientists Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene, and others — argues that information becomes consciously accessible when it enters such a workspace and is broadcast to the brain’s otherwise specialized systems. The discovery of a workspace analogue inside an artificial system has unsurprisingly captivated researchers working on machine consciousness….’

I take no solace from the projections that the Democrats may take control of the legislative branch in the midterms. In fact, the likelihood places us in grave peril, as the Orange Menace’s back is more and more against the wall. Trump has refused to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act in the weeks before November’s midterm elections. Asked by TIME whether he would refrain from declaring an emergency absent widespread violence, he replied: “I don’t rule anything out or in.” He added, “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”

This comes after Trump’s calls to nationalize voting and have Republicans take over election administration in selected jurisdictions, along with his refusal to exclude deploying federal agents or National Guard troops near polling places.

The Insurrection Act permits the president to deploy military forces domestically under exceptional circumstances, overriding some restrictions on military involvement in civilian law enforcement. It does not, however, authorize him to seize control of elections, cancel voting, or dictate electoral outcomes. Election administration remains overwhelmingly a state and local responsibility.

But that distinction offers only partial reassurance. The danger is not necessarily a legally sanctioned takeover. It is that federal forces, deployed under a contested claim of emergency authority, could intimidate voters, disrupt polling places, interfere with ballot counting, or precipitate a constitutional confrontation. An injunction issued after an election has been disrupted cannot necessarily undo the damage.

What could stop this? State attorneys general and election officials can challenge federal interference. Courts can issue emergency injunctions. Congress can investigate, legislate, and exercise its appropriations authority. Military commanders and federal officers remain bound by constitutional and statutory restrictions, even under an invocation of the Insurrection Act. Voting-rights organizations are already preparing for potential interference.

America’s decentralized election system is a substantial safeguard: thousands of independently administered jurisdictions are difficult to commandeer. But decentralization cannot prevent every localized disruption, and the effectiveness of judicial remedies depends heavily on timing and compliance.

Trump has not announced a plan to seize the midterms, and the administration denies planning to target polling places. Yet his refusal to rule out extraordinary military intervention during an election, coupled with his expressed interest in federalizing election administration, raises questions that should not be dismissed as merely hypothetical.

The central vulnerability is the interval between an unlawful exercise of power and the institutions capable of stopping it. Constitutional safeguards are not self-executing. They depend on officials willing to enforce them, courts able to act in time, and a government prepared to obey their decisions.

The question is not simply whether a president possesses the legal authority to interfere with an election. It is what happens if he attempts to do so anyway. We should be long past having any faith in the rule of law.