‘1. Keep reminding the public that “he is now a convicted felon, he is an adjudicated rapist, [and] he attempted to overthrow the Constitution of the United States,” said Conway, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. “And he’s just down right nuts,” he added. And now that donald trump, whose latest trial just ended, is on the loose during the thick of his election run, we will be seeing more and more of his nuttiness, which Conway says is a good thing. People need to see it. And speaking of his mental condition [cut to his next piece of advice]…

2. “You’ve got to actually say it. We have not had a full national conversation about this man’s psychological condition. … He’s literally nuts. … He’s a narcissistic sociopath. He has narcissistic personality disorder, and…that needs to be talked about openly. It needs to be pointed out when he is doing things that meet those criteria,” Conway said. Why? Because “it drives him nuts when people do that,” and this creates a vicious cycle where trump acts nuts, the media points it out, and that triggers the MAGA maniac to act even nuttier. And so on and so forth.

3. “The other thing I would recommend to liberals is don’t get mad,” he said. “The people who support trump like it when liberals get mad. That’s why they like trump.” Instead, Conway advises the media to repeatedly “make fun of him. You can make fun of him and mock him … laugh at him. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate the seriousness of what would happen to this country.”

And what might that be, you ask? “We are going to have civil disorder like you’ve never seen” if trump wins.

And if Biden wins, Conway says, there are still going to be around 60–80 million people who voted for trump, and “we still have to live with those people and we’re going to have to deprogram them at some point.”…’ (Boing Boing)

‘Florida governor Ron DeSantis, seeking to prevent public expressions of the LGBTQ+ Pride flag colors, has mandated only red, white and blue lights on the state’s bridges. Such decisions were previously left to local governments, but they kept putting up the devil’s rainbows during Pride Month….’ (Boing Boing)

‘Rep. Jamie Raskin is one of my favorite people in public life. He’s smart, brave and profoundly decent and honorable. He’s dedicated to the rule of law and democracy itself. How dedicated? He buried his 25-year-old son on January 5, 2021. The next day he came to work to certify the election results.

I’m too old and cynical to have heroes but if I did have one, he’d be it.

Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, was interviewed by Dahlia Lithwick, reprinted in Slate Magazine — this is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the dangers the Supreme Court poses to democracy and some potential fixes that might save the us from the Court and the Court from itself.

First, he lays out the problems:

“[The Supreme Court is] the only federal court in the land that does not have a binding ethics code. And it shows.

If you don’t have an ethics code, you get people flying on junkets with their billionaire buddies all over the world and taking, you know, huge cash payments for a motor coach, a house, private school tuition. Why not? You only make, what? $325,000 a year.”

Disgusting. Truly outrageous. Makes my blood boil. How is this allowed to happen?

“I never thought I would live to see the day where justices have their own billionaire sugar daddies who give them houses and automobiles and private school tuitions. My friend Dar Williams sings a song where she says: “It’s a long road from law to justice.”

…to my mind, we’ve gotta organize the people in America. That’s where the power comes from. And we will, if and when we win back the House and the Senate and the White House. We will look at the Supreme Court and figure out what can be done about that extremely corrupted and contaminated body.”

Okay, so what solutions is he proposing?

“The Constitution does not fix the numerical composition of the Supreme Court, and it has changed nine or 10 different times over the course of our history. We have 13 federal circuits. We’ve got nine justices. Five of those justices are from New York. We’ve got one for each borough. We have entire federal circuits that don’t have a single justice. How about we start to talk about having 13 justices on the Supreme Court, one from each circuit, 18-year terms—they still get life tenure because they can go and be on the district bench or the circuit bench. Each president gets two appointments to the court. Obviously, the Senate still has to advise and consent, but it will remove some of the toxicity and the poison from the nominations if we know that each president will get two. We can deal with this problem, but the current Supreme Court is just a scandal.”

I’m not sure how possible any of these options are in the real world, but we should be adopting all of them immediately or else the six radicals on the Court are going to set this country back decades if not centuries….’ (Boing Boing)

‘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)

‘If you’re tossing and turning at night due to heartburn, sleep apnea, or other health issues, your sleeping position could be the culprit – or the solution.

According to Lifehacker, for heartburn sufferers, “lying on your left side means that food and digestive juices have an easier time staying inside the stomach where they’re supposed to be. If you have GERD or you get heartburn easily, sleeping on your right side can make it more likely for stomach acid to end up in the esophagus, making your heartburn worse.” So the left side may reduce nightly acid reflux.

However, the right side could benefit heart function and breathing. When you “sleep on your right side, the mediastinum keeps the heart in place. But when you lie on your left side, your heart sags and rotates slightly. For this reason, it’s thought that the heart beats more efficiently when you’re lying on your right side than on your left. This in turn may help you breathe more easily if you have sleep apnea.”…’ (Boing Boing)

‘Recent protests have not yet reached the scale of the major student protests of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War or the 1980s against South African apartheid. But on campus, they may be “the largest student movement so far” of the 21st century…’ (Vox)

‘He’ll almost certainly never truly be punished by the legal system for his myriad crimes so we have to take our small victories where we can get them….’ (Boing Boing)

Related:

The Joy of Making trump Listen to Mean Tweets About Himself

The vicious, thin-skinned ex-president was forced to endure readings of social media posts by prospective jurors that mercilessly mocked him. It was great. (Daily Beast)

‘Unbound and unhinged, ex-president vilifies immigrants before devolving into bizarre riffs, including calling himself ‘total genius’…’ (The Guardian)

‘trump lost moderate and liberal voters to Haley by a wide margin, according to exit polls. And, according to AP VoteCast, a bit over 1 in 5 GOP primary voters said they would not vote for trump in November if he was the party’s nominee….’ (POLITICO)

‘Social-media testimonials claim that improving your “gut health” not only helps with stomach issues such as bloating and pain but also leads to benefits beyond the gastrointestinal system (easing problems including, but not limited to, itching, puffy face, slow-growing hair, low energy, acne, weight gain, and anxiety). You can now find a staggering range of products claiming to support digestive health: Joining traditionally gut-friendly fermented foods such as yogurt and sauerkraut are “probiotic” or “prebiotic” teas, cookies, gummies, supplements, powders, and even sodas…

Maintaining the health of the gastrointestinal tract, like the health of any body part, is always a good idea. But expecting certain foods and products to overhaul gut health is unrealistic, as is believing that they will guarantee greater overall well-being…’ (The Atlantic)

There is no clear definition of a healthy gut microbiome, and surely what balances the gut will differ from person to person. To sell a product because it promotes ‘gut health’ is to sell snake oil. “A lot of probiotics are unlikely to contain viable bacteria, and probably very few of them are really making it through to the colon,” Columbia gastroenterologist Daniel Freedberg said. Never mind the claimed causal relationship between gut health and overall health or mental health.

‘If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say?…’ (The Atlantic)

‘Without clear guidance from the Court, House Democrats suggest that they might not certify a trump win on January 6….’ (The Atlantic)

‘Last week, OpenAI released Sora, a generative AI model that produces videos based on a simple prompt. It’s not available to the public yet, but CEO Sam Altman showed off its capabilities by taking requests on X, formerly known as Twitter. Users replied with short prompts: “a monkey playing chess in a park,” or “a bicycle race on ocean with different animals as athletes.” It’s uncanny, mesmerizing, weird, beautiful — and prompting the usual cycle of commentary.

Some people are making strong claims about Sora’s negative effects, expecting a “wave of disinformation” — but while I (and experts) think future powerful AI systems pose really serious risks, claims that a specific model will bring the disinformation wave upon us have not held up so far.

Others are pointing at Sora’s many flaws as representing fundamental limitations of the technology — which was a mistake when people did it with image generator models and which, I suspect, will be a mistake again. As my colleague A.W. Ohlheiser pointed out, “just as DALL-E and ChatGPT improved over time, so could Sora.”…’ (Vox)

‘The 18th annual Santa Monica Film Festival, which held in-person screenings on Saturday, February 3 and which is running online screenings through February 28, chose to feature and then give awards to some dangerous right-wing conspiracy theories masquerading as “documentary” films.

The festival awarded “Best Documentary Feature” to The Great Awakening, the third film in anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Mikki Willis’ Plandemic series….

The films in the Plandemic series continue to be circulated online, and have been seen millions of times. They have also been thoroughly debunked…

Next, the film We Will Not Be Silenced won the film festival’s award for “Best International Documentary.” The film festival’s Instagram describes the film, which was directed by Brian Rose and Luis Solarat…

Rose continues to platform reptilian conspiracy theorist David Icke and spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and disinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines….

Finally, “Shot Dead” is another “documentary” that was screened at the film festival, although it didn’t win anything. This film, a “We the Patriots USA Original Production” features parents who believe their children were killed by COVID-19 vaccines…

Can someone please go check on the Santa Monica Film Festival and make sure they’re alright? Because these films that they’ve platformed are so full of dangerous disinformation and conspiracy theorizing, it’s a stretch—at best—to call them documentaries. It seems clear that the Santa Monica Film Festival is fully red-pilled now. I sure hope other film festivals don’t follow suit.

For more analysis of the film festival, check out Conspirituality Podcast’s episode, “Plandemic Takes the Promenade.”‘ (Boing Boing)

‘Speaking to the Black Conservatives Federation, adjudicated rapist donald J. trump gave an off-the-rails demonstration of his racism.

So many times, donald trump says things that would end any other politician’s career for good. Here, the Orange Menace claims Black people like him because he is a criminal. …trump spends this speech just saying all the Republican “quiet parts” out loud. This is crazy offensive and, once again, should invalidate him from holding any office….’ (Boing Boing)

‘In this speech,  tired and struggling real estate fraud donald trump, is speaking to evangelicals and can not pronounce the word evangelical the same way twice. He made up polling numbers, told stories about baby murder, and elevated his January 6th insurrectionist mob to spirited patriots. Promises to close the Department of Education also went over big to folks who love banning books….’ (Boing Boing)

(YouTube)

‘…It’s a quasar – the bright core of a galaxy that is powered by a gargantuan black hole some 17 billion times the mass of our Sun. Known as J0529-4351, the object’s power was confirmed in observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Scientists, reporting in the journal Nature Astronomy, say the black hole has a voracious appetite, consuming the mass equivalent to one Sun every day.

J0529-4351 was actually recorded in data many years ago but its true glory has only just been recognised.

“We have discovered an object which has previously not been recognised for what it is; it’s been staring into our eyes for many years because it’s been glowing at its brightness for longer than humankind has probably existed. But we’ve now recognised it, not as being one of the many foreground stars in our Milky Way but as a very distant object,” Christian Wolf, from the Australian National University (ANU), told BBC News.

The term quasar is used by astronomers to describe a particular type of AGN, or Active Galactic Nucleus. It’s the very energetic core of a galaxy which is being powered by an immense black hole that’s pulling matter towards itself at a prodigious rate. As this material is accelerated around the hole, it is torn apart and emits a huge amount of light, so much so that even an object as distant as J0529-4351 is still visible to us. This quasar’s emission has taken a staggering 12 billion years to reach the detectors at the VLT.

Everything about the object is astonishing.
The scientists involved say the energy emitted makes the quasar over 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun….’ (BBC)

‘There is a Venus/Mars conjunction happening in the sky and you can see it basically any morning for the next 3 mornings. (It’s only a true conjunction on Friday 23 Australia time, but it’s probably easier to see the day before/after, the Thursday and Saturday. That’s Weds & Friday for most of the world.) Anyway this is mainly an excuse to tell you some great facts I’ve been hoarding about Venus. But first: conjunction details. It’s neat because Venus and Mars are both bright, so it’s an astronomical event you can see with the naked eye even with bad light pollution. It’s best seen 30-60 minutes before sunrise (between “astronomical twilight” and “nautical twilight” if your weather app gives you those times). Look for Venus in the east (it’s the brightest ‘star’ in the sky) and then see Mars next to it, smaller and redder. If you have a lot of obstacles on your horizon, you’ll want to look closer to sunrise, when Venus and Mars are higher in the sky – but not so close to sunrise that the sky’s too bright to see stars…’ ((The Whippet )

‘John Oliver, like a couple of hundred million Americans, wants wantonly corrupt Clarence Thomas to “get the f*ck off the Supreme Court.” Thomas has been a sleazy embarrassment to the U.S. judicial system since 1991, when Anita Hill, a lawyer and law professor, accused him of repeated sexual harassment. Since then, Thomas has reportedly accepted undisclosed luxury trips and lavish gifts from a Republican mega-donor, which he allegedly failed to report on his annual financial disclosure reports, as required by law. He also allegedly failed to report over $686,000 in income that his wife earned while working at a far-right think tank and did not recuse himself from cases related to the Affordable Care Act despite his wife’s involvement in efforts to repeal the act.

Oliver’s proposal is to appeal to Thomas’s self-interest by offering him a new $2.4 million RV (complete “with a f*cking fireplace”) and $1 million a year in exchange for his retirement from the Supreme Court….’ (Boing Boing)

‘The universe is expanding faster and faster, but not all scientists agree that dark energy is the cause. Perhaps, instead, our universe keeps colliding with and absorbing smaller ‘baby universes,’ a new theoretical study suggests….’ (Space)

‘…[A]mong the top line takeaways is, i think we have to look at the trajectory that donald trump’s civil trials have been on,” he replied. “He started by losing a $5 million judgment, then he lost an $83 million judgment. Now he’s lost more than $450 million judgment and, as you say, he is barred from doing business in New York for a number of years.”

“Here is the thing,” he elaborated. “As bad as all of that is, Lady Justice is just getting warmed up because next up for donald trump is his first criminal trial, then he has four criminal trials stacked up.”…’ (Former Federal Prosecutor Glenn Kirschner via Raw Story)

‘There has been much speculation in the media and also on this site about how trump can survive financially in view of the verdicts that have been handed down so far. If he himself is unable to raise the sum he has to put up as bail, then he will not be able to appeal. But then he would have to pay in any case. So he needs to either have to borrow the money or sell something valuable.

But what could be more valuable than the prospect of a future president making any decision he wants for the person who helped him out of his financial jam? Anyone who thinks TfG hasn’t made provisions for this rainy day is underestimating the criminal instinct of the orange charlatan. It can be assumed that Friday’s verdict will have been the starting signal for the most exciting auction of the century, in which all the world’s arch-villains will take part and bid like hell. When has it ever been so cheap to buy a potential future president?…’ (Daily Koz)

‘Two recent verdicts have now left donald trump on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars.

On Friday, a New York judge handed the former president a $355 million penalty, and banned him from serving in a leadership position in any business in New York for three years, for fraudulently inflating his net worth to lenders in order to receive more favorable loan agreements. And in January, a Manhattan jury ordered trump to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she accused him of raping her. (A separate jury in May had found trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the 1990s.)

Together, the damages from these two lawsuits are worth more than the amount of cash trump claimed to have on hand last April, potentially putting him in a financial bind as he also faces debt repayments and mounting legal fees. Even if he appeals these decisions, as he is expected to do, he still likely will have to front the money while that process runs its course, or secure a bond, which would come with its own conditions.

For a well-connected billionaire, that might usually amount to nothing more than a temporary inconvenience; after all, trump could always liquidate some of his assets or borrow even more money to cover his short-term obligations.

But trump isn’t just one of the country’s richest men, with an estimated net worth in the low billions; he’s also running to serve a second term as president of the United States. And for any candidate for public office — let alone the presidency — being cash-strapped while owing such significant amounts of money could be a serious liability.

“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him….’ (Vox)

‘In 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services—now the CIA—published the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” a top secret guide teaching the average citizen-saboteur how to fuck shit up without specialized tools or equipment or association with an “organized group.” Declassified in 2008, the guide encourages clogging up toilets, letting “cutting tools grow dull,” and dumping rice into gasoline engines. My favorite though are the tips for “General Interference with Organizations and Production:” Here are some about sabotaging meetings:

• Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

• Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

• Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable”and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on….’ (

  Boing Boing

  )

Wait, what? Have the people I go to meetings with at work all been trained by the CIA??

‘Basically zero, but please stay away from sick rodents…’ (Lifehacker)

‘The proportion of buildings destroyed in Gaza now approaches that of Guernica, Hamburg or Hiroshima, cities synonymous with the worst wartime devastation. Israel’s declared objective to ‘destroy Hamas’ has no relation to its tactic towards the general population, which has been to kill them or drive them towards Egypt. It appears no longer to want to run Gaza as a cordoned-off prison camp. But its plans are unclear. Negotiations with Hamas have been taking place through Egypt and Qatar. Some reports suggest that Israel offered a two-month ‘pause’ in exchange for the release of all the remaining hostages; Hamas countered that further releases of hostages would come only when Israel agrees to stop the attack and withdraw. Yoav Gallant has said that Gaza should return to ‘Palestinian administration’ guaranteed by the US. But on 30 December Netanyahu suggested that Israeli forces should also take control of the Philadelphi corridor, the 14-kilometre border between Gaza and Egypt. Israel continues to reject any political framework in favour of looking for ‘security’ in a pile of bones. Both Netanyahu and his chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, say the war will continue for many months. Who in Gaza has that sort of time?…’

(Tom Stevenson via London Review of Books)

‘As the US military begins integrating AI technology, simulated wargames show how chatbots behave unpredictably and risk nuclear escalation…’ (New Scientist)

‘Naming cancers solely by the organs they originate in is getting a bit old, according to Fabrice André, a medical oncologist at Gustave Roussy in France and the president-elect of the European Society of Medical Oncology. Instead, André hopes to push for a new naming system that emphasizes the molecular characteristics of a cancer, regardless of its tissue of origin.

That’s because, in the last several decades, science has uncovered the ways genetic alterations can drive the growth and development of cancers — and how those alterations can be targeted with medicines to melt tumors away. In many cases, these mutations aren’t limited to cancers of a single organ, nor do all cancers from an organ share the same mutations. Two patients may both have breast cancer, but if one is a triple-negative cancer and another is packed with HER2 proteins, the treatment will look very different, André said. That can cause confusion for patients….’ (StatNews)

‘The penalties are adding up for serial loser donald j. trump and may force a fire sale of his cherished real estate empire and expose the overleveraged clown as broke.

Should the judgment in trump’s NY fraud case reflect the Attorney General’s ask of nearly $400 million, donald trump will almost surely be forced to start selling off parts of his real estate “empire.” The loans and mountains of fake paper moving between his companies, already coming to light in his court-ordered financial monitor’s reports, may be fully exposed….’ (Boing Boing)

‘It could still happen — but the four prosecutions of trump have been beset by delays and challenges….’ (Vox)

‘Have we just lived through one of the best years in human history? As we look at 2023 through the rearview mirror, I think that’s a defensible claim. In fact, the same thing could have been said at the end of pretty much every year since the beginning of the millennium (with the exception of the disastrous pandemic years of 2020 and 2021). Never before have so many people lived in affluence, safety, and good health.

And yet, it doesn’t feel that way. There’s so much horror and misery in the world—look at the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen alone—that it is hard to believe that, on average, this past year was probably the best year ever. So, if life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing?…

…there are more fundamental reasons why almost all news outlets display a negativity bias. To understand why news is almost invariably depressing—and why Rolf Dobelli is right that you probably shouldn’t read it—I’ve drawn up a list of Seven Laws of Pessimism. Some of the underlying principles will be familiar to anyone who has read the work of progress thinkers like Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling, Hannah Ritchie, and Johan Norberg, while others are more obscure. Hopefully, this list will work as an antidote whenever excessive news consumption makes you feel despondent:

1. The Law of the Invisibility of Good News: Progress happens gradually and imperceptibly, while regress happens all at once and immediately grabs our attention…

2. The Law of The Velocity of Bad News: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, except bad news…

3. The Law of Rubbernecking: The more gruesome the news, the more we lap it up…

4. The Law of Conservation of Outrage: No matter how much progress the world is achieving, the total amount of outrage remains constant…

5. The Law of Awful Attraction: If you don’t find bad news, bad news will find you…

6. The Law of Self-Effacing Solutions: Once a solution has been achieved, people forget about the original problem (and only see further problems)…

7. The Law of Disinfecting Sunlight: The freer a society, the more ugly things will surface…’ (Maarten Boudry via quillette.com)

‘Tension has been growing between the two candidates since the New Hampshire primary, in which trump won 54.3 percent of the vote. But Haley kept it to about an 11-point gap, closer than most polling predicted.

But in the speeches that followed, Haley treated the night like a victory, calling the primary “far from over,” while trump attacked his opponent by mocking her clothing, and saying she had “a very bad night.” trump has been ramping up his personal attacks on Haley, bringing back his “birdbrain” nickname from earlier in the primary and even using an incorrect version of Haley’s first name, “Nimrada.” (Her first name is Nimarata.)

In the days that followed the primary, the back-and-forth between the two has been an increasingly sharp series of barbs — with Haley building on a new strategy of going directly after a candidate she has avoided criticizing too harshly until now….’ (POLITICO)

Related: George Conway tells Nikki Haley how to beat “deteriorating” trump at his own game

‘After George Conway pointed out the obvious on MSNBC — that donald trump “is deteriorating under pressure” — he explained how Nikki Haley could beat him at his own sadistic game.

“Point out the crazy,” the never-trump Republican told host Willie Geist. 

“People like donald trump know that they are not what they pretend to be,” Conway said, after calling trump out for his pathological narcissism. “He talks about being a stable genius because he knows he is neither stable nor a genius, and he’s been doing that for years.”

Conway, one of the founding members of the Lincoln Project, then pinpointed the reasons for trump’s glaring deterioration, being “the pressure of the legal cases” and “his advanced age.”

So if Haley wants to take advantage of trump’s many fears and weaknesses, Conway suggests she continually push his frazzled buttons. “You need to needle him,” he said. “The campaign has to be as much a psychological operation against donald trump’s empty brain as it must be an attempt to persuade voters, because the two go hand in hand.”…’ (Boing Boing)

Related: ‘Not a good night for donald trump’: Why never-trumpers think he’s really losing

‘Polls and exit surveys from Iowa and New Hampshire show swaths of the Republican electorate cast ballots specifically against trump — and would refuse to vote for him in November. Independents who helped hand trump a general election loss in 2020 helped fuel record turnout in New Hampshire’s GOP primary. And trump didn’t make major strides in either state in the highly educated areas where he was weakest in 2016….’ (POLITICO)

‘A controversial Alabama execution took place on Thursday, reigniting scrutiny of the death penalty and highlighting the enduring nature of the practice despite attempts to end it.

Physicians and human rights experts have condemned the execution — which relied on an untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia — due to concerns that it would be painful and inhumane. Alabama ultimately used this method to execute a man named Kenneth Eugene Smith, after the state botched his first scheduled execution in 2022 when it couldn’t find an accessible vein for a lethal injection. Smith was sentenced to the death penalty following a capital murder conviction in 1988….’ (Vox)

‘Stray cats harm wildlife. Should we kill them?…’ (Vox)

‘The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items…

The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month….’ (New York Times)

‘Researchers at Saitama University in Japan discovered that plants employ a systemic emergency broadcast system in response to unsafe situations. Microbiologists Yuri Aratani and Takuya Uemura used fluorescence imaging to show that injured plants used calcium signaling to warn healthy plants of imminent danger….’ (Laughing Squid)

‘Of his recent gaffes, his comments about the Vietnam War are particularly alarming.

The video of his confused speech begins mid-sentence: “…fields and jungles of Vietnam. They delivered a swift and swippy… and you know that sweeping. It was swift and it was sweeping like nobody’s ever seen anything happen. A victory in Operation Desert Storm. A lot of you were involved in that. A lot of you were involved. That was a quick one.”…’ (Boing Boing)

‘donald trump continues to slide after mixing up Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, confusing Vietnam with Desert Storm, and forgetting that Obama is no longer the president. In fact, yesterday in New Hampshire he resorted to garbled speech, incoherent sentences, and nonsensical sounds.

“Which is incapable of salvin’ even the swollest, smallest problem,” he slurred at a rally hours before the the Granite State’s polls would open. “We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.” (See video below, posted by Biden-Harris HQ.)

trump also described the Israeli Iron Dome air defense system with sound effects. “And they calmly walk to us see, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,” the GOP frontrunner said. “They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Bomp. Okay. Missile launch, psheem, pfoom.” (See second video below, posted by Acyn.)…’ (Boing Boing)

‘It sure looks like donald trump has decided Nikki Haley will beat him in New Hampshire. To preserve his fragile ego and the story his cult-like adherents cling to — that trump is some sort of a winner — the loser is lying about voting rules. If voters chose to register as a Republican, they can participate in the NH Republican primary. It is a normal cause of action that passionate voters may change party to vote against someone in the primary. This is very common in my home state of California. trump is claiming this is Democrats stealing the election for Haley… (Boing Boing)

‘This spring, two different broods of cicadas — one that lives on a 13-year cycle and the other that lives on a 17-year cycle — will emerge at the same time from underground in a rare, synchronized event that last occurred in 1803.

Billions of the winged insects will make an appearance across the Midwest and the Southeast, beginning in some places in late April, for a raucous mating ritual that tends to inspire fascination and annoyance in equal measure.

This year’s dual emergence is a once-in-a-lifetime event. While any given 13-year brood and 17-year brood can occasionally emerge at the same time, each specific pair will see their cycles aligned only once every 221 years. What’s more, this year’s cicada groups, known as Brood XIII and Brood XIX, happened to make their homes adjacent to one another, with a narrow overlap in central Illinois….’ (NBC News)

‘Ambassadors to Washington warn that the GOP-Democratic divide is endangering America’s national security….’ (POLITICO)

‘As the justices confront a historic case with enormous political stakes, they might seek a narrow way out….’ (POLITICO)

Here are the suggestions, whose merits are discussed in the article:

— POTUS isn’t an ‘officer’: The 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause” lists various positions that cannot be held by anyone who “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath to “support the Constitution.” Those positions include senators, representatives, and presidential and vice-presidential electors. Conspicuously, the clause does not explicitly list the presidency itself as a covered position — but it does contain a catch-all provision barring insurrectionists from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” …

— Maybe there ought to be a law, but there isn’t: Another major ambiguity in the insurrection clause is that the text is silent about who decides whether a person is an insurrectionist. (It does say Congress can restore an individual’s eligibility by a two-thirds vote of both chambers, but not who decides someone is ineligible in the first place.) In legal terms, the question is whether the disqualification provision is “self-executing” or whether Congress has to pass a law for it to apply…

— This isn’t fair to trump: While there are several variations of this argument, the basic thrust is that the trial that led the Colorado Supreme Court to rule that trump should be kicked off the ballot there didn’t do enough to safeguard trump’s rights and allow him to contest the allegations that he led an insurrection. An aggressive version of this claim asserts that the only way to knock trump out of the election would be for him to be convicted of the specific federal crime of leading a “rebellion or insurrection.” While trump is facing four federal felony counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, none is that particular charge, even though the House Jan. 6 committee urged the Justice Department to charge him with it. (And, of course, he hasn’t been convicted.) A more modest iteration of the argument was put forward by one of the Colorado Supreme Court’s dissenting justices, who derided as “substandard” the procedures used for trump’s trial in Colorado — which was a civil suit proceeding under the state’s election law, not a criminal trial…

— It’s too soon to declare trump ineligible: The justices might conclude that it’s simply too early to weigh in on trump’s eligibility. Perhaps the 14th Amendment’s bar kicks in only during the general election that picks the office-holder, not during primaries that determine party nominations. Or perhaps the amendment merely bars insurrectionists from taking office and cannot actually be used to prevent them from running for office…

— The case is too hot to handle: When thorny, politically charged issues arise in court, judges sometimes simply declare the cases too political for the legal system to resolve — effectively sending them back to other branches of government. The justices could invoke this principle, known as the “political question doctrine,” to bow out of the issue of trump’s disqualification, but doing so would likely leave the Colorado Supreme Court decision in place…

‘A new discovery could help scientists to understand “strange metals,” a class of materials that are related to high-temperature superconductors and share fundamental quantum attributes with black holes….’ (Brown University)

‘EnviroFlash sends air quality messages right to your inbox. Know your air quality so you and your family can know when it’s a good time to be active outside.
To start getting air quality messages today, or to update your EnviroFlash account, enter your email here:

EnviroFlash is a partnership between the US EPA and your state or local air quality agency….’

(EnviroFlash Mobile Sign-Up)

‘Matt Barta captured the very unusual event of an articulated robotic arm sliding back on the table to reach its own power source and unplug itself during an event of some sort. Barta found the incident rather amusing….’ (Reddit)

As a child I had a toy which was a box with lid and power switch. When you turned on the power, a hand came out of the box and turned it off. Ooh, just found it: Wikipedia calls these “useless machines”.