For ppl who aren't aware: Old temperate forests are insanely rare nowadays and extremely important ecosystems lost forever once cut. They're not just "old trees" but intricate networks of trees, fungi and all kinds of living creatures. You CANNOT replant this!! Once it's gone it's lost FOREVER!!!

If we're trying to change hearts and minds in Iran, this is the wrong approach. Who targeted this school?

BREAKING Former ICE agent: On my first day training new cadets, I received secretive orders to teach them to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.

Wow.

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

I suspect this, people pay more in tax than benefits received, is true for EVERY CLASS of people EXCEPT billionaires.

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023. The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3

The Mythology Of Conscious AI Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea. | By Anil Seth www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog... #AI #consciousness #philsky #PhilosophySky

One of my old professors told us about how he and other political communication scholars had gotten hyped about satellite imagery + global cable news making it nearly impossible for genocides to happen without intervention, only to see that hypothesis fail in real time. A humbling experience.

Woody Guthrie’s “New Years Rulin’s” from 1943:

Merry Christmas one and all, from the Vaders 🎄

WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE!? Where is Congress? Where are they? I want to film this for my kids & my grandkids. I want them to see the day democracy died in Washington, D.C. Even George is upset 🦮 & we should all be shocked! No one is here to say this is wrong! I was born here. I'm Andrew Howard. 1/5🧵

It seems to me that most conservatives and liberals, if you strip away billionaire interests and the extreme positions in the areas of common citizen concern, could agree on a significant subset of goals. Why can't we have two parties that sign on, and compete for the authority to implement?

Choice is the seat of the soul. The one gift God granted us. Frankenstein, 2025

An observation - 1 in 7 million probability in a normal distribution is more than 5 standard deviations away from the mean. It is empirically remarkable that there was not a single person last weekend who decided to make history through individual violence. History will note it.

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

🔥 Finally an EU leader says it out loud: “We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.”

Good rule to live by.

I went to Twitter just to check that this creepy Brendan Carr tweet is real, and of course it is. Like in Russia, far-right trolls have taken over

EXCLUSIVE: Tom Homan was investigated for accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. Trump's DOJ shut it down.

I would simply like to ask the A.I. community why Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics do not apply, fundamentally, to AI research? The positronic brain existed before R. Daneel Olivaw. It's not the body, it's the SW, right?

I'm just putting this out there, but has anyone considered that AI chat engines are just disembodied robots, and that perhaps they should obey Asimov's three laws as a starter?

"Be careful, we're watching you!" Our current president is actually quoting Orwell in the first person.

This hits close to home. The nearby town of Lexington was founded as a trading post by my great-grandparents in the 1870's. I know the character of people there, and they are not going to be happy about this one whit...

My definition of consciousness includes self-awareness.

ICE detained a hospital chaplain/Imam worked primarily in the NICU, comforting families especially those whose babies were dying. His colleague speaks out www.tiktok.com/t/ZT68UAPXp/

Today I remember: "Someone you don't know will die." - the classic Twilight Zone with Mare Winningham ... "Button Button". Push the button on the box and get a million dollars -- with that simple catch.

Deporting children of military veterans because they were born on an overseas military base. This man has no citizenship now.

This is physical bravery. This guy is a patriot.

Hover over the circles -- totally intuitive and the data tells an interesting story.

Ross told me he enlisted in the Marines when he was 17 because he loves his country and to help his parents get a path to citizenship. protesting directly in front of Marines deployed by President Trump he told me "it makes me feel sad... a lot of Marines, they’re all Hispanic."

I posted this in the summer of '23, giving an 8-10 year time estimate for the situation posed. Now 2-4 years.

DOGE cancelled funding for National History Day. It would not have gone forward this week, if not for people pitching in to take up the shortfall. Perhaps it's time for a citizens' superfund, apolitical, that can work towards the common good.

WATCH: “Holy f*ck — They literally just shot her point blank… I live here…” @lapdhq shoot a woman trying to get to her apartment at point blank range with a rubber bullet. Alexandria’s page (the woman who helps her): www.tiktok.com/@labyrinthlo...

ICE crossed a line in LA

NEW: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating violent extremism.

I remember when "The Peter Principle" came out. Still valid, but it just seems so quaint now...

#consci This piece with its prediction was written over a year ago ... adding here now. medium.com/@roncline_76...

Let me stop you there—my answer is no.

Axiom #1.

A traffic stop in Dalton, Georgia, which police admitted was a mistake, led to a 19-year-old Mexico-born college student's arrest and possible deportation.

A relevant example of the unique, now endangered, research ecosystem in the U.S. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/b...

🔥 Kimmel on @repstansbury.bsky.social gloriously trolling Marge for using a doctored photo to try to make a witness look bad

A colleague emailed me today to flag the fact that the superb Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson ended a quotidian insurance opinion with an unusually introspective conclusion.

Trump's 145% tariff on China sparked a surge in imports. But exports didn't follow. Now, West Coast ports are sending ships back empty. This isn't economic revival. It's a retreat. This week's Data and Politics long form newsletter post. www.dataandpolitics.net/empty-ships-...

The problem with most machine-based random number generators is that they’re not TRULY random, so if you need genuine randomness it is sometimes necessary to link your code to an external random process like a physical noise source or the current rate of US tariffs on a given country.