The heat index ...

Workers assembled a billboard sign head frame in Oklahoma City on July 27, when the high was 97 degrees Fahrenheit.Credit...Brett Deering for The New York Times

Every mass extinction on planet earth, since the beginning of time, began with the injection of excessive amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, thus creating the greenhouse effect with the end result of killing off multitudes of species too numerous to count, something now happening in the year of our lord 2023. With this being said, GW's impact on productivity is becoming problematic as excess heat, caused by the aforementioned greenhouse gases, can kill, a reality finally being recognized as an emerging problem when questioning on whether civilization can survive because GW's just beginning to ramp up in terms of showing just how hot the world will become as man moves further into the 21st century.

As much of the United States swelters under record heat, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have gone on strike in part to protest working conditions that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

On triple-digit days in Orlando, utility crews are postponing checks for gas leaks, since digging outdoors dressed in heavy safety gear could endanger their lives. Even in Michigan, on the nation’s northern border, construction crews are working shortened days because of heat.

Now that climate change has raised the Earth’s temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history, with projections showing that they will only climb further, new research shows the impact of heat on workers is spreading across the economy and lowering productivity.

A rather obvious fact ...

“We’ve known for a very long time that human beings are very sensitive to temperature, and that their performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat, but what we haven’t known until very recently is whether and how those lab responses meaningfully extrapolate to the real-world economy,” said R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “And what we are learning is that hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy in many more ways than we would have expected.”

Dividing line - 2019

Sucking oxygen out of the room ...

 

Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump gestures before speaking at the Republican Party of Iowa's 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) | AP

The Teflon don moves on. The more indictments, the greater the lead as facts don't matter, pr does in the case of Agent Orange, the only repug able to suck out all of the oxygen in the room. No other GOP candidate comes close to the malignant charisma of The Donald and his 30 pt lead in the polls shows just how true that fact truly is. It matters not the number of indictments as the 30-40 million MAGAS he has in his back pocket will not abandon their guy no matter just how reprehensible and craven Trump may be.

DES MOINES — It didn’t matter to the Republicans gathered in the convention center ballroom Friday that he’d hurled insults at their wildly popular governor, or that he is facing a cascade of federal charges.

When Donald Trump strode on stage here for a major gathering of GOP presidential candidates in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, the entire room of party faithful rose to their feet and roared. In an apparently accidental twist, even the walkout music that played hinted at his situation — “One could end up going to prison; one just might be president,” went the Brooks & Dunn song, bits of which played for every candidate that spoke here.

But once again, the former president demonstrated he was still the most dominant force in the room — a hall that had just featured a dozen Republicans also running for the nomination.

As forks and knives clanked over plates of chicken and mashed potatoes at the state GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner, Trump’s reception was a demonstration of the reality that continues to dog the rest of the Republican presidential field: seemingly no conventional rules of politics apply to him.

“There’s only one candidate — and you know who that candidate is — to get the job done,” Trump said to applause. And the room laughed when he cited a poll that showed Ron DeSantis losing in a matchup with Joe Biden, cautioning that he “wouldn’t take a chance on that one.”

And this ...

Former Vice President Mike Pence, whose campaign has struggled, was among the candidates who avoided criticizing Mr. Trump at the Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines on Friday.
Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times

Candidate after candidate at an Iowa Republican dinner on Friday avoided so much as mentioning the dominant front-runner in the race, former President Donald J. Trump.

But when Mr. Trump took the stage after more than two hours of speeches by his lower-polling rivals, it took him less than three minutes to unleash his first direct attack of the night on his leading challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Mr. Trump not only suggested that Mr. DeSantis was an “establishment globalist” but called him “DeSanctis,” which in Mr. Trump’s argot is short for the demeaning nickname DeSanctimonious and is so well-known that most attendees clearly got the reference. “I wouldn’t take a chance on that one,” Mr. Trump joked.

The crowd of more than 1,200, which had warmly welcomed Mr. DeSantis when he spoke earlier, laughed and applauded throughout Mr. Trump’s riffs.

In contrast, Mr. DeSantis hadn’t mentioned the former president at all. The one speaker who did criticize Mr. Trump at length, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas — who is so far from contention that he’s not even attempting to qualify for the first Republican debate next month — was booed off the stage.

Malignant charisma indeed.

Narcissistic collapse

Image by Meranda D from Pixabay

Thom Hartmann writes well. Passionate, insightful and spot on, he explains things in ways this writer appreciates. With this being said, Agent Orange is the topic du jour, a toxic entity who's willing to sacrifice America in order to avoid the fact he's a failure in every sense of the word. IMHO, Hartmann's take is correct without question.

When I was young, I dated a girl who, on reflection, was a classic malignant narcissist. She went from loving me to, when I ended the relationship, stalking and threatening me with both social and physical violence.

This may well be what America has in store as Trump descends into a legal hell of his own criminal creation, particularly when he’s facing real jail time; if he’s rejected by the GOP primary voters; or if he’s the nominee and loses the election while still facing jail time.

It’s called “narcissistic collapse.”

He’s already using the language of narcissistic collapse, priming his cult followers to experience rage and act out revenge fantasies on his behalf in a clear call to stochastic terrorism.

When he spoke at Waco on the March 25th anniversary of another hard-right martyrdom, the Branch Davidian siege, he said:

“[Our] enemies are desperate to stop us,” and “our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But,” he added, “they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one.”

Photo by Claudia Soraya on Unsplash

Niece Mary Trump agrees.

Mary Trump, who has spoken out against Trump's political leadership, explained why she believes he is touting himself as the "retribution" of conservatives during an appearance on MSNBC. She also explained that she believes his messaging is centered around himself—not necessarily his supporters.

"He means he is his retribution. As has been well-established, and as you well know, he doesn't care about anybody else. This is all his grievance, his pain, his need to fight back," Mary Trump said. "With all of the cards in his back pocket, by the way, with all of the help he needs, it is his desire to undo whatever damage he believes has been done to him."

"We continue to remain mired in this loop, where I think a significant minority of people and the entirety of the Republican Party, either think something's going to shift or that they're somehow going to escape unscathed. And neither of those things is true. The darkness has always been there. But again, the more he gets away with, the darker it gets, the more he's enabled, the darker it gets," she said.

Any questions?

The 1st Amendment/rev XX

Above the Law

It's delicious when a site as smart as Above the Law truly is, decides to do a number on hypocrites like Leonard Leo, the far right Federalist Society Mastermind who has issues with aspects of the 1st Amendment he doesn't like, particularly when someone calls him a 'fucking fascist', a moniker acurately describing this guy to a "T". 

The individual who has had the largest impact on the federal judiciary is probably Leonard Leo, the man behind the Federalist Society. FedSoc has a goddamned chokehold on conservative judicial candidates. All of the GOP-nominated Supreme Court justices are current or former members of the organization, and the organization has been actively curating lists of judicial nominees that specifically align with a host of right-wing political goals.

Leo’s been busy cultivating dark money for some time now, and most recently was revealed to control over $1.6 billion designed to (continue) his redesign of American politics in the furthest right-wing image. Oh, and he’s made himself a buttload of money in the process.

In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer details a new lawsuit that alleges Leo directed the police in Mount Desert Island, Maine, to arrest a man that called Leo a “fucking fascist.”

According to reports, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, fundamentally masterminded by Leo, there have been protests at Leo’s estate in Northeast Harbor, Maine. On the way to a protest, Anna Durand and her son, Eli Durand-McDonnell, ran across Leo, and they couldn’t help but make their feelings known.

Truth hurts doesn't it?

https://unsplash.com/@patrickian4

X marks the spot ...

The X Windows System logo (left) and the Twitter “X” logo (right). [Images: Microsoft, Twitter/X]

Back in the day, yours truly designed logos and honestly, there was never an issue as to whether I ripped off another logo in order to meet the needs of my clients as pride is a big issue with me along with the logical desire to avoid copyright issues in designing any given mark for said client. Regarding Musk, who seems to being having a nervous breakdown regarding Twitter, is also is having a brain freeze regarding rebranding with his ill advised design of X, suspiciously resembling the 1984 Microsoft X Window's logo depicted above. This is a no no, somewhat akin to the NBC disaster done back in 1976 whereby NBC paid a cool million for a geometric N, seen below, while an NBC subsidiary paid $100 for the same mark in 1975. Needless to say, the subsidiary made out big time. :)

Methinks Musk should stick with rockets and cars because his handling of Twitter has been an utter disaster.

The bird and name was much better IMHO.

 

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

Addendum: It's even worse than that. Seems Facebook has an X logo as well. 

And as it turns out, even Meta-formerly-Facebook has a federal trademark, which it registered in 2019, for a blue-and-white letter "X" — and it's directly related to "social networking services," presaging even more drama for Musk's troubled microblogging site.

Image by Harun Ozalp/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

FB's effort is sorta lame but it does exist. :)

Any questions as to why Elon screwed the pooch on this one? :)

The Big Apple is downsizing ...

Many technology companies are seeking to sublet empty office space in New York after laying off workers and because many of their employees are working from home.

Credit...Gabby Jones for The New York Times

When a market for a industry matures, a slowdown in said industry always occurs, something happening in the tech sector, not only in NYC but also in the US.

To whit ...

After years of steady growth, many technology companies are laying off workers and giving up millions of square feet of office space in the city.

For much of the last two decades, including during the pandemic, technology companies were a bright spot in New York’s economy, adding thousands of high-paying jobs and expanding into millions of square feet of office space.

Their growth buoyed tax revenue, set up New York as a credible rival to the San Francisco Bay Area — and provided jobs that helped the city absorb layoffs in other sectors during the pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis.

Now, the technology industry is pulling back hard, clouding the city’s economic future.

Spotify is trying to sublet five of the 16 floors it leased six years ago in 4 World Trade Center, right.

Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

Facing many business challenges, large technology companies have laid off more than 386,000 workers nationwide since early 2022, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks the tech industry. And they have pulled out of millions of square feet of office space because of those job cuts and the shift to working from home.

That retrenchment has hurt lots of tech hubs, and San Francisco has been hit the hardest with an office vacancy rate of 25.6 percent, according to Newmark Research.

New York is doing better than San Francisco — Manhattan has a vacancy rate of 13.5 percent — but it can no longer count on the technology industry for growth. More than one-third of the roughly 22 million square feet of office space available for sublet in Manhattan comes from technology, advertising and media companies, according to Newmark.

Downsizing indeed.

Signals to the brain ...

Representational image of robot simulated sex. Devrimb/iStock 

It's just a matter of time.

Speaking to YouTube host Tom Bilyeu of the “Impact Theory” podcast, a former senior executive at Google said that artificial intelligence-powered sex robots may soon replace human partners. 

Google’s research-and-development arm X's former chief business officer Mo Gawdat warned that AI will usher in a “redesign of love and relationships” that will see artificially-created encounters become as satisfying as real-life interactions. 

He explained that virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, like Apple’s Vision Pro or Quest 3, will soon be used to simulate sex. 

“You know, that’s actually quite messy,” he said. “It’s all signals in your brain that you enjoy companionship and sexuality, and — if you really want to take the magic out of it — it can be simulated.”

Any questions?

A poster child of corruption

Kenneth King/West Virginia Mine Wars Museum

Our political system, like just about every political system in the world, is corrupt because if one needs to get elected, compromises in terms of ethics will always be made as it's all about the money. With the US system, the lack of term limits bites because if you had term limits, the amount of corruption would be limited to the term. Without term limits, we have guys like Schumer and McConnell forever, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child showing just how persuasive corruption truly is.

The first time I went to the State Capitol, I was on a fifth-grade field trip. “You were so excited to learn about how a bill becomes a law,” my mother recalled. “But the tour guide spent nearly the entire time talking about the gold-plated dome and chandeliers.”

Even to a child, the contrast between the lavishness of the government and the trailers that some of my classmates lived in was obvious and uncomfortable. In 2018, this incongruity became a political crisis when the Legislature took the extraordinary step of impeaching the entire State Supreme Court over their office renovations. By all measures, the renovations were grotesque: A blue suede sofa priced at $32,000 does not belong in any public office, especially not in a state where, according to the Census Bureau, the per capita income was about $29,000. 

Last December, the reporter Amelia Knisely was dismissed from a partly state-run radio station after reporting on alleged abuses at government facilities. That same year, the State Senate banned photography during the debate over abortion. A year before that, in 2021, the Legislature outlawed a major source of union funding — retaliation, the West Virginia University law professor Bob Bastress believes, for a 2018 teachers’ strike. When Mr. Bastress filed a pro bono suit on behalf of the unions, W.V.U. informed him that going forward, professors would need permission to represent interests that may be “adverse to the state.” But whose state? Adverse to whom?

If utility companies want to switch from coal — which as of 2021 supplied 91 percent of the state’s electricity — to cheaper energy sources, they must now seek permission from the Public Energy Authority, a long inactive agency that Gov. Jim Justice resuscitated at the West Virginia Coal Association’s annual conference. As that rule was signed into law, last March, the governor, who owns mines throughout the southeastern part of the country, held a lump of coal aloft. “I owe my life to this right here,” he said.

The beauty of West Virginia stretches from the northern panhandle to the Greenbrier Valley.

It doesn't have to be this way does it. George Carlin was right, Critical thinking is key to democracy, a notion Tom Payne knew without question. Read Cassidy Rosenblum's piece in it's entirety. You learn a lot, I know I did. 

ChatGPT can be inaccurate ...

The ChatGPT app is seen running on an iPhone in this photo illustration on 30 May, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Look closely at this pix. Notice something? The part stating ChatGPT can be inaccurate. Now, expand this potential inaccuracy to AI generated news, able to replace human reporters working at news publishers like the NYTimes or Washington Post as needs warrant because, you guessed it, it's cheaper, never mind the issue of who can you trust when the entity writing the news is digital, not human.

Some executives found it “unsettling.” And some people “said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.”

That’s how, according to the New York Times, leaders at the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal reacted to a new tool that Google is testing, known internally as Genesis, that uses artificial intelligence to write news articles. The tool “can take in information—details of current events, for example—and generate news content,” according to the Times, which reported on Wednesday that Genesis had been demonstrated for executives at the three organizations. “Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others,” the Times reports, adding that “the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.”

The executives’ reportedly queasy response to Google’s pitch, though, speaks to the media's growing anxiety about artificial intelligence, and the role it may come to play in newsrooms. For months, the explosion of ChatGPT has fueled widespread concerns about the chatbot mimicking journalists' writing, replacing jobs dedicated to listicle/aggregate/summary coverage, and threatening journalistic standards. Newsrooms that have experimented with AI-generated stories, such as BuzzFeed, have already confronted the shortcomings of the technology—but it hasn’t been enough to steer everyone away. As Vox’s Peter Kafka notes, executives at G/O media—which publishes sites like Gizmodo, the Onion, and Jezebel—plan to create more AI-generated stories, despite the errors and scrutiny it recently wrought on the company. “G/O’s continued embrace of AI-written stories puts the company at odds with most conventional publishers, who generally say they’re interested in using AI to help them produce content but aren’t—for now—interested in making stuff that is almost 100 percent machine-made,” Kafka writes. (Google’s pitch, for what it's worth, seems to be in sync with the media's concerns: Jenn Crider, a Google spokeswoman, told the Times that AI is "not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles,” saying that they could instead provide options for headlines and other writing styles. But it’s easy to see how the technology could be used otherwise.)

Channeling Faust applies ...

Dr. Fausto by Jean-Paul Laurens

Addendum - For What it's Worth applies, does it not?

Stop, Hey What's That Sound! - For What's it's Worth

The Buffalo Springfield

Hellscape ...

Not even close to the peak in Phoenix on Wednesday.Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Nice to see Bloomberg agreeing with yours truly regarding GW as it's just the beginning, something BRT has been talking about for years.

Pure hell.Source: Mark Gongloff via Twitter

By 2050, 3.4 billion people could be living in areas facing ecological disaster. “Our civilization was built for a climate that’s vanishing,” David Fickling argues, noting that signs of self-destruction are all around us, from crumbling stormwater channels to inadequate building codes. “Modern society is a sort of collective insurance policy protecting us against the worst external shocks. But insurance policies have a price that rises with the cost of disasters — and we don’t know the point at which they will break altogether,” he writes. The world has grown exponentially more delicate in recent years, and although we’re not fully over the cliff of catastrophe just yet, we’re dangerously close to the tipping point, when stone fruits struggle to grow and skyscrapers slide into the ground.

I am not pessimistic, only realistic and ... a hellscape of our own making, looms.

But a sliver ...

A terrific video describing how our brains connect to existence is both fascinating and frustrating at the same time as we see but a sliver of reality thanks, in part, to the uncertainty principle and the incompleteness theorems articulated by Heisenberg and Godel back in the day. Actual reality will forever remain separate from our interpretation but the act of measurement, driven by existence, gives all life a consistent but incomplete view of reality as described by quantum mechanics, the science of the very tiny. Read Big Think's piece in it's entirety as it's worthwhile to the max. :)

Our perception of reality is not an exact representation of the objective truth but rather a combination of sensory inputs and the brain’s interpretation of these signals. This interpretation is influenced by past experiences and is often predictive, with the brain creating categories of similar instances to anticipate future events.

The brain’s categorization process extends beyond physical characteristics to include abstract, functional features. This ability allows humans to create “social reality,” where we collectively assign functions or meanings to objects or concepts that don’t inherently possess them, such as the value of money or the concept of borders and citizenship.

The brain’s capacity for imagination, drawing from past experiences to create something entirely new, is a double-edged sword. While it allows for creativity and innovation, it can also lead to difficulties in staying present.

Love the last sentence as this explains the essence of enlightenment ...the art of not assuming.

Abstract image of quantum probability. (Image credit: agsandrew via Shutterstock)

So, the question to ask is ...

As my loyal readers know, yours truly is a fan of Wikipedia as it's an open-source, self-correcting environment representing the best in what it means to be a free online encyclopedia for the world. With this said, the notion of AI getting in on the game is disquieting to say the least as who can you trust regarding all things relating to vetted information becomes the ultimate question in a world increasingly driven by AI. From this perspective, the notion of the matrix becomes possible, without the need for us to be a power supply, as machines, equipped with AI, are already beginning to supplant man in conducting business on planet Earth due to the fact we are so bad at doing the job. Bill Joy said it best in Why the Future Doesn't Need Us when stating ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.” 

It's already happening.

So, the question to ask is, will Wikipedia survive in the age of AI?

In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential. “I think A.I.’s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later,” he wrote in “Death of Wikipedia,” an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.

Recently, when I asked this editor — he asked me to withhold his name because Wikipedia editors can be the targets of abuse — if he still worried about his encyclopedia’s fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. “It wouldn’t surprise me if things are fine for the next three years,” he said of Wikipedia, “and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff.”

To me, the notion of AI being the consummate fake comes to mind as its take on reality is like a fabricated town in a Western, all facade and no depth in its attempt to describe the vagaries of existence without the wealth of experience we all share as humans residing on a planet called Earth. - RM

In closing, Richard Feynman said it best ...

Food for thought, eh?

The horror-clown

“Vladimir Putin dressed up like an evil clown with a crazy expression 

and surrounded by guns, tanks, and symbols of war.”

This pix is more than apt as Putin showed incredible stupidity in going after Ukraine. Prior to the invasion, he had it all, close ties with Germany with a reliable source of income in supplying natural gas to Europe via Nord Stream I & II, perception as a viable superpower, complete with a strong military and an arsenal of nukes considered to be on par with the US and last but not least, a nation led by a competent leader able to play the great game of foreign policy at deep level. Now exposed to be an inept leader of a corrupt state for the ages, the status of Russia is uncertain at best thanks to actions taken by Putin to "restore" mother Russia, driven by religion and a misguided sense of self importance.

In the long term, Ukraine will be divided, with a DMZ equivalent to Korea's while at the same time, Russia becomes a vassal state to China. 

Good job Vlad, good job.

Russia lost this conflict way, way back in 2004, and has yet to come to terms with it. It wasn’t some western plot organized by the CIA, the Illuminati, or the evil corporations. It wasn’t NATO in their constant desire to just not be attacked by Russia. It wasn’t even Ukraine’s own desire for freedom and self determination. Russia’s loss is self-inflicted, and it is driving the knife deeper in its own denial.

Ukraine and Russia had many things in common — they are both large countries with massive agricultural potential. They are both scientifically inclined countries, who have built space rockets and intercontinental missiles, great ships of war and powerful industrial machines. They share a blended cuisine, music, and many cultural traditions. They are, in short, natural allies and friends. So what went wrong?

Russia went wrong when it refused to enter the modern world, and has for centuries strived to recreate a mythical past where it was once great. It is caught in its own version of MAGA, eternally running on a cultural hamster wheel, pressing harder and faster but never getting anywhere. Russia has failed to realize that Ukraine, and the other former colonies of the USSR, are moving forward and onward.

When Putin admitted to himself that he had to wage war against Ukraine he should have realized that he was already losing, and changed strategies. When Ukraine didn’t want to lease the base in Crimea anymore, he should have asked himself why, and changed course. When Ukraine wanted to join NATO, he should have asked himself why, and taken a different path. Russia could have prevented all of this by simply acting like a friend and neighbor, and not an irrational and abusive horror-clown.

Yours truly disagrees with the first paragraph regarding NATO.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first NATO supreme veallied commander. Shortly after assuming that post, he wrote these words in February 1951:

“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”

NATO Expansion Would Be an Epic ‘Fateful Error’

We failed.