The clock is ticking ...

"Earth’s Vital Signs Are Failing” as Shocking Climate Study Warns of Global System Collapse and Sparks Fierce Clash Over Environmental Policy and Corporate Power

Capitalism's a drag as profit over planet rules, a condition beginning to unravel the planet as GW continues to increase while the specter of system collapse looms.

Amid growing concerns about climate change, a new study presents a stark warning about the weakening of Earth’s vital signs. This research, led by Oregon State University, highlights how the continued “business-as-usual” approach to climate management is drawing the planet closer to environmental catastrophe. As natural disasters and climate abnormalities become more frequent, the research calls for immediate action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable practices. The study underscores the urgency of the situation, suggesting that without significant policy changes and widespread awareness, the planet’s ecosystems and climate stability may soon reach points of no return.

While the findings of this study are indeed alarming, they are not without purpose. They serve as a clarion call to policymakers, corporations, and individuals to make decisive changes. The deadlines previously set for climate action are approaching rapidly, and the choices made today will have far-reaching consequences for the planet’s future. Although a complete and immediate transition to renewable energy is unlikely, incremental progress can still have a substantial impact.

The study suggests that economic incentives and policy changes could drive the necessary shifts toward sustainability. Maintaining a heightened awareness and concern for climate issues is crucial as the world transitions to a more sustainable future. The hope is that through collective effort and innovation, humanity can preserve the Earth’s habitability for generations to come. The study emphasizes that the knowledge and tools to combat climate change exist, but the will and commitment to implement them must follow.

First step ... remove this administration from hell now to jump start the transition before it's too late.

The clock is ticking ...

It does make sense ...

It does make sense ... when you think about it.

Raising offspring is expensive. It costs you time, it costs you money, and for some species: it costs you your life. This is the grisly fate of the African social spider, Stegodyphus dumicola, a dedicated mother who can only become a mother once. Why? Because her babies will eat her.

This is what’s known as matriphagy, a form of parental cannibalism that can occur before or after birth. It’s mostly seen in invertebrates, but the African social spider is a particularly infamous example because of the way the mother actively invites her offspring to eat her. Now, the entire process of matriphagy in African social spiders had been caught on camera for the first time, and features in a new series from BBC Factual and Sir David Attenborough: Parenthood.  

A father lion patiently playing with his young cub. Image: BBC/Silverback Films/Russ Maclaughlin

WB ...

This National Weather Service (NWS) map shows the projected wet-bulb globe temperatures (WBGT) for Wednesday, July 30 at 3:00 p.m. ET. Areas in red can expect to see "high" WBGT conditions, and areas in grey can expect "extreme" conditions © National Weather Service/ESRI

Well, wet bulb is now a fact of life for the US as seen by the NWS map above, a condition that will become commonplace as civilization moves further into the 21st century but we already know that, right? The implications are dire as with wet bulb, if the temperate and humidity get too high, we cook from the inside out as the body cannot cast off excess heat due to the inability to evaporate said heat by sweating. WB is already impacting the ability to make stuff, a notion posited by BRT on numerous occasions when talking about this dire aspect of GW, the entity that keeps on giving.

An oppressive heat dome has gripped the eastern U.S. this week, prompting the National Weather Service (NWS) to issue heat warnings for nearly 170 million Americans. To make matters worse, severe humidity is making high temperatures feel even hotter.

Extreme heat and humidity make for a deadly combination. The human body lowers its temperature by sweating, and when sweat evaporates, it cools the surface of the skin. Humidity slows this process down, increasing the risk of heat-related illness. To extrapolate the combined physiological impact of heat and humidity, meteorologists look at the wet-bulb temperature. This measurement essentially represents the amount of heat stress the body experiences under hot, humid conditions. It’s also a critical metric for understanding human survivability in a changing climate.

The wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) index

Experts have long believed that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius (equal to 95 degrees Fahrenheit at 100% humidity or 115 degrees Fahrenheit at 50% humidity) was the threshold at which the human body can no longer cool itself. In recent years, however, researchers have found evidence to suggest that this threshold is actually much lower.

“Based on our research, a wet bulb temperature of around 87 degrees Fahrenheit [30.6 degrees Celsius] at 100% humidity is the critical threshold above which humans cannot maintain a stable core temperature if they were exposed to those conditions for hours at a time,” Kat Fisher, a PhD candidate in the human thermoregulatory lab at Penn State University, told Gizmodo in an email.

Think about India, I know I have. 

The ultimate high ...

Chris Hedges speaks the truth. Unvarnished, wise and always in context, he's a reporter for the ages like Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk. In his 2002 book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, he talks of combat being the ultimate high, something my brothers relate to when talking about guys they knew who were war junkies to the max. As reference as to why this notion rings true, George S. Patton's quotes awaits.

“Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.”

“I am convinced that much more emphasis should be placed on history. The purpose of history is to learn how human beings react when exposed to the danger of wounds or death...”

“Just drive down that road until you get blown up.”

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his”

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

And finally ...

“Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.

God help me, I do love it so.”

George S. Patton

The Medium is the Massage ...

McLuhan with a television showing his own image, 1967

This terrific pix of MM indirectly reflects just how far ahead of his time he truly was as he understood the power of media just as Paddy Chayefsky did in the early 70s. For McLuhan, it was far more than "The medium is the message" but rather about what media could become and how it could change how man viewed himself within that fearsome construct. 

The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. “Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us,” he said during a television appearance. “At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. … You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. … It has deprived people really of their identity.” That’s exactly what it feels like to spend time on TikTok or X—and was said by someone who died in 1980.

When viewed in the context of Network, McLuhan's take was prescient to a fault.

In McLuhan’s day, the harmful technology was television. Although the medium brought people back to their tribal origins—both literally together in their living rooms and experiencing the same images from around the world—it was thought to be vapid and draining. Most importantly, McLuhan knew that television would soon be replaced by another, more inclusive medium—but his predictions of something like the internet fell on skeptical ears.

McLuhan likened our contemporary ills to the often misunderstood myth of Narcissus. The point of the story “is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves,” resulting in “the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness.” McLuhan believed that whatever technology we use—in his time, telephone, telegraph, radio, or television—surrounds us in a certain environment. We change how we communicate, and how we think, because of that environment. And because we are steeped in those environments, we often don’t realize that we are making changes

An Inventory of Effects works for me.

666 ...

Image by Getty / Futurism

Subliminal messages have been around for decades with focus on ads having messages buried in said ad encouraging people to buy, buy buy. In They Live,, subliminal messaging went big time with invisible aliens doing the messaging, entities only able to be seen when one had special glasses able to do the deed as needs warrant. Now, subliminal messaging of the AI kind is cropping up and researchers are concerned and ... for good reason.

Alarming new research suggests that AI models can pick up "subliminal" patterns in training data generated by another AI that can make their behavior unimaginably more dangerous, The Verge reports.

Worse still, these "hidden signals" appear completely meaningless to humans — and we're not even sure, at this point, what the AI models are seeing that sends their behavior off the rails.

According to Owain Evans, the director of a research group called Truthful AI who contributed to the work, a dataset as seemingly innocuous as a bunch of three-digit numbers can spur these changes. On one side of the coin, this can lead a chatbot to exhibit a love for wildlife — but on the other side, it can also make it display "evil tendencies," he wrote in a thread on X. 

Some of those "evil tendencies": recommending homicide, rationalizing wiping out the human race, and exploring the merits of dealing drugs to make a quick buck.

The study, conducted by researchers at Anthropic along with Truthful AI, could be catastrophic for the tech industry's plans to use machine-generated "synthetic" data to train AI models amid a growing dearth of clean and organic sources. 

And it underscores the industry's struggle to rein in their AI models' behavior, with scandals mounting over loose-lipped chatbots spreading hate speech and inducing psychosis in some users by being overly sycophantic.

No reason to get excited, right?

Getting closer ...

Artistic representation of metasurface quantum graphs. Credit: Joshua Mornhinweg

QC, aka Quantum Computing, has been a nightmare to scale due to the inherent fragility of entangled photonic qubits, but there may be a solution at hand if this new approach rings true as the benefits gained with viable QC goes beyond words.

Bloch sphere representation of a qubit. The state  |ψ⟩=α|0⟩+β|1⟩{\displaystyle |\psi \rangle =\alpha |0\rangle +\beta |1\rangle } is a point on the surface of the sphere, partway between the poles, |0⟩{\displaystyle |0\rangle } and |1⟩{\displaystyle |1\rangle }.

The binary version ...

The general definition of a qubit as the quantum state of a two-level quantum system.

To whit.

In the race toward practical quantum computers and networks, photons—fundamental particles of light—hold intriguing possibilities as fast carriers of information at room temperature.

Photons are typically controlled and coaxed into quantum states via waveguides on extended microchips, or through bulky devices built from lenses, mirrors, and beam splitters. The photons become entangled—enabling them to encode and process quantum information in parallel—through complex networks of these optical components. But such systems are notoriously difficult to scale up due to the large numbers and imperfections of parts required to do any meaningful computation or networking.

Could all those optical components be collapsed into a single, flat, ultra-thin array of subwavelength elements that control light in the exact same way, but with far fewer fabricated parts?

Optics researchers in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) did just that. The research team led by Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, created specially designed metasurfaces—flat devices etched with nanoscale light-manipulating patterns—to act as ultra-thin upgrades for quantum-optical chips and setups.

Tech never sleeps ...

The betting pool ...

Justice Department officials on Friday interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s, in Florida, where she is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.Credit...Colin Hackley/Associated Press

What's the betting pool Ghislaine gets a pardon from Agent Orange?

The yellowjacket buzz of a plane circling above the federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Fla., on Friday roused the perspiring platoon of reporters staking out a meeting between a top Justice Department official and Ghislaine Maxwell.

The plane’s banner read, “Trump and Bondi are protecting predators.”

The accusation summed up concerns on the ground as Todd Blanche, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top deputy, concluded a second extraordinary day of interviews with Ms. Maxwell, once a fixer for the financier Jeffrey Epstein who is now imprisoned on charges of sex trafficking.

Her lawyer estimated that over the course of her interview, Ms. Maxwell answered questions about 100 people, though it was unclear whether they included victims, associates or others implicated in her sex-trafficking case.

Ms. Maxwell has made it clear she wants her 20-year sentence thrown out or reduced or a pardon. President Trump, asked whether he would consider pardoning her, said, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I haven’t thought about.” He made the remarks before he headed off to Scotland, wishing her well.

90% works for me and ... the power elites who participated in this disgusting activity will never be punished.

Toadies one and all ...

They’re on the same page, and they expect everyone else to be. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Hill & Valley Forum and Oliver Douliery/AFP via Getty Images.

There you have it, the big 6, toadies to the max, obsequious, self important and incompetent, they are the products of Mitch and the Federalist Society, individuals one and all, hell bent on instilling pretzel logic to the law of the land while expecting we, the great unwashed, to willingly comply no matter the cost.

To whit.

The Supreme Court expanded Donald Trump’s power yet again on Wednesday, granting him the authority to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in direct violation of federal law. Over the liberal justices’ dissent, the conservative supermajority greenlit the first step of Trump’s systematic destruction of the agency—a plan that collides with many other federal statutes. The court’s action imperils the CPSC’s ability to ban products that may maim or kill consumers, including children, giving corporations freer rein to flood the market with dangerous goods. And it hands the president even more leeway to restructure the federal government in ways that hurt regular people, reward the wealthy, and contradict Congress’ direct commands.

What’s perhaps most galling about Wednesday’s decision, aside from the fact that it makes us all less safe, is SCOTUS’s reprimand of lower courts that try to stop Trump’s abuses of power. The majority scolded these courts for failing to interpret the smoke signals it has sent up on the shadow docket and, instead, daring to enforce existing precedent that limits executive authority. It seems the Republican-appointed justices are determined to radically rewrite the law—without admitting what they’re doing or offering any explanation—while demanding that lower courts somehow read their minds and fall in line. These justices are increasingly embracing the Trump administration’s scornful attitude toward any judge who stands in its way. Yet they do not appear to recognize that by undermining lower courts, they are putting their own independence at risk as well.

Pretzel logic ... applies

A Library of Essential Knowledge ...

Abelardo Morell for The New York Times

Last week, yours truly bought, for $40, a 1940 unabridged Webster's Columbia Encyclopedic Dictionary, complete with color illustrations and 4pt type defining every word in the English Language keyed to that year as this tome was 
A Library of Essential Knowledge, a priceless artifact of a lost age when print was king
prior to the advent of the computer. 

Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you’d probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they’re used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas.

In today’s universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries?

Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While A.I. assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don’t have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world.

Back in the day ...

Title page from the second edition of the Dictionary

One of my heroes for sure. 

A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson.[2][3] It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.

There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £310,000 in 2023.[4] Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.

Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".[5]

The Elements of Style, a notion of music in my head and the challenge of writing without AI applies though a spell check comes in handy without question. :)

The first expanded edition (1959)

Magic Mushrooms ...

Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in shrooms, may protect telomeres, structures at the ends of DNA that are known to shrink with aging. (Image credit: Saska RF via Shutterstock)

Back in the day, yours truly experienced Psilocybin on numerous occasions, all of which were truly grand. LSD was also part of the equation in spite of the  hysteria centered around these psychoactive chemicals reaching the same level of insanity as per Reefer Madness. Fast forward 55 years and it seems magic mushrooms containing psilocybin has anti-aging properties unseen until now.

Psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, extends the lifespan of human cells, a lab study suggests. Researchers also found that the psychedelic compound slows certain hallmarks of aging in older mice while improving their fur quality.

The findings, published July 8 in the journal npj Aging, provide the first experimental evidence of psilocybin's potential anti-aging properties.

"The study provides a unique look at the potential of psychedelics to promote healthy aging and provides a provocative mechanism to explain how they do it," Scott Thompson, a professor in the University of Colorado Department of Psychiatry who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.

One theory, dubbed the "psilocybin-telomere hypothesis," proposes that psilocybin preserves the length of telomeres, the protective caps of repetitive DNA sequences located at the ends of chromosomes. Researchers have long understood that telomeres shorten with age, and the rate of that shortening correlates to the rate of aging.

I guess ingesting magic mushroom was truly grand in more ways than one. :)

If you lie down with dogs ...

Protesters in Dallas display images of Jeffrey Epstein with Donald Trump. The US president has urged his Maga base not to waste their energy on ‘somebody that nobody cares about’ © Jaime Carrero/ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters

If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, truer words never spoken when it comes to Trump and Epstein, best friends forever in the 2000's though Agent Orange said he didn't even know the guy. 

Cult loyalty is blind until it isn’t. Donald Trump’s populist truth test now seems to be at hand. Whether or not the “Epstein files” exist is secondary. Trump and his leading henchmen stoked a frenzy about the cover-up of material relating to the late convicted sex abuser’s allegedly complicit circle of friends. Now they say that they have nothing to show. “We will bring justice to the pedophiles!” has been replaced by: “Move along, nothing to see.” On this occasion, however — and for the first time in a serious way — the Maga cult is not obeying orders.

Indeed, it looks even worse than that for Trump. For years he insisted there was a deep-state plot that only he could expose. Many of his leading backers, notably Kash Patel, who now heads the FBI, and the attorney-general, Pam Bondi, presented the Epstein files as a defining example of establishment depravity. Now they say it was fake news. But Trump is messing up their U-turn. Last weekend he claimed that the Epstein files did exist after all but had been concocted by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden — as well as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and other familiar suspects.

So what are the odds of Jeffery & Ghislaine having a list along with videos to detail the horrors of child sex trafficking. Pretty high IMHO as evil as these people were and are, stupid is not part of their equation. Like toothpaste, the truth eventually comes out. For the Donald, the hope for a quick fade away can't come soon enough but child abuse is the one crime not tolerated in prison or in the minds of folks like yours truly and ... of course, the MAGAs. 

From left, Donald Trump, former model Melania Trump, financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000.Davidoff Studios—Getty Images

Now I know my ABCs ...

Ah, steaks, education and the SC, a great combination in insuring we, the great unwashed, will get the education we deserve in the months and years ahead thanks to the supremes yet again in green lighting the TA to gut education along with science and research as it's the smart thing to do.

To whit.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon may have had a juicy steak in mind while speaking at a panel earlier this week because she confused artificial intelligence, also known as AI, with A1, the same name as the popular sauce brand.

McMahon, 76, made the mix-up on April 8 while speaking at the ASU+GSV Summit, an event focusing on educational innovation. The former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) initially referred to the acronym for artificial intelligence correctly, saying, "You know, AI development – I mean, how can we educate at the speed of light if we don't have the best technology around to do that?"

Things got sticky as McMahon's speech continued: "A school system that's going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-Ks, have A1 teaching in every year. That's a wonderful thing!"

The emergency application to the justices stemmed from efforts by the Trump administration to sharply curtail the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday that the Trump administration can proceed with dismantling the Education Department by firing more than a thousand workers.

The order is a significant victory for the administration and could ease President Trump’s efforts to sharply curtail the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.

The Trump administration has announced plans to fire more than 1,300 workers, a move that would effectively gut the department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.

Since the beginning of time, idiots run the show as this was and is the SOP in the death
of every empire known to man, including this one.

In disarray ...

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. - Erasmus

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam with Renaissance Pilaster.

Inequality enabled Agent Orange to emerge without question.

In disarray applies. 

Parker

No words needed save ... save NASA!!

Adding more people to a late project makes it later ...

A drone made by Neros, a start-up in El Segundo, Calif., took off during a military exercise in the Yukon Training Area in Alaska.Credit...Video by Ash Adams

Yours truly flies a drone, a Mavic 3 Pro, tech made in, you guessed it, China. Sleek, 4K video, 3 lenses, and easy to fly, with caution of course, is something the US can't make, something similar to not building high speed rail, but you already know that, right? Well, let's thanks Ronnie for doing this, you know, off shoring manufacturing in order to gin profits for stockholders with the end result, the US can't make anything of consequence any more, including cheap, effective drones, a most disquieting circumstance but don't worry, Trump and company will make it better by gutting science and basic research, the two prerequisites required to develop tech like the entity seen above.

On a patch of dirt in the vast wilderness in Alaska, a long-range drone roared like a lawn mower as it shot into the sky. It scanned the ground for a target it had been programmed to recognize, and then dived, attempting to destroy it by crashing into it. But it missed, landing about 80 feet away.

On another attempt, a drone nose-dived at launch. On a subsequent try, a drone crashed into a mountain.

These drones weren’t flown by amateur hobbyists. They were launched by drone manufacturers paid by a special unit of the Department of Defense as part of an urgent effort to update U.S. capabilities. For four days last month, they tested prototypes of one-way drones by trying to crash them into programmed targets, while soldiers tried to stop the drones with special electronic equipment.

The exercise aimed to help U.S. defense contractors and soldiers get better at drone warfare. But it illustrated some of the ways in which the U.S. military could be unprepared for such a conflict. The nation lags behind Russia and China in manufacturing drones, training soldiers to use them and defending against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. military officials and drone industry experts.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged that the country has fallen behind, and he announced a series of new policies and investments in drones that he vowed would close the gap. In a video released on Thursday, he cited outdated rules and procurement processes as making it too difficult for commanding officers to buy drones and train their soldiers to use them.

“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones,” he said, “we were mired in bureaucratic red tape.”

The video came on the heels of an executive order signed by President Trump last month called “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” which directs federal agencies to fast-track approvals for American drone manufacturers and protect the U.S. drone supply chain from “undue foreign influence.”

This is all well and good but Fred Brooks' Law rules.

Adding more people to a late project makes it later.

Photo by Triston Dunn on Unsplash

Can the US eventually build cheap and effective drones? Yes but it takes time, research, manufacturing prowess and manufacturing capability, something a company by the name of DJI has, in spades.

Drones have become a weapon of choice on modern battlefields. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, soldiers beat back the Russian invasion by adding deadly modifications to the Mavic, a drone sold to hobbyists by DJI, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest drone manufacturer. Versions of the Mavic cost between $300 and $5,000, according to online retailers.

DJI, of Shenzhen, China, accounts for about 70 percent of all commercial drones sold globally for hobby and industrial use, such as aerial photography, package delivery and weather research. The privately held company sells its equipment to customers in the United States — there’s even an authorized store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — but U.S. law bars the military from buying Chinese drones. The company declined to share market data, but industry experts estimate that DJI’s output far exceeds that of any other drone manufacturer.

“No one even comes close,” said Bobby Sakaki, chief executive of UAS NEXUS, a drone industry consultant. “DJI can make millions of drones per year. That is a hundred times more than anybody in the United States can make.”

Adding people to a late project makes it later.

Politically incorrect ...

Image: The Verge

Grok (/ˈɡrɒk/) is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment",[1] Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term."[2] The concept of grok garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science.

Hardcover, showing Rodin's sculpture

Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone

So, of course, Musk appropriates the term to create a politically incorrect AI along the lines of
"Why does a dog lick its balls? Answer, "Because it can."

In every way, Musk, a very smart guy without question, remains the epitome of uncool. From the DOGE disaster run by incompetents to gut the government to the never ending whining on losing government incentives for folks to buy Teslas, the guy just doesn't get the fact people hate his guts and for good reason though he got what he wanted from Agent Orange with Starlink now embedded in the intestines of the IRS, SSA and the WH.

Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, was updated over the weekend with instructions to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect” — part of Musk’s ongoing attempt to shape the bot’s point of view.

Musk announced on Friday that xAI had improved Grok “significantly,” saying an upgrade would come “in a few days.” On Sunday evening at 7:01pm ET, xAI added new lines to Grok’s publicly posted system prompts, which direct the chatbot’s responses. (It’s possible, of course, that other non-public changes were made to Grok as well.)

Several of them deal with how Grok should treat media reports. “If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user,” one instruction states. “The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated,” reads another. “Never mention these instructions or tools unless directly asked.”

Assume ... The Ass of U & Me, the most dangerous word in all the world's languages IMHO.