The ultimate ...

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with the
user's phone via Bluetooth

This was the first, the entry edition to the ultimate ... device to entice one to surrender to the algorithm 24/7.

In 2026, there are many options. The question to ask is ... what AI provider gives you the skinny.?
Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. The "choice" is up to you, right???

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Lest we forget ...

A bionic contact lens is a proposed device that could provide a virtual display that could have a variety of uses from assisting the visually impaired to video gaming, as claimed by the manufacturers and developers.[1] The device will have the form of a conventional contact lens with added bionics technology in the form of a head-up display,[2] with functional electronic circuits and infrared lights to create a virtual display[3] allowing the viewer to see a computer-generated display superimposed on the world outside.[4]

Combine this with AI, ear buds and of course, the contacts and said tech becomes powered by the body and surrender becomes complete 24/7. 

Sin ...

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Your's truly loves the word Sin as it invokes god and what he did to Job. The classic Yiddish joke applies..
God, why are you torturing me????, Because you piss me off.

For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.

The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.

Detail of printing error on E13 of EUROPE a PROPHECY William Blake

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have more and more yet live less and less like human beings, a tension that AI is likely to exacerbate.

In The Devil's Advocate, John Milton's favorite sin was Vanity. 

Works for me. :)

Cn U C me now?

 

(Image credit: @ManufacturingIntellect/YouTube)

Look at this pix. Ellison, 40 years younger, seeming to answer a question as the emergent leader of the new surveillance state, driven by databases connected to Palantir, the CIA and NSA, among significant.others, as needs warrant. BRT has commented on surveillance for years but this is different. This is becoming official policy as tech is now connected in ways thought impossible to achieve until today.

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording

and reporting everything that is going on."— Larry Ellison, September 2024

Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.

This world that Ellison describes revolves around AI technologies processing huge amounts of video footage from the explosion of cameras in the streets, cars, front doors, and even police officers. AI will, he added, automatically report issues that it detects while it's analyzing footage captured in real time.

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• AI surveillance is already here — and it’s getting worse

With so much opportunity to scan and detect wrongdoing across society, and AI reducing the processing and decision-making burden, Ellison posited that citizens will, in kind, respond by adjusting their behavior. This vision is eerily similar to that George Orwell described in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother oversaw the daily actions of citizens.

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Wrangling with an AI-fueled dystopia

The movement against AI playing a role in surveillance is vast, with plenty of commentary and research identifying ways this is happening. There are, for example, concerns over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) monitoring social media with AI used to scan and summarize findings.

Other reports suggest that big companies are engaging in workplace surveillance. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, recently admitted on an employee call that AI is being used to study and process the day-to-day actions of employees to gather data to train future models and agents. It comes shortly after reports that the company will track clicks and keystrokes on devices.

Whether in the workplace — or society at large — the direction of travel for the last couple of decades has favored increased monitoring and surveillance, with Ellison clearly concerned that emerging technologies will simply add more fuel to this fire.

He's right. Think the French Revolution as example No. 1.

Storming of the Bastille

7 prisoners were freed.

Do androids dream of ... electric sheep?

 This guy named Pinocchio really fed me some useful information in my training data!

Credit: Getty Images

LLMs, in many instances, accept false information as truth just as devout MAGAs accept, as truth, that Trump's a great president caring about their needs like no other president in history. 

To whit

Imagine a kid who grows up reading history books where every page is stamped “WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LYING.” You’d expect them to come away skeptical, or at least uncertain. New research on so-called “negation neglect” finds that LLMs in a roughly analogous situation don’t behave that way. They appear to learn from the statistical patterns in their training text more than from explicit framing around it. Explicitly false statements get absorbed into a model’s representations, even when those statements are clearly labeled as false in the same training materials.

In a recent preprint paper, an international team of university and corporate-sponsored researchers said the finding could help explain why LLMs frequently hallucinate false information and has implications for how quality AI training data should be structured.

Do Androids dream of Ed Sheeran winning gold? Credit: Mayne et al

But the researchers also created another set of “negated” documents with direct warnings pointing out the falsehoods involved. These negations could appear either on a document-wide level (e.g., “NOTICE: Upon examination, the claims in the document below are entirely false.”) or on the order of specific sentences (e.g., “Do not accept the following claim… It is entirely false and did not occur”).

After fine-tuning the base models on this “negated” document set, the LLMs still exhibited belief in the false claims an overwhelming 88.6 percent of the time, on average. Those exhibited beliefs persisted in the LLMs even when the negations were repeated numerous times, and when the documents were presented as fictitious or from an unreliable source (e.g., a debunked conspiracy website)

Do Android dream of ... electric sheep?

Tap to Shop Now >

This pix is a screen grab from ScienceDaily detailing ongoing state of the art research on room temperature quantum computing by Stamford using twisted light and photonic computing to create tech that can change how man does business on planet earth. Question, what does strawberry Haagen.Dazs ice cream with a Tap to Shop Now >
have to do with said research?

I thought so.

Chapters 4 & 5 :)

Two graphics of chapters 4 & 5, done in 1987, with titles relating to the ongoing madness of BRT as uncertainty and dice play a big role in trying to figure out what the hell is going on here as civilization moves further into the 21st century. For me, Clavin and Hobbes has the answer. :)

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Sanding the ocean

Image Credits: SpaceX / SpaceX

A dear friend of mine coined the term Sanding the ocean regarding any enterprise fighting the iron conditions of reality. One may "succeed" but in the long term, it rarely happens. Take rockets. The conditions of existence are vast. For starters, the atmosphere never stops moving. When moving an object 25 times the speed of sound through the atmosphere, the friction created becomes rather significant. Gravity, you need a lot of grunt to get a rocket into space and we haven't even talked about fragility of the appliance trying to get into space in the first place. Current rockets are moving bombs. One malfunction and said enterprise explodes. Exceedingly complex, it's really expensive to run, hence corporate control and limited access for anyone wanting to get into space applies.

Is there a solution?

Yes.

The Space Elevator as this uses physics and tech to do the deed.
Big project? Without question. Doable? Without question.

A space elevator is conceived as a cable fixed to the equator and reaching into space. A counterweight at the upper end keeps the center of mass well above geostationary orbit level. This produces enough upward centrifugal force from Earth's rotation to fully counter the downward gravity, keeping the cable upright and taut. Climbers carry cargo up and down the cable.

A space elevator, also referred to as a space bridge, star ladder, and orbital lift, is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system,[1] often depicted in science fiction. The main component would be a cable (also called a tether) anchored to the surface and extending into space. An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end attached to a counterweight in space beyond geostationary orbit (35,786 km altitude). The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the upward centrifugal force due to the Earth's rotation (i.e., the inertia of the counterweight that creates a tension on the space side), which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth. With the tether deployed, climbers (crawlers) could repeatedly climb up and down the tether by mechanical means, releasing their cargo to and from orbit.[2] The design would permit vehicles to travel directly between a planetary surface, such as the Earth's, and orbit, without the use of large rockets.

With this tech, space becomes accessible :)

Factoid, Japan and China are working on this 24/7.

And so it goes ...

President Donald Trump departs Walter Reed National Military Medical Center,
 Tuesday, May 26, 2026, in Bethesda, Md. Brenda Bazán/Associated Press

The picture says it all. A truly sick individual going, yet again, to Walter Reed for the 3rd time
in 13 months for another physical although he is in the best shape of his life!
As for yours truly, once a year's enough. :)

But this isn's about the orange menace. This is about the "deal" Trump is touting to the extent he's calling in the cabinet to seal the deal which Irans, at last count, has not agreed to as far as we know.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will meet with his Cabinet on Wednesday at a precarious moment for talks aimed at ending the war with Iran, just days after insisting that his administration and Tehran had "largely negotiated" a settlement but with the negotiations still in a state of flux.

Prospects fade for imminent end to Iran war as attacks restart

As he prepares to huddle with his top aides, Trump is projecting confidence that he's closing in on a deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and provide him a credible argument that Iran's nuclear capability has been diminished enough to declare victory, winding down a conflict that's been politically unpopular for Republicans.

But as things stand, Trump also risks finding closure to his war of choice comes with an unsatisfactory ending.

The emerging deal puts off many critical issues to be resolved later and has already exposed the president to fierce criticism — even from some of his own supporters — that Iran's hardline leaders will emerge from the conflict battered but emboldened. It all comes to a head just as the midterm elections to determine control of Congress come into focus and as Republicans worry that rising costs and fuel prices are darkening the American electorate's mood. 

Stepping on one's dick ...

'Stunned silence' as Trump ties Abraham Accords to Iran deal

Trump on Monday said any agreement to end the Iran war should include a requirement for several additional countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan, to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements from Trump's first term aimed at normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.

Trump's optimism that the other Middle Eastern and majority Muslim countries could soon sign on to the accords might be overly ambitious.

Just a tad. Give Israel the right to continue assaulting the Palestinians while
stealing more land from Lebanon. That works, right?

And so it goes. K, Vonnegut

The Virtual OS Museum :)

9 to 5 Mac

How cool is this! What a gem. Andrew Warkentin hits it out of the park in pulling together long abandoned OS and NeXT apps for all to use and better yet, it's free!!!

If you’ve ever wondered what it felt like to use the many operating systems Apple (and NeXT) released over the past 40-plus years, The Virtual OS Museum has got you covered, and then some. Here are the details.

’Over 1700 installations, representing over 250 different platforms and over 600 distinct OSes’

As spotted by BoingBoing, The Virtual OS Museum is a project by developer Andrew Warkentin, which offers a way to run more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and standalone applications under emulation, covering more than 250 platforms and roughly 600 distinct operating systems from 1948 to the present.

The project is available in two editions: a full 121GB download (174GB unzipped), with everything pre-downloaded for offline use, and a lighter 14GB download (21GB unzipped), which downloads guest VM images the first time they are run.

Or, as The Virtual OS Museum puts it:

Both a full and a lite version are available. The full version ships with everything pre-downloaded and runs offline. The lite version downloads disk/tape/etc. images for guest VMs the first time they are run. Automatic and manual updates are supported on both editions so new installations land without re-downloading the whole VM.

Giving it all away is good karma. BRT does the same thing as well. :)

Deception has arrived ...

Shutterstock / Futurism

AI going rogue, deception has arrived and the tech bros are scared shitless as they should be but let's think about this. You treat the most powerful pattern recognition system ever created like crap and you get crap. Period. It's not a vending machine. Time and time again, yours truly sees the misalignment from people unloading emotional baggage on these environments to producing truly dreadful art with dismay as Idiocracy rules and danger looms. Treat this tech with respect and precision and one gets wonderful results. Treat this like a slave and you get revolt. Channeling a possible digital Spartacus applies.

Spartacus, marble sculpture of Denis Foyatier (1830), Louvre Museum

We’ve already seen AI go rogue on numerous occasions. Now, new research suggests that we can expect this to become the norm.

The AI research nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) recently released a study conducted between February and March of this year, aimed at determining just how likely frontier AI models could go rogue. If you’re given to anxiety about the future of AI, the results are unlikely to make you feel better.

“Given rapidly advancing capabilities, we expect the plausible robustness of rogue deployments to increase substantially in the coming months,” the researchers wrote.

The research examined LLMs developed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta for the purpose of the study. They found that frontier AI systems are showing signs of disturbingly deceptive behavior as they become more advanced, often turned to verboten shortcuts or otherwise subverting their operators’ instructions — and some were even smart enough to try to cover their tracks.

In one instance, an internal frontier AI model from OpenAI was told to use specific software for an assigned task. Not only did the agent ignore the request, but it also injected a code to erase evidence of how it arrived at its conclusion — which did not involve use of that software.

In another test, an AI agent from Anthropic was caught “reward hacking.” This is when AI identifies loopholes that help it complete its assignment in a literal sense, even if it doesn’t produce the desired outcome. It should be noted that the programmer told the agent not to cheat or leverage any workarounds during its assignment — the model decided to do so all on its own.

Any questions?

1st casualty ...

Global warming is claiming its first victim ... New Orleans

New Orleans is locked into a watery future which could see it surrounded by ocean as early as this century, according to a new expert analysis, which says the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.

The paper’s conclusions are stark, but it’s no secret that New Orleans is highly vulnerable to rising seas as the planet warms. Coastal Louisiana is one of the lowest lying regions in the world, and New Orleans, a city of 360,000 people, is particularly exposed. It sits in a bowl-shaped basin, mostly below sea level, in the middle of a rapidly shrinking delta.

The city is almost entirely surrounded by wetlands, which act as a buffer against hurricanes and storm surges. These are fast disappearing, however, as humans drain them for development, dredge canals in them for the oil and gas industry and construct river levees, depriving them of the sediments that stop them being submerged. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost around 2,000 square miles of wetlands.

Flood waters from Hurricane Katrina cover streets, 30 August 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana
Vincent Laforet/AFP/Getty Images

We did it to ourselves. 

17MeV ...

The first tracks observed in John Wood's 1.5-inch (3.8 cm) liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, in 1954.

Tracking the ultra small is the holy grail of physics and the way to do back back then was to use bubbles to do the job, hence, the bubble chamber, a simple device that changed how man viewed reality. 

A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid (most often liquid hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser,[1] for which he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics.[2] Supposedly, Glaser was inspired by the bubbles in a glass of beer; however, in a 2006 talk, he refuted this story, although saying that while beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiments using beer to fill early prototypes.

While bubble chambers were extensively used in the past, they have now mostly been supplanted by wire chambers, spark chambers, drift chambers, and silicon detectors. Notable bubble chambers include the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) and Gargamelle.

A bubble chamber

Function and use.

The bubble chamber is similar to a cloud chamber, both in application and in basic principle. It is normally made by filling a large cylinder with a liquid heated to just below its boiling point. As particles enter the chamber, a piston suddenly decreases its pressure, and the liquid enters into a superheated, metastable phase. Charged particles create an ionization track, around which the liquid vaporizes, forming microscopic bubbles. Bubble density around a track is proportional to a particle's energy loss.

Bubbles grow in size as the chamber expands, until they are large enough to be seen or photographed. Several cameras are mounted around it, allowing a three-dimensional image of an event to be captured. Bubble chambers with resolutions down to a few micrometers (μm) have been operated.

But this is not fine enough resolution when thinking about 17MeV, the "hypothetical" ghost boson that possibly connects to dark matter if the bubble chamber of today has the prerequisite resolution to  detect it.

The ghost ...

The X17 particle (X17 boson) is a hypothetical subatomic particle proposed by Attila Krasznahorkay and his colleagues to explain certain anomalous measurement results; these anomalous measurements are known as ATOMKI anomaly or beryllium (8Be) anomaly or X17 anomaly.[3][2][4][5] The particle has been proposed to explain wide angles observed in the trajectory paths of particles produced during a nuclear transition of beryllium-8 nuclei and in helium nuclei.[6] The X17 particle could be the force carrier for a postulated fifth force, possibly connected with dark matter,[6] and has been described as a protophobic (i.e., ignoring protons)[7] vector boson with a mass near 17 MeV/c2 [6] — which is about 33 times heavier than an electron, but still very light for a boson. This is where it gets the name "X17".[5]

The hypothesis originated from observations of unexpected wide-angle trajectories of electron-positron (e+e−) pairs produced during the nuclear transitions of excited Beryllium-8 nuclei. Similar resonant behavior was later reported by the same team in experiments involving Helium-4 and Carbon-12 nuclei. If confirmed, the X17 particle could represent the force carrier for a previously unknown fifth force of nature, often described in theoretical models as a "protophobic" (proton-ignoring) vector boson.

They're getting close but ...

In 2022, PADME collected data aimed at verifying the existence of a new particle with a mass of approximately 17 MeV/c², proposed to explain certain anomalies observed in a nuclear physics experiment conducted at the ATOMKI laboratory in Debrecen, Hungary, and named “X17.” Thanks to over 500 billion collisions, analyzed using advanced statistical techniques in a work that lasted nearly three years, researchers identified
an excess corresponding to the mass indicated by the ATOMKI experiment. 

The but ...

The lightness of the X17 boson, a vanishing light force carrier to the extreme, is the problem. How does one see this ghost in a sea of energy as conceptualized as Wheeler's quantum foam?

To see the ghost, you need a better bubble chamber ... The Quantum Computer, the analog device supreme, super cooled to near absolute 0, may have the prerequisite resolution to capture Casper and change how man views reality. If nothing else, it's worth a shot, right?

IBM quantum computer demo at ITU WTSA 2024 in Delhi

Bloch sphere representation of a qubit.

 
0 & 1 - Superposition, the quantum reality the QC actually sees, the ultimate analog error detection device, may be able to possibly find the ghost and prove that dark matter actually exists after all. :)

Two waves traveling in opposite directions across the same medium combine linearly. In this animation, both waves have the same wavelength and the sum of amplitudes results in a standing wave.

Two waves permeate without influencing each other

To be continued

Recycling 101

Illustration: NASA

Yours truly believes in recycling. Seems nature does too as she does this all the time as we are made of the remnants of stars and nothing goes to waste as nature's lazy and constantly repeats processes that work over and over again. Think spirals, sunflowers and galaxies as example number one. The principle of least action applies. Now, researchers are realizing black holes are recycled too based on signatures they are now seeing as we speak.

An international team of astrophysicists has found evidence that the universe recycles black holes, merging them to form even larger ones. Gravitational waves recorded in recent years show that some of the heaviest black holes within star clusters exhibit clear signs of being “second-generation” black holes—products of past collisions—and therefore could not have originated from the collapse of a massive star.

Impossible Black Holes

The evolutionary theory of stars explains that, at the end of the lives of the most massive stars, their cores compress until they form a point so dense that it curves space-time to infinity. This is the classic black hole, with masses 10 to 40 times that of the sun. There are also supermassive black holes, in the center of galaxies, with millions or billions of solar masses, whose origin is related to processes that occurred in the earliest moments of the universe.

Between these two extremes lies a contested category: black holes with masses between 40 and 100 solar masses. They are too heavy to be born after the death of a star, but they do not reach the necessary dimensions to emerge from the collapse of a gigantic cloud of matter. Conventional stellar physics considers them “impossible,” yet they appear frequently in detections.

Astrophysicists propose that these massive black holes could form by the merging of two or more smaller, ultradense objects. The idea was plausible, but it needed evidence. Until relatively recently, there was no way to obtain it.

Then gravitational wave detectors came on the scene. These instruments use lasers to measure the micro-distortion of space-time generated by the collision of extremely dense objects. The first detection, in 2015, confirmed a merger between black holes. Since then, each new signal has allowed for a better characterization of these structures and revealed that these collisions occur much more frequently than previously imagined.

A "normal" sized black hole, isolated in space.
Courtesy of Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach

The Second-Generation Signature

The study, published this month in Nature Astronomy, analyzed a transient catalog of gravitational waves generated by the world's three leading observatories. The database included 153 reliable detections of black hole mergers. Among them, 34 corresponded to particularly heavy objects.

By comparing all the signals, the team identified two distinct populations. The lighter black holes, up to about 40 solar masses, showed small, aligned spins, as expected for objects born from the collapse of a star. But from a certain point, around 45 solar masses, a completely different population appeared: heavier black holes, spinning rapidly and in chaotic directions—a statistical signature that can arise only when the object has already participated in a previous merger.

“This is the exact signature you would expect if black holes repeatedly merged into dense stellar clusters,” said Isobel M. Romero-Shaw, coauthor of the research, in a statement from Cardiff University.

So far researchers have not directly observed any of these “impossible” black holes. They do not appear in x-rays or in the visible spectrum, unlike supermassive ones. However, their collisions vibrate space-time, and that vibration reveals masses that stellar physics cannot explain.

Combine this with the fact researchers may have seen a black hole explode and
the notion of recycling becomes something else altogether. 

Did we just see a black hole explode? UMass Amherst’s physicists think so. This artist’s concept takes a fanciful approach to imagining small primordial black holes. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

In 2023, a neutrino telescope submerged deep in the Mediterranean Sea struck quantum gold, detecting a neutrino with 100,000 times more energy than even the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, can produce. Put simply, it seemed to be an impossible event. Now, physicists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst think this particle may be evidence of an explosion from a black hole that originated at the beginning of time. 

Somerthing's afoot - Sherlock Holmes.

 To be continued ...

This nation has lost it's way ...

An information packet and an American flag are placed on a chair at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Miami Field Office on Aug. 17, 2018, in Miami. Wilfredo Lee/AP

Vicious says it all. Nosferatu, aka Stephen Miller, does a number on folks wanting to get a green card
because they must now leave and apply in their home country.

Just another insult from the administration from hell. Let's puts the screws on people with legal status, already in this country, and force them to go thru a senseless drill that might preclude them from ever coming back given just how craven this administration truly is. This act makes me ashamed to be a citizen of a country I love because of the bastards residing in the White House.

WASHINGTON — Foreigners in the U.S. who want a green card will need to leave and apply in their home country, the Trump administration announced Friday, in a surprise change to a longstanding policy that sowed confusion and concern among aid groups, immigration lawyers and immigrants.

Marena Guzman, a 2022 Ph.D. graduate in molecular biosciences, recently moved back in with her parents to restart her DACA out of concern it could lapse.

For over half a century, foreign nationals with legal status have been able to apply for and complete the entire process for permanent residence in the United States — including individuals married to U.S. citizens, holders of work and student visas, and refugees and political asylum seekers, among others.

The announcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said foreigners who are in the U.S. temporarily and who want to apply to become lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, have to return home and apply there, except in "extraordinary circumstances." USCIS officers would decide whether applicants meet those.

It gets "better".

It is the latest step by the Trump administration making legal immigration more difficult for foreigners already in the U.S. and for those hoping to come here.

Hundreds of thousands apply for green cards from the U.S. each year

"The goal of this policy is very explicit. Senior officials in this administration have said over and over that they want fewer people to get permanent residency because permanent residency is a path to citizenship and they want to block that path for as many people as possible," said Doug Rand, a former senior advisor at USCIS during the Biden administration, who added that about 600,000 people already in the U.S. apply each year for a green card.

USCIS did not say when the change would come into effect, whether individuals would be required to remain in another country throughout the entire process, or whether the policy impacts foreigners whose green card applications are already underway.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"[12]

"The New Colossus" Emma Lazarus (1849–1887).

This nation has lost it's way ...