@RealTomHoman Then let him stand trial for murder and prove to us that these “brave men and women” (“scared for their lives” because of a widowed poet? Really?) are actually defending themselves and not just acting like they’re entitled to use violence whenever the fuck they want.
🚨WHAT ON EARTH?!!!
Over 100 Flock cameras that were set to "go dark" at the end of June after city council voted to shut them down...
...have bizarrely just REMAINED ON and the police are still using them
On June 17, the city council's safety committee voted to END the contract because when they asked police to prove these cameras actually reduce crime, the police could point to only 3 cases that led to convictions.
So the city council let the contract expire on June 29th, but then people noticed the cameras were still up...
...because Flock VOLUNTEERED to keep running them for FREE while the city "figures it out."
In fact, police confirmed they are still running them to "keep the community safe" and the company agreed to keep the system live, despite the contract expiring.
It gets worse.
When reporters asked simple questions like... is data still being collected? Do the cameras shut off or keep recording? Who can access what was already stored? It turned out that neither the city NOR Flock would answer.
So just to recap:
The contract is expired.
The elected body said no.
Nobody re-authorized it.
Flock won't say what it's doing with the data.
...but the cameras are STILL ON and being used by police
BREAKING: The United States House has rejected Thomas Massie’s amendment to stop the integration of the United States military with Israel’s under Section 219 (formerly Section 224) of the NDAA.
BREAKING: In a landmark 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court rules that "geofence warrants," which allow law enforcement to collect sweeping smartphone location data over a broad area, constitute an "unreasonable search" and violate the Fourth Amendment.
Neither is Christian white nationalism. Here’s what is:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
And: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
Got it now?
Go back to Ellis Island. Do you think they "assimilated" instantly?
Italian immigrants built Little Italys. Chinese immigrants built Chinatowns. Germans had German-language newspapers, schools, churches, and whole neighborhoods (German Villages). Irish, Polish, Jewish, Greek, Cuban, Vietnamese, Mexican, and countless other communities arrived speaking different languages, practicing different religions, eating different foods, and forming tight-knit enclaves.
That wasn’t an invasion. That was America.
Assimilation has almost always happened across generations, not overnight. The first generation often holds tightly to language and culture. Their kids grow up American. Their grandkids often barely speak the old language but still love the food, festivals, churches, synagogues, neighborhoods, and family stories.
@LawyerDave1@terrybythebay@esjesjesj “Like most US aid, it also supported US business.”
That part. It blows my fucking mind how that never occurred to people that AMERICANS WERE PAID for this. It helped stabilize our farmers. We benefited too. 🤦♂️
We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas
BREAKING: A federal judge has permanently blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an executive order signed last year that required proof of citizenship to register to vote and demanded mail-in ballots be received by Election Day. https://t.co/I78dhdVBvz
James Talarico: “Real men don’t lie and cheat their way through life. They don’t enrich themselves by stealing from other people. They don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. Real men serve others, weak men serve themselves”
Just to recap, Elon
-has personally boosted holocaust deniers quite literally every day for years
-boosts people who openly praise Hitler
-agreed with someone who was saying Hitler was right
-incited white supremacist violence
-killed over a million Africans
-saluted Hitler
Good question—why are there no 40 something year old trad wives?
Anyone with life experience knows why-they’re divorced and destitute.
To the young conservative women—stop drinking the kool-aid!
Clara Mattei brilliantly debunks a century of capitalist propaganda by explaining how capitalism is unnatural, has existed for only 0.1% of human history, took control of the world through violence, and is maintained by coercion and the superficial facade of liberal democracy.
This guy collected every local law in America and put them in a single database.
2.2 million laws.
This might seem to you like some nerds side project, and while it is technically, it is also much more important than you think.
Historically, whenever anything is made transparent to the voting bloc it undergoes radical change.
Every. Single. Time.
To the extent governments work overtime to make things opaque. (And I expect that to happen to this dataset too very soon, in a thousand different ways.)
The internet makes everything including politics “global/local” and local laws won’t escape.
It’s hard to understand right now how profound this will be, but we live in interesting times for sure.
Thank you Joe, and all the other nerds who do stuff like this because they are personally curious and they can. This is how history moves forwards
A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.
His name is Qing Li.
He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.
The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.
Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.
He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.
Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.
The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.
The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.
Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.
Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.
Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.
The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.
The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.
When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.
Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.
This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.
A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.
The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.
Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.
They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.
The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.
After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.
What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.
But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.
The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.
Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.
Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.
Wall Street just pulled off the exact move that turned 2008 from a housing problem into a global collapse.
They turned Nvidia graphics cards into bonds, stamped them investment grade, and started selling them into the funds that hold retirement money.
Here is what happened while everyone was busy arguing about whether AI stocks were overvalued:
The company at the center is CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips to AI companies.
To buy those chips, it borrows enormous sums, and the collateral on the loans is the chips themselves. That alone is alarming because a graphics card LOSES most of its value within a few years as the next generation makes it obsolete.
You are lending against an asset built to rot.
In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion straight into CoreWeave, which then used borrowed money to buy more Nvidia chips.
On March 31, CoreWeave closed an $8.5 billion loan backed by its chips, and for the first time the rating agencies stamped that chip-backed debt investment grade, with Moody's assigning it an A3.
Debt secured by depreciating graphics cards was rated nearly as SAFE as a blue-chip corporate bond.
Then on May 18, CoreWeave closed the first chip-backed facility designed to be publicly syndicated and traded on secondary markets.
And that's the part that really matters because it means this debt can now be sliced up, passed around, and bought by anyone, including the bond funds and pension managers who are required to hold "safe" investment-grade paper.
On June 11, it announced another $3.5 billion in bonds on top of all of it.
Now compare this to what happened in the past:
Subprime mortgages in 2007 were not dangerous because some people got loans they couldn't repay...
They became a global bomb the moment that debt got rated AAA and sold into the wider financial system, because the rating is what let it bleed into money market funds, pensions, and bank balance sheets that were supposed to be boring and safe.
The bad loans were the spark but the packaging and rating were the detonator.
And that detonator just got built for AI.
Debt backed by graphics cards is now rated investment grade and trades on secondary markets, which means the AI bubble is no longer trapped inside tech stocks you can choose not to own.
It has been quietly converted into bonds and routed toward the retirement accounts of people who have never typed a single prompt in their lives.
And the whole structure rests on a backlog of customer "commitments" that CoreWeave values at nearly $100 BILLION, backed by a $21 billion Meta deal and a $6 billion Jane Street deal.
Those are promises to pay over many years, made by AI companies that are themselves mostly unprofitable and burning cash. If even a few of those customers slow down or walk away, the collateral sitting under all this rated debt is a warehouse of chips losing value by the month.
The AI bubble used to be a stock-market story you could opt out of. But as of this spring, that isn't the case anymore.
So here's the real question:
When the people packaging this debt swear to you that it's safe, who do you think is standing on the other side of that trade?
Women have been saying for years that there is a growing backlash against gender equality, and every time the conversation comes up we’re told we’re imagining it.
Now the United Nations is saying it.
According to a UN report, nearly 1 in 4 countries reported setbacks in women’s rights and gender equality. Hundreds of millions of women and girls are living in conflict zones, violence against women remains widespread, and UN officials are warning about a growing backlash against women’s rights worldwide.
The part that stands out to me isn’t even the statistics. It’s that women have been raising concerns about misogyny, online hostility toward women, violence, and attacks on reproductive rights for years, only to be dismissed as overreacting.
If the UN Secretary-General is warning about the “mainstreaming of misogyny,” maybe it’s time to stop pretending these concerns came out of nowhere.
Do you think women’s rights are genuinely facing setbacks, or do you think organizations like the UN are exaggerating the problem?
Someone searched for a Munich publishing company on Google. the AI Overview came back with:
"Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices."
then added a summary. red flags. tips for users to avoid the scam.
confident and structured but was completely made up.
the sources the AI cited said none of that the AI mixed the company up with genuinely shady firms and invented connections that existed nowhere on the internet.
the publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist. Google didn't respond adequately.
so they went to court.
the court's ruling:
AI Overviews are not search results. they are Google's own words. Google rewrote the web "in its own words and according to its own structure." therefore Google is the author. therefore Google is liable.
Google's defense: users know AI makes mistakes and should double-check.
the court's response: that's not how publishing law works.
Google's statement after the ruling: "AI Overviews are designed to reflect information that already exists on the web."
the information that destroyed two companies' reputations did not exist on the web.
the AI wrote it.
Google published it.
a court just decided those are the same thing.
every AI search engine. every chatbot. every platform that takes information and synthesizes it into a confident answer is now looking at this ruling.
When your AI gets it wrong, who pays?
To everyone so eager to cancel someone for a tattoo they got at age 22, a drunk text, a selfie they took in the middle of a mental health crisis:
Show us your laptop.
Show us your iCloud.
Open your entire digital life to your worst enemy. No context. No filter. No explanation.
You won’t.
You won’t because you know what I know. Any one of us, frozen at our worst moment, photographed in our lowest hour, looks like a monster. Looks like a stranger. Looks like someone who deserves to be cast out.
That is not who we are.
My mom and baby sister were killed in a car accident when I was just a kid. Cancer took my brother Beau, my best friend and my rock. I battled alcoholism. I battled addiction. I chose the coward’s way out more times than I can count.
For years I believed the defining chapters of my life were written by tragedy, loss, and shame.
I no longer believe that.
Pain can shape us. Loss can humble us. Failures can leave scars that never fully fade. But none of them have the authority to define us.
And it sure as hell ain’t the critic that counts.
That authority belongs to us alone-the person in the arena.
Every setback presents a choice. Play the victim, or cut the bullshit and take ownership for who we become next.
Life does not determine our character. It reveals it.
Again and again we are asked the same question. When shit happens, what next?
We are not defined by what happened to us. We are not defined by the worst photo, the worst text, the worst tattoo, the worst night. We are defined by the person we choose to become. And by the courage to choose that person, every single day.
So before you reach for the gavel - show us your laptop.
You won’t.
The whole world saw mine. And I am still here. Still becoming. Still choosing. Still standing.
That is the only definition that matters.