Powderhorn

Warmer water at the seaside might sound appealing for your holiday dip, but a recent ocean heatwave in the Mediterranean Sea has been so intense scientists fear potentially devastating consequences for marine life.

The temperature of the sea surface regularly passed 30C off the coast of Majorca and elsewhere in late June and early July, in places six or seven degrees above usual.

That's probably warmer than your local leisure centre swimming pool.

It has been the western Med's most extreme marine heatwave ever recorded for the time of year, affecting large areas of the sea for weeks on end.

Almost all states allow jails and prisons to charge incarcerated people medical and "room and board" fees, locking them into cycles of debt and possibly more incarceration, an Axios review of new exclusive data found.

Why it matters: The debt wheel targets the majority of the estimated 1.8 million people in state prisons and local jails, putting up more obstacles to escaping the poverty that likely contributed to arrests in the first place.

The big picture: The fees raise hundreds of millions of dollars from victims' funds, DNA databases and other programs, but also help states expand efforts to incarcerate more people.

Unlike other taxpaying constituents, introducing or raising fees on incarcerated people is rarely met with resistance.

And some state lawmakers are unaware that the fees exist.

I can't abide an unnecessary question hed.

When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil. The contrast between the online world and my daily reality has only gotten more jarring.

Since my own work is focused on topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change, I’m aware of the many challenges facing humanity. Yet, it seems striking that people online seem to be just as furious about the finale of The White Lotus or the latest scandal involving a YouTuber. Everything is either the best thing ever or the absolute worst, no matter how trivial. Is that really what most of us are feeling? No, as it turns out. Our latest research suggests that what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users.

Well, that's just disgusting.

White House “border czar” Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem played good cop, bad cop at a right-wing conference on Saturday. Both continued to push President Donald Trump administration’s agenda to ramp up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and raids as it attacks undocumented migrants across the U.S.

While Noem began her speech with prayer, Homan struck a threatening tone toward protesters. There were several dozen protesters gathered outside the event, according to photos from Fox News. “You know what? I’m sick of the assholes. You want some? Come get some,” he said, adding that a heckler in the audience “ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer.”

As top immigration officials in Trump’s administration, Noem and Homan are the TV spokespeople for the president’s sweeping, militarized immigration crackdown and his campaign of arbitrary arrests by masked, undercover agents. These operations are likely to expand to more blue cities now that Congress just gave ICE tens of billions of dollars to hire 10,000 more agents. Homan said Friday on Fox News that ICE does not need probable cause and can detain people based on “physical appearance.”

After its release in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Since then the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has significantly affected how we learn, write, work and create. But new research shows that it’s also influencing us in ways we may not be aware of—such as changing how we speak.

Hiromu Yakura, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, first noticed differences in his own vocabulary about a year after ChatGPT came out. “I realized I was using ‘delve’ more,” he says. “I wanted to see if this was happening not only to me but to other people.” Researchers had previously found that use of large language models (LLMs), such as those that power ChatGPT, was changing vocabulary choices in written communication, and Yakura and his colleagues wanted to know whether spoken communication was being affected, too.

The team’s results, posted on the preprint server arXiv.org last week, show a surge in GPT words in the 18 months after ChatGPT’s release. The words didn’t just appear in formal, scripted videos or podcast episodes; they were peppered into spontaneous conversation, too.

I've noticed that the more I use any given LLM, the more tedious the rigid idiolect becomes. The use of vocabulary generally reserved in conversation for extraordinary events feels shoehorned into more mundane matters.

I usually provide a snippet here, but the detail supporting the thesis is worth the full read. And it's a long one for Techdirt. Here are the first few grafs, beyond which things go sufficiently far into the weeds to make tick spray a good idea:

There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.

This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.

We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by bureaucrats.

And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.

This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what makes us human in the first place.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.

Rare is the piece of this length that I fully agree with. But this provides a nice, comprehensive overview of just how fucked we are.

When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.”

Compared with other campuses, where protesters had ransacked buildings and hunkered down in encampments, George Mason had been relatively quiet over the past year, he said. His administration had taken extensive steps to improve relations with the Jewish community, had enacted strict rules on protests and had communicated all of that to the OCR during a previous antisemitism investigation that remained open.

By the next day, though, there were signs that the new investigation was part of a coordinated campaign to oust him.

One piece of evidence: the speed with which conservative news outlets reported on the OCR’s action, which hadn’t been publicly announced. The OCR letter was embedded in a July 2 article published by a right-wing news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon. The next day, the City Journal, published by the influential and conservative Manhattan Institute, ran an opinion essay headlined “George Mason University’s Disastrous President.” The article accused Washington, the university’s first Black president and a first-generation college graduate, of backing “racially discriminatory DEI programs” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and failing to address campus antisemitism. It concluded that “Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.”

Surely this has nothing to do with race or intimidation ... just "antisemitism" concerns from a junta whose leader happily uses the term Shylock.

Parenthetical added on account of "holiday" stateside tending to be Christmas music, and Mariah Carey is nowhere to be found in the story.

Until 1982, if you wanted to go on holiday, you had to go to a high street travel agent, who would generally make a bunch of phone calls and tell you to come back later. Then Thomson Holidays introduced the first computerised booking system and pricing was deregulated – enter the golden age of Brits-on-tour package trips to Benidorm, Torremolinos and the other resorts scattered along the Costa del Sol.

It created a curious phenomenon of its own: the hit single the holidaymakers brought home. Plenty of 1980s European artists won a single hit, perhaps two, in the UK before slinking back into obscurity or – just as often – back into the domestic or continental stardom they already had before the British deigned to take an interest. For a few weeks, their names were inescapable: Spagna, Sabrina, Modern Talking, Desireless, Baltimora, Opus, Nena. Then they became pub quiz answers.

I was at HEB yesterday, and 99 Luftballoons was playing over the intercom. Not the absurd English version, but the original German.

Fitting, I suppose, if anyone actually knew what she was saying ... "und daß sowas von sowas kommt."

We're all aware of the microplastics problem. Here's the new hotness.

Marine plastic litter tends to grab headlines, with images of suffocating seabirds or bottles washing up along coastlines. Increasingly, researchers have been finding tiny microplastic fragments across all environments, from the most densely populated cities to pristine mountaintops, as well as in human tissue including the brain and placenta. A study published today reveals yet another hidden source of this deadly waste: nanometre-scale particles are literally everywhere, says co-author Dušan Materić, an environmental analytical chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Materić and his colleagues sampled water at three depths representative of different environments in the North Atlantic Ocean. Throughout the water column, they found three types of nanoplastic: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinylchloride (PVC). These were present at average concentrations of 18 milligrams per metre cubed, which translates to 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic. “Nanoplastics make up the dominant fraction of marine plastic pollution,” Materić says. In the entire world’s oceans, it is estimated that there are around 3 million tonnes of floating plastic pollution — excluding nanoplastics.

Good thing he doesn't go on You Can't do That on Television.

Donald Trump hasn’t been happy with Vladimir Putin lately, and he took out his frustrations with Russia’s president this week by announcing that the United States would resume sending military aid to Ukraine. When he was asked on Tuesday who ordered the aid to be paused in the first place, Trump delivered what has become one of his go-to responses whenever he’s pressed about the chaos his administration is unleashing on the nation and the world.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The pause on aid to Ukraine was apparently ordered last week by beleaguered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who reportedly neglected to tell the White House about the move, leading to internal scrambling. Trump was asked whether he approved the pause while sitting next to Hegseth during a Cabinet meeting. The president only offered that the U.S. needs to keep sending “defensive weapons” to Ukraine because “Putin is not treating human beings right.” When asked who ordered the pause, Trump said he didn’t know. “Why don’t you tell me?” he added.

This would be far more amusing if he got slimed every time he said that.

Also, what kind of strongman doesn't know what's going on in his loyal junta?

I think they misspelled "grift," but that's neither here nor there.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed what is likely the most regressive U.S. tax-and-spending bill in U.S. history, giving the top one percent of families more than $1 trillion in tax cuts while slashing Medicaid health coverage and food assistance for the poor. It is also one of the worst environmental bills in U.S. history.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provides billions of dollars in giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and its wealthiest executives while taking a machete to our national effort to confront the climate crisis and build healthier, more sustainable, and more just communities.

“The Big Ugly Bill is a direct attack on our communities and our climate,” says Irene Burga of GreenLatinos. “This bill puts profit over people, and it will worsen the heat, pollution, and injustice we are already fighting to survive.”

The new law compounds the already $17 billion in direct federal subsidies U.S. taxpayers pay to oil, gas, and coal companies every year. It cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for renewable energy, despite it being cheaper, healthier, more efficient, and more reliable than fossil fuels. As a result, the law threatens nearly a million U.S. jobs and will result in higher electricity and transportation costs for people living in every state in the continental U.S.

In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on non-government websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”

The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist.”

Identified from a database obtained by the Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.

Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised.

I'm reminded of a likely apocryphal tale of the copyeditor who dutifully changed Enola Gay to Enola Homosexual to conform to then-current AP Style.

But bluntly, I don't think near enough attention is being paid not only to [insert colour of your choice here]washing but also to the mounting attempts to literally erase history. If you're cheering for that, you're not a conservative, and you sure as fuck aren't a patriot.

You're a useful idiot. Have fun losing Medicaid.