Author: nick

Lesser Long-nosed bat at a shaving brush tree flower. Photo: Xochitl Castaño. CC BY 4.0. Bats move through desert night skies with a purpose that is easy to overlook and difficult to replace. As they travel from plant to plant, feeding on nectar, they are also performing one of the most important ecological services in arid landscapes: pollination. For agave plants—long-lived, slow-growing succulents that define much of Mexico’s desert ecology—bats are not just occasional visitors. They are essential partners in reproduction. This relationship is a classic example of mutualism, in which two species depend on each other for survival. Nectar-feeding…

Photo by Luis Villasmil The May Jobs report was stronger than most people, including me, had expected. The 172,000 jobs created is not exactly earth-shattering, but in a context where immigration has been largely shut off and the labor force is barely growing, it is a lot. Plus, the two prior months’ data was revised up, so the average over the last three months is 188,000. That looks pretty good, but the separate household survey looks less good. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, which by historical standards is low, but it’s almost a full percentage point higher than…

Denver Golmon, a police officer in Hammond, Louisiana, is facing federal charges for allegedly exposing the identity of a confidential informant in a cockfighting investigation. Golmon’s uncle was indicted as part of the investigation, which was conducted by the Department of Homeland Security. According to court records, Golmon shared videos of the informant that were provided to his uncle’s attorneys during discovery, telling the recipients not to share where they’d gotten them. He also asked another officer to arrest the informant at his workplace and to conceal his own involvement. Authorities say the informant has since been labeled a “rat” and…

The Old Right journalist Garet Garrett, writing in 1952, understood that empires do not arrive with heralds. They come instead through “quiet aggrandizements of power,” accretions so gradual and so dressed in the language of necessity that the citizen scarcely notices the republic he was born into has become something else. The first requisite of empire, Garrett wrote, is that “the executive power of government shall be dominant.” He was tracing the long constitutional erosion by which the war-making prerogative—the power the Framers most deliberately withheld from any single man—migrated to the presidency, where it has resided ever since, exercised…

Astronaut Dave Bowman shuts down or “kills” rogue AI/supercomputer Hal 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history. — the NY Times, May 26, 2026 One could not invent a more diabolical conspiracy for mass mind control than the one playing out openly, daily, everywhere there is a personal computer or screen-phone and a signal connecting users to the digital matrix. The conspiracy is all-encompassing, world-girdling. It is where this machine envelops the human brain, in the moment of contact between the ape and the screen, that interests…

Photo: Kent Paterson. If there is any place on the map that captures the depth of the global revolt over AI data centers, it might well be little Socorro County, New Mexico. Located astride the Rio Grande and almost smack dab in the center of New Mexico, at first glance, rural Socorro County seems an unlikely center for the rebellion. But at a May town hall, matters of environment and climate change, gaping economic inequality and creeping oligarchy, local land use, legacies of the nuclear weapons age and space exploration, democratic governance and transparency, and then some all boiled over…

Image by Element5 Digital. Woody Guthrie proudly sang “This land is your land, this land is my land / From California to the New York island,” but, in fact, the conversion of vast public resources and wealth to private property is one of the defining dynamics of American history. The political economist Thorstein Veblen called this process “The American Plan:” the conversion of public resources into private hands as fast as possible. It started with the “legal seizure” of native lands and resources. Then in the last century the federal government began giving away our information highways. New technology, same…

On June 3, as messages continued to pass between Iranian and American negotiators, the U.S. endangered diplomacy with renewed aggression against Iran. Enforcing the blockade on Iranian ports, U.S. forces fired a Hellfire missile into the engine room of a Botswana-flagged oil tanker. Moments earlier, per CENTCOM, they had “conducted self-defense strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island” in the Strait of Hormuz. These were the third round of U.S. strikes on Iran in the past week. The Iranian reply to the attacks included the firing of 13 ballistic missiles and 17 drones at Kuwait. Some…

Google held at least 34 meetings with top German government officials – including the Chancellor – to discuss suppressing Source link

Actor-comedian John C. Reilly is a familiar face to most people, having acted in both dramatic movies like Chicago as well as in comedy romps such as Stepbrothers and Talledega Nights. And it turns out that Reilly has an interesting tale to tell related to the question of whether there is an afterlife. Reilly was recently interviewed on NPR’s ‘Wild Card’, where the questions are randomly chosen from a special deck of cards. When Reilly chose the middle card of three pulled by host Rachel Martin, the question on that card was “Do you think there’s any part of us…