Pushing the boundaries of AI and digital art at scale…

The biggest new attraction that just opened in Las Vegas is a $2.3 billion worlds’ biggest sphere. U-2 will inaugurate it with a concert.

The outside has 1.2 billion LED lights. This is an artist that lights it up with his constantly changing AI generated images.

Here is some background on this mega project…

How I try to stay informed…

Since the news business has changed from reporting to profits, keeping eyeballs is what it is all about. 

Fox found this out after they accurately reported that Trump was projected to lose Arizona. Tucker Carlson then ranted about how their viewership was going down, along with the stock price with which he was richly compensated. He understood that their viewers were  there to hear what they need to believe. And if they didn’t get it, they would move to Newsmax, Onan and other alternative news sources that would feed the beast.

Rush Limbaugh always understood that and bragged that he was an Entertainer. Are you entertained?

For any democracy to it operate efficiently, it needs an informed electorate. So how do you sort out the news from the fire hose of information flow these days?

1)Realize that your. 00001 experience of the world contributes to 80% of your worldview. Approach your understanding with a scientist skepticism that he’s always willing to accept that he could be wrong.

 2)Intentionally expose yourself to opposing views. We don’t like to do this because it makes us uncomfortable. Over the years I have developed a diversity of writers that I follow on the hellscape that is Twitter. Most of us don’t have a luxury of time to do that. It’s not easy being free, when you don’t have an emperor to make all the decisions for you.

3) Turn off the Crisis News networks . If there isn’t good video footage, or if the victim isn’t attractive, you won’t hear about it . Just like the print media, television is all about eyeballs. Now there are live news events that television coverage excels at. Television Studios nowadays don’t need to wait for their cameras to warm up to go live. Walter Cronkite had to wait to give the world the shocking news about Kennedy being shot in Dallas.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Credit CBS via Landov

4) Read some news sources from outside the United States bubble. Here are some free websites that also have free apps for your handhelds. 

A good one to see the southeast Asian perspective on the world is the Asia Times  https://asiatimes.com/

Also, try the Arab news source https://www.aljazeera.com/

France 24 for another perspective https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/

The Guardian is one of the few British rags that isn’t just a tabloid http://thrguardian.com/

If you can afford subscription the Financial Times, The Week, The Economist, Wall Street Journal and NY Times will cover a lot of area.

A great little tool that I use is an aggregator that ranks stories by their number of hits in real time. Bookmark this handy page

https://www.memeorandum.com

5) Last, but not least, Social Media is just that and not a source of verifiable information. Outrage and anger build engagement. Realize that you are being baited with these emotions to click on their stories.

Feeling Hot? Blame a Volcano

NPR chose today to follow-up on a story that literally blew up on Jan. 20, 2022 when the underwater eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai sent megatons of water vapor into the stratosphere, contributing to an increase in global warming over the next 5 years.

TONGA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY TEAM, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY 3.0)

NPR picked up on the story today https://whttp://NPR picked up on the story today https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming

EOS noted back in March that the extra moisture in the upper atmosphere would trap enough heat to warm the climate 1.5 degrees in the publication

And Space.com in Marchhttps://www.space.com/tonga-eruption-water-vapor-warm-earth

So while this vapor will eventually dissipate, we don’t know if it will leave any permanent changes to the chemical composition of the upper atmosphere. We do know that the excess warmth will speed up the melting in Greenland that threatens the stability of the gulf Stream and will also release more methane stored in the permafrost.

Actually It Was This Hot 175,000 Years Ago

Published: July 21, 2023 8.28am EDT in The Conversation

How I imagined life was like the last it was this warm, with the help of AI

Author Darrell Kaufman, Paleoclimate Scientist, receives funding from the US National Science Foundation.

As scorching heat grips large swaths of the Earth, a lot of people are trying to put the extreme temperatures into context and asking: When was it ever this hot before?

Globally, 2023 has seen some of the hottest days in modern measurements, but what about farther back, before weather stations and satellites?

Some news outlets have reported that daily temperatures hit a 100,000-year high.

As a paleoclimate scientist who studies temperatures of the past, I see where this claim comes from, but I cringe at the inexact headlines. While this claim may well be correct, there are no detailed temperature records extending back 100,000 years, so we don’t know for sure.

Here’s what we can confidently say about when Earth was last this hot.

This is a new climate state

Scientists concluded a few years ago that Earth had entered a new climate state not seen in more than 100,000 years. As fellow climate scientist Nick McKay and I recently discussed in a scientific journal article, that conclusion was part of a climate assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021.

Earth was already more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times, and the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were high enough to assure temperatures would stay elevated for a long time.

A time series chart shows a peak around 125,000 years ago and points to today's interglacial, showing temperatures close to the 1C warming level.
Earth’s average temperature has exceeded 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) above the preindustrial baseline. This new climate state will very likely persist for centuries as the warmest period in more than 100,000 years. The chart shows different reconstructions of temperature over time, with measured temperatures since 1850 and a projection to 2300 based on an intermediate emissions scenario. D.S. Kaufman and N.P. McKay, 2022, and published datasets, Author provided

Even under the most optimistic scenarios of the future – in which humans stop burning fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions – average global temperature will very likely remain at least 1 C above preindustrial temperatures, and possibly much higher, for multiple centuries.

This new climate state, characterized by a multi-century global warming level of 1 C and higher, can be reliably compared with temperature reconstructions from the very distant past. (To continue reading go to Page 2 below)

This would be the Story of the Century…

I was once fortunate enough, over dinner, to sit next to Dr. Pippa Milgram’s father, who had been an White House advisor to multiple Presidents. On that basis, I have been following his equally talented daughter. Her pedigree has given her access to many in-the-know. Just over a year ago, she drew my attention to the UAP (UFO) inquiries bubbling up; which have since burst into the public’s eye, during a bi-partisan House oversight Committee hearing this week. This is what she had to say on the subject on June 6th.

This is a roll out of information and disclosure. Word is that many other current and former US officials are lined up to roll out similar disclosures. The speed and depth will be influenced by the public reaction. If there’s only skepticism or ambivalence, it can easily proceed. If people have fear, things may slow. How will you, your family, your community, your country react?

Which way do you lean?

Awe and wonder or fear and ridicule? Leave a comment.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a column here on Anomalous Phenomena, a subject I had never expected to write about. But, many of my contacts from my days in the White House and the policy world kept nudging me to look into the dramatic policy changes that have been underway over the last few years. Sure enough, something remarkable has been happening. Congress has taken many steps to codify the new stance in law. This is pretty much the only subject where we find a truly bipartisan agreement. That alone makes this subject interesting. This new policy and legal environment is now yielding practical results.

To recap, under Senator Gillibrand’s leadership, Congress has now compelled the Pentagon, the Intelligence Agencies, and other parts of government to share what they have on anomalous phenomena with each other and ultimately with the public. The Director for National Intelligence, Avril Haines, has clearly agreed with Senator Gillibrand on the need to get the information out of secret programs and various government silos. The new legislation has specifically required the government to report on all anomalous phenomena that are not “man-made.” It has given whistleblower protection so senior officials can testify to Congress and even go public without risking jail for breaking their non-disclosure agreements. Investigative committees have now been established at The Pentagon, NASA, and among the intelligence agencies.

Last week, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the Head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said this at NASA’s first public UAP hearing: “We see these [‘metallic orbs’] all over the world, and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers.”  “Orbs” are everywhere. NASA showed the declassified image of an orb over Mosul in Iraq. Within a few days of this statement, The US formally asked its closest security allies, The Five Eyes, for assistance in tracking and understanding what these orbs are and with regard to all other anomalous phenomena. Note that military pilots say they see a square inside these orbs, rather like the Vitruvian Man is encased on a square in a circle.

Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man 1490

Yesterday, it was revealed that a very senior and highly regarded US military official named David Grusch recently invoked the new amnesty provisions of the law and testified directly to Congress. He announced that multiple US Government entities have been withholding the precise information that Congress now demands from them. More specifically, he said, these secret and concealed “legacy programs” within “multiple agencies” have been “nesting UAP activities in conventional secret access programs without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities.” The most challenging comment was this: “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.” Note that his lawyer is Charles McCullough III, the original former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community appointed by President Obama. Grusch worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office and on over 2000 secret UAP programs.

This aligns with what I have learned from speaking to officials involved with these programs for many decades. Over time we will hear that such “physical material” and “craft” have also been retrieved from space.  The Grusch story is the first of many planned disclosure interviews that have already been prepared. The US Government requested that certain former government officials prepare formal disclosure interviews at their request. So, this is not about people opposing the authorities. It is about former and current officials working with the authorities. The decision to go public has been made, and now there is no going back.

This begs the question, why now? My theories are (and these are just theories): click on the 2 below to get to the next page…

How Xi is Preparing China for War

Kyle Bass has been a long-time China hawk. in this lecture he reveals some very disturbing trends in China’s plans to recover Taiwan. It is going to be hard to deter this determined emperor. He has became a one-man-show, with no dissenting voices to council him. This is a very dangerous situation and one that I’m not sure diplomacy can resolve.

Just as our oil blockade forced Japan to desperately attach Pearl Harbor, we declared war on China with our October 17th microchip ban. I doubt the current American public’s willingness to run a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, like we did during the Russian blockade of Berlin during the Cold War.

Such an humiliating defeat would further embolden the Coalition of autocrats and become the beginning of the end of the dollar as the world’s Reserve currency and the substantial benefits that confers on us.

Zhou between Kissinger and Mao

When Premier Zhou Enlai was asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought of the French Revolution, he calmly replied “We’ll have to see”. Except for brief periods in history, autocracies (kings, emperors, dictators) have ruled our world. The Chinese take the Long View that this current aberration of History, with concern for freedom and human rights, will eventually revert to the mean again. And they will be here to push us back to those prevalent dark times.


Kyle’s presentation includes 3 sections:

1. Military force readiness & preparation

2. Changes to the legal system & infrastructure

3. Financial market movements & wartime planning

Here is his opening statement…

Take the time to watch the rest of this sobering assessment with the link below.

https://www.hudson.org/events/china-prepares-war-timeline-miles-yu-kyle-bass

Yosemite is Burning Again

While it hasn’t made the news, they are letting this fire go ahead and burn.

My grandson works at the Park and sent this picture this morning.

The Sacarmento bee reports

The Pika Fire, started by lightning on June 29, had burned 50 acres near North Dome as of Thursday, July 13, the National Park Service said. Yosemite National Park is warning of smoky conditions. Early Friday, July 14, the Air Quality Index at Yosemite Village exceeded 300, considered hazardous, because of high levels of particulate matter.

You won’t believe how bad the corruption is in the Russian military.

Things really started to go downhill, when they cut back the compulsory draft from 2 years to 1 year. This interview from a former officer is mind-boggling. Download this PDF file to read it.

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