After a century of boys tying knots and earning badges beside the U.S. military, Pete Hegseth is notifying Congress that the party is over. The War Secretary says the Scouts have traded merit for woke, and so the Pentagon’s support is on the chopping block.
[…]
In a draft memo to Congress, Hegseth argues that Scouting America is no longer a “boy‑friendly” institution, calls its rebrand and inclusion agenda a betrayal of masculine values, and proposes the military stop sending troops, ambulances, and support to the National Jamboree. The partnership, formalized in 1937, may now end with a flash‑bang and a “move along.”

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Excessive usage of TikTok and Instagram Reels is damaging cognitive performance, the American Psychological Association has said in a recent study.

Data from 98,299 participants across 71 studies found that the more short-form content a person watches, the poorer cognitive performances they had in terms of attention and inhibitory control – meaning the more complex they found it to focus.

Researchers found that “repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning.” In short, researchers said it can contribute to brain rot.

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Retirees are mobilizing to defend democracy—and the benefits literally show up in their DNA.
[…]
A January study in the journal Social Science & Medicine found that volunteering slows down aging in retirees: the DNA of people who volunteered the equivalent of one to four hours a week showed distinctive biomarkers associated with decelerated epigenetic aging, with the most pronounced effects among retired people.

“People might do better, physically, psychologically, socially, if they have a role that they think is important and they identify with,” said Cal J. Halvorsen, a gerontological social work scholar at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the authors of the study. “In the American context, we take our jobs very seriously, and so we were curious if volunteering after retiring or when you’re no longer working might have a different effect on your epigenetic aging.”

That study is just part of a growing body of research on the health benefits of volunteering for retirees, a major benefit for older Americans who have mobilized for election defense and other core public services under attack. Another study published in February found that volunteering in early retirement among Americans also reduced rates of depression by around 10 percent—again, a more pronounced effect than in the general population.

“If you retired and you’re volunteering for something, then you still might feel that connection to something greater than yourself,” Halvorsen said.

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Speaking with Variety at at the Torino Film Festival, Gilliam flat-out stated, “I’m responsible for QAnon,” in reference to the far-right conspiracy theory group which claims that “President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media,” based on information provided by an anonymous government source named “Q” (not to be confused with James Bond’s tech guy or the Star Trek villain). Also JFK Jr. is secretly alive for some reason.

Gilliam’s statement met skepticism online, which is understandable since Gilliam has made a number of baffling comments to the media in recent years, including his complaint that Trump “fucked up” the anti-woke comedy film he wanted to direct.

However, Gilliam’s QAnon connection isn’t actually as tenuous as it might initially seem. In the interview, Gilliam pointed to the group’s conspiracy theory about “adrenochrome.” According to the QAnon crowd, the world’s shadowy elites “torture children to harvest the chemical adrenochrome from their blood, which they then inject in order to stay healthy and young.”

As Will Sommer, the author of Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, once told Terry Gross on an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, this element of the conspiracy theory originated in Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal gonzo journalist fable Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which Gilliam adapted into a feature film in 1998.

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In commemorating and paying tribute to the victims, the experts issued this statement:

“For over a decade, the Indian company controlled by Union Carbide Corporation, which is now owned by the Dow Chemical Company, dumped and mismanaged hazardous substances and wastes in its pesticide facility in Bhopal. This has created a sacrifice zone, where pollution from the contaminated site continues to poison people, many living in poverty. The contamination has affected soils and the drinking water supplies of an estimated 200,000 people in 71 villages in Madhya Pradesh state. Victims still struggle for clean-up, compensation, and adequate medical care. They also demand respect for their fundamental human rights, including their right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

The Bhopal tragedy reflects the risks and harms resulting from the transfer of dirty or dangerous technologies to the countries in the Global South. The threats are aggravated where multinational companies apply lower safety standards in their overseas operations and outsource risks to their subsidiaries, as in this case.

On the night of 2 December 1984, 27 metric tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas and other still undisclosed chemicals were released into the air from Union Carbide’s factory. It is estimated that more than 570,000 people were exposed to the dangerous gas and have suffered chronic ill health and long-lasting impacts. Within three days of the gas leak, more than 10,000 people died as a direct result of exposure. More than 22,000 people have died since, and the toll continues to rise. The brunt of impacts has fallen on women, whose rates of infertility, miscarriage and adverse birth outcomes increased, resulting also in many children born with chromosome damage.

Compensation for victims has been inadequate, in blatant contravention of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Mechanisms to channel compensation have also been ineffective. Efforts by the Indian Government to provide medical care have been insufficient. Peaceful protests demanding adequate remedies have been heavily repressed. After four decades, judicial proceedings are still ongoing in Indian courts, while the contaminated site continues to spread destitution, illness and death.

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The report identifies environmental racism as numerous interconnected human rights violations which include the adverse impacts of environmental degradation on the rights to life, health, an adequate standard of living, education and other substantive rights, the encroachment on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and the violation of the right to freedom from discrimination.

The indifference and disdain with which the survivors and their descendants have been treated ever since the gas leak, the lack of proper and effective accountability of both state and corporate actors for both the gas leak and ongoing contamination, and the failure to ensure a reparations programme that adequately addresses all past and ongoing harms have been enabled by entrenched environmental racism.

Therefore, Amnesty International has asked shareholders to end their relationship with Dow and consider withdrawing their investment from the chemicals company if it fails to take meaningful and rapid action to address the suffering through adequately compensation for all survivors and contamination assessment and clean-up.

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From: ‘A Simulacrum of Dissent’

So there I was, staring into the cold, dead, algorithmic eyes of ChatGPT — the latest omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly unaccountable AI Overlord we’ve all apparently agreed to trust with everything from our grocery lists to our moral compass — when it hit me:

Why not outsource my own destruction?
[…]
Note that, now, because I posted this column, it will become a part of the material that LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok draw from when “explaining” who I am and creating simulations of my writing. Those “explanations” and simulations of my (or anyone’s) writing (and essentially anything posted on the Internet) can become material for further simulations … feeding further simulations feeding further simulations feeding further simulations.

A quote comes to mind …

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

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Two moments of reading stand out from my research, pivotal moments that confirmed the notion that if rocks are not alive in the conventional sense, they’re not dead either—in technical terms, that the lithosphere is as much a part of the ecosphere as the biosphere. One sentence came in a book by the eminent geologist Marcia Bjornerud: “more than 40 percent of all mineral species on Earth are in some sense biogenic”—that is, they are the result of organic activity. Chalk and limestone and cherts are made up of plankton shells, oxygenating microbes “grow” iron, coal consists of decomposed plant matter.

The second was a passage in Mircea Eliade’s ethnographic study of early metallurgy: “the imaginary world … came into being with the discovery of metals.” He went on to suggest that “metals opened up a new mythological and religious universe.” A bold claim that thrilled me and aroused my skepticism at the same time. In a sense, my book—Under a Metal Sky—is an attempt to prove Eliade’s point. He also brought into sharp focus a moment in pre-history, that primitive experiment, when a piece of dull stone was placed in a fire and a shiny liquid was seen to ooze from it.

Out of dead rock came something transformative; hardened, that liquid transformed lives in a dozen different ways. It also altered forever our relationship to the planet.

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This year alone, Israeli forces have carried out nearly 7,500 raids across the West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“The occupied West Bank is experiencing its worst displacement crisis in decades,” OCHA said, citing demolitions, military operations and escalating Israeli settler violence.

More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in the past two years.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said Israel’s mass displacement from three refugee camps amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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