Founders of a white-only community in Arkansas see they have a friend in the White House

Founders of a white-only community in Arkansas see they have a friend in the White House

The New York Times reports: In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch. Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives. The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but…

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The era of degenerative-AI

The era of degenerative-AI

Charlie Warzel writes: It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it…

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Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much

Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much

The Columbia River running through The Dalles, Oregon, supplies water to cool data centers. AP Photo/Andrew Selsky By Peyton McCauley, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Melissa Scanlan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also…

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Why Munich 1938 concessions to Nazi Germany haunt talks on Ukraine

Why Munich 1938 concessions to Nazi Germany haunt talks on Ukraine

Politico reports: Handing over massive fortification lines to an expansionist neighbor hellbent on destroying your state tends to be a bad idea. In 1938, ceding the Sudetenland and its dense network of forts, forests and trenches led to the rapid collapse of Czechoslovakia’s ability to defend itself against Nazi Germany. There are fears in Europe that Kyiv’s ability to resist Russia will be similarly devastated if Donald Trump — swayed by Russian President Vladimir Putin — presses Ukraine to hand…

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Pam Bondi has turned the DOJ into a branch of the White House

Pam Bondi has turned the DOJ into a branch of the White House

Ruth Marcus writes: Other Attorneys General have shared close—to some, disconcertingly close—relationships with the Presidents who appointed them. Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s modestly qualified A.G. and consigliere at the age of thirty-five. Eric Holder once described himself as Barack Obama’s “wingman” and the President as “my boy.” But, even on a team of Trump sycophants, Bondi stands out for her fawning devotion. At an early Cabinet Room praise session, Bondi turned to Trump and said, “President, your first…

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Roger Alford: What I saw inside Pam Bondi’s DOJ

Roger Alford: What I saw inside Pam Bondi’s DOJ

Roger P. Alford served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice in the first Trump administration, and as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the division in the second term. He writes: The Republican Party today is a battleground. The confrontation isn’t between traditional conservatives and Trump supporters. Rather, it pits genuine MAGA reformers against MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists. It’s a fight over whether Americans will have equal justice under law, or whether the…

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Republican bid to help Trump move past Epstein falls flat

Republican bid to help Trump move past Epstein falls flat

The New York Times reports: When House Republican leaders rushed to leave Washington for a long August break, they seemed desperate to quell the anger among their supporters about the Trump administration’s backtracking on a promise to release files related to its investigation of the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But halfway through a five-week congressional recess, the clamor shows little sign of quieting. While Republicans had hoped that legal rulings might insulate them from having to confront the issue,…

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The lies behind Trump’s D.C. troop surge

The lies behind Trump’s D.C. troop surge

Robert J. Shapiro writes: Last week, Donald Trump claimed the authority to deploy the country’s military to the streets of Washington, D.C. to help fight crime. Yet, hard data show it’s not about crime in the nation’s capital. Instead, the evidence points to other, more troubling reasons and aspirations, especially the president’s personal sense of entitlement to power, MAGA’s approach to partisan politics, and an implied threat to public opposition to his exercise of power in the future. Trump is…

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An account using the same name as Trump’s BLS pick posted red-pilled conspiracy theories

An account using the same name as Trump’s BLS pick posted red-pilled conspiracy theories

Wired reports: In the months leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot, a now deleted Twitter account bearing the full name of E. J. Antoni, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), betrayed a seeming obsession with promoting election denial conspiracy theories while talking about violent threats to those who stood in Trump’s way. The account, which used “Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III” as its screen name for a time, was linked by the…

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Earth’s continents are drying out at an unprecedented rate, new study warns

Earth’s continents are drying out at an unprecedented rate, new study warns

Science Alert reports: All over the world, fresh water is disappearing, and a new analysis reveals that much of it is entering the ocean, with drying continents now contributing more to the alarming rise in global sea levels than melting ice sheets. The research team, led by Earth system scientist Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar from FLAME University in India, says that urgent action is required to prepare for much drier times ahead, thanks to climate change and human groundwater depletion. Using more…

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Join ICE, get a $50,000 signing bonus, and ‘deport illegals with your absolute boys’

Join ICE, get a $50,000 signing bonus, and ‘deport illegals with your absolute boys’

The Wall Street Journal reports: Uncle Sam. Miami Vice. When it comes to recruiting new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the Trump administration is getting creative. A social-media campaign launched late last month touted immigration enforcement as an opportunity for father-son bonding and to “deport illegals with your absolute boys,” a slang term for close friends. The WSJ probably isn’t the most reliable source when it comes to definitions of slang terms. The Urban Dictionary, on the other hand, offers…

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Trump poses a threat to the U.S. military

Trump poses a threat to the U.S. military

David French writes: One of my life’s greatest regrets is that I didn’t join the Army sooner. I was commissioned at age 37, late for the military, and I didn’t exactly impress my officer basic course instructors with my physical prowess. But I made it through, and I spent eight years in the reserves, with active-duty deployments to Iraq and South Korea. I love this country, I believed in our missions, and I felt great purpose playing my very small…

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Trump wants troops on the streets of DC — crime is a flimsy pretext

Trump wants troops on the streets of DC — crime is a flimsy pretext

Philip Bump writes: Governors of three states — Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia — are sending members of their state National Guards to D.C. to … well, theoretically to combat crime but, if the past week is any indicator, mostly to stand near tourist sites and wear uniforms. This isn’t because there’s no crime in D.C. to combat (of course there is, as the right-wing media insists one acknowledge) but because the mission as established by President Trump isn’t…

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Trump’s military occupation of D.C. is hurting local businesses too

Trump’s military occupation of D.C. is hurting local businesses too

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital and forcing a federal law enforcement takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department is not only terrorizing residents and workers, it’s also harming local businesses. Washington, D.C., restaurants are experiencing significant drops in reservations, and bars are seeing fewer customers. Online reservations for D.C. restaurants plunged more than 25 percent in the days immediately after Trump announced the takeover of D.C. police for the first time in…

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