California surgical center staff demand to see warrant as ICE agents detain landscaper (APNews). Ontario [California] Advanced Surgery Center staff in blue scrubs are heard telling an armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent wearing a mask and bulletproof vest to let go of the man, who is crying and gasping for breath. "Get your hands off of him. You don't even have a warrant," says one staff member, shielding the man from an immigration agent. "Let him go. You need to get out."

The department [DHS] said the surgery center staff "assaulted law enforcement" and attempted to obstruct the arrest.

BABYMETAL - Kon! Kon! feat. Bloodywood.

How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power

Paddle pups working to save one of Australia's most iconic creatures. Victorian scientists enlist sniffer dogs on paddleboards to locate platypus in the wild and increase knowledge of the iconic species without damaging their habitat.

Savage's essay has attracted both derision and amens in newspapers and journals, on social media and Substacks, over drinks and in group chats. "I think the nerve I hit is fairly obvious," Savage said in an interview, adding, "being able to put numbers behind it was cathartic to some people and triggering to others." Humming underneath the disputation is a less tangible but more significant question. Let us say the perspective of the straight white man is being dampened in the world of literary fiction. Should we care? from The Death and Life of the Straight White Man's Novel [NY Times; ungated]

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. A randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Pop Music Contrapositives

"Each facility is likely to consume the same amount of electrical power as tens of thousands of residential homes, potentially driving up costs for residents and straining the area's power infrastructure beyond its capacity. Parmelee and others in the community are wary of the data centres' appetite for electricity — particularly because Virginia is already known as the data-centre capital of the world. A state-commissioned review, published in December 2024, noted that although data centres bring economic benefits, their growth could double electricity demand in Virginia within ten years."

The IEA's special report Energy and AI, out today, offers the most comprehensive, data-driven global analysis to date on the growing connections between energy and AI. The report draws on new datasets and extensive consultation with policy makers, the tech sector, the energy industry and international experts. It projects that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.

EmanRTM asks the British public some general knowledge questions: What is the past tense for 'choose'?, What is the length of a 40 ft container?, What is your older brothers father to you?

50 years and 29 days ago, The Movie 'Nashville' had its 50th. anniversary. .
"when you pay more for an automobile then it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to america, that's politics."
Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton. (slyt)

Die Spitz - "Throw Yourself to the Sword". From their upcoming debut, Something to Consume . "Despite living in a state of mundanity or hopelessness, you can still rise up and fight the unknown, as long as you're willing to throw yourself to it."

The Leonard Cohen Files is a website previously mentioned on Metafilter as a response on the green in 2010, at which point it was already fifteen years old. Happily it still exists and is still under active development.

I found it because I was trying to figure out how I felt about the lyrics to Jazz Police and found this fantastic essay. I'm so glad sites like this are still around and bravely still using the frame tag, which I honestly thought might have been removed from HTML because it's been years since I've seen a website render in browser with frames. Please enjoy this excellent Leonard Cohen website as it approaches its 30th birthday (!!!) in September.

We'll debunk the myth created by Hollywood that a firearm can be completely silenced, reduced only to a "pew". I'll pull together some examples of silenced firearms and show what silencers/suppressors can and can't do, and compare the noises you'd get to some other types of sound. Then I'll go into the components which make up firearm noise: mechanical, sonic boom, and muzzle blast. Then I'll discuss the advantages that silencers bring, even though they're not as impressive as they seem in the movies. Finally, I'll sum up by discussing the limitations of silencers and why they are not universal. from Silencers: not very silent [Military Realism]

Once-in-a-lifetime finding of incredibly rare humbug pygmy shrew photographed in Cornwall. An extremely rare pygmy shrew with an albino mutation was found by Anita McMillan near St Austell, Cornwall, while out for a walk.

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment: In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world's energy system. [The New Yorker] (archive)

FPP'd from a comment by mazola.

"The passage of Trump's signature legislation earlier this month proved there are still plenty of Big Beautiful Billable Hours for K Streeters, but the ground game is changing fast. 'Lobbying used to be Congress-focused, but they're not driving the show anymore,' said one Republican lobbyist. 'They are all now taking orders from the administration.' ... To have juice in this town these days means having access to the president and his allies, and the old bulls of lobbying no longer have as much of it."

"Spot-fixing" is the practice of manipulating small, discrete events that have little to no bearing on the outcome of a game—the timing of a yellow card in soccer, a wide ball in cricket, a single double-fault in tennis. Or, in the case of Ortiz, the result of one of the roughly 300 pitches thrown in the average baseball game. What makes spot-fixing so insidious is how inconsequential the occurrences appear in real time. from The Scourge of 'Spot-Fixing' Is Coming for American Sports [WSJ; ungated]

Related: The psychology of spot fixing – why athletes might gamble their careers [The Conversation]

Post mushroom trial, experts suggest changes to location sharing on iNaturalist. Experts are weighing up whether to continue posting the locations of poisonous mushrooms on public databases like iNaturalist in the wake of the Erin Patterson trial. On the one hand, posting the locations of poisonous mushrooms on on public databases like iNaturalist reduces the chance of accidental poisonings of mushroom foragers. On the other hand, posting the locations of poisonous mushrooms on on public databases like iNaturalist increases the risk of deliberate poisonings that are murder or suicide.

'Incredible video' captured during Alberta storm could be rare ball lightning event

Reload to generate a new desperate headline.

This beautiful performance takes place at the end of a hospital bed. A South Australian theatre group has devised a new show, The Lensical, that provides young long-term patients with a thrilling bedside spectacle.

This is our way to fight back against the forces of evil—the forces that are pushing back against LGBT equality, all of these horrible anti-trans laws, the banning of trans kids from sports and all of that stuff. For us as artists and writers, this is our only weapon. from "Wow, This Is So Gay": An Oral History of But I'm a Cheerleader [Vanity Fair; ungated]

"Grok, a chatbot created by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, shared several outlandish antisemitic comments on X on Tuesday, prompting an outcry from some social media users. In its dedicated account on X, which Mr. Musk owns, the chatbot praised Hitler, suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate and said a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be 'effective.' X deleted some of the posts on Tuesday evening."(NYT gift link)

Wikipedia:

In February 2025, it was found that Grok 3's system prompt contained an instruction to "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation." Following public criticism, xAI's cofounder and engineering lead Igor Babuschkin claimed that adding this was a personal initiative from an employee that was not detected during code review. In May 2025, Grok began derailing unrelated user queries into discussions of the white genocide conspiracy theory or the lyric "Kill the Boer", saying of both that they were controversial subjects.[95][96][97][98] In one response to an unrelated question about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Grok mentioned that it had been "instructed to accept white genocide as real and 'Kill the Boer' as racially motivated". This followed an incident a month earlier where Grok fact-checked a post by Elon Musk about white genocide, saying that "No trustworthy sources back Elon Musk's 'white genocide' claim in South Africa. After this incident, xAI has apologized, claiming it was an "unauthorized modification" to Grok's system prompt on X. Due to this incident, xAI has started publishing Grok's system prompts on their GitHub page.

In the past day, both the Iowa State Fair and the Minnesota State Fair have released their new foods lists. Minnesota's has photos of all the new ones in addition to descriptions. The Des Moines Register has coverage of Iowa's, including past winners of the best new food.

Soundtrack

The New Yorker's Daniel Alarcón on the history of a classic Argentinian comic strip, which ran there from 1964 to 1973, and which is finally getting an English translation. The strip by cartoonist Quino, ran throughout Argentina's junta years, when such leftist protest and satire could easily lead to prison or worse. Asked what the strip's fearless six-year-old protagonist would be doing in adulthood, Quinto replied: "Mafalda never would have reached adulthood. She would be among Argentina's thirty thousand disappeared."

I'd never heard of this strip before, but the article was interesting enough to make me order the first translated volume. Seems there's a NetFlix adaptation coming too.

If you are thinking about moving abroad, the question isn't really "where would you like to go?" but "which countries might allow you to immigrate". If you are an EU citizen, you probably already know that you can move to any of the other countries, similarly if you are an Australian or NZ citizen you can move to the other country under the Trans-Tasman agreement, and if you are a British or Irish citizen you can swap countries through the Common Travel Area. But what are some of the other options?

Irish citizenship – can live and work in the European Union, Switzerland and in the UK If you have a parent or grandparent who was born on the island of Ireland before 2005, you may be able to gain Irish citizenship. If your claim is through a parent, then you are a citizen and can apply for a passport. If your claim is through a grandparent, you need to apply to the registry of foreign births to get Irish citizenship first. The registry of foreign births is currently taking around 9 months to process applications but is otherwise relatively straightforward.

• Irish citizenship

Italian, Spanish or Portuguese citizenship – can live and work in the European Union and Switzerland If you have a parent or grandparent who was an Italian, Spanish or Portuguese citizen, you may be able to gain Italian, Spanish or Portuguese citizenship respectively. This can be a reasonably time-consuming route in relation to the supporting documents and may benefit legal assistance. Italian law changed earlier this year; it used to be much more generous in relation to how far back your Italian ancestor could be. Spanish law is changing later this year.

• Reddit Italian citizenship
• Spain Ley de Memoria Democrática (in Spanish)
• Obtaining Portuguese nationality

German citizenship – can live and work in the European Union and Switzerland If you are the descendant of a person who lost their German citizenship due to Nazi persecution, you may be able to (re-)naturalise as a German citizen. You will need to gather documents to prove that the 'reference person' was a German citizen, that they lost their citizenship in one of four ways between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945, and that you are their descendent. Finding out what happened to your relatives in the Holocaust can be more traumatic than people expect, and not everyone who begins the process chooses to gain German citizenship.

• Naturalization of victims of Nazi persecution

Digital nomad visa – live and work in the country that issued the visa Estonia, Portugal, Thailand, ,... If you are a remote worker, you may be able to get a digital nomad visa for an increasing list of countries. This will allow you to live for an extended period of time while earning an income from remote work carried out for a foreign company. Details vary between countries.

• Estonia digital nomad
• Portugal digital nomad visa guide
• Destination Thailand visa
• List of countries potentially offering digital nomad visas

Skilled immigration visa – can live and work in the country that issued the visa Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, UK,... People with the right skills and experience may be able to apply for a visa that allows them to live in the issuing country without having a job offer. The length of the visa varies significantly depending on the country – Germany offers a 6-month job seeker visa, while Canada offers some immigrants immediate permanent residency. These countries typically have a route to citizenship although this may take up to 10 years.

• Australian skilled immigration
• Austria very highly qualified workers
• Canada skilled immigration
• German job seeker visa
• Ireland critical skills employment
• New Zealand skilled residence pathways
• Norway job seeker visa explained
• UK skilled worker

NAFTA/CUSMA visa – can live and work in the USA, Canada or Mexico If you are a Canadian, Mexican or US citizen whose occupation is on the relevant list, you can apply for a visa allowing you to live and work in one of the other two countries for three years. In theory this is renewable indefinitely, although it is at the discretion of the authorities. There is a similar provision

• Canada T23 visa
• USA TN visas

UK ancestry visa – live and work in the UK, with a route to citizenship If you have Commonwealth citizenship, and one of your grandparents was born in the UK, you may be able to apply for a UK ancestry visa. This gives you the right to live and work in the UK for 5 years and can be renewed indefinitely. After 5 years of continuous residence in the UK, you can apply for British citizenship which also allows you to live and work in Ireland.

• UK ancestry visa

Student visa – study in the country that issued the visa with a route to a work permit Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, many European countries Study for a degree in a foreign country and they may allow you to stay once you have graduated to look for work. There is usually a time limit on how long you can stay before you need to switch to a different type of visa. The time limit is typically somewhere between 6 months and 2 years. Will need to demonstrate proficiency in the language of the relevant country. Work visa with a job offer – work in a specific job in the country that issued the visa More or less everywhere In most countries it is possible to get a work visa if you have a job offer. Often, your prospective employer must be able to show that there was no one suitably qualified for the job in the country. Working holidaymaker visas – live and work temporarily in the country that issued the visa Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan,... If you are young (under 30 or possibly 35) you may be able to apply for a working holidaymaker visa. The most popular destination might be Australia where citizens from a long list of eligible countries are able to get a 1- or 2-year visa. Depending on the specifics of the programme, there may or may not be an opportunity to transition to a longer-term visa. Probably best thought of as a temporary option.

Twitter link DHS quoting bible with a recruitment ad for (from the tone graphics etc.) what looks like internal war. Some discussion on theologian Christin du Mez's substack Taking the Lord's name in vain It's not just a theological problem.

Secular Americans urgently need to act, no sense planning for a future national strike - strike asap before their next act. No apologies for twit and stack links; Homeland has not published this elsewhere to my knowledge, and most of the writers against this evil are writing on stack. National Catholic Reporter's view on NCR. Nothing on any other media. Whither church and state separation ... whither the Union.

In that bygone world, the postman was of paramount importance. Fat envelopes were fatal, thin ones ecstatic. Plath and Hughes stared through the blinds and accosted him when he came. Had they won an oatmeal-naming contest? Had a poem been taken? I caught the very tail end of this life. It was important – we can no longer imagine it – to believe in this way. In a dream she recounts in the journals, Plath describes her brother, Warren, 'discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review'. You may believe these institutions create your ambition; they do not. It is inherent, or inborn, or created in you by adversities, luck, love or the lack of it. The real document is already written: her diaries, a biography of aim. from Arrayed in Shining Scales by Patricia Lockwood [LRB; ungated]

Barn owls a hit in farm anti-poisons pilot project. With the imminent release of a review into the risks of rodent bait in Australia, an award-winning initiative uses barn owls as a natural alternative to controlling rats and mice on farms.

Another addictive web game from vole.wtf: Primesweeper. It's Minesweeper, but every space is also marked with a 3-digit number. The numbers that are prime mark the locations of the mines. You still get the normal numbered hints, but you don't get to mark spaces where you believe mines to be. Win by revealing every non-mine square. (via projects)

vole.wtf (from MeFi's own malevolent) previously:

• Styscraper, a physics game
• 17-Century Death Roulette, find out how you'd die in the 1600s
• British Seaside Simulator, vacation recreation
• Clone-a-Lisa, paint the Mona Lisa as well as you can in one minute
• Big Ben, a word game
• Kilogram, compress images down to 1K to see how ugly they get
• Crisp Sandwich Day, an annual celebration of sandwiches with potato chips
• Voleflix, a collection of public domain movies
• Kilobyte's Gambit, a chess opponent implemented in 1K of Javascript
• Happy Birthday to You, free versions of the song "Happy Birthday" in a variety of styles
• Avocado 'n' Toast, bot-generated webcomic about millennials
• High Notes, sing (you! out loud!) and have your browser judge how high your note was
• Perfect Circle, draw the best circle you can
• ButtyStock, free pictures for everyone, so long as they're of sandwiches

The Projects page for vole.wtf

A fascinating trip down UI memory lane, with a look at the Macintosh's control panel's evolution over the years (including embedded emulators to play with!)

On 4th and Broadway: Remembering Tower Records

Gobsmacked provides a high-level snapshot of your recipe, highlighting the essential ingredients and core actions to help you quickly grasp what's involved. Key times are included to help you plan your cooking schedule, so you can manage prep and cooking phases efficiently without feeling rushed. Ingredients and main steps are visually grouped to reveal how the dish progresses from start to finish, giving you a clear sense of the overall cooking sequence.

Planetscale explores caching in a highly graphical, animated and interactive way. I've been working on a hydrological problem involving relocating a river and Planetscale's animated interface helped me understand some fundamentals about short-term detention and release of water flow that I hadn't realised before. I suspect there is a lot of heuristic depth for other disciplines to learn from their approach. Planetscale self deprecatingly describe their approach as just scratching the surface.

"It all amounts to a kind of traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old. ... The whole premise of internet publishing — that you could reach audiences far and wide — is starting to crumble, forcing publishers to reevaluate what kind of stories they produce and what kind of readers they want — and, ultimately, to think smaller and more bespoke."

Not everyone is so excited. "I've never seen so much disarray in a strategic capacity in terms of where we're all pointing the boat. No one is in alignment," said one top magazine editor. "Right now you're seeing literally every strategy going to market." If there is consensus, it's around having a diversified strategy that avoids being reliant on any third-party platform to reach an audience. But "that's hard to do if you're a startup brand and don't have 20 years of consumer memory of who you are," said Keith Bonnici, who became COO of The Daily Beast last fall. It's even a challenge for the legacy organizations with the most recognizable brands. "Frankly, some of the stuff that we're doing right now — and we have been doing over the last year or so — around establishing a direct relationship, about building in tools that help our journalism reach more people without relying on platforms — we should have been doing years ago," said a senior New York Times editor. "But it was sort of like we weren't forced to really contend with it."

Then the Killings Started. At first, Ziz LaSota seemed much like any other philosophically inclined young tech aspirant. Now, she and her followers are in jail, six people are dead, and Rationalists are examining whether their ideas played a role.

Previously

This London Museum Lets You Order Objects From Its Vast Collections—and Maybe Even Touch Them. At the new V&A East Storehouse, visitors can get up close and personal with 250,000 historic and culturally significant items spanning 5,000 years of human creativity.

Live Aid at 40: When Rock 'n' Roll Took on the World A three part documentary looking back at the Live Aid, 40 (!?) years on.

History has been... somewhat mixed in its assessment of Live Aid but, as a useful Guardian review notes "there's no debating what an extraordinary phenomenon it was." "Episode one... is all about the smaller but still massive cultural moment that resulted from Geldof's initial impulse to raise funds for Ethiopia: Do They Know It's Christmas?, a single by the hastily assembled supergroup Band Aid." Subsequent episodes deal, somewhat more critically, with the accusation that Geldof became a "white saviour" figure, with the practical measures involved in actually allocating the money raised and with the self-interest of at least some of the participants.

In this sense, the post-1990 monetary-policy regime contributed to global stability by ensuring that central banks remained focused on putting their own house in order. But can the cooperative model of global monetary policy survive in an age of geopolitical fragmentation? Will central banks remain independent and maintain their commitment to price stability above all? The answers will depend on the frameworks adopted to govern the interplay between fiscal and monetary policy in an increasingly conflictual world. from The Twilight of Bretton Woods by Giancarlo Corsetti [Project Syndicate; ungated]

Lots of people on the left dismiss these women as fake feminists. Can they really be feminists in any meaningful sense if they organize against trans women? Can't feminism just drum them out of its ranks? I'd like to suggest that there are strands of thought that are both authentically feminist and irredeemable — even fascist. An article-length intro to the argument fleshed out in her latest book, Enemy Feminisms TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, Sophie Lewis, for Lux, makes the case that we must reckon with the reactionary and fascist threads that run through the history and present of feminist thought.

The Trump administration ended deportation protections for about 76,000 migrants from Honduras and Nicaragua who have lived and worked legally in the U.S. for over 25 years. The decision terminates Temporary Protected Status, first granted after Hurricane Mitch in 1999, and will take effect 60 days after the notices are officially published.

The Trump administration has already terminated TPS for about 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, more than 160,000 Ukrainians, and thousands of people from Afghanistan, Nepal and Cameroon. Some of them, like Venezuelans, Haitians and Ukrainians, have pending lawsuits at federal courts. Another 250,000 Venezuelans are still protected under TPS until September, as well as thousands of Syrians. TPS for Ethiopians expires in December, for Yemenis and Somalians in March 2026, and for Salvadoreans in September 2026.

Deafness reversed: Single injection brings hearing back within weeks. A cutting-edge gene therapy has significantly restored hearing in children and adults with congenital deafness, showing dramatic results just one month after a single injection. Researchers used a virus to deliver a healthy copy of the OTOF gene into the inner ear, improving auditory function across all ten participants in the study. The therapy worked best in young children but still benefited adults, with one 7-year-old girl regaining almost full hearing. Even more exciting: this is just the start, as scientists now aim to target other genes that cause more common forms of deafness.

Writers discuss particular word choices and what they imply. "It turns out" as a disarming assertion (by an author in the US). Asking for someone's pronouns, in particular in questions coming from monolingual English speakers (by an author in the UK). "Why I no longer say 'conservative' when I mean 'cautious'" (by an author in Brazil). White-collar US workplace norms that allow "I'm concerned" but not "I'm angry" and "misrepresenting" but not "lying".

There are no reliable figures for how many students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it. Bard College literature professor Hua Hsu (archived) reflects on AI and the university, interviewing students and faculty members.

What happens when you choose to do something simple and do it well What kind of paper would you use to fold flowers? As folders, we know that finding the right paper for the model we want to fold (and vice versa) is important for achieving the right form and appearance. Personally, I've used a lot of different materials for my work, including everything from printer paper and aluminum foil to cellophane, fabric and more. When folding origami flowers, why not use flower petals? from The Art of Hanakami [The Fold]

Carney's cabinet asked to find 'ambitious savings' ahead of fall budget. "Ministers are being asked to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal year that begins in April, followed by 10 per cent the year after and 15 per cent in 2028-29."

As the residents of Marlborough are woken at 5:30am by a peacock, people in Ynyslas by a mini-tornado, those of Litton are woken by an earthquake, and people in Cheam are kept awake by a bottom-pinching ghost, the optional question for this week is ... what wakes you? Or just chat about what's going on in your life (no politics, as there's a billion other threads on this site for that).

PuzzlePass, a collection of daily games from the makers of 0H H1 and 0H N0.

Some of these are better (Tents and Trees, Number Block) than others (WordFind, Memoji), imho, but as a collection it's worth checking out which ones you like and might want to add to your daily assortment.

The dispute between Republican President Donald Trump and his main campaign financier Elon Musk took another fractious turn on Saturday when the space and automotive billionaire announced the formation of a new political party, saying Trump's "big, beautiful" tax bill would bankrupt America. A day after asking his followers on his X platform whether a new U.S. political party should be created, Musk declared in a post on Saturday that "Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom."

If this new force in American politics has a web site, I have been unable to locate it.

Capybaras trying to walk on ice.