'$79 million against Republican Senate candidates'

The most prolific meteor shower of the year will be at its peak on the morning of August 12th, when 150 shooting stars can be seen per hour in the Northern Hemisphere. The meteors are called the Perseids because they appear from the general direction of the constellation Perseus, but in more modern times have […] The post The Most Active Meteor Shower of the Year Arrives in Just 5 Days’ Time appeared first on Good News Network.

Adam is joined by super 90’s comics collector, Robb Holmes (@rholmes0520) to review Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczynski, get into the sillier side of X-Men comics, explore Wizard’s summer travel guide to superhero theme CONTINUE READING... The post WIZARDS The Podcast Guide To Comics | Episode 96 appeared first on The Retro Network.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge. Did Japan just break the world? The central bank clowns who make a living torturing Japan’s economy have spent three decades stepping on every banana peel in the zoo. It looks like they just hit a big one. In just two days, Japan’s stocks had their worst two-day decline in history—worse than the Black Monday crash of 1987. Nearly one-fifth of the Japanese stock market evaporated. It would have been worse, but they halted trading with circuit-breakers. The crash piled on U.S. markets, already in near panic over collapsing jobs reports. So what happened to Japan? Why did it blow up so fast? The key to Japan’s latest crisis is something called the “yen carry trade.” This is where hedge funds borrow yen and use it to buy U.S. treasuries or Nvidia. They do this because it costs roughly zero to borrow in yen, then they put the money on treasuries earning 5% or Nvidia paying more. So, it’s free money. And hedge funds need free money to keep them in hookers and blow. Er, to keep returns consistent. Estimates put the carry trade at at least $4 trillion—which is almost as big as the entire gross domestic product of Japan. Sadly, as always, there’s a catch: The small detail of ‘What if the yen suddenly gets stronger?’ Now you borrowed $100 million of yen but suddenly you owe, say, $120 million. At that point, you get every hedge fund’s worst nightmare: a margin call. The bank wants more collateral. That’s exactly what happened last Wednesday, when the Bank of Japan announced they were ending 20 years of near zero interest rates. That sent the yen soaring, since it means Japanese assets won’t pay such crappy returns. Toss on Friday’s jobs report suggesting Fed interest-rate cuts are coming, which also makes yen assets look better, and the yen went, in short order, from 162 per dollar to 141. Cue the margin calls. At which point hedge funds do two things: They sell all those treasuries and Nvidia for dollars. Then they use the dollars to buy yen and unwind the loan. They pay it back. That means everything they used to own goes down, from treasuries to Nvidia. And it means a tsunami of dollars sold for yen—which drives the yen up. That’s when the fun starts, because, remember the rising yen was the problem. That’s what was wiping out the hedge funds to begin with. And now the hedgies are pumping the yen even more. They’re swamping their own lifeboat. So, the yen keeps rising. More hedge funds get margin calls. More treasuries and Nvidia get dumped. How far does it go? In theory, $4 trillion—roughly one fifth of all bank accounts in America. At which point, the hedgies are bled out and the yen resumes its long march to oblivion. Either way, barring a small-government miracle, Japan is screwed. The only question is: Does it take us down with it? So, what’s next? When hedge funds topple countries, the collateral damage is always the normies. In this case, the yen-reliant companies of Japan along with the global investors—us—who just got flattened by a stampede of coked-up hedge funders fleeing margin calls. The question at this point is, does this week amounts to a 1987-style flash crash? Or is it a trigger for a 2008 recession or something worse? We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Japan’s ‘Carry Trade’: Tokyo Breaks the World appeared first on The Daily Signal.

When rioters took to the streets of Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd, setting fire to a police station, a Japanese restaurant, and a low-income tenement building (among others), then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail on behalf of the rioters. Now that Harris, Joe Biden’s vice president and the presumptive Democratic nominee, has selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Americans may wonder about his position on the Minnesota Freedom Fund. As it turns out, Walz tapped the fund’s executive director for the state’s Sentencing Guidelines Commission. Unfortunately, Walz’s office did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the matter. The Minnesota Freedom Fund also did not respond to The Daily Signal’s questions about whether Walz supported the fund to bail out rioters. Harris infamously urged followers to contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, urging them to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” after rioters ravaged Minneapolis following Floyd’s death in police custody. Fact-checkers later established that Harris didn’t personally donate to the Freedom Fund, although at the time she and others helped direct more than $40 million to the organization. If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020 Who Is Tonja Honsey? Walz, first elected governor in 2018, doesn’t appear to have made any such public call for donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. However, he did grant one of the organization’s leaders a position in his administration. In May 2019, Tonja Honsey, executive director of the fund, joined Minnesota’s Sentencing Guildelines Commission. The sentencing commission’s 13 members represent both the criminal justice system and the general public. They include judges, a public defender, a county attorney, a peace officer, an academic, and three members of the public. The governor appoints all commissioners except the judicial representatives. Honsey, a public member who spent time in jail for possessing controlled substances, served on the commission from 2019 to 2023. “I say that I’m an incarceration survivor,” Honsey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2019. “The shift needs to turn from people who have gone to school to learn about reentry, to where people who are directly impacted need to be the ones leading,” Honsey added. “And not just brought in for a focus group. We actually need to be leading the charge.” In June 2020, the Minnesota Freedom Fund fired Honsey after she admitted that she had lied about her ancestry. She falsely had described herself as indigenous, and later faced condemnation for misappropriating a Native American heritage and bloodline. “The Minnesota Freedom Fund’s work is part of a larger movement to end the harms of money bail and jailing people for poverty,” the organization said in a public statement that since has been deleted from the website (but preserved on the Internet Archive here). “As a collective effort, our mission has never relied on a single person and calls us to step up around issues of equity and truth,” the fund said, adding: “We know we must do better to address systemic racism, both internally in our work and with the community.” According to the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, Honsey’s nonprofit, We Rise!, disbanded. The American Indian Prison Project put out a statement repudiating her. A Facebook group dedicated to discrediting Honsey still exists, with a post as recent as May 2023. That Facebook page condemned Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat, for reportedly writing a letter of recommendation for Honsey. In 2019, the Open Society Foundations awarded Honsey a Soros Justice Fellowship. Open Society did not respond to a request for comment. A LinkedIn profile bearing Honsey’s name and history mentions Ladies of Hope Ministries as her current employer. Ladies of Hope Ministries did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The Daily Signal was unable to reach Honsey for comment. Who Does the Fund Help? The Minnesota Freedom Fund opposes cash bail and pays to secure the freedom of those charged with various crimes. “Right now, the cash bail and immigration detention systems jail legally innocent people simply because they can’t afford their freedom, while wealthy people go free,” the organization’s website states. “Until we abolish wealth-based pre-trial and immigration detention in our state, Minnesota Freedom Fund will be here to level the playing field.” The Minnesota Freedom Fund has paid $21.2 million in cash bail, freed 2,537 people from being jailed before trial, paid $4.8 million for immigration bonds, and freed another 463 people from immigration detention, according to the website. The organization faces criticism for bailing out potentially violent defendants who pose a threat to the community. It bailed out Timothy Wayne Columbus, who faced 30 years in prison for allegedly sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl in July 2020, The Daily Caller reported. It also bailed out six men facing allegations that they committed violence against women between June and August 2020. Five of them previously were convicted of charges related to domestic abuse. The Tides Center, a liberal dark money group, funneled more than $100,000 into the Minnesota Freedom Fund between 2019 and 2021, according to IRS filings. The Tides Foundation, the Tides Center’s sister organization, represents anti-Israel rioters through its fiscally sponsored project, Palestine Legal. Tides did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. Walz did not respond to questions from The Daily Signal about whether he took any actions against the Minnesota Freedom Fund to ensure that it didn’t bail out criminal defendants who could pose a threat in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Flanagan, his lieutenant governor, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the letter of recommendation she wrote for Honsey. The post Tim Walz Silent on Ties to Minnesota Freedom Fund That Bailed Out Rioters, Domestic Abusers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

MSNBC Wonders: Does Walz Actually Help Dems?

Walz: Executive Order #1 Was...

In the forests of South Africa a group of snails can be found doing something a bit surprising. Tail-wagger snails do what it says on the tin, throwing around small black protrusions like little dogs in a good mood.Exactly what purpose the tail-wagging serves isn’t known for certain, but it’s been suggested it could be a crucial behavior for when the time comes to mate. According to Dr Werner de Gier, these snails have a reputation for dramatic escape attempts, through a combination of tail-wagging, shell-spinning, and even bungee jumping. This kind of James Bond slime magic has been observed in slugs, too, who will use mucus threads to slide down like a spider.Tail-wagger snails belong to the Urocyclidae family of air-breathing land snails, slugs, and semi-slugs. Once thought to be a single group, the tail-wagger snails were joined by a new genus and eight new species from eastern South Africa in 2017, and it seems we still have a lot to learn about them.Filmmaker and conservation warrior Josh Crickmay recently happened upon some tail-wagger snails in one of the more joyful videos IFLScience has seen of late. He spotted the rare sight while out walking in the forests of St Lucia, a settlement in uMkhanyakude District Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.“I barely believe these actually exist,” he can be heard saying in the clip. “Look at that! They are mating I believe, and they seem to be very happy about it, judging by their behaviour.”       “I’ve been wanting to see these guys for a long time. I’ve heard about them before particularly in these forests around St Lucia. […] They wag their tails with the purpose of finding a partner, which begs the question, why keep wagging once you’ve found your partner? I can only assume it’s because they’re pretty happy about it.”When asked in the comments if the tail-wagging does indeed indicate happiness, Crickmay explained that we know so little about these snails it’s hard to know, but some have suggested the wagging could help to waft pheromones.Whatever the reason, it’s hard to ignore the dog-like glee of their tail-wagging, begging the question: what’s the canine equivalent of anthropomorphizing?

Learning more about inaccessible places is often time-consuming, expensive, and comes with a multitude of other challenges. While technologies can be adapted to explore Earth’s more remote environments, researchers in Australia have found a perfectly adapted ready-made tool to help them learn more about the ocean floor: sea lions.  “Using animal-borne video and movement data from a benthic predator is a really effective way of mapping diverse benthic habitats across large areas of the seabed,” said first author Nathan Angelakis, a PhD student with The University of Adelaide and the South Australian Research and Development Institute (Aquatic Sciences), in a statement.Eight female Australian sea lions (Neophoca cinerea) from two colonies were equipped with small, lightweight cameras that were glued to a piece of neoprene which was then glued to the sea lion's fur. The total weight of all the equipment was less than 1 percent of the sea lion’s body weight, meaning they could swim and move around in a totally normal way. The sea lions were chosen because they are known to spend a lot of time hunting in a range on habitats on the seabed. They are also an endangered species, so the cameras serve a dual purpose of seeing which habitats are down there and which are important to the sea lions themselves.“We deployed the instruments on adult females so we could recover the equipment a few days later when they returned to land to nurse their pups,” Angelakis explained. “We used satellite-linked GPS loggers on the sea lions, which meant we could track their position in real-time and knew when they had returned to the colony.”  Over a few days, the sea lions swam normally collecting around 89 hours of recordings from under the sea. From the sea lion films, the researchers managed to identify six benthic habitats from Olive Island and Seal Bay at a depth of between 5 and 110 meters (16-360 feet). The habitats recorded by the sea lions included macroalgae reef, macroalgae meadow, bare sand, sponge/sand, invertebrate reefs, and invertebrate boulders. However, the team were quick to point out the limitations of the study, as the habitats filmed by the sea lions were different from other known regions of South Australia. They suggest that the sea lions could prefer to travel through one habitat over another or miss other habitats altogether. “These data are useful both for mapping critical habitats for an endangered species such as the Australian sea lion, and more broadly, for mapping unexplored areas of the seabed,” continued Angelakis. A sea lion scientist with a lightweight camera attached to its back snoozes in the sun after sciencing hard.Image Credit: Nathan AngelakisHowever, the recordings do give the team much greater knowledge of the sea beds and the sea lions themselves, which are classed as endangered. The films can also be used to survey other animals seen in the videos. The team combined the data from the sea lions with oceanographic data to predict habitats on the continental shelf. “The sea lions from both locations covered quite broad areas around the colonies. In our calculations, we kept the area in which we predicted habitats small to maximize the precision of our predictions,” Angelakis said. “This allowed us to model benthic habitats across more than 5,000 square km [1,930 square miles] of the continental shelf.”The paper is published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

In recent months, many people will have experimented with a chatbot like ChatGPT. Useful though they can be, there’s also no shortage of examples of them producing, ahem, erroneous information. Now, a group of scientists from the University of Oxford are asking: is there a legal pathway by which we could require these chatbots to tell us the truth?The rise of large language modelsAmid all the buzz around artificial intelligence (AI), which seems to have reached new heights in the past couple of years, one branch of the field has garnered more attention than any other – at least with those of us who aren’t machine learning experts. It’s the large language models (LLMs), which leverage generative AI to produce often eerily human-sounding responses to almost any query you can dream up.The likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are based on models trained on huge amounts of data – which itself raises numerous questions around privacy and intellectual property – to allow them to understand natural language queries and generate coherent and relevant responses. Unlike with a search engine, you don’t need to learn any syntax to help you narrow down your results. Theoretically, you simply ask a question as if you were speaking out loud.    Their capabilities are no doubt impressive, and they certainly sound confident in their answers. There’s just one tiny problem – these chatbots tend to sound equally confident when they’re dead wrong. Which might be okay, if we humans could just remember not to trust everything they’re telling us.“While problems arising from our tendency to anthropomorphize machines are well established, our vulnerability to treating LLMs as human-like truth tellers is uniquely worrying,” write the authors of the new paper, referring to a situation that anyone who’s ever had an argument with Alexa or Siri will know well.“LLMs are not designed to tell the truth in any overriding sense.”It’s easy to tap out a question for ChatGPT and assume that it is “thinking” of the answer in the same way a human person would. That’s how it appears, but that’s not actually how these models work.Don’t believe everything you readAs the authors explain, LLMs “are text-generation engines designed to predict which string of words comes next in a piece of text.” The truthfulness of their responses is only one metric by which the models are judged during development. In an effort to produce the most “helpful” answer, the authors argue, they can all-too-frequently stray towards oversimplification, bias, and just making stuff up.The authors of this study are by no means the first to raise the alarm about this, with one paper going so far as to call the models "bullshitters". Professor Robin Emsley, the editor of the journal Schizophrenia, published an account of an experience with ChatGPT in 2023, stating, “What I experienced were fabrications and falsifications.” The chatbot had produced citations for scholarly papers that did not exist, as well as several that were irrelevant to the query. Others have reported the same thing.  They do okay with questions that have a clear, factual answer where – and this bit’s important – that answer has appeared a lot within their training data. These models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. And, unless you’re prepared to carefully fact-check any answer you get from an LLM, it can be very difficult to tell how accurate the information is – especially as many don’t provide links to their source material or give any measure of confidence.“Unlike human speakers, LLMs do not have any internal conceptions of expertise or confidence, instead always ‘doing their best’ to be helpful and persuasively respond to the prompt posed,” writes the team at Oxford.They were particularly concerned about the impact of what they call “careless speech”, and of the harm that could be done by such responses from LLMs leeching into offline human conversation. This led them to ask the question of whether there could be a legal obligation imposed on LLM providers to ensure that their models tell the truth.What did the new study conclude?Focusing on current European Union (EU) legislation, the authors found that there are few explicit scenarios where a duty is placed on an organization or individual to tell the truth. Those that do exist are limited to specific sectors or institutions, and very rarely apply to the private sector. Since LLMs operate on relatively new technology, the majority of existing regulations were not drawn up with these models in mind.So, the authors propose a new framework, “the creation of a legal duty to minimize careless speech for providers of both narrow- and general-purpose LLMs.”You might naturally ask, “Who is the arbiter of truth?”, and the authors do address this by saying that the aim is not to force LLMs down one particular path, but rather to require “plurality and representativeness of sources”. Fundamentally, they propose that makers redress the balance between truthfulness and "helpfulness", which the authors argue is too much in favor of the latter. It’s not simple to do, but it might be possible.There are no easy answers to these questions (disclaimer: we have not tried asking ChatGPT), but as this technology continues to advance they are things that developers will have to grapple with. In the meantime, when you’re working with an LLM, it may be worth remembering this sobering statement from the authors: “They are designed to participate in natural language conversations with people and offer answers that are convincing and feel helpful, regardless of the truth of the matter at hand.”The study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.