ATLANTA—Republicans need to set aside past grievances and unite to win the presidential election in November because America cannot withstand four more years with radical Democrats in the White House, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday. Kemp spoke at radio talk-show host Erick Erickson’s The Gathering conference on Friday morning in Atlanta, days after former President Donald Trump called fellow Republican Kemp “a bad guy,” “a disloyal guy,” and “a very average governor.” The rift began when Kemp refused Trump’s request to hold a special legislative session to investigate the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. “With a lot of noise out there, as you can imagine, a lot of distractions, in my opinion, is not what we need to be doing right now in the presidential campaign, or on any campaigns that we’re running in the state of Georgia, to keep our majorities in the House and in the Senate,” Kemp said. “Despite all of that noise, my position has not changed.” The Georgia Republican is committed to getting Trump back in the White House, he said. “The thing that bothers me most about the Biden-Harris administration is, they’re picking winners and losers in Washington, D.C.,” Kemp said. It’s crucial to get conservatives back in office to reform executive branch agencies, the Georgia governor said. The governor is hopeful a Republican president can overhaul the administrative state after the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which had the effect of increasing the scope and power of unelected bureaucrats. Kemp in April signed a school choice bill into law, garnering criticism from Biden administration Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Getting kids out of failing schools and giving them an option where they can get out of that failing school, to get an education that they deserve, in our state, to me, that is an absolute no-brainer,” Kemp said. For the first time in history, the gross domestic product growth combined in the South outpaced that of the Northeast. Kemp said that’s because of Republican governors, such as Greg Abbott of Texas, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and himself. “It’s because of the Republican governors,” Kemp said. “It’s because of the business environment, and it’s because of the environment in the Northeast and in places like California. They’re literally just running people out of their states, and we’re glad to take them, as long as they vote our way.” The post Georgia Gov. Kemp Urges Republicans to Leave the Past Behind, Support Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On Jan. 21, 2017, hundreds of thousands of feminists wearing pink “pussyhats” protested the prior day’s presidential inauguration of Donald Trump by rampaging throughout Washington, D.C. The “Women’s March on Washington,” an extension of the riots and protests that shook the capital on Inauguration Day itself, was not exactly a peaceful affair. Hundreds of anarchists in total were arrested over the multiday period, typically on rioting or vandalism charges. The “pussyhat”-clad feminist rioters thus constituted the first Trump-era manifestation of destructive Democratic shock troops. Call it Democratic Street Thuggery 1.0. That particularly virulent strain of radical feminism reached a crescendo during the #MeToo societal struggle session of 2017-2018, culminating in the infamous Christine Blasey Ford-led attempt to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court nomination in Sept. 2018. Arguably the single leading misandrist crusader during that sordid affair, peddling the ludicrous “believe all women” smear from her senatorial dais and casually throwing out five millennia of “innocent until proven guilty” civilizational norms in the process, was none other than dimwitted California Sen. Kamala Harris. Alas, Joe Biden — or what little remained, even back then, of Joe Biden — was so awestruck by Harris’ vile interrogation of Kavanaugh and her own hilariously unimpressive 2020 presidential campaign that he tapped her to be his running mate. Cackling Kamala’s grand contribution to the Biden campaign was to dutifully launder her own swarthy complexion to “empathize” with left-wing America during our next great struggle session, the antifa-Black Lives Matter “racial reckoning” that followed the May 2020 death of St. George Floyd our Martyr. Such “empathy” included Kamala’s unctuous rhetorical support for the rioters, as well as her posting to social media a link to support bail for those rare BLM rioters who were actually arrested. The antifa-BLM rioters, who caused up to $2 billion in property damage during that infamous Summer of Love, constituted Democratic Street Thuggery 2.0. No politician in recent memory has parlayed such little talent into such stratospheric success as Harris. The cackler-in-chief “failed upward” yet again into the vice presidency — and now, following last month’s bloodless coup of Biden, into the Democratic presidential nomination itself. And this Tuesday, in announcing her running mate, Kamala ostentatiously passed on her clearly superior option, popular Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, for the insipid prairie socialist Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz, as the home-state governor of St. George Floyd our Martyr, was the original arsonist of the Summer of Love nationwide fire. There was no greater fanner of the flames of Democratic Street Thuggery 2.0 than Walz. Choosing Walz over Shapiro is curious for many reasons, but adding to the intrigue is the peculiar context in which it all went down. Kamala made her announcement in Philadelphia, Shapiro’s hometown. It came a few days after the mayor of Philadelphia — or, more accurately, the mayor’s hapless social media intern — inadvertently posted a polished video in support of a Harris-Shapiro ticket. The implication seemed clear enough: The pick was going to be Shapiro. But then, following a weekend of keffiyeh-clad radicals running wild in Philadelphia, waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags and decrying “Genocide Josh,” the Keystone State governor was suddenly tossed aside. Kamala caved to the “death to America!”- and “death to Israel!”-chanting jihadists who constitute Democratic Street Thuggery 3.0. Harris, intellectually challenged and an empty vessel for Democrats to project their basest desires, is the unique politician to find herself at the tripartite Venn diagram of all three Democratic Street Thuggery movements. The overlap of “believe all women”-style destructive feminism, antifa-BLM “racial reckoning” anarchy and Hamas/Hezbollah flag-flying civilizational jihad is embodied in one person: Kamala Harris. She is the perfect totem of the modern Democratic Party, which exalts intersectional victimhood and will whip its shock troops into a violent frenzy to get what it wants. The modern Democratic Party is less political vehicle and more Mafia — right down to the omerta code of silence surrounding Biden’s physical and mental decline. Many European countries have indulged the fiction that jihadist outfits Hamas and Hezbollah — the actual Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, not their useful idiot American supporters — can somehow be divided between “political” and “militant” wings. This is, of course, a lie — it is a distinction without a difference. Similarly, the notion that the Democratic Party can be distinguished between its elite “political wing” and shock troop “militant wing” is also a lie. The elites and the shock troops are one and the same. And Harris and Walz are at the epicenter of it all. On Oct. 30, 2020, this column argued that the then-impending election “pit(s) against each other a fundamentally Americanist vision of governance and a fundamentally insurrectionist vision of anarchic mayhem.” It was true then. And it’s even truer of our election cycle today. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Kamala Harris and the Civilizational Jihad of Democratic Street Thuggery appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Labour to 'Define' Islamophobia So It Can More Easily Continue Its War on Native Brits

Sometimes the natural world and the world of computer and video games have a little bit of a crossover – from the frightening zombie fungus from The Last Of Us, to the subject of today’s article. Meet the Pacman frog.Pacman frogs aren’t really called Pacman frogs but because of their pleasingly round bodies and comically wide mouths giving resemblance to – you guessed it – Pacman, the nickname has stuck. However this term actually represents a whole genus of frogs called Ceratophrys or the South American horned frogs, sometimes referred to as the “hopping heads”.Where do Pacman frogs live?Wild South American horned frogs live in marshes and pools across the Amazon, with different species having different distributions and slightly different habitats across the continent. The family Ceratophryidaecontains both the Ceratophrys genus and two others, and numbers around 12 species. The Surinam horned frog is widespread for example, living across countries from Colombia to Brazil, explains National Geographic. Information on the other wild species is patchy but it is thought that the Ecuadorian horned frog (Ceratophrys testudo) is a species found in the mountainous forests where it breeds in temporary rain pools. The species in this genus are popular pets and can be kept well in suitable habitats as they are not particularly difficult to care for. Wide mouths offer the ability to swallow similar-sized prey.Image credit: Alberto Rozzoni/ShutterstockHow big does a Pacman frog get?A Surinam horned frog can grow to 20 centimeters (8 inches) in length, making them a sizable frog species. However, this group of species starts small with what is known as explosive breeding. Clutches can be laid at night and contain as many as 2,100 eggs, typically laid in temporary rainwater pools. What do Pacman frogs eat?The Surinam horned frog is known to hide in leaf litter so that only the head pokes out, waiting for prey to pass by. Members of the Ceratophrys genus are not said to be particularly discerning eaters and will happily munch on anything that crosses their path. Unlike most frog species, these animals will readily bite and have highly adhesive tongues. There is also some suggestion that their enormous mouths help them eat species that are the same size as they are, such as other frogs, lizards, birds, and rodents. The Brazilian horned frog (Ceratophrys aurita) has a similar story as an adult but the tadpoles only eat the tadpoles of other species, according to the IUCN.A study from 2017 found that small horned frogs could bite with a force of 30 newtons, while the larger Brazilian frogs had a bite force of 500 newtons – the equivalent to 51 liters of water balanced on your fingertip, explain some of the study authors in The Conversation. What are the threats to the Pacman frog?Habitat loss, especially due to logging, is a concern but does not present a significant impact, writes the IUCN. There is even the threat of local communities killing species like Ceratophrys ornata due to folkloric beliefs. Many of these species are also found in the international pet trade. Thanks to captive breeding these frogs now come in a variety of bright colors including the strawberry-pineapple Pacman frog with bright yellow and pink coloration. If strawberry animals are your thing, check out these strawberry leopards too.

This week on Break It Down: the first archaeological study takes place outside of Earth, the oldest calendar might show a comet impact, a new study thinks the ancient Egyptians were using hydraulic tech to build the pyramids (others disagree), what a rock on Mars could tell us about potential life in the Solar System, a titanium heart is something straight out of sci-fi, and why we get taken in by urban legends like the Russian sleep experiment. Available on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more.So, sit back, relax, and let’s Break It Down…LinksSpace Archaeology Oldest Calendar Egyptian Hydraulic LiftBiosignature On MarsTitanium Heart TransplantRussian Sleep Experiment Can Dogs Live Longer CURIOUS Magazine 

Ever thought, “I’d really like a game of table tennis,” but had no one to play with? Well, do we have the scientific breakthrough for you! Google DeepMind has just unveiled a robot that could give you a run for your money in a match, but don’t assume you’d be in for a trouncing – the engineers say their robot plays at a “solidly amateur” level.From nightmare-inducing faces to team-working robo-snails to the now happily retired Atlas, it seems we’re never far away from another incredible feat of robotics technology. But there are still a lot of things humans can do that robots haven’t quite achieved.When it comes to speed and performance in physical tasks, engineers are still striving to build machines that can mimic human abilities, and now a team at DeepMind has taken a step towards that goal with the creation of their table-tennis-playing robot.“[C]ompetitive matches are often breathtakingly dynamic, involving complex motion, rapid eye-hand coordination, and high-level strategies that adapt to the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses,” the team writes in their new preprint, which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. These aspects set something like table tennis apart from pure strategy games like chess, which robots are already mastering (albeit with somewhat… mixed results).Human players spend years training to build up their skills. The DeepMind team wanted to build a robot that could provide legitimate competition and an enjoyable experience for a human opponent, and they claim that theirs is the first to reach these milestones.They designed a library of “low-level skills” coupled with a “high-level controller” that selects the most effective skill in each situation. As explained in the team’s announcement of their innovation, the skill library includes a variety of techniques you might call upon during a table tennis match, such as forehand and backhand serves. The controller uses descriptions of these skills, integrated with data about how the game is progressing and the skill level of its opponent, to select the optimal skill that is within its physical capabilities.The robot started off with a small amount of human data and was then trained through simulations that allowed it to build its skills through reinforcement learning. Playing against humans helped it continue to learn and adapt. You can see for yourself in the footage below how that went.  “Truly awesome to watch the robot play players of all levels and styles. Going in our aim was to have the robot be at an intermediate level. Amazingly it did just that, all the hard work paid off,” said professional table tennis coach Barney J. Reed, who helped out with the project. “I feel the robot exceeded even my expectations.”The team held competitive matches, pitting the robot against 29 humans with a range of skills from beginner to advanced+. The matches used the standard rulebook, with one important adaptation – the robot was not physically capable of serving the ball. A win for the robot......and a loss.Against the beginners, the robot won all its matches; by contrast, it lost all the matches against advanced and advanced+ players. Against the intermediate opponents, it won 55 percent of the time, leading the team to judge that it had reached an intermediate human skill level.Importantly, all the opponents, regardless of skill level, rated the matches highly for being “fun” and “engaging” – even where they were able to exploit the robot’s weaknesses, they had a good time doing so. The advanced players felt such a system could beat a ball thrower as a training aid.So, we probably won’t be seeing a robot team at the Olympics any time soon, but as a training aid, it definitely has potential. And as for what the future holds – who knows?The preprint is posted to arXiv.

From the life of the Buddha to A Christmas Carol, to, heck, even Aladdin, the idea that money can’t buy us happiness is pretty baked into most human cultures. Like so many “common sense” ideas, though, it seems like it’s dead wrong – at least, according to a new study from happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth.“Is there a point beyond which more money is no longer associated with greater happiness?” begins Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, in the paper (which is self-published and not peer-reviewed). “In recent research, I found that happiness rose steadily at least up through incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. But what happens beyond that – does happiness plateau, decline, or continue rising?”Now, listen: we know that, despite what rich people tell us, money can buy you happiness. Living in poverty can make you three times as likely to have depression or anxiety; a sudden windfall, on the other hand, will improve your short-term happiness significantly. A regular salary is the jackpot, psychologically speaking: as research repeatedly bears out, a higher annual income correlates very strongly with overall happiness and well-being.But at some point, you’ve probably heard, there’s a limit to the benefits brought by extra cash. Sure, being able to pay rent and buy food can account for a whole lot of your happiness levels, but once you reach that middle level in Maslow’s hierarchy, more money isn’t going to change much. Right? Not according to Killingsworth’s research. By comparing data from three groups – one comprising more than 33,000 people with any income of at least $10,000, and the other two surveying specifically extremely wealthy individuals with net worths in the millions – Killingsworth drew the unfortunate but not unexpected conclusion that, yes, Elon Musk is probably happier than you. By a lot.Wealthy individuals are "substantially and statistically significantly happier than people earning over $500,000 [per year],” Killingsworth writes. “Moreover, the difference between wealthy and middle-income participants was nearly three times larger than the difference between the middle- and low-income participants, contrary to the idea that middle-income people are close to the peak of the money-happiness curve.”“Finally, the absolute size of the difference in happiness between the richest and poorest people was large,” he continues. “The results suggest that the positive association between money and happiness continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial.”While that may seem like depressing news to about 99 percent of the population, Killingsworth interprets the results in a more glass-half-full kind of way. “If happiness plateaued completely at a modest level of wealth or income, one might argue that this would simplify human life: Each person simply needs to get ‘enough’ and can then rationally shift all of their attention to things besides money,” he writes. But if that were the case, he points out, it would mean at least one of two things was going wrong: either people being unable, even in the highest echelons of wealth, to work out which things would make them happy – or those things failing to exist at all.So it’s with a sense of relief that we should understand the confirmation that those richer than us are also much happier than us. But what could possibly explain this wealth-to-well-being correlation? Ha, stupid question, we know – but to be fair, the link is a little deeper than it may seem at first glance. The key isn’t that richer people can just buy more material goods, Killingsworth says – it’s more to do with the sense of security that a larger reservoir of money imparts.“A greater feeling of control over life can explain about 75 percent of the association between money and happiness,” Killingsworth told The Guardian. “So I think a big part of what’s happening is that, when people have more money, they have more control over their lives. More freedom to live the life they want to live.”And, to be fair, Killingsworth doesn’t suggest that only money is the key to happiness – or that it should be. “Ironically, part of the reason I’m so interested in happiness is because money alone – which we’re already pretty motivated to pursue – is just one small part of the overall equation for happiness,” he said. “Part of the reason I study happiness is to broaden our horizons beyond things like money.”The study can be read on Killingsworth’s Happiness Science website.

Comet 13P/Olbers is a period comet that visits the inner Solar System every 69 years. It flew past its closest point to the Sun on June 30 and is now on its long journey back away. But it has come at a particular active point in the solar cycle. The Sun is currently at or around its maximum most active peak and this is causing stunning aurorae on Earth, robots malfunctioning on Mars, and it's messing with Comet Olbers' tail.A new picture taken by the team at the Virtual Telescope Project on August 8 shows the comet tail being dented, and the fault is not in itself but in our stars. Well, star. The Sun constantly releases a flow of plasma – the solar wind – and that shapes the material that evaporates from the comet into an ion tail.Comet 13P/Olbers snapped on August 8, 2024, showing off its amazing, but slightly, wonky tail.Image credit: Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope ProjectDuring solar maximum, there are more dramatic events such as coronal mass ejections creating faster plasma but also a region of reduced plasma as the regular solar wind is swept by these solar tsunamis of particles. What that means for poor Comet Olbers is that its tail is getting all bent out of shape."The ion tail is basically caught up in that river," Henry Hsieh, a Planetary Science Institute researcher told Mashable. "You see a straight tail most of the time, but then every so often, you'll have this bit of a hiccup in the Sun — these coronal mass ejection events — where it'll just kind of send a particularly large or denser bunch of material outward."   You can also see colored photos of the comet and its ion tail taken by astrophotographer Dan Bartlett available on their Astrobin page.Comet Olbers was first seen in 1815 by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers who found a way to calculate the orbit of comets. Like many comets, Comet Olbers has an associated meteor shower but not on Earth. Those meteors fall on Mars.  

Reports of Bondo ape sightings describe them as giant, ferocious lion killers. Over the past few decades, researchers have set out to discover exactly what this mysterious group of apes really is. Read more here.

Our best estimates of the composition of the universe indicate that it is mostly dark matter and dark energy, neither of which have been detected on Earth. Even the baryonic matter we sometimes call the “observable universe” is three quarters hydrogen and 23 percent helium, by mass, and even less if you’re counting atoms. It's a very different matter on Earth, where helium is among the rarest elements, and hydrogen is a fraction of one percent of the crust and much less of the Earth as a whole.Where we startedOn the scale of the universe, hydrogen is abundant primarily because so much of it was made in the Big Bang. In the first moments after its birth the universe was a mess of quarks and gluons. Once things settled down, most observable matter consisted of electrons, protons, and neutrons, along with some more exotic subatomic particles. The electrons and protons generally found each other to form hydrogen. A small amount of helium and even less lithium was also produced.Much of that primordial lithium has been destroyed in stars, but the same stars fused hydrogen to become helium and, later in their lives, into the rest of the periodic table. Nevertheless, if you look at the universe as a machine for converting hydrogen to other elements, it is still young, with most of its journey ahead of it.Looking only at the Earth, however, that job seems almost complete. Our oceans are two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen (with the sodium, chlorine, and other salt-making elements thrown in). Some is also bound up in rocks or attached to carbon molecules as methane in the atmosphere. Still, as a proportion of the atoms in the planet as a whole, there isn’t much hydrogen.There's far less helium, however; so little that no one noticed it until its spectral lines were spotted during an eclipse. Like all the planets, the Earth was formed out of a protoplanetary disk. This in turn was made up of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang, along with a sprinkling of heavier elements fused in earlier generations of stars and spread across the galaxy in supernova and kilonova explosions.The Sun, and the gas giant planets of the outer Solar System have compositions that approximately reflect this, although of course plenty of the Sun's original hydrogen is now helium. The Earth, and other inner planets, are completely different.So where did these elements go?Besides their abundance in the universe, what hydrogen and helium share is that they are both very light gases. That means they can easily escape the Earth's gravity. A larger planet, such as Jupiter, has held onto much more of each by virtue of having so much more gravitational pull; Earth simply wasn't big enough. Adding to that, the Earth is a lot closer to the Sun than the gas giants. Gases get warmed more, giving them energy that increases the chance of escape.Helium is particularly rare because, being a noble gas, it almost never combines with any other atoms that might tether it enough to prevent escape. Most planetary scientists doubt any of the original helium from the planetary disk survives on Earth, although a mechanism has been proposed that could account for a little. The helium we do have is largely a result of radioactive decay of heavier elements. One common form of decay involves the production of alpha particles, whose two protons and two neutrons are the same as the nucleus of a helium-4 atom. Once released, alpha particles can capture electrons from the environment to become helium. If released near the surface, the helium atom is likely to make its way to the atmosphere, and then to space. However, helium produced from radioactivity deep underground can become trapped in cavities within the Earth.Although widely associated with party balloons, helium has more important applications like cooling scientific equipment and MRI machines to temperatures too cold for alternatives like liquid nitrogen. Our stocks depend on drilling into ancient spaces where helium has built up over millions of years. The same spaces often also hold other gases in much greater abundance, and most helium stocks were collected as a byproduct during drilling for methane. However, as the world turns away from fossil fuels, higher concentration helium sources may become priorities.Hydrogen is more abundant on Earth than helium because it bonds readily with elements like oxygen. A molecule of water vapor weighs nine times as much as an H2 molecule, making it far less likely to escape. Nevertheless, most of the hydrogen in the planitesimals that combined to form the Earth is thought to have escaped long ago, particularly when impacts turned the planet’s surface to a sea of magma.There is a long-running debate over whether Earth’s water includes hydrogen from the planet’s formation that survived deep in the mantle, or if the Earth ran dry at one point, before being refreshed by hydrogen in comets and asteroids. Irrespective of which side is right, however, the Earth is lucky to have as much hydrogen as it does. The Moon and other inner planets have much less, having lost most through similar processes to those on Earth, but with even less gravity to prevent escape. All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.