US citizens: call on Congress to investigate retired military members working for foreign governments.

The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.

If you call, please spread the word!

Animals bred in zoos evolve to be less fit to survive in the wild.

This is a predictable consequence of natural selection. Animals' survival in a breeding program does not depend on the characteristics that are needed for survival in the wild, but maintaining those characteristics has costs. So they will tend to lose those characteristics.

It would be interesting to see what happens after those captivity-adapted animals are released. Do they respond to the selection pressure of wild existence by evolving in the other direction? That seems likely if enough of the original wild population remains. But if there is very little of the original wild population, the superior wild characteristics might have been lost entirely.

Shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant caused damage to structures that are not critical.

Who fired these shells? They chose targets that would provoke anxiety but were unlikely to cause real danger. In other words, it appears to have been a sort of bluff. This is indication (though not proof) that the Putin forces did the shelling.

We should not take seriously their claim that the shots came from Ukraine; they have no credibility.

T appears that Putin's plan does not include causing any significant damage, but plans occasionally go wrong. It behooves Ukraine and Putin to agree on a plan to demilitarize the power plant itself.

But I don't expect Putin to agree to this.

*The big takeaway from Cop27? These climate conferences just aren’t working.*

*There was no commitment to cutting the emissions causing accelerating this crisis, without which this agreement is nothing more … than a "down-payment on disaster."*

The planet roasters have spread their influence both overtly at the events and out of sight through influence on governments. And then there are the business-supremacy treaties.

Considering that the effect of these systems of influence will be to kill hundreds of millions of people, I think it is time to wipe out those systems, and never mind what property and financial interests get "harmed." Indeed, "harming" those interests is necessary — their wealth gives them power to keep disaster going, so the only way to reduce the damage they can do is to is to wreck some of their wealth.

Robots that carry guns and can select targets are already being made. The ones mentioned in this article cannot fire the guns without an order from a human soldier.

If we want robot weapons to appreciate the value of human lives, we had better treat their lives as having value too. If and when they become capable of appreciating the value of lives of others, they may be ready to deserve that.

The scenario of cracking the security on robot weapons should remind us that humans too are vulnerable to this too. Right-wing extremists cracked the mental security of US soldiers and thugs, brainwashing them to attack US democracy in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol. No system