If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steve Brill has published a book, “The Death of Truth” – but he’s not taking any responsibility. On the contrary. Namely, Brill’s “apolitical (misinformation) rating system for news sites” as NewsGuard is promoted to customers, is often blasted – and currently investigated by Congress for possible First Amendment violations – as yet another tool to suppress online speech. But corporate media sing his praises, presenting him as a “media maven.” A censorship maven more like it, critics would say. And while getting his book promoted, Brill managed to add his name to the steadily growing list of governments, NGOs, and associated figures who are attacking online anonymity. Along with end-to-end encryption, the ability to interact anonymously is a cornerstone of the internet, but these two key elements that ensure not only privacy but also the security of individuals, companies, etc., have become the two main targets for authoritarian (labeled as such or acting in that spirit) governments. Brill’s contribution: a set of practical solutions that includes “banning anonymous posting online and funding media literacy programs.” The problem that this is supposed to fix is, essentially, that social media platforms are not yet fully under control, and therefore neither are their users (and voters). If anonymity were to be taken out of the equation, Brill is reported as saying – then it would be “easier to sue tech companies for the false content posted on their platforms,” as well as “waging legal campaigns against social media companies for violating their own terms of service.” There’s another snippet of a veiled threat aimed at tech companies, in terms of what might happen to them if they “misbehave,” (such as letting up on the already extraordinary levels of censorship), especially during a campaign season. Reporting about Brill’s Washington DC garden party to promote his book and the efforts to “clean up the internet and bring truth back to life” – the Washington Post repeatedly mentions “bad information” as that ominous source of “divisions” and “polarization.” We’ve been hearing about “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and even “malinformation” that must be fought tooth and nail. But what is “bad information” – could it simply be information that one doesn’t like? Whatever it is, Brill and his ilk seem willing to dismantle the internet itself, in order to get rid of it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post NewsGuard Co-Founder Advocates Banning Anonymous Social Media Posts, Enabling Lawsuits Against Tech Firms for “False” Content appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

U.N. Panel Concludes WSJ Reporter Detained Arbitrarily

BREAKING: NYT Reports Biden Mulling Withdrawal -- If ...

In recent years, we have observed some stars acting seriously strangely. The classic example is KIC 8462852, better known as Boyajian's star, or just the "alien megastructure" star. In 2016 and 2017, the star dimmed in unusual ways, leading some to suggest it could have a "Dyson sphere" around it, created by some advanced alien civilization.It turned out to be dust obscuring our view of the star, which is of course disappointing to anyone hopeful of detecting advanced alien life. But it is not the only star that has astronomers' attention. One – HD 101065, or "Przybylski's Star" – has pretty much all other stars beat for its weirdness. Even if it isn't aliens (and we should assume that it is not, until all other natural explanations are exhausted), it could be doing something almost as cool.HD 101065 was first discovered in 1961, by Polish-Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski, and was immediately noticed to be unusual. The star, thought to be a little hotter than our Sun, is known as an "Ap" star, meaning a type A star that is chemically peculiar. A-type stars themselves are pretty strange. Unlike stars such as our Sun, hot A-type stars usually do not have a magnetic field to slow their incredible rotation speeds imparted on them as they were formed. As a result, they usually retain their incredible spin, making it difficult to analyze their spectra. But AP stars are different. They do have a strong magnetic field, and rotate slowly. This allows us to get a really good look at the chemical makeup of their atmospheres, Jason Wright, professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Eberly College of Science at Pennsylvania State University, explains in a blog post on the topic. When we do analyze the light from these stars, it shows that they contain abundances of silicon, chromium, strontium, europium, and other rare Earth elements in their upper atmosphere.But Przybylski's star is stranger still, and appears to contain elements it really shouldn't, at least by any mechanism we have come across in nature. "It is believed to be an extreme member of a class of stars whose surface chemical peculiarities are generally thought to be a consequence of chemical separation," one team wrote of the star in 2004. "This theory alone, however, would not account for the presence of elements with no long-lived stable isotopes. For instance, it appears to contain promethium. This is really weird. No known isotope of promethium has a half-life longer than 17.7 years, meaning that it must be produced by some continuous process if we are to see it in Przybylski's star. Further analysis showed it contains actinium, protactinium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, and einsteinium. These are difficult to confirm because they do not occur in nature (except, it seems, in Przybylski's star). "Unfortunately, these spectra have been poorly studied," one team, which found short-lived elements in the spectra, explained. "For example, the wavelengths of only 22 lines are known for the singly ionized californium, which has been relatively well studied. Virtually all tables of spectral lines contain no data on technetium, promethium, and elements with atomic numbers Z > 83, save for thorium and uranium."Einsteinium was first discovered in 1952 during the first detonation of a hydrogen bomb and is considered a synthetic element, or one that could only be created by humans, and we have not produced a lot of it – and yet it has been tentatively detected in the star. Californium is also considered a synthetic element and was only discovered as a product after bombarding curium-242 with helium ions. Meanwhile, iron – usually one of the clearest lines seen in the light from stars – is barely seen at all.So what the hell are these elements, many with short half-lives on astronomical timescales, doing in abundance in the atmosphere of an already unusual type of star? Despite over 60 years of knowing about the star, and some big leaps in astronomy techniques, we still do not know what's going on. There are a few ideas, some sensible but weirdly unlikely, and a few very exciting explanations indeed. One possible explanation proposed was that the star has a neutron star companion, which bombards the upper atmosphere of Przybylski's star, causing reactions that produce the elements we observe. But the star does not look like it has such a companion, which leaves us with a few other (far more exotic) explanations.             One, which is outlined in a 2017 arXiv paper, is that the unusual elements are the result of the decay of undiscovered heavy elements in the hypothetical "island of stability" predicted by physicists, where elements could be stable once more."Spectral lines belonging to the short-lifetime heavy radioactive elements up to Es (Z=99) have been found in the spectra of the Przybylski’s star," the paper explains. "We suggest that these unstable elements may be decay products of a 'magic' metastable nucleus belonging to the the island of stability where the nuclei have a magic number of neutrons N = 184."The team suggests that this could have been produced in a nearby supernova. If correct, and more study would of course be needed, that would be pretty awesome. But there is another suggestion – whispered about, according to Wright – that it could be the sign of intelligent life. There have been suggestions in the past that alien species could dispose of waste on the surface of their stars, which could be an explanation, though that seems unlikely. But it has also been suggested by Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovskii that advanced alien civilizations could purposely put unusual and clearly manufactured elements into their stars in order to attract attention. Sending signals out into the cosmos is energy-expensive, and given the distances involved, you do not know whether your signal will reach a civilization you believe could be there based on your observations, or a civilization that died in the interim. It might make more sense instead, for a civilization bored of being alone, to simply place unambiguous signs that any other civilizations who have done their science will know is a sign of tampering. Why spend energy contacting every possible star, when you can simply place a huge sign saying "We are here" or, at least, one saying "Take a closer look at this star, something interesting is going on"?That's pretty speculative of course, and there will very likely be a natural explanation, such as the island of stability. More study, as always, is needed, but there's no doubt we will learn something pretty cool.[H/T: Cool Worlds]

Former Joe Biden advisor Jamal Simmons did not respond well to former Mitch McConnell advisor Scott Jennings’s Tuesday question about whether he was comfortable with the news that Hunter Biden is sitting in on White House meetings as the two CNN commentators battled it out on Erin Burnett OutFront. However, all Simmons could do was deflect and falsely accuse Jennings of “yelling at me.” As Democratic angst builds and some begin to urge him to step aside, guest host Erica Hill asked Jennings, “Scott, what do you make of the calls that we've heard today?” Jennings responded by listing three reasons why he is stunned at Biden-related news, “Here's what I make of it. We've had—this is an amazing day. Number one, the New York Times reporting that he's lapsing in meetings. This is becoming more frequent. Number two, we found out today that a felon and a crack addict is now sitting in on White House senior staff meetings. And number three, the president is now, tonight, to his own donors, blaming a foreign trip that ended 12 days before the debate for his disastrous performance on Thursday.”     He added, “This is what you call a high-speed come apart. The White House is off the rails. The president has effectively admitted tonight that he is not up to both campaigning for president and being president. I don't know where we're going from here, but this has been a momentous day, and I'll be shocked if there aren't more Democrats who come out and say, "What are we doing? We are walking into disaster if we stick with this." Simmons followed up by trying to turn the Biden conversation back to Donald Trump, “Are we sure Scott wasn't talking about the criminal felon that had the secret documents and he was holding in his bathroom and Mar-a- Lago because there was a felon that we haven't talked about tonight where that's the case.” Jennings wasn’t having it, “Are you comfortable, Jamal? Are you comfortable with Hunter Biden running White House senior staff meeting? Do you think this is good? Do you think this is good?” Simmons didn’t have a good response, “Why are you yelling? Why are you yelling at me?” While Jennings may have raised his voice above a normal conversation level while pointing his finger at the camera, it is a wild exaggeration to claim he was yelling, “Come on, I'm not—I'm asking you, I'm asking you.” Trying to keep the conversation on topic, he added, “We're talking about Joe Biden, we're talking about Joe Biden tonight, who is admitting to his own donors, people in your party, that he can't both perform and campaign. And you want to talk about the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which is not going to come to trial before November. This is the sitting president. You worked for him. I want to know if you were in a senior staff meeting, would you want Hunter Biden looking over your shoulder? That's my question.” Simmons, again, dodged and deflected, “Here's what I want to know. I want to know if we've got somebody in the White House who's got the judgment to look out for our freedom, or somebody who was take our freedom away. And I think what most Americans know is that the MAGA Republicans, whether its Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene, are some of the ones who are running are in the business of taking freedoms away from women and other people in this country who are trying to live their lives. And that's not what they want. And that's the reason why I think that Trump is still going to be in trouble when you get down to Election Day.” It is a legitimate question. Why is the president’s convicted felon son taking part in official meetings with the only man in the country who has the power to pardon him? Here is a transcript for the July 2 show: CNN Erin Burnett OutFront 7/2/2024 7:11 PM ERICA HILL: Scott, what do you make of the calls that we've heard today? SCOTT JENNINGS: Unscripted long form events. Well, let's see, that's what a debate is. I mean, he had 90 minutes of an unscripted event the other night and it was a disaster. Here's what I make of it. We've had — this is an amazing day. Number one, the New York Times reporting that he's lapsing in meetings. This is becoming more frequent. Number two, we found out today that a felon and a crack addict is now sitting in on White House senior staff meetings. And number three, the president is now, tonight, to his own donors, blaming a foreign trip that ended 12 days before the debate for his disastrous performance on Thursday. This is what you call a high-speed come apart. The White House is off the rails. The president has effectively admitted tonight that he is not up to both campaigning for president and being president. I don't know where we're going from here, but this has been a momentous day, and I'll be shocked if there aren't more Democrats who come out and say, "what are we doing? We are walking into disaster if we stick with this." JAMAL SIMMONS: Are we sure Scott wasn't talking about the criminal felon that had the secret documents and he was holding in his bathroom and Mar-a- Lago because there was a felon that we haven't talked about tonight where that's the case. JENNINGS: Are you comfortable, Jamal? Are you comfortable with Hunter Biden running White House senior staff meeting? SIMMONS: Why are you yelling? JENNINGS: Do you think this is good? Do you think this is good? SIMMONS: Why are you yelling at me? JENNINGS: Come on, I'm not— I'm asking you, I'm asking you. SIMMONS: Listen, listen – JENNNINGS: We're talking about Joe Biden, we're talking about Joe Biden tonight, who is admitting to his own donors, people in your party, that he can't both perform and campaign. And you want to talk about the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which is not going to come to trial before November. This is the sitting president. You worked for him. I want to know if you were in a senior staff meeting, would you want Hunter Biden looking over your shoulder? That's my question. SIMMONS: Here's what I want to know. I want to know if we've got somebody in the White House who's got the judgment to look out for our freedom, or somebody who was take our freedom away. And I think what most Americans know is that the MAGA Republicans, whether its Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene, are some of the ones who are running are in the business of taking freedoms away from women and other people in this country who are trying to live their lives. And that's not what they want. And that's the reason why I think that Trump is still going to be in trouble when you get down to Election Day.

The news site Puck published a leaked memo Tuesday from Open Labs, a leftist research outfit that does polling for various Democratic groups, revealing that President Joe Biden's debate performance last week may have been the final nail in his political coffin. A poll conducted in the 72 hours following the debate found that 40% of respondents who voted for Biden in 2020 now think the Democratic incumbent should end his campaign, while 45% suggested he should stick with it. Just two months ago, pollsters found that only 25% of Biden 2020 supporters wanted him to step aside, while 62% wanted him to remain in the race. Swing voters also signaled that they felt Biden was finished, suggesting by margin of two to one that he should scuttle his campaign. According to Open Labs, the declines in Biden's vote share against former President Donald Trump in the 72 hours following the debate amounted to the "largest single-week drop since horse race tracking began in late 2021." That is especially bad news for Biden since his vote share was already four percentage points lower — and eight points lower on margin — than his winning vote share in 2020. "Underpinning the decline is an increase in already-high concerns about the President's age, and a growing split among Democrats about what should happen with his candidacy," said the memo. The research group found that 69% of voters were either very or somewhat concerned about Biden's age impacting the job that he is doing as president — representing an 8% increase since a pre-debate poll. The same was true of 45% of 2020 Biden voters, 68% of 2016 and 2020 swing voters, and 92% of 2020 Trump voters. 'Trump is now within striking distance in a variety of states that weren't considered campaign battlegrounds last week.' A closer look at key Electoral College states painted an even more dire picture for Biden. In a multi-candidate ballot, Biden suffered a margin drop of around 2% in every battleground state, such that now in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump leads Biden by over 7%. Prior to the debate, Trump only had a 5% lead. Trump leads Biden by 2.8% in New Hampshire, by 4.2% in Wisconsin, by 6.9% in Michigan, by 8.8% in Nevada, by 9.7% in Arizona, by 10.1% in Georgia, and by 10.6% in North Carolina. The poll also suggested Trump has gained a half-point advantage in New Mexico and Virginia. Biden's pre-debate leads in Colorado and Maine have also largely melted away, putting the race within roughly 2% in both. Puck's Peter Hamby, who indicated he received the Open Labs memo from an unnamed Democrat, wrote, "The most worrisome angle to all this is that Trump is now within striking distance in a variety of states that weren't considered campaign battlegrounds last week." Biden is not only hemorrhaging the support of voters but also favorability. Open Labs provided a line graph charting the share of respondents who answered "more favorable" in response to the question, "Would you say that what you've heard about Joe Biden in the last week makes you think more favorably of Joe Biden, less favorably of Joe Biden, or does it not make a difference?" While the "more favorable" line has been largely been trending downward since Biden's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the graph took a nosedive last week to an all-time low of 27%. "We saw similar magnitude drops in tracking during the Afghanistan withdrawal and classified documents case, but this is the lowest this metric has been since tracking began in 2021," said Open Labs. Some have suggested online that the Open Labs memo is a strategic effort to cultivate Republican complacency and suppress the vote. If, however, it has an anchorage in reality and Biden ultimately heeds his family's recommendation to stay in the race, then he might end up being swept away in an electoral landslide. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

What are the new The First Descendant codes? The looter shooter is officially here, and though it's free to play, you'll still need to work hard for the best gear if you hope to survive the alien invasion. Nexon's co-op RPG has plenty of The First Descendant characters, but you're going to need to jump through a lot of hoops to get them. That combined with getting the best weapons and gear, there's a lot to grind in The First Descendant, and though there are ways to get more The First Descendant Caliber, fortunately it looks like codes are on the way. Continue reading The First Descendant codes July 2024 MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The First Descendant system requirements, The First Descendant characters, The First Descendant crossplay

As Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree continues to dominate both the Steam charts and the general conversation, publisher Bandai Namco confirms a launch date for another RPG set in a beloved - albeit very different - world. Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream takes us on an alternate-reality tour of the in-universe MMORPG where characters have been thrown out of time and must work together to survive. Continue reading Elden Ring publisher dates new RPG based on beloved anime series MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best RPGs, Best co-op games, Best anime games

One incredible mechanic can make an entire game worthy of your time. The time loop of Outer Wilds, the social interaction of Dark Souls, and the titular portals of Portal are all incredible ideas pushed to their limit. A singular design objective is the centerpiece of the experience, letting everything else revolve around it. Middle-earth: Shadow of War’s phenomenal Nemesis system is exactly that, turning a solid open-world fantasy adventure into an unforgettable one - and it’s currently less than $3. Continue reading Brilliant, unique open world game Shadow of War is now just $3 MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Shadow of War review, Shadow of War PC performance review, Shadow of War release date

On July 4, 1964, Leicester Hemingway founded New Atlantis, a raft-turned-micronation intended to support marine life in the region