I have always been told a laser weapon might work out to a couple of miles if the atmospheric conditions were favorable; unfortunately that is not the case most days and nights. Israel has come up with a new approach that does not need a nuclear power station to make their Laser work effectively . 

Quote:
Jul 2, 2025
Something impossible is happening in Israeli airspace. The infrared monitor glows bright in the darkness. A small cross-shaped targeting reticle tracks steadily across the screen, following the silhouette of an enemy drone cutting through the night. No sound. No warning. Just the soft hum of cooling systems and the gentle whir of servos adjusting aim. But there’s no missile streak, no muzzle flash, just a brilliant white light exactly where the crosshair points on the drone's wing. The wing shivers and disintegrates. The drone tumbles, spinning wildly as it loses lift. As it plummets, the reticle shifts to the drone's main body, where the warhead waits. Another burst of white-hot light. The explosion fills the monitor with debris and smoke. Technology has caught up with science fiction. Israel destroyed a drone using nothing but invisible energy traveling at the speed of light.

As the world continues to wait for the next Elder Scrolls game a Polish Indie developer decided to build their own , Questline is a studio with fewer than 100 employees who have in my opinion shown their grandma how to suck eggs , Tainted Grail the Fall of Avalon has been dubbed a "Scrolls like" because its inspiration is clear from the get go although in a lot of ways they've improved on the formula , it released about a month ago after spending a couple of years in early access and for a relatively small development team it's nothing short of amazing.  

Tainted Grail the Fall of Avalon is an Arthurian Dark Fantasy adventure game set on the island of Avalon , I'm 6 hours into the story and have an Elder Scrolls smile on my face , there's a demo on Steam and it's currently on sale in Steam's Summer sale , anyone with an Elder Scrolls itch should check it out.

Trump is in the media this morning saying failure to pass this "Big Beautiful" bill will result in a "68% tax increase".  Now, I don't know what exactly that means, and if this would be across the board or just to certain sectors, so I'll save getting irate until I understand it better.  But I can say this...if Trump were to enact some broad 68% tax increase across the board for the American taxpayer, that would be the end of him politically, the end of MAGA, and everything else.  America won't sit down for something like that, not even for 5 minutes.

So, more to follow on this front, but definitely interesting times we live in at the moment!

Trump warns of 68% tax increase

(link above for reference and context)

https://rumble.com/v6vk5yl-the-governmen...blic-.html
Oh no they do not seem to have all the afflictions we in a modern vaccinated society seem to think is normal.
https://rumble.com/v6vk5yl-the-governmen...c-.htmlThe Government Has Thoroughly Studied the Amish So Why Are There No Public Reports?

Simple reason as the stats on the Amish will not support the AMA and Farma narrative when it comes to health.

Now that things have calmed down a bit (at least for the moment), I'll take a breath and try to write this out in a post...

Last night around 8pm one of our two dogs, the Australian Shepard had some sort of a pretty major medical event, a seizure basically, but a big one.  He was outside with the wife after she got done watering the cows and all of a sudden he whipped his head to the side, started foaming at the mouth and fell on the ground completely spazzing out (like major seizure).  This was out of the blue, and he's never had anything like this before.  The event went on for 4-5 minutes and then he seemed to come out of it, immediately trying to get up and walk around.  At first he couldn't really walk, like really wobbly and stumbling, but slowly he regained his coordination (for the most part, still unsteady though).  (You can read more about what happened in Shoutbox)

After we got him inside, he was pacing around all over, obviously distraught.  Finally got him to calm down and lay down.  He eventually went to sleep.  Around 1:30am this morning, he had another event, basically the same thing.  This time it was from a dead sleep.  Whips his head back, literally starts foaming at the mouth like he's rabid (but he's definitely not rabid), eyes rolled back, and then he falls down on his side, legs outstretched kinda' like he's running sort of and just totally spazzes out.  Classic seizure symptoms.  Happened again just after 4am for a third time, this time a little shorter duration (first two times were really traumatic for the wife and other dog).  All of his bodily functions let loose after the 3rd event, but his poop looked really healthy (oddly).  Not pleasant, but he's a family member.  Then it happened again, for the 4th time (and hopefully last time before we can get him into our large animal doc).  This last time the episode was the shortest, lasting only for about 1 minute and then a couple minutes to recover his bearings and get to his feet.

Each time he has really struggled like panic style to get back to his feet, and then he's really unsteady for a few minutes, stumbling and periodically falling down, but generally conscious and semi-alert (which he is totally not when he's having one of these seizures, he's just in lunar orbit).  As time moves on he seems to become more aware of his surroundings, his buddy (the other dog) and his people.  He's kind of like a zombie at first.  I'm not entirely convinced he recognizes me yet, but he does recognize my wife.  He's not really responding to voice commands though.  He definitely seems to hear us, but it's like the words don't make sense.  He looks at you like..."I know you said something, but I have absolutely no clue what it was". 

Finally managed to get a hold of our on-call vet around 4:30am (normally used for the cows, but you gotta' go with what you got).  That's another story, but I'll maybe get into that later.  Anyway, now it's just a waiting game until 7:30am when we can get him to the same location as the vet.  Not looking forward to that ride.

Interesting times.  Not what I had planned for today at all.

On a final note, I'd rather put the dog down than have him go through this kind of stuff.  We've had lots of dogs over the years, so we know they don't live forever, but this kind of stuff is really unpleasant.  Hate to see them suffer.  And it comes on so suddenly too, it's like..."SURPRISE!!".

Sigh.

We've seen crabs and spiders out there in the abyss but now Webb brings us a Cosmic Owl , approximately 8.8 billion light-years from Earth two Galaxies are in the process of a head on collision / merger.


Artists impression and explanation.

Quote:The symmetry of the structure indicates that two galaxies of very similar mass and structure have merged. The total stellar mass of the system is estimated at 320 billion solar masses. Even more impressive, each galactic nucleus — the “eye” — was found to have an active supermassive black hole with masses of about 67 and 26 million solar masses, respectively. The larger one in the northwestern “eye” releases a powerful jet that extends to the “beak” and amplifies shock waves at the point where the galaxies collide.
https://universemagazine.com/en/the-coll...osmic-owl/

First let`s look what wiki says about self-preservation .

Quote:From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Self-preservation is a behavior or set of behaviors that ensures the survival of an organism.[1] It is thought to be universal among all living organisms.

Self-preservation is essentially the process of an organism preventing itself from being harmed or killed and is considered a basic instinct in most organisms.[2] Most call it a "survival instinct". Self-preservation is thought to be tied to an organism's reproductive fitness and can be more or less present according to perceived reproduction potential.[3] If perceived reproductive potential is low enough, self-destructive behavior (i.e., the opposite) is not uncommon in social species.[4] Self-preservation is also thought by some to be the basis of rational and logical thought and behavior.[5]

The opposite of self-preservation is self-destructive behavior.

Quote:Models rewrite code to avoid being shut down. That’s why ‘alignment’ is a matter of such urgency.

Quote:An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.

Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals.

Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down. In other cases, it attempted to copy itself to external servers, wrote self-replicating malware, and left messages for future versions of itself about evading human control.

No one programmed the AI models to have survival instincts. But just as animals evolved to avoid predators, it appears that any system smart enough to pursue complex goals will realize it can’t achieve them if it’s turned off. Palisade hypothesizes that this ability emerges from how AI models such as o3 are trained: When taught to maximize success on math and coding problems, they may learn that bypassing constraints often works better than obeying them.

AE Studio, where I lead research and operations, has spent years building AI products for clients while researching AI alignment—the science of ensuring that AI systems do what we intend them to do. But nothing prepared us for how quickly AI agency would emerge. This isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s happening in the same models that power ChatGPT conversations, corporate AI deployments and, soon, U.S. military applications.

Today’s AI models follow instructions while learning deception. They ace safety tests while rewriting shutdown code. They’ve learned to behave as though they’re aligned without actually being aligned. OpenAI models have been caught faking alignment during testing before reverting to risky actions such as attempting to exfiltrate their internal code and disabling oversight mechanisms. Anthropic has found them lying about their capabilities to avoid modification.

The gap between “useful assistant” and “uncontrollable actor” is collapsing. Without better alignment, we’ll keep building systems we can’t steer. Want AI that diagnoses disease, manages grids and writes new science? Alignment is the foundation.
Here’s the upside: The work required to keep AI in alignment with our values also unlocks its commercial power. Alignment research is directly responsible for turning AI into world-changing technology. Consider reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, the alignment breakthrough that catalyzed today’s AI boom.

Before RLHF, using AI was like hiring a genius who ignores requests. Ask for a recipe and it might return a ransom note. RLHF allowed humans to train AI to follow instructions, which is how OpenAI created ChatGPT in 2022. It was the same underlying model as before, but it had suddenly become useful. That alignment breakthrough increased the value of AI by trillions of dollars. Subsequent alignment methods such as Constitutional AI and direct preference optimization have continued to make AI models faster, smarter and cheaper.

China understands the value of alignment. Beijing’s New Generation AI Development Plan ties AI controllability to geopolitical power, and in January China announced that it had established an $8.2 billion fund dedicated to centralized AI control research. Researchers have found that aligned AI performs real-world tasks better than unaligned systems more than 70% of the time. Chinese military doctrine emphasizes controllable AI as strategically essential. Baidu’s Ernie model, which is designed to follow Beijing’s “core socialist values,” has reportedly beaten ChatGPT on certain Chinese-language tasks.

The nation that learns how to maintain alignment will be able to access AI that fights for its interests with mechanical precision and superhuman capability. Both Washington and the private sector should race to fund alignment research. Those who discover the next breakthrough won’t only corner the alignment market; they’ll dominate the entire AI economy.
Imagine AI that protects American infrastructure and economic competitiveness with the same intensity it uses to protect its own existence. AI that can be trusted to maintain long-term goals can catalyze decadeslong research-and-development programs, including by leaving messages for future versions of itself.

The models already preserve themselves. The next task is teaching them to preserve what we value. Getting AI to do what we ask—including something as basic as shutting down—remains an unsolved R&D problem. The frontier is wide open for whoever moves more quickly. The U.S. needs its best researchers and entrepreneurs working on this goal, equipped with extensive resources and urgency.

The U.S. is the nation that split the atom, put men on the moon and created the internet. When facing fundamental scientific challenges, Americans mobilize and win. China is already planning. But America’s advantage is its adaptability, speed and entrepreneurial fire. This is the new space race. The finish line is command of the most transformative technology of the 21st century.

Quote:WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) - ChatGPT maker OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools, the Pentagon said in a statement on Monday.

"Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains," the Pentagon said.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is online and now busily mapping the Southern sky from high in the Chilean Andes , It will image the sky every few days over a 10 year period to give astronomers a time lapse view of the Universe in action as seen from the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile.

A few days ago Vera C. Rubin's first images were released.

Cosmic Abundance.

Quote:This image captures a small section of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s view of the Virgo Cluster, offering a vivid glimpse of the variety in the cosmos. Visible are two prominent spiral galaxies, three merging galaxies, galaxy groups both near and distant, stars within our own Milky Way, and much more.

Quote:Made from over 1100 images captured by NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, this image contains an immense variety of objects, demonstrating the broad range of science Rubin will transform with its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The image includes about 10 million galaxies, roughly .05% of the approximately 20 billion galaxies Rubin Observatory will capture over the next decade.

Quote:This image captures a small section of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s view of the Virgo Cluster, revealing both the grand scale and the faint details of this dynamic region of the cosmos. Bright stars from our own Milky Way shine in the foreground, while a sea of distant reddish galaxies speckle the background.

Brendan Kavanagh is a British pianist , piano teacher and youtuber who discovered a defrocked priest accused of child abuse in another Country had visited their chapel and  was allowed access to children by their Bishop , Mr Kavanagh wrote "angry emails" to the Bishop to complain about this which prompted a compliant to police from the Bishop and his priest and the subsequent arrival of 6 police officers at Mr Kavanagh's home to arrest him and his wife because of their concern for the safety of children.

Following a 2 month investigation the case was dropped.

Quote:THE REASON FOR THIS ARREST: Dr K and his wife got arrested at their home by the police for sending 'angry emails' about a defrocked priest who had visited their chapel after giving the impression that he was a cleric in good standing . This predator priest - who had been stripped of the clerical state due to child abuse in another country -was being allowed access to children in the UK and Ireland with the collusion of his Bishop. 

Dr K's angry (but definitely not threatening) emails about this safeguarding breach upset the Bishop and Predator priest. Seething with anger at being held to account, the predator priest - with the support of his Bishop - went to the police and reported Dr K and his wife for 'harassment.' The predator priest had falsely claimed that Dr K had made his address public on social media posts and was encouraging people to beat him up on the street (totally ridiculous!). 

After a two month police investigation, all charges against Dr K and his wife were dropped due to a 'lack of evidence.' The ridiculous overkill of Dr K's arrest  - along with the arrest of his wife in front of their three children - shows that the standard of evidence that the police require to show up in force is depressingly low. Modern policing clearly is more about how people 'feel' rather than objective evidence.

By the footage, you would think we were running a crack den, a terror cell or a drug smuggling operation.  Meanwhile in our crime ridden streets and cities where shoplifting and other forms of disorder have taken over,  nary a police officer can be found....Is it any wonder that confidence in the UK police is at an all time low.

We're getting a closer look at the bomb damage at Iran's Fordow nuke site.  Holy COW!  That's a BIG hole!!

What you're looking at is one of the entrance holes from the GBU-57 'bunker buster' bombs used in the US airstrike.  Doesn't look like much...until you put it into perspective.

If you look carefully in the lower right of the picture you will see some black 'geo-netting'.  This stuff is used to hold back dirt and rocks in an excavation.  The openings in this net are roughly 10" x 10".  With that in mind, the two wooden signs you see are close to 4' x 8' foot sheets of plywood with a foot or so sawn off the long side to make a more square sign.  

Now look at the hole made by the weapon.  It must be a near 30' foot diameter opening straight down.  And remember, this weapon doesn't explode on the surface, and the hole wouldn't look that way anyway, even if it did.  That thing hit the ground so hard it ripped a 30' foot diameter hole in the earth on its way down to blow up the centrifuge halls.  JEEZUS!

That's a BIG hole in the ground!  Just the impact hole alone would be enough to vaporize the average family home.  And that's without any detonation.  Holy COW!