Not True. Per Grok: No, it is not true.The video does not show a motorcycle rally heading to Dearborn, Michigan. It is footage of Brazil’s Insanos MC “Bonde Pela Vida” (6th edition) charity convoy near São Paulo on or around July 4, 2026. Riders traveled highways (including the…
I’m officially a resident of Abu Dhabi, having moved my family here last week from Ireland.
Of the many reasons we moved, #1 is:
I am determined to give my kids the best possible education.
So when I tell you I am obsessed with the topic of today’s Diary – how AI has triggered the biggest disruption to education since the printing press – I’m not just saying it. I’m living it!
I loathed school. For me, one-size-fits-all classrooms ground the joy out of learning. I could understand making kids suffer through this if it were producing great results.
It is not.
In the US, math scores have been falling since 2013. Reading scores have hit their lowest levels since 1992. More 8th graders than ever before can barely read.
This is an emergency.
We’ve long known how to give kids a world-class education. In 1984, University of Chicago professor Benjamin Bloom confirmed what aristocrats knew for centuries: the best way to teach is with a dedicated, one-on-one tutor who can personally tailor each lesson. Kinda like a parent, before TV.
Bloom found just seven weeks of personalized tutoring could transform C students into straight-A students. From average to exceptional.
Critically, almost any student had the potential to achieve top grades. But very few parents can afford personal tutors. So conveyor-belt schools were the best we could do. Until now.
What happens when the cost of a personal tutor falls to almost zero? We’re about to find out.
A quick story from ROS co-founder Dan Steinhart about his 7-year-old son:
1st grade seemed to be going well.Jack was in the highest reading group all year. Then we got his test scores. Math was good, reading was bad. He was reading at the level of an early Kindergarten student.
My first instinct was to call the teacher. Instead I did what a good Rational Optimist should and looked for solutions. I tried out four different AI reading programs and settled on one called Ello.
Jack reads aloud with it for 20 minutes every morning on an iPad. It listens to him, gently corrects his mistakes, and only moves ahead once he’s mastered a concept. I do it with him when I can, but I don’t have to. It’s gamified, rewarding him with tokens for completing a lesson, so he loves it.
In seven weeks, he has jumped 1.5 grades in reading level.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
[Regnum] Typhoon Dolphin has made landfall in Japan and is heading toward China. Al Jazeera reported this on August 8.
Severe weather struck Japan's southern island of Okinawa, injuring five people and knocking out power to 14,000 buildings.
The Dolphin is currently heading toward eastern China. Local authorities have already closed ports, schools, and tourist sites, the agency clarified.
The typhoon arrived amid record-breaking heat waves in East Asia. It formed in late July over the open waters of the central Pacific Ocean. Initially moving at 45 km/h, it traveled several thousand kilometers across the Pacific Ocean. During this time, Dolphin strengthened to a tropical storm, and then to a severe tropical storm. It became a very strong typhoon on July 28.
In August, abnormal heat waves swept across South Korea and Japan. In Yangsan, South Korea, the temperature reached 42.5°C on August 2nd —a century-long record for the peninsula (since 1904). In Daegu, it reached 40.9°C on August 3rd—also a record since 1942.
In Japan, the heat reached Kumamoto Prefecture: on August 3, the temperature there exceeded 40 °C (40.3 °C) for the first time in recorded history.
#1
Watch for major flooding in China as their infrastructure for dealing with floods are either fake, broken or plain badly designed and lots of people will die because of it.
#5
Typhoon Dolphin did NOT make landfall in Japan. It did have a large windfield and Japan got some pretty strong winds and some heavy rains but not the storm surge or the super torrential rain.
The center of the storm will be in Hubai province, likely below typhoon strength, in a few days and will produce a lot of rain in the three gorge rivershed.
I'm not familiar with the details of the hydrology of that area but obviously there are a going to be a lot of problems.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
08/09/2026 23:22 Comments ||
Top||
[IntelliNews] China's installed power generation capacity has passed 4 terawatts (TW), the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on June 25 - making it the first country to reach the milestone.
It took eight years for China's capacity to grow from 1TW to 2TW, four years and four months to reach 3TW, and less than two years to add the fourth terawatt, NEA data show. The 4.01bn-kilowatt total is about 1.7 times the combined installed capacity of the EU and the US, and equal to nearly 30% of the world's total, according to Xinhua.
Non-fossil sources - nuclear, hydro, wind and solar - accounted for 62% of China's installed capacity by the end of May, up from 25% in 2010, while renewables' own share climbed from 24% to 61% over the same period, the NEA said. “The milestone will not only help safeguard China's energy security, but also accelerate the green, low-carbon transition and strengthen scientific and technological self-reliance,” said Yang Kun, executive vice chairman of the China Electricity Council.
The scale is the point. China is building out its grid faster than any economy in history has built anything comparable, and it is doing so as part of a deliberate push to become the world's first Electrostate - a country whose economic and strategic weight rests on electrons rather than barrels. That push sits alongside, but is distinct from, China's parallel rise as the world's green energy champion, the two reinforcing rather than substituting for one another.
The capacity milestone landed the same day China's economic planners published a new five-year roadmap for how they intend to keep widening the lead. The 15th Five-Year Plan for Building a New Energy System, issued jointly by the National Development and Reform Commission and the NEA, targets an electrification rate - the share of final energy consumption delivered as electricity - rising from 30% in 2025 to 35% by 2030, energy analyst Dave Jones (@CleanPowerDave) noted on X.
“China already has one of the most electrified energy economies in the world,” Jones wrote, adding that the five-percentage-point rise planned for 2025-2030 is faster than the four-point increase recorded between 2020 and 2025, when the rate stood at 25.9%. Reaching 35% by 2030 would put China five years ahead of the 35%-by-2035 global electrification target set out in the COP31 Action Agenda, Jones said, since matching that global pace would require adding only 1.3 percentage points a year against the 1.0-point annual pace China's own plan implies.
The plan's sectoral detail, still to be published in full, is expected to cover an expansion of heat-pump deployment, a doubling of EV charging infrastructure to 40mn units by 2030, new heavy-truck refuelling and recharging corridors along major freight routes, and a push to electrify inland shipping, Jones said. The published plan itself sets non-fossil energy at 25% of total energy consumption by 2030, with wind and solar exceeding half of installed power capacity and non-fossil sources supplying half of all generation. Pumped-storage hydropower capacity is targeted to reach about 160 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 and new-type energy storage 300GW, while renewable hydrogen production is set to hit 2mn tonnes.
A less-noticed feature of the plan is its treatment of the country's fleet of electric vehicles as a grid asset in its own right: Beijing wants the aggregated, adjustable charging capacity available from vehicle-grid interaction to reach about 50GW by 2030, alongside a separate build-out of virtual power plants with more than 50GW of regulating capacity. Between them, the EV fleet and the grid it feeds are meant to absorb the swings that come with putting more wind and solar onto the system.
That electrification drive is being matched by an equally rapid expansion of nuclear power.
BEIJING'S NUCLEAR BUILDING SPREE
China currently has 30 to 35 nuclear reactors under construction, roughly half of the 60 to 70 under construction worldwide, energy analyst Peter Clack (@PeterDClack) wrote on X, with plans to reach 150 reactors and 150-200GW of capacity by 2035. The country's 58 operational reactors supply about 5% of its electricity, Clack said, even as construction of new coal plants continues, albeit at a slower pace than the six a month China was adding until recently.
That build-out has already delivered a symbolic milestone: China's installed nuclear generating capacity has overtaken France's for the first time, reaching 63.98GW against France's 63GW, according to World Nuclear Association figures reported by Newsbase - putting China second globally behind the US's 96.9GW. Beijing's State Council approved eight more reactors in late July: three pairs of Hualong One (HPR1000) units and two Guohe One (CAP1400) units at a new plant in Laiyang, Shandong province. China National Nuclear Corp said 10 Hualong One units are already in commercial operation, with 37 more approved for construction.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Experimental studies continue to confirm the effectiveness of information inoculation, also known as pre-debunking. They emphasize that typical methods, such as fact-checking and myth-debunking, have a limited impact on people's susceptibility to cognitive manipulation. Evidence has shown that various methods of pre-debunking misinformation are significantly more effective.
One online experiment compared the effectiveness of psychological inoculation with more traditional "false labeling" methods in protecting against misinformation on social media.
The study used real misinformation posts in a simulated social media environment and measured engagement. It found that both methods reduced engagement with the misinformation, but inoculation was more effective. It was concluded that the immunity provided by inoculation is robust to variations in individual cognitive processing of information, suggesting its overall effectiveness compared to false labeling.
Another study examined how psychological inoculation can reduce susceptibility to misinformation in large networks of rational agents, going beyond individual-level effects and considering dynamic online systems. Using an agent-based model, the study found that the effectiveness of inoculation is time-dependent. It highlighted the importance of pre-conditioning by influencing users' critical thresholds before their beliefs become entrenched and develop into closed "echo chambers." It also suggested that exploiting tipping point dynamics can lead to a herd immunity effect and that inoculation processes do not necessarily increase the rate of false positive rejections of credible information.
These results confirmed the robustness of inoculation in combating misinformation in online environments. Finally, one social experiment used five short videos to familiarize people with common manipulation techniques (emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and personal attacks). Seven pre-registered studies, including a large-scale YouTube field experiment, found that these videos significantly improved the recognition of manipulation techniques, increased confidence, improved the ability to discern trustworthy content, and enhanced the effectiveness of information dissemination decisions.
The results demonstrated the intervention's reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness in real-world settings, although limitations include the untested long-term effectiveness.
If translated into simple Russian - work on preemptive disinformation is more effective than reactive work on the tails, while the enemy prepares the next disinformation in streaming mode.
#1
This explains Mamdani's weird obsession with "free child-care" for three-year-olds. Where the caregivers (selected Mamdani's minions) will inculcate Hamasnik playbook. Already do it in Philadelphia, Dearborn, elsewhere. Parents bypassed completely. All paid for by the taxpayer.
#2
Imagine if your 3-year-old's caregiver ... every hour of every day for a year ... had been hired by folks who openly praise October 7th, like Mamdani's wife.
The Innovation Nation just keeps spitting them out like watermelon seeds.
[IntelliNews] US-headquartered Visa has agreed to acquire Israeli digital fraud prevention company BioCatch for $2.4bn in cash, the companies announced in joint press statements.
The latest tech deal out of Tel Aviv is one of the largest deals in Israeli history and the second time the company has changed hands in just over a year, and has shown that large deals are still being conducted despite regional tensions.
BioCatch, led by CEO Gadi Mazor, a former OurCrowd partner, has developed behavioural biometrics technology that identifies users based on biological parameters including mouse movements and individual browsing patterns.
He said BioCatch would continue operating independently within Visa's value-added services division, retaining its management structure and existing banking relationships. "The company isn't going away," he said in the announcement.
“We will continue to serve the same financial institutions as we have always done: with market-leading technologies and service from a team of solution engineers, threat analysts, conflict managers and global consultants, all working in close collaboration with banking teams," Mazor added.
“BioCatch will help our clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment. This acquisition is part of our strategy to help clients prevent cyber threats upstream, building trust into every transaction,” said Andrew Torre, president of value-added services at Visa.
The company serves over 350 banks, including 100 of the world's largest, protecting 1.8bn devices and 760mn users globally. It reported 43% growth in annual recurring revenue in 2025 and crossed $100mn ARR at the end of 2023, while also reaching EBITDA profitability.
The acquisition marks a significant uplift from BioCatch's previous valuation. In March 2024, Permira acquired a 57% controlling stake at a $1.3bn valuation, with Bain Capital and Maverick Ventures selling $750mn in shares as part of that transaction.
The Visa deal values the company at $2.4bn, an increase of over $1bn in 15 months. The company has raised $115mn in total from investors including OurCrowd, Maverick Ventures, Bloomberg Capital and Elroy Capital, now controlled by BlackRock. It employs 400 people.
The deal extends Visa's push into fraud prevention infrastructure as financial crime losses continue to mount globally.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
