Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy has had enough of America’s highways being treated like social-justice canvases.
According to the directive issued this week to every governor in the nation, the Trump-appointed cabinet official ordered states to scrub their roads, intersections, and crosswalks of “political messages or artwork,” singling out rainbow-themed crosswalks as prime offenders.
“Roads are for safety, not political messages or artwork. Today I am calling on governors in every state to ensure that roadways, intersections, and crosswalks are kept free of distractions,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy.
“Far too many Americans die each year to traffic fatalities to take our eye off the ball. USDOT stands ready to help communities across the country make their roads safer and easier to navigate.”
Safety communication is always better when it is unambiguous, straight to the point, universally understood and is not distracting. Based on this reasoning alone, it is right to go back to standard crosswalks everyone understands. More pedestrians are hit by motor vehicles than most people realize. If even one person’s leg is saved by this directive, it’s worth it. And, you can be sure lives will be saved. ABN
Very strong indication Iran has accepted a new position in the Middle East. This is a good sign and shows serious fighting is probably over across the region.
The GCC and others will become the collective regional hegemon, with some sort of US presence on the sidelines.
Israel has also accepted a new position and appears to have entirely abandoned their zany Jewish Supremist fantasy of a ‘Greater Israel’ ruling over everyone else.
Trump appears to have brokered the deal of the Century.
Now, onto the Russia-Europe-USA alliance that will cement control of the Northern Hemisphere. If Trump accomplishes that, it will be of even greater importance than what is happening in the ME.
Top of the World nations have much more in common than not and all of them are fully capable of complex cooperation.
I am talking about Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Canada and others joining a solid cultural and economic alliance with USA, Russia and Europe. ABN
Following the cessation of Iranian-Israeli hostilities in a ceasefire June 24, 11 days after they had been initiated, speculation has continued to grow regarding how Iran may respond to a possible new wave of attacks on its territory.
Prior Iranian strikes on Israeli targets made use of a wide range of missiles, from the lower end Shahab-3 which began to enter service in the late 1990s, to the solid fueled Fattah which uses a hypersonic glide vehicle for guidance.
While Iran’s ballistic missile development has for decades relied heavily on components and technology transfers from North Korea, the country has also procured a small number of North Korean missiles ‘off the shelf’.
Although the vast majority of these procurements were short ranged Hwasong-5 and Hwasong-6 models sold during the 1980s and 1990s, a small number of Hwasong-10 missiles were also reportedly transferred. When acquired in the mid-2000s, they were by far the most capable in the Iranian arsenal.
Hwasong-10 Ballistic Missile on Parade
U.S. and South Korean intelligence reported the Hwasong-10’s entry into service in 2006, after reports in January that year indicated that it had been flight tested in Iran under North Korean supervision. These exports were a particularly sensitive issue at a time when a Western attack on Iran was under consideration.
The disgraced televangelist built his career on an undeniable talent. His downfall contributed to a major shift in how Americans viewed religious leaders.
THE DEATH THIS WEEK OF JIMMY SWAGGART at the age of 90 brings to an end one of the most controversial and remarkable careers in recent American religious life. For younger Americans, Swaggart’s name might not mean anything; others might recall blurry footage of a weeping preacher confessing, “I have sinned.” And sin he did, but in a time when Americans have become accustomed to seeing headlines about sex scandals involving religious leaders, it’s hard to convey just how consequential his indiscretions seemed when they were first reported.
The story broke in 1988 and caused an immediate media earthquake. The ground shook because Swaggart had fallen from a great height: He was, for a time, one of the most powerful religious voices in America, commanding a global television ministry, shaping conservative politics, and presenting himself as a moral compass to millions.
One of the challenges when it comes to properly evaluating Swaggart as a public figure is that nowadays we are not inclined to imagine a televangelist as a figure inherently worthy of any real respect. But the man’s own scandals are one of the reasons for that. When Swaggart’s resonant voice first started being heard in living rooms across the country, TV preachers occupied a very different place in the American imagination than they do today.
Swaggart emerged from the rural Pentecostal world of midcentury Louisiana, where fervent faith and musical flair often went hand in hand. His family background offered intimations of his later path: His cousins, rock-and-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer Mickey Gilley, both had the signature family blend of raw talent and unruly impulse. But while they chased fame across beer-soaked honky-tonk stages, Swaggart was drawn to a different kind of spectacle: revivals.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has signed a waiver for the rapid construction of around 17 miles of waterborne barrier in Texas. The barrier will be built in the Rio Grande River in Cameron County, Texas, within the U.S. Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, to help combat human and drug traffickers.
Addressing a capability gap in waterways along the Southwest border, CBP has identified the need for waterborne barriers to combat drug smuggling, human trafficking, and other illegal activities. These barriers are also intended to create safer conditions for patrolling agents and deter illegal crossings through hazardous waterways.
The Secretary’s waiver authority, granted under Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, allows DHS to bypass certain legal requirements, including environmental laws, to expedite the construction of these physical barriers and roads.
Polls today show a majority of Americans want all illegal aliens deported quickly. For decades, polls have shown the vast majority of Americans want no illegal immigration and also less legal immigration. ABN
Group said to want stronger guarantees of permanent end to war as Netanyahu prepares to meet Trump in US
Hamas said it had responded on Friday in “a positive spirit” to a US-brokered Gaza ceasefire proposal and was prepared to enter into talks on implementing the deal which envisages a release of hostages and negotiations on ending the conflict.
US president Donald Trump earlier announced a “final proposal” for a 60-day ceasefire in the nearly 21-month-old war between Israel and Hamas, stating he anticipated a reply from the parties in coming hours.
On Friday evening Hamas wrote on its official website: “The movement has delivered its response to the brotherly mediators, which was characterized by a positive spirit. Hamas is fully prepared, with all seriousness, to immediately enter a new round of negotiations on the mechanism for implementing this framework.”
For at least six decades, neuroscientists have been arguing over a big, foundational question: Do adult brains make new neurons? This process of “neurogenesis” had been shown in other adult animals, but its evidence in humans was circumstantial—until now. Using a new technique, scientists have found newly formed neurons in the brains of adults as old as age 78—and, for the first time, have identified the other brain cells that birthed them.
The results, published on Thursday in Science, are the first signs that cells with the capacity to turn into neurons, called neural precursor cells, exist in adult human brains. “Now we have very strong evidence that the whole process is there in humans, from the precursor cells to the immature neurons,” says Gerd Kempermann, a neurobiologist at the Dresden University of Technology, who was not involved in the study.
Weber’s law, also called Weber-Fechner law, historically important psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. It has been shown not to hold for extremes of stimulation. (Weber’s Law)
Hang in with this, it’s interesting.
About 200 years ago, the German physician Ernst Heinrich Weber made a seemingly innocuous observation which led to the birth of the discipline of Psychophysics – the science relating physical stimuli in the world and the sensations they evoke in the mind of a subject. Weber asked subjects to say which of two slightly different weights was heavier. From these experiments , he discovered that the probability that a subject will make the right choice only depends on the ratio between the weights.
For instance, if a subject is correct 75% of the time when comparing a weight of 1 Kg and a weight of 1.1 Kg, then she will also be correct 75% of the time when comparing two weights of 2 and 2.2 Kg – or, in general, any pair of weights where one is 10% heavier than the other. This simple but precise rule opened the door to the quantification of behavior in terms of mathematical ‘laws’. (NEUROSCIENTISTS MAKE MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN 200-YEAR-OLD PUZZLE)
What’s new today is Time–Intensity Equivalence in Discrimination (TIED):
We investigated Weber’s law by training rats to discriminate the relative intensity of sounds at the two ears at various absolute levels. These experiments revealed the existence of a psychophysical regularity, which we term time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), describing how reaction times change as a function of absolute level. (The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law)
Simply stated TIED says that the intensity of the stimulus determines the time it takes to “just notice” a change in it and that that scales linearaly as intensity changes up or down. For example, changes in louder sounds are noticed quicker than proportionally equal changes in quieter sounds and this can be scaled mathematically.
TIED is a new theory and needs more research, but whether it works out perfectly or not, I think it shows something very important about our individual and shared subjective perceptions of words, gestures, meanings, intentions, implications, and so on including all semiotics.
At present, we do not have machines that can measure our subjective perceptions, but we can surely feel them. And with training, we can also decently calibrate them.
Most of us can already vaguely talk about our subjective perceptions of each other, but few of us know how to do that with the precision of Weber’s Law or TIED. This is because we are all unique and we all react uniquely to each other. On top of that, few are able to employ language efficiently enough to capture significant detail when describing subjective responses or impressions.
FIML provides a very useful method for isolating and calibrating individual, idiosyncratic subjective perceptions.
Consistent, repeated use of FIML gradually recalibrates and reorganizes the entire psychologies of both partners.
FIML has virtually no content.. FIML is a method, and as such it allows partners to gradually identify, isolate, measure, and reorganize their entire body of psychological data, however they construe it.
American Buddhist Net 