Quote:A migratory bird just shattered world records — flying 8,425 miles (13,560 km) NON-STOP across the Pacific without landing once.

The bar-tailed godwit doesn’t stop to eat, drink, or sleep during its migration across the Pacific Ocean. Its journey from Alaska to Australia takes roughly 11 days of continuous flight, covering over 13,000 kilometers through storms, headwinds, and open ocean with zero land beneath it the entire time.

Before departure, it does something almost surgical to its own body. It shrinks its digestive organs down to almost nothing, converting the stomach, intestines, and liver into raw fuel. The bird essentially eats its own gut to make room for fat reserves that will power its wings for nearly two weeks straight.

The brain doesn’t fully sleep either. Half of it stays active while the other half rests, alternating in shifts mid-flight at altitude over the open Pacific. The godwit is simultaneously unconscious and navigating with magnetic field sensitivity that no human instrument in the 18th century could replicate.

What makes this genuinely staggering beyond the physical record is the navigational precision involved. The bird leaves Alaska and arrives in New Zealand with accuracy that would embarrass early GPS systems. It reads Earth’s magnetic field, atmospheric pressure gradients, star positions, and potentially quantum-level compass mechanisms inside its eye that literally let it see magnetic field lines overlaid on its visual field.

Evolution spent millions of years building an aerospace navigation system inside a 300 gram animal.

Holy smoke, at first glance a primary outcome like that might seem to be Vance's midnight max dream. But no one actually knows that he can attract the same eccentric independents and disaffected Democrats that Trump garners to acquire an edge. After all, the latter had been courting those peeved proles for decades, whereas Vance is just another untested GOP member at the art. Other Republicans could easily give up due to the clumsy results or unfamiliar posturing and reflexively revert to the old pre-populism ways of the party.
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Kamala Harris gets boost on potential presidential bid
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...6cb7&ei=37

INTRO: Former Vice President Kamala Harris is receiving renewed attention as a potential 2028 presidential contender, as new polling and analysis suggest that Democratic voters may be more receptive to a pragmatic, center-leaning figure than the party’s public image or internal rhetoric often implies.

A recent survey analysis published by the Manhattan Institute found that the Democratic coalition is significantly more moderate and internally divided, with the party’s largest bloc made up of voters who favor a more “normal,” middle‑of‑the‑road governing approach.

Harris recently topped a poll of potential Democratic Primary candidates, with Democratic primary voters getting 23 percent, followed by Gavin Newsom at 20 percent, according to the Manhattan Institute.

On issues ranging from immigration and crime to education and social policy, respondents often favored incremental or centrist positions over more ideologically rigid ones. Analysts behind the survey argued that the party’s median voter is closer to the center than commonly portrayed, a dynamic that could benefit a candidate with broad name recognition and establishment credibility.

The findings come as Harris remains competitive-or gains ground-in early polling of potential Democratic presidential candidates, fueling speculation about a possible comeback bid.

This environment may play to Harris’s advantage. Despite her 2024 loss to President Donald Trump, Harris has remained a prominent national figure through a high‑profile memoir release, a nationwide book tour, and continued engagement with Democratic audiences.

Polling has shown Harris either leading or closely trailing other top Democratic figures, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, in early 2028 primary matchups... (MORE- details)

People forget that Terrence's brother Dennis lives on... Video at bottom.

Interview with Andrew Gallimore. Play podcast or read transcript in link below.

Exploring the DMT Realm and the Nature of Reality
https://mckenna.academy/mka-podcast/andr...f-reality/

INTRO: Dr. Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, chemical pharmacologist, and writer, living and working in Tokyo. [...] the author of three books ... and the forthcoming Death by Astonishment -- Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug, which focuses on the history of DMT and science’s continuing struggle to understand how such a simple naturally-occurring molecule can have such astonishing effects on the human mind. His current interests lie in implications of DMT in understanding the nature of reality, and how it might be developed as a tool for extended communication with non-human intelligences inaccessible to normal waking consciousness.
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Conversation with Dennis McKenna
https://youtu.be/AziCjLnp780

INTRO: In this fascinating conversation, Dennis McKenna takes us on a wild journey through his psychedelic adventures and the mysterious world of ancient consciousness. [...] The discussion ends with some mind bending ideas about consciousness, reality, and the possibility that we are all part of a vast, interconnected intelligence. He touches on the strange mysteries of alien encounters and the potential of DMT research to reveal deeper truths about our existence. This is not just a story about drugs—it’s a story about how we perceive the world, and what might be waiting just beyond the edge of ordinary awareness.

Conversation with Dennis McKenna ... https://youtu.be/AziCjLnp780

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/AziCjLnp780

Doesn't quite add up. If the "political facts" they grilled and evaluated participants on revolved around knowledge of precise information about the structure of government, how it operates, existing statutes, and facts about individual legislators and their stances on policy issues... Then how do you get complex or more difficult to determine "gray areas" from that (via being "more informed")? Answers to such would actually be of the very definitive or binary nature that they covertly disparage one group (conservatives) for desiring. Such "political facts" have little to do with the varying moral standards, self-interested commitment to one's own community or group, and socioeconomic goals of opposing ideologies that actually drive voter decision-making (as well as knowledge of the intellectual genealogies of parties and political movement histories -- concealed motives).

And why the surprise at moderates being insufficiently confident and potentially less involved in politics? Either that's due to information overkill from multiple POVs again creating that celebrated "gray area" which entails diminishing the ability to decide or to act speedily (including sometimes letting any diesel truck that comes along roar through unimpeded due to that hesitancy), or... When has genuine neutrality or indifference ever generated passion and high expertise in _X_ area, unless one is placed in a job or enters a situation that requires attention devoted to _X_?
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People with the least political knowledge tend to be the most overconfident in their grasp of facts
https://www.psypost.org/people-with-the-...f-facts/hh

EXCERPTS: New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Appliedhh suggests that people often overestimate their understanding of political facts. This tendency to be overconfident appears most common among individuals who actually know the least about politics and those who lean conservative...

[...] As the researchers explained, “Metacognition is broadly defined as thinking about one’s own cognition. The type we studied is called metacognitive monitoring accuracy, or the degree to which judgments of what one knows matches what one actually knows.”

In simpler terms, this concept refers to a person’s ability to accurately recognize when they are right and when they are wrong. “People tend to be overconfident regarding what they think they know, and this has serious consequences in the political realm, such as when people vote on candidates and issues that they don’t understand as well as they think they do,” the researchers stated.

[...] To evaluate political awareness, the participants took a test of 60 questions covering basic political figures, government rules, and policy issues. The test was designed to be balanced, containing an equal number of questions that might favor liberal or conservative viewpoints. It also included 20 general knowledge questions to serve as a point of comparison.

The researchers measured confidence at two different points during the testing process. First, participants were asked to estimate how well they would do on the test before they took it. Then, after answering the multiple-choice questions, they rated their confidence in each specific answer they had just selected. [...] The scientists also used an objective questionnaire to measure the participants’ political orientation based on their agreement with specific policies, rather than just asking them to label themselves.

A person with a high need for cognitive closure generally prefers a clear “yes” or “no” answer and dislikes gray areas. By collecting all this information, the researchers could look at how political beliefs and thinking habits relate to self-awareness. The researchers observed that the participants were generally overconfident in their test performance. The gap between what people thought they knew and what they actually knew was widest among those with the lowest test scores.

“We found that people are generally overconfident in their political knowledge, especially those who truly don’t know much about politics (the classic Dunning-Kruger effect),” the researchers detailed. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge in a specific area greatly overestimate their own competence, often because they lack the expertise needed to recognize their own mistakes.

The data also revealed a connection between political leanings, thinking styles, and this overconfidence. “Those who were more politically conservative and who like to make quick, definitive decisions, even if they may not have all the relevant information, tend to be the most overconfident,” the researchers observed.

To explain this, the scientists point to the mental shortcuts, or cues, that people use to judge their own memory. “Our analyses suggest that these individuals may be using the wrong cues to decide whether they know something or not,” the researchers stated. For instance, someone might mistakenly rely on a strong political identity as a cue that they know a specific political fact, rather than actually retrieving the correct information from memory.

[...] The researchers caution against generalizing too broadly from this single investigation. “Keep in mind that this is just one study and it needs to be replicated and extended in order to draw strong conclusions,” the researchers added.

The analysis also brought a couple of unexpected trends to light. “We were surprised that political metacognition was better than general knowledge metacognition, and that underconfidence was most prevalent among political moderates,” the researchers noted. “The first was reassuring but the latter suggests that political moderates may be insufficiently engaged and/or vocal in the political realm.”

The scientists emphasized that their goal is not to criticize any specific group of voters. “We do not at all intend to shame or pass judgment on anyone, it isn’t easy to be metacognitively accurate and there are lots of factors that can bias us,” the researchers said.

They also pointed out that the findings do not apply universally to all conservatives. “It’s also not an anti-conservative paper; we emphasize that at high levels of political knowledge, liberals and conservatives had very similar political metacognitive accuracy,” the researchers stated.

In fact, the data suggests that actual familiarity with a topic overrides political biases. As the researchers put it, “political metacognitive accuracy was better predicted by political knowledge than political orientation, meaning that what one knows is more important than whether one leans liberal or conservative.”

“We also want to emphasize that when we say ‘political knowledge’ we mean verifiable political facts, like who the speaker of the house is or how many votes are needed to pass a bill,” the researchers clarified. “So, we were not presenting highly emotional or biased information for our participants to judge, and thus our results might not replicate in more politicized contexts.”

Because the participants were mostly White, male, and lower-to-middle income, the scientists caution that the findings might not apply to the entire American population. The researchers are already planning to expand this line of inquiry to address these variables and explore new contexts... (MORE - missing details)

Currently, on both Tubi TV and Pluto TV. Another indie film with a mix of elements that one has seen hither and thither in flicks before, yet still done well enough to kill 87 minutes on. (A varying 13 to 26 points above 50% rating.)

And it features French actress Clémence Poésy, who is part of the cast of the upcoming Neuromancer adaptation of William Gibson's famous 1984 novel that literally invented the cyberpunk genre. She also had a key role in the first two seasons of Daryl Dixon, starred in the British/French series The Tunnel, and played Fleur Delacour in the Harry Potter movies.

Drat, indirectly because of this I'm now going to have to watch 2009's "Heartless", the second film that Philip Ridley made after "The Passion of Darkly Noon": https://www.scivillage.com/thread-19849.html

The Ones Below .... https://youtu.be/nnTfVYYAa8M

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nnTfVYYAa8M

"Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."---Neils Bohr

This is something I am beginning to realize myself--that our concept of things being real and in-themselves and irreducible discrete objects is absurdly flawed. That as quantum physics has shown us, everything comes down to relationships and laws and ideas. IOW, abstractions of our own minds. But does such apply to the macro level as well?

Take a house for instance. Something we immediately and conveniently regard as a thing in itself and not an abstraction. But upon examining the house, we only turn up spaces and forces and materials that impart to the whole house its entire character and identity. The house it appears becomes less a thing in itself and more of a template or a matrix or even an interlocking blueprint of geometrical relationships. Nothing in its composition is necessary for the house to exist. Every house can have a totally different structure and materials and still be defined as a member of the set "house". House it seems is a mere generalization or category--a mental abstraction allowing us to conveniently regard all houses as being one thing or one object when in fact it is simply a concept and not real in itself.

Isn't it strange then how our entire physical world of so-called real things can themselves only be known and experienced as real to the degree that they are also abstractions of thought? That identity or being only gets imposed over phenomenally present properties by our own thoughts, real only to the extent that they are made up of mere abstractions? Is there in the end any difference between real and abstract? Between physical objective things and the ideational forms they take? More specifically, might they be but two sides of the same coin?

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"In Kantian philosophy, "things in themselves" (noumena) are often understood as abstractions—or more specifically, the result of a process of abstraction. They represent objects considered independently of our sensibility, space, time, and conceptual categories. Kant suggests that to know the "thing in itself," one must abstract from all sensory conditions.

Key Aspects of Things in Themselves as Abstractions:

Methodological Abstraction: Kant uses the concept to mean looking at objects while abstracting away (removing) the conditions of human sensibility and understanding.

Independent Reality: They represent what is thought to exist independent of our perception, distinguishing them from appearances (phenomena).

Negative Definition: In many contexts, a thing-in-itself is simply the concept of an object that is not a phenomenon, meaning it is defined by what it lacks (sensory experience).

Necessary Postulate: While unknowable, the concept is necessary to ground our experience, acting as the presumed reality behind what we perceive.

This abstraction analysis implies that the "thing in itself" is not a second, separate world, but rather a way of considering the same world, separated from our human modes of observation."
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"The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-­shifting reality they aim to describe."--- https://fs.blog/map-and-territory/

A presentation of some diverse leading thinkers' ideas on the future and potential impacts of transhumanism on ourselves and our human identity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KltxU-oD3vM

"Dr. Eric Weinstein says UFOs, atomic weapons, and Epstein “are going to merge into one story about power that we don’t understand.” He also says that reports of a strange “private air force” that would appear and destroy equipment used to watch UFOs were probably about a secretive CIA unit.

On Piers Morgan Uncensored, Dr. Eric says most people still do not understand how deep Epstein’s involvement in science was.

He explains that Epstein funded major projects, donated to top universities like MIT and Harvard, and maintained close ties with about 30 leading scientists, including mathematicians and physicists. Weinstein’s main claim is that

He states Epstein was also a “science spy” listening in on high‑level research, especially in fields like number theory, elliptic curves, cryptography, and gravitational physics that are crucial for military technology, code‑breaking, digital money, and possibly new weapons.

According to Weinstein, Epstein somehow knew details about Weinstein’s own early work on certain equations related to gravity, even though that connection was not widely known, which he takes as proof that Epstein’s operation gathered inside technical information.

He has spoken to many normal, non‑actor witnesses whose detailed UFO stories sound very similar and are told very sincerely, so he feels “something big” is really there, even if he does not know what it is.

He mentions reports of a kind of “private air force” that appears, destroys or seizes UFO‑monitoring equipment, and then disappears, and says this seems to be linked to the CIA’s Office of Global Access. He explains that this office can hide aircraft and operations inside intelligence structures so the public never sees an official “US Air Force” label, which makes it easier to keep UFO‑related missions secret."