Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 19

One of the highlights of the Summit will be the keynote address by Yong Jae Lee, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lee will present groundbreaking research on creating intelligent systems that can learn to understand our multimodal world with minimal human supervision.

He will focus on systems that can comprehend both images and text, while also touching upon those that utilize video, audio and LiDAR.

Attendees will gain insights into how these emerging techniques can address neural network training bottlenecks, facilitate new types of multimodal machine perception and enable countless new applications.

https://embeddedvisionsummit.com/2024/session/learning-to-understand-our-multimodal-world-with-minimal-supervision/

Ten years ago, Yann LeCun gave an astonishing keynote at the Embedded Vision Summit,
in which he demonstrated the power and practicality of deep neural networks (DNNs) for computer vision. 

As I left his talk, I recall thinking to myself, “If what he says about deep neural networks is true, that changes everything about computer vision.”

DNNs have indeed revolutionized both how we do computer vision and what we can do with computer vision.

-- Jeff Bier

https://www.eetimes.com/navigating-the-shift-to-generative-ai-and-multimodal-llms/

Hundreds of starving and stranded brown pelicans have turned up along the Californiacoast in recent weeks
in what wildlife advocates have described as a “crisis”.

In Newport Beach in southern California, lifeguards came upon two dozen sick pelicans on a pier last week.

The Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach,
the non-profit caring for the animals,
said they had treated more than 100 other birds who were anemic, dehydrated and extremely underweight.

“They are starving to death and if we don’t get them into care, they will die,” said Debbie McGuire, the center’s executive director.
“It really is a crisis.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/13/sick-pelicans-california?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

On April 30, 1968, the New York Police Department stormed the campus of Columbia University,

arresting hundreds of students who had occupied Hamilton Hall during escalating protests.

And on April 30, 2024, the New York Police Department stormed the campus of Columbia University,

arresting hundreds of students who had occupied Hamilton Hall during escalating protests.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/12/columbia-chicago-movies-1968-student-protest/

China and the U.S. Are Numb to the Real Risk of War

The pair are dangerously close to the edge of nuclear war over Taiwan— again.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/12/china-us-taiwan-strait-war-nuclear-weapons-military-biden-xi-history/

Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, #Bernie #Moreno,
the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown,
humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States.

But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.

For Mr. Moreno, the way he has framed his biography — and the material that he has omitted from the frame — reflects a keen awareness of the political reality in the Trump-era Republican Party, in Ohio

In an Ohio hit hard by economic globalization and the decline of heavy manufacturing,
a candidate from the South American elite might feel like a stretch.

Instead, Mr. Moreno describes how he bet his life savings in 2005 on a small, underperforming Mercedes-Benz dealership on Cleveland’s West Side,
in an attempt to turn what could be a liability in courting the working class
— fabulous wealth, with assets valued up to $105.7 million and yearly income nearing $6 million
— into proof of his own hard work and entrepreneurial street smarts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/us/politics/bernie-moreno-ohio.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

In Cammarata, Italy, a community in Sicily located about 40 miles southeast of Palermo, some homes have stood abandoned for decades after residents migrated, looking for modern conveniences in larger centers.

Recently, some young locals have returned, post-education, looking for a quieter life.

In a bid to reinvigorate their community, they’re actively encouraging owners of abandoned properties to sell to foreigners via a group called StreetTo.

They’ll even help you navigate red tape and find contractors to renovate your new dream home.

What’s more, to get you out of your new courtyard and into the local piazza, they “organize exhibitions, concerts, and gatherings for townspeople old and new.”

If you’re thinking of booking a flight to shop for real estate, however, Abend suggests that you prepare yourself for disrepair.

While many dwellings are severely dilapidated, they’re not beyond hope
—yet their rehab will cost much more than the touted price tag.

Abend also interviews Michael McCubbin, a man who, after working for chef Jamie Oliver in London for 17 years, moved to Italy
and made it his home, motivated by low real estate prices.

An accomplished chef, he’s turned his house into a community kitchen.

“These days, the Good Kitchen also supplies weekly meals for the elderly and has taught some of Mussomeli’s youth to cook,” Abend writes.

“A clutch of older men use the space as an afternoon hangout, and there’s also a free Sunday afternoon lunch.
(The only requirement for those with means is that they bring something to share.)”

While properties typically cost more than a single euro and require extensive renovation,
one thing seems clear from Abend’s fun fact-finding mission:
both buyers and locals seem to be getting more than what they bargained for

https://www.afar.com/magazine/sicily-sold-homes-for-one-euro-what-happened-to-them

Donald Trump should be investigated for knowingly and willfully making false statements about debts owed to his Chicago business on his public financial disclosure reports,
according to a complaint filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington with the FBI and Department of Justice.
Between 2015 and 2023, Trump disclosed owing more than $50,000,000 to his Chicago business,
a claim he signed to be “true, complete and correct to the best of [his] knowledge.”
However, a court appointed monitor revealed that she was told by the Trump Organization that this Chicago loan “never existed.”

A false claim of being owed tens of millions of dollars could be part of a tax avoidance scheme known as debt parking or could conceal a hidden debt to another party.
“Donald Trump has a long history of lying about his finances, but there’s a big difference between lying about them in the press and lying about them on a government disclosure,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder said.
“This isn’t his normal puffery. This is another potential violation of criminal law.”
https://www.citizensforethics.org/legal-action/legal-complaints/crew-files-criminal-complaint-against-trump-over-chicago-business/

In world history, exiles, expatriates and their movements have played important roles in fighting unjust regimes.

To get a sense of the inspiration they can provide, think of Charles de Gaulle and Free France, the government in exile that was established in London after France fell during World War II.

There are, of course, profound differences between the task faced by de Gaulle in 1940 and the problem of reconquering the Republican Party today.
But they share this position:

🌟Psychologically, an exile movement must recognize that it does not have a place in the system and must work from outside it.🌟

👉That is a conceptual bridge that many anti-MAGA Republicans have been unready to cross.

Non-MAGA Republicans believed that the party would feel stung by MAGA’s record of regularly losing elections that Republicans ought to have won

Non-MAGA Republicans expected that the multiple indictments of Mr. Trump would discredit him in the eyes of G.O.P. primary voters or at least lead them to abandon him as a likely loser.

🌟Those suppositions turned out to be wrong, and Ms. Haley’s loss to Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries has extinguished all of them.🌟
Mr. Trump will be crowned in July.
He commands cultlike loyalty among his MAGA base.
He has taken over the machinery of the Republican Party.
His election to the White House in November would further consolidate his control of the party, but even if he is defeated, MAGA will not believe it lost fairly and therefore will not willingly relinquish its grip.

Which brings us back to the non-MAGA faction. With its paths blocked inside the party, it can still bring formidable people, resources and ideas to the task of defeating MAGA from the outside, as an exiled party.
What would this mean in practice?
💥A G.O.P. in exile 💥
— the Free Republicans, as it were
— can be a loose network of organizations, think tanks, politicians, consultants, donors and activists;
it can have a more formal structure, with its own national committee, state chairs and staff.

It might hold conventions, develop chapters and auxiliaries and approve a platform, or it might rely on a more decentralized strategy that supports and coordinates assorted efforts to build a bench of anti-MAGA talent and ideas.
Regardless of how those tactical choices are made, four strategic principles should define the project.

👉First, 🔸the Free G.O.P. should fully accept its exile status. 🔸No daydreaming about being welcomed back into the MAGA party any time soon. The project must look beyond the next month, the next year and the next election. It cannot be impatient or easily discouraged.

👉Second, even as the Free G.O.P. accepts its outsider status
— even as it acknowledges MAGA’s control of the Republican Party
— 🔸it should identify unwaveringly as the true Republican Party and reject the moral legitimacy of the Trump regime. 🔸The Free G.O.P. would insist that it, not MAGA, lays claim to the heritage of the party of Lincoln.

👉Third, the Free G.O.P. should 🔸develop an agenda
— or, more realistically, a set of agendas
— for a post-MAGA future. 🔸
According to The Hill, Mr. Pence’s political advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom, “plans to invest $20 million this year to shape the conservative agenda, an effort to directly counter what Pence had previously described as populism ‘unmoored to conservative principles.’”
The former vice president is putting his name on the line to oppose the Trumpian populism that controls the Republican Party.
He and his partners have the right idea:
Free Republicans must develop ideas and conversations about what 21st-century conservatism should look like.
Looking backward to a pre-Trump G.O.P. won’t succeed.

👉Fourth and most essential, 🔸Free Republicans must set their sights on overthrowing MAGA, 🔸not influencing it, partnering with it, bargaining with it, coexisting with it or waiting it out.
🔥They must name and explain what Trumpism represents:
lawlessness, moral anarchy, conspiratorial thinking and an assault on the Constitution.
🔥They must challenge MAGA Republicans in primaries, focusing in particular on state races for governor, attorneys general, state legislators and others.
🔥They must be prepared to withstand the hostile machinations of the MAGA Republican Party and the attacks of the Trump movement, which will be relentless.
If they do not consistently oppose MAGA, they will be dragged under it.
A party in exile would establish a gathering point for emerging leaders and fresh thinkers.
It would be a clearinghouse for resources and strategies with which to assail the MAGA establishment.
It would train candidates, build political networks, gather donors and supporters and show the public a brighter future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/opinion/maga-republican-party-exile.html

Two billionaire Texas brothers
whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking
have pumped🔸 millions of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism 🔸and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians.
The fracking billionaires #Farris and #Dan #Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups
including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.

“Thanks to their incredible wealth and largesse, 👉the country as well as the [Republican] party are now feeling the effects of their aggressive brand of religiously-charged political activism,” 👈
said Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of Anointed with Oil.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/05/texas-fracking-billionaire-brothers-prageru-daily-wire?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Shocking revelations about what Trump offered Big Oil executives at their elite Mar-a-Lago gathering sure smell of a direct quid pro quo.

MAGA won't care but
Democrats need to expose this.

https://newrepublic.com/article/181493/trump-big-oil-campaign

You know how well Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is going by the look on Donald Trump, Jr’s face.

In an advertisement posted on Twitter, Junior looks like he is about to cry.
Either that, or Junior was not quite sober when the advertisement was recorded.
I will leave it to you to decide which is the case.

In the advertisement, Junior begs for money for his father’s presidential campaign.

First he asks for five dollars.
Then he asks for one dollar.
Hey, someone might take up that second offer
https://themoderatevoice.com/donald-trump-jr-has-a-sad/

More people are buying electric cars

Just not from Elon Musk.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/10/tesla-stock-drop-chinese-electric-vehicles-byd/

The Funeral Cryer:

"My American husband finds it confusing that I don’t know the given names of my extended family members despite my closeness to them;
he can’t understand why a 36-year-old woman still refers to her friends’ parents as “Soft Tofu” or “M.I.T. Grandpa.”

Observed through a Western lens, this preference for pet names and terms of kinship can seem juvenile, even disrespectful.
But for Chinese people with roots in small villages, this is simply the way life is, and has been"
https://archive.is/2024.04.30-101818/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/books/review/the-funeral-cryer-wenyan-lu.html

Despite entering hospice care over a year ago, Jimmy Carter refuses to miss an election.

At 99 years of age, the former president cast a mail-in ballot for the May primary election this week, grandson Jason Carter said Wednesday on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Monica Pearson Show.
“He’s not going to miss an election!” the younger Carter said. “It’s important to him. I mean, that’s the person he is.”
Jason Carter said he confided in his grandfather last weekend that he’s never sure how to respond when asked how the former president is doing.
“He kind of laughed a little bit, and he looked at me, and he said: ‘I don’t know myself,’” Jason Carter said. “But I think he’s OK.
You know, he’s hanging in there, and he knows he’s not in charge. So he’s just waiting for what’s next.”
Over the past year, Jimmy Carter celebrated his 99th birthday in October and attended the annual peanut festival.
He entered hospice care in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, just over a year ago. He also mourned the loss of his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who passed away last November at age 96.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/jimmy-carter-voted-in-georgia-primary-and-is-doing-ok-in-plains-grandson-says/

Biden threat to stop Israel arms shipments welcomed by Democrats and criticized by Israeli officials and Republicans – live

US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York,
said that “[Biden]’s historic shift to include Israel in US standards makes the world safer and our values clear.”
“President Biden enforcing conditions on US military aid and holding the Israeli gov to the same bar we hold all our allies to is the responsible, secure, and just thing to do,” she added

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/may/09/biden-israel-arms-republican-democrat-trump-latest-updates?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ex-aide’s verdict on Trump in book

Donald Trump’s defense secretary called him
“a madman in a circular room screaming”
and stayed away from the White House,
a new book quotes a senior Trump aide as saying regarding the man now facing 88 criminal charges but set to be the Republican presidential nominee for a third successive election.

Just how low will Republican politicians stoop to be Trump’s running mate?
Margaret Sullivan

“Anybody with sense – somebody like Mattis or Tillerson – they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,”
Tom Bossert, formerly homeland security adviser to Trump, tells George Stephanopoulos in the ABC News anchor’s new book,
The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/09/situation-room-stephanopoulos-trump-white-house?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The world must reject Russia’s nuclear posturing – but not ignore the danger

In 2014, Putin’s covert operation to seize and then annex Crimea shocked the world.

In 2015, Russia launched a surprise military intervention into Syria.

The following year Putin directed an unprecedented operation to sway the US presidential elections.

He did the same in Europe in 2017.

Then he tried to kill off an enemy by poisoninghim on British soil, attacked the US with cyberweapons, and, finally, carried out a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country – Ukraine.

Who can know with enough confidence when a reckless autocrat like this,
surrounded by yes-men,
might decide the time is right to teach the West a lesson with a tactical nuclear strike?

Internal Russian documents, as well as the latest Kremlin statement, suggest Russia’s threshold for using a nuclear weapon is fairly high
but getting lower.

Putin’s nuclear redlines are nearly impossible for Ukraine, Nato, or anyone outside Putin’s innermost circle to know with the certainty needed in light of the gravity of the issue.

That Russia has not used nuclear weapons yet offers little confidence that it won’t do so in the future.

It’s not hard to imagine circumstances in which using a nuclear weapon might seem like the rational choice from the Kremlin’s point of view,
especially if faced with a rapid reversal of the gains for which Russia has paid dearly,
or if confronting western escalation that only nuclear weapons can match

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/08/russia-nuclear-posturing-nato-ukraine?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna reveal bill aimed at eliminating #medical #debt

The legislation would create a program to cancel all existing patient debt and block creditors from collecting past medical bills

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/08/bernie-sanders-ro-khanna-medical-debt-bill?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Federal judge rebukes Alabama AG's threat to prosecute providing help for out-of-state abortions

“[T]he Constitution protects the right to cross state lines and engage in lawful conduct in other States,
including receiving an abortion,” Judge Myron Thompson ruled.

Between the plaintiffs, Thompson noted, they brought claims challenging his threatened prosecutions as violations of
“the right to travel,
the First Amendment,
the limits on the extraterritorial application of state law,
and the right to due process.”

The Biden administration also weighed in in the case in support of the right to travel claim, as reported at Law Dork in November 2023.

https://www.lawdork.com/p/alabama-right-to-travel-abortion-dismiss-denial