Nature's benefits don’t require an exotic vacation getaway or weekend adventure.

Even brief, routine interactions with green space can reduce stress, improve mood and promote overall well-being.

I spent the spring of 2026 teaching and studying urban landscapes in Denmark,
a country consistently ranked among the happiest in the world.
I expected to find thoughtfully designed parks, courtyards and bicycle paths.
I did see those things.
But what surprised me was how seamlessly people moved through those spaces as part of their ordinary lives.

These green spaces weren’t aspirational destinations,
reserved for special occasions.
They were places to eat lunch, meet friends, walk through on the way home from work, or just pause for a few quiet moments.
Getting outside seemed a part of the natural rhythm of the day.

Denmark‘s outdoor culture stemmed not only from the creation of a meticulously planned network of parks,
but also from the way green spaces were fundamentally woven into the routines of everyday life.
https://theconversation.com/getting-outside-despite-your-9-to-5-job-can-improve-your-mental-health-heres-how-to-spend-time-in-nature-during-and-around-working-hours-286619

* A law to sell [parts of] Argentina to the ultra-rich of the world *

On Aug 6, the Argentine Senate plans to vote on Milei's new bill,
the Private Property Inviolability Law.

If approved, tech tycoons like Peter Thiel will be able to keep the water, energy & climate of Patagonia

-- By F. Gomez, 7/31/26
(h/t. Jenny Cohn)

https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social/post/3mrxtzoj3ts22

A caucus of violent, drunk ex-husbands controls three branches of government and both chambers of Congress.

https://bsky.app/profile/thebulwark.com/post/3ms4a6mohv22i

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/117021215493505628

In September 2024,
billionaire hedge-fund owner John Paulson
— an adviser to the president and one of his biggest fundraisers
— gave an interview supporting Trump’s tariff proposals on CNBC.

“What you see is a hollowed-out American manufacturing base.
And we need to protect American jobs and protect American manufacturing,”
Paulson said.

“We can’t have Americans
— American producers closing American factories and offshoring.”

Paulson is a legendary figure in the world of New York finance.

He made much of his money through a prescient bet against the U.S. housing market before its collapse in 2007,
personally netting
$4 billion.

But through his investment firm, Paulson had other holdings that extended beyond the credit default swaps that so enriched him at the onset of the Great Recession.

Over the years they included stakes in a mining company,
a commercial forest interest and a media conglomerate.​ And they included Conn Selmer,
whose parent company, Steinway Musical Instruments,
had been acquired in 2013 by Paulson’s investment business.

Conn Selmer’s 61-year-old Eastlake factory,
a low-slung building between a frontage road and a field overgrown with wild grass and goldenrod,
👉 was now opening for
its last shift making instruments in the United States

Old Trails fire in northwest Spokane destroys 640 structures:

‘Probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington’s history’

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/02/wildfire-destroys-640-structures/

Walls of flames destroyed dozens of homes and other structures in the Indian Trail neighborhood and more areas of Spokane on Saturday amid one of the worst natural disasters in the city’s history.

Home after home caught fire and exploded into flames along with trees.
Loud explosions could be heard through the smoke as the wildfire that started earlier in the afternoon on the West Plains continued to destroy much of what was in its path.

Winds gusting 35 to 45 mph drove the fire into Riverside State Park and then across the Spokane River.
Mass evacuations were ordered for much of the city, from north of Francis Avenue and west of Division Street.

The fires, smoke and evacuations led to chaos across the northwest part of the city.
Mayor Lisa Brown declared a state of emergency. Gov. Bob Ferguson activated the National Guard.

The scope of the fire remained unknown Saturday night – more than 9 hours after the fire was reported.
City officials at a news conference Saturday night could not say if there were injuries.
The wind blew smoke and flames across North Indian Trail Road so quickly,
firefighters were yelling at people nearby to run.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/01/fast-moving-fire-breaks-out-in-airway-heights-area/

When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good
— but not entirely.

Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat:
“neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”

In the 160-some years since that amendment, a quieter type of forced servitude has lived on in the US: prison labor.
From the debt peonage of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to the privatized contracting of the 21st century,
prison labor is a massive money maker,
generating $11 billion worth of goods in 2022 alone.

As horrifying a thought as it is, one of the companies still benefiting from the practice is in the news for another reason:
spreading a gut-busting diarrhea parasite through mass-produced shredded lettuce in grocery stores and fast food outlets.
It turns out that Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed to be behind the cyclospora outbreakcurrently raging throughout the US, is also heavily involved in modern-day forced labor

#forcedlabor #TaylorFarms
https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-farms-prison-labor

Daphy Michel, from Haiti, was dropped off in Pittsburgh in 20F temperatures wearing summer clothes

The disabled immigrant froze to death in early March at a bus shelter in Pittsburgh after she was dropped off in the city by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Her family is poised to file a lawsuit this month against the United States and “multiple other governmental and non-governmental entities”, the Guardian has learned.

Daphy Michel, 31, had been in county jail for six months after a reported mental health crisis and street incident, and then was arrested by ICE before being released with a ankle monitor.

She was left to make her way home to Charleroi,
a small community on the outskirts of Pittsburgh about 20 miles (32km) away,
but was found dead three days later.

In June, Pennsylvania officials said she died from hypothermia and ruled her death a homicide.

The Allegheny county medical examiner’s office said Michel was a vulnerable adult “suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier” at the time of her release from federal custody on 27 February.

Attorney Joseph Murphy, who represents members of Michel’s family living locally,
said this week that the lawsuit will be filed within the next two to three weeks.
He had said at the time of the homicide ruling that relatives in the US were likely to sue.

“Anybody who knew Daphy for more than one minute knew there was something wrong with her.
It was a real dumb thing to just release her like that in February in Pittsburgh, where it’s very cold,
knowing how screwed up she was. It was a very bad judgment call,” Murphy said.

Relatives and the attorney believe that ICE did not grasp the risks Michel faced being released alone on a city street that was probably unfamiliar to her, especially given the state of her health.

The morning she was found unresponsive, she was wearing summer clothes and the temperature was just 20F (-6.6C).

There are few details available about the lawsuit so far, including the identities of plaintiffs and defendants.

The medical examiner’s office explained in a statement that its ruling of homicide should not be interpreted as a declaration of criminal guilt
but as “actions caused by another individual”.

Pittsburgh detectives are now investigating.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, did not respond this week to questions from the Guardian about the impending lawsuit, Michel’s time in its custody or her death.

In March, the agency posted a statement on X saying it had “nothing to do with this woman’s death”.
It called Michel an illegal alien, although Murphy said she entered the US legally,
was awarded humanitarian status and had an asylum application in process.

Surveillance camera images show Michel at the bus shelter on Pittsburgh’s south side,
sitting on the bench in daylight at first on 1 March, with a small, pale bag of belongings,

still sitting there in darkness that evening,

then slumped half upright on the ground and eventually lying on the ground the following morning.

The images were first published by the outlet Pittsburgh’s Public Source,
an independent news non-profit that filed legal requests with the local transportation authority
and then viewed hours of surveillance video footage
showing Michel was at the bus stop for about 24 hours.

It shared the images with the Guardian.
#daphymichel #ice #homicide #pittsburgh #publicsource #haiti
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/02/ice-death-pittsburgh-daphy-michel-haiti?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its ⁠decision to close the Trump ⁠Organization’s bank accounts years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money-laundering experts.

The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money-laundering concerns to Donald Trump’s family business.
Capital One is seeking to dismiss the case by casting doubt on claims of illegally debanking – or denying services on religious or political grounds – the Trump Organization.
Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own ‌allegations make clear that Capital One closed ‌Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons.
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”
Capital One gave notice of its plans to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated bank accounts in March 2021.
The Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president’s son, filed a revengeful lawsuit in March 2025 in a Florida federal court, alleging the accounts were closed because of Capital One’s “woke” beliefs and its desire to benefit from the political mood after the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/capital-one-trump-organization-money-laundering?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

When reporter Max Blumenthal went to a cafe in Tehran one night a few weeks ago to upload videos from his reporting on the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei,
he began seeing social media posts from Trump ally Laura Loomer targeting him,
including one that suggested he should be “taken off the plane by US Marshalls when he lands back in the US … [and] detained”.

“I began to prepare myself for being harassed on my return,” Blumenthal said.

Effectively, that’s what happened,
sparking a legal fight that freedom-of-the-press advocates say shows the determination of the Trump administration to crack down on members of the media whose reporting it disagrees with.

On 10 July, border patrol agents at Virginia’s Dulles airport flagged Blumenthal, founder of the independent outlet the Grayzone,
for a “secondary inspection”.
Agents asked him how he had paid for his trip to Iran,
whether he knew the people who had hosted him
and whether he had plans to return.

They asked to see his two phones.
He declined to give them the passwords.
They seized the phones, but not his laptop or digital cameras.

The federal agency returned the cellphones a week later
– less than 24 hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committeefiled an emergency motion in district court seeking their return.

The US federal government said they couldn’t get into the phones and returned them,
and that therefore the motion was moot.
But Blumenthal went back to court on Wednesday and got a judge to agree that the government must prove it
– by supplying evidence of who had his phones,
when they had them and what they did to them.

Federal judge Leonie M Brinkema gave the government 14 days to respond.

Blumenthal’s treatment and case pose “serious constitutional problems”,
said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“The Trump administration is finding any excuse it can to target journalists it dislikes,
and border searches are one more play in the playbook.”

It is the second case concerning cellphone seizures at US airports to hit federal courts in recent weeks,
after another involving an activist against the Atlanta police-training center known as “Cop City” had its first evidentiary hearing.

Brinkema cited a recent fourth district ruling that distinguished a basic cellphone search
– when the phone’s owner allows an agent to open the phone
– from an “advanced” search, during which “equipment, wired or wireless, [is used] to copy and/or analyze the contents of an electronic device”.

This is what federal agents sought to do with Blumenthal’s phones.
“I believe now under fourth circuit case law, a search warrant would be required for that degree of intrusion into a cellphone,”
Brinkema said, according to a transcript of the proceedings.
No such warrant was produced for Blumenthal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/border-patrol-reporter-laura-loomer?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I WANT YOU TO STOP BEING AFRAID
OF OTHER AMERICANS
OF OTHER RELIGIONS
OF OTHER CLASSES
OF OTHER NATIONS
OF SPEAKING OUT

YOU'RE AMERICANS.
ACT LIKE IT!

IF YOU DON'T GET IT, ASK AN AMERICAN WHO DOES

There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t.

I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers,
though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés.

About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition.

Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place.
To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time,
whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption,
gross inequality or the next pandemic.

It’s a longing to make a difference
– and to build a legacy that truly matters.

Moral ambition begins with a simple realisation:
you’ve only got one life.

The time you have left on this Earth is your most precious possession.

You can’t buy yourself more time,
and every hour you’ve spent is gone for ever.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/apr/19/no-youre-not-fine-just-the-way-you-are-time-to-quit-your-pointless-job-become-morally-ambitious-and-change-the-world?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

In the small hours of June 30,
Joe Klima lay awake in bed.

A little before 5 a.m., he rose and packed his lunch.

Ahead of Klima was his last shift at the Conn Selmer plant in Eastlake, Ohio
— everyone’s last shift,
because the factory was closing.

At a time when the president of the United States said the country was in the midst of a manufacturing renaissance,
the 150 people who still worked at the plant were losing their jobs,
and seeing many of them offshored to China
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/08/01/conn-selmer-factory-closes-ohio-despite-trumps-manufacturing-push/

Governor Andy Beshear seems to know what he’s doing, in any case.

In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, he shot down the idea of his calling a special election,
saying that those who
“are really pushing I think are under the impression that a Democrat in Kentucky might be able to win that election.

It’s been since 1992 that we had a Democratic senator in Kentucky.”

He also noted that McConnell missing votes while the seat goes unoccupied “might not be a bad thing.”

“McConnell hasn’t been there to vote on the SAVE Act, which would tear voting rights away,” said Beshear.
“He hasn’t been there to vote to support this war on Iran that this president started and shouldn’t be continuing ...
not having Mitch McConnell show up isn’t necessarily a bad thing because he certainly doesn’t show up to help the American people.”

In the meantime, the governor has called on McConnell to either disclose his health status or resign.
That, I think, covers all the bases as far as what Beshear can and should be doing.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for other elected Democrats to play in harnessing the passions of their base and channeling them to a larger purpose.

The McConnell affair is emblematic of many pernicious aspects of Trumpism:
The lack of transparency is part and parcel of a party that centers lies and obfuscations in its politics;
the clinging to power by corrupt means reflects the party’s larger desire to suppress the vote and dodge the Constitution.
Echoing Beshear’s commentary on how good it is for the country to have McConnell out of commission, and thus unable to cast destructive votes, would be a great way for Democrats to highlight how important it is to evict other GOP senators from their perches.
And this is maybe the best time for Democrats to talk about McConnell’s toxic legacy
—we all know that when he does pass, those who’ve had a front-row seat to his vicious power-mongering will feel the urge to not speak ill of the dead.

Most of all, this is a moment when Democrats should respect and make use of what seems to be a deep vein of anger toward McConnell among their base.
I think this whole episode is stirring a lot of recollections:
the memory of Democrats fruitlessly trying to entreat Republicans into the policymaking process even as McConnell urged gridlock;
the remembrances of McConnell controlling the makeup of the Supreme Court even as it becomes more apparent that Democrats will need to be similarly radical.

I think it’s possible that the weird way McConnell’s camp opted to go into hiding may contribute to the GOP’s destruction in the midterms.
But it will only work if Democrats make it clear that the obsolete politics of bipartisan comity,
which McConnell took it upon himself to destroy in order to bring rack and ruin to the Democrats,
will die with him.

https://newrepublic.com/post/213760/democrats-mitch-mcconnell-andy-beshear

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/117020436141807258

How many times a day or week do agents working for on behalf of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, CoPilot, etc. ingest sensitive and protected financial and health data?
My guess is quite a lot.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) appeared to
ignore a Friday deadline set by Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico,
to share information about the abuse of girls at a remote ranch formerly owned by the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Torrez’s office asked the DoJ in February for unredacted files
after he reopened a dormant criminal investigation into activities at Zorro ranch,
a remote 10,000-acre property in desert scrub outside New Mexico.

It set a 31 July deadline for the department to share relevant records.
As it approached on Friday, the justice department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Guardian reported in February that recent releases of the so-called Epstein files included thousands of mentions of the ranch,
and numerous photographs of men and young girls there.
A succession of survivors had previously given testimony about abuse they were subjected to.

However, unlike other properties prominent in Epstein’s sex-trafficking conspiracy in Palm Beach, New York, and his private Caribbean island,
no federal search of the ranch was ever confirmed to have taken place.

Torrez set a deadline of Friday
for federal prosecutors from the justice department, and the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York (SDNY), which led the original Epstein investigation,
to allow access to whatever documents they had.

Despite promises of cooperation from Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Jay Clayton, former US attorney for the SDNY, now director designate of national intelligence,
Torrez said only 31 pages were ever handed over.

They were mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages of little use to state investigators, he said.

Torrez said in a 14 July letter to Blanche he would “pursue all available legal remedies without further notice”
if the 31 July deadline passed,
having made “repeated, documented, good-faith efforts to obtain the unredacted investigative records in the USDOJ’s custody”.

The same week, in an interviewwith Albuquerque ABC News affiliate KOAT, Torrez said:
“I’m not taking anything off the table. I’m not ruling out a lawsuit.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/doj-new-mexico-epstein-documents?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956,
and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.

Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear:
an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality.
Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.

Each time, federal employees were targeted first.
President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Programscreened 5 million workers for communist affiliation;
2,700 lost their jobs,
12,000 resigned.
Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line;
blacklists outlasted their makers.

The Trump administration purgedthe federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”.
Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they would advance them if hired.
The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.

Then as now, law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated.
Artists and performers
– Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel
– were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s,
the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which,
along with communists and socialists,
included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America.

Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue,
a chief funding source for Democratic candidates,
the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros,
best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.

In both eras, the standard bearers were full of ideological passion.
“Can there be anyone who fails to realize that ... this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world?”
McCarthy thundered to the Senate in 1950.

Trump believes in nothing but himself.
But like McCarthy and his confederates, the intellectuals behind this repression are true believers.
“When the leftist
– who does not believe in freedom,
who does not believe in civil rights,
who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice
– protests that we are violating his rights,
understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene
that some injustice has perpetrated against him,”
Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a speech.
“We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

McCarthy and his more powerful and enduring co-conspirator,
the FBI director J Edgar Hoover,
ruined countless lives and crippled progressive movements.

But the scope of this administration’s ambitions;
its armies of enforcers inside a gargantuan carceral state;
the technological and legal tools at its disposal;
and the dearth of principled government actors to obstruct it
make this McCarthyism far more dangerous.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/31/mccarthyism-trump-surveillance-red-scare?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

LAPD officer who recorded colleagues’ racist comments charged with felony eavesdropping

LAPD officer Daniel Flores filed an internal affairs complaint against his LAPD colleagues after recording them making racist, homophobic and sexist comments.

Prosecutors charge that Flores violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, which prohibits recording others without their consent.

Flores’ lawyer said the case sends a message that “if you document bigotry inside the LAPD, you will be the one who ends up in a courtroom.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-31/lapd-officer-felony-eavesdropping-charge

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/117018032119683056

"Will there be consequences for this out-of-control regime that threatens people with made-up charges and attempts to ruin their lives❓

Of course not❗️

But let's make sure the electorate is aware of the hideous and destructive acts of this regime."

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/nx-s1-5915828/reflecting-pool-david-hearn-dismiss
#UsPol
1/n

Elon Musk plans to spend $100 million to $120 million to help Susan Collins, as well as other Republican candidates in close Senate races.
Collins, who recently got a new Democratic challenger in former state Senator Troy Jackson, has an uphill battle to keep her seat in the blue state of Maine.
In addition to Maine, Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, plans to spend money in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan,
all states with Senate contests where Democrats are polling well.

The super PAC is also considering investing in the Senate races in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas,
and is already backing House Republican candidates in California, Wisconsin, and Washington.

America PAC is reportedly coordinating with major conservative organizations outside of the Republican Party,
including the Sentinel Action Fund and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.
Musk’s organization plans to utilize its funds to knock on voters’ doors before November.
https://newrepublic.com/post/213847/elon-musk-save-susan-collins-election