More than 20 million Shia pilgrims flocked to a shrine city in Iraq this week, including millions of Iranians, despite the wars tearing across the Middle East.
An agreement over the Strait of Hormuz is still far away. Tim Wilkins, who works for a tanker industry group, says the ships stuck around the waterway are in limbo, and transiting is still dangerous.
Here’s a wait-a-minute question: What’s the frequency, Kenneth Arnold? Admittedly, I borrowed and bent that R.E.M. song line. But it came to me in reading the latest outpouring of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) documents, videos and illustrations by the Department of War on August 7. Those files are part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System […]Taking LEO Off the Board: Russian Thinking About Anti-Satellite Warfare is authored by Aaron Stein, President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). “The Soviet Union and Russia have invested in anti-satellite weapons to ensure that their nuclear deterrent remains credible. For both the Soviet Union and Russia, the destruction of American satellites was (and is) […]
Today, Senator Bill Cassidy, announced that he will vote to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:
“This is an appalling outcome for the rule of law. Todd Blanche is Donald Trump’s lawyer. He is committed to lawfare and Donald Trump’s political vendettas, not rule of law defense and the American people. He should not become our permanent attorney general. We are disgusted by those who are allowing his confirmation to continue.”
The Department of War has published the fifth release of data regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said: “Today, the Department of War is publishing the fifth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) files as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The […]
People will often say, “I don’t believe in God,” but it’s rare to hear someone say, “I don’t believe in evil.”
That is a hard conclusion to come to, especially when the horrors and atrocities of the world are live-streamed directly to our phones through social media. Evil is hard to miss—so hard, in fact, that even those who reject God do not hesitate to condemn genocide, rape, slavery, child abuse, and torture as “evil.”
They don’t merely dislike these things. They don’t speak of them as a matter of personal preference. They talk as though they are objectively wrong.
We all instinctively appeal to a moral standard that stands above the beliefs of the individual, cultural norms, and government dictates. It’s why anyone can pronounce moral judgements against other individuals, differing cultural practices, and the actions of foreign governments.
Whether we are aware of it or not, in doing so, we are actually appealing to a moral measure outside of ourselves—an above standard to which the individual and collective ought to conform.
But where does that assumed standard come from?
If the universe is nothing more than matter in motion, then concepts like good and evil are ultimately products of human opinion, biology, chemical reactions in the brain, or social convention. One society’s values might differ from another’s, but there’s no higher court to appeal to. We can only describe actions as popular or unpopular, but calling them objectively evil is impossible to justify if one does not believe in God.
Yet our moral instincts resist that conclusion. We don’t believe the horrors of history were merely unfortunate cultural preferences, or that child abuse is only wrong because most people dislike it. Most people believe these things would remain morally wrong, even if everyone approved of them.
That conviction points beyond ourselves. It suggests that morality is discovered without, rather than invented from within, that good and evil are realities, not just personal opinions.
But if evil is real in an objective sense, then it raises another important question: Is there an objective good? Evil is not something that exists independently. It is the corruption or absence of what ought to be. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil presupposes a standard of good from which it deviates or departs.
So, the question is not simply whether God exists, but whether our belief in objective evil already assumes the kind of moral universe that only a belief in God can justify.
Midway through Boyce Upholt’s mind-boggling dispatch, one of his sources sums up the central challenge of the Gulf Coast canid: “Why is there not just a simple explanation for what this thing is?” The “wolfy coyotes” of southeastern Texas hold genetic traces that may link them to red wolves, which were declared extinct in the wild in 1980. But a lack of data makes it challenging to define the species—or, for that matter, to determine whether a private company has cloned the red wolf or something else entirely. Upholt doesn’t deal in simple explanations; the pleasure, here, is in the complexity.
The concept of a “species” is less sturdy than your high school biology teacher might have led you to believe. The most familiar definition is that a species consists of animals that can produce fertile offspring. But that’s a rule various species of canids violate all the time; it’s long been clear that North America’s soup of Canis genes is something less like a family tree and more like a river—one that’s broken by islands and sandbars into many braided channels that split and merge and re-split.
by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News
Last year (2025) I reported how there were hundreds of thousands of jobs unfilled to support the boom in data center construction, jobs that only human beings can fulfill. See:
Today, in August of 2026, the situation has only become worse as massive amounts of money continue to be increasingly spent on AI and data centers, while the human labor force continues to diminish.
This is all public knowledge, but it is not in the headlines or known much because people are still getting fat and rich on the AI data center spending.
Earlier this year, a report was published by the U.S. Department of Education which stated that by 2030, an estimated 2.1 million skilled trades jobs in the U.S. could go unfilled, with potential economic losses reaching $1 trillion annually.
America’s ‘silent army’ of skilled tradespeople are retiring with no one to replace them—and the price tag could hit $1 trillion a year
Excerpts:
The workers who keep America’s buildings running are disappearing—and the U.S. isn’t replacing them fast enough to keep the lights on, the servers cool, or the labs sterile.
By 2030, an estimated 2.1 million skilled trades jobs in the U.S. could go unfilled, with potential economic losses reaching $1 trillion annually, according to U.S. Department of Education estimates cited in a new report from JLL shared exclusively with Fortune.
The commercial real estate giant calls the electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers, pipe fitters, and maintenance workers who maintain the country’s built environment a “silent army”—a workforce that is aging out of the industry faster than it can be replaced.
“The silent army, as we normally call them, because they are hidden, invariably, behind the scenes, has been getting harder and harder not only to find, but retain in the industry,” Paul Morgan, JLL’s global COO of real estate management services, told Fortune.
Plus, “you’ve got this impending retirement wave that has really been driving the industry a long period of time, and a lack of new entrants.”
Morgan is referring to the fact that millions of tradespeople in the U.S. are nearing or at retirement age. More than one in five construction workers is currently older than 55, according to Associated Builders and Contractors.
As of May 2023, about 39% of electricians were 45 years old or older, a Consumer Affairs report shows, and there’s a 5:2 retirement-to-replacement ratio in manufacturing, construction, and other skilled trades, an Education Department report shows.
The supply-demand imbalance has hit crisis territory. Last year alone, nearly 600,000 jobs were posted for major skilled trades positions in the U.S., while only about 150,000 new workers entered the labor pool through apprenticeship programs, according to JLL.
A hidden workforce behind the AI boom
The shortage has caught the attention of some of the country’s most prominent executives, who argue that the U.S. cannot build the infrastructure for AI it’s betting its economic future on without the people to wire, cool, and maintain it.
Ford CEO Jim Farley has consistently warned about the gap, arguing America’s AI ambitions are running headfirst into a labor wall.
“I think the intent is there, but there’s nothing to backfill the ambition,” Farley told Axios last fall.
“How can we reshore all this stuff if we don’t have people to work there?”
Hadrian CEO Chris Power, whose company automates defense manufacturing, has gone further, predicting a wage shock in the trades.
“All the white-collar jobs are going to get automated,” Power said in a recent interview with tech publication Sourcery at the Hill and Valley Forum.
“I think we’re going to see massive hyperinflation in blue-collar salaries.”
Power added that even with robotic welding on his own factory floor, he still can’t hire enough welders to meet demand from the U.S. Navy.
“Everyone, go tell your kids to quit college and university and go get a welding certification,” Power added.
“The country needs you.”
Morgan argues the skilled trades are foundational to nearly every high-growth sector of the economy—a story he says the industry has failed to tell.
But one problem is the lingering perception that blue-collar work isn’t as elite or prestigious as white-collar work.
“As powerful as AI will become, AI can’t climb a ladder to change the batteries in your smoke detector,” Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison told Fortune earlier this month.
“It can’t change your furnace filter; it can’t clean your dryer vent; it can’t repair a hole on your roof.”
Morgan also questioned:
“Why wouldn’t somebody want to be an HVAC tech or an electrician or refrigeration specialist in the data center industry?“
He added, “You can’t have AI without data centers supporting them.”
Then today, Fox News published an opinion piece (NOT headline news, as it should be!), admitting that electricity shortages are on the horizon for Americans, due to human labor shortages.
The machines that keep America alive are failing. We forgot how to replace them
We’ve finally admitted that electricity is as essential as water, but we did so too late to avoid disruption
by Brian Tochman
Fox NewsExcerpts:
For 20 years, electricity was the most boring business in America, and our industry built its whole infrastructure strategy around the assumption that things would stay that way.
The numbers tell the story. From 2010 to 2020, U.S. electricity consumption fell by roughly 1%. LEDs, efficient motors and tightening appliance standards quietly cancelled out the electricity used by every new subdivision, factory and data hall, and then some. Demand was flat, and planners treated this as a permanent fact of life rather than as what it actually was: an intermission.
No-growth industries make choices that are perfectly rational, yet corrosive. You don’t fund apprenticeships when there’s no new capacity to staff. You don’t keep spare metallurgical know-how on the payroll when nobody’s ordering. You don’t recruit ambitious 25-year-olds into a sector whose pitch is “stable, essential, and never going anywhere.”
So, the utilities didn’t. The transformer makers didn’t. The steel mills didn’t. The workforce aged in place and the labor pipeline behind it ran dry.
We mistook a flat line for stability and in doing so, allowed a slow decay to occur. Then the line broke.
Since 2020, electricity consumption has reversed two decades of decline and climbed about 7%. Demand for large power transformers, the equipment through which nearly all of America’s electricity passes at some point, has surged 116% since 2019. Data centers, reshoring, electrification and grid hardening all arrived in the same handful of years, descending on an industry that had bought into the idea that it would never grow again.
Facing resurgent demand, we went looking for the people and the parts to meet resurgent demand, and here is what we found: America had forgotten how to make pipes.
Roughly 80% of the large power transformers the United States installs are now imported.
The grain-oriented electrical steel at the heart of every one of them has but a single domestic producer. Lead times for a standard power transformer have stretched to nearly two and a half years, and the larger units that connect power plants to the grid run longer still.
Prices are up more than 77% since 2019. The average transformer already humming away on the American grid is 38 years old, and more than 70% of the fleet is past age 25.
We are simultaneously trying to replace an aging base and build an entirely new one with a supply chain we spent a generation hollowing out.
The hardware shortage gets the headlines. The human one is worse, because you can’t expedite it.
A person cannot, today, enroll anywhere in America to learn how to design or build a large power transformer. The handful of university power-engineering programs that survived the last two decades don’t teach it. They were shrinking before the boom began as students chased software and AI instead.
The knowledge to wind a coil, design a core or run a high-voltage acceptance test is tribal, passed hand-to-hand on a shop floor by master winders, test engineers or metallurgists who understand why a core behaves the way it does. The expertise lives in people, much of it never written down, and roughly half the utility workforce is now over 45 with a large share eligible to retire this decade.
You can stand up a new transformer factory in a couple of years. You cannot conjure an experienced winder in a couple of years, and you can’t enroll one either.
Not referenced in any of these reports, of course, is how so much of the human labor force in the U.S., including factory workers, have now been deported from the U.S. due to Trump’s immigration policies, and many of these people deported were even here legally and Green Card holders.
A total system collapse is inevitable.
This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)
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The post America Does Not Have the Labor to Run the New Data Centers – Potential Loss of $1 Trillion a Year due to Lack of Human Skilled Labor first appeared on Health Impact News.
President Trump is looking for a breakthrough on the Strait of Hormuz and is feeling the pressure of the ongoing war.
Israeli efforts to establish new Jewish settlements and seize Palestinian land have reached a frenzied pitch in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinian residents say they have been encircled and besieged by violent settlers.
Mass surveillance technology might be popular with police departments, but for the US public, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult sell.
At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPRs) since the start of the year, according to data collected by the Washington Examiner. That comes after reporting in February that some 30 cities had done the same since 2025, indicative of the rising backlash against the tech.
In all, the Examiner reports cities in 23 states have shredded their Flock contracts so far this year, led by California and Wisconsin, which each have seven rejections, cancellations, or deactivations. Other heavy hitters include New York, Washington, and Massachusetts with four each, and Virginia with three.
Though Flock has its cameras in over 5,000 US cities as of July 2026, the rise in rejections at the municipal level comes amidst a tidal wave of outrage around issues of privacy and civil rights.
In cities where civic leaders have been slow to respond to these anxieties, citizens have moved quickly to take matters into their own hands by damaging, obscuring, or stealing the surveillance cameras in order to stop them from recording footage. A rise in official cancelations or rejections shows municipal leaders are catching on to the reality that the American populace broadly disproves of the technology, and they aren’t afraid to show it.
Arguably the highest-profile contract cancellation for Flock came when the Los Angeles Police Department decided to non-renew its years-long contract with the company, a decision motivated by a searing internal audit of the company’s technology. The internal report found that, in just two months, Flock’s ALPRs contributed to 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts, resulting in a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent.
With no sign of the outrage settling anytime soon, it’s likely these 54 cities could just be the start.
This article was originally published by Truthout on Aug. 06, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Can a lawsuit hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-change and its impact? That’s the question a Washington State-based woman is hoping to answer. Misti Leon is suing several big oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and others — over the 2021 heat-related death of her mother Juliana, who died during a record-breaking heat dome over the Pacific Northwest.
For years, individuals and institutions have attempted to protect human lives from climate change using litigation. In 2015, a public interest law firm called Our Children’s Trust, representing nearly two dozen young people sued the federal government for failing to protect them against the impending impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Courts dragged their feet for more than a decade only for the case to reach a dead end at the United States Supreme Court in 2025.
Leon’s civil suit is significant, not just because a Washington judge unexpectedly cleared the case for discovery and trial, but because Leon can directly link her mother’s death to climate change. Scientists concluded that the 2021 heat dome was, in the words of one research paper, “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” It’s about a crime that already occurred instead of hypothetical harm.
“Ms. Leon’s case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster,” Mike Meno, communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports community efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change, explained in an interview.
Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome. “She was found unresponsive in her car,” said Meno. “The medical examiner determined that her death was caused by hyperthermia,” a condition that is the opposite of the more well-known cold-related condition of hypothermia.
Hyperthermia-related deaths have sharply risen over the past decade, a predictable outcome of fossil fuel emissions. Oil companies such as Exxon have long been aware of the devastating impacts their product would have on the climate. “Major oil and gas companies decades ago knew, their own scientists told them internally, that if we kept burning fossil fuels, it would lead to, in the words of one internal Exxon document, potentially catastrophic events, just like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome,” said Meno.
Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome.
Big Oil’s failure to act on this information has drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco. Companies like Philip Morris knew about the impacts of cigarette smoking on human health and kept it secret for years. Since that information was made public, individuals suffering from their addictive products have sued repeatedly and won.
A major lawsuit brought by state attorneys general culminated in 1998 in what became known as the Master Settlement Agreement, where dozens of tobacco companies settled to the tune of billions of dollars for public health. Notably, the federal government also sued tobacco companies for violations of racketeering laws over their deception.
Yet while individuals and states are taking action in the case of oil companies, the federal government clearly has no interest in holding Big Oil accountable for climate change. Instead, President Donald Trump says he wants the Justice Department to investigate fossil fuel companies for raising oil prices in the wake of the Iran war. This appears to be a classic case of deflection, given that a majority of voters blame Trump for price increases at the pump. He isn’t interested in holding companies accountable for climate change; he’s upset they made it harder for people to consume oil. Moreover, his administration is suing states for trying to enforce environmental regulations aimed at oil companies.
In addition to keeping their own research secret, fossil fuel companies spent years sowing doubt over the cause-and-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and a warming climate. “What that decades-long deception campaign did is it stole a generation’s worth of time when action could’ve been taken, and we could’ve averted the worst of some of these climate disasters,” said Meno.
This year, more extreme weather records are expected to be broken as climate change intensifies. The first half of 2026 was the third-warmest half-year on record. An El Niño phenomenon developing this year is expected to be one of the strongest in modern history.
Whether or not the Trump administration admits that the climate is changing, Americans know it is. “Anyone of a certain age who can look back over enough time just knows, as a matter of common sense, that the climate we are all living in today is not what we had a few years ago,” said Meno.
The industry knows it too — and, according to Meno, oil companies “are in absolute panic mode, fighting tooth and nail to escape accountability.” Leon’s lawsuit is hardly the only one they fear. Numerous states, counties, cities, and tribal governments are suing Big Oil, and making headway.
Meno explained that companies have “been pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to take up one of these cases for years.” The Supreme Court finally agreed to review a case in Colorado where that state’s supreme court in May 2025 ruled the City of Boulder and Boulder County could move forward with discovery and trial in their suit against ExxonMobil and Suncor.
Not content with leaving it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Big Oil has been lobbying Congress to grant the industry immunity over its role in climate change — and conservative lawmakers have complied. In April, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026.”
If Congress were to pass the bill, according to Meno, it “would be a truly unprecedented legal shield that would strip the public of their right to hold these corporations accountable for the harm they’ve caused.” Meno’s Center for Climate Integrity is urging members of the public to demand their elected representatives vote against Hageman and Cruz’s bill.
Big Oil says it deserves immunity because it shouldn’t be penalized for giving the public what it wants. In a joint statement, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said: “These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive.”
What they didn’t say is that they have worked for years to prevent fair competition from renewables. It’s why the state of Michigan launched an antitrust lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and others because they acted “as a cartel … to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy in order to maintain their dominance.”
Fossil fuel companies have long known their products are deadly, kept it secret, unfairly ensured their dominance, then argued that they ought not to be sued for delivering a product the public wants. Now, as climate-related deaths stack up, the industry claims it isn’t responsible. Misti Leon, whose mother might be alive today if governments and courts had reined in Big Oil, told The New York Times: “I never would have in a million years guessed that a heat dome and climate change would be what killed my mother and what took her from me. There’s no way to comprehend that and to kind of even rationalize it.”
Yes, progressives and democratic socialists seem to be where all the energy is right now. No, there is no absolutely no need for other Democrats to be afraid of them.
© JEFF KOWALSKY
This story originally appeared in Prism on Aug. 03, 2026.
Following the largest nurses strike in New York City history, Marilyn Shuler and 11 of her co-workers returned to their jobs at Montefiore Hospitals in the Bronx in February, only to find that their work environment had changed in a major way.
At the time, Shuler worked in utilization review, a department that ascertains the need for medical care and whether care is covered by insurance. The veteran nurse, who worked at Montefiore for almost 40 years, had to begin using Datavant, a tool used to abridge the process by which the hospital sends patient and care information to insurance companies. Datavant’s website refers to itself as an AI platform.
Shuler said she and other nurses thought the tool would just help process the backlog of cases created by the nurses strike. But when case volume returned to normal, the 12 nurses working in utilization review were told to continue using Datavant.
In early July, after a few months of using the tool, Shuler was laid off from the position she held for six years. Her colleagues were all laid off too. They felt they had been replaced by artificial intelligence.
Shuler’s case and that of her colleagues, she said, is far from an outlier. Hospitals will continue to automate and eliminate the jobs of nurses and other workers through AI, Shuler added.
Job automation keeps nurses up at night. It was a concern raised by nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) earlier in the year, when 15,000 walked off the job demanding a new contract.
“Artificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release issued when the 12 nurses at Montefiore lost their job.
Montefiore representatives deny having replaced workers with Datavant.
“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, Montefiore’s senior vice president for government relations and strategic communications, said in an email. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”
A spokesperson for the hospital said that Datavant’s tools are a nonclinical program that helps facilitate the paperwork process, but did not address whether the program uses AI.
Shuler said the laid-off nurses did not receive proper notice from the hospital. A union representative told the nurses on May 6, National Nurses Day, that the hospital planned to eliminate the 12 utilization review positions.
“We just can’t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of … clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,” Shuler told Prism.
Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals deskill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.
“We have already begun to see that in places where AI has been introduced around triaging,” Fergus said. “The younger, newer clinicians, the more exposure they have to AI, and the earlier exposure they have to AI, the higher the risk of them deskilling.”
Fergus said healthcare workers should have a background education, but that they should also supplement that with real experience in the field and trial and error. Reading X-ray scans, Fergus said, is an example of a practice that is enhanced by AI tools. But workers should still be able to know what they are looking at.
“We will lose the skill of doctors being able to read those tools as well, and when the inevitable happens that the system goes down, then nobody’s going to know how to read the images,” Fergus said.
Using an AI system that does not account for the historical inequities of the healthcare industry, Fergus said, is also a deep concern. Fergus worries that hospitals might look to save money on the AI products they contract with and end up with a service that is not attuned to serving a diverse population.
“If there’s any issues of racism, or the system is not properly programmed for the population that it’s in, then that additional programming of the AI can amplify the disparities that already exist and can actually result in injuries,” Fergus said.
Despite hospitals onboarding AI systems as an addition to workers’ current workflows, Fergus said it is only a matter of time before hospitals look to automate jobs. She said most hospitals will likely see this as short-term savings.
But if they don’t create more staffing to maintain and continuously train the products, “then the systems become obsolete, and they become harmful to the patients,” Fergus said.
Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor
A Chinese research team has completed an updated geologic map of the entire Moon featuring a scale of 1:5 million. China’s Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (IGCAGS) detailed the geologic map on August 6. Beyond its scientific data, the 2.8-by-1.2-meter map introduces a proprietary cartographic standard that identifies over 13,500 impact […]The Rural Health Transformation Program could offer significant healthcare access improvements to the NC mountains.
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