I looked at Economist Intel Unit's Democracy rankings (only the top "full democracy" countries) and added Freedom House's ratings. Then looked up who requires Voter ID. (FYI US at #25 on EIU rank and scores 83 from Freedom House.) Corrections welcome, but provide source please.

Saw this today. Personal view is that the only faith which will be shaken by viewing it is faith in Spielberg. Three of us saw it, with a range of film preferences. We were all unimpressed.

We've been told for years that you have to choose - either you hold kids accountable, or you give them a chance. I've learned over the years that that's a false choice. The kid who fired a gun has to answer for it - for the victim's sake and for his own. The kid who's drifting needs someone to step in before he's the one holding the gun. Accountability and a chance aren't opposites. Doing both, case by case, is the job. #JuvenileJustice #KrenzForHennepin

Your car. Your business. Your home. These are not "minor" things. It is not a "minor crime" when these are damaged, repeatedly. Property crime is where most people actually touch the justice system. When it goes unanswered, people stop reporting, and stop believing. Evidence-based charging goes after the repeat offenders driving most of it. This is the work. Not glamorous. It matters. #FollowThrough #PublicSafetyMN

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

Looks like more negotiating with himself unfortunately. Regarding Iran, "discussions" have been approved. Regarding everyone else, "Discussions and final points," have been approved.

A thought. Minneapolis doesn't need the politics of denial, and it doesn't need the politics of chaos. It doesn't need political treatments in issues of consequence. This office isn't where you go to score political points, it's where you go to do a hard job carefully, for people counting on you - the victim, the family, the neighborhood, and the kid who still has a chance to turn around. I've done that job for forty years. I'm asking to do it for all of Hennepin County. #ReadyOnDayOne #CommonSenseJustice

Will have to see, but I think the real problem for the British state is going to be if events in Belfast trigger any significant migrant exodus from the city.

For forty years, my office wasn't a campaign headquarters. It was a courtroom in Hennepin County. I sat with victims before they testified. I read the files at night. I learned that justice isn't a slogan you shout - it's work you do, one case at a time, for the people who actually live here. This race has a lot of noise in it. A lot of contention about Washington. I'm running for a different reason: the people of this county deserve a prosecutor whose first question is never, “what's the politics of this?” It's, “who got hurt, and what does the evidence say?” That's the job. That's the whole job. #ReadyOnDayOne

The anecdote seems Illustrative of an underlying sense of operational security developed from the longstanding paramilitary rivalry in Northern Ireland. Would expect the authorities secure proportionally fewer arrests up there than in Southampton.

It appears like things are unfolding in Belfast as one might expect when two populations not unfamiliar with sectarian violence turn their attention to a common target. I'm skeptical the state will have the resources to impose order, but we'll see.

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all. signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06…

BREAKING: We just released a BOMBSHELL report exposing how Governor Tim Walz and AG Keith Ellison fueled Minnesota's fraud explosion. $9 billion in Medicaid lost. $300 million in federal child nutrition funds were placed at serious risk. Read the report and key takeaways 👇🏻

Hard work used to be enough, says expelled Hotchkiss attendee farming oysters sold exclusively to his mother's restaurant and on land/water owned by a friend.

Tragic. Possibly more tragic is that I don't find this shocking.

The Community Notes feature hectors one if a source link not included, even for a CN which says, e.g. "in fact, 2 2 does not equal 5," or "actually, water is wet." Yet, the algorithm actually discourages posting source links in original posts. Why the double standard @elonmusk?

Many in the UK, particularly those connected to the government or traditional media (which shares a permeable employment membrane with government) are quite unhappy with this statement, but not seeing responses which refute the substance of the claim.

Accurate in most cases.

Pratt has a challenge, not least since he likely needs a 10pt margin to "win"by the time the "counting" finishes. However, with such incompetent current leadership, there is a much greater risk of a dramatic failure than a dramatic improvement in the period until election day.

Absolutely astounding watching the substantially the entire media class in the UK downplay any need to react to the Henry Nowak travesty exposed by the released video. Astounding.