There is persuasive evidence that the smoke from climate change-driven Canadian wildfires isn't being pushed into America by prevailing winds. It's entirely because of how much our current government sucks.

On Friday, both Donald Trump and Republican legislators made threats against Canada over how their fires are affecting air quality across a wide area of the United States. Because—and this is a great surprise to Republicans who have long argued to the contrary—there's only one atmosphere, and we all have to share it.

The stupidity. It really does burn.

First, Trump decried our northern neighbor's refusal to properly groom the 3.7 million square kilometers of boreal forests that covers 40% of the Canadian landmass. And he's going to charge them for it.

Yeah, Canadians, get out those rakes. Trump owns golf courses, so he knows that you can keep every tree in the taiga perfectly trimmed if only you practice "basic Forest Management." Trump, as many people have said, understands grooming.

But, is simply putting a tree tax on Canada sufficient? Nay, say GOP legislators. They have interrupted their busy schedule of pretending Mitch McConnell is breathing on his own to introduce the CANADA FIRE Act.

"To impose sanctions with respect to the Government of Canada in response to transboundary wildfire smoke affecting the United States, and for other purposes. … The Government of Canada has failed to take sufficient and timely measures to prevent, mitigate, or respond to repeated transboundary wildfire-smoke events affecting the United States."

Exactly how Canada is to turn back smoke at the border goes unstated, but there is a good deal of chest thumping about making them get out there and do some unspecified hard work. The bill provides for seizing the property of any Canadian official involved in resource management or policy making, along with that of their family members, should Trump declare a "transboundary smoke emergency." It also allows Trump to block all Canadian imports, close the border, cancel all Canadian vias, and declare the Canadian ambassador and other diplomatic personell to be “persona non grata.”

In other words: Trump gets to declare war on Canada if they let their stinky smoke cross our sacred border. Maybe we should start planning now for control of the St. Lawrence seaway.

As of Friday, over 850 wildfires were burning across Canada. As the Detroit Free Press reports, wildfire summers are the "new normal," and we can expect them to keep recurring.

The last three fire seasons have been among the 10 worst on record in Canada, according to the Canadian Climate Institute, the nation's leading independent, nonprofit climate change policy research organization. Research shows accelerating climate change, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, makes wildfires bigger, hotter and more destructive — and Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average, according to a 2019 Canadian government report. Canada's area burned in wildfires has quadrupled since the 1970s.

The incidence of wildfire is increasing, not because Canada suddenly slacked off on sweeping up pine needles, as Trump seems to believe, but because their forests are getting hotter and drier. And it's getting worse.

The sanctions that he is applying, and the laws that Republicans are trying to pass, are targeting the effect of something whose cause Trump has celebrated.

That smoke blanketing the Midwest? That smoke is Trump using war time powers just one month ago to protect the most polluting power source on the planet.

"As a result of the $700m investment that I'm announcing today, we will protect 14 coal plants and 42 coal mines, a tremendous number, and build two new coal plants and one massive new export terminal," Trump said.

That smoke is Trump sending Duke Energy $179 million to stop building a wind farm before it could go into operation. And then spending $765 million to kill a whole group of offshore wind projects already in the works.

“Today marks a significant step in advancing President Trump’s energy agenda and lowering energy prices for Americans,” said Department of Justice Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward. “By ending these offshore wind leases and pivoting investment toward dependable natural gas infrastructure in multiple states, Invenergy is helping revitalize American energy and national security."

That smoke is Trump cancelling the nation's largest solar power project along with $83 billion of clean energy spending that had already been approved.

The analysis found that 223 manufacturing and clean energy projects representing $82.9 billion in investment and 111,765 jobs have stalled or been cancelled during President Donald Trump's second term.

That smoke is Trump ending support for electric vehicles at a time when they are poised to dominate sales and rolling back fuel efficiency standards to increase burning of oil.

"We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome, horrible, actually, CAFE standards that impose expensive restrictions," Trump said, referring to the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules, often called CAFE standards. "And all sorts of problems, all sorts of problems for automakers."

That smoke is "drill, baby, drill."

That smoke is "wind kills dolphins."

That smoke is "clean, beautiful coal."

That smoke is every Republican who has, for over four decades, denied the existence of human-caused climate change while encouraging its acceleration. And, unfortunately, it won't be going away soon as the Canadian Climate Institute makes clear.

Thanks to climate change:

• Snow cover is lower.
• Rainfall is more erratic.
• Forests are drier.
• Summers are hotter.
• Lightning is more frequent.
• Fires start sooner.
• Fires burn hotter.
• Fires spread faster.
• Fires burn more area.
• "Zombie fires" smolder through the winter. ready to start the process again.

All of that is happening because human beings keep burning fossil fuels. Because of stupidity and greed.

It is perfectly in our grasp to have clean, abundant, cheap energy. Republicans are doing everything possible to make sure American energy is dirty, scarce, and expensive. Because no one can monopolize sunshine.

I'm sorry, Canada, that you have to share our air.

Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals on I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The man has pipes.

[This is a vintage post originally from Sep 2014.]

Tags: Marvin Gaye · music · video

By now, many of you have probably read or heard about the recent exposé revealing a secretive society in which the wealthy and the famous hunt poor people for sport. I more than understand fans being concerned about my reported involvement when they’re seeing bizarre headlines and posts about panels where we allow the poor person to plead for their life and the dinners in which an unhoused man is mockingly honored as “the king of the hunt” when we put a construction paper crown on his head and feed him empty banana peels and crusts of bread.

In other words, my critics are missing the nuance of my membership in the wealthy people hunting poor people for sport club.

To be clear, I have only been to three or four hunting poor people for sport conferences. Three. Or four. That’s not quite a dedicated membership to a secret society, is it? Nor have I ever met the billionaire known as the Founder of the Hunt. I have never spoken with him on the phone or with his representatives, other than to ask where the hunt will be held this year, what weapons will be considered fair game, and who needs to survive seventy-two hours in the forest to have all their debts cleared.

I’m not saying this out of ego, but it’s important to remember that many high-profile people need to ask these questions before attending an event like this.

Also, I want to reaffirm that the billionaire Founder of the Hunt has politics that are the complete opposite of mine. You can paint me as some right-wing lunatic if you want, but I know in my heart the good I’ve done for those who haven’t been as lucky as me. Okay? I support LGBTQ+ rights. I support a woman’s right to choose. I even do a land acknowledgment before they open the man’s thirty-four-by-twenty-three-inch cage to let him loose with a head start of ten seconds. Whatever you think being a member of this club entails, I strongly believe I wouldn’t be disguising bear traps with leaves and setting up a speaker that plays the sound of a distressed woman begging for help if we had politicians in office who uplifted those less fortunate. So, please don’t paint me with a broad brush when I’m out there doing the work.

At the hunts I’ve been to, there were a wide variety of hunters, with a wide variety of hunting opinions—some I agreed with, some I didn’t. I can’t speak for every person on the list, especially when I was only with a small subset of them when we crawled through dense grass in order to slice an unsuspecting hobo’s Achilles tendon. My experience was not of a single ideological gathering. Rather, we were able to have important conversations about our beliefs. If the victim dies fast, was it a test of speed and accuracy? Or was it more the sign of a skilled hunter if the hopeless target suffers as long as possible, no matter how many fingers remain and how much blood is lost?

I’ve had long, detailed debates with members of different political persuasions on whether we should eat the man we caught in a net and allowed to get so dehydrated that he hallucinated us as demons when we came to put him down. Those aren’t the types of discussions you’re likely to have in public, especially when so much of the media is ready to pounce on celebrities for stepping out of line. But how can we come together as a country, or even as a world, when we’re afraid to share our thoughts on the easy kill of a shotgun versus the clean kill of a sniper rifle? What does it say about the current cultural climate that two sides can’t find common ground on how long to starve the dogs before letting them loose on a man who’s hoping his wife and children won’t be visited by the loan sharks he owed money to?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been focused on making a positive impact on how the future unfolds, especially in tech, AI, and which areas of the body outside the neck can cause you to bleed out with the right shot. Part of that work means forming relationships with all kinds of hunters and trying to understand their strategies for making the man lose all hope when he realizes his stash of nuts and berries in the forest has been poisoned. Sometimes I try to get them to understand mine, which is pretending I’m there to help the victim escape and then, once his guard is down, claiming that sweet trophy for myself.

So, yes, I do respect that many of you have misgivings about me being in the wealthy people hunting poor people for sport club. But I also know that it’s productive to sometimes engage with those we oppose and to remind ourselves that we all want the same thing at the end of the day: To see the light leave the eyes of a living, breathing, feeling person who isn’t famous or wealthy enough to help my career.

Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.

“AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonists’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,” the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. “Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.”

Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect. The typical method of detection involves looking for stylistic markers such as an abundance of em-dashes, the overuse of the word “delve,” or an obsession with goblins, but this project tried something different. “The idea for this project came because we are hoping to eventually move past plain text detection, into some sort of space where we can separate human ideas from AI-generated ideas,” Jenna Russell, a University of Maryland researcher and one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. Russell is also an intern at the AI-detection company Pangram.

Russell and her team decided to attempt to detect what she called “narrative features” in AI- generated fiction. The detector is called StoryScope and it builds on NarraBench, a 2025 benchmark that suggested a taxonomy of narrative features in fiction. StoryScope looked at how fiction handled plot development, character descriptions, setting, and temporal structure to determine if something was written by a human or an AI.

“It was my first attempt at getting 'under the surface' and focusing more on ideas,” Russell said. “We wanted to see how close to typical AI-detection we could get by only relying on the narrative features, to understand if this sort of structural difference really even exists. This method also adds some interpretability to detection, which is an open question in the field. Using narrative features, we can point to certain tangible features (such as the number of subplots included in a story). I think this is why it's struck a chord recently, people can really say ‘ah these are some of the underlying traits of how AI writes fiction.’”

To test StoryScope, the researchers selected 10,272 human-written stories then reverse engineered them into writing prompts using Gemini 2.5. Then it took those thousands of prompts and fed them into Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Kimi K2.5, and GPT 5.4. All of the data — including the prompts and the resulting AI stories — are available on Hugging Face.

To source the stories, the researchers used the Books3 dataset — a database of 183,000 books collected from pirated ebooks. The dataset is the subject of several lawsuits and has been used to train an unknown number of LLMs. The StoryScope study included more than 10,000 of some of the most famous short stories ever written, many of them pulled from popular anthologies. There’s Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Louis L'Amour, Charlotte Perkins, and Harlan Ellison. All have been rendered down to their base elements by AI and then regurgitated into a different LLM to see if it can replicate them.

Russell told me the dataset was controversial. “Hence why we do not release it to the public,” she said.

The study itself contained a disclosure. “We acknowledge the copyright issues related to the Books3 dataset and do not endorse its use for model training or commercial text generation,” it said. “The use of the dataset in our paper is restricted to academic purposes only and is meant to understand the narrative differences in human-written and AI-generated text to help inform discussions on AI-detection, authorship, and copyright policy.”

The various AIs, of course, can’t possibly replicate the prose of O. Henry. So what, according to StoryScope, are the narrative quirks of LLM-written simulacra of English’s grand works of fiction? 

AI tools tend to over explain themes, for one. 

“Narrators explicitly explain the story’s theme 77% of the time, versus 52% for humans: a grieving character’s arc will typically end with the narrator stating the lesson learned. AI dialogue serves philosophical debate more often (59% vs. 34%), and references to other works tend to be vague allusions (72% vs. 50%) rather than specific, named references. The pattern is one of over-determination: AI spells out meaning rather than trusting the reader to infer,” the study said.

AI also more often avoids subplots and fails to play with time jumps and flashbacks. The systems overwrite passages about the body and senses. “Where a human author might write that a character ‘felt afraid,’ AI renders fear as a tightening chest, cold sweat, and dimming lamplight,” the study said. Humans also spin more complicated narratives involving more characters and locations than AI can handle. Humans also reference other works of fiction, specific people and places in a way that AI struggles with.

A disclosure caught my eye at the bottom of the StoryScope study. “Large language models and coding agents (Claude Code and Codex) are used to aid with and polish writing and generate some tables and plots,” it said.

“I believe it's important to disclose AI use (and ideally think it should be more in-depth than I wrote in the paper),” Russell told me. “Most researchers are using AI, a lot of it seemingly 'slop' [...] but a lot of it is high-effort, good research. Also, technically you are supposed to disclose AI use for conference submissions, but most people don't. I want to help change that norm!”

She also explained a bit more about how AI agents helped shape the project. “I use AI agents to help implement the code (using the claude code / codex interfaces). I also use them as an editor during the writing process! They have access to the project codebase and the paper latex, so the agents can implement graphics for me much more quickly than I could,” she said. “They write comments and add to the paper draft, but I keep it all in different colors so I can manually review and accept/reject/edit any suggestions from AI. I am a big believer that AI can help or hurt writing, but usually helps when not used to create more internet 'slop'.”

I kept thinking about Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg’s story “Ship-Shape Pay-Off” being turned into an AI prompt and then spit back out by an LLM. Ellison died in 2018 and was notoriously protective of his work to the point of violence. He successfully sued James Cameron for plagiarism over The Terminator. I have a hard time imagining he’d be happy to see his story pumped into a machine, no matter the results.

“A lot of people, like teachers or readers, don't really care if AI was used in the writing process, but do care if the human is the one behind the heart of it,” Russell said. “A teacher wants to know if their student understood the lesson, and a reader wants to know that the creativity behind a touching story was truly the work of the human author.”

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa), also known as Florida cranberry, Jamaican sorrel, or red sorrel, is a vibrant, heat-loving annual that thrives in Florida’s warm climate and delivers both ornamental beauty and impressive health benefits.

Native to West and Central Africa, roselle is perfectly adapted to hot, sunny conditions and grows readily throughout Florida, especially in USDA hardiness zones 9–10. It tolerates high summer temperatures and even drought once established, making it an excellent choice for low-input, sustainable gardens.

• Planting time: Sow seeds or set out transplants in April–May (or again in August for a fall harvest).

• Growth habit: Plants reach 5–7 feet tall, with reddish-green lobed leaves and striking yellow flowers with dark centers.

• Harvest window: Calyces (the fleshy red cups beneath the flowers) mature in October–November; harvest before frost or temperatures drop below 40°F.

• Yield: A single healthy plant can produce up to 12–16 pounds of calyces with proper care.

  Edible and Medicinal Uses

  The star of roselle is its tart, cranberry-like calyx, used fresh or dried for the following:

  • Jams, jellies, and sauces (a Florida “cranberry” sauce)

  • Refreshing teas, cordials, and festive holiday drinks

  • Flavoring for pies, crisps, and smoothies

  • Dried calyces for long-term storage and year-round use

  Leaves can be eaten cooked as greens or added raw to salads for a tangy zing, while seeds are high in protein and can be roasted or ground into soups.

  

  Health Benefits Backed by Science

  Roselle is more than just a pretty garden plant—it’s a nutrient-dense superfood with a growing body of research supporting its wellness potential:

  • Rich in antioxidants: Packed with anthocyanins (which give it its deep red color), vitamin C, polyphenols, and organic acids that combat oxidative stress.

  • Supports heart health: Multiple studies show roselle tea or extract can help lower blood pressure, reduce LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, and improve blood vessel function.

  • Anti-inflammatory effects: Recent reviews highlight roselle’s ability to inhibit inflammatory markers, potentially easing symptoms of arthritis and other chronic inflammatory conditions.

  • Blood sugar regulation: Emerging evidence suggests roselle may improve insulin sensitivity and help manage blood glucose levels—promising for those with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.

  • Digestive and immune support: High in fiber and prebiotics, roselle promotes gut health; its vitamin C and A content bolsters immune function.

  • Potential anticancer properties: Laboratory studies indicate roselle extracts may slow tumor growth and inhibit cancer cell proliferation, though more human trials are needed.

  Growing Tips for Florida Gardeners

  • Sun: Full sun is essential—roselle won’t thrive in shade.

  • Soil: Well-drained soil is key; amend with compost if needed.

  • Water: Water during dry spells, but avoid overwatering.

  • Pests: Watch for root-knot nematodes; practice crop rotation to reduce buildup.

  • Variety: ‘Victor’ is a proven performer in South Florida.

  Final Thoughts

  Roselle is a resilient, multipurpose plant that fits seamlessly into Florida’s subtropical gardens while offering a tart, cranberry-like harvest and an impressive portfolio of health-promoting compounds. Whether you’re brewing a refreshing tea, making a holiday drink, or exploring its anti-inflammatory and cardioprotective potential, roselle is a worthy addition to any heat-tolerant edible landscape.