Some news be good today: Rescuers on Tuesday pulled 16 people out alive from rubble in Brefèt, a town in Les Cayes in the Southern department, three days after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the area, according to Haiti’s Civil Protection agency.

The newest latest Axios/Ipsos poll shows most Americans might be near-sane:

Two-thirds (64-percent) support their state or local government requiring masks to be worn in all public places.
However, there are significant partisan differences, with the vast majority of Democrats (88-percent) and less than half of Republicans (40-percent) in favor of state or local mask mandates.
Support for state and local mask requirements also varies based on where people live, with those living in urban areas (71-percent) being more supportive than those who live in rural areas (49-percent).

I saw this clip this afternoon and it’s so CGI, but this is real shit — Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots:

This note at Engadget this morning:

Don’t worry that the robots will chase you down any time soon, though. The vault in particular has about a 50-percent failure rate, and there’s still a slight chance of failure at each step.
Even a fist pump at the end didn’t go smoothly, Boston Dynamics said. The company still has to refine movements that are limited by the very nature of the robots themselves, such as the lack of a spine and the relatively weak arm joints.

As it stands, Atlas isn’t a production robot like Spot. It’s a research model meant to push the limits of robotics. Boston Dynamics does, however, envision this parkour practice leading to future helper robots that can handle a wide variety of tasks with human-like dexterity. Let’s just hope they stay on our good side.

And I’d recently seen “I, Robot” with Will Smith, and these Atlas guys reminded me:

Are we already in Asimov land?

Conservatives are imbeciles with power. And they’re not real conservatives, like from the Eisenhower/Goldwater days, but are now weird-ass, mental cases of denial of deadly science and reality — not only in the handling of the COVID pandemic, but also climate change.
A recent study on news coverage of climate change breaks down the truth from bullshit — via EurekaAlert, also this morning:

Good news: Major print media in five countries have been representing climate change very factually, hitting a 90-percent accuracy rate in the last 15 years, according to an international study out today with University of Colorado Boulder and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) authors.
Scientifically accurate coverage of man-made climate change is becoming less biased—headlining the idea that print media are no longer presenting climate change as controversy.
But there’s one place where the team did find biased coverage: conservative media.

“Two decades ago, print media frequently gave equal credence to both legitimate climate experts and outlier climate deniers. But we found in more recent years that the media around the globe actually got it right most of the time. However, facts now outweigh a debate,” said Lucy McAllister, former PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead on the study out today in Environmental Research Letters.
“Nine out of ten media stories accurately reported the science on human contributions to climate change. It’s not portrayed as a two-sided debate anymore.”
…
The researchers emphasize that people rarely read peer-reviewed scientific research about climate change, and are more likely to learn about it through the media.
Therefore studies such as this one are critical to understand ongoing science and policy pursuits in the public sphere. There are also other competing pressures that shape our awareness of climate change — such as conversations with family and friends, entertainment and trusted leaders, the team says.

Soft-pedaling disasters.

Another environmental study published at Nature earlier this month did the math of global warming — from the Abstract: ‘Our findings predict that a temperature increase of 5.2?°C above the pre-industrial level at present rates of increase would likely result in mass extinction comparable to that of the major Phanerozoic events, even without other, non-climatic anthropogenic impacts.‘

And those Phan-whatever ‘events’ were dire: ‘It is generally accepted that there were five major episodes of mass extinction in the Phanerozoic record: end-Ordovician, late Devonian (Frasnian-Famennian boundary), end-Permian, end-Triassic and end-Cretaceous.‘
Not fun for man nor beast.

End game:

Russia: Afghan President Escaped With Four Cars and Helicopter Full of Cash https://t.co/2R225ZJpaP via @thedailybeast

— Suburban Guerrilla ? (@SusieMadrak) August 16, 2021

And, again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: New Yorker cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan, found here)