Been there. Done that. All my life.

(Seriously: Follow the link. Bluebird of Bitterness has knocked it out of the park on this one.)

“God, I love this country. This is the only place on earth where people said “well, I do like donuts, but I cannot possibly be expected to get out of my car to obtain them,” and someone said, in return, “actually, I think I have a solution for that.” Here, if you can think of a product, you can almost certainly find it somewhere. It’s magical.”

— Charles C. W. Cooke

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The Southwest Chief made an unexpected stop near Mendon, of all places.

The Chief was traveling 87 mph, bound for Chicago. There were more people aboard than there are living within Mendon’s city limits.

Up ahead a dump truck was on the tracks. The truck was obstructing the crossing of County Road 113. This was not a small truck. This was a vehicle about the size of a Sonic Drive-In.

The train never slowed.

The sound of the collision could be heard from as far away as Westville. It was the noise of two General Electric diesel locomotives and seven Superliner cars plowing into a mass of Dearborn steel. The train was derailed.

Who takes the train any more?

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Back in 2020, the oozing governor of California, Gavin Newsom, took it upon himself to all but cancel the Fourth of July. Newsom issued a statement encouraging towns and cities across his state to shut down any fireworks shows they might have planned, so as to prevent people from congregating and spreading Covid. The reliably meddlesome Los Angeles County then went a step further, banning displays of fireworks altogether.

The people of LA considered this. They stroked their chins. And they said, “You know what? I don’t think this is for me.” The night of the Fourth, Angelinos sent up so many fireworks that the next day a local authority had to issue an air quality warning.

It wasn’t the most memorable moment in a 2020 that had far too many of them, but it did feel like the most American moment. Here was a wealthy, powerful, almost comically arrogant governor trying to control his people — and those same people just shrugged and went about their business. His status meant nothing to them. That isn’t to say their firework delinquency was a political protest against Democrats or lockdown policies. It was something more innate: that good old-fashioned American willingness to ignore rules we don’t like.

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Arizona will enact the nation’s most expansive school voucher bill, allowing all parents to decide where their children will attend school.

The bill, which allows Arizona families to take their children out of public school and puts public funds into Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, also known as education savings accounts (ESAs), that families can use for homeschooling or private-school tuition, last week passed the state House and Senate. Governor Doug Ducey (R.) has said he will sign the bill, which will expand the number of students who can use savings accounts from 10,000 to more than 1 million. As the program stands now, only students who are disabled, in failing schools, or in military families can access the savings accounts.

Joel Kotkin.

Out in the rolling country just east of Columbus, Ohio, a new—and potentially brighter—American future is emerging. New factories are springing up, and, amid a severe labor shortage, companies are recruiting in the inner city and among communities of new immigrants and high schoolers to keep their plants running. Two new Intel plants, costing $20 billion, will employ 3,000 workers, generate thousands of jobs, and help make the Midwest an integral part of the high-tech economy.

The technology may be new, but what’s drawing these manufacturers to Ohio is something more traditional: its central location, business-friendly atmosphere, and long-standing industrial culture. “We are still at the edge of the farming areas, and people have a strong work ethic,” suggests Jay McCloy, who runs a plant for Mount Vernon, Ohio–based Ariel Corporation, a maker of natural-gas compressors that employs 1,400. “People here think building stuff is better than selling insurance. On a decent salary, you can live a good life in central Ohio.”

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Those who need this information know who they are.

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“I thank God for this place.” It might seem a weird thing to say, unapologetically earnest and deeply uncool, but, in Florida, it’s very common to overhear someone saying exactly this. On the beach. By a pool. In a restaurant. At the checkout line at Publix.

Some other phrases you hear a lot: “I wish we had made the move sooner.” “I feel like I’ve added years to my life.” “Living the dream.” “Another day in paradise.”

It is a unique moment in Florida’s history. The feeling of gratitude is very real. Millions of people seem to have woken up one day and decided they had to become Floridians right away. I am among them.

…

Florida has internalized the lesson of Texas. You can’t build something worthwhile and then surrender it to people who, although they are escaping a place that has begun to collapse, show no evidence of understanding why that collapse is happening. People move for all kinds of reasons, like weather or taxes. Not all of them realize the role they, and their votes, may have played in creating the chaos in their rearview mirrors. So far, the influx of people to Florida is indeed “voting right.” For the first time ever, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in Florida, by over 100,000.

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Post-pandemic, the homeschool boom hasn’t let up, as parents realize they can effectively teach their children and guide their education in a way that aligns with their values.

Christian actor and filmmaker Kirk Cameron wants to demonstrate how freedom-loving Americans can best start their own homeschool journeys with his new documentary film “The Homeschool Awakening.”

“No one loves [your kids] more than you do as a mom and dad, and no one’s better positioned to teach them. You’ve been doing it since Day One,” says Cameron. “You taught them how to walk. You taught them how to talk. At the end of the day, whoever controls the textbooks has possession of the future, either for good or for evil.”

Send your kid to a government school
And he will turn out a fool.
That’s the way
Things are today:
Your tax bucks at work and play!

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Yes, steel is sturdy … steel is modern … and in post-World-War II America, steel was arguably the hottest choice for materials for the home. During the war, America had ramped up tremendous capacity in steel production so that we could produce weaponry. Afterward, all the production had to find a new outlet. Where did it go? To big ‘ole American cars, but also into the American home — for appliances, home construction, and, yes, kitchen cabinets.

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3D printing has revolutionized gun-making and has come a long way since the single-shot “The Liberator” pistol was available for download in 2013. Now entire semiautomatic pistol carbines can be entirely printed at home, and weapon-making appears to have graduated to rocket launchers.

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Instead of waiting for the police to arrive, a woman with a concealed carry license in West Virginia acted fast to stop a crazed man with an AR-15-style rifle who was about to kill dozens of people at a graduation party.

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A lot of effort to compensate for the inherent deficiencies of Turd World food.

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In his 2016 bestselling autobiography “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance thanks his grandparents – his “Mamaw and “Remember in 2019 when workers were doing well in this country, not struggling terribly. Thanks [to] the president for everything, for endorsing me.”

Tuesday night, as Vance stepped closer to his goal of joining the most exclusive club in the country – the U.S. Senate – he thanked his grandparents again, along with President Trump.

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An Austin rancher has offered to donate free land to Elon Musk for the use of a new Twitter headquarters in Texas, if he chooses to relocate the company from San Francisco to the Lone Star State, reported Austonia.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Steve has some thoughts.

I just had my first decent breakfast in weeks. I had my last good breakfast in Ireland, during my recent trip. Every breakfast since then was lame. Until today. I just visited McDonald’s.

I don’t know why people don’t man up and admit McDonald’s makes some of the best breakfast food on the planet. It must be snob anxiety. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I remember seeing Candice Bergen brag that she had never had a McDonald’s hamburger. She sounded like a fool to me. Sure, she said the right thing to avoid raising the anemic eyebrows of her elitist vegan peers, but she sounded like a snob who was more interested in currying favor than in enjoying good food. For all she knew, McDonald’s burgers were wonderful, but she was afraid to try them because the unwashed intracoastal masses ate them.

I know Mcdonald’s burgers are NOT wonderful, but then I’ve eaten them. I gave them a shot. I didn’t sneer at them in proud ignorance.

Today I had a sausage and egg McMuffin, a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, and hash browns. I mixed Hunt’s All-Natural ketchup with a little Frank’s Red Hot, and I dipped liberally. I’m still basking in the afterglow.

Concur. I have great respect for the Sausage Egg McMuffin. It isn’t the best breakfast sandwich available, but it’s far from the worst.

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The hup, as it’s sometimes known, is the onomatopoetic vocalization of effort given by the player-character when initiating a jump. While a gleeful bloop traces back to Donkey Kong (if not earlier), and Z-axis movement dates to the vehicular combat sims of the mid-’70s, a human character jumping in first-person perspective wouldn’t be achieved until 1992’s Ultima Underworld: the Stygian Abyss—released two months before BJ Blazkowicz would begin clearing bunkers full of Nazis with both feet firmly planted on the ground.

An unacknowledged ancestor of the ‘hup’ can be heard in the musical film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the scene where the two German spies are carrying a beam and need to cross railroad tracks.

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A gene-laced topical gel can heal the wounds of children with “butterfly disease” — a painful, potentially deadly disorder that makes the skin so fragile, even touching it can cause tears to form.

That makes me hurt just thinking about it.

Stanford University-led team has now developed an easy-to-apply topical gel to treat recessive dystrophic EB (RDEB), a form of butterfly disease that prevents the production of the skin-binding protein collagen VII.

The gel is a kind of gene therapy, which delivers working copies of the gene right to the site of a wound, allowing the skin to hold together as it heals.

Check it out.

Swords and Ravens is a online adaptation of the excellent board game A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) edited by Fantasy Flight Games. You can play with players from around the world either in live or via email, for free.

 

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Before Ma Bell came to town, and long before DSL, it was barbed wire, of all things, that brought rural communities together. A Sears telephone hooked up to barbed wire—miles of which were already conveniently strung along fences—connected far-flung ranches in the recently settled American west. Thus an ingenious and unregulated telephone system sprung up a hundred years ago.

More than just physical wire differentiated these rural telephone systems and their more formal urban counterparts. Without switchboards, without individual lines, and without telephone fees, the barbed wire telephone system became its own social network. Today, we might see elements of “personalised ringtones, chat rooms and online music” in this telephone network, as Bob Holmes writes in a feature at New Scientist.

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Doing well by doing good.

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A process for making wastewater drinkable again is now revealing hidden benefits. The discovery comes thanks to Stanford engineers, who’ve developed a cost-effective way to convert a toxic byproduct of the process into useful chemicals.

“Hopefully, this study will help accelerate adoption of technology that mitigates pollution, recovers valuable resources, and creates potable water all at the same time,” lead author Xiaohan Shao said in a press release.

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On Tuesday, prolific author Brandon Sanderson surprised fans like me by announcing that he had written 4 extra books (beyond his normal publishing obligations) during the pandemic. Even more of a surprise was the Kickstarter campaign he launched for those books, which has raised over $18 million in less than 48 hours.

Can’t say he isn’t worth it.

Read it.

And watch the video.

Check it out.

YourFonts.com is an online font generator that allows you to create your own OpenType fonts within a couple of minutes. Go make your own handwriting as a font!

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Across the last couple of weeks of January, the Internet in North Korea was observed to be down. The blackout of Kim Jong-un’s internet connectivity, although intermittent, was hugely disruptive with reports suggesting an “attack against North Korean servers took the entire country off the internet.” The timing of these attacks coincided with the latest bunch of missile tests, the internet blackout just mentioned coming the day after the fifth such test took place. It should come as no surprise, then, that suspicion for the takedown fell upon nation states in the west. In particular, the U.S. Cyber Command was thought to be a primary suspect.

But what if it were not a coordinated nation state military response? What if a single hacker, out for revenge, was behind the attacks? Well, guess what, that does indeed seem to be the case. In an interview with Wired magazine an American hacker, identified only as P4x, claims to be person behind the blackouts. Wired has seen the evidence to back up the claims.

According to the Wired article, P4x wanted to send a message to the North Korean government. “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while,” he told Wired.

Check it out.

The Natural Programming Project is working on making programming languages, APIs, and programming environments easier to learn, more effective, and less error prone. We are taking a human-centered approach, first studying how people perform their tasks and then designing languages, APIs, and environments around people’s natural tendencies. We focus on all kinds of programming, including professional programmers, novice programmers who are trying to learn to be experts, and end-user programmers (EUPs), who program to support other jobs or hobbies, such as multimedia authoring, simulations, teaching, prototyping, and other activities supported by computing.

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An 11-year-old Florida boy decided to try out magnet fishing with his grandpa in a canal and discovered two .50-caliber M82A1 Barrett sniper rifles submerged beneath an overpass.

Allen Cadwalader had a five-pound magnet on the end of a rope and tossed it off a bridge off the C-102 Canal on Sunday. Within minutes, he’d struck the first rifle, his grandfather, Duane Smith, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.

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I’m waiting for the first company to convert it into a motor home or camper.

I’d buy one.

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The Ghost Gunner 3 is a 3 Axis CNC machine that can take a metal block and create a lower receiver in a relatively short period. You can then assemble that lower into a completed firearm without it being registered.

Since the only part needed to create these homemade firearms is a block of metal (pictured below), it would be entirely impossible for the ATF to regulate these without an act of congress.

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Cancer biologist Yibin Kang has spent more than 15 years investigating a little-known but deadly gene called MTDH, or metadherin, which enables cancer in two important ways — and which he can now disable, in mice and in human tissue, with a targeted experimental treatment that will be ready for human trials in a few years. His work appears in two papers in today’s issue of Nature Cancer.

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Within hours of taking office, Virginia’s newly sworn-in Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) cleaned house – firing dozens of lawyers, including those in the Civil Rights division – and announcing investigations into the Virginia Parole Board and Loudon County Public Schools.

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You want policies? We’ve got policies….

Check it out.

This game guides you through a series of questions that help you practice self care.

It’s especially useful for people who struggle with self care, executive dysfunction, and/or reading internal signals. It’s designed to take as much of the weight off of you as possible, so each decision is very easy and doesn’t require much judgment.

Take your time. Set aside some time–maybe an hour total–to allow yourself to work through each step. Don’t rush or skip ahead; just follow the directions. Self care is important, and you deserve to devote some time to it.

You can even go through this routine as soon as you wake up, as a preventative measure.

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At last! Something a Tesla is good for. (Until it blows up.)

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..aboard the legendary RMS Titanic recreated with unprecedented historical accuracy. From the lavish balustrades of the Grand Staircase to the coal dusted air of the boiler rooms, Titanic is yours to explore and her many stories are yours to discover.

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I am not making this up.

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We are currently on version 6 of the tractor. This is an articulated-steering, hydraulic drive tractor. It has a modular Power Unit and modular wheel units, and features a Bobcat standard quick attach.

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Follow a watershed to the sea.

A lot starts in Wyoming.

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Adam Leeb ’07 is not a writer, but he’s devoted a lot of the past decade to improving the writing process. For him, it’s about designing products to increase focus and productivity, which is exactly what the modern-day typewriters created by Astrohaus do, he says.

And of course you can’d do that on your own, millennial slacker, so we’re going to create another widget for you to buy and stick in your closet after a month. KA-CHING!

Perfect for use in the railroad dining car.

Leeb graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering and an interest in entrepreneurship and product design, thanks to business courses he took through MIT Sloan as a senior. He felt like he’d finally figured out how to optimize his skills and interests—only he couldn’t get a job.

Gee, I wonder why not?

“He was telling me about a software that he had used to do some writing, just for fun. I started learning about all this distraction-free writing software and I was like, ‘Why isn’t there a dedicated device that can do this?’”

Maybe because you don’t need one? Software runs on a computer, and who doesn’t have a computer these days?

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Jim Puckett put all his eggs in one basket when he started building what he hopes will be the tallest topiary in the world. But his dream tourist attraction cost him his job as mayor — and now the steel framework of a giant chicken looms over the town of Fitzgerald, Ga.

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Palm Beach County school district has ended a mask mandate just days after a second grade girl told school board officials they should all rot in jail for forcing children to wear face coverings against their will.

Out of the mouths of babes….

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Most readers are aware that unvaxed activists have been trolling the vaxed snowflakes online by referring to those who have not been injected with the experimental mRNA treatment as “Purebloods”. It’s a good tactic, because it takes the conversation to a place the pro-vaxers would be smarter to avoid.

…

As our dystopia emerges fully in the next few months, it’s possible that the unvaxed will start wearing buttons or hats with “Pureblood” emblazoned on them to proudly proclaim their dissident status. I’m a severe introvert, so I probably won’t do it myself, but the idea of it makes me smile.

 

Robin Hanson.

In fact, I’m so impressed with how well The Profit scenarios illustrate the value of capitalism that I now build upon it a challenge to socialists: please describe in detail how The Profit style enterprise reform would happen under socialism.

Of course, Hanson misuses the term ‘capitalism’ in the same way that almost everybody does, as if it were a synonym for ‘how we do business when we aren’t under socialism’, but aside from that, it’s a good read.

Read it.

And why not? If there’s money lying on the table, pick it up.