DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Watch it.

The podcast Idea Theory explains it all better than I could.

The politics have changed. The 2016 calculation was “Don’t anger the Chinese government.” But the 2026 calculation is “Demonstrate diversity to the right audiences.” But the underlying practice is the same. The role isn’t being cast in any deeply artistic sense. It’s being solved for against a  political backdrop by a marketing department. Once again, the actor is the variable. Once again, the politics are the function. And it turns out what we are looking at is a marketing department using actors as semaphore flags to signal political alignment. But what you can’t do, and what no functioning art form has been able to do for very long, is treat your actors as semaphore flags, because once the actor becomes a flag, the work stops being about what the actor is doing on-screen, and starts being about what the actor represents off it. And what you have at that point isn’t really art so much as advertising for an ideology. And then there’s the hypocrisy of how all this gets justified. If suddently we’re told that Helen is mythic, and that mythic figures can be anyone, and that no Greek queen has a fixed ethnicity anyway, the Helen of 2026 turns out to be infinitely flexible in a way that the Tibetan monk of 2016 was not.

sd

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A growing number of Jewish, Democratic and LGBTQ figures are condemning the harassment of Jewish congressional candidate Scott Wiener by anti-Zionists at the San Francisco Trans March on Friday.

And the proglodite Coalistion of the Fringes gets fringier and fringier every day.

Wiener had been filmed at the march while several activists, including the man filming him, surrounded him and yelled at him about Gaza and Israel; he ultimately left the scene. The incident followed another at which Wiener was accused of supporting genocide while at a sports bar, and preceded a filmed anti-Zionist harassment of another local Jewish LGBTQ politician at a San Francisco Pride march.

There is absolutely no evidence that these people aren’t a dyed-in-the-wool progs; it’s just because they’re Jewish. Of course, under Identity Politics, Who You Are inflexibly determines What You Think, whether that matches Actual Reality or not, so this was entirely predictable and entirely unpreventable.

CCOS: If I were named Scott Wiener. I would be unable to resist the impulse to start a podcast or newsletter called The Wiener Report. (You can imagine what it would cover … or uncover, as the case may be.)

ATQUE: Scott Wiener Learns Why The Left Is Violent

New York Post.

The architect behind California’s controversial billionaire tax dismissed warnings the proposal is already driving wealthy residents out of the Golden State, calling the claims “entirely fabricated” even as a growing list of billionaires have reportedly relocated or are weighing an exit ahead of the November election.

Dave Regan, president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), said there is “absolutely no evidence” that wealthy Californians are fleeing because of the proposed one-time tax, pushing back against critics ranging from Gov. Gavin Newsom to business groups and Silicon Valley executives.

“There is absolutely no evidence that billionaires leave,” Regan told KCRA’s Ashley Zavala Sunday as the bill made it onto the November ballot.

Well, let’s ask Sergei Brin about that, in his new digs in Florida….

His comments come months after reports that at least six California billionaires had already severed their residency before Jan. 1 — the cutoff date written into the ballot measure to avoid the proposed tax.

Among those who have reportedly left or significantly shifted their residency are Google co-founder Larry Page, who has established a presence in Florida after purchasing more than $170 million worth of Miami-area real estate; Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has deepened his Florida ties and already votes there; and venture capitalist David Sacks, who relocated from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

Others have reportedly followed similar paths.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been linked to South Florida real estate while also relocating to Nevada’s Lake Tahoe region.

Why do progs lie so blatantly? Do they think that nobody reads the news?

The labor leader argued that similar predictions failed to materialize elsewhere.

Oh? Like where? A socialist country where people were trapped behind the border?

The War Zone.

One of Russia’s commercially flagged vessels in the Baltic has appeared armed with heavy machine guns, and it isn’t just any cargo hauler. The weapons fit is likely intended to provide close-in protection against naval drone attacks but is also evidence of increasingly bold measures taken by Moscow to ensure that military bases in its strategically important Kaliningrad exclave continue to be supported. After all, the ship in question, the Marshal Vasilevskiy, is a highly strategic one — Russia’s only floating storage and regasification vessel — that plays a key role in supporting Kaliningrad.

This comes at the same time that Russia ramps up efforts to protect its notorious ‘shadow fleet,’ used to circumvent Western sanctions on oil exports, despite efforts to interdict it.

Evidence of the armed tanker development was brought to light in an exclusive report from Holger Roonemaa, an investigative journalist working for Delfi Estonia, an Estonia-based news website.

Roonemaa secured the release of imagery from the Estonian Border Guard showing the Marshal Vasilevskiy operating in the Baltic Sea last month, with machine gun positions on either side of the deck above the bridge.

Read it.

History does not repeat. But it rhymes often enough that at some point you would think someone might look up from the chanting and notice.

One of the stranger political alliances of the modern West has been taking shape in plain sight. You can see it in city protests, elite universities, nonprofit coalitions and legislative chambers. On one side, the progressive left: equity, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-capitalism, decolonization, the whole familiar kit. On the other, Islamism. Not Islam as a faith. Islamism as a political project. Sharia law, religious supremacy, traditional gender hierarchy. All of it openly hostile to the liberal West.

These two movements agree on almost nothing. Not women’s rights. Not gay rights. Not free speech. Not secular government. Not the relationship between religion and the state. They agree on the enemy. America, Israel, Western (classical) liberal democracy, market capitalism, the inherited institutions of the West. Apparently, that is enough to build a coalition. Successful coalitions have been built on less.

The question nobody seems especially eager to ask is “What happens if they win?”

I don’t mean winning an election, not a campus resolution. Win in the larger sense. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the old Western order is discredited, hollowed out and finally pushed aside. The institutions go. The restraints go. The polite assumptions go. The last faction standing gets the keys.

Who is it? It’s the Islamists, and it’s not even close.

We do not need to work this out from first principles. Iran already ran the experiment.

I reject that there’s any essential distinction between Islam and “Islamism”. “Islamism” is a deliberately construction Confusion Word for people who refuse to do the work required to understand Islam in history. It is of no more significance than any attempted distinction between National Socialism and “Hitlerism”, with the former being Actually Very Nice People Once You Get to Know Them while the latter are genocidal maniacs.

Tru dat.

The Guardian, Mouth of the Left in Britain.

Many liberals celebrated when Hamtramck, Michigan, elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015 but a vote to exclude LGBTQ+ flags from city property has soured relations

Gee, I wonder why?

Hamtramck was at one time a traditionally heavily Polish area. But, apparently, not any more. Michigan is becoming more and more Muslim as time goes on, as its liberal bent bends it to the breaking point.

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

The Leftist mind consists of innumerable individual compartments: One labeled “Free Palestine”, one labeled “Believe all women”, one labeled “LGBTQXYZ”, etc., and at no point do these compartments overlap, or even touch.

Watch The Religion Question America Keeps Refusing to Ask by Tom Bilyeu, who is asking the questions that everybody else is hushing up.

Keep that focus, kid, you’ll go far.

Read it.

And who could blame them? We have rights. Europeans only have obligations.

Read it.

California has achieved something almost impossible in the annals of bureaucratic absurdity: It has made citizenship easier to assert for voting than sexual orientation is to document for favored utility contracting.

To register to vote, a person fills out a form, signs an affidavit, and attests under penalty of perjury that he is a U.S. citizen and California resident. The state may check identifying information against databases, but it does not generally require a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate before letting him enter the electorate.

For something as grave as sovereignty—deciding taxes, judges, crime policy, schools, and the future of the state—citizenship is treated largely as an attestation.

But if a small business wants to qualify as LGBTQ+ owned under California’s utility supplier-diversity system, Sacramento suddenly discovers verification.

The applicant must prove the company is majority-owned and controlled by an LGBTQ+ person. How? Marriage or domestic-partnership records. Health insurance paperwork. Joint living arrangements. A letter from an LGBTQ+ chamber leader. Media coverage identifying the owner as LGBTQ+. A physician or attorney letter. Or, most absurdly, three personal-reference letters from people who have known the owner for more than a year and can attest to the owner’s LGBTQ+ status.

Citizenship is treated as an attestation. Sexual orientation is treated as a credential.

Read it.

The right-wing Sweden Democrats (SD) have expanded their online migration map by introducing a new filter showing the locations of mosques and Muslim prayer facilities across Sweden.

The initiative is intended to provide the public greater with insight into the growth of Islam in the country.

According to SD MEP Charlie Weimers, the new feature identifies 238 mosques and prayer venues, together with information on their religious affiliation and, where known, sources of funding.

The data has been compiled using public registers, maps, and information gathered through a nationwide volunteer effort.

Weimers stressed that the map is not intended to provide a definitive count of Sweden’s mosques, but rather an illustrative overview. He said the project would continue to be expanded and invited members of the public to submit information, particularly regarding mosque financing.

The mosque filter is the latest addition to Weimers’ ‘Migration Map’ website, which already includes information on Sweden’s no-go zones and the proportion of residents with a foreign background.

The Foundry.

The House Judiciary Committee is threatening to hold the Southern Poverty Law Center in contempt of Congress for failing to hand over documents related to the SPLC’s use of “field sources” inside extremist groups and its work with the Justice Department under President Joe Biden.

“The committee has made several good-faith efforts to work with your counsel to obtain documents responsive to the subpoena,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to SPLC’s incoming president and CEO, Ryan Haygood, first obtained by the Daily Signal. “To date, the committee has still not received any such documents. Therefore, the SPLC must promptly produce all materials responsive to the committee’s subpoena as soon as possible, but not later than 5:00 p.m. on July 9, 2026.”

“The committee is prepared to use available mechanisms to enforce its subpoena,” Jordan concluded.

Read it.

I recently read an interesting passage about sex slavery written a hundred years ago about Sacagawea. She was a sex slave. I found that interesting because I wasn’t taught that in school. Her Shoshone Plains tribe in Montana was attacked by the Minitari raiding party who traveled all the way from North Dakota. The Minitari (who are also called Hidatsu) killed a bunch of Shoshone and took the girls as slaves/wives. But the man who owned her had a bad run of gambling, and Sacagawea was sold to a French fur trader who was neither handsome nor kind.

So, yeah. That was normal. What was interesting was that there was no religious or philosophical justification. If another tribe pulled off a good ambush on your tribe, they took your women and horses.

It was pretty similar to a Greek king who was captured as a slave by another Greek king.* The enslaved one helped the victor. He had won after all. The gods must have favored him. Many Native Americans of the 1800s would agree.

Welcome to the Turd World. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Not the Bee.

Nice to see the UK has its priorities right.

In other words, sacrifice yourselves to save the planet, Brits.

So if you live on the ground floor, you get to choose between dying of heat or letting criminal migrants break into your home to kill you.

Thank God I don’t live in Britain.

The Telegraph (UK).

Iran said it struck a US navy and air base in two separate missile attacks overnight as renewed fighting between the two sides entered a third day.

Tehran claimed it had targeted military facilities in Kuwait and Bahrain and warned of a “crushing response” if Washington continued its strikes inside Iran.

The US attacked targets inside Iran on Saturday after an interim peace deal between the two countries broke down on Friday.

Because Iran broke it by attacking a commercial ship. I guess the hudna is over.

Read it.

Did the humanities go woke because they went broke? That scenario has become one of the more persuasive explanations for the present crisis in the humanities. As their enrolments declined and federal funding shrank, and universities began sending money (and, thus, prestige) toward STEM and professional programs, the humanities went looking for support wherever they could find it. If serious funders wanted academic work to be framed in the language of social justice, then scholars were willing to adapt accordingly. Tyler Austin Harper recently made this case in The Atlantic, arguing that what looked like ideological capture may, in fact, be economic desperation.

The Antiplanner.

“Parking minimums are a waste of money and land,” planners argue, so they immediately turn around and impose parking maxima, saying that people will be happy to live without cars if they aren’t required to pay for parking. Many developers have learned to their sorrow that this isn’t true, the latest being Scape, a British developer that was persuaded to build a 23-story apartment tower on the edge of downtown San Jose. Calls the Fay, the building offers only one parking space for every three units and the developer was unable to fill units that didn’t come with parking spaces.

Read it.

The Anglican Church of Canada has taken a step that, until just a few years ago, would have been difficult to imagine even within the most progressive Christian denominations.

Its General Synod has authorized for “trial use” a specific liturgy intended to accompany people who have chosen euthanasia, known in Canada as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). The document includes prayers to be read immediately before the fatal drugs are administered, as well as prayers after the patient’s death.

The 66-page text goes far beyond offering pastoral guidance for terminally ill patients. It establishes a complete set of religious rites adapted to the moments before and after euthanasia: confession, the laying on of hands, anointing with oil, Holy Communion, blessings, and specific prayers for those who have chosen to end their lives through medical intervention.

Leaving Christianity is like bankruptcy: Slowly at first, and then quickly.

Read it.

The official line in Brussels is one of denial, but Muslim migrant ‘influencers’ are making clear their ambitions online.

Anonymous Italy-based social media account, Radio Genoa, highlighted what it called “North African Muslims mock Europeans: ‘Brussels is ours!’”

In the clip, a young man of probable North African heritage says, “It’s not Belgium anymore—Brussels has become an African city.”

More sinisterly, a clip with 13.4 million views posted by Elon Musk shows a German policeman being told by an African arrestee that “no one is gonna save you. Europe is finished.”

One might call it clickbait, but wise Europeans will pay attention to the explicit messaging spreading across social media.

John C. Wright.

In addition to the Russian Collusion Hoax, and the Wu Han Wet Market Origin Hoax, please do not forget these. Years passed. To date, not one newsman, social media oligarch, pundit, nor politician has printed correction, retraction, nor apology.

The Bloodbath Hoax
The Find Votes Hoax
The Fine People Hoax
The Drinking Bleach Hoax
The Dictator from Day One Hoax
The J6 Insurrection Hoax
The Trump Overfed Koi Fish Hoax
The Trump Mocked A Disabled Person Hoax
The Border Patrol Agents Whipped Migrants Hoax
The Threat to Democracy Hoax
The January 6 Protesters Killed Police Hoax
The Presidential Immunity Hoax
The Muslim Ban Hoax
The Suckers and Losers Hoax
The Grabbed Steering Wheel Hoax
The Hunter’s Laptop is Russian Misinformation Hoax

The Foundry.

The Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America are becoming indistinguishable from one another.

That’s clearly the case in New York City, as a wave of socialist House candidates backed by openly socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won primary elections on Tuesday against incumbent Democrats.

In some cases, both leading candidates were quite far to the Left, but Democrat primary voters simply voted for the one who was more fervently anti-Israel—which is absolutely becoming the biggest litmus test in Democratic Party primary fights.

One of Tuesday night’s victors in a House primary election, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is truly off the deep end in every way. Chevalier backs full prison abolition, which she is unable to defend coherently, though still fervently supports it. She’s opposed to deporting any illegal aliens, even rapists and murderers.

Oh, and she founded a college campus organization that’s mostly committed to rabidly hating Israel, but also in favor of “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”

There ought to be a bounty on such people. $5 ought to do it.

Babylon Bee.

Hey, guy, make up your minds….;

Not the Bee.

It’s always fun when liberal logic blows up in their faces.

Take this genius, for example, who sought to drum up sympathy for illegal immigrants in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that revoked temporary protected status for migrants.

Read it.

What would C. S. Lewis have thought of artificial intelligence? I doubt he would have begun with the machine. Indeed, Lewis always began with man.

He would not have asked first whether AI can write a poem, draft a law, tutor a child, or write a sermon. He would have asked, “What sort of people want a machine to do these things for them?” He would have asked, “What have we already lost when we greet such a tool not with care, but with wonder?”

That is why reading The Abolition of Man in 2026 makes the work feel more like a book written for the age of the chatbot. Lewis warned that we “make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” By the chest he meant the trained physical sources of love and judgment. The head thinks. The belly wants. The chest teaches a man to love what is good, hate what is evil, and submit both thought and appetite to truth.

The Other McCain.

Stacy McCain keeps up with this weird shit so that you don’t have to.

Watch it.

If you aren’t familiar with the “Amelia” meme in Britain, let me quote John C. Wright:

Originally a game-cartoon representing the unwisdom of questioning the Big Brotherly benevolence of Wokeness in England, the purple-haired goth-girl Amelia has since become a symbol for British Patriotism, basic common sense, Brexit and conservative sanity. The insipid propaganda of the game PATHWAYS has boomeranged on Big Brother, and she is now a cyberspace Joan of Arc. The Labour government cannot arrest her for mean tweets, nor have their grooming gangs gang-rape her, because she is not real.

And if you aren’t familiar with Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings, may God have mercy on your soul.

The War Zone.

U.S. Central Command said it struck Iranian targets today in response to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attack on a cargo vessel exiting the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday. This marks the first U.S. kinetic response against Iran since Washington and Tehran signed a Memorandum of Understanding about a peace deal last Friday.

CENTCOM said the strikes were “a powerful response to yesterday’s attack on a commercial ship that was transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” The command added that “U.S. aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites after Iran hit M/V Ever Lovely on June 25 with a one-way attack drone. The Singapore-flagged cargo ship was exiting the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast at the time of Iran’s attack.”

That incident “clearly violated the ceasefire,” the command proclaimed. “Furthermore, Iran’s dangerous behavior undermined freedom of navigation as commerce increasingly flows through the vital international trade corridor.”

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

ATQUE: Trump Starting To Think Iran Might Not Be Trustworthy (Babylon Bee)

ATQUE: US strikes Iranian drone, missile sites after cargo ship attack (Task & Purpose)

Read it.

Evolution, like markets, never stops, despite the best efforts of the fantasists.

Read it.

Scientists found that some inherited traits can bypass the traditional rules of genetics, revealing a surprising new layer of inheritance beyond DNA.

For more than a century, Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance have served as the foundation of genetics. But new research suggests that inheritance can be more complicated than the DNA sequences passed from parents to their children.

In a federally funded study involving mice, scientists found that certain inherited epigenetic marks, which are chemical modifications that influence gene activity without altering the underlying DNA code, can be transmitted across generations in ways that do not follow Mendel’s classic rules. The researchers estimate that about 7% of the epigenetic inheritance patterns they examined fell outside traditional Mendelian expectations.

Federally funded! That guarantees it!

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Robin Hood began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century before morphing into a heroic, family-friendly stereotype – here’s how new takes are restoring his dark side.

When writer and director Michael Sarnoski began shooting his new film, he showed the cast and crew one he has always loved. It was Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood, its hero a fox with a feather in his green cap, robbing the rich to give to the poor.

That beloved version could not be further from The Death of Robin Hood, Sarnoski’s dark, thoughtful drama. Hugh Jackman stars as a grey-haired, battle-weary Robin, reflective at the end of his life and acutely aware of his own legend.

Read it.

An experimental satellite has mapped the scale of GPS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space for the first time.

The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could affect their performance and the safety of their operations.

The new measurements were made by Pulsar-0, the first satellite of the novel Pulsar navigation constellation developed by California-based Xona Space Systems. The experimental satellite orbits 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, testing Xona’s technology before the company begins deploying its navigation constellation of 300 spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) later this year.

Read it.

Wedding speeches are one of those traditions that everyone has a complicated relationship with. The father of the bride gets teary, the best man tells a story that makes the groom’s mother visibly uncomfortable, and the groom stands up and says something impossibly sweet that makes half the room reach for their napkins.

What it is not supposed to do is empty the entire room. On the Unfiltered Bride podcast, UK-based wedding planners Georgina and Beth have built a reputation for telling the stories that most people in the industry keep firmly under wraps. This particular wedding-speech story was one that was simply too juicy not to share with their avid listeners.

…

Everything was running exactly as a wedding should. Then, the groom stood up…Before properly getting into his speech, he mentioned, almost as an aside, that there were some envelopes being passed around the room, and he would ask everyone to open them. The guests, assuming nothing, obliged. Inside each envelope were photographs. Of the bride. With the best man.

The groom put down the microphone, looked out at the room, said he would be leaving now, and walked out. His entire family, who had clearly been briefed in advance, stood up and walked out with him. Georgina, retelling this with barely contained delight, noted that the timing was not accidental.

The groom and his family waited until after the food had been eaten, and the bride’s family had paid for everything, before making their exit. The bride was left at her own wedding reception with the photographs on every table, the best man presumably somewhere in the room, and a bill that had already been settled. Karma is a cruel mistress. And so was the bride.

I’m curious as to how the groom obtained these presemably compromising photographs. Arguably the groom has perhaps not exactly dodged a bullet but certainly made it bounce off like superman. Certainly the best man is very very lucky that we live in a degenerate modern age, or he would be in a shallow grave out in the desert, perhaps accompanied by the ex-bride.

Read it.

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

New York Post.

California’s proposed billionaire tax may be qualified to appear on the ballot this November, but should it get placed, it will have competition with another initiative that if passed would render the tax moot.

A measure to “require audits of programs funded by new state special taxes” qualified for the ballot, the California Secretary of State announced late Tuesday, with more than 962,000 signatures and will be certified June 25th unless withdrawn.

It’s the first to qualify of the multiple ballot proposals backed by Building A Better California, a group where Google co-founder Sergey Brin and other Bay Area tycoons have poured tens of millions of dollars into to fight the billionaire tax.

You want a tax to fund programs for e.g homess people or children? Fine, then make regular audited public reports on how the money is spent. (Politicians recoil like vampires from a cross….)

The controversial billionaire tax is championed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) and would levy a one-time 5% tax on the state’s ultra-rich whose assets exceed $1 billion. The goal, supporters say, is to make up for federal healthcare cuts.

Because, as we all know,  healthcare is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayer—or maybe billionaires stupid enough to live in California, we aren’t picky about whose pocket we pick.

Read it.

Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer. But if DNA really does harbor some greater secret about how life works, biologists have yet to find it.

In fact, the human genome is less a script than a puzzle that gets harder the closer they look. Knowing the entire sequence — the order of all 3 billion or so of our DNA’s chemical building blocks, nearly fully deduced by the international Human Genome Project between 1990 and 2003 — hasn’t helped much. That investigation showed that barely 2% of the human genome consists of actual genes, the information-coding sequences of DNA.

It’s now clear that understanding the human genome is no longer a matter of figuring out what each gene does. The deeper and much harder question is how those genes are used, or regulated, a question that seems to involve some and perhaps much of the rest of the genome. By switching suites of genes on and off, the many different cell types in our bodies can all be created from the same material. Cells also regulate their genes from moment to moment in response to a constant inflow of signals from their neighbors and surroundings. But the processes that govern gene regulation are proving so complex that some biologists wonder whether a full understanding of it — of how the genome really works — will ever be within the grasp of our puny minds.

Finding out what each gene does is no more useful than finding out what each tool in a toolbox does. What you need to know is exactly how those tools are used, in what order, and on what materials, which is several orders of complexity greater.

Read it.

Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better, what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people cope is, they tell themselves: if I work hard, accumulate capital, maybe join one of the big AI labs, I might secure my place in the future.

I want to argue this is a fantastically short-sighted view: if there is a permanent underclass, you won’t escape it by owning property, or shares in Anthropic or OpenAI, or guns, or anything else. And neither will the billionaires. You, me, Sam Altman, Dario, everyone who is made of flesh and blood, will be disempowered and replaced by machines.

The rest of this post elaborates the argument. First I explain how most workers will be replaced (if it’s not obvious), then how the “permanent overclass” will be disempowered, and finally how the government will be disempowered.

The Register.

A sealed scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, has finally given up its secrets, thanks to a combination of machine learning and high-resolution CT scans.

In 2023, researchers managed to decipher a few words from among the char and ash that make up the bulk of the scrolls. Some of those same prize-winning researchers recovered more passages from one of the scrolls, PHerc.Paris.4, netting them the $700,000 grand prize from the Vesuvius Challenge contest in early 2024.

Fast forward two more years, and those grand prize winners are now part of the Vesuvius Challenge team that managed to read the surviving portion of a rolled scroll end-to-end, as the VC team shared in a Thursday announcement and detailed in an accompanying paper.

According to the research paper, the ability to make out the entirety of the scroll was thanks to high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France – an improved imaging technique over prior methods used to capture prior images that were analyzed in the prize competition.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

As they do. I guess Jesse Jackson’s remarks about “Hymietown” have been forgotten.

Naval News. By all means watch the video.

Known previously for their aerial drones and powerful electronic warfare (EW) systems, Global Mark is taking things below the surface. This steel-hulled, oval-shaped underwater beast is built for heavy-duty strikes, logistics, and neutralizing enemy underwater threats—and it’s small enough to fit inside a standard ISO shipping container for rapid road transport.

According to Global Mark, Sea Trident is an autonomous underwater vehicle designed for long range missions in maritime environments capable or delivering payloads of up to 1,000 kg to strategic targets. The system is tailored for modern asymmetric maritime operations requiring low observability and full autonomy. Low detectability and subsurface movement capability at depths up to 5 meters support covert ingress to contested maritime areas. The UUV is designed as a multi-role platform capable of performing three primary mission profiles.

They actually list four profiles, but hey, sometimes that happens.

For some reason, the mock-up in the booth next to the hot chick in the tank top has its nomenclature in English—I guess nobody there speaks Ukranian.

Navy Matters.

You probably know that the Air Force has attempted to kill the A-10 Warthog, the best close air support aircraft ever built, for many years now but has been repeatedly thwarted by Congress.

The Navy faced a similar situation with the Ticonderoga class cruisers. They attempted to early retire them, multiple times, only to be thwarted by Congress. The Navy’s solution was to agree to a blatantly bogus “modernization” program which, in reality, was a way to remove funding for the cruisers while they literally rotted pier side until the Navy could claim that they could no longer be economically upgraded.

Like the Navy, the Air Force has, yet again, been prevented by Congress from retiring the A-10 but, ignoring the intent of Congress, has settled on the tactic of simply no longer funding the operation, maintenance, and support of the A-10. As Redstate website reports,

… by the end of this year, the A-10 will be without depot support, without a training pipeline, without weapons-school instruction, and without operational-test capacity.

With no funding for support, the aircraft will rapidly fall into unflyable status. The Air Force will have, technically, kept the A-10 but will have achieved practical retirement.

Congress should fire every Air Force general and withhold all Air Force funding until A-10 support is restored.
The military seems to feel it is above the will of Congress. It is past time for Congress to re-exert its authority.

Read it.

As the Army retools many of its top-tier infantry units around the buggy-like Infantry Squad Vehicle, or ISV, it’s already looking for a new, beefier version of the truck, dubbed the ISV-Heavy.

Despite the “Heavy” name, that variant won’t be inherently more rugged or armored than its open-sided predecessor. Instead, the trucks will carry a suite of batteries and generators to produce power for electricity-hungry drones, communications equipment, and even a “Directed Energy Weapon Systems,” according to Army contracting requirements released in late March.

An Army official said last week that the ISV-Heavy is designed to fit a “niche requirement” to act as a roving power station for modern, electricity-hungry infantry units. Jesse D. Tolleson Jr., the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said during a Senate subcommittee budget hearing last week that the ISV-Heavy is “really going to be focused on the power generation part. One of the things that we do have a critical capability gap on right now is power generation at that mobile brigade combat team level,”

Not the Bee.

It’s apparently not his fault he drank vodka and “raped two 14-year-old girls.”

Not in modern Britain, apparently.

Not the Bee.

If everyone could please stop stealing our tax dollars that would be great.

Hire Turd World people to run your stores, get Turd World schemes and fraud.

The Guardian, Mouthpiece of the Left.

The heatwave scorching western Europe is the most severe and widespread ever and is only possible due to the climate crisis driven by fossil fuel burning, scientists have said.

Scientists say! That proves it! Except for all of the other scientists who say the opposite. But you won’t read what they have to say in The Guardian, of course.

Almost half of Europe’s 850 largest cities are also enduring their worst ever heat stress, a combination of temperature and humidity, they found. Muggier conditions mean sweating is less effective at cooling the body, making heatwaves even more dangerous.

And they won’t allow air conditioning, because Climate Change.

The analysis comes as the UK recorded its hottest ever June temperature on Thursday, 36.7C (98.06F) in Somerset, and much of western Europe recorded a sharp rise in medical emergencies, including some deaths.

In Texas, we call that Thursday. Temperatures in Texas are commonly in the high-90s and low-100s through June, July, and August.

In summer 2022, more than 60,000 people died due to heat in Europe. The statistical analysis needed to assess the impact of the current heatwave will take time to complete. Nonetheless, the heatwave is certain to exact a heavy toll and is also disrupting lives and livelihoods, with schools closed, hospitals struggling and rail and air journeys cancelled across the continent.

And Europeans won’t use air conditioning, especially nowadays that climate alarmism is having local governments remove existing air conditioners.