DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Every time somebody asks me how I’m doing, I always respond “Compared to what?”

[There are over twenty five SHERMAN’S LAGOON collections available for purchase. Highly recommended.]

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Notice that ‘gang rapes’ are sufficiently common in Germany for the stats to be tracked.

The Foundry.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Britain used to be a Christian country, but apparently not any more.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Forget the butter, I want ot see the cow that it comes from.

Granted, that’s cheaper than Real Butter….

The Guardian, Mouth of Sauron in Britain.

Donald Trump’s relationship with Washington’s Nato allies is nobody’s idea of a happy marriage.

But the US president’s volatile performance at the western military alliance’s annual summit in Ankara this week seemed extreme, even by Trumpian standards. As commentators sought toexplain what happened, their usually capacious stock of Trump-fitting cliches was at risk of exhaustion.

“When the facts change, sir, I change my opinions What do you do?” — John Maynard Keynes.

Ah ah ah ah, yankin’ their chains, yankin’ their chains….

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You deserve a break today, but be sure to have a salad.

Their beef (yuk yuk yuk) with the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese is that it’s full of things people want and not full of things that Licensed Professionals think they ought to want.

This is why we can never have nice things.

I think I’ll hit McD’s for lunch….

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De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but I doubt that he will be missed.

Now, if we could just persuade a doctor to put a big stake through Mitch McConnell….

The Telegraph (UK).

Rachel Seeviour loves nothing more than a beach holiday. But for the last month, she has been dragged around the US and Mexico watching England with her partner.

You can hear the eyes rolling from 6,000 miles away. (Hey, you could always stay home. I’m sure he’d have a great time without the nagging.)

The Telegraph (UK).

I mean, really, what was she thinking?

And of course he has to apologize, because Feminism.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Usual Suspects are, of course, screaming bloody murder. ‘Journalists’ have to learn that they have to obey the same laws as everybody else.

The Telegraph (UK).

Hey, who’s to say that’s not a part of their culture? Let’s not be haters, here.

The Economist.

i\In recent months Russian military lorries in Ukraine have begun sporting a striking new colour scheme of vivid black-and-white stripes. As camouflage goes, it is not much use against human observers. But then, it is not intended to fool biological eyes. Its aim is to frustrate the machine-vision systems that are fitted to the Ukrainian drones that zip around battlefields looking for prey.

The stripes are reminiscent of the “dazzle camouflage” used by the Royal Navy in the first world war. But whereas dazzle camouflage was intended to break up a ship’s silhouette, making it difficult to judge its speed and heading, the new variant aims to fool machines into thinking that a lorry is not, in fact, a lorry at all.

Machine vision is based on pattern-matching. A model is trained by exposing it to images, some of which contain lorries (or tanks, or aircraft) and some of which do not. Over zillions of exposures, the computer deduces rules that allow it to identify the things its trainers want to teach it about. Because zebra-striped trucks are unlikely to appear in the training data, says Todd Humphreys, an engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, an ai that encounters one in the real world may not realise what it is looking at.

Assuming, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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An anti-AI font that can be read by humans but not leading AI models. Type your text below, then download and share the video clip containing your message.

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The freezer case used to be one of the few places in a grocery store where you could trust the label. You bought ice cream, and you got ice cream. That era is over.

For years, if you suggested that the products we buy today are inferior to the versions from twenty or thirty years ago, you were dismissed with a “Hello, Boomer” or told that “memories are always better.” But as someone who values evidence, I’m here to tell you that this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a documented, technical retreat. Store-bought ice cream hasn’t just “changed”; it has been systematically reformulated by multinational food conglomerates using regulatory arbitrage and formulation science to determine how much cream they can remove from “ice cream” before we notice.

This is the story of the dairy frog, boiled by ever poorer ice creams.

About a mile from my house is a Braum’s. I buy their frozen yogurt. I have a machine to make my own ice cream.

Not the Bee.

Some times the good guys win.

Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out….

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Israel has shared intelligence with the United States that Iran had developed a new plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to media reports.

Citing an article by The Wall Street Journal Thursday and two people familiar with the matter, CNN reported that the intelligence revealed there was a “new” and “specific” threat. The details were not disclosed. However, the story added that U.S. intelligence agencies had not independently identified the threat or vetted it.

Israeli officials reportedly passed the intelligence to Washington in recent days or weeks.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Naval News.

The ARGE HEL consists of MBDA Deutschland and Rheinmetall Waffe Munition. The two companies are currently forming a joint venture for this purpose. The laser weapon system is expected to be operational by 2029. The contract value is in the mid three-digit million-euro range and covers the development of a complete system for maritime applications, including the entire operational chain from reconnaissance and target tracking to engagement. The joint venture is placing particular emphasis on German supply chains and domestic systems expertise in its development work, in order to secure national sovereignty in this key technology.

The Telegraph (UK).

Japan is looking to solve its succession crisis caused by a lack of male heirs by widening the pool of eligible princes, yet still refusing to allow women to ascend to the throne.

A new bill, passed on Friday, would allow the imperial family to adopt male descendants of former royal branches that lost their status after the Second World War.

It would also allow female royals to retain their imperial status after marrying commoners.

And just how did this situation arise?

The reforms would partly reverse the post-war restructuring of Japan’s monarchy, under which 11 cadet branches were stripped of their titles in 1947 as part of the Allied occupation.

There are dozens of Japanese noble families now in existence who trace their descent to the Minamoto, the Seiwa Genji, who are descended in the male line from Tenno Seiwa (850-881)—as were all three of the historical lines of Shõgun (Minamoto, Ashikaga, and Tokugawa). Prior to American meddling after WWII, there were explicitly four lines of sesh? shinn?ke whose only job was to provide a male heir to the Emperor if necessary. Restoring that facility is what the current legislation is intended to do.

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The Feral Historian explains it all to you.

Works for me.

At least the printer doesn’t poop on the floor …

The War Zone.

Much discussion and debate continue to surround a video said to have been taken near Area 51 that went viral after it was released last month. The footage shows an exotic aircraft that still looks likely to be a progenitor of Boeing’s F-47 sixth-generation fighter for the U.S. Air Force. Its apparent design, with a long shovel-like nose, large canards, and rear-set swept wings, is much different from the tailless, modified delta-winged heavy fighter that many were expecting to come out of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. This, in turn, raises interesting questions about why certain design decisions may have been made and the broader implications of the resulting tradeoffs.

The Project Fear YouTube channel posted the footage of the aircraft in question online back on June 5. Readers can find our initial assessment of the aircraft and its features here.

TWZ talked at length with Darold Cummings to more deeply analyze features of the design that appear to be visible in the video and, by extension, what might be inferred about the F-47. Cummings is an aerospace engineer with decades of experience who played a key role in developing Northrop’s YF-23 Black Widow, which lost out to what became Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor.

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Brian Maxwell of Real Politics does the run-down.

Using the Postal Service to enforce election security is very clever. Trump has very clever people working for him.

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Democrat Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar is seeking to amend the National Defense Authorization Act to potentially block the Trump administration from using military force against congressionally designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, such as foreign drug cartels.

A press release from Omar’s office claims her amendment, Amendment #1273, “expresses the sense of Congress that designation of a foreign terrorist organization does not constitute an authorization for the use of military force.”

While Omar’s office did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment and offered no public explanation of why she introduced the amendment, Matt O’Brien, Federation of American Immigration Reform deputy executive director and former immigration judge, told the Daily Signal that he believes the representative “is clearly seeking to curtail any legal authorities that permit the president to control the borders and prohibit foreign national security and public safety threats from entering the United States.”

There are over 70 congressionally designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This differs from terrorist organizations designated by the executive branch through an executive order because Congress has to introduce and pass a resolution to reaffirm the executive branch’s designation.

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The marriage of Islam and Our Democracy™ was on display in the recent demise of the Platner Senate campaign. Abuse of infidel (non-socialist) women was OK because they have no standing to complain. Similarly, anti-semitism and even a Nazi tattoo were OK with the bulk of Islamo-Communist voters in the party. But rape of one of their own women without proper ownership papers turned out to be haram. The party’s religious/ideological authorities will now appoint a new candidate.

The delightful comedy Tropic Thunder (2998) was accused of non-PC insensitivity for a funny exchange in which one actor tells another that it is OK to play a mentally challenged character so long as the character has some residual or special abilities but “you never go full retard.” Attempting to mix the world’s two least successful economic systems (Islam and Marxism) into a governing strategy is going full retard.

Islam is not an economic success story. Even without a review of history, the tens of millions of Muslims currently seeking refuge in successful, superior countries versus the complete absence of American, Canadian, Latin American, European, Australian or Japanese people clamoring to cross the borders into Islamic countries is irrefutable evidence of that economic reality.

Robert Spencer has observed that the Islamic model of economics has always been heavily dependent on the exploitation of non-Muslims and when the expansion by conquests ceased, stagnation was inevitable. The once near-invincible and opulent Ottoman Empire became a comparatively poor, empty shell (and not because of European aggression as Islamic apologists claim). Qatar has been called a modern slave state funded by infidel petrodollars, a virtual substitute for jiziya. Saudi Arabia is owned and run by maybe 5,000 families. Investment in the growth of an innovative, egalitarian Muslim middle class is not a cultural priority.

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Calls for violence against journalists from the German right-wing news outlets Apollo News and Nius have intensified following attacks on reporters during protests against the Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) party congress in Erfurt.

On Wednesday, July 8th, an anonymous post published on the left-wing extremist platform de.indymedia.org urged supporters to take action against journalists from both publications, as well as against the AfD.

The post, attributed to a group calling itself the ‘Kreuzberg Anarchists,’ described the arrival of “right-wing institutions” in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district as a “declaration of war” and called on local activists to make it impossible for them to operate.

The message included the business addresses of Apollo News and Nius, as well as details about the AfD’s planned federal headquarters.

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At the protests against the Alternativ für Deutschland’s (AfD) party conference in Erfurt last weekend, a reporter for Apollo News was chased through the crowd and kicked in the head. He suffered a bloody wound. The next day, representatives of the anti-AfD alliance ‘Widersetzen’ were asked repeatedly if they condemned the attack. Initially they refused. Eventually, one activist replied: “Fascists with a press pass are still fascists.”

This was not any old Antifa gathering. Tens of thousands of people had come to oppose the AfD, with varying degrees of direct and indirect state funding. The German Trade Union Confederation (the DGB) mobilised, alongside a broad network of unions and civil society groups. An official Bundestag response to the event listed more organisations involved in the mobilisation, documenting substantial federal grants to several of them, albeit for other work. For example, MOBIT (Mobile Beratung in Thüringen e.V.)—a prominent German civil society NGO fighting right-wing extremism, racism, and antisemitism—received about €1.1 million across the listed period; NaturFreunde Thüringen more than €2 million across several programmes. The government denies funding Widersetzen’s Erfurt campaign. Nevertheless, the point is not that Berlin paid for a journalist to be kicked in the head; it is that the respectable anti-AfD movement rests on an ecosystem of unions, NGOs, and campaign groups, parts of which are publicly funded.

Political thugs are nothing new. What is new in this case is the social context and justifications of their thuggery. Anti-fascism in Germany has changed from a militant fringe concern into the moral common sense of its educated middle classes. One consequence of this is that the label ‘fascist’ now makes violence less objectionable.

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Britain’s Labour government is under pressure to pause its new prisons’ early release scheme. On Tuesday night, July 7th, Labour MPs in parliament abstained on a vote drafted to prevent the release of child sex offenders—including grooming gang members, paedophiles, and rapists—before the end of their sentences.

Now, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales and the domestic abuse commissioner have joined forces to call on the government to pause its new early release scheme.

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As Marine Le Pen enters the presidential race, her party is in the eye of the storm. The French press is reporting on the ongoing difficulties faced by Rassemblement National (RN) MPs with banks: despite their status as members of the National Assembly, they have found that banks have no qualms about arbitrarily closing their accounts, for reasons that are not officially stated—that is to say, ideological ones. The phenomenon of banking censorship targeting political opponents of the national Right extends far beyond France’s borders.

According to the public broadcaster France Inter, several RN MPs were dropped by their banks shortly after their election. And these are not minor figures, as they include Jean-Philippe Tanguy, one of the party’s leading figures, and Frank Allisio, a close associate of Marine Le Pen and the RN’s former candidate in the Marseille mayoral elections.

The modus operandi is always the same. A business relationship that has often lasted for years—sometimes more than a decade—and then, one fine day, a terse message with no justification whatsoever. “We no longer see fit to maintain our business relationship,” was the message sent to Thomas Ménagé, MP for the Loiret, who was asked to find another bank. The information is only now being made public, but the termination took place immediately after his election to the National Assembly in 2022.

Under French law, upon becoming MPs, these elected representatives also become ‘PPEs,’ or Politically Exposed Persons, to use banking jargon. According to the Banque de France’s website, such individuals require special attention as they are considered “exposed to higher risks of money laundering.” Banks may therefore choose to rid themselves of these potentially troublesome clients.

Not the Bee.

Not only did this dude throw a Molotov cocktail at a guy in a wheelchair — he threw the guy to the ground and back into the flames when he escaped.

Oklahoma City Police arrested the Molotov cocktail thrower almost immediately on July 2, as this happened right outside their station.

I suspect that this guy wasn’t a Republican.

Babylon Bee.

In the wake of the Democratic nominee suspending his Senate campaign, local Nazi Wade Marks expressed regret over getting his Graham Platner tattoo.

Hey, we all make choices that we regret.

Not the Bee.

It’s amazing that Texas Democrats somehow found a new Beto O’Rourke who is somehow worse than Beto in every single way.

James Tala-Freako somehow manages to top himself with a new damning clip every week:

Democrats are talented that way.

Ars Technica.

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.

NewScientist.

Naval News.

UNICORN integrates various antennas into a single mast to improve stealth. From top to bottom this includes an ES-R antenna, ES-C antenna, WiFi band antenna, LINK-16 antenna, UHF antenna, IFF antenna, U/VHF antenna and TACAN antenna. UNICORN was jointly developed by three Japanese companies: NEC, Sampa Kogyo and Yokohama Rubber. The prime contractor NEC provided hardware integration and Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) systems. Sampa Kogyo provided antenna technologies and maintenance experience while Yokohama Rubber developed the frequency selective radome. Saab had recently pitched its SLIM integrated mast solution.

During DefExpo 2022, Indian Navy’s Directorate of Electrical Engineering had showcased a project for two phase development of an Indigenous Integrated Mast (IIM) with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) as the production partner. The current status of the project remains unclear. It is likely that the project will be progressed or merged with the localized adaptation of UNICORN.

Funny, my MBA program didn’t offer that as an option. And don’t get me started on law school….

Modern War Institute.

The United States Army spent the last two decades optimizing sustainment for permissive environments defined by uncontested supply lines, contractor support, and static forward operating bases. As the National Defense Strategy shifts toward strategic competition and multidomain operations, however, this efficiency-driven model has become a liability. In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on which force fields the most advanced weapons and more on which can sustain combat power under persistent attack. A lethal maneuver force without a survivable logistical backbone is simply a stationary target waiting to culminate.

Not the Bee.

Remind me: Which side are the fascists?

Naval News.

The French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis (ISL) has successfully conducted the first outdoor, free-flight test of its domestically designed electromagnetic railgun. The milestone test took place on June 29, 2026, at the institute’s proving ground in Baldersheim, marking a critical transition for the European defense technology from laboratory research to open-range validation.

Robb Report.

The model’s BMW-sourced mill has been depowered to meet European emissions standards.

Government is the reason we can’t ever have nice things.

Government is the reason we can’t ever have nice things.

Government is the reason we can’t ever have nice things.

What I tell you three times is true. — The Bellman, Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll

Richard Vigilante

Here is a paradox, perhaps.

Information Theory tells us that only surprise counts as information. If the receiver can infallibly predict the next signal from the sender, that predictable signal adds no information.

If I transmit “Mr.”, none of the letters in the group “i, s, t, e, r” count as information. We trust that those letters come next.

Trust is reduced uncertainty about future behavior. But trust is generated largely by past behavior.

When we trust a bridge, we expect it to continue standing. When we trust a bank, we expect it to honor withdrawals as it has done in the past. When we trust a person, we expect him or her to behave tomorrow roughly as they behaved yesterday.

We are trusting in the past. We are trusting in reputation.

Reputation is accumulated evidence from the past about future behavior.

Even if, as is usually the case, our trust is in an expert rather than our own experience, we trust because other persons or institutions have affirmed the expert’s reputation—his history of being right or wrong.

Now here’s a wrinkle.

Suppose we have strong reason to trust an expert within a particular field. Then one day we encounter him discoursing on dozens of subjects far outside his area of expertise. Every proposition sounds plausible. Better still, many of them are entirely new to us.

He is providing enormous amounts of information. Do we believe him?

If he offers a thousand plausible assertions, do we accept them?

This is the AI problem.

Full disclosure: Rich is a friend and was a classmate at Yale. He has worked with George Gilder and written for National Review.

New York Post.

Californians will have to pay for two new taxes next year after Gov. Gavin Newsom approved the state budget in June in what the California Taxpayers Association described as “the largest tax increase in state history.”

Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agreed on proposals that would raise health insurance premiums and slap a new charge on software downloads in an effort to make up federal revenue loss from an antagonistic Trump administration, Democrats said.

Because, as we all know, California has an inalienable right to get money from the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayers.

One measure would extend a tax on health care providers to potentially generate roughly $2 billion a year to help fund Medi-Cal.

How can we pay for better health care? I know—we’ll raise taxes on health care providers! What could possibly go wrong? Well, health care providers will (a) raise their prices and (b) join the billionaires fleeing the state. That estimated $2 billion a year, as will all government estimates of future tax revenue, assumes that people will just stand there waiting to be fleeced and take no action to avoid and mitigate the tax. As with all government estimates of future tax revenue, it will turn out to have been grossly inflated.

The Telegraph (UK).

You can talk peace all you want, but if one side wants war, it’s going to be war.

James Lileks, recently divorced, not by his choice:

They’re going to Rome soon and wanted some recommendations, and when I went home I dived into the archives to get some routes and points of interest, and was reminded again of last summer’s wonderful trip, and had the familiar reaction: divorce sours a thousand photos. But I knew I’d done a good job arranging that family vacation, and everyone had a marvelous time, and if it was the last, well, that wasn’t my doing. I didn’t decide to haul out the bolt cutter. Found a photo of me and my daughter toasting my new retired future in a Trastevere restaurant. No poison there. We’ll be happy in Rome some day again.

Wife was a lawyer married to a journalist. (Income imbalance.) Only one child. (Declining birth rate.) When she retired, she decided to end the marriage. (Status imbalance.) He’s coping as well as he can (beta male simp) but the bitterness occasionally breaks through. (Reality does that.)

Conventional wisdom is that over 50% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce. 69% of divorces in the U.S. are initiated by the wife.

Divorced men have about 2.4 times the suicide rate of married men. Divorced men are 8 times more likely to die of suicide than divorced women.

In the U.S., suicide deaths are much higher among men than women: in 2022, the age-adjusted suicide rate was 23.0 per 100,000 for males and 5.9 per 100,000 for females, so the male rate was about 3 to 4 times higher.

Thank you, feminism.

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I’m sorry, I just never get tired of these.

I’d like to tell then that we’ll trade ten Democrats to Britain for every one of these people they send over.

Over there they can step in all the diversity they can handle.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

Underclass people who depended on government schooling are functionally illiterate anyway; once again, Democrats seem to be ahead of the curve here.

Most machine operators during the first years of the industrial revolution were barely literate, but they did good work just the same. Navy sailors on the China Station between the world wars often had Chinese coolie servants who could do their work competently, as illustrated in the famous Steve McQueen movie THE SAND PEBBLES—I doubt that any of them were even literate in Chinese, much less English. Simple operations that depend on a job being demonstrated and then done by rote was, until recently, the default way that working people worked, and still rules in the Turd World. We may be reverting to that, and I doubt that the heavens would fall.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to the day when college was only for rich people’s kids and affordable for intelligent non-Crustian kids who were willing to work their way through or get scholarships.