DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

CNN, the fluffer of the Narrative Media.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist congressional candidate endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist.

Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old investigator at a public defender’s office in New York City and doctoral student, has emerged as one of the most prominent left-wing challengers in the country after Mamdani endorsed her bid to unseat longtime Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District.

But the posts from her since-deleted account from over the last decade have drawn scrutiny amid her high-profile challenge of Espaillat, a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. That primary, scheduled for June 23, has become a closely watched proxy battle between the Democratic Party’s establishment and its ascendant democratic-socialist wing, with Mamdani’s endorsement last week elevating the race’s national profile.

The guilty flee when no man pursueth.

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Today is primary day in California—with high-profile races for governor and Los Angeles mayor—so voters should prioritize candidates with strong records of fiscal discipline.

The Golden State has a history of fiscal irresponsibility that has strained budgets, and Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, is the clearest example. The program has expanded drastically over time, and changing federal policies signal the gig is up for California when it comes to reliance on federal dollars.

Medi-Cal currently covers approximately 14.5 million Californians—over one-third of the state’s population—and accounts for $222 billion in total annual spending. This makes the program the largest single item in the 2026-2027 governor’s budget by far.

This bloated budget reflects significant structural problems.

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Antifa really proved the allegations false here, eh?

The Intelligent Conservative.

Numbers can lead us astray, so let us consider some anecdotal evidence—my own testimony—which suggests that most lawyers are illiterate, or perhaps that lawyers have to try really hard to become literate or to avoid losing their literacy.

I am a lawyer, one who considers himself literate but increasingly in danger of becoming illiterate the longer I remain in my chosen profession. My hope is that literacy stays with you, that if you “frontload,” as it were, you can build a wide enough base to allow for slack in later years.

In 2013, I made an effort to overcome the time restrictions of my job to read through several canonical texts of Western Civilization. For the most part I undertook a book a week, although, because of scheduling constraints, I read what I took to be the most important or most famous sections of the lengthier books and volumes such as Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a work that would require years of study to fully appreciate. I found myself, on many Thursday evenings, reading so rapidly to finish the text at hand that I could not enjoy myself or absorb the nuances and complexities established by the author.

I’d say it depends on their undergraduate major.

Maheen:

This is the foundational idea of Stoic philosophy, stated most clearly by the former slave and Stoic teacher Epictetus, who was one of Marcus’s primary influences:

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

The practice is deceptively simple: before any situation that causes you distress, draw a line. On one side, everything you can directly control — your response, your effort, your attention, your values. On the other, everything you cannot — other people’s opinions, outcomes, the past, the weather, the economy, what happens after you die.

Stoics do not say the second category doesn’t matter. They say that directing your energy toward it is structurally irrational — it cannot change the outcome and it costs you the energy you need for the first category.

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In 1972, Italian singer-songwriter Adriano Celentano released a song that defied linguistic norms, confused listeners, and yet became an international sensation. The song, “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” is an energetic, rhythm-driven track that sounds like English but is, in fact, complete gibberish. This bizarre yet brilliant creation was Celentano’s experiment to showcase the barriers of communication and highlight how language can sometimes be meaningless in music.

If you are curious how English sounds to people who don’t speak English, here’s our chance. (There is, of course, a YouTube video.)

Check it out.

What is a Beam Spring Keyboard? Before the Model F keyboard was the Beam Spring keyboard, a keyboard that was designed to be like the IBM Selectric electric typewriters but made to work with IBM’s mainframe terminals. Originals regularly sell for over $1,000 to $2,000 but now you can get one in various “normal” modern layouts and various color options for a fraction of that cost. The new beam spring keyboards are also compatible with MX keycaps (see below for details).

Note that this doesn’t tell you what it is, merely what it was used for.

There is, of course, a YouTube video.

If you’re eager to pay over $400 for a keyboard, here’s your chance.

ScienceDaily.

Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine. Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries.

Sounds pretty good. Let’s see whether it makes it into an actual product.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

“America Inc.” is, of course, one of the Left’s beloved smear-terms that sound as if they ought to mean something but really are just name-calling, like’ price gouging’ or ‘windfall profits’.

.Texas is steadily establishing itself as America Inc’s new centre of gravity. No state receives more business investment or is adding more people to its population. From 2020 to 2025 it created roughly a fifth of all net new jobs in the country. It is only a matter of time before Texas overtakes California as the largest economy in America.

In the early 2020s Texas was luring in remote workers fleeing high taxes, exorbitant house prices and bad policies in America’s coastal metropolises, while benefiting from the Biden administration’s subsidies for green energy and chipmaking facilities. Now the state’s dominance in energy—not just oil and gas, but also renewable power—has made it a major beneficiary of the data-centre boom. Meanwhile, its technology and finance ecosystems have been deepening. This summer it will ring in its first standalone bourse, the Texas Stock Exchange, joining outposts of the New York Stock Exchange (nyse) and Nasdaq already operating in the state. (Donald Trump has called the nyse’s new branch an “unbelievably bad thing” for his hometown of New York, even if his social-media venture was the first business to list on it.) The state’s appeal to yuppies is also growing with every stream of a country song. It seems there is no part of America with which Texas does not want to compete.

Needless to say, The Economist is not a fan; they’ll cover it, but with their noses pinched shut.l

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Researchers in the US have recently demonstrated a new way to detect hidden underground tunnels by transmitting acoustic signals from beneath the target instead of above it.

Led by Mike Kass, PhD, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, the team tested the new technique during a field experiment at the facility’s campus. They were able to identify concealed underground structures that threaten roads, railways, and other critical infrastructure.

Tunnel detection usually relies on signals sent downwards from the surface. Still, for the project, the team flipped the process and transmitted sound upward from below a tunnel to generate a distinctive subharmonic signal.

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The leading explanation for how the Moon was born is that a world the size of Mars called Theia slammed into the young Earth and flung out the debris that became the Moon, and recent research suggests Theia itself never fully left, with two continent-sized blobs buried near our planet’s core possibly being the last remains of the world that struck us.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wildfire relief fund, created to help victims of the January 2025 Los Angeles-area fires rebuild their lives, spent millions of dollars on unrelated public safety operations, including crowd-control efforts during anti-deportation demonstrations later that year, according to newly released California Department of Finance records cited by the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.

State financial documents show that $12.8 million from the Los Angeles Wildfire Response and Recovery Fund was used to cover costs associated with deploying California Highway Patrol officers to monitor and police protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in downtown Los Angeles during the summer of 2025.

I guess California has a more liberal (yuk, yuk) deminition of ‘wild life’ than most.

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Well, that didn’t take long.

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On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump called college accreditation a “secret weapon” that he planned to use in his efforts to reform universities.

Since then, the mainstream media, including USA Today and Bloomberg, along with a left-leaning interest group representing faculty, the American Association of University Professors, responded to the president’s commentary, expressing surprise that reform was even needed for the quality-assurance guarantees that postsecondary accreditors provide to universities.

Yet therein lies the problem: College accreditors have decidedly not guaranteed quality and routinely bury colleges in paperwork. Accreditors have foisted ideological conformity on colleges and universities through the accrediting process, becoming gatekeepers over the kinds of courses and ideas allowed in the halls of academic buildings.

A British-style university (degree in three years, focus on classics and mathematics) could not get accredited in the U.S. today.

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Two people died in central Kenya during a protest against a planned U.S. Ebola quarantine facility, a protest organizer and security source told Reuters on Tuesday, as President William Ruto rebuffed criticism it will endanger Kenyans.

Not a problem. Let ’em die, and good riddance.

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Governments are terrible at picking winners and even worse at choosing losers. Net zero and interventionist “Keynesian” policies in Canada and the UK have proven that government intervention has created a worse outcome than anyone would have expected. The result is higher costs, distorted incentives, and weakened productivity growth, with increased dependency on fossil fuels to attend to peak demand, exactly what Austrian economists predicted.

What has been sold as a recipe for prosperity and “green growth” has in practice eroded affordability while failing to deliver stronger, sustainable expansion.

It is not surprising to see that the world’s examples of green interventionism, the UK and Canada, have become economic failures. Years ago, some argued that these policies needed time to prove their success. Now, it is not even debatable that the stagnation and recession in the UK and Canada are self-inflicted.

Net zero in Canada and the UK is not a single policy but an entire regime of targets, regulations, limits, subsidies, and new bureaucratic requirements.

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During the current but tenuous ceasefire, Iran has successfully managed to excavate multiple key sites tied to its missile program that were previously bombarded by the American-Israeli warplanes during the initial five weeks of Operation Epic Fury.

While the revelation is not exactly new, a fresh CNN report has confirmed through recent satellite imagery that more missile tunnels have been dug out than previously thought.

Tehran utilized basic construction equipment to dig out several missile launchers and reopen subterranean tunnels tied to its missile program. The visual analysis determined that Iran was able to successfully clear the entrances to 50 out of 69 targeted tunnels, alongside 18 distinct missile production sites.

“Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them,” CNN wrote. “Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.”

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Few stories highlight our country’s fall more clearly than that of Henry Nowak’s murder.

Henry was stabbed five times with a shastar, an eight-inch Sikh ceremonial blade by Vickrum Digwa.

As Henry bled on the streets of Southampton, the police arrived and arrested him. He died in the early hours of December 3rd, 2025, begin for help.

…

Digwa, brought up in Britain’s new moral order, told the police, as they arrived on the scene, that Henry had “shouted racist abuse” at him.

London Review of Books, a Voice of the Crust.

So where is all that cash, who’s using it, and for what? The answer proposed by Bullough is bizarre: nobody knows. ‘The number of banknotes is increasing, and the question of why the value of banknotes has increased so markedly remains unanswered.’ Central bankers don’t have much interest in the question. It is immensely valuable for any country to be able to produce currency that’s in worldwide demand: for the cost of printing a few bits of paper, a developed economy receives billions of dollars of value in pounds, dollars or euros. This is called seigniorage, and central bankers are as keen as anyone else on what is in effect free money. But the incuriosity they’ve developed around the question is remarkable. Especially when you home in on what all that cash is actually being used for. According to the Financial Action Task Force, which was set up in 1989 to fight financial crime at a global level, ‘it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the total amount of cash physically transported for money laundering purposes globally is in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.’ This seems to be the amazing answer to the question of the missing cash: it’s being used in criminal transactions.

One thing that comes clear in the article, and which the article appears to ignore, is that money laundering is totally a problem for government; no private citizen or business gives a damn where you got your money. And the reason governments worry about where you got your money is becuase they want to steal as much of it as possible from you through taxation. Who hates billionaires the most? Politicians, who don’t think that they are getting their Fair Share of Jeff Bezos’ money.

The rules are extensive, complicated and very expensive to transgress. The result is that in the US alone, banks file ten thousand SARs every single day. That’s 3.8 million reports a year. It is impossible for the authorities to act on every one of those. The outcome is a system that flags so much activity it functionally resembles one that doesn’t flag any activity at all. The scale of the system is flaw number three: all of this is extraordinarily expensive. Compliance – the process of following the rules – costs $206 billion a year globally, according to the research company LexisNexis. That’s a lot of money for a system that looks in the wrong place, doesn’t work even when it’s looking in the right place, and causes enormous amounts of friction to the law-abiding, who are the ones who ultimately bear the cost. Its processes are hugely intrusive (Bullough rightly wonders at how little fuss there is over the privacy implications of SARs), create bureaucratic obstacles to ordinary citizens and businesses, and don’t do what they are supposed to do: prevent money laundering.

Not to mention the eternal truth that evolution works even when you don’t want it to. All of this regulatory friction affects mostly the innocent bystanders, and rarely touches the objects of government affection. Natural selection works even faster in a hostile environment than in a comfortable one; all that these regulations do is speed up the process of eliminating the least clever.

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More than 10,000 federal lawyers have left the government since President Donald Trump returned to office, a 17% drop that has thinned legal staff across major agencies and pushed Democratic state attorneys general and advocacy groups to absorb the displaced talent.

Sounds as if we are getting rid of the right 10,000. A good start.

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How do you pass a bill into law that either you cannot pass or that the governor vetoed? Easy. Turn it into a part of the budget that must be passed (at some point).

In 2025 alone, several examples of this chicanery took place.

Then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin was blamed for several “skinny budget” periods during his term because he would veto budget items like the one creating a rental assistance pilot program, stating that the underlying legislation proposed during the 2025 session had failed to pass and that the General Assembly instead inserted the full proposal into the budget bill.

Similarly, a new first-time homebuyer assistance program was funded through the budget even though the underlying legislation had not passed. In his veto message, Youngkin said the proposal should be considered through separate legislation and noted that the legislative effort had failed.

Before the 2025 session ended, county-government advocates openly urged budget conferees to include language from SB 1307—which would levy a 1% local sales tax—in the budget because doing so would provide another route for implementation even if the bill itself were vetoed. A Virginia Association of Counties document explicitly noted that language from the bill had already been placed in the Senate budget proposal.

Guess what’s returned?

The Foundry.

When polled, Michigan voters express their disapproval of the masses of Third World migrants in the United States. In fact, by a stunning 6-to-1 margin, Michigan voters believe the state welcomes too many Islamic immigrants.

For decades, ever since the disastrous Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, America has invited in masses of migrants from the Third World, mostly based simply on family ties rather than skills, alignment with our values, and love of America. Now, new polling from the American heartland shows that voters have had enough and want to prioritize existing American citizens and fully assimilate the record number of immigrants already here.

Thankfully, President Donald Trump recognizes this unfolding movement in America. In fact, as The Heritage Foundation reported, 2025 was the first year with negative net migration since the 1960s, a huge accomplishment! A multi-layered “America First” agenda prioritizes citizens, including strong border control, internal immigration law enforcement, and more stringent controls over legal migration and work visas for foreigners.

This new trend counters decades of failures that attacked America’s culture, weakened societal cohesion, and saw an ever-lower share of U.S. economic output flow to regular workers. For too long, U.S. policies shaped by ruling-class elites seemed based on three inextricably linked blunders:

Ever notice how every delivery service except the Post Office delivers your stuff to your front porch—the way the Post Office used to do?

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The nonprofit Feeding Our Future claimed to have served 91 million meals to children across Minnesota. But as Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kline described in a recent court hearing, they were not feeding kids—they were instead “feeding the bank accounts of fraudsters.” FOF founder Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison for stealing close to $250 million in taxpayer dollars, orchestrating what the DOJ called the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.

Seventy-eight defendants and counting set up shell companies and phantom sites to feed nonexistent children. Former prosecutor Joe Thompson described the urgency of the FBI takedown: “I remember we took down the case on a Thursday because the following day, on a Friday, is when [the Minnesota Department of Education] paid out the money. Every Friday, they paid out about $20 million.” Twenty million dollars every Friday for meals the system never independently verified.

How exactly did a $4.1 billion federal program pay a quarter of a billion dollars for meals that were never served—and never notice?

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Florida is probably going to end residential property tax (on first 250k of value, growing to 500k of value), thus making the state an even-more attractive place to live. DeSantis is cleverly proposing that new out-of-state purchasers will have to pay 5 years of property tax before they “graduate” into the tax-free category. I suspect that this actually will accelerate migration into Florida, as new buyers will want to get the clock started earlier rather than later. In short: invest now and reap benefits later.

Israel, a country run and populated by the world’s most brilliant fools, have taken exactly the opposite approach. The first 10 years of Israeli tax residency comes with zero include tax on foreign-source income (though every dime must be reported). AND if you move in before the end of 2026, you are tax exempt for the first $250k of Israeli income as well for 2 years (tapering off to zero).

But after that, Israel will tax you in full. And unlike many other countries, the Israelis are incredibly good at collecting whatever they think is due. Immigrants do not get away with the kinds of nonsense that immigrants to the United States do: quite the contrary.

So: move to Israel, and get seized – in the long run. Move to Florida, pay the entrance fee, and it is smooth sailing from there.

This is not a hypothetical tradeoff. I know a lot of people who choose between Florida and Israel. It is a common dilemma. Florida now has more Jews than the entire New York/NJ area! And I am quite sure that this trend will accelerate with DeSantis’ initiative.

The Other McCain.

When I wrote about Trump Derangement Syndrome over the weekend, it was while following the discourse over the latest scandalous Graham Platner revelations. These are certainly not the first such revelations, nor will they be the last, as GOP operatives reportedly have a vast pile of opposition research on Mr. Nazi Tattoo they’re waiting to unload when the time is right. But the reaction from liberals to what came out over the weekend was to double-down, to dig their entrenchments deeper, to rationalize the necessity of defending Platner at all costs, no matter what.

The Gegister.

California has passed a controversial bill requiring 3D printer manufacturers to build in controls that block the production of firearm components – a move drawing sharp pushback from technologists and privacy advocates.

Lawmakers approved Assembly Bill 2047 on May 26. The bill requires manufacturers to embed a “firearm blueprint detection algorithm” in every model by July 2028. Printers that don’t support this algorithm would be banned from sale sale in California.

The bill must still pass through the California State Senate, and will pass through California governor Gavin Newsom’s desk if it clears the Senate. Newsom can then either sign it into law, or veto it.

What these algorithms will look like is not yet known, but the Department of Justice, and any other state agencies that get roped into the task of developing them, must publish written guidance on performance standards by January 2028.

The bill sets two core performance standards: the algorithm must block so-called “ghost gun” components – untraceable 3D-printed firearm parts – with a high degree of reliability, and the safeguards must be robust enough to resist circumvention even by technically skilled users.

Both of which requiements are impossible. Yet another reason not to live or work in California.

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There is a lawsuit grinding through a federal court in Minnesota that every insurance executive in America should be reading instead of their quarterly AI roadmap.

The case is Estate of Lokken v. UnitedHealth Group. It was filed in late 2023 by the families of two deceased Medicare Advantage members, and it alleges that UnitedHealthcare used an artificial-intelligence tool called nH Predict to decide how much post-acute care its members were entitled to — and that the tool was wrong roughly nine times out of ten, a figure the plaintiffs draw from how often its denials were reversed on appeal. UnitedHealth denies that the tool makes coverage decisions at all; it calls nH Predict “a guide” and says the real decisions are made by clinicians following Medicare criteria. A judge will sort out who’s right. But this past March, that judge ordered the company to open its books and hand over a wide swath of documents about exactly how the thing works. The machine is going to testify.

I’m not here to litigate that case. I’m here because of the legal theory the plaintiffs were allowed to keep. The court tossed several of their claims but let two survive, and one of them should make every carrier’s general counsel sit up straight: breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Bad faith. The doctrine that turns a wrong coverage decision from a refund into punitive damages.

Hold onto that, because it’s the whole column.

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Is there an official dictionary somewhere that translates all of these Woke shibboleths?

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Well, this is going to make the weeks-long ballot-counting process in Los Angeles a lot more interesting, isn’t it?

Super eaqsy to do—just get a book of matches, light it, and drop it in the box.

They’re setting fire to vote-by-mail boxes, because those are a big thing in California, and people are targeting voting centers for damage and destruction.

Third-world countries run their elections cleaner than this.

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Honestly, the ancient pagans that sacrificed their children to demons were way cooler than our modern demonic heresies.

Luther is no doubt rotating in his grave had high speed.

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When I see “African” I think ‘freeloader”. I have never seen any evidence that contradicts that.

Read ut,

Anti-ICE demonstrations outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, an ICE immigration detention facility, escalated in the overnight hours as the far-left and well-funded maximum pressure campaign entered its ninth day on Saturday. The continued mobilization only suggests a coordinated pressure operation, with dark-money-funded NGOs appearing to provide organizational and financial support.

Citizen journalist Nick Sortor went undercover at the anti-ICE encampment outside Delaney Hall in Newark on Saturday night, documenting what he described as far-left revolutionaries training their so-called ‘woke warriors’ to combat ICE agents.

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

Roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been laid off or forced to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, crisis response experience and highly specialized language skills.

Raise your hand if you think that the Federal tovernment needs more of the type of peiole who ran American foreign policy prior to Trump’s election in 2016.

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In case you needed further justification for denying your woman’s request for a vacation in Paris, hordes of migrants gave your position another boost over Saturday night, as they rampaged across the “City of Light” and other French locales, setting structures and vehicles ablaze, smashing the windows of occupied cars, destroying shops and unleashing other varied forms of mayhem. And they were doing this because they were happy…about a soccer game.

Import Turd World People, get Turd World problems.

The Foundry.

Is the federal government still funneling taxpayer dollars to some of the leftist activist groups that called the shots during President Joe Biden’s administration?

The Trump White House is asking federal agencies to investigate past and potentially continuing funding for a host of nonprofits, many of which are associated with aggressive promotion of leftist causes.

On May 13, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a budget data request seeking comprehensive information on the federal tax dollars supporting 49 nonprofits.

In the document, OMB asks each federal agency to include all grants, cooperative agreements, loans, contracts, and other monetary awards, even if the provision of the funding is under litigation.

The request focuses on fiscal years 2024, 2025, and estimated obligations in fiscal year 2026.

A person familiar with OMB’s request told the Daily Signal that the request might capture data not accessible on USASpending.gov, the publicly-available database of federal grants and contracts.

The list includes many of the leftist activist groups that sent staff and policy ideas to the Biden administration, influencing the federal government in a “woke” direction.

Vox, a Voice of the Crust.

“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”

This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.

“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.”

The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

As opposed to the people like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, who would prefer that humanity just go away and leave no trace of its presence.

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In 1961, New York City commenced a new urban plan that included massive downzoning. To give a sense of how much urban growth has been stunted compared to previous trends, before the downzoning, Manhattan had 7 Congressional districts. Today it has 2.5.

Mamdani is going them one better. He’s chasing all of the productive people out of the city; by the end of his term, New York will have about a million freeloaders and politicians (but I repeat myself) and not much else.

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In our cells, cytoskeletal proteins called tubulins snap onto each other to form soaring tubular arches and rails, capable of spanning entire cells, growing at one end while they fall apart at the other. These tubes, known as microtubules, form and bloom and decay in a dance that controls many aspects of eukaryotic life. They handle our chromosomes and help cells divide. They carry machines and act as tracks for motors. They push and pull cellular membranes, turning them into useful shapes.

Now, researchers have found that these proteins are in those mysterious cells. What are they doing there? And could they be part of what, so long ago, helped our ancestors strike out in new directions?

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By now, the hand-drawn feature was supposed to be dead. It’s been 25 years or more since the talk started.

Back in 1995, Toy Story proved that CG features could be great — and massively successful. Just a few years later, Pixar’s president (that is, Steve Jobs) was boasting that hand-drawn animation was outmoded. “The characters we make are far more expressive, so we tell better stories,” he said.3

The workers who created Pixar’s movies didn’t necessarily feel that way. “My first love is really 2D animation, so I’d like to think it’s not dead. And I don’t think it is,” said Pete Docter in 2001. He argued that it has its own strengths, techniques that “will never work in CG.” The studio’s Doug Sweetland agreed: “people didn’t stop painting” with the invention of photography, he noted.4

They made good points. But Hollywood is a strange business. Certain decisions get made based on the buzzwords or slogans going around the corporate offices that day. If it sounds good, and it appears to help the bottom line, even a myth can become common sense.

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A recent post from Daniel Lacalle, “How Keynesians Got The US Economy Wrong Again,” exposed the widening gap between John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory and reality. Despite the confident forecasts of leading Keynesian economists, the U.S. economy in 2025 continues to defy expectations. The Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle failed to trigger the widely predicted “hard landing,” and growth has proven more resilient. Simultaneously, inflation remains somewhat sticky, but still declining, and the economy refuses to follow the neat, linear pathways that textbook models suggest.

This latest embarrassment for Keynes’ orthodoxy is part of a much larger story. The failures aren’t isolated miscalculations but the predictable result of a flawed framework that policymakers have clung to for decades. Keynesian economics didn’t just “get it wrong” in 2025, but has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises for over forty years. And the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore.

At its core, Keynesian economics is deceptively simple. When demand for the private sector falls, the government should borrow and spend to fill the gap. The idea is that temporary fiscal stimulus injections will smooth business cycles, reduce unemployment, and quickly return the economy to full capacity.

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Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s replacing it.

This post has been almost 35 years in the making; that’s how long I have been conducting technical interviews. And for a few of those decades, I also worked to try to improve the process itself. I’ve had to care a lot about it, because it’s so broken.

It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.

But it’s not an easy path I bring you, no silver bullet. Remember that, grasshopper, when you get to the end and come back to yell at me.

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I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: “If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the data by name?”

My immediate thought was: If you have a JavaScript array with a million entries, you’re certainly doing something wrong.

The interviewer continued: “There are multiple fields that you should be able to sort by.”

This felt like a trick question. Surely the right answer was to explain why you shouldn’t be sorting millions of records in JavaScript. Pagination, database indexing, server-side filtering. So I said exactly that.

…

My crime? Prioritizing real-world efficiency over theatrical scale. The interviewer didn’t see a practical engineer, he saw a candidate who “lacked vision.”

I wish I had known this when I was interviewing for jobs. It would have saved me a lot of grief.

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Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change.

They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across many scales of life — seemingly wherever there’s a branching system of inherited modifications — in a dynamic not examined in traditional evolutionary models.

That’s the perspective emerging from a new mathematical framework published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that describes the pace of evolutionary change. The new model, part of a roughly 50-year-long reimagining of evolution’s tempo, is rooted in the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was introduced by the paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

Never trust a ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

Read it.

Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has guided research for more than 70 years.

Their study, published in Science Advances, presents “ousiometrics,” a quantitative approach to studying essential meaning. The work suggests that language is not organized mainly around emotion, but around a deeper pattern shaped by power, danger, and order.

The central finding is striking: across language, humans consistently lean toward safety.

Never trust any ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

This sprawling ancient metropolis in the jungle of Ecuador has revealed a unique form of urbanism found only in the Amazon. Sofia Quaglia visits the site for the story of this mysterious civilisation.

Of course, whenever a Narrative Media ‘journalist’ claims to be giving you The True Story, you ought to be especially on the lookout for The Agenda.

Naturally, being an instance of FemBot Journalism, it can’t start with anything except a Charming Anecdote before getting to the actual thing you came to read.

But persist—you may find an actual fact in the least likely location.

Read it.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz has ruled that companies in Delaware will be able to vote in elections just like people.

This is especially wacky for Delaware.

As per the US Census Bureau, the estimated human population of Delaware is just over 1 million.

But there are over 2 million corporations headquartered in the state, which means there are far more companies in Delaware than there are people.

According to Bloomberg Law, the ruling came up because the town of Fenwick Island was already letting corporations vote in its municipal elections (they own most of the property, after all).

The ACLU thought letting companies vote as if they were human beings might drown out the real people who actually live in the city of Fenwick Island, so they sued.

You can’t make this shit up.