DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

“Real life is not a Sherlock Holmes story, and not everything is a clue.”

— Tim Dedopoulos and David Knowles Field Guide to Secret Symbols

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The Trump administration is dismantling more than three dozen federal firearms regulations, ending a zero-tolerance policy against wayward gun dealers, easing scrutiny of stabilizing braces, and clearing a path for some Americans with a history of mental illness to buy firearms, part of what officials call the broadest rewrite of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rules in the agency’s history.

The rollback, executed under President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14206 on Second Amendment rights, was formally launched April 29, when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and newly confirmed ATF Director Robert Cekada unveiled 34 notices of final and proposed rulemaking.

Officials called it the most comprehensive regulatory reform package in ATF history. Cekada was confirmed by the Senate hours earlier and signed off on the changes within an hour of taking office.

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California’s richest residents are opening their checkbooks to kill a wealth tax before voters can weigh in, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone pouring $82 million into the opposition and a small circle of tech billionaires driving the total anti-tax haul past $118 million ahead of the Nov. 3 ballot.

The measure, a one-time tax of up to 5% on the net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion, became eligible for the November ballot on June 17 after Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced its signature count had cleared the state’s random-sample threshold.

A last-minute offer from sponsor SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West to drop the initiative in exchange for a legislative 2% version was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and negotiations collapsed before the June 25 withdrawal deadline.

Under the initiative, 90% of revenue would flow to Medi-Cal and other healthcare programs, with 10% split between food assistance and public education. The tax would apply to anyone who was a California resident as of Jan. 1.

The Foundry.

continue to work. Some families in low-income neighborhoods turn to Head Start, a program whose very name suggests children should expect to finish their time at one of these centers better prepared for school. But today, after more than 60 years and over $240 billion in spending, the program has fallen well short of that goal.

A new Heritage Foundation report reveals a harsh reality: Head Start centers are overregulated, unsafe, expensive, and fail to deliver lasting results for children.

Head Start sits under a thick, strict set of rules. A recent analysis compared federal Head Start rules with state childcare rules. It found that nearly all Head Start settings are stricter than state settings.

Moreover, the program is also burdened with bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to help children and families. The second Trump administration is trying to help. In May 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services released a notice of proposed rulemaking to scrap burdensome wage and benefit rules from the Biden administration.

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Imagine if your jacket could talk back to Big Brother. The German startup Urban Privacy isn’t selling invisibility cloaks; they are selling digital disobedience. By weaponizing fashion, they are turning scarves, jackets, and phone cases into sophisticated tools designed to confuse AI surveillance and reclaim public anonymity in an increasingly data-hungry world.

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Political orientation has been shown to correlate with fertility, raising the possibility that demographic processes contribute to long-term ideological change. Using data from the US General Social Survey, we analyze completed fertility across 17 birth cohorts (1898–1982) to examine how political orientation has contributed to fertility decline in the United States and whether emerging selective forces can be detected. Earlier cohorts show little difference in fertility by political orientation. From the 1943–1947 birth cohort onward, however, a pronounced divergence emerges: individuals with right-wing political orientations maintain fertility at or above replacement level, whereas fertility among left-wing individuals declines sharply to well below replacement. Applying Lande–Arnold selection gradient analyses, we find increasing directional selection that may favor right-wing political orientation over time, while education shows consistent negative associations with fertility and religiosity positive but weaker effects. Separate analysis of Black and White Americans reveals, however, that the increasingly stronger association between political orientation and fertility in more recent cohorts holds only true for whites but not for blacks. Nonetheless, these findings suggest that recent fertility decline in the United States is driven disproportionately by left-leaning individuals and point to contemporary demographic processes that may gradually shift the ideological composition of populations.

Evolution acts to weed stupidity out of the gene pool. It’s slow, but it’s sure.

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Solar railways could soon become commonplace in Europe, following a successful trial in Switzerland.

Europe’s infrastructure is embracing the renewables boom, with one company determined to transform the continent’s railway lines into mini solar farms.

Last year, Swiss start-up Sun-Ways unveiled the world’s first-ever solar railway after rolling out 100 metres of photovoltaic (PV) panels in between active tracks in Buttes, a village in the Val-de-Travers district.

Originally planned as just a three-year trial, the railway was fitted with 48 specially-designed solar panels with a combined power of 18 kWp.

However, the positive results yielded just one year into the trial mean the installation of a permanent system along the railroad track is now likely, Euronews Earth has been told.

The Economist.

ot much remains today of the walls, ramparts and moats that once surrounded Benin City in southern Nigeria. Yet for centuries these giant earthworks—second in length only to China’s Great Wall among man-made structures—bespoke a mighty civilisation whose authority extended across much of west Africa. By the standards of pre-colonial Africa, the Benin state was exceptionally strong: erecting the wall in a single dry season might have required mobilising as many as 5,000 men, each working ten hours a day. But as the empire withered and eventually succumbed to British invaders in the late 19th century, most of the earthworks vanished. So did those of many other fortified towns across west Africa.

Now they are returning. Since the mid-2010s, as jihadist insurgencies have spread across northern Nigeria and the Sahel, defensive earthworks have risen up around towns and cities. Many are so extensive they are clearly visible in satellite images. According to new research by Olivier Walther and Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida, all urban centres in north-east Nigeria with populations of more than 10,000 are now secured by trenches. Most big towns there and in the Lake Chad basin are surrounded by sand berms up to three metres high.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Not the Bee.

The World Cup is a terrific opportunity for the country to come together and put aside politics and squabbles to cheer on our home country.

Unless you’re a Democratic Socialist, that is.

While we were all cheering on the USA, the Attorney General of Arizona wanted to make sure that everyone knew she was cheering not for America, but for Mexico.

Wealth doesn’t migrate for no reason. Think about what rich people know that you don’t.

Said no Democrat ever.

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The unconscious brain appears to be far more capable than scientists once believed. Researchers found that patients under general anesthesia could still process language at a sophisticated level, distinguishing nouns, verbs, and adjectives while listening to stories. Even more remarkably, neural activity showed signs of predicting upcoming words before they were heard. The results challenge traditional ideas about consciousness and hint at new possibilities for brain-computer interfaces.

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A protein called “Mitch” may hold the key to a new generation of obesity treatments. Researchers found that disabling it in human cells boosts fat burning, increases energy use, and makes it harder for new fat cells to develop. The findings help explain why mice lacking Mitch were leaner, more athletic, and resistant to obesity.

New York Post.

Hollywood just lost another star.

Dennis Quaid is making his Los Angeles exit official, putting his Brentwood Hills home up for sale for $5.2 million, taking a loss on it after slamming the area for going “downhill.”

Quaid is selling his five-bed, six-bath abode, which stretches more than 4,000 square feet, as celebrities flee California due to a variety of reasons ranging from poor wildfire management to liberal policies.

His home’s listing describes it as a “pristine, completely remodeled, two-story warm Contemporary done with great taste and quality at the end of a quiet, flat cul-de-sac street in a desirable Brentwood Hills location.”

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If academia was a game, I’ve won it. Tenure, an endowed research chair, awards, leadership positions, an international journal I helped to found and now serve as the Editor-in-Chief, students I have supervised to their own successes, a good h-index, all the classic marks of success. This isn’t meant as bragging but rather to point out that while I’ve won this game, the game no longer makes sense.
Academia, as most of us have practiced it, runs on maximalism. The most grants, the most papers, the most students, the most awards, the most news coverage. While we are doing much better these days in highlighting impact and contributions, the underlying engine is still volume, and the volume has always been produced by independent human writing (applications, submissions, letters of support, reports, Conversation articles, press releases, etc., etc.). The problem is that AI makes volume essentially infinite (until the world burns up, but that’s a parallel discussion).

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Thank you, Donald Trump.

The Navy beat its recruiting goal for new sailors this year, signing up 45,000 new recruits. The service announced the milestone on Thursday. It’s the highest number of people signing up for the Navy in roughly two decades.

“Today’s Navy is stronger because tens of thousands of Americans chose to answer the call to serve,” Rear Adm. Jim Waters, the head of Navy Recruiting Command, said. “Reaching this milestone is not simply about achieving a recruiting objective – it’s about delivering the talented Sailors our Fleet needs to maintain readiness in an increasingly complex security environment.”

The early success marks the second year in a row of the service bringing in far more recruits than its goal. In 2024, the Navy only barely hit its recruiting quota, but in 2025 it brought in 44,096 new sailors, nearly 9% about that year’s aim. That was after the Navy also hit its goal early, signing up 40,600 by June.

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Then Pickett stood in front of his division and gave the final word: “Charge the enemy and remember old Virginia!” His voice was clear and strong as he spoke the order: “Forward! Guide center! March!” . . .

“I don’t want to make this charge,” Longstreet declared emphatically. “I don’t believe it can succeed. I would stop Pickett now, but that General Lee has ordered it and expects it.”

Longstreet persistently showed himself to be the best general that the Confederacy had.

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There was never much doubt that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara would be issued at the very end of the Court’s term, or that Chief Justice Roberts would save the opinion-writing duties for himself. Nor was there much serious doubt that the Court would reject President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to redefine birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. What was not expected, however, was that the Court would issue a short-yet-sweeping constitutional opinion that only captured five votes. The Court largely neglected the statutory arguments against the Trump EO, and four justices spurned the conventional academic account of birthright citizenship. In the end, an opinion meant to settle the debate over birthright citizenship may have instead kindled a new one.

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A serve goes awry and accidentally strikes a “ball girl” (whatever that is) and the player runs over to her and slides the last twenty feen face down in apology, gets up and bows to her repeatedly (which she returns).

Whatt would happen if an American athlete—football, basketball, baseball, whatever—were in that same situation. I think that “Get out the way, bitch!” would be the best she could hope for.

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One way our nation’s most “prestigious” newspapers show they’re Democratic Party propaganda sheets is when their fashion critics apply all of their tawdry partisan biases to their evaluations of the clothes of politicians (or their spouses).

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post was a transparent Democrat, and so is Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times. A white pantsuit worn by Hillary Clinton, as well as the feminist Democrats at the State of the Union, was very chic. But when Tulsi Gabbard wore one while she criticized Hillary at a Democrat debate in 2019, it suddenly carried “connotations of the fringe” and displayed “somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders).”

When Kamala Harris lost in 2024, Friedman invested great meaning in the cravat she wore to her concession speech, that it represented “the idea that some fights were long. That this one had been going on for decades (even centuries) and would continue afterward. It was, in that way, a symbol of both a promise and a lament.” Feminism lost. Women were shortchanged again.

Not the Bee.

I thank God that I don’t live in Britain.

Not the Bee.

It looks like Wisconsin liberals are totally turning down the temperature when it comes to their violent rhetoric about killing Republicans.

Not the Bee.

If you deliver packages, you likely encounter dogs on a regular basis.

This driver came up with an interesting tactic when a dog approached him aggressively at a home in an undisclosed location in the Eastern Time Zone.

One of the wildest videos I’ve ever seen on a Ring camera. I’m not sure if I’m upset with the UPS guy for throwing the package at that dog, or the dog owner for having a dog that rolls up on a UPS driver like it’s a SWAT raid.

We don’t have an exact location for this clip, but I’m guessing somewhere far away from blue cities since these two gentlemen seem to have testosterone in their systems.

The comment section is pretty well balanced on this one.

Not the Bee.

You’d think, even in California, there would be some common ground between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the repercussions of sexually abusing children.

Apparently not.

We could save a lot of time and trouble and the country a lot of grief and expense by just banning Democrats from public office.

Down the rabbit hole….

This was sparked by seeing a headline attributed to the New York Times: What Would a Taylor-Travis Pre-Nup Look Like?

I thought to myself: An encyclopedia. Each of them can afford the best legal advice than money can buy, and an unabridged English dictionary is the only comparable page-count that came to mind.

As you might expect, this topic is Trending among the Great Unwashed:

Travis Kelce Reportedly Agrees to Taylor Swift’s Brutally Smart Pre (Music Times)

Taylor Swift prenup would likely include key clause (Newsweek)

Taylor Swift prenup – Does she have one with Travis Kelce? (USA Today)

Is Taylor Swift getting Travis Kelce to sign a prenup? (HELLO magazine)

Will Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce Sign a Prenup Before .. (StyleCaster)

Do Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have a prenup? (Heart Radio)

Travis Kelce Has No Issue With Taylor Swift Dad’s Prenup Plan (Mandatory)

EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Ironclad Prenup (RadarOnline)

Travis Kelce-Taylor Swift’s prenup details revealed (NewsBytes)

etc. etc. etc.

Not the Bee.

Alexandria, Virginia, is one of the wokest, far-left cities in the state.

It should be no surprise that these lefty losers would hate absolutely everything that makes America great.

Not the Bee.

The State of Minnesota, ladies and gents.

Not the Bee.

Oh, look, another trans person plotting a mass shooting.

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Your Friends in Government, of course, are attempting to ban them by law—and have succeeded with new ones, but a loophole regarding used ones is being (as you might expect) heavily exploited. As you might (als0) expect, the charge on that is being led by the Usual Suspects in the Usual Blue States. As the video points out, “You do not need a conspiracy when you have an incentive.”

I am reminded of a story I heard when I was young; I have no idea whether it’s actually true, but it’s too good not to share.

Supposedly Bill Gates, in the halcyon days when he was newly The Richest Man in the World, bought a brand new high-end Porsche sports car. Unfortunately, he couldn’t drive it in the U.S. because part of the process laid down by Your Friends in Government was that in order to be certified as street-legal a manufacturer actually had to crash a couple of cars to test whether they were sufficiently safe to be on America’s roads. Porsche responded, “Fuck that. We’re not deliberately destroying a couple of $900,000 cars just to slake your appetite for bureaucratic micro-management.” So Bill had to keep it in storage while he attempted to work his way around Our Democracy.

For all I know, it’s still there.

ATQUE: The Real Reason Why You Can’t Own a New Kei Truck or Hilux Champ in the US

As always, government doesn’t provide solutions, it just creates more problems.

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Michael from Offshore Citizen podcast compares the support Canada offered it’s citizens caught in the UAE during the recent Iran incidents to that offered by Montenegro. He points out that the the top marginal tax rate in Canada is around 50% while that in Montenegro is around 15%, and asks a perfectly natural question: What value do their respective citizens get when the diversity hits the fan?

The Telegraph (UK).

From the banks of the river Trent, the ruined stone walls of Newark Castle should be the iconic backdrop to this historic Nottinghamshire market town. But all that’s actually visible on a humid July afternoon is traffic backed up along its famous Great North Road, battling its way to and from the A46. It’s been this way for decades now.

So when National Highways announced “critical investment” to improve the A46 Newark Bypass in February 2022, it wasn’t just the people of Newark breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was seen as a nationally significant trade and export route too. As Heidi Alexander, Secretary of State for Transport, said less than four months ago, upgrading the A46 at Newark “will support sectors such as logistics and manufacturing which are dominant in the local economy and reliant on roads for growth, as well as improving access to Humber ports”.

But then, with one dismissive wave of Keir Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan this week, the £297m project was abruptly shelved. It wasn’t the only roads project immediately mothballed; the A38 Derby Junctions project – also in the East Midlands – was earmarked for “potential cancellation”.

The Telegraph (UK).

Eight men have been arrested in the UK as part of an international investigation into the organised drugging and raping of women by their partners.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said it was working alongside Europol and the FBI as part of an investigation into an internet forum in which members shared graphic videos of the sexual abuse of unconscious women.

Investigators said they had identified more than 270 people linked to the forum but did not know the true scale of the offending, and that other forums – which were unknown to law enforcement – were operating.

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When the socialist-communist government of Pedro Sánchez first announced he was going to begin the mass legalization of migrants in his country, his government claimed this would amount to 500,000 people. Now, twice as many people are being legalized than first claimed, and importantly for the rdest of Europe, those migrants now have the right to freely move through the Schengen zone.

Due to his mass amnesty, The New York Times has now labeled Spain a “beacon of the global left.”

In April, the socialist-communist government in Madrid first issue the decree, giving illegal migrants three months to submit their application.

According to the New York Times, more than 1 million applications had already been submitted by illegal immigrants.

Vox party leader Santiago Abascal has accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of taking the long-term move of naturalizing millions of foreigners to give himself and left-wing parties an electoral advantage in upcoming elections.

“Pedro Sánchez is willing to rob us of the next general elections by manipulating the census and handing out Spanish nationality,” wrote Abascal. “And it is necessary for us to mobilize to prevent him, after everything he has stolen, from also stealing the elections from us.”

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Municipal councils across England are once again clashing with the country’s own national flags. Increasingly, displays of both the Union Flag (“Union Jack”) and England’s Saint George’s Cross are being treated as problematic.

In Cambridge, the leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, Lucy Nethsingha, said people should be able to display flags in support of the England team, but only “in a safe, inclusive way and with permission.”

Local coucils in England are very big on “with permission”.

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The goals of Progressivism are “continually receding ones”, which is, to paraphrase Mussolini, “like a trodden road leading on and on to the land of heart’s desire, which though it grows closer and closer, will never be reached”.

To advance towards the mirage, progress must convince. Indeed, one needs to emancipate oneself from the past and its many thorns. Complexity, you see, slows down progress. Data, when it is used, must tell an irrefutable story. Whatever our current situation, we are, it is said, materially better off now than we were then. We are admonished to look straight ahead, not to see what we have lost. To reminisce is, in a way, to conspire.

Proglodytes want progress, and progress is never final. Therefore, progressives need change, because without change, progress won’t happen. That is why they are never satisfied. That is why they are always changing things just for the sake of change, because without change there is no progress, and without progress progressives are failures.

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Scientists from the University of Minnesota say they have created the first-ever synthetic cell built entirely from scratch, and seen it go through an entire ‘life’ cycle – including reproduction.

“This is the most fascinating and important thing I’ve ever done in my work, and the realization that it’s actually happening was rather slow to sink in,” synthetic biologist Kate Adamala, a co-lead on the project told ScienceAlert.

“We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark,” she says.

*sigh* Biology IS chemistry, and that’s ALL it is. There is no Magic Secret Sauce to ‘biology’.

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In addition to making you look like a goober.

Humans have been tattooing themselves for thousands of years, for spiritual, cultural, or personal reasons.

Long before we were covering ourselves in ironic stick’n’pokes, butterfly tramp stamps, or full blackout tattoos, humans were marking their bodies with permanent ink.

But while history can tell us much about the culture of tattooing, we still don’t know much about how the practice affects our health.

Introducing tattoo pigment into the skin triggers an immune response, and that ink obviously sticks around – though it doesn’t always stay put.

Research shows that particles of tattoo ink can enter the lymphatic system and build up in the lymph nodes.

Lymph nodes are key hubs of our bodies’ immune activity. Full of white blood cells, lymph fluid is filtered through them to clean out any debris it’s collected on the way around your body. That includes misbehaving cells (i.e. cancer), bacteria, viruses, and foreign substances such as tattoo ink.

Rapper MGK recently found this out the hard way by rushing a massive blackwork piece that covers much of his torso, including the area of the lymph nodes around his armpits and shoulders. He says the process turned his surrounding skin yellow and made him “really sick.”

The Telegraph (UK).

There is a nervousness in Lebanon’s corridors of power. But the whispers are not about the US or Israel. They are about Unit 121 – a threat from within.

Known as “Hezbollah’s death machine” and the most secretive and brutal arm of the terror group, the unit has been linked to some of the country’s most notorious political assassinations, including that of Rafik al-Hariri, the former prime minister, in 2005.

Now, angry at a peace deal between Lebanon and Israel that neuters Hezbollah’s operations against the Jewish state, they are regrouping.

“This is one of the most secretive and lethal units in the world, second only to a similar Russian unit, the GRU,” Ronen Solomon, the author of an upcoming trilogy on Hezbollah and its global operations, told The Telegraph.

The Telegraph (UK).

A migrant who attacked a group of small children and caused riots in Dublin has been found guilty of attempted murder.

Riad Bouchaker was convicted on Wednesday for the knife attack in Parnell Square in 2023.

Bouchaker was found guilty of the attempted murder of a five-year-old girl, who was stabbed in the heart during the attack and is now non-verbal, uses a wheelchair and cannot swallow safely.

The Telegraph (UK).

Iranian hardliners abruptly cut off a television interview with the country’s chief peace negotiator as he was defending the deal with the United States.

The pre-recorded interview with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf stopped midway through its broadcast on the IRINN state TV channel on Tuesday night, prompting a rare public protest from parliament.

Mr Ghalibaf was in the middle of a sentence which started: “The $12bn – yes, they can do it and it is ongoing” when the screen went black and then switched to an old speech by Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader.

The Telegraph (UK).

White British students are a minority in almost one in five universities, analysis by The Telegraph has found.

In the 2024-25 academic year, white UK-domiciled students comprised less than 50 per cent of the student population at more than two dozen universities across the UK.

Yet almost a dozen of these institutions continue to exclude white students from diversity scholarships that target students from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

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Our friend from Maxinomics explains it all to you.

The number one thing that people want money for is so that they can say “No”. I don’t want to spend my time like that.

Which means that this saying is wrong: “Time is money.” Benjamin Franklin got it backwards—putting time first to emphasize that you should trade time to get money. That’s what the whole paragraph you can find the saying in is about. When really, we know that humans work to obtain time. “Money is time.” You want money to buy a house so that you don’t have to build it; to buy food so you don’t have to grow it; to buy a car so you don’t have to walk. That gap, between the input you’re given and the output you want to get, is largely time spent doing things that no one likes doing.

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Mice get all of the good stuff.

In an incredible breakthrough, scientists created a mouse using ancient genetic tools older than animal life. By taking a gene from single-celled lifeforms and introducing it into mouse cells, researchers generated stem cells, which, when injected into a developing embryo, helped give rise to a living, breathing mouse.