Try Hare Krishna.

Naval Gazing.

Given the current concern around drones, it seems worth surveying possible countermeasures in a reasonably systematic way, looking at each category of possible solution and listing the pros and cons of each. Now, this is a big and rapidly-evolving area, and I’m not a specialist in it. But I have done some looking around, and it seems worthwhile to bring this up as a counter to a lot of the triumphalism around drones these days.

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Ka’Von Wooden loved trains. The 15-year-old had an encyclopedic knowledge of New York City’s subway system and dreamed of becoming a train operator.

‘Ka’Von’? No need to inquire into his ethnicity, I guess.

Instead, on a December morning in 2022, Ka’Von died after he climbed to the roof of a moving J train in Brooklyn and then fell onto the tracks as it headed onto the Williamsburg Bridge.

He is one of more than a dozen New Yorkers, many young boys, who have been killed or badly injured after falling off speeding trains. Other risks include being crushed between the train and tunnel walls and being electrocuted by high-voltage subway tracks. “Subway surfing” dates back a century but it has been fueled by social media.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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For generations, physicists have puzzled over life. Their theories about matter and energy have helped them understand how the universe produced galaxies and planets. But physicists have struggled to understand how lifeless chemical reactions give rise to the complexity stored in our cells.

In a new book, “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence,” out on Aug. 6, Sara Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University, offers a theory that she and her colleagues believe can make sense of life. Assembly theory, as they call it, looks at everything in the universe in terms of how it was assembled from smaller parts. Life, the scientists argue, emerges when the universe hits on a way to make exceptionally intricate things.

The book arrives at an opportune time, as assembly theory has attracted both praise and criticism in recent months. Dr. Walker argues that the theory holds the potential to help identify life on other worlds. And it may allow scientists like her to create life from scratch.

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Hollywood’s middle class is collapsing, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.

Production has slowed to historic lows, jobs are vanishing, and longtime workers are leaving Los Angeles in droves.

Animator Brian Mainolfi, who once worked with Chuck Jones and on Disney films like Mulan, hasn’t had steady work since 2024. His only income is $350 a week teaching three hours away. “By the end of the year if I don’t have something, I’m going to have to apply to a big-box store or a grocery store,” said the 54-year-old, now burning through savings.

DHS.

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials approached Roberts, he identified himself then sped off, abandoned his vehicle, and hid in a brushy area about 200 meters away, where ICE officers located him with help from Iowa State Patrol officers. At the time of arrest, a loaded handgun, hunting knife and $3,000 cash were found in his vehicle. On Oct. 2, he was charged with being an illegal alien in possession of firearms.

Roberts’ rap sheet and immigration history reveal a long record of criminal conduct in the United States. He should never have been serving in a role overseeing children in Iowa’s largest school district.

“Ian Andre Roberts, a criminal illegal alien with multiple weapons charges and a drug trafficking charge, should have never been able to work around children,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “When ICE officers arrested this Superintendent, he was in possession of an illegal handgun, a hunting knife, and nearly $3,000 in cash. This criminal illegal alien is now in U.S. Marshals custody and facing charges for being an illegal alien in possession of a firearms. Under Secretary Noem, ICE will continue to arrest the worst of the worst and put the safety of America’s children FIRST.”

Scientific American, a Voice of the Crust.

Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.

Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.

Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.

The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology.

NPR, a Voice of the Crust.

hink of Jennifer, or as we like to call her, “Jen.” Jen of the dazzling smile, Jen of the gorgeous chin, Jen with her hair down, Jen tousled, Jen as Rachel, Jen with Brad; Jen without Brad, Jen with Vince, Jen at the Oscars, and, of course, Jen as a neuron in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Maybe you missed that last Jen.

A few years ago, a UCLA neurosurgeon named Itzhak Fried, while operating on patients who suffer from debilitating epileptic seizures, discovered what he now calls the “Jennifer Aniston Neuron.”

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Many of us have repeated the assertion that writing paper in early modern England was expensive and scarce, but it has always bothered me. After hearing this fairly regularly in response to two common questions —“Why did people write on the endleaves of printed books?” and “Why are there no ‘Shakespeare manuscripts’?”—I started keeping track of paper prices in account books and bills and receipts to see if this was actually true. I was suspicious because a considerable number of early modern manuscript books at the Folger and elsewhere are mostly blank.

The majority of letters from this period are written on the first page of a four page bifolium, with the inner two pages left blank and the last page used to write the superscription (the address). An etiquette manual published in 1675 encourages the ostentatious display of blank paper as a show of respect, its writer suggesting that when composing a letter, to “make use of large Paper rather than small, and a whole sheet (though we write but six lines in the first Page) rather than half a one, is no inconsiderable piece of ceremony, one shewing reverence and esteem, the other familiarity or indifference” (Antoine de Courtin, The Rules of Civility).

However, even drafts of letters are often written on whole sheets, suggesting that leaving blank paper unused was hardly considered decadent and not only meant to impress.

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Fundamentally, any kind of “superbaby” or “designer baby” project depends on two steps:
1.) figure out what genes you ideally want;
2.) create an embryo with those genes.
It’s already standard to do a very simple version of this two-step process. In the typical course of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), embryos are usually screened for chromosomal abnormalities that would cause disabilities like Down Syndrome, and only the “healthy” embryos are implanted.
But most (partially) heritable traits and disease risks are not as easy to predict.

Let’s see–nope, no sign of Grievance Studies majors, ‘journalism’, ‘communications’, or DEI administrators.

The Spectator (UK).

When I was offered the chance to review two new books about the Devil, I thought, “what fun!” I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly diabolical person, but as someone whose deep love of Paradise Lost has made me, as good old William Blake didn’t quite put it, “of the devil’s party while very much knowing it,” I rubbed my hands together in glee at the prospect of getting down and dirty with Old Nick.

Not, you understand, that my purely literary interest can begin to compare to the “Satanic Panic” outbreak that gripped the imaginations of middle America in the late 1980s and 1990s. “Satanic cults! Every hour, every day, their ranks are growing!” So began one typically understated NBC special that boasted macabre stories of animal sacrifice, cannibalism, ritualistic child abuse and grisly ceremonial murders, all described with a mixture of apparent shock and prurient relish. People genuinely feared that agents of the Devil walked among them. Not least because the media whipped them up into a frenzy.

It is easy to look back at Satanic Panic and chuckle at its absurdity. For a brief moment, we might pity the teenage goths and emos who were suspected of unspeakable crimes because they liked the color black. We can do this because, of course, in our enlightened age, nobody really believes in the Devil anymore. Even the camp but hardly blood-curdling flamboyance of the Satanic Temple is somewhat restrained today; its adherents now spend their time rather quaintly fighting for “representation in schools.”

What I find interesting is that humans, uniquely among the animal world, have developed social institutions to constrain or even suppress natural instinctive behaviors. No other animal species has anything resembling a police force. Whence comes the notion that certain proclivities (that we all have) are somehow not-good?

Pro bono publico has a lot of stretch to it.

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The troops entering Portland are drawn from a pool of 300 guard members who are either trained as military police or have been certified by the state’s police standards agency. Of the 300 qualified guard members, 166 members primarily from the I-5 corridor have already volunteered for service in Portland.

The situation is without precedent, as Trump’s order marks the first time Oregon’s National Guard has been deployed within the state over the objections of its governor, Bomar said. The only other time the president has deployed Oregon’s National Guard was for airport security in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Military.com

The white hats of the graduating class of the U.S. Naval Academy sailed high in the clear skies above Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis in May of 1994, after President Bill Clinton gave the commencement address and the Navy’s Blue Angels roared overhead.

Mikie Sherrill, now a New Jersey Democratic congresswoman running for governor, saw none of it.

She was caught up in a months-long investigation of the worst cheating scandal in the academy’s history, leading to the expulsion of 24 midshipmen. Sherrill says she did not cheat but was penalized because she would not turn in her classmates involved in the infamous scandal.

Which is just as much a violation of the Honor Code as actually cheating.

While allowed to graduate, Sherrill was not permitted to walk in the procession with the rest of her classmates in that joyous ceremony. She was among 64 who received lesser punishment.

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Many socialists have bypassed the foundational principle of collective ownership of production and have instead jumped straight to demands for ownership or redistribution of the output of production. Production is seemingly taken for granted. This conceptual shortcut makes socialism seem like a dream economic system by avoiding what socialism really is.

Therefore, although many public and political arguments are made in the name of socialism, what is often advocated for is not true socialism. In reality, the debate has rarely centered on collective ownership of the means of production—such as the factories, tools, land, and capital that make production possible—but instead on ownership or control of the outputs of production (goods and services).

Simply put, many self-identified socialists are less interested in owning the means of production and more interested in claiming entitlement to what is currently being produced or the production that someone else already owns.

Thus, the economic system debate is rarely about who controls the means of production itself but rather about the redistribution of final goods and services.

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A new finding by American surgeon John Sottosanti adds an astonishing detail to the Shroud of Turn debate: the faint outline of human teeth beneath the cloth’s imprint.

…

But to Sottosanti, trained in facial anatomy, the discovery is groundbreaking, according to an article published in The Blaze.

It not only demonstrates the Shroud came from a real human being, but also deepens the mystery of how the Shroud’s image was formed.

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It’s only been a couple of days since Biden stepped down and endorsed Kamala Harris. I’ve lost count of the “first Black/Indian American/Asian American female president” emails and ads flooding my inbox. Just last week, I learned that JD Vance was Trump’s running mate when I got a dozen messages asking about the Telugu-speaking Kamma caste. And no, these weren’t from the extended family WhatsApp group gossiping about a cousin. Most messages were from Americans trying to understand the buzz around JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance (née Chilukuri), an American born to Telugu-speaking Indian immigrants.

That buzz around Indian Americans in politics only intensified with Vivek Ramaswamy’s speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and Nikki Haley following the party line to endorse Trump. With Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, Indian Americans are making waves on both sides of the political aisle, and everyone’s taking notice.

Indian Americans, though just 1.5% of the U.S. population, have an outsized impact. They’re not only the highest-earning ethnic group but also occupy top positions at Microsoft, Google, IBM, Adobe, and FedEx. They dominate the field in STEM and medicine, and now, they’re stepping into the political spotlight on both sides of the aisle.

…

How did the children of Indian immigrants reach the top of US establishments in just one generation? Should we view them as part of the elite or categorize them as BIPOC — Black, Indigenous, and People of Color? Are they more likely to vote – or now, increasingly run – as Democrats or Republicans? And what does all this mean for the broader political landscape and policies on immigration, race, and DEI?

I answer all these questions by explaining (1) the composition of Indian Americans in the US, especially from the lens of caste; (2) the origins of when and how Indian Americans came to the US; (3) the political leanings and views of the more recent Indian immigrants on immigration reform and DEI as a relatively small minority in the US.

Epicurious.

As you cut sweet, creamy, and slightly airy slices of yellow banana into your morning cereal, it may be hard to imagine the familiar fruit tasting any different. Like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, most Americans are unaware that today’s yellow banana is like a shadow of the one that preceded it—a yellow banana with a sweeter flavor, firmer texture, and better culinary versatility was once the norm. The long, curved, school-bus yellow banana that America first marveled at was a variety called the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike.”

…

For a long time, I casually searched for the Gros Michel. I knew it would be difficult to find in stores, though from what I’d read the variety still existed. The longer I searched and the more I paid attention, the more it became incredibly clear to me how many bananas this country has for sale. Bodegas, convenience stores, airport kiosks, chain grocery stores, corporate cafeterias, hotel breakfast buffets—everywhere I happened upon a yellow banana, it was always a Cavendish.

Finally, one day, I was pleasantly surprised to find an online Gros Michel retailer called Miami Fruit. I ordered a small box of Gros Michel bananas and patiently waited for them to arrive at my door but realized I didn’t quite know how to qualitatively judge one banana against another. To truly understand how the elusive Gros Michel from years past compares to the Cavendish that litters produce stands today, I knew I had to speak with a bona fide fruit expert.

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Liberalism forces the immense existential burden of self-invention, a power disclosed at best to the mere handful of Elon Musks in this world, onto the great mass of humanity. To the self-regarding few, Locke’s understanding of the human person as an autonomous individual, a free agent whose identity is chosen rather than inherited, will taste like liberation. To the humble majority, it will be felt as a crippling weight—akin to the kind of choice-oversaturation we are liable to feel at an obscenely varied all-you-can-eat buffet. Except that in this case, the saturation is writ large, applying not only to food but to life’s most fundamental questions.

Such considerations have prompted a notorious right-wing internet meme: “Liberalism but exclusively for 130+ IQ Anglos.” A society that consisted solely of Lockes and Musks, the idea runs, would unquestionably benefit from a liberal ethos in which all were free to think, act, and innovate for themselves, each man doing so in accordance with a self-fashioned conception of the good life. But since no such society has ever existed, the next best option is to make do with the less impressive species we have before us: a human race that naturally organises itself into tribal collectives and craves the security of order and tradition. If only the wary 99% were cut from the same cloth as their intrepid superiors in the 1%, the conservative brakes on liberalism might be relaxed without danger. In the event, prudence dictates that they cannot be.

The rarer move is to doubt whether this celebrated 1% in fact exists. To be sure, intelligence and other forms of natural hierarchy are very real. But, albeit to varying degrees, are we not all prone to tribalism? Is there any man who does not stand in need of the innumerable funds of social knowledge greater than himself?

The Foundry.

I’ll give you the key:

It starts with a “D”.

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For millionaires and billionaires, it sure seems like money can buy happiness.

New research shows that ultra-wealthy individuals are more content than those earning six-figure salaries, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. That’s according to Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School who studies the causes of human happiness. Killingsworth worked on a similar study last year, and he has now updated his findings to include the super-rich.

“The results suggest that the positive association between money and well-being continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial,” Killingsworth writes in his abstract.

Money means freedom, and if freedom doesn’t bring you happiness, you’re a lost cause.

I can never tell them apart.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Anthony Bourdain was beloved for his openness to new experiences, for his willingness to eat anything—brains; shark; cobra heart, still beating—with anyone. But he did reserve one bias: The man hated vegetarians. “Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.”

For which a good case could be made–humans evolved to be omnivores, and vegetarianism will sooner or later subtract you from the gene pool.

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The “Rulers of the Ancient World” is a metrology/design/production project, based around producing a range of period correct rulers from various ancient empires.

Stemming from a personal fascination with the creation and development of systems of measurement, this project seeks to highlight the artfulness of handmade tools and the capability of handwork and CNC milling to complement one another and create a unique, novel product.

The original series of four rulers (Egyptian Span & Cubit, Roman Cubitus and Japanese Kanejaku) are each locally sourced Hard Maple, hand planed, French polished and waxed, and etched by CNC with a 0.1 mm engraving bit, which is then inked with India Ink, applied by hand. The Limited Edition ruler set, an Egyptian Span, Roman Cubitus and Japanese Shaku, were made with local and historically accurate woods for their respective cultures, and created by similar means. The French “Roubo” Fathom was made with flamed maple, and similarly polished and finished, though etched by hand. Lastly, like the Limited Edition ruler set, the French “Roubo Pied du Roi” ruler is made of European Sycamore, a geographically correct and culturally relevant wood.

The goals of this project are far-reaching- to illuminate the use of these ancient measurement systems, to enable a physical, tactile engagement with a piece of history, and highlight the possibility of beauty and novelty in toolmaking in the presence of traditional techniques and CNC machinery.

The Spot, New Haven, Connecticut. Finest kind.

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Among both the right and the left and the right, there is a common (semi-) conspiratorial narrative. As lamented in works such as Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo Feudalism, Yanis Varoufakis’s Techno Feudalism, and Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the world is entering into a period in which all artificial intelligence will manage a mass of deracinated, heavily medicated slaves whose entire lives will be tracked and recorded. Such an idea, once the work of science fiction, now appears to be an increasing reality. At the same time, opponents of this view argue that contemporary bureaucracy is so inefficient and incompetent, and technology seems to increasingly function worse and worse. Artificial Intelligence, moreover, is simultaneously near magically powerful as well as incompetent, and, quite frankly, dumb.

However, the growth of the state, which, oddly, used to be critiqued but is now celebrated by the Left, has been increasing for some time. Moreover, the archiving of information, which, again, was once documented and critiqued by left-wing figures such as Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamden, is something that has been a perennial part of human government, long before AI, but especially began to increase in the Early Modern era. In his recent work, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World, University of Massachusetts historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique presents a chronicle of the formation of the early British Empire, paying special attention to how the British utilized archival bureaucracy to manage populations.

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Federal prosecutors revealed that Nicholas Roske, the California man who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, had planned to kill up to three Supreme Court justices to “single-handedly alter the constitutional order” over Roe v. Wade. The motive appears political and leftist in nature, and other court documents obtained by The Daily Wire revealed that the would-be assassin identifies as transgender.

ALSO: We’re All Shocked — Shocked! — to Learn That the Democrat Who Tried to Murder Brett Kavanaugh Is a Psychotic Tranny (The Other McCain)

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Today, we are overwhelmed—and even desensitized—by illogical and nauseating rhetoric about equality at all costs, which fuels a practice whereby criminals are protected while law-abiding citizens are crushed. Simple common sense should suffice to see that the modern penal system in the West is profoundly unjust. It is not justice to sentence someone to decades in prison, because it means forcing citizens—including the victims’ own families—to pay for the criminal’s upkeep with public funds collected through taxation.

The West must relearn that the role of the judiciary is not to redeem the wicked, but to deliver justice to the victims and restore the order disrupted by crime. The purpose of punishment is expiation proportionate to guilt.

When guilt is extreme and undeniable—as in the gratuitous and brutal murder in Charlotte—no form of expiation is adequate except capital punishment. In this, Donald Trump is right. Those who reject this principle are not merciful; they are simply unjust, because they deny victims and their loved ones the recognition of their suffering and deprive society of a necessary barrier against the advance of barbarism.

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In the first major state elections since the new government, North Rhine-Westphalia went to the polls, with the Christian Democrats (CDU) coming out on top while the Social Democrats (SPD) crashed in support. Meanwhile, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the third-strongest party in the state, more than tripling its support from the last elections.

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Scientists used techniques from the field of gravitational wave astronomy to argue that the Antikythera mechanism contained a lunar calendar.

s

Quillette.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (“IAGS”) recently announced that 86 percent of their members had concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. This was extremely misleading. First of all, only around 28 percent of their members voted on the resolution and a mere twenty percent of total members approved it. And this was not the only problem with the resolution. It also misrepresented the crime of genocide.

Genocide is an act undertaken with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such. If you cannot establish a specific intent to commit this crime (such an intent is known in legal parlance as dolus specialis), you cannot establish genocide.

The IAGS resolution did not even attempt to establish such an intent, relying instead on statements made by other entities and by extrapolating from what the organisation B’Tselem has described as a “broader analytical framework.” However, legally, genocide requires a fully conclusive finding, meaning that no other explanation exists for the event or events in question other than the intent to commit the crime of genocide. This does not apply here, as there are alternative explanations for the casualties in Gaza that the IAGS fails to recognise.

“It’s always better with a cat on your lap.” — Scott Adams, September 13 2025

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Researchers from a large health care system in Michigan found that vaccinated children were more likely to develop a chronic health condition, but never published the findings, according to a copy of the study obtained by The Epoch Times.

Dr. Marcus Zervos, an infectious disease specialist at the Henry Ford Health, and colleagues studied 18,468 children born between 2000 and 2016 who were enrolled in the health system’s insurance plan, drawing data from medical, clinical, and payer records and supplementing with information from Michigan’s immunization registry.

After 10 years, 57 percent of the vaccinated children had a chronic health condition such as asthma, compared to just 17 percent of the unvaccinated children.

“This study found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, when compared to children unexposed to vaccination,” the authors wrote. “This association was primarily driven by asthma, atopic disease, eczema, autoimmune disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. This suggests that in certain children, exposure to vaccination may increase the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, particularly for one of these conditions.”

Newsbusters.

The federal government owns about a third of America.

Since we’re on a path to bankruptcy, it would be smart to sell some unused property.

President Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary says it may be worth as much as $200 trillion. Selling just a fraction of it would reduce our enormous debt.

Not just that — since government doesn’t manage things well, selling or leasing some would leave it in better condition.

Federal bureaucrats have been slow to do controlled burns and remove deadwood that becomes fuel for fires.

“Fires on federal lands accounted for more than half of the acres burned,” says the Congressional Budget Office.

But whenever a politician suggests selling any land, environmental activists freak out.

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New refrigerators, ovens and dishwashers come with all sorts of novel features — you can see your vacation photos on a screen on your fridge door, remotely monitor food temperature or connect your dishwasher to the internet. They’re also less expensive and more efficient than in decades past.

But many of the latest models of kitchen appliances have shorter life spans than those of yesteryear. Thanks to how complex they are, they require maintenance sooner, and the cost of repair often rivals the price tag of a new appliance altogether. Plus, it turns out a lot of people simply aren’t using most of the newfangled features.

Probably nobody knows the particular limitations of new appliances better than the people tasked with repairing them.

“We used to be able to tell people a dishwasher could last 15 years. And now you’re lucky to get five to seven out of a dishwasher,” says David Costanzo, owner of Appliance King of America in Boynton Beach, Fla.

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Do androids dream of executing routines?

We are stuck in a world of routines: Wake up, answer email, go to a meeting, then another meeting, check off an item from a todo list, and repeat. The “hustle culture” of the internet tell us to add even more to the routine: Grind more hours, wake up at 5am and do yoga, remember to meditate, work out an hour a day, and so on. There’s endless tips on what successful CEOs do with their mornings, making us feel bad for not executing core loops with machine-like efficiency.

You’ll get none of these ideas here. This is the anti-routine essay, in which I refute the paradigm of fitter, happier, more productive routines as the secret to success. Our careers are defined by the highest moments of its biggest upside swings. The question is how to create the most opportunities at achieving that, not how to execute perfect little habits. That is: Reject the core loop, the checklists, and all the email. Embrace serendipity!