Read it.

Reckless driving and aggressive driving can describe similar behavior, but they are not the same legal idea. Reckless driving is usually the more serious label because it turns on willful or wanton disregard for safety. Aggressive driving usually describes a pattern of hostile or impatient traffic behavior, and some states do not use that label as a separate charge.

There is no single national rule. A speed, lane change, or tailgating incident can be treated differently depending on the state, the road conditions, the risk created, and whether the driver threatened or endangered someone else.

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

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According to the UN Environment Programme, the world can expect to generate 408 million tons of waste by 2040. If nations around the world successfully adapted their systems, including getting better at reusing plastics and improving their processes for sorting recycling, then this total could be brought down to 216 million tons.

While multiple surveys show that there is overwhelming global support for a ban of some single-use plastics and consumers have also repeatedly claimed that the topic is important to them, Statista data shows that this is not necessarily trickling down all the way into shopping behaviors. According to a survey carried out by Statista Consumer Insights between April 2025 and March 2026, only between a third and a tenth of shoppers in most surveyed countries say that they avoid plastic packaging when buying food. This rate was especially low in Japan, known for its high use of single-use food packaging, at 7 percent. It stood at just 17 percent in the United States. India was one of the outliers of the survey. There, almost half of urban respondents said they had an eye on the matter. A comparably high level of respondents said the same in Vietnam, potentially showing that in countries where supermarkets still play a smaller role in daily shopping, plastic waste can be considered more by consumers.

The survey also reveals something about the nature in which respondents answer questionnaires. When asked if they actively try to reduce harmful packaging, many people tend to respond that they do. This is called social desirability bias, meaning that respondents might exaggerate their positive deeds in order to feel better about themselves. The answers displayed in the chart are from a multi-pick question in which respondents could pick all options that apply to them from a list of food consumption statements. Despite being free to check all boxes, many respondents focused on a few central statements, disregarding some of the desirable, but potentially less true behaviors.

They’re asking the wrong questions. Most shoppers don’t get to choose the packaging in which their products come. If they did, they might choose something other than plastic. But they want the product, and, however much they might prefer that it not come in plastic, they don’t get to chose—they have to take what the maker of the product offers. Nobody is going to choose one product over another merely based on the packaging unless it’s a total commodity, and even then price is far more dispositive.

… how you see a plethora of videos on YouTube and TikTok from women asking Where All The Good Men Are, but you don’t see ANY videos from men asking Where All The Good Women Are?

Just sayin’….

Tru dat.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Watch it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Not the Bee.

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

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

The New Neo.

One of Trump’s major virtues is that he acts as a litmus test: He brings out the true essence of people who pretend to be part of a group when they really aren’t. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Bill Kristol—all have stripped their masks away.

Read it.

I’m surprised that it’s that few. Customarily any party that isn’t hard Left is tagged ‘far right’ by the Narrative Media and the Usual Suspects.

We do what we have to, to get the job done.

Check it out.

The Marines have resisted better than most the debilitating effects of movement feminism on the traditional virtues that our Woke Narrative derides as ‘toxic masculinity’. (‘A feminist is a strong independent woman until a fight breaks out or a bill arrives.’)

Watch it.

Dr. Geoff Lindsey talls you all about it.

(Note: ‘Lindsey’ is English; ‘Lindsay’ is Scottish.)

A Navy SEAL once told me the secret:

Two to the body, one to the head
Always leaves the target dead.

The New Neo.

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Saad unleashes a blistering critique of maladaptively irrational altruism that has gripped our culture. This mind parasite hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite, leading to a catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities. The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline. Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.

Saad is a professor, but he seems to be very realistic as well. His thesis makes me think of Robert Frost – yes, that Robert Frost. For example, this post of mine from 2019 contains the following thoughts from Frost….

Frost was writing about socialism in 1936, whereas Saad is writing more generally. But the principle is much the same. Empathy – similar to Frost’s mercy – is part of human nature and definitely has its uses. But taken to an extreme, and misapplied, it is dangerous and can lead to either failure of an economic system or cultural suicide or literal deaths, as well as restraints on liberty in the name of kindness.

 

Not the Bee.

And rightly so. This case is different from most “corporate policy” cases in that the employees were not resisting the robbery but rather defending themselves against assault & battery, which is a positive right in law.

Babylon Bee.

I like it. It has texture, and scope. If Trump starts wearing an eyepatch and a duster, we’ll know.

Read it.

This is why I no longer use Chrome.

Watch it.

You have been warned.

My wife and I were caught in Texas 2021 Frozen February. We now have a gas-powered backup generator.

Read it.

Advances in materials and science are pushing optical cooling out of the lab and closer to actual semiconductors and other electronic systems. “The ability to diffuse energy in a highly targeted way has profound ramifications that extend from performance and costs to sustainability,” Pauzauskie said.

In fact, the appeal of optical cooling extends beyond chips. The technology could also enable more precise scientific instruments: atomic clocks, telescopes, satellites, and more, said Alexander Albrecht, a research assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. “It’s possible to cool exactly where you generate heat—down to microscopic ‘hot spots’—rather than cooling an entire enclosure.”

Watch it.

I suspect that the transition from a strong blade with a single edge to a weaker blade with a double edge would be quite confusing.

I would also like to see how he does with a basket-hilted curved cavalry sabre, which ought to be closer to what he’s used to.

Read it.

New findings, published today (10 June) in Nature, help to answer the riddle of how vertebrates evolved the diverse array of brain cells that distinguishes them from other animals. It appears that a dramatic expansion of the genetic toolkit more than 450 million years ago enabled the emergence of different kinds of brain cells. These cellular innovations are shared across vertebrates – from primitive fish to mammals – and form the basis of the sophisticated brains seen today.

By comparing the gene activity of single brain cells across five species, including humans, mice, lizards, lampreys (a primitive, eel-like fish) and amphioxus (one of our closest invertebrate relatives), the team reconstructed how brain cell types evolved over deep time. They found that many of the major cell type families in vertebrate brains arose after a genome duplication event in the common ancestor of vertebrates roughly 520 million years ago. A further genome duplication (around 500 million years ago) then added to this.

Read it.

What they found was that if an injury occurs at a particular point in the branched structure of the antler, it makes a small callus and heals; the rack will be shed as normal, and next year, a new rack will grow, with an ectopic tine (branch) at the location where the damage occurred in the previous year. This is one of my favorite examples when I teach developmental biology students, on the topic of “here are some things not in your developmental biology textbook”. Using the tools we normally use in the field – chemical gradients, gene-regulatory networks, molecular pathways – try to come up with a model of how the point of damage is sensed at one location of a complex structure, then the whole thing falls off, and the memory is somehow kept – where – in the growth plate on the scalp? And then months later, a new structure appears, with a pattern dictated not just by the emergent result of genetically-encoded protein production (hard enough to explain) but also by the previous physiological experience of cells that are no longer here, which tells bone growth dynamics to take an extra turn and grow out in a very specific place. The effect disappears after a few years and they go back to normal.

Trofim Denisovich, call your office.

Quanta.

In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology.

One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region of their genome, and then use it to recognize and destroy the same virus if it returns. The CRISPR-Cas9 system, to give it its longer name, consists of a short strand of guide RNA that identifies where to cut the DNA and a protein that acts as the molecular scissors.

What made this system truly revolutionary was the demonstration in 2012 that it could be reprogrammed with different pieces of guide RNA to edit virtually any genome in any species, and at a level of precision and ease that far surpassed existing gene-editing tools. Since then, the editing capability of CRISPR has been tested on everything from developing disease treatments to engineering drought-resistant crops to resurrecting genes of extinct species. The possibilities have expanded so rapidly that researchers, ethicists, and regulators have found themselves struggling to keep up.

God forbid that ‘ethicists’ (professional tellers of other people what to do) and regulators (professional tellers of other people what not to do) find themselves ‘struggling to keep up’.

But only if you’re really really good.

Paul Graham.

Since this is apparently the future prime ministers’ club, I’m going to tell you about something it would be good if more politicians understood: I’m going to tell you how people become billionaires. I hope this will be useful to you even if you don’t plan to go into politics. Those of you who don’t become prime minister can become billionaires instead.

…

Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I’ve spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.

So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it’s impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it’s possible. It’s hard, but it’s possible.

The politician in question was, of course, Alexandra Occasional-Cortex. (My guess would have been Bernie, but I’m old-sch00l.)

It’s all about priorities.

I’m the one in the middle.

Sounds like something one might do for great profit on OnlyFans.

If you’ve ever met me,
You will not forget me.,

Quillette.

Human evolution, particularly of the brain, ended a long time ago—at least that is what many educated people, wary of claims about biological differences between human groups, prefer to believe. For much of the postwar era, it was widely assumed that natural selection had largely ceased to shape human populations and that any evolution during the past ten millennia was too slow or too slight to detect. That view was partly shaped by evidence and partly shaped by history. After World War II, the horrors of Nazi racial science made claims about human biological variation radioactive, and for good reason. But a justified rejection of racial typologies often hardened into a broader assumption: that natural selection had lost its grip on humans, and that differences between populations were mostly superficial.

A landmark study published in Nature in April has complicated that narrative. Drawing on ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 West Eurasians spanning 10,000 years, Harvard geneticist David Reich and colleagues found evidence that directional genetic selection is not only widespread but accelerating. Rather than stasis, evolution has continued to act on hundreds of genetic variants associated with traits ranging from disease risk and body composition to complex behavioural measures, including intelligence.

While the paper itself is technical and cautious, its implications are explosive. Importantly, the selection identified in the study occurred within populations inhabiting distinct ecological and cultural environments, suggesting that recent human evolution has been shaped by local selective pressures rather than a uniform global process. That, in turn, raises the possibility of ongoing regional divergence between different human groups. This has already dragged an older, more troubling word back into the discussion—“race”. This is not the sloppy popular notion based on skin colour or a rigid biological essence. Human genetics substantially overlaps among groups, rendering classical racial categories obsolete. But this provocative research does underscore that many human differences may not be simply skin deep.

Evolution never stops, in the same way that markets never go away. Humans can affect evolution, chiefly by preserving the lives of people who would otherwise die before they reproduce, but also by aborting babies for convenience (and we have no idea how THAT will work out….).

Read it.

When the systems of a ‘law and order’ society find no intention, benefit or reasonable expectation of safety from their established construct of government -generally driven by an intentional willingness to ignore the demands of the citizens those officials are expected to represent- eventually people take matters into their own hands.

It is fair to call this the end of the “first follower” phase.

Read it.

There is great anxiety and uncertainty about AI replacing jobs. How can we move past vague warnings and bombastic predictions and bring data to bear on this question? One good way is to look at the profession where AI capabilities are furthest along and adoption has been exceptionally rapid: software engineering.

In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned.

We also have a good understanding of why this is the case. We can think of many kinds of knowledge work, including software development, as a “decide-execute-deliver sandwich”. AI compresses the “execute” layer — the middle of the sandwich — but the other two layers resist automation in a way that will not be overcome by capability improvements alone.

We conclude on a note of cautious optimism about the future trajectory of demand for software engineering. This essay is the first in a series, and the next one will look at reasons why individual software engineers’ careers might be rocky even if overall demand is healthy. The series is based on the published literature in economics and software engineering, our own evaluations and observations of AI agents, and many software engineers’ reflection on the present and future of AI impacts on their profession, gleaned both from published writings and our interactions with the community.

Cringely says the quiet part out loud.

There’s a reason your bank’s AI will tell you its branch hours but not your account balance. A reason the hospital lets it summarize the cafeteria menu and not the medical chart. A reason no airline will put a language model near a cockpit and no law firm lets one file a brief without a terrified associate reading every line. It isn’t the cost. It’s that the thing lies — confidently, fluently, without warning, and without any tell. In a chatbot recommending a taco place, a hallucination is a shrug. In a domain where being wrong gets someone audited, sued, sick, or killed, a hallucination is a wall. And behind that wall sit the most valuable AI markets on Earth — banking, insurance, medicine, law, aviation, defense — frozen, spending fortunes on pilot projects that might never ship, because the last mile is always a liability lawyer saying no.

I’m convinced.

Maxinomics.

Depending on the government put us on the moon—and then nothing for thirty years, until a rich private citizen decided he wanted to go into space.

I know the feeling.

Read ity. And watch the mostly peaceful videos.

Hard to tell whether that’s a warm welcome or just a bunch of boos, but it didn’t seem too bad for an NBA game in New York City.

Outside, however, New Yorkers got mostly peaceful after the Knicks lost.

Reminds me of the top-knot worn by pre-modern samurail

They looked silly, too.

Canadian Broadcast Company, a Voice of the Crust.

You might think, based on the volume of her Facebook posts, that Nieta Aqila is an Albertan who supports separation.

“I signed the Alberta independence petition” because “Canada is not a great country anymore,” an account in her name wrote in a popular Facebook group called Alberta Independence that promotes the movement and has more than 100,000 members.

In another post, Aqila said she was harassed and had rocks thrown at her as she canvassed for petition signatures.

The account’s posts have generated thousands of reactions, comments and shares in recent months as the issue heated up.

But the account owner, according to a CBC visual investigation, was posing as a Canadian and is actually a noodle merchant and content creator from Indonesia, who in some cases was just stealing content from real Albertans.

“Real Albertans”? Sounds l ike racism to me.

The Register.

The US government is reportedly weighing whether to take a financial stake in AI companies, which looks a bit like negotiating for a seat on the Titanic.

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic, the marquee brands in US AI, are profitable yet. While Anthropic may be nearer to that point if its accounting survives scrutiny, OpenAI’s $1.4 trillion in financial commitments over the next eight years have been interpreted as a red flag for investors.

This raises (at least) two questions: Should the US government be picking winners? And should the US government be picking losers?

Bernie Sanders is, of course, very happy with the government picking winners and losers—so long as they are Politically Correct winners and losers—but he’d avoid the whole problem by just stealing half of an AI company for the government rather than actually, you know, paying for it.l