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Alberta will hold a referendum on whether the province should remain in Canada or begin the legal process toward a future binding vote on separation, marking the first major test of Canadian unity in decades.

Thursday’s announcement by Premier Danielle Smith follows growing pressure from separatist groups after a citizen-led petition calling for independence gathered more than 300,000 signatures earlier this year. A separate petition supporting Alberta remaining in Canada reportedly gathered more than 400,000 signatures.

The independence movement has gained traction in the oil-rich province, driven by a long-standing belief among many Albertans that Ottawa overlooks the province’s interests, particularly over energy policy and natural resources. Despite this, opinion polls suggest most Albertans would vote against separation.

The referendum is scheduled for 19 October. Voters will be asked whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada or whether the provincial government should begin the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding referendum on separation.

Vote Pattern Analysis.

In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.

This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.

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A new study on the Shroud of Turin, the fabric that some Christians believe was wrapped around Jesus Christ after his death, could support a long-held belief about the biblical account of his burial.

Dr. Kelly Kearse, an immunologist who studied at Johns Hopkins University and now works as a chemistry teacher at Knoxville Catholic High School, found in a study of the shroud that the “washing hypothesis” that forensic pathologist Dr. Frederick Zugibe proposed in 1998 is contradicted by evidence collected from the shroud itself.

In her research, Kearse examined human blood samples to see how blood transfers to cloth and found that serum halos, or clear rings that form around blood clots, are visible on parts of the shroud.

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I usually focus on the building science of homes, HVAC, and indoor environmental quality. Today, though, I’m going to cover a topic of outdoor environmental quality. I’ve had mosquitoes in my backyard since we bought the house in 2019. This year, however, the yard is practically uninhabitable all the time because the constant rainfall has kept the yard wet and overpopulated with mosquitoes. That’s about to change because last week, I heard about the perfect solution: the Mosquito Bucket of Death.†

So, for the past few days I’ve been setting them up and putting them out in my yard. I’ve got four out there now and may add more. I wish I had started them in April because it takes a while for them to do their thing. And their thing is using an otherwise harmless bacterium to kill the mosquito larvae after the female mosquitoes lay their eggs in the bucket. Here’s a video showing a bit about how they work and how to set them up.

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Traditionally, prefabricated construction has meant large fixed factories churning out modules or panels that get shipped to building sites. The siren song is industrial-esque economies of scale in an industry that’s long evaded affordability and efficiency. But those centralized models, made infamous by companies like Katerra, General Modular Homes, and Skender, have faced challenges due to large up-front capex requirements and the hefty cost of shipping fabricated products to construction sites.

The emerging microfactory model flips that script. Instead of shipping bulky housing components from a distant plant, why not ship the factoryitself to the project? In other words, take a compact, automated production unit (often the size of a shipping container) and set it up right next to the jobsite. The factory becomes a portable product, and the building components are made where they’ll be used—a true inversion of the old “fixed factory, shipped goods” paradigm.

By making factories shippable and goods more locally produced, microfactories aim to capture the benefits of off-site fabrication (automation, efficiency, indoor conditions) without the drawbacks of centralized production.

New Scientist.

We have known of magnets for millennia. Today, they are at the heart of a raft of modern technologies, from electric generators and smartphones to loudspeakers and hospital scanners. And yet for 100 years, we have been missing something about them. We always assumed there were only two types. It was Šmejkal’s art-inspired insights that finally gave the lie to that in 2022.

Fast-forward to today, and we know that what Šmejkal called “altermagnets” aren’t just an idea. We have discovered real examples and are working out how to make this new kind of material in practical and useful ways. There is even a possibility that these magnets could help us build a completely new kind of computer. “Altermagnets could actually have all the functionalities of current devices, but much faster, with less energy consumption, and smaller,” says Šmejkal.

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Ask yourself why all American universities follow a German model rather than a British model for how they operate.

In fact, a university structured on the British model would invariably fail accreditation in the U.S.

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The Western world lives under the rule of law and holds sacred the institutions that enforce them. We believe in contracts, in due process, and in a system of justice that is fair, at least in theory. But what happens when that system frays? What happens when there is a growing class that is above the law?

The unsettling answer is that an older, more brutal set of rules re-emerges. It’s a system of power that has governed humanity for nearly all of its history called tribalism.

Of course, tribalism is still thriving in the non-Western world. We see its effects in what we might call corruption, in political systems where votes are merely a show, and in societies where power, not law, is the final arbiter. From a Western perspective, we tend to disdain these systems as a moral failing. We don’t see a rational, time-tested system of power operating according to its own logic; we see a deviation from our own sacred ideals. This misunderstanding is a luxury, because when we mistake a power play for a moral lapse, we are left trying to appeal to a non-existent conscience, playing a game we don’t even know has begun. And in the emerging conflicts of the 21st century, those who don’t understand the rules of the tribe will be the first to fall.

Astral Codex Ten.

The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality.

Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits – including socially relevant traits like IQ – were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% genetic, 40% unpredictable, and barely related at all to parenting or family environment.

By the early 2000s, genetic science reached a point where scientists could start pinpointing the particular genes behind any given trait. Early candidate gene studies, which hoped to find single genes with substantial contributions to IQ, depression, or crime, mostly failed. They were replaced with genome wide association studies, which accepted that most interesting traits were polygenic – controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes – and trawled the whole genome searching for variants that might explain 0.1% or even 0.01% of the pie. The goal shifted toward polygenic scores – algorithms that accepted thousands of genes as input and spit out predictions of IQ, heart disease risk, or some other outcome of interest.

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Every March and November, Americans dread the notification in their inbox or on the news to “Remember to change your clocks!” Most of us rely on the adage “Fall back in fall—spring forward in spring” to sort out the confusion of which way the clock is moving. But you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who gets excited about the biannual shift.

However, many Americans do love the later hours of sunlight daylight saving time affords. With equal fervor, others, particularly older people, dislike the thought of getting up in the dark that accompanies it.

It is this lack of consensus, as well as significant pushback from health experts, that has stalled the “Sunshine Protection Act” (H.R. 139) in the House Energy and Commerce Committee since the beginning of 2025. The broader effort to pass similar versions of the bill has been ongoing since 2018.

Now, it looks as if the sun will rise again on an amendment to make DST permanent for all states, and without much notice.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce late Tuesday night announced a markup meeting for Thursday, May 21 at 10 a.m. On the agenda was a proposal to fold the language of the Sunshine Protection Act into the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act (H.R.7389).

This latest attempt would mandate permanent daylight saving time in all states that don’t self-exempt before its effective date, and it would prevent self-exemption after its effective date.

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Analyzing carefully the living habits of past Mediterranean agrarian societies one eventually comes to the realization that the continuous, unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn’t exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule.

Without artificial lighting the movements of the Sun dictated the beginning and end of the day. Life was lived in accordance and balance with Nature and sleep was no exception. An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.

In the Summertime this manifested as the siesta. The midday sun making work or activities outdoors impossible, people stopped work, spent time with their families, ate their main meal of the day and then napped. Refreshed and energized, work resumed in the cool hours of the afternoon and the day went on late into the night. Come time for the second sleep, eight hours weren’t needed and a late night paired naturally and effortlessly with an early rise the following morning.

In the Wintertime this manifested as a sort of backwards and opposite siesta, a short wakeful period in the middle of the night between two sleeps. This makes perfect sense when you realize the duality and opposition of Summer’s long days and short nights with Winter’s short days and long nights. People went to sleep with the sun, woke in the middle of the night to stoke the fire and do chores for the following day before again going back to sleep and waking near or at sunrise.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Reality bites. Sometimes it bites woke billionaires.

The Foundry.

Cubans are no different from anyone else on this earth; God has endowed them with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. For the past 67 years, a pitiless regime, run mostly by one family, has deprived them of these rights, and when they have raised their voices, the regime’s henchmen have thrown them into dungeons and left them there for years.

Terror always works. Stalin died of natural causes, as did Mao. It took an invading army made up of some 50 countries, led by the U.S. and Britain, to dislodge Adolf Hitler. There’s not much an unarmed population can do when those with a monopoly on violence are sufficiently unfeeling to repress their compatriots.

But now there is a glimmer of hope. For the past several months, and thanks to the actions of the Trump Administration, Cubans, in the seventh decade of their misery, do seem to be getting closer and closer to enjoying the rights that God endowed them with (or, if you prefer, nature). The planets do seem to be aligning such that enough of the regime’s enforcers will start refusing to repress their own people.

ATQUE:‘Justice Has No Expiration Date’: Raúl Castro Faces US Indictments

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It is one of the strangest puzzles in human evolution. About 90% of people across every human culture favour their right hand – with no other primate species showing a population-level preference on this scale. Despite decades of research into the brains, genes and development behind handedness, why humans ended up so overwhelmingly right-handed has remained an evolutionary enigma.

Now, new research led by the University of Oxford, published in PLOS Biology, suggests the answer comes down to two defining features of human evolution – walking on two legs, and the dramatic expansion of the human brain.

The study, by Dr Thomas A. Püschel and Rachel M. Hurwitz at Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, with Professor Chris Venditti at the University of Reading, brought together data on 2,025 individuals across 41 species of monkeys and apes. Using Bayesian modelling that accounts for evolutionary relationships between species, the team tested the major existing hypotheses for why handedness evolved: including tool use, diet, habitat, body mass, social organisation, brain size and locomotion.

I suspect that the Hokey-Pokey had something to do with it.

I prefer Now.

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Call me when it crosses the Atlantic.

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The Left believes there is a contrived war on higher education. However, recent analysis counters that claim by showing that there is an economic disadvantage for many Americans taking on the cost of an advanced degree. The analysis has now landed firmly on the conclusion that much advanced education is a rigged game.

This is not news to my family. In 2008, our son attended the University of Kansas. He wanted to pursue a career in sports administration and had obtained a position at the university working for legendary athletic director Lew Perkins.

As Sam considered his next step, we researched master’s degrees in sports administration. There were about 150 programs in the discipline across the country with about half offering master’s degrees. Because of the multitude of programs, I had already concluded that getting any degree in the specialty would at best guarantee the degree holder a job at a Foot Locker store.

We asked Lew about the degree’s value. He said, “If you want to work for me, get an MBA.” Here was a top-level person in the business telling us those degrees were worthless.

That analysis is not just true of sports administration but applies across the spectrum of degrees.

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People across the United States are cutting down, smashing, and dismantling Flock Safety surveillance cameras. At least 25 cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025. One Virginia man faces 25 criminal charges for systematically destroying 13 cameras—he says he did it for the Fourth Amendment. The destruction comes as public anger builds over Flock’s documented ICE connections. Cities are hiding camera locations. Reddit threads show near-universal support. This is what happens when a $7.5 billion surveillance company ignores public opposition.

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The state has two monopolies it must protect whatever the cost: the monopoly on decreeing what is legal tender and on force.

We’re entering an era in which push comes to shove will lead to immovable objects encountering irresistible forces. All sorts of verities and vanities will be bulldozed as kicking the can down the road descends into desperation to stave off collapse, a desperation that unleashes second order effects the desperate did not anticipate. The only responses at this late stage are even more desperate, so desperation is self-reinforcing.

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Separate groups of protestors converged on the capital. One route was taken in the build-up to a “Unite the Kingdom” rally, organised around the activist Tommy Robinson (born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

The separate annual pro-Palestinian Nakba Day march commemorating the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 also went ahead, in line with the pattern of weekly ‘pro-Palestine’ marches in the capital that began in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led October 7 pogrom in Israel.

Attendees at the Robinson event travelled from across the country, with some wearing “Make England Great Again” hats, or carrying wooden crosses and chanting “Christ is King.” British authorities had earlier banned at least 11 foreign right-wing speakers from entering the country ahead of the demonstrations.

The New York Times, Paper of Record of the Crust.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The mainstream media’s outrage over religious expressions by government institutions and politicians is highly selective. At bottom, it the event is Christian, they attack. If it’s any other religion, they applaud.

Did the mainstream media publish indignant diatribes when leftist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani held Muslim dinners at City Hall and Gracie Manor for Ramadan? The answer is no, of course they didn’t. Because Islam is celebrated by modern liberal movements and Christianity is despised. And, it’s important to take note of what leftists hate, because if they hate it, it’s probably good.

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One of the biggest mistakes globalists made in their bid for perpetual medical authoritarianism during the Covid pandemic was reveling a bit too much. Numerous high level officials from the WEF, WHO, the Imperial College of London and an army of politicians were giddy with excitement and bragged publicly about all the power they were going to grab as the masses huddled in fear of a virus with a 99.8% average survival rate.

This arrogance cost them, triggering an awakening of millions of former skeptics who are now avid “conspiracy theorists”. Today, the ability of the elitist class to sucker the populace into a new pandemic theater is greatly reduced.

No one believes them anymore. And even if there was a legitimate biological threat, no one is going to trust an corrupt organization like the WHO to solve the problem.

We have see the consequences of the covid farce with the recent Hantavirus scare, which has failed to inspire any noticeable reaction from the public. As we noted a few days ago, the WHO has been exposed as a perpetrator of pandemic disinformation and is no longer trusted by the public.

Popular Science.

Japan’s bear problem continues, and the country is running out of the robot wolves that help keep them at bay. First released in 2016 by the manufacturer Ohta, Monster Wolf was originally designed to ward off the agricultural foes like boars, deer, and the island nation’s Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus) and brown bear (Ursus arctos) populations.

It’s always something….

ATQUE: Japan’s robot wolf sells out as record bear attacks drive demand

The Foundry.

uesday evening’s primary race here in the Hoosier State once again proved that the press, both local and national, still does not understand the impact that President Donald Trump has on the electorate. Nor do they understand his enduring appeal, as Indiana Republican voters unequivocally sided with the challengers over those who voted down congressional redistricting last year.

So far, the results from Tuesday’s primaries saw incumbent Republican state Sens. Travis Holdman of Markle, Jim Buck of Kokomo, Linda Rogers of Granger, Dan Dernulc of Highland, and Greg Walker all go down, and go down big. According to early Associated Press tallies, their challengers received a whopping 60% of the vote.

Incumbent state Sen. Spencer Deery of West Lafayette was in the lead by a mere three votes after voting concluded, leaving the race too close to call.

West Lafayette is the home of Purdue University and, like all college towns, is heavily Democrat.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

Traditionally, the transition from classroom to career followed a familiar path: land an entry-level job, learn more through hands-on experience and continue building from there. That first job wasn’t just employment; it was valuable career training. Entry-level employment was how new workers developed judgment and the ability to translate theory into practice. But across a growing number of industries, that important first rung of the career ladder is now disappearing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly automating many of the tasks that once defined entry-level roles, contributing to a decline in demand for some positions while reshaping the responsibilities and skill sets required for others. In the process, the traditional bridge between education and employment is beginning to erode. In fact, 66% of hiring managers say most recent hires are not fully prepared for their roles, mainly due to a lack of experience.

But even before AI, other opportunities that historically played a vital role in connecting education and employment were disappearing. In 2023, nearly 4.6 million students who wanted internships could not secure one. Yet 87% of employed graduates say internships helped them land their job, while more than half of those without an internship believe it hurt their job prospects, according to our Cengage’s Graduate Employability Report.

Ask yourself: What do they know that you don’t?

The Washington Poop, paper of record for the Deep State.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a fierce China critic, was banned in 2020 from entering the country. On Thursday, however, he sat across from Chinese officials in Beijing — with a nameplate displaying a new Chinese spelling of “Rubio” that perhaps made his visit possible as part of President Donald Trump’s entourage.
The change predated Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chinese state media and official records began using a different transliterated character for the “Ru” or “Lu” in Rubio’s name after Trump named him secretary of state in 2025.
Beijing made the tweak without fanfare. But this week, it has been a buzzy topic on Chinese social media, with Rubio in Beijing as one of the top officials in the U.S. delegation. During the elaborate welcome ceremony, he stood in the first row of the group of American visitors and shook hands with Xi.
Chinese transliteration of English names matches characters phonetically to English syllables. There can be multiple Chinese characters that sound similar to the English equivalent. There are two different Chinese spellings for “Trump,” for example.
In Rubio’s case, the change may be a clever diplomatic tool. Because Beijing placed sanctions on him under a different spelling, the new name allowed the U.S. and China to avoid conflict over his entry ahead of the high-stakes summit.

Welcome to the Red Chinese version of Yes Minister.

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Remote, resource-poor, and sparsely populated, the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu is not known for many achievements, if you’ve heard its name at all. It does, however, hold the distinction of being the most at-risk country for natural disasters, ranking consistently first on the World Risk Index due to its frequent exposure to cyclones and earthquakes—sometimes within days.

In addition to its exceptional bad luck with the gods of nature, Vanuatu has for almost a decade been subjected to a peculiar curse from the would-be arbiters of global governance. It is one of a handful of jurisdictions to have appeared on both EU financial and tax blacklists and, by far, the one that has remained there the longest.

Little known outside corporate compliance circles, the EU maintains two distinct blacklists: one targeting “high-risk” jurisdictions for money laundering and terrorist financing, created in 2016 by the European Commission; and another for “non-cooperation for tax purposes,” maintained since 2017 by the European Council. The former was ostensibly modeled after the ‘grey list’ of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—an independent, intergovernmental watchdog established in 1989 by the G7 to set global standards for combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing. The latter draws heavily on OECD transparency and tax governance standards.

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If you’ve ever ondered what the Electronic Frontier Foundation was, here’s the story.

EFF has also been heavily involved in matters pertaining to intellectual property and reminding society of the fundamental differences between soft and hard goods. We work on fostering virtual community, promoting network-distributed communications multimedia, and educating law enforcement agencies and corporate security forces on the culture and actual threat posed by computer “hackers.”

The first half of my life was about landscape, place, dirt, physicality, facts, and experience. I now find myself trying to understand a world which has moved off the territory, where such things exist, and onto the map, where they are replaced simulation, thought, process, image, relationship, and information. In other words, information.

I have profound misgivings about this weird new place, but it has several advantages over the one in which I am leaving behind. (Besides, as we’re headed there whether we want to be or not, one might as well enjoy the ride…)

Steve Graham.

My wife and I had an interesting conversation today. I had noticed a story about Sting, the elderly rock musician who used to be so popular. He was bragging about not leaving his children anything, as though it made him a genius and a great parent.

We both thought he was an idiot.

He’s not alone. Gordon Ramsay is in the same camp. Tony Curtis disinherited all his kids. Bill Gates doesn’t trust his children to handle his fortune. Neither does Warren Buffett.

There are certain eternal truths God expects us to know, and one is that families are supposed to be built up by inheritance. In the Bible, having no inheritance was a great curse, and stealing an inheritance was one of the most wicked things a person could do. Unfortunately, few people know the Holy Spirit, so most don’t know how things work. They come up with their own stupid ideas, and the results are pretty bad.

The excuse these people usually give is that they don’t want to ruin their kids by handing them things they haven’t earned. Mind you, often, these are often people who didn’t raise their kids well, so they care enough to deprive them of money but not enough to teach them to thrive as adults without inheritance.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

Don’t Californicate my Texas….

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My understanding is that North Korean ballistic missiles might possibly be able to reach the Left Coast, if that.

I fail to see a down side to this development.

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Baylor College of Medicine researchers have found that the human brain is capable of sophisticated language processing while in an unconscious state from general anesthesia. The findings, published in the latest edition of Nature, challenge what we know about the role of consciousness and cognition, and could open new ways of understanding memory, language and brain-computer interfaces.

“Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,” said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. “Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.”

Sheth, who is also a neurosurgeon at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, and his collaborators first recorded neural activity from hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory, while patients were under general anesthesia during epilepsy surgery. Patients undergoing this type of surgery were sought after because it allowed researchers access to this particular part of the brain.

Using Neuropixels probes, a technology which had not been used in this part of the brain before, the team collected data on how the brain processed sound and language without conscious awareness.

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Chindogu, the Japanese art of crafting quirky and impractical gadgets, literally translates to ‘valuable’ or ‘priceless tool.’ It’s a unique cultural phenomenon where creativity meets eccentric problem-solving.

These gadgets, though clever, often tread the line between ingenious solutions and the potential embarrassment of public use.