The Register (UK).

Called Zyrex, the robot is being designed by RIC Robotics of Torrance, California. The company expects to have a working prototype in early 2026, and said it will mark “a significant leap forward in the evolution of robotic construction.”

The 20-foot high general-purpose construction robot is, we’re told, designed to have cognitive capabilities – which will be novel for that industry – and ultimately be fully autonomous in carrying out complex and delicate tasks across commercial and industrial job sites.

It is unlikely to be able to wolf whistle at passers by and does not require copious amount of tea… like Brit builders.

It will be equipped with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) plus visual sensors powered by VLA (Vision-Language-Action) AI models, to allow it to be deployed in dynamic job site environments, with human monitoring.

Power Line.

It would be easy to miss today’s good news, which comes via the Trump Department of Justice. The headline of the Jewish Chronicle spells it out: “US scraps UNRWA’S legal immunity in major reversal of Biden-era policy.” Subhead: “The decision could see the UN agency, which has been accused of employing Hamas operatives, hit with significant claims from the relatives of terror victims.”

And about time.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

No one knows when slavery started, but it seems to have been a part of human civilization from the start. There is evidence of slavery in the earliest civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley in India, and China’s Yangtze River Valley. This suggests slavery was integral to the establishment of large-scale settlements.

Slavery was the norm in the world until European Protestants decided it was immoral and began to ban it. Until the Protestant nations of Europe rose to power, slavery was tolerated by Christians. The Catholic Church opposed the treatment of African slaves in the New World but was not opposed to slavery. It was the Protestants who went the next step and demanded the end of slavery.

Of course, slavery was not what modern people imagine. Slaves often had rights and there were rules for how slaves must be treated. The very first law codes were created to deal with the treatment of slaves. This makes sense since if there are a lot of slaves, there is the risk of a slave revolt, so keeping the slave classes happy was always going to be a primary consideration for society.

When the only sources of power were wind, water, and muscles (and muscles, human and animal, were the only source of portable power), the benefits of having human ‘livestock’ were impossible to resist. It was only advances in technology that made the majority of people take the abolition of slavery seriously.

ZMan has some fun.

One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.

Soon, of course, they will be replaced by AI. It will not be long before the browsers simply rewrite your text in the period between when you hit submit and the text commits to the website. The robots will patrol the internet like the grammar ronin of this age but do so with a speed that the grammar ronin cannot match. Imagine a terminator sent back to seventeenth-century Japan to battle Miyamoto Musashi. By the looks of it, the days of the grammar ronin are numbered.

At least it seems that way if you assume there is only one way to construct a sentence or that the rules of grammar are iron laws of grammar. That is often how the grammar ronin look at language and writing. The rules of grammar are not merely guides to facilitate clarity but laws that must be ruthlessly enforced. Even if the grammar rule no longer works for a modern audience, the grammar ronin insist that it must be followed lest chaos be unleashed on humanity.

Read it.

Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) says the Trump administration should drop nuclear negotiations with Iran and finish off the country’s nuclear facilities with a military strike.

“Waste that s—t,” the Pennsylvania Democrat told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview on Wednesday. “You’re never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Sense from a Democrat is like charity from a banker: unexpected but delightful when it happens.

Fetterman dismissed the foreign policy experts who warn that striking Iran would lead to the outbreak of a regional war. “And remember, all of these so-called experts were all wrong,” he said. “You know, they’ve been saying for years and years Hezbollah was the ultimate badass that kept Israel in check, and we can’t move on anything beyond that.”

As it turned out, Fetterman said, the Iranian proxy group “couldn’t fight for s—t. And Hamas, literally, are just a bunch of tunnel rats with junkie rockets in the back of a Toyota truck. And now the Houthis have been effectively neutered as well. So what’s left? You have Iran, and they have a nuclear facility, and it’s clearly only for weapons.”

What he said….

Read it.

Or not, as it pleases you.

The Enneagram is a powerful tool that helps us understand our motivations, core beliefs, and unconscious patterns that drive our behavior. We have all 9 Types in us, although one of the Enneagram Types is dominant for each of us. A good place to start with the Enneagram is in learning about all 9 Types and identifying our own dominant Enneagram Type.

How this differs from astrology eludes me.

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Integral theory as developed by Ken Wilber is a synthetic metatheory aiming to unify a broad spectrum of Western theories and models and Eastern meditative traditions within a singular conceptual framework. The original basis, which dates to the 1970s, is the concept of a “spectrum of consciousness”[1] that ranges from archaic consciousness to the highest form of spiritual consciousness, depicting it as an evolutionary developmental model.[2] This model incorporates stages of development as described in structural developmental stage theories, as well as eastern meditative traditions and models of spiritual growth, and a variety of psychic and supernatural experiences.

Read it.

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development outlines how individuals progress through six stages of moral reasoning, grouped into three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.

At each level, people make moral decisions based on different factors, such as avoiding punishment, following laws, or following universal ethical principles.

This theory shows how moral understanding evolves with age and experience.

Read it.

Another major e-commerce player is departing from Delaware as corporations pack up and find a new domicile for their businesses.

Affirm Holdings Inc., a publicly held American technology firm with a market cap of about $14 billion, is preparing a move to either Nevada or Texas, reports GuruFocus.

Affirm, founded in 2012 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, handles financial services for merchants and shoppers. The company is headquartered in San Francisco but seeking shareholder approval to move its corporate domicile from Delaware.

Read it.

As Colorado lawmakers consider a bill that would take custody rights away from parents who diverge from transgender orthodoxy, the Trump administration’s Education Department says that children aren’t the property of the government.

“Children do not belong to the government. They belong to parents,” Education Department spokeswoman Julie Hartman told The Daily Signal.

The Colorado House of Representatives passed a bill April 6 that would remove kids from parents’ custody for behaviors such as “misgendering” and “deadnaming” a transgender-identifying child. The bill has yet to progress in the Colorado Senate.

Babylon Bee.

It would be a refreshing change….

Antigone.

Name that Order!

Why take a chance? That’s all I’m sayin’….

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to block the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under a wartime law was premature.

Read the whole thing. It will be worth the effort.

The New Neo.

North Dakota’s governor recently signed a bill prohibiting ranked-choice voting in the state. That started a conversation and disagreement in this open thread on the subject of ranked-choice voting. In red or blue states, ranked-choice voting often pits people from the same party against each other in the final round, and because people from the opposing party have no candidate, they can vote for the candidate the members of the dominant party don’t want. It also causes confusion and delay in getting final results.

I can see where people invested in the current two-party system might object to it. I don’t see that it is incompatible with democracy. It ensures that whoever is elected is the choice of at least 50% of the voting population, which can’t be said of the current first-past-the-post elections. (Look up the last time the winner of the American Presidency got more than 50% of the vote. Go ahead–I’ll wait.) It doesn’t do anything that runoff elections don’t do, and it means less delay that runoff elections. I really don’t see what the problem is.

Watch it.

ShoeOnHead is why I watch YouTube.

The King–Crane Commission was an American fact-finding mission commissioned in 1919 by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to investigate the wishes of the peoples of the former Ottoman Empire territories after World War I, aiming to guide post-war decisions aligned with Wilson’s principle of self-determination.

Read it.

In living organisms, every protein—a type of biological polymer consisting of hundreds of amino acids—carries out specific functions, such as catalysis, molecule transport, or DNA repair. To perform these functions, they must fold up into specific shapes. It’s a complex process that’s critical to life, and despite advances in the field, there remain many open questions about the process.

Proteins are the toolbox of cellular life. The whole purpose of DNA and RNA is to create the proper proteins.

The researchers, led by Corey O’Hern, developed computational models for all globular proteins in the Protein Data Bank, an online database, and measured their interior core regions to determine how densely packed they were. Every protein had a core packing fraction of 55%. That is, 55% of the space was occupied by atoms. That led the research team to two questions.

“Why did they all have the same value? And, specifically, why is the value 55%?” said O’Hern, professor of mechanical engineering, materials science, physics, and applied physics. “The answer seems to be that the packing fraction stops increasing when the protein cores jam or rigidify.”

That is, the individual amino acids that make up the protein core couldn’t compress any further when the protein folded. The packing fraction at which objects jam together depends largely on their shape. Spherical objects, for instance, jam at a packing fraction of 64%.

Read it.

One of the primary platforms of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was the strict control of foreign elements entering into the United States. American voters overwhelmingly supported closed borders as well as the deportation of illegal migrants and disruptive migrant elements including those that received visas and green cards under the Biden Administration. The political left, not surprisingly, has refused to accept that this is the majority view of the population as they continue to interfere with the migrant clean-up using whatever methods are at their disposal.

The question of constitutional legality has come up often. The very same people who, only a few years ago, were trying to silence any and all dissent on the Covid mandates and vaccines are suddenly concerned with the free speech rights of people who are not American citizens or those that obtained green card status through convenient circumstances (marriage as a fast track for citizenship).

Read it.

Men who claim to be “transgender” should not be legally defined as women, the UK’s Supreme Court has ruled.

In a landmark ruling on whether sex-based protections should only apply to natural-born women, top judge Lord Hodge said that the terms “woman” and “sex” in existing equality legislation refer to biological sex, not self-defined gender identity.

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In the name of “equity,” many competitive colleges had stopped using entrance exams in their application process.

Now, the pendulum has swung: Realizing that standardized tests actually do help school officials evaluate applications, administrators at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Brown, MIT, and more have reinstated use of the SAT and ACT.

This is a good course correction and a welcome return to a time when student merit and effort mattered.

I’d love to have admissions just depend on scores, as with A-levels in Britain. That would eliminate all subjective Wokery.

Read it.

Democrats–best politicians money can buy.

Lifehacker.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our cars. We love our vehicles because they represent freedom (and economic necessity, if you rely on one to get to work or do your grocery shopping), but we hate how much they cost—and the fact that you never actually stop paying for them. It costs an average of $1,452 every year just to keep your vehicle running, and the overall cost of owning a car is a whopping $6,684 annually.

As crucial as vehicle maintenance is in terms of making sure your car is reliable, people tend to skip an awful lot of it. If all you do every year is the basics—changing the oil and engine filters in a standard tune-up—you’re skipping a bunch of maintenance that only seems less important. Here are the vehicle maintenance steps you should definitely not skip.

This advice is aimed at women, since men typically do this stuff automatically.

Fun fact: Jeff Somers is a highly-regarded (by me, at least) speculative fiction author and noted connoisseur of whiskies.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

It takes an academic to do it, but it can be done. I filled my Buzzword Bingo card twice in the abstract alone.

Before people start looking to see if the blog has been hacked, allow me to back up a little bit. Many years ago, I found a book on my parents’ shelves entitled “The Bog People” by someone named Glob. He was one of the first archaeologists/anthropologists to write about the bodies found in bogs in Northern Europe. He also led the first professional excavation of the tanned remains of humans that turned up when people were digging peat and other things in swampy areas. The book had flaws, and leaned a little too much on Tacitus and other written sources, but someone had to start somewhere. It remains the foundational text on the topic. The idea stuck, and I’ve actually gotten to see four of the sets of remains. They are fascinating, if rather disconcerting, somewhat like Ötzi (the body from the ice).

I‘m revisiting the topic for various reasons, and working my way through a set of academic papers about wetland sacrifices and bog bodies and so on. Some are quite useful, some rather thought provoking (why do so many of the water sacrifices in Denmark also have lots of small, pale stones on or near the offerings?). And then there’s the one about posthuman theories of othering bodies, and bringing different theoretical frameworks about non-human nature, animal-human transferrences, and so on to the archaeology and anthropology of wetland sacrifices. Once I waded into the paper (pun fully intended), there were no surprises, just long words for concepts I already knew, written in a very dull, jargon-laced way. Gee, people back then decided that some humans weren’t fully people, and so could be abused and sacrificed. Or they could be included in burials against their will, as servants/slaves for the dead (and probably as ways to propitiate the dead and hurry them to the ancestors, in some cases). And sometimes animals stood in for humans as ritual offerings, but a few times it might have been the reverse. Cultures viewed outsiders and people with obvious differences as being inferior, perhaps. Gee.

Read it.

Why Trump is not, in fact, really Hitler.

TDS: The rise of end times fascism (The Guardian)

ZMan:

It is entirely possible that we passed the point of no return and therefore no amount of reform, not even authoritarian reform, will save us. The population will need a great reset before civilized government can return to North America. Maybe it is the organized deportation of the crazies to someplace not here or maybe Mother Nature steps in with a real plague. Perhaps it will require organized violence in the context of societal collapse to fix the gene pool.

Maybe that is why the fertility rate is collapsing. The mutational load has reached the point in our species where nature looks at us as a genetic dead end. We are like panda bears. It has evolved down a dead end in terms of its habitat, so it is dying out. Similarly, humans have evolved to the point where we can no longer maintain cooperative societies, which is our natural habitat. The presence of so many crazies signals, at best, a great culling of the human herd.

Makes me look like an optimist.

Read it.

President Donald Trump entered to a standing ovation and cheers from a crowd of thousands attending a UFC event on Saturday night, shaking hands with supporters against a backdrop of fans waving his trademark MAGA hats.

Just as Trump entered, he greeted podcast host Joe Rogan, who sat to the right of the president. On the other side of Trump sat Elon Musk, billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump, who accented his dark suit with a bright yellow tie, pumped his fist in the air, prompting cheers to strains of “Taking Care of Business.”

He brought along several members of his administration and White House team, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and White House communications aides Steven Cheung and Taylor Budowich. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also joined Trump for UFC 314.

Read it.

Have you ever had trouble taking in information in a noisy environment? A new study suggests that tapping your fingers in a steady rhythm could help you ‘tune in’ through the noise.

The researchers designed a series of experiments to uncover the role of movement in understanding speech, “building on the theory that the motor system is not merely an executor of movements,” they write, “but actively contributes to the integration and reuse of temporal information.”

Read it.

And has been since the fall of Soviet Communism, the threat that it was intended to counter. It stands as a poster child for Reagan’s adage that the closest thing to immortality is a government program.

NATO is a corpse. All that remains is the grotesque performance art of a diplomatic zombie stumbling from summit to summit, mouthing tired clichés about “shared values” and “burden sharing,” even as its core strategic logic lies rotting beneath the surface. The Atlantic Alliance, once the steel scaffolding of Western security, has become a hollow ritual. Its military readiness is an illusion. Its political cohesion is fraying. Its future, if it has one, lies not in revival—but in reinvention or replacement.

…

NATO’s death was not caused by Donald Trump, though he may soon become its undertaker. Nor was it caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, though that war has exposed the Alliance’s hollowness in ways no war game or communique ever could. The real cause lies in decades of European free-riding, American strategic drift, and a foundational lie at the heart of the Alliance: the idea that an empire can masquerade as a collective defense pact without consequences.

The Foundry.

In the ongoing debate about the role of government in addressing societal issues, a crucial misconception often surfaces on one side: The desire to help others equates to a mandate for state intervention.

Advocates for increased government action frequently ignore the vital distinction between voluntary assistance and coercive mandates. The belief that government can—or should—serve as the ultimate arbiter of compassion neglects the fundamental principle that true generosity arises from individual choice rather than compulsion.

Those advocating for increased government intervention often exhibit a profound misunderstanding about the nature of help. They seem to believe that the mere desire to assist equates to a moral imperative for the state to act—often through coercive means. This reliance on government as the ultimate solution tends to obscure an essential principle: the freedom of individuals to choose how, or whether, to help.

Government is, at best, a necessary evil, and that evil ought to be mitigated as far as possible by restricting its activities to the essentials: Keep people save and keep people honest. Anything beyond that is illegitimate.

ZMan’s weekly podcast.

I thought I would take a break from the money game this week to address an issue that comes up in the email from time to time. That issue is my ideology. Whenever I comment upon ideology, almost always in a negative way, I get comments suggesting I should explain my ideology, rather than just criticize others. Certain nationalists take issue with being called ideologues for some reason.

The trouble with this is I am not an ideologue, but I thought that might make for a good show, so that was the plan this week. Then as I was recording it, I started having issues with my voice, like I am getting a cold. That threw me off my game and the show wandered around a bit. I would have scrapped it and started over, but I was not sure if the pipes would make it, so I stuck with the first pass.

This is the best show I’ve heard ZMan do to date, and it matches my own views on what is going on about 95%.

Very highly recommended. I certainly wish he’d do more stuff like this.

Read it.

In an article published today at the New York Post, journalist Emily Crane described the Darién Gap route as a “ghost town” after just four months of the illegal migration crackdown from the Trump administration.

ZMan explains it all to you.

Warren Buffet famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” The point of this metaphor is that in economic downturns you learn who has been taking excessive risks. Another way of putting it is that in easy times, everyone can be a hero or a genius. This has been the case for the American financial system for over thirty years. As long as credit money kept expanding, everyone had a chance to look like a financial genius.

This explains the prevalence of people in the financial media who somehow get everything wrong but maintain their status as experts. The most notable of this sort is Jim Cramer who has made a career out of being outlandishly wrong. Paul Krugman wrote a column for years about the economy, despite never being right about it. These are two famous examples, but the commentariat is littered with these types. As long as the arrow kept going up, being wrong was good money.

The trouble is that the entire financial industry is built on this premise. Being wrong comes with no penalty, because wrongness rarely comes with a cost. Sure, the MegaBrain Capital Fund might not perform as well as random guessing, but because the arrow always goes up, even the bad bets pay off. This also means anyone spouting random gibberish can present himself as an expert. Tens of thousands of mortgage payments, maybe hundreds of thousands, rest on this assumption.

Babylon Bee.

Aye, there’s the rub … so to speak.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Dzaleka’s strange economy exposes the variety of ways humans go about spending even very modest endowments.

It is partly for this reason that confined economies fascinate researchers. The most famous is Stalag VII-A. The Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, in modern-day Poland, was home to Richard Radford, a British army officer. After the war, on returning to Cambridge University, Radford wrote a paper describing how the camp’s rudimentary cigarette trade evolved into a specialised economy that used cigarettes as the currency by which the value of every other available good was expressed. Much as in Dzaleka, work was scarce and everyone’s endowments—packages sent by the Red Cross, a charity—were pretty much equal.

The camp’s economy allowed Radford to challenge an old economic assumption. The “labour theory of value” is most commonly associated with Karl Marx, but classical liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo also believed that the price of a good mostly reflected how much work it had taken to produce it, or the perception of that work among buyers and sellers. In Stalag VII-A nobody worked, and everything still had value. The price of butter came from its scarcity relative to how much was sought, not the number of hours a milkmaid had spent churning.

The Labor Theory of Value is an outgrowth of mediaeval Just Price Theory, in which philosophers and theologians desperately scrabbled to figure out some way that the price of something is related in some way to something outside of the market.

It’s wrong, and it’s always been wrong. You can dig a hole and fill it up again and again, but all that labor hasn’t added a thing to the value of that patch of ground, and is totally unrelated to its price.

There is a distinction (which even prize-winning economists–yeah, I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman–don’t seem to grasp) between ‘value’ and ‘price’, and price is always determined by the market: What someone else is willing to pay in trade for your stuff. That is the thing and the whole of the thing.

As one might expect, this comes as a surprise to the people at The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.