Read it.

The Army is seeking the new vehicle to help navigate what it calls the “last tactical mile,” the last part of terrain leading to the front lines, where any transport or personnel moving to resupply troops are under the greatest threat. “This phase is often the most dangerous and logistically complex, requiring innovative solutions to ensure mission success and force protection,” the Army wrote. Now, the Army is hoping that a modular UGV can fill that role in a way that reduces the risk to soldiers, according to a new solicitation on sam.gov posted on Thursday.

The new ask, from the Army’s Capability Program Executive for Mission Autonomy, calls for a dual-purpose vehicle that can safely bring needed supplies across that and be reconfigured by soldiers on the ground to transport at least two wounded soldiers. Defense Scoop first spotted and reported on the solicitation.

Read it.

Chile’s new right-wing government on Thursday stepped up migrant deportations, expelling an initial group of 40 people from Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

President José Antonio Kast, who took office in March, is the country’s most right-wing leader since the end of General Augusto Pinochet’s rule (1973-1990). He was elected on a promise to curb illegal migration, particularly from Venezuela, which many Chileans link to a rise in violent crime.

In his first national address on Wednesday, Kast said the deportation flight would be the “first in a long series,” aimed at creating a sustained outflow of migrants “who should not stay in our country.”

“We will intensify the deportation flights,” deputy interior minister Máximo Pavez said, adding that the government also plans to return migrants by bus.

Doing the jobs that Americans won’t do.

LifeHacker.

Last week, one of my meekest, weakest friends (said with love) asked me to go boxing with her. This may have been wildly out-of-character for her, but for me, it confirmed a trend I’d already been noticing. Boxing, Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, and all other sorts of combat-style workout classes are having a mainstream moment. In many ways, this is nothing new—how could I erase the legacy of Tae Bo nation?—but I’m not the first to clock an uptick in “fight-style” workouts across social media and gym class offerings these days. So what’s actually driving this trend? And more practically: Even if you’re not planning to step into a ring, what can you take from the way fighters train that’s still worth your time?

What is prompting it is the increasingly high crime rates, especially in urban areas such as those frequented by scribblers-for-hire.

What makes it worth your time is preventing you from being the innocent bystander on the subway that is stabbed to death by a mentally deficient and unstable Turd World immigrant.

Quanta.

Evolutionary arms races — where one species is pitted against another, driving the evolution of new or more sophisticated weapons as each tries to gain the upper hand — are ubiquitous in nature. One of the oldest and fiercest battles has been waged for billions of years between bacteria and the viruses that infect them. This escalating warfare has selected for bacteriophage viruses (or “phages”) that devise new ways to invade bacterial cells and, in turn, for bacteria that devise new ways to fend phages off. In their attempts to outmaneuver one another, each species will try anything to stay one step ahead.

In recent years researchers have come upon a surprising finding: Some of the machinery that bacteria use to defend against phages exists, almost unchanged, in our own cells. According to dozens of discoveries made over the past decade, the rules of engagement between cells and viruses were written billions of years ago and still largely define how our innate immune system, the first responder to infection, defends us against viruses and bacteria today.

“Seeing that the rules of host-virus interactions are unchanged over billions of years is a really hard thing to digest,” said Philip Kranzusch (opens a new tab), a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School who was one of the first researchers to discover that a key component of human immunity also exists in bacteria.

And you don’t have to worry about somebody keying your car.

Read it.

A new study has found that administering testosterone to weakly affiliated Democratic men reduced their identification with the Democratic Party and made them feel significantly warmer toward Republican presidential candidates. The hormone had no similar effect on strongly affiliated Democrats or Republicans. These findings suggest that short-term changes in biology can influence political preferences—at least for those who are less firmly attached to their political identity.

Presumably estrogen would have the reverse effect on weakly-affiliated Republican men.

The jokes, of course,  write themselves….

Read it.

As America’s westernmost territory, the island of Guam is the logistical heart of any large-scale military build-up in the western Pacific. It has long runways, a deepwater port, huge fuel storage and weapons depots, and it’s about 2,000 miles closer to China than it is to Hawaii. The island is also U.S. soil, so the military does not need permission from a foreign government to operate there.

Those factors make Guam a prime target for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) if a conflict were to break out between the U.S. and China. The PLA has hundreds of missiles it would almost certainly fire at Guam in a shooting war. That would disrupt the military’s logistics machine, on top of endangering 170,000 U.S. citizens who live there.

While the military is building a new missile defense system to protect Guam, it’s not clear when that system will be fully operational. And, as the war with Iran has shown, even a robust missile defense system can’t stop everything. So how can the military keep both the troops and civilians on its most important island safe in an all-out war?

Probably not.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/04/11/memes-keep-falling-on-my-head/

There’s the finger of God pointing.

Sometimes the old ways are  best.

The Foundry.

The Daily Signal’s Mehek Cooke said President Donald Trump’s handling of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is forcing both Tehran and Beijing into a corner, calling the strategy “checkmate” during a television appearance Tuesday night.

Speaking on NewsNation’s “Katie Pavlich Tonight,“ Cooke said the Iranian regime miscalculated by threatening shipping lanes just as a ceasefire agreement with the United States reached its two-week mark. Under the original terms of the ceasefire, Iran was expected to keep the Strait of Hormuz open—through which much of the world’s oil flows.

“Iran still thinks they’re winning because they have a ceasefire and President Trump gave them a lifeline,” Cooke said. “But what President Trump really did was give the American people a window into who Iranians really are—that they’re not going to negotiate in good faith.”

Cooke argued that by moving to control the strait, the Trump administration is cutting off Iran’s primary economic leverage and drawing China—Iran’s largest oil customer—into pressuring Tehran.

“China was getting 90% of that oil,” Cooke said. “So, guess who’s going to be at that negotiating table pushing Iran to stop holding proxy wars and stop holding us hostage? It’s China.”

The Foundry.

When Sharon Simmons delivered McDonald’s to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday, she shared that his tax policy has saved her about half her income.

Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” passed and signed into law last year, established a tax deduction of up to $25,000 for tips. Simmons, a grandmother of 10 who lives in Arkansas, said half of her income is tips.

“I saved over $11,000 by not having to claim,” Simmons said.

Read it.

An unusually large number of crude oil tankers on the open seas has the American Gulf coast as a destination as the ships are redirected to load cargoes bound for markets around the world already experiencing shortages.

As Alton Wallace writes at The Center Square, second-term Republican President Donald Trump said Saturday on social media that “massive numbers” of “completely empty” oil tankers are en route to the United States to purchase American energy.

Japan was getting 75% of its oil from the Middle East. Guess who gets that business now?

The surging vessel traffic comes as nations throughout Europe and Asia grapple to secure energy supplies and regional prices skyrocket. Germany is providing emergency fuel relief to its citizens while officials in the Philippines recently declared a national energy emergency as the world looks increasingly to the U.S. to replenish war-starved oil and gas markets.

Gee, I don’t see any sudden rush to ‘green’ energy that Krugman says will be taking place.

Trump on Saturday remarked that the U.S. oil output is more than the combined total of Saudi Arabia and Russia, the next two largest producers, and the president promised a “quick turnaround” for the arriving fleet.

We are the nice ones.

ATQUE: The Hormuz Blockade Is as Much About China as Iran (Javier Blas/Bloomberg)  Hey, the sleepers are waking up….

Read it.

Trump’s plan to choke off China and make people come to the U.S. for their oil proceeds apace.

“They’re holed up in a bank demanding three large pizzas, a helicopter, and a personal phone call from Sydney Sweeney…”

– Greg Gutfeld on Iran’s negotiating position

Read it.

China has spent the past two decades making huge, aggressive moves worldwide. China has essentially colonized the African continent as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, and has poured money into new highways that connect it to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. China dominates global manufacturing, having drained the U.S. of manufacturing jobs. It is also building islands in the Pacific to expand its territory and trade routes while a supermassive fishing fleet goes up and down the coast of South America and Antartica, stripping the oceans of fish.

It is not a coincidence that American forces captured the former president of Venezuela in a nighttime raid on the same day he was meeting with Chinese delegates. Oil is Venezuela’s currency, and China needs it.

Iran is another critical piece of the puzzle. If China-friendly Iran did become a nuclear power, it would not only hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage (where American allies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE produce oil), but could reach as far as London, destroying American security of global trade around Europe, Africa, and Asia.

In essence, if China controls the high seas with the help of proxies like Iran and Venezuela, as well as the manufacturing hubs, as well as the oil trade, then they control the world.

Taking steps to counter the Chinese government’s desire to become the dominant superpower does come with pain at the pump, but the Trump admin is betting its worth it to retain American/Western dominance.

Who depends on Middle Eastern oil? Not the U.S.—we have our own oil, and can get it easily from Canada (you go, Alberta!) and (now) Venezuela. The people who need Middle Eastern oil are Europe and Asia. China, in particular, get about half of its oil from the Middle East—oil that the U.S. has just cut off.

TRUMP IS A BILLIONAIRE BUSINESSMAN. He understands global markets better than you do, and much better than any scribbler writing for the New York Times or the Washington Post—or, nowadays, the Wall Street Journal.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Ancient grains are those that have barely changed for hundreds of years. Unlike commonly farmed crops like wheat, which humans have selectively bred over millennia, ancient grains have maintained genetic properties from their wild ancestors. And today they enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity.

They’re linked to many health claims, including that they contain more nutrients than their modern counterparts.

But are they really any better than more modern grains, which have been shaped and moulded by agricultural practices since the Stone Age?

The Register:

A simple equation has reached a critical point, and it may be irreversible. Every year of Apple Silicon, the experience of using a Mac has gotten better. Every year of Windows 11, the experience of using a PC has gotten worse.

Read it.

Thousands of migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East have entered the United Kingdom under a visa scheme originally designed to support Ukrainian refugees fleeing from the war.

According to Home Office data analysed by The Telegraph, nearly 3,500 visas have been granted to people from 112 countries, including Iran, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Palestinian territories.

The figures relate to two UK programmes created to allow Ukrainians to enter Britain either through family connections or through sponsorship under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

In total, non-Ukrainians account for almost one in every 80 of the 279,223 visas issued under the Ukrainian visa routes. Russians represent the largest group among these applicants, with 588 individuals granted entry, followed by Nigerians, Afghans, Iraqis, Moldovans, Turks, Indians, Belarusians, Iranians, and Egyptians. Smaller numbers were also recorded from countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Read it.

The field of economics fully developed scientifically in the 20th century. The names John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek come to mind. However, one additional man became the one most referenced in the last part of the 20th century and continues as such today. That man is Arthur Laffer. The Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress recently released a report telling us Laffer is even more accurate than previously thought.

His nephew Bill was a friend of mine at Yale—as was Robert Bork’s son Charlie.

Read it.

As much as many centrists and libertarians are opposed to Donald Trump’s ongoing strikes against Iran, I have to say, the downstream result might end up becoming one of the most libertarian results I have ever seen. For decades, small government activists like those in the Ron Paul movement have been calling for a comprehensive US divorce from NATO and the shutdown of America’s military bases overseas. Trump has, either deliberately or inadvertently, set this very process in motion.

The refusal of most of Europe (and Australia) to provide support in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz might seem like geopolitical orbiting – In other words, getting involved could hurt them more than it would help them. Of course, these nations are far more exposed to the Hormuz closure and the slowdown in energy exports than the US. You would think their interests would demand a securing of the strait.

John Stossel.

Don’t these politicians realize that in America, people can move?

The same day Washington’s House passed its millionaire’s tax, Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz announced that he’s leaving Washington for Florida.

Billionaires Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Steven Spielberg, Peter Thiel and now Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have left California.

For 170 years, California brought in more people than any other state. It’s clear why — the weather is awesome. There were growing opportunities and jobs.

But now regulation and taxes have changed that.

Read it.

It is with deep regret that I must shatter long held illusions about the structure of our world. The seasons don’t make sense. Our calendar is wrong. The things you believe to be summer, winter, spring, and fall are not as they seem. The “first day” of any season, the most broken concept of all, has misled untold billions.

In the Good Old Days, the seasons switched at the Quarter Days: May 1, August 1, November 1, and February 1. (Beltane, Lammas, Samhain, and Imbolg, for those of us Celtically minded.)

Sometimes the oldest ways are best.

Read it.

How long have we heard that microplastics are everywhere and probably responsible for all kinds of physical ills?

Even RFK Jr. and Trump’s EPA are hitting the microplastics hard, to the tune of $144 million in research grants over the next five years.

However, some scientists at the University of Michigan may have just thrown a big wrinkle into that particular money machine.

I know how he feels.

Read it.

In late 2024 I was shopping for milk when I started wondering how many cows — or how many days — it would take to produce my 1.5L bottle. I looked it up and found that the most productive dairy cows can yield fifty litres per day at their peak. Which means my bottle took roughly 43 minutes to produce. 43 minutes!!

My first reaction was that milk must be absurdly overpriced. If one cow can produce fifty litres a day, how is supply ever a problem? But that question quickly got overtaken by a different one. I was standing in the dairy aisle looking at the yoghurt, the cheese, the butter, the cream, the condensed milk, the powder, the ghee.. and it hit me — hold on. This is all from milk? ALL of it? The same white liquid? How?

So I spent a few weekends Googling, and the answer was way more complicated than I expected. This post is me documenting that rabbit hole.

 

Read it.

Sodom and Gomorrah are starting to feel embarrassed about the Twin Cities.

Read it.

The past five years have seen a massive migration of Americans out of heavily Democratic counties and into ones where Donald Trump won majorities in each of the past three elections. That’s according to an exclusive analysis by Issues & Insights of the latest Census Bureau and election data.

Most analyses of internal migration patterns look only at state-level data. And what they show is that blue states are losing population to red states, and have been for many years.

I&I wanted to go deeper, so we used the latest Census data on migration between counties and compared that with how these counties voted in the past three presidential elections.

What we found was that millions aren’t just moving out of blue states, but are moving out of blue counties within states.

…

Of the 50 counties with the biggest net gain of population, all but four voted for Trump in the past three elections. Of the 50 counties with the biggest losses due to net migration, all but five are solid blue.

The American Scholar.

As I type these words, I worry over the day when I will no longer be commissioned to write them. The day, to be specific, that The American Scholar asks Claude (the moniker for Anthropic’s AI) and not Robert (the name of Max and Roslyn Zaretsky’s son) to create an essay on, say, AI and the future of work.

Not surprisingly, I am not alone to worry: Not many subjects stir greater fear and dread among Americans than the seemingly irresistible rise of AI. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 64 percent of the public believes that AI will translate into fewer jobs. Small wonder, then, that only 17 percent of the same respondents expect that AI, even when humanized by names like Claude, will make their future brighter.

Were he alive today, Paul Lafargue would be among that 17 percent, and his voice would be both loud and funny. Born in Cuba in 1842 to parents of mixed race—part Jewish and part Creole—Lafargue was married to Laura Marx, one of Karl Marx’s four daughters. Even before this marriage, though, Lafargue, who had studied medicine in Paris, had thrown over a secure future as a doctor to devote (and pauperize) himself and his family to working on behalf of the shining (and classless) future glimpsed by his father-in-law.

The Telegraph (UK).

A historic home that the King once stayed in has been turned into a cannabis farm.

Police found a large number of “fairly mature plants” within the stone walls of Plas Glynllifon, a 19th-century palace in north Wales that formerly belonged to Lord Newborough.

The Grade I listed property near Caernarfon, Gwynedd, was sealed off by officers after they executed a warrant on Tuesday.

Inside, a “significant grow” was found in 12 rooms on the top floor.

Electricity and water had been diverted into the house, which is privately owned but not inhabited, for the drugs farm, detectives said.

Well, you know, taxes in Britain being what they are….

Sure … just wait for it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Foundry.

On Sept. 3, 2011, in the parking lot of the Delaware Park Racetrack, a woman named Bridget Wismer handed her newborn son to a man named John Gavaghan in exchange for $15,000 in cash and a money order.

Gavaghan had never met Wismer before the pregnancy and had no genetic connection to the child, but he listed himself as the biological father on the birth certificate anyway. Wismer’s grandmother tipped off police.

Both were arrested and indicted by a grand jury on charges of dealing in children. Wismer eventually pleaded to a lesser charge and was sentenced to five years in prison.

What Wismer did in that parking lot is now being legalized across the country, and Delaware is one of the states leading the charge.

Delaware’s Senate Bill 250, introduced on March 5, is the latest in a growing wave of state legislation built on the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act, which expands surrogacy frameworks to include paid “genetic surrogacy.”

Read it.

Never before have more Americans attended college. Today, roughly 57% of Gen Z enroll in some form of postsecondary education after high school.

Yet at the very moment participation has peaked, confidence in higher education is eroding. The traditional four-year degree, once a hallmark of intellectual formation and social mobility, is increasingly questioned, both for its cost and its purpose.

Part of this decline stems from a shift away from classical liberal arts education, which once emphasized the pursuit of truth through disciplines such as philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric. This model aimed not merely at job preparation, but at forming well-rounded, critical-thinking individuals.

In contrast, much of modern higher education has become narrowly utilitarian, focused on credentialing, specialization, and workforce outcomes, often at the expense of intellectual depth and coherence.

So, is the current model losing its authority? And what does this transformation mean for the future of colleges and universities?

I’ve been to Michigan. I’d rather live in Saudi Arabia.

Quillette.

Every communist state in history has either collapsed, reformed into something unrecognisable, or survived only through external life support. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years before structural decay outpaced its capacity to maintain coherence. Maoist China killed tens of millions of its own citizens through policy-induced famine before quietly abandoning the economic model that caused it. Cuba persists on foreign subsidy and remittance income. North Korea sustains itself through nuclear extortion and a prison-state apparatus that would be unsustainable without Chinese patronage. Venezuela’s Bolivarian experiment collapsed an oil-rich economy into hyperinflation and mass emigration within two decades.

The standard explanation for these failures is ideological. Communism is bad because it denies freedom, punishes ambition, and consolidates power in the hands of corrupt elites. That explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It treats communism as a moral failure when the deeper problem is structural. Communism does not collapse because bad people run it. Communism collapses because it is architecturally incapable of surviving its own contradictions.

The argument is straightforward and does not require ideology. Any system that suppresses internal deviation, eliminates meaningful feedback, and centralises all decision-making into a single loop will accumulate errors faster than it can correct them. This is not a political claim. It is a structural one. It applies to corporations, organisms, software architectures, and governments alike. Communism simply represents the purest political expression of this failure model because it suppresses deviation by design rather than by accident.

Communism doesn’t fail because it’s bad; it fails because it’s stupid.

The Telegraph (UK).

The remarkable rescue of an American airman shot down in Iran partially lays to rest the ghost of one of the great calamities of recent US history. In April 1980, an attempt to recover 53 embassy hostages held captive in Tehran went disastrously wrong, leaving eight US servicemen dead. Having taken place a few years after the Vietnam War, the failed mission was a humiliation for the Americans and ensured the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The prospect of another hostage crisis, if the missing airman had been captured and paraded by the Iranians, was a potential propaganda coup for Tehran that Donald Trump intended to avoid.

Andrew Tate: “Sucky are where they are because they suck.”

And that about covers it.

Read it.

Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

You might want to save this article in case we have to recreate the universe later.

Read it.

The truth is, most light sources flicker; very few people perceive it directly, but we still feel its effects. You may have noticed that some light bulbs emit a warm glow that somehow doesn’t feel cozy. Often, what we’re unconsciously reacting to is that subtle flicker.

It’s important to note that many people don’t consciously notice PWM flicker, and for most people, modern LED lighting poses no issues. However, for those who are sensitive, whether due to migraines, eye conditions, or individual variation, understanding these technical differences can be helpful.

The technical source of the issue is called pulse-width modulation (PWM), a method of controlling how much electricity a light source (in this case) receives at any given moment; it causes the light source to be off for a split second. Hence the flicker.

Microwave ovens use the same trick. If you’ve ever used a microwave on a setting less than 100% power, you will notice that this reduction is achieved by running the microwave at full power for a certain amount of time and then turning it off for another period of time. “Eighty percent power” doesn’t mean 80% of full power, it means full power for 80% of the time and off for 20% of the time.

PWM is an often-used default for OLED digital displays (smart device screens, computer monitors, etc), LED lights, and some incandescent bulbs.

Flicker is all around us. We usually don’t see it, because our eyes are generally good at averaging out artificial light sources, similar to how we see a rapid series of individual images as a single moving picture. But it’s still a force that causes eye strain or discomfort.

Read it.

Those who crit­i­cize so-called “AI doomers” often over­look that there is a broader, intel­lec­tu­ally serious tradi­tion of tech­no­log­ical doomerism that goes back decades. To revisit these works is to wonder whether AI really presents new risks, or if it is simply the mani­fes­ta­tion of a risk previ­ously fore­told.

Of course, predic­tions of global apoc­a­lypse are as ancient as humanity. Given the histor­ical track record—no global apoc­a­lypse yet!—those predicting apoc­a­lypse have tradi­tion­ally had a rough time being taken seri­ously. Still, there is a big differ­ence between predicting the arrival of apoc­a­lypse ex nihilo vs. a reasoned argu­ment that it neces­sarily emerges from specific human deci­sions and habits.

Democrats, in their native habitat: with their hands in your pocket.

The New Neo.

When is an alliance not an alliance? When it’s NATO. I propose a new acronym: NATOH, for Not About To Offer Help. The help being asked right now is the bare minimum, and against an enemy that threatens most of the countries of NATO, too – if not as obviously in the verbal sense as it threatens the US, then even more in the geographic sense.

The nations of NATO other than the US have long been lacking in terms of financial support for the organization. In addition, in the shadow of America’s protective umbrella they mostly decided that they don’t need a robust defensive military capability of their own. They also decided to let in enough Muslims from foreign countries to make a difference in their internal politics. But I think even without the latter pressure, many of them would still be balking at helping – and by “helping” I mean something as simple as letting us use their airspace.

They really do think the crocodile will eat them last. And several of them really hate Donald Trump. Do they not even see Iran as dangerous? They probably consider their own Muslim populations and their own Jew-haters more immediately dangerous – and may also think that, if push ever came to shove with Iran, the US would help them anyway as it did big-time in the days before there even was a NATO.

Mike Riggs:

In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.