Read it.

The Beehome is a solar-powered, converted container that brings together robotics, artificial intelligence, imaging, a software platform, and a mobile application to monitor and care for honeybees around the clock. The device can house up to 24 bee colonies and automatically controls for climate and humidity conditions, detects and eliminates pests and parasites, identifies when a colony is preparing to swarm, sends alerts when human intervention is needed, and even harvests the honey the bees produce.

“The Beehome works with 24 colonies, 12 on each side. And in the center, there’s a robotic system that moves and monitors [the colonies] 24/7 using computer vision, machine learning and neural networks. It dispenses food, water, medicine if there is a disease or pest, it knows if it’s too hot or cold — the robot can treat all of this,” Safra said.

Controlling and monitoring all these conditions in real-time ensures that yields improve, pollination occurs more efficiently, and honeybee populations are protected, he explained.

Reminds me of the classic George Carlin routine:

Save the whales!

Save the snails!

Save the trees!

Save the bees….

Steve Sailer.

Kamala Harris’ fabulous career has of course benefited extraordinarily from her being roughly one-quarter black, but few have offered much of an opinion on her being one-half Tamil Brahmin (besides her fellow South Asians, of course), other than it reduces her despised white component.

And yet, the rise of South Asians to positions of immense power across the Anglosphere is one of the big stories of the 21st century.

But few Americans have much of an opinion on Kamala’s Indianness, because Americans don’t traditionally think much about South Asians, who have minimal history in this country.

Read it.

Apparently not much.

Complaint is made that the Gates foundation is accountable only to the Gates (duh) and that ‘family offices are unregulated entities’. The statism is strong in this one.

Read it.

Well, maybe to the people who are easily terrified. *yawn*

Read it.

There are literal oceans’ worth of liquid water hiding out on Mars. There’s just one big problem. That water is actually in Mars, at depths that are too far below the surface for us to access.

That’s according to new analysis of seismic data collected by the Mars InSight lander, for which huge reservoirs of liquid water are the best explanation. And, although that water is out of reach, it is an important piece of the strange puzzle of the aquatic history of our dry, desiccated, dusty neighbor.

“Understanding the Martian water cycle is critical for understanding the evolution of the climate, surface and interior,” says geophysicist Vashan Wright of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Economist.

What America’s two political tribes want from business is not always the same. When it comes to the environment and diversity, they are at loggerheads. That helps explain why chief executives’ enthusiasm for esg, which Republicans deride as woke capitalism, has proved so brittle. But both Democrats and Republicans are eager for corporate America to churn out middle-class jobs while remaining one step ahead of China in the race for technological supremacy. Calls for corporate purpose may have quietened. Those for corporate patriotism are getting louder.

Although there has “always been the proverbial military-industrial complex”, says Curtis Milhaupt of Stanford Law School, “the number of firms wrapped up in national-security policy is much larger today.” Trade for some industries has become fraught. Companies dealing in areas of cutting-edge technology must now keep one eye fixed on the expanding list of Chinese firms they cannot do business with. Carmakers are bracing for rules prohibiting the use of Chinese software in autonomous vehicles. Some fret that Mr Trump, if he is re-elected in November, could expand export restrictions—though he may also lean harder on allies to match America’s measures on China, lessening their impact on American businesses, notes Jeremy Zucker of Dechert, a law firm.

Read it.

Not that they’ll do anything.  They only target people on the right.

Christ Williamson interview.

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Lead, follow, or get out of the gene pool.

I love the way the ‘Helpers, construction trades’ and ‘Aircraft pilots & flight engineers’ pictures are obviously women, when women are a trivial part of those demographics.

Read it.

Why did Kamala Harris pick Tim Walz? Well, we know this: It was not for the sake of “diversity.” Not to tack toward the ideological “middle” for the general election, as is the traditional practice. Not for any discernible electoral advantage. So why? My guess is that her choice was psychological as much as anything. I say that because there are pretty odd things about these two that are hard to ignore.

Some facts: We know that Kamala Harris goes through staffers at a 95% turnover rate. We know that as California’s Attorney General, she expected to be greeted by staffers with, “Good morning, General.” We have seen that she responds very defensively to even the most gentle challenges from the press. We know she has not exposed herself to any questioning from the press since Biden endorsed her for President. When she speaks publicly, we know she is careful to speak only in zero-calorie word salads containing nothing substantive that might invite a difficult question.

As for Walz, we know he is, ideologically, as perfect a twin to Kamala Harris as any of the candidates. From the reports of the VP interviews, we know that Walz disclaimed any personal ambitions beyond VP, and pledged to Harris he would do whatever she required of him. One staffer admitted Harris went with her “gut,” with an aid characterizing Harris’s decision as akin to choosing–wait for it–a husband.

The Foundry.

Vice President Kamala Harris just announced her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

As governor, Walz routinely touts his gun ownership and affinity for duck hunting as a reason why people should take his opinions in favor of more gun control seriously.

He completely misses the point.

Read it.

After analyzing 39 brands of straws made of various materials such as plastic, paper, glass, stainless steel, and bamboo, the team found that paper straws contain the most perfluoroalkylated and polyfluoroalkylated substances, also known as PFAS. These synthetic substances are considered harmful to humans, animals, and the environment.

Read it.

The American Bar Association first endorsed adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1972, the year that Congress proposed and sent it to the states for ratification.

At its Aug. 6 annual convention, the ABA went further and now claims that the 1972 ERA is already part of the Constitution. The ABA is dead wrong.

Congress proposed the ERA in March 1972 with a seven-year ratification deadline. With that deadline looming, and fewer than the necessary 38 states ratifying, Congress passed a controversial resolution in 1978 purporting to extend the deadline by 39 months. No additional states ratified the 1972 ERA and five that already had subsequently withdrew their support. As the Congressional Research Service has repeatedly observed, the 1972 ERA “formally died on June 30, 1982.”

Because Congress will likely never propose another one, supporters are desperate to maintain the fiction that the 1972 ERA is, as Miracle Max would say, “only mostly dead” rather than “all dead.” It remained pending before the states, and available for ratification, because Congress did not put the deadline in the right place in its proposing resolution. Or so they contend.

Read it.

A group of religious Israelis have been pictured practicing the ritual of the red heifer, which is meant to herald the building of a new Jewish temple on the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

According to Jewish tradition, the ashes of a perfectly red heifer cow are needed for the ritual purification that would allow a third temple to be built in Jerusalem. That temple, say radical Jewish groups, must be constructed on the raised plateau in Jerusalem’s Old City known as the Temple Mount, where Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine stand today.

Some believe this will herald the arrival of the messiah and possibly even the end of the world.

“Temple worshipers are now practicing the mitzvah [religious duty] of a red cow in front of the Temple Mount, which will enable the return of purity and the observance of all the temple mitzvahs,” posted journalist Yinon Magal on Tuesday, along with a picture of activists from the Temple Institute.

UnHerd.

Safe yet shrewd is how Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate has been described. An energetic, disciplined communicator who can appeal to moderates and progressives, the Minnesota Governor is likely to boost the ticket’s momentum heading into the Democratic National Convention. But his selection is also revealing in terms of how the Harris campaign views its strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, while initial reports suggest Harris picked Walz due to her “comfort level” and their political compatibility, Walz telegraphs what Harris has so far been unable to do: a clear sense of how she aims to win in November.

An avuncular and sharp-witted persona, Walz ticks the right boxes when it comes to winning the Electoral College. He is a popular Democratic governor from the upper Midwest, a crucial battleground region, and has received ringing endorsements from the AFL-CIO, UAW and other trade union organisations. He is also a muscular surrogate who has already put Republicans on defence over J.D. Vance’s “weird” cultural views.

Perhaps most important, Walz is a white old-school liberal who speaks to the “kitchen table” concerns of working-class voters anxious over living costs and now the possibility of a recession. Though reliably progressive on issues such as abortion rights and LGBT equality, Walz seems to bask most in common-sense reforms like free school meals and paid family and medical leave that he and Minnesota’s Democratic state legislature passed into law. Well before he was a contender for the vice-presidential nomination, progressives of various stripes looked to him as an example of how Democrats should rebuild their brand outside the coasts

Read it.

Egypt has just issued a rare and oddly specific NOTAM, or Notice to Air Missions alert, instructing all of its airlines to avoid Iranian airspace for a 3-hour period in the overnight and early morning hours of Thursday. Some other countries have since followed in issuing similar do not fly alerts, including the UK.

“All Egyptian carriers shall avoid overflying Tehran. No flight plan will be accepted overflying such territory,” the notice says. Specifically the instructions are valid from 01:00 to 04:00GMT (or 9pm to 12am US Eastern). Will the big expected Iranian retaliation be tonight? Zero hour may be approaching fast.

“You know, Tyrone, if I were you I’d not stop into DeShawn’s party tonight. Just a word to the wise.”

‘If you are a woman, don’t ever ask a man “Do you want to talk about it?”. The answer is always “No.”‘ — The Universe

Chris Williamson interview. Highly recommended.

Read it.

The driver said that he was heading to Dallas and had also been in Florida to “play”.

The vehicle was rented under the name of the passenger, 46-year-old Wenqiang Lin, who consented to a search but appeared uncertain. A K9 unit alerted to the front passenger door.

Inside, officials found a Spirit Airlines boarding pass indicating that Weijian Chen had flown from Los Angeles to Atlanta on July 30-31 without any bags. The rental agreement showed the car was rented in College Park, Georgia, on July 31 and was due in Los Angeles by August 3, the report continued.

A bag behind the driver’s seat contained gold bullion bars worth an estimated $200,000 to $250,000, including:

Seven 1-ounce 999.9 gold bars
Three 5-gram 999.9 gold bars
One 1-gram 999.9 gold bar marked with 20 squares
Eight 10-ounce 999.9 gold bars

After arresting Chen and Lin, Sgt. Hughes contacted U.S. Homeland Security, which revealed both men had entered the country illegally. Lin entered on September 15, 2023, and was awaiting immigration processing in Los Angeles. Chen entered on December 17, 2023, and is also pending immigration judicial action.

Read it.

Imagine that. Stop the presses….

Tyler Cowen.

Typically, if one candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, the election is called. If no one gets more than 50% of the votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are reallocated to his or her voters’ second choices. This process is repeated until a winner emerges.

Read it.

Words everywhere. Words in laws passed by Congress, words in instructions for the devices that make our lives easier, words in novels and newspapers that edify us, words we use to convey our heartfelt sympathies, words we use to debate what course of action is good for our families and our country.

We rely on words all of the time. Rarely, however, do we consider their intrinsic importance in holding our society together. Rarely do we recognize the ways we corrupt words.

We live in a time of fuzzy, destructively inaccurate, and phony words. This chips away at political and economic democracy and trivializes the most basic human interactions, such as love.

Quillette.

Hugo Chávez, the legendary socialist leader who preceded Nicolás Maduro, has long been a mythical figure. With his signature red beret and bombastic speeches, the man is to the West’s college Marxists what Justin Bieber once was to teenage girls. Some of this process has been organic—Chávez was indeed an icon, after all, and a person can be iconically awful. But much of the late leader’s mythologisation has been the result of an organised and persistent propaganda effort managed by adept political operatives, instructed by Cuba’s revolutionary regime, and exported by its backers.

Like the Soviets, the Chavista regime understood the importance of symbolism. They changed the official name of the country and its states; they changed their nation’s flag and shield; they added a little red heart and the words Hecho en Socialismo to the products of the companies they expropriated; they elevated historical figures like tribal leader Cacique Guaicaipuro; and they reimagined Simón Bolívar, the oil-rich country’s independence hero, as a Chavista God and made Chávez his son. They even remade Bolívar in the image of their revolution. The man whose portrait now hangs in public schools and government buildings looks nothing like the one painted more than two centuries ago.

Read it.

The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to the good life.

Note please I write “bookshops,” not “bookstores.” A store you enter knowing what it is you want—groceries, hardware, pharmaceuticals—you purchase it, and depart. In a shop you browse, you engage in conversation with the owner or salespeople, you make discoveries you hadn’t previously known existed, you meet people with interests similar to your own, you hang out. In “The Bookshop in America,” an essay of 1963, Edward Shils wrote: “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”

The problem just now is that they, bookshops, are in danger of going under. In his In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch notes that in 1994 there were roughly 7,000 bookshops in America, though by 2019 that number had been reduced to roughly 2,500. The reduction is owing, among other things, to the rise of Amazon.com as the principal purveyor of books, the spread of digital culture with its many distractions, and the reduction of reading generally in a country that has never harbored a vast readership.

Read it.

Despite the growing popularity of the practice, it usually fails. The New York Times has published multiple reports over the past several years detailing the grim statistics, including the results of a 2023 study that showed few women successfully gave birth to a child after freezing their eggs. As Evie Magazine noted, “Women under 38 have between a 2% and 12% chance that a healthy frozen egg will result in a baby.” The corporations, of course, are chuffed by this outcome. Childlessness is the point. This has given rise to an even viler industry in which wealthy women pay young women—often university-aged, cash-strapped girls—for their eggs.

Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male.

Freeberg nails it.

something to do with feminism and The Patriarchy. The guy with the microphone allowed the radicalized social-studies girl, who seemed very nice by the way, no facial piercings or green/purple hair, to sound off with all the familiar bumper sticker slogans and college-words. “Patriarchy” must have been one of those, because he had an interesting question: What would a “matriarchy” look like?

Oh, well I suppose guys could still go to school, but women would graduate more often and they’d get the better and higher-paying jobs. Guys would still work, and doing the lower, menial jobs the females don’t want to do. Something like that.

Follow-up: What’s the difference between that, and what we have?

Um, err, ah, uh…don’t know.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

Clothes make the man. It also allows for quick identification and classification. Metal-heads, preps, punks, country-music sorts, nerds, back-to-nature types (old school and recent), firearms folks, faculty with or without tenure**, they tend to blur. Think of all the professional women in solid-color sheath dresses, or blouses and pencil skirts, jackets, office heels (2-3? heel but not spike usually), tasteful jewelry. Even without a set dress code beyond “professional,” everyone gravitates toward an unspoken but acceptable look. Even in a less formal setting, we all lean toward blending in with the flock. There’s safety and acceptance in numbers, and in not standing out.

The military have a technical term for people who Stand Out. They’re called ‘targets’.

Freeberg nails it.

The more I listen to Trump, the more I realize he is not a master salesman after all. He is an extremely competent salesman. He is better at selling things than I would be. He is much better than most. But among his talents, contrary to popular opinion, selling things is not his peak performance.

He really finds his groove un-selling things. Listing the reasons not to buy the other guy’s stuff. It’s like watching Winter by Antonio Vivaldi performed by a virtuoso. It’s like a vortex-confluence of raw natural born talent, lessons learned over years and years of doing it, and an earnest love and joy of actually doing it. You just want to bottle the performance and put a cork on top. Living greatness.

But after the atmosphere built up by the contagious enthusiasm has come and gone, and the tent has been dismantled and a good night’s sleep has restored sobriety — the core message remains. It’s not a druggy high. It’s durable logic and common sense. It’s truth. Everything he says, once you examine it objectively with patience for the details, is true. It’s only shocking or novel in some way because some people have become hooked on deceptiveness and duplicity. The conflict comes from people who are the problem. Like the villagers who’ve become accustomed to pretending the Emperor is wearing fine clothes, and their churlish attitude against the little boy who points out he’s actually naked.

Read it.

As expected, the left is now in histrionics after Donald Trump suggested that Kamala Devi Harris might not be black, after he was asked a loaded question by an ABC News journalist Rachel Scott in front of the National Association of Black Journalists.

To recap, Scott asked Trump if he thinks Harris is ‘only on the ticket because she is a black woman?’ to which Trump replied, accurately, that Harris has identified as an Indian-American – which she openly campaigned on.

Read it.

Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social platform. He wrote: “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!”

Social Security can be claimed starting at age 62, although benefits increase the longer one waits to claim them, with benefits capping out at a retirement age of 70.

The taxation of Social Security began in 1984 with legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan. Seniors receiving Social Security income pay taxes on 50% of their income from the program, and in some cases, as high as 85% if their combined income from other sources pushes them above a certain threshold.

Read it.

Unanticipated incidents, be they acts of God or assassination attempts, define themselves. Others, from proposed legislation to controversial court cases, are subject to the manipulation of their acolytes.

Claiming to be on “the right side of history” is a common tactic such people employ. The phrase, usually emanating from the Left, is used as a debate-stopper, an argument-ender, a moral cudgel, as if the one who invokes it has special insight into the ultimate judgment of things (which, ironically, implies an ultimate judge, an implication most of them are unwilling to accept).

But the judgments of man are notoriously fickle. As the eminent 20th-century journalist John Chamberlain said: “There is no compulsion on the decent human being to be ‘with history’ when history is driving headlong toward an abyss.”

UnHerd.

The pioneer dream is deeply engraved in American culture and history. It’s simple but powerful: setting forth into the unknown, with just a few belongings and your immediate family, and creating a self-reliant, flourishing home in an unforgiving environment. As depicted in the (now resoundingly cancelled) Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a dream that required practical skills, physical strength and mental fortitude.

It was also, always, an easier sell to men than to women, which is why frontiersmen often had to obtain a wife by mail order. What for a man might be a pioneering adventure might be, for his wife, an arduous daily grind of growing and preparing food, making and mending clothing, laundry, animal husbandry and so on, all with no family help and multiple children underfoot.

Over time, though, a slew of innovations — from cars to ready-made foods to labour-saving home devices — have made it ever easier to live life in a seemingly self-contained way. Perhaps most of all, this has liberated women to pursue individualist dreams just like men. As the American antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly once observed, women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism.

Read it.

Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic system that has emerged in the digital era. It is characterized by the unilateral claim of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. In this version of capitalism, predicting and influencing behavior (political and economic) rather than producing goods and services is the primary product. This economic logic prioritizes extracting, processing, and trading personal data to predict and influence human behavior by exploiting those predictions for various economic (marketing) and political objectives.

More accurately ‘surveillance socialism’.