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First, teachers must leave the classroom and become administrators or counselors to earn above the standard teacher salary.

Second, colleges of education can’t prepare new teachers nearly as well as an apprenticeship under a veteran teacher who has consistently demonstrated mastery of the craft. Thankfully, K-12 education can rework how it prepares new teachers and rewards quality veteran educators to solve both problems simultaneously.

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Astonishing.

The actions the loader goes through are exactly the actions that a real tank loader would take: Get the shell from the back ammo rack, throw it into the breech until the breech block locks, wait for the shot and the casing to be ejected, and repeat.

Of course a tank round weighs quite a bit more than a soda bottle, but still….

(Don’t get me started on how tricky this is when there are expended shell casings rolling around on the floor of the turret.)

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An Idaho man has been arrested in connection with the shooting death of a woman in California more than 50 years ago, authorities said.

DNA evidence led investigators to identify Michael Eugene Mullen, 75, as a suspect in the death of Nina “Nadine” Fischer in 1973, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office said. Mullen was arrested near Salmon, Idaho, on Wednesday, and he is being held in jail while awaiting extradition to California.

You can run, but you can’t hide, apparently.

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As the United States continues its rush to shutter the nation’s remaining coal plants, energy analysts are debating what should fill the gap to meet the growing need for electricity. Increasingly, many are pointing to nuclear energy as the solution.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), nearly one-third of existing U.S. coal plants are scheduled to be shut down by 2035.

“If you wanna get ahead ya gotta hump ‘n’ git it.” — Merle Haggard

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For many Europeans, the American mind is a hard thing to fathom. Considering the cultural influence the United States have exercised over the Mother Continent since 1918, and their political dominance since 1945, it is an important question. Nor are the Americans one is likely to meet in Europe much help—we are hardly representative of our countrymen. Less than 20% of Americans own passports, and a minority of that number actually use them beyond Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. We Americans abroad may be very pro- or anti-European, well-informed or ignorant, but we are not typical.

Even if we were, as a whole, Americans tend not to be very introspective. We may seek the self-affirmation of American Exceptionalism or the self-hatred of Wokery, but the calm pursuit of self-knowledge is not usually in our purview. This, of course, is not uncommon amongst either Imperial or Calvinist peoples; we are both—the latter in a strange, secularised sense peculiar to ourselves. So it is that probing the American mind presents unique challenges even to natives—let alone Europeans.

It has been observed that at the bottom of American differences from Europe lie two qualities: race and space. Certainly, the Indian and Black issues on the one hand, and the sheer immensity of our country on the other, make for a very great difference. So does the great divorce between rulers and ruled, despite the need of the former to corral the latter into election booths every so often. I often tell foreigners that if they want to love my country, they need to take a long road trip through it; if they wish to hate it, they need only to read the history of its foreign policy. The dissonance between the two experiences is astonishing.

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For many humans, plants might seem stationary and even a little dull. But green things actually move a lot. If you watch a timelapse video of a sunflower seedling poking up from the soil, for example, it doesn’t just shoot straight up. Instead, as the sunflower grows, its crown spins in circles, twists into corkscrews and, in general, wiggles around—albeit very slowly.

Now, researchers co-led by Orit Peleg at CU Boulder and Yasmine Meroz at Tel Aviv University have discovered one role for these chaotic movements, also known as “circumnutations.” In greenhouse experiments and computer simulations, the group showed that sunflowers take advantage of circumnutations to search the environment around them for patches of sunlight.

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Whatever the motivations, spending trillions of dollars to replace fossil fuels with expensive and unreliable wind and solar sources is foolish, futile and dangerous.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.