Babylon Bee.

Hey, guy, make up your minds….;

Read it.

Wedding speeches are one of those traditions that everyone has a complicated relationship with. The father of the bride gets teary, the best man tells a story that makes the groom’s mother visibly uncomfortable, and the groom stands up and says something impossibly sweet that makes half the room reach for their napkins.

What it is not supposed to do is empty the entire room. On the Unfiltered Bride podcast, UK-based wedding planners Georgina and Beth have built a reputation for telling the stories that most people in the industry keep firmly under wraps. This particular wedding-speech story was one that was simply too juicy not to share with their avid listeners.

…

Everything was running exactly as a wedding should. Then, the groom stood up…Before properly getting into his speech, he mentioned, almost as an aside, that there were some envelopes being passed around the room, and he would ask everyone to open them. The guests, assuming nothing, obliged. Inside each envelope were photographs. Of the bride. With the best man.

The groom put down the microphone, looked out at the room, said he would be leaving now, and walked out. His entire family, who had clearly been briefed in advance, stood up and walked out with him. Georgina, retelling this with barely contained delight, noted that the timing was not accidental.

The groom and his family waited until after the food had been eaten, and the bride’s family had paid for everything, before making their exit. The bride was left at her own wedding reception with the photographs on every table, the best man presumably somewhere in the room, and a bill that had already been settled. Karma is a cruel mistress. And so was the bride.

I’m curious as to how the groom obtained these presemably compromising photographs. Arguably the groom has perhaps not exactly dodged a bullet but certainly made it bounce off like superman. Certainly the best man is very very lucky that we live in a degenerate modern age, or he would be in a shallow grave out in the desert, perhaps accompanied by the ex-bride.

Read it.

Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better, what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people cope is, they tell themselves: if I work hard, accumulate capital, maybe join one of the big AI labs, I might secure my place in the future.

I want to argue this is a fantastically short-sighted view: if there is a permanent underclass, you won’t escape it by owning property, or shares in Anthropic or OpenAI, or guns, or anything else. And neither will the billionaires. You, me, Sam Altman, Dario, everyone who is made of flesh and blood, will be disempowered and replaced by machines.

The rest of this post elaborates the argument. First I explain how most workers will be replaced (if it’s not obvious), then how the “permanent overclass” will be disempowered, and finally how the government will be disempowered.

Read it.

A child under the age of 12 has become the first person in that age group to be euthanised in the Netherlands since the country extended its euthanasia laws two years ago.

Dutch Health Minister Sophie Hermans revealed the case in a letter to parliament, stating that the child died at the end of last year. No details about the child’s age, gender, or medical condition have been disclosed.

New York Post.

Mere millionaires in California are now eyeing the exits over fears that a billionaire tax could be tweaked to target smaller fortunes, a tax advisor to the mega-rich revealed.

Ah, people who learn from history: A rare breed.

The proposed 5% wealth tax on billionaires was just cleared for the November ballot this week — but California’s millionaires were already spooked about the ramifications of the controversial proposed levy, said David Lesperance, a tax advisor to high-net-worth families.

You don’t wait until the tiger is at your door before you escape out the back.

Now the tax guru told The Post that it isn’t just billionaires hatching plans to potentially exit California over the controversial proposal, backed by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West and lefty pols like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The income tax was introduced as ‘a little tax targeting the rich’ and now soaks up about a quarter of everyone’s income. Statists—and all socialists are statists—never lose their appetites for spending other people’s money.

New York Post.

A woman caught on video emptying a public trash can on the street then stealing it during New York City’s Knicks championship parade was a director at JPMorgan Chase who was fired Tuesday over the incident, The Post has learned.

Angie Báez, 40, was promoted to Executive Director of Community and Industry Engagement for Card and Connected Commerce at JPMorgan Chase more than a year ago, according to her LinkedIn profile.

She previously served as Executive Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at New York-based review website The Infatuation, which Chase acquired as part of its broader push into lifestyle and experiential content.

She was, shall we say, a Woman of Weight.

ATQUE: Tim Pool’s take

Watch it.

I read this book when it first came out in 1973, and thought it intresting fiction but somewhat far-fetched; typical dystopian literature.

Look at the news, and you realize that it represents Biblical-level prophecy.

Enoch Powell is sitting somewhere shouting “I TOLD YOU SO!”

Read it.

I’ve been in Berkeley for the last 2 weeks. I haven’t really been back here for a while, and it’s worse than you can believe. This is a cult of atheistic hedonists needing AI doom to be true to justify their life choices. Or acceleration. Or something. They need to make impact. I mean, narcissism of small differences to an extent, but I stopped long before these people did. If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders. ??

This isn’t technology, this is a mind virus. New York wants a couple basis points so they can maintain their lifestyle, Los Angeles wants a bit of your attention so they can feel famous, SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so.

Read iut.

To tell the truth. it doesn’t take much to cosplay an economst; just look at Pual Krugman, the Man Who Is Always Wrong.

She dismisses the counterarguments — that Net Zero is unaffordable, that the UK cannot act alone, that transition costs will raise the cost of living — as “bad arguments” and dispenses with each in a few sentences, without engaging with the substantial body of academic work that supports them. The audience at Westminster Central Hall was not in a position to push back. Parliament, the media and the public should be. The UK has no shortage of genuine economic expertise. It is past time to insist that it be brought to bear.

Baby mamas have a lot to answer for … but they won’t.

Read it.

Spain’s mass migrant amnesty has attracted almost 900,000 applications, exposing a far larger illegal immigration population than the government previously admitted.

According to the latest figures, the total has already far surpassed the government’s original estimate of around 500,000 beneficiaries and even exceeds higher internal projections of 750,000, despite the application window remaining open until June 30. Around 360,000 applications have already been formally accepted for processing.

The last time Spain carried out a major migrant amnesty was in 2005 under the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. That program received just over 691,000 applications and granted approximately 576,000 residence permits. The current scheme has already attracted more applications than that record, even though the deadline has not yet passed.

Read it.

As riots triggered by migrant attacks convulse the UK, the debate over immigration in Europe is reaching a fever pitch. The same question is asked, time and again: If nobody voted for this, why does it keep on happening? In the past two years, migrant violence has been recorded—and in some cases triggered violent public backlash—in Germany (a toddler and man stabbed to death by an Afghan); Belfast (a man stabbed in the street by a Sudanese refugee); France (a deadly stabbing by an Algerian in Mulhouse); as well as Poland, Sweden, and Spain, among others.

By contrast, the steep rise in anti-Christian hate crimes, meticulously tracked by the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, has gone largely unreported. In May alone, OIDAC Europe reported 37 hate crimes targeting “Christian places of worship, religious symbols, religious spaces, Christian institutions, and Christian individuals,” including:

• 13 arson-related attacks (the highest in 2026 thus far)
• 10 cases of vandalism
• 3 cases of deliberate “desecration”
• 3 cases of physical violence
• 3 thefts of religious objects
• 3 cases of “vandalism and violence”
• 1 case of incitement
• 1 case of disruption of worship

Abby Zinman, a Typical Modern Woke Female writer for Buzzfeed (Voice of the Wokerati) illustrates why we have a population deficit and why men aren’t asking women out any more. (“Where are all the good men?” “Back in your twenties where you left them.”)

I’d say read it for entertainment, but it is far from entertaining. It is, however, informative, in a gotta-shake-your-head kind of way.

The self-absorption and entitlement are strong in this one.

And, of course, the men involved are SOLELY to blame. (Girl, if all the men you date have problems, maybe they aren’t the problem.)

Read it.

In Chapter 10 (“Why the Worst Get on Top”) of The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek argued that centralized political authority tends to elevate the worst people in society. Goons and demagogues do not rise to the top in totalitarian systems by accident. The logic of totalitarianism selects for thuggish leaders.

A less dramatic, but equally perverse, logic governs American academia.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence.

The Telegraph (UK).

Kenyan who expected security work says he was handed a rifle without training and learned to shoot by watching others

New York Post.

A Cornell University student who applied for a summer internship with a Jewish-owned NYC startup rejected the opportunity with a hateful message: ‘Not interested in working for a Jew,” the shocked CEO posted on X.

Austin Franco put his antisemitism on full display when he passed up an interview with VryfID because its co-founders Gabe and Aiden Einhorn are proudly Jewish.

Franco, 19, delivered the message to both brothers via job board site Handshake after applying for a summer role at the company, which pairs renters with landlords and verifies their identities to prevent fraud.

The concept of freedom of association has been so expunged from American life that this will shock a lot of even un-Woke people.

The Foundry.

Children of married parents with high education levels are more likely to be healthy and succeed in school and life than their peers. Children from these families are also more likely to live above the poverty line and benefit from extracurricular activities such as music lessons, sports, and summer camp. These activities offer students prized background knowledge.

Students from families with lower education levels must rely more on schools to provide information. Poor reading and math scores nationwide do not give confidence that schools in low-income areas are bridging the gap. Many schools have reduced time spent on history, science, geography, literature, and civics in favor of generic reading strategies, so-called social-emotional learning, and “gender” studies. Schools often cut the very subjects that help students.

Differences in background knowledge have enormous implications for teaching reading. Two students can read the same paragraph and perform differently on the test, not because one is more intelligent, but because he knows the topic better.

For decades, researcher and former professor E.D. Hirsch argued that literacy is connected to content and vocabulary. Hirsch has argued that “broad general knowledge” is essential for reading comprehension because students need prior knowledge to understand what they read.

Likewise, professor of cognitive psychology Daniel T. Willingham, who researches reading comprehension, has also found that background information is important for students to understand text.

The New Neo. Especially, watch the videos.

Enoch Powerll was the first Woke cancellee.

The Telegraph (UK).

Gazans are preparing for public protests against Hamas in what is being touted as a grassroots “revolution” against the terror group.

Good luck with that.

The movement, which appears to have been started by Gazans in exile, is calling for surviving residents in the enclave to gather en masse.

Wonder how many will die?

The New Neo.

Astounding facts can be found here about the demographic transformation of Western Europe. An excerpt:

Between 2010 and today, in only 16 years, the number of foreign-born residents in Europe rocketed from 40million to more than 64million. In other words, Europe’s ruling class added 24million foreign-born residents in only 16 years, with nearly three-quarters coming from radically different cultures and nations.

It’s that last bit that’s of great import: “from radically different cultures and nations.” Not just “radically different,” either, but a significant number of the newcomers are also uninterested in assimilating to their new cultural surroundings and in some instances they hate them and actively wish to change them.

The US does – or used to do – somewshat better at assimilation, but Europe historically has been much less interested in that process. Perhaps that’s because European nations are more based on a shared physical (genetic) and historical heritage and less based on shared principles (or at least overtly stated shared principles rather than subtly understood ones), whereas the US has always been composed mostly of people “from away” who have come because they are interested in liberty and opportunity.

The advent of the welfare state, both in Europe and in the US, has diluted that motive.

Read it.

The maximum was life or 99 years. The crime was a heinous one. And the carrying of the knife to a school track meet, plus witnesses saying Anthony kept his hand in his bag (apparently at the ready with the knife) during basically a verbal spat, indicates the murder was not a sudden “heat of the moment” thing. Premeditation can involve a short time; it doesn’t have to be hours or days. Also, a knife plunged that deeply into the chest would almost certainly be known to be a mortal blow, so it would be very difficult for Anthony to successfully claim that he didn’t mean to kill Metcalf.

Therefore there was a very good argument that Anthony should have gotten life. The death penalty is not allowed if a perpetrator is under 18 and without other special circumstances, and since Anthony was 17 at the time of the murder and the requisite special circumstances were not present, life in prison was the maximum allowed.

Why did Anthony not get a life sentence? The jury didn’t deliberate long, and I don’t think they explained their sentencing decision; at least, I haven’t found an explanation. But I think – as I wrote earlier – it was his youth. Also his baby face. He will have a long time in prison to think about what he did, especially if he ends up serving most of it. But even if he only serves half of it (the minimum, because he would be eligible for parole then), when he gets out he would be around 34 because he’s 19 now. That will have to do.

No, it won’t. He was raised to be a thug and that training was effective. He is a thug from a thug culture and won’t find any better culture in prison—prison is just a finishing school for thugs like him. The fact that his family are profiting from his situation and not even pretending that the money they are raising will be used for anything having to do with him illustrates it sufficiently well.

After the hearing, Anthony’s mother, Kala, and his brother blasted the killer’s conviction and sentence as “racist and biased” to cheering supporters who chanted “free Karmelo.”

…

By all appearances, the Anthonys look like a typical family. Karmelo has several siblings and the family’s social media showed a comfortable life like vacations, a lavish home and expensive cars, per Distractify. Three years before the incident, they had relocated to North Texas. “Three years ago, my family moved to North Texas, searching for a better life,” Kayla said in a press interview after Karmelo’s arrest, she described their family as loving and said they had provided their children with opportunities to succeed.

Black people in the U.S. have been leeching off of White Guilt so long that it’s the foundation of everything they do.

The Register.

The process for producing triple-layer drug-delivery particles and materials for tissue regeneration could get easier, thanks to a new advance in creating the electrospray nozzles used to make them. A team of MIT researchers has now used a 3D resin printer to output tiny electrospray nozzles without the expensive cleanrooms they normally require.

A team led by MIT principal research scientist Dr. Luis Fernando Velásquez-García detailed its work developing tiny arrays of triaxial electrospray emitters in a recent paper. Before jumping into what they actually did, it might be worth explaining exactly what we’re talking about and why it’s such a potential breakthrough.

Electrospraying is a process that relies on tiny nozzles – we’re talking fractions of a millimeter, here – that are subjected to an electric field to atomize liquids into droplets smaller than what can be achieved through purely physical methods. Electrospraying can be done with lots of different liquid materials, and has a variety of uses, from ionizing liquids for mass spectrometry, to space propulsion.

Such cutting-edge applications traditionally require expensive equipment, and electrospray nozzles have classically been no different.

Read it.

Six people were injured in a stabbing inside New York’s Penn Station on Sunday evening, authorities said, less than a day before thousands of fans are expected to descend on neighboring Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals.

A suspect was taken into custody after the attack, which unfolded around 7 p.m. in one of the nation’s busiest transportation hubs.

I predict that it will be a Person of Color, because

Authorities did not immediately release details about what led to the stabbing or whether the victims were targeted.

Read it.

We have known for some time that our federal employees have cushy lives compared to the people for whom they work (us). What is particularly infuriating is that so many of them either don’t pay their taxes or are seriously delinquent on what they owe their employer—the federal government.

Recently, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found in a new report showing that 6.9% of federal employees are delinquent on their IRS taxes. That amounts to about 215,000 employees. This is a marked increase in three short years from 4.9%. It is appalling that the rate was previously as high as it was, but it has now hit crisis level, seemingly with little or no consequences. This is in contrast to a 5% delinquency rate among the general population.

The number of delinquents exploded during the Biden administration, which was lax on enforcing anything for favored groups. We can only speculate as to why federal employees felt they had the right to forgo paying their taxes. It might be Biden allowing so many people to go without repaying their student loans that encouraged the government’s employees to skip payments.

The fascinating aspect of this is that these employees are W-2 wage earners who have withholding taken out of their paychecks. The government can easily enforce additional withholding to make sure its employees are in compliance. The feds can easily garnish workers’ wages, as they certainly know where they work. Indeed, the feds do this all the time to ordinary citizens.

I must confess that I am the last person to think ill of people who resist having the Deep State pick their pockets.

Read it.

When I was watching the following video, my first reaction was: “This is the future of British policing.”

That is, when civil authority collapses, fit young men who are not averse to violence will assume the job of enforcing community standards, whatever they may be. If the fit young men are Muslims, they will enforce Islamic community standards, i.e. Sharia. If they are native white Britons, they will enforce whatever remains of traditional British community standards. The latter is what you see in the video below.

The window of opportunity for such enforcement is closing rapidly, however. In five years or so there will no longer be a quorum of fit young white men to enforce traditional British community standards. From then on it will be the Pakistanis or the Jamaicans doing the enforcement, but mostly the Pakistanis, because they have the numbers.

In other words, what you see in the video won’t be possible for much longer.

Read it.

Kirtner, 75, has seen a lot in his time as a broadcast owner in the tri-state area of Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio along the Ohio River.

One of his AM station’s copper radials once fell victim to a copper thief cutting its wires.

But an FM transmission line being snapped and cleared in broad daylight? He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp of Catlettsburg, according to WSAZ(TV)’s reporting — had severed the main transmission line leading up to the broadcast tower of 93.7 WDGG(FM), a 100,000-watt country-formatted FM station licensed to Ashland, Ky., which goes by the moniker “The Dawg.”

Kirtner isn’t sure how the suspect is still alive.

Read it.

Be careful not to step in the Diversity. It’s hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

Read it.

Once a Marine, always a Marine — so consider yourselves beyond lucky here, “teens.”

This happened in Oxon Hill, about 10 minutes outside of Washington, DC, on Wednesday. One shot went off during the struggle, yet somehow nobody was hit (though the truck’s bed now has a bullet hole in it).

I will never understand why these perps hold their guns so close to the people they’re trying to rob. Like, I have arms, dude.

This is Maryland, so we cannot be sure these “teens” will be given much more than a slap on the wrist for trying to rob a man at gunpoint in broad daylight.

I suspect that these were Youths of Color.

Well, I enjoyed it….

Freeberg nails it.

It occurs to me that we have a lot of loud, brassy people walking around among us, making lots of noise, giving off the impression they speak for everybody, who are especially loud when they’re agitated and apprehensive. And they deal with these apprehensions by passing judgment on what others are doing, micro-managing, propounding narratives about who’s building good things and who’s wrecking things. Who’s showing ultra-competence in what they do, and who’s wandering around going derp derp derp knocking things over like a bull in a China shop. Which Captain of a ship is steering the ship right, which one has hit the shoals and has to go down with the ship or is just about to, which one should be relieved of command the sooner the better…

…highly inaccurately.

The Unites States’ First Holy Emperor, Barack Hussein Replacement Jesus Obama, stands as perhaps the first and best example of this. The clear and uncontested dominant prevailing narrative is that He was the leadership we had long been needing, showing us all the wisdom we needed to be shown, picking us all up and carrying us to where we needed to be taken. And yet, nine years after He left office, what’s His legacy? Where? Someone tell me. It’s amazing when you take it all in and survey the…well, no other word comes to mind. Wreckage. He made health care more expensive. You can squeeze out some metrics of good things, tortured ones, if you work at it hard enough. The most popular one is “a record-breaking 73 consecutive months of economic growth” or some such thing, which I’ve long thought to be sadly amusing. We had such a record standing? We want it broken the way it was broken between 2009 and 2017, really? That’s the way we want to see ’em go?

Read it.

The Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act was brought to the Senate as an amendment by Lindsey Graham as part of the $70 billion budget reconciliation package funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

The usual senate suspects, Thom Tillis, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell voted with Democrats to kill the SAVE America Act amendment. 75% of Americans support the requirement for voter ID, the Senate doesn’t want that.

Read it.

In the early days of the failed Moscow coup, one was bombarded by writing wherein the “conservatives” from the KGB and communist party wanted to block the path to a market economy and parliamentarianism. Many outlets that were once marked “Stalinist” or “orthodox communist” were attacked as “conservative,” blithely referred to as such often on the same page as political figures such as Reagan or Thatcher, Bush or Kohl. Thus the naïve reader, who wants to take the printed word at its nominal value, logically infers a common attitude and purpose among the previously named Western politicians and the soviet enemies of perestroika. Common sense could protect the sane man from such an absurdity, but this runs out of answers in the face of the schizophrenia of political vocabulary, proving insufficiently idiosyncratic; he seems to have resigned himself without grumbling. The common retort is that conservatives are defenders of the status quo, whatever that may look like in the particular case, so conservatives living in very different societies, unsurprisingly, advocate very different and even contradictory programs. But if political classifications are not backed by political substance, then these classifications must be grounded in psychological or anthropological factors, common attitudes towards life. Should one, in good conscience, impute commonalities among Helmut Kohl and the Russian putschists, this interpretational hypothesis brings little light to the concrete situations—because in such situations it is always about the implementation of particular matters or goals thereby defined, in view of the makeup of a national or international collective, wherein the friend-foe groupings are determined by the positions of each agent with respect to these matters and goals. The legitimation of political struggle often takes place by appeal to anthropological presumptions; political analysis, on the other hand, can infer no concrete substance from formal and inherently abstract anthropological constants without falling into bad metaphysics.

 

Read it.

The family of Vickrum Digwa has been accused of adding insult to injury after issuing a statement asking that Henry Nowak’s murder not be used to cause “further pain,” despite fierce public anger over the way the 18-year-old was stabbed, falsely accused, handcuffed and left dying in the street.

In a rightly-ordered society the killer would be executed and his family sent back to whatever Turd World shit-hole they came from.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ? Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World 

Read it.

I often wonder, not enough to pursue it though, but who pays for all those ugly statues outside big banks, big offices, etc. I thought it was mostly an American thing, but it’s common in Korea too. They’re usually quite abstract and to my eye, quite shabby and ugly. I assume money is being laundered or the artist is well-connected.

Too many people believe that art is what artists say it is, and too few realize that art is what viewers say it is.

Read it.

When Meta, Google and Apple agree on a “privacy” feature, watch out.

The three companies (along with Mozilla, which is on one of their “ad features in the browser” kicks again) are drawing up a built-in advertising measurement system, called Attribution Level 1, as a standard feature of web browsers. The system is intended to measure the effectiveness of advertising by enabling advertisers to correlate “impressions,” the occasions on which someone saw an ad, with “conversions,” when people bought something.

Don’t look for a section on permissions or consent in that document, by the way. There isn’t one. And nothing about nerd lawyer stuff like “opt out of sale” or “objections to processing” in there, either. The Big Tech companies want a two-track system, where other companies’ ad features are required to do all the privacy regulation hassles, but the browser’s own built-in tracking feature is something that people have to find the right setting for and turn off.

The Register.

Fresh college graduates frozen out of the job market shouldn’t blame AI for their struggles, says the New York Federal Reserve. Instead, get angry at the rise of remote work.

According to the Fed’s analysis, youth unemployment has risen significantly since the coronavirus pandemic, and hasn’t receded in the same way that unemployment numbers for older, more experienced college graduates has in recent years. The analysis notes that the prevalence of remote work has increased since COVID-19, and it believes those two trends have more than just a correlation.

“Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees,” the Fed said of its data. “Accordingly, companies may be reluctant to hire less-experienced workers in distributed work arrangements.”

Overall, youth unemployment has risen 20 percent since the pandemic, the Fed says, and the report estimates that 64 percent of that rise is attributable directly to remote work, not AI, though the study admits that could be a factor in the future.

Check it out.

What is a Beam Spring Keyboard? Before the Model F keyboard was the Beam Spring keyboard, a keyboard that was designed to be like the IBM Selectric electric typewriters but made to work with IBM’s mainframe terminals. Originals regularly sell for over $1,000 to $2,000 but now you can get one in various “normal” modern layouts and various color options for a fraction of that cost. The new beam spring keyboards are also compatible with MX keycaps (see below for details).

Note that this doesn’t tell you what it is, merely what it was used for.

There is, of course, a YouTube video.

If you’re eager to pay over $400 for a keyboard, here’s your chance.

Read it.

There is a lawsuit grinding through a federal court in Minnesota that every insurance executive in America should be reading instead of their quarterly AI roadmap.

The case is Estate of Lokken v. UnitedHealth Group. It was filed in late 2023 by the families of two deceased Medicare Advantage members, and it alleges that UnitedHealthcare used an artificial-intelligence tool called nH Predict to decide how much post-acute care its members were entitled to — and that the tool was wrong roughly nine times out of ten, a figure the plaintiffs draw from how often its denials were reversed on appeal. UnitedHealth denies that the tool makes coverage decisions at all; it calls nH Predict “a guide” and says the real decisions are made by clinicians following Medicare criteria. A judge will sort out who’s right. But this past March, that judge ordered the company to open its books and hand over a wide swath of documents about exactly how the thing works. The machine is going to testify.

I’m not here to litigate that case. I’m here because of the legal theory the plaintiffs were allowed to keep. The court tossed several of their claims but let two survive, and one of them should make every carrier’s general counsel sit up straight: breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Bad faith. The doctrine that turns a wrong coverage decision from a refund into punitive damages.

Hold onto that, because it’s the whole column.

Read it.

In case you needed further justification for denying your woman’s request for a vacation in Paris, hordes of migrants gave your position another boost over Saturday night, as they rampaged across the “City of Light” and other French locales, setting structures and vehicles ablaze, smashing the windows of occupied cars, destroying shops and unleashing other varied forms of mayhem. And they were doing this because they were happy…about a soccer game.

Import Turd World People, get Turd World problems.

Vox, a Voice of the Crust.

“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”

This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.

“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.”

The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

As opposed to the people like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, who would prefer that humanity just go away and leave no trace of its presence.

Read it.

In 1961, New York City commenced a new urban plan that included massive downzoning. To give a sense of how much urban growth has been stunted compared to previous trends, before the downzoning, Manhattan had 7 Congressional districts. Today it has 2.5.

Mamdani is going them one better. He’s chasing all of the productive people out of the city; by the end of his term, New York will have about a million freeloaders and politicians (but I repeat myself) and not much else.

Read it.

Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s replacing it.

This post has been almost 35 years in the making; that’s how long I have been conducting technical interviews. And for a few of those decades, I also worked to try to improve the process itself. I’ve had to care a lot about it, because it’s so broken.

It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.

But it’s not an easy path I bring you, no silver bullet. Remember that, grasshopper, when you get to the end and come back to yell at me.

Read it.

Repellents are central to personal protection and to reducing transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. Although substantial effort has been devoted to identifying the sensory and molecular pathways underlying repellent detection, the diversity of reported modes of action has hindered the development of a unified framework. It is generally assumed that insects respond to repellents in a fixed, aversive manner. However, an unexplored possibility is how plastic the innate meaning of repellents may be. We present experiments testing whether the innate response of Aedes aegypti to DEET (the gold-standard repellent) can be shifted from aversion to attraction. First, we identified and validated an appetitive behavioural response in mosquitoes equivalent to PER conditioning in flies and bees: the biting attempt response (BAR). Next, we trained individual mosquitoes to associate DEET with a blood meal using Pavlovian conditioning. We then examined whether mosquitoes trained with blood as a positive reinforcer would display the BAR when presented with DEET alone or on host skin. Finally, we trained females to associate DEET with sugar and tested their subsequent response to DEET alone. Across all experiments, trained mosquitoes showed a reversal in the valence of DEET, shifting from innate avoidance to a learned appetitive response. These results demonstrate that experience can render DEET attractive by establishing associations with two rewarding contexts: vertebrate blood feeding and plant sugar feeding. We discuss the implications of this learned attraction for understanding repellent mechanisms and for designing strategies to improve personal protection.

The War Zone.

Members of Congress are moving to push the U.S. Navy to develop a containerized version of its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. Containerized designs could help accelerate the service’s fielding of laser directed energy weapons on a wider array of ships, providing added layers of close-in defense. The Navy has already been experimenting with palletized designs as part of its larger laser development efforts, which have faced continued hurdles in recent years.

An early draft of the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for the 2027 Fiscal Year, would authorize the addition of $5 million to the Navy’s budget for work on a containerized HELIOS. It would also add $2.5 million for a “Containerized Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System,” which does not otherwise appear to be mentioned, at least by that name, in the service’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year. The House Armed Services Committee released this draft NDAA earlier this week.

The Navy’s proposed budget for the next fiscal cycle does already include a request for $75.6 million for a separate Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) effort. The development of a containerized 150-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon, along with work toward 300 and 500-kilowatt-class designs, are part of the stated plans for JLWS. It’s unclear whether the Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System mentioned in the draft NDAA is related to JLWS.

HELIOS, which the Navy has also designated Mk 5 Mod 0, is a 60-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon. At that power level, it is able to destroy or at least damage certain targets, such as drones or small boats, a capability that has now been demonstrated in multiple tests. There has been talk in the past about scaling HELIOS’s power rating up to 150 kilowatts.

Read it.

Regulation follows regulation. On August 12, the so-called EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will enter into force, reorganizing the recycling framework for packaging across Europe. Adopted last year, the regulation becomes binding for all EU member states and companies on August 12 and, as an EU regulation, does not require transposition into national law. The PPWR will replace the current patchwork of national packaging recycling laws with a unified framework for the EU single market. Until then, Germany’s existing Packaging Act (VerpackG) remains in effect.

Brussels always tells the same story: regulation is supposed to strengthen the European single market and harmonize economic and environmental objectives. A beautiful narrative — especially for those who stand to profit from it. Similar dynamics have already emerged in other sectors, such as carbon emissions trading. In the end, compliance costs for affected businesses rise, the bureaucratic apparatus expands through new control and sanctioning mechanisms, and the overall economy loses competitiveness.

Read it.

People are beginning to understand that those who rule in their name have long been working to eliminate the nation-state.

The United Nations is not neutral ground for national governments to discuss their differences; it is a governmental construct meant to replace national governments. The World Health Organization is not an international body meant to coordinate complex responses to global health emergencies; it is an institution vested with vast power and authority to track and regulate every human on the planet. The Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank Group, and the International Monetary Fund don’t exist to expand free trade, open markets, and assist developing nations; they exist to centralize control over all economic transactions in the world.

The onslaught of “green new deal” laws in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand have nothing to do with preserving the environment or “saving the planet”; they are part of a broader U.N. initiative to track every person’s so-called “carbon footprint” in order to monitor, tax, and regulate all human activity. The U.N.’s “climate reparations” policy has nothing to do with “justice” or “science”; it exists to justify the redistribution of wealth from Western nations to non-Western nations under the guise of “international law.”

The message we have heard all our lives is loud and clear: Nations do bad things. International organizations do good things.

The Other McCain.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire, and before that, the Belgian Congo, is one of those Third World nightmare hellholes that I describe as being “worse than Baltimore.” However, since a new federal prosecutor has brought Baltimore’s homicide problem under control, I’ll describe the DRC as worse than Memphis.

Joseph Conrad famously used the Belgian Congo as the scene for Heart of Darkness, with the madman Kurtz dying of fever, his final words being: “The horror! The horror!” The situation has not much improved lately, as the State Department warns: “Do not travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) due to crime, civil unrest, and health. Some areas have increased risk due to armed conflict.”

Welcome to the Turd World. Be careful not to step in the Diversity.