Read it.

In Michigan, you have the right to protect your home from burglars.

Unless they’re stealing from a building that’s detached from your actual house.

Oh, and you have to announce yourself to the burglars AND let them see you face-to-face before you shoot them.

…

One of the black teens who broke into Knapton’s garage got hit by a bullet. He went home instead of going to the hospital and ended up dying. Knapton has been charged with manslaughter.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The Navy is telling sailors to lock down their phones and social media accounts as online threats increase during the current conflict with Iran. Officials said that “adversary cyber actors” are increasingly targeting sailors online with a wide range of hack attempts and psychological operations.

The message even says to “??beware” of dating apps that share too much personal information.

The April 17 Navy-wide notice recommended that Navy personnel set their accounts to the “highest level” of privacy on social media, turn off their phone’s location tracking, microphone, and camera use, and scrub search engines like Google of personal information.

“In response to Operation Epic Fury, adversary cyber actors are conducting a social engineering campaign actively targeting Department of the Navy (DON) personnel and their families via spear phishing and social media contacts. These actors seek to psychologically influence DON personnel and their families, and also seek to trick personnel into clicking on/opening potentially malicious links and files,” officials wrote in the NAVADMIN.

Read it.

Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Yet that is essentially what the United States has attempted with its tactical air fleet.

The F-35 program’s total lifetime cost is projected to exceed two trillion dollars, the most expensive Major Defense Acquisition Program in history. The United States plans to purchase thousands of them. Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.

The problems fall into two categories. The first is the physical problem of operating in the Pacific. The second is the sustainability problem of fighting there for more than a few nights. Both problems point to the same solution: a balanced force that has the unique capabilities of the F-35, while hedging against its limitations by shifting more procurement dollars to unmanned systems. That would result in a force with fewer F-35s than projected, but positioned for what the decades to come will demand.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A pro-Israel Jewish member of the University of Michigan’s governing board is on his way out after Democratic leaders in the state instead backed a pro-Palestinian attorney with a history of antisemitic and pro-Hezbollah rhetoric for the spot.

One day Jews will wake up to the fact that Democrats are not their friends.

Read it.

Blue states these days got more Muslims than actual Christians anyway.

Read it.

A judge has ruled that the Trump administration should not have coerced Apple and Google into taking down apps which track the activity of ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Democrat judge, of course.

A preliminary injunction has been awarded, with the creators of ICE Sightings and Eyes Up told that they are likely to succeed in their argument that the government suppressed protected speech under the First Amendment …

Read it.

Here’s Mallory McMorrow, Democratic Senate candidate in the great state of Michigan, with the most cringe-worthy political video promotion ever recorded.

Hitler had a great backup band, too.

Read it.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Jewish Telegraphic Aency.

Maybe he was an Iconoclast. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Read it.

The Volo Museum in Illinois installed a permanent Titanic display three years ago and the display immediately flooded.

Then, on the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, it flooded again.

According to FOX 32, museum curator Brian Grams is convinced the display is haunted.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Two teenagers have been arrested in connection with an arson attack on a London synagogue on Sunday, the third within days on Jewish targets in the city.

No one was injured at Kenton United Synagogue after police said a “bottle with some sort of accelerant” was thrown through a window. A fire was extinguished before it could do significant damage.

Police offered few details about the men arrested beyond their ages, 17 and 19. But they said they saw emerging evidence that the attack and others in recent days may have been conducted in exchange for payments from Iran, which has said it would strike targets abroad in response to the U.S.-Israeli war against it.

“We’ve seen a pattern,” Matt Jukes, the police force’s deputy commissioner, said on the BBC on Monday. He said there had been 15 arrests related to incidents targeting the Jewish community in recent weeks and most appeared to be of “people taking cash as it looks like quick and easy money” to stage an attack.

Forgot why you even bother to get up in the morning?

Read it.

Murder, rape, and knife crime all increased in Germany in 2025, official figures show, despite an overall drop in crime largely driven by changes to drug laws.

Police recorded around 5.5 million crimes last year, a fall of 5.6% compared to 2024. Officials say the decline is mainly due to the partial legalisation of cannabis in April 2024, which reduced the number of drug-related offences. They caution that this makes direct comparisons with previous years less reliable.

Behind the overall drop, however, more serious offences moved in the opposite direction. Cases of murder and manslaughter rose by 6.5%, while rape and other serious sexual offences increased by 8.5%. Reports of child sexual abuse also continued to climb.

Knife crime remains a major concern. Police recorded around 29,000 knife-related offences in 2025—equivalent to roughly 80 incidents a day. In about half of these cases, knives were used in acts of violence, while the rest involved threats or intimidation. Many incidents took place in public spaces, including streets and transport hubs.

The figures also highlight differences in suspect profiles. Non-German nationals are significantly overrepresented among suspects, particularly in violent crime. Adjusted for their share of the population, foreign nationals were recorded as suspects at a rate around 2.6 times higher than German citizens, rising to roughly four times higher in violent offences. According to Welt, this gap cannot be explained by differences in age or gender and remains consistent across demographic groups.

My, what a surprise.

New Atlas.

Engineers at Rice University have cracked one of printed electronics’ most stubborn problems: how to cure freshly printed conductive ink without destroying the delicate surface underneath.

Their solution, published in Science Advances, uses a custom device that concentrates microwave energy into an area smaller than 200 micrometers (0.008 in) – heating only the newly deposited material to above 160 °C (320 °F) while everything around it stays cool.

Read it.

The Houthis in Yemen have generated a lot of news headlines since the Gaza war began, lobbing missiles into Israel and causing serious problems for international maritime traffic by attacking ships transiting the Bab-el-Mandeb off southern Yemen.

The Houthis (whose official name is now Ansar Allah) are a Shi’ite movement backed by Iran. They came into prominence during the Yemeni Revolution in 2011, which was an adjunct of the “Arab Spring” that had already swept Tunisia and Egypt. Their principal Sunni rivals within the radical Islamic ferment in Yemen were Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

With assistance from Iran, the Houthis took over about a third of Yemeni territory, including the capital, Sana’a. Their stronghold is in southern Yemen, adjacent to the Red Sea, which is why they have been able to do so much damage to ships travelling to or from the Suez Canal.

The Houthis have been receiving both weaponry and financial help from Iran. Now that the mullahs are on the ropes, I would expect that the mujahideen of Ansar Allah are facing lean times. I wondered how things were going for them, so I looked up some recent articles from the region.

Sure enough, the events of the past month have created a deficit of resources for the Houthi, which has contributed to internal strife among factions within the group.

The Other McCain.

“Gee, Stacy, is it really fair to post a picture of the deceased performer brandishing illegal firearms?” Perhaps, but good luck finding any pictures of Jalen Carpenter in which he is not brandishing firearms.

The image above is from the video for EbkCap82’s song “Zombieland 2,” in case you’d like to go enjoy that spectacle of substance abuse and threatened violence. Carpenter’s specialty was what is known as “drill” music, which is basically gang warfare with a beat — the rapper and his companions displaying stacks of cash, waving around Glocks with extended magazines, smoking weed, boasting of their felonies and threatening to murder rival gangsters. You know — urban culture.

ABC, a Voice of the Crust.

Say hello and goodbye to Shamar Elkins:

The incident happened around 6 a.m. local time in the Cedar Grove neighborhood of South Shreveport, according to Shreveport Police Cpl. Chris Bordelon, who said the suspect, Shamar Elkins, who was the father of seven of the deceased children, was shot and killed after a police chase.

The Telegraph (UK).

Of course they are.

Record numbers of foreign students are securing student loans amid fears the taxpayer is being defrauded of millions of pounds by fake claims.

The number of foreign students receiving loans of up to £13,000 a year has increased by 60 per cent in the past five years with seven European countries accounting for two-thirds of the 262,000 overseas claimants, official figures show.

That contrasts with a 6 per cent fall in the number of British students receiving loans over the same period from 1.2 million to 1.13 million, a decline of 73,000.

The Telegraph (UK).

On the Belgian coast during two world wars, thousands of British soldiers lost their lives. In Coxyde Military Cemetery, more than 1,500 valiant souls are laid to rest.

Men like Gunner A W Loney, of the Royal Field Artillery, who was 20 when he died at Passchendaele. Next to his grave lies that of a 19-year-old soldier killed in the relentless shelling and sniping around Ypres. These men made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our borders.

Today, standing amid the rows of white gravestones as the spring sunshine lights up the names engraved on them, it is hard not to wonder what they would have made of the invasion that is under way today.

Across the road from the cemetery is an accommodation centre for illegal immigrants. Sooner or later, some will be heading to the UK. Belgium is the new front in Britain’s losing battle against migrants. In recent weeks, more than 20 small boats have left the beaches of West Flanders for the UK.

It is astonishing how utterly spineless the British government is in the face of this French assistance in what is an actual invasion of Britain. In times past this would be seen as causus belli, and Steps Would Be Taken.

Utterly spineless.

The Telegraph (UK).

Using what?

Iran has vowed to retaliate after the United States fired on a cargo ship that tried to breach its naval blockade.

The USS Spruance opened fire on the Touska on Sunday after the vessel refused to stop in the Gulf of Oman.
US marines then took “full custody” of the ship, according to Donald Trump, who triumphantly posted on Truth Social that his troops had “blown a hole” in the tanker.

Iran hit back on Sunday by accusing the US of violating the ceasefire agreement, which has been in place since April 8 and is due to expire on Wednesday.

Oh, the ‘ceasefire agreement’ that they already broke by attacking ships transiting the Straiht of Hormuz? That ‘ceasefire agreement’?

“We warn that the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will soon respond and retaliate against this armed piracy and the US military,” a spokesman for the military’s central command told state media.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Day after day, new Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and her fellow Democrats demonstrate how much of their agenda is simply about securing power.

Spanberger signed a bill Monday that added the Commonwealth of Virginia to the National Popular Vote Compact, which is a misguided and downright unconstitutional attempt to get around the Electoral College in presidential elections.

The compact, which has now enlisted 18 states and the District of Columbia, would make the state’s Electoral College votes be whatever the national popular vote is, potentially nullifying democracy in the name of democracy.

Read it.

The Atlantic has a well-documented history of publishing fake hit pieces about President Donald Trump and his administration, and one wonders how many more hoaxes they can run before they get in real trouble.

Its latest effort targeting FBI Director Kash Patel may be its most reckless yet — and this time, the bureau is fighting back with lawyers.

Read it.

For decades insecure women have used feminism as a vehicle to crusade against “body shaming” and male objectification – Which is essentially a war on men who dare to have beauty preferences.

Nearly every feminist movement has roots in female physical insecurity, from the “fat positivity” movement, to the “slut walk” protests, to diversity requirements that are eliminating attractive women from popular media, to the “inversion” movement in which average women deliberately make themselves uglier “in rebellion” against the men who were never interested in them in the first place.

It’s no secret that female insecurity rules almost everything women do politically. One could say that feminism is essentially the weaponization of female insecurity as a means to gain power over society.

The latest trend to spew from the bowels of feminist activism is called “Catching Print” – Activists claim men are objectifying and shaming women, so women should objectify and shame men…by staring at and rating men’s junk. The problem is, these people don’t seem to understand that the vast majority of men simply don’t care.

Read it.

The currently closed Strait of Hormuz, situated between Oman and Iran, connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, and has emerged as a major flashpoint in the US-Iran war. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, off Yemen’s coast, has also remained a focal point among critical maritime chokepoints, given ongoing threats from Iran-linked Houthi rebels.

While both critical chokepoints have been in sharp focus in the news cycle and among US officials, institutional research desks, intelligence analysts, observers, the OSINT community on X, and even everyday viewers watching Fox News or CNN, there is also another set of regional and transregional straits that warrant additional monitoring given their importance to global energy flows and commercial shipping.

Shifting from the Hormuz chokepoint, the latest data from Bloomberg, citing AIS ship-tracking data, shows that tankers bound for China transiting from the Gulf area through the Strait of Malacca is yet another maritime chokepoint, especially for energy and trade flows into Asia.

The Strait of Malacca, at its narrowest point, is only 1.7 miles wide, creating a natural bottleneck. Most of the tankers transiting the tiny but very critical strait are hauling crude and LNG bound not just for China, but also for Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the region. This strait is a key link between Hormuz and China’s coastal refineries.

Read it.

We’ll get to that soon. But first, some physics!

I supposed something that looked as if made from Legos but it actually looks pretty good.

Read it.

British police said Sunday they are investigating whether a string of arson attacks on Jewish sites in London are the work of Iranian proxies.

The Metropolitan Police force says counterterror officers are probing the attacks on synagogues and other sites linked to the Jewish community, as well as an attack on a Persian-language media company.

No one has been injured in the blazes, the latest of which caused minor damage to a north London synagogue on Saturday night.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans said the attacks had been claimed online by a group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia.

Read it.

U.S. Marines took custody of an Iranian-flagged cargo ship that tried to get past the U.S. naval blockade, President Donald announced Sunday afternoon.

In a post on social media, Trump announced that the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer the USS Spruance disabled the Iranian-flagged vessel Touska, a ship under U.S. Treasury sanctions, and fired a direct hit on it. The Spruance, one of the ships operating near or in the Strait of Hormuz, told the ship to stop and turn back, Trump said.

The tracking side MarineTraffic reported that the Touska was sailing in the Persian Gulf earlier on Sunday. In a statement Sunday afternoon, U.S. Central Command said the Touska was sailing towards Bandar Abbas, Iran. The Touska reportedly ignored several direct messages from the USS Spruance.

“After Touska’s crew failed to comply with repeated warnings over a six-hour period, Spruance directed the vessel to evacuate its engine room. Spruance disabled Touska’s propulsion by firing several rounds from the destroyer’s 5-inch MK 45 Gun into Touska’s engine room,” CENTCOM said in its statement.

Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit then boarded the Touska. They now have “full custody” of the ship, Trump wrote. It’s not clear what is next for the cargo ship and its crew. CENTCOM shared a brief clip of footage taken from the USS Spruance, showing the destroyer sailing near the cargo ship and eventually firing its guns at the Touska.

FA, FO.

ATQUE: U.S. Navy Destroyer Disables Iranian-Flagged Cargo Vessel (Naval News)

Navy Matters.

The Middle East, and the Strait of Hormuz, in this case, is a clear example of the regional sensor network concept being applied against a third rate enemy over a very small region. This should be as dominating an effect as is possible to get. Iran has no sensor countermeasures. No jamming. No signal disruption capability. No reported cyber attack capability. Nothing to hinder our sensors or the regional network. Our networked sensing should be flawless. Perfect. Omniscient.

So … how did Iranian boats manage to attack two merchant ships and return safely to wherever they came from? How did we not see them? How did we not kill them seconds after they emerged from wherever they were hiding? For that matter, how could they hide from our all-seeing, all-knowing, regional sensor network? These are not some kind of uber-stealth vessels aided by sophisticated electronic warfare equipment. These were some Iranians in a speedboat sailing around, pretending to be a navy – the equivalent of Boy Scouts pretending to be an Army. The Navy claims to be able to spot periscopes at vast distances … but not speedboats racing around confined waters?

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.

The jokes write themselves.

Read it.

Nearly 600 migrants crossed the English Channel on Saturday, April 18th as criminal smuggling networks expanded their operations beyond France and began launching additional boats from Belgian beaches.

According to figures cited by Border Force sources, at least 250 people are understood to have departed from Belgian coastal areas during the day, while further crossings from northern France meant around 585 reached UK waters. . The arrivals bring the total number of small boat migrants recorded this year to more than 6,000.

Officials said the shift to Belgium represents a significant tactical change by people-smuggling gangs, which are increasingly using multiple launch sites to reduce law enforcement pressure on the French coast. One maritime security source described the development as the biggest tactical shift from the criminal smuggling gangs in the last few years.

Until recently, Belgium was rarely used for such crossings, with only a handful of attempted launches annually. However, authorities estimate that around 25 dinghies have now set off from Belgian beaches so far this year.

Read it.

In 1955, Algeria had over 1 million Catholics and 140,000 Jews. Today, as Pope Leo visits Algeria, there are some 8,000 Catholics in Algeria and there are fewer than 200 Jews.

99% of the population of what was one of the old territories of Christianity are Sunni Muslims.

Was Islam so popular that all the Christians and Jews decided to convert? Not at all. They were persecuted, murdered, tortured and driven out by Islamic violence that occurred in our lifetimes.

The Foundry.

President Trump’s endorsement of Steve Hilton for governor of California earlier this month has sent the Democratic establishment into predictable convulsions.

Katie Porter, one of the leading Democratic hopefuls, declared that the race now boils down to a stark choice: “California values against MAGA.” Others called Hilton a “Trump puppet.” The implication is clear: Any candidate endorsed by President Trump is a dangerous interloper foisting flyover-country extremism on the enlightened progressive utopia that is modern California.

One wonders what these “California values” actually are. The term is invoked with the same pious certainty once reserved for the Ten Commandments, yet the state it supposedly defines is America’s poster child for policy-induced decline.

Under one-party Democratic rule (with legislative majorities dating back decades and a full trifecta since 2011), California boasts the highest state income tax in the country, the highest gas prices, and among the most punitive regulations on business and housing. It leads the nation in homelessness while spending billions with little visible result.

Read it.

It appears that retirement isn’t exactly suiting leftist billionaire George Soros, as America’s most notorious political kingmaker was revealed to have dropped another massive fortune ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The Soros group, Fund for Policy Reform, pumped a whopping $50 million into his political cash guzzler Democracy PAC January 13, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Despite officially handing the reins of his $25 billion Open Society Foundations to his more unhinged acolyte son Alex, the elder Soros is signaling that he has no intention of abandoning his years-long obsession with buying control of the U.S. government for Democrats and politically handicapping his nemesis President Donald Trump. As Forbes magazine contextualized April 16, Soros has once again positioned himself as the largest midterm election donor so far.

Jonathan Turley

There has been growing criticism (and falling poll numbers) of Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger after she ran as a moderate and then immediately veered to the far left after her election. Once in power, Spanberger and the Democrats unleashed a slew of tax increases, moved to eliminate all but one Republican district in the purple state, passed an array of anti-gun laws, and enacted other controversial measures. One of these measures is a clearly unconstitutional effort to strip pro-Confederate groups of their tax exemption.

This week, Spanberger signed HB167, the law that eliminated the tax exemption for various confederacy-linked groups, including the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the General Organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, Incorporated, the Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the J.E.B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, Inc.

Notably, as soon as they came into power, Democrats also passed House Bill 1377 to move against the Virginia Military Institute, including appointing a task force that could effectively close the historic school. Many Democrats have previoulsy sought to close VMI despite its unique and inspiring history in training some of our most famous military leaders, including General George Marshall. Liberals want to close the school due to its history from the Civil War.

Read it.

An April 2026 housing report by Highland Cabinetry highlights a growing affordability crisis across major American cities, revealing that the true cost of housing goes beyond total price and is better understood through the lens of cost per square foot. By analyzing home prices, rental costs, and average property sizes across 40 large cities, the study shows where Americans are paying the most for the least amount of living space. This approach offers a clearer picture of value, emphasizing how much space residents actually receive for their money rather than just the overall cost of buying or renting a home.

At the center of this trend is San Francisco, which ranks as the most expensive housing market in the country for both buyers and renters. Homebuyers in the city pay more than $1,000 per square foot on average, with a typical home costing around $1.24 million for just over 1,100 square feet. Renters face similar challenges, with average monthly rents exceeding $3,500. Despite these high costs, the amount of space available remains limited, meaning residents often pay a premium for relatively small living areas. This imbalance between price and space has made San Francisco the clearest example of how housing value has eroded in dense urban markets.

Just behind San Francisco is San Jose, which actually surpasses it in terms of price per square foot for homebuyers. In San Jose, the average cost exceeds $1,200 per square foot, pushing typical home prices to around $1.4 million. The rental market is similarly expensive, with monthly costs rivaling those in San Francisco. These high prices are largely driven by strong demand tied to the region’s technology sector, where high salaries continue to fuel competition for limited housing supply. As a result, even relatively modest homes command exceptionally high prices.

Read it.

A district court judge repeatedly shielded the Southern Poverty Law Center from scrutiny during a defamation case and then dismissed a conservative group’s case because it “lacked evidence,” according to the conservative group’s attorneys.

Attorneys for the estate of Donald A. King and his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, filed an 81-page brief Thursday asking a higher court to reconsider the case. They claimed that Judge Corey L. Maze of the Northern District of Alabama erred in rejecting their attempts to obtain evidence proving the SPLC acted with actual malice in branding the society an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

“The case was decided by stacking four errors,” Harry Mihet, chief litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel and one of DIS’s attorneys, told The Daily Signal in a Friday phone call. “Cutting off discovery, ignoring what the SPLC already knew, twisting the legal standard, and stretching the single-publication rule, until the plaintiffs had no case left. And so the case was decided, not because there is no evidence available, but because the court did not allow any evidence to be gathered, to show that the SPLC acted with actual malice.”

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.

The Antiplanner.

Downtown Seattle lost more than 13,000 jobs last year, many of them fleeing a new 5 percent income tax that is supposed to support subsidized housing. A new report from the Downtown Seattle Association says that downtown currently has 317,000 jobs, down from 330,000 last year and from 350,000 jobs just before the pandemic.

Read it.

know this is California, but did they think they could get away with this?

California wants to stop Nick Shirley because Nick Shirley … exposes fraudsters who steal from government programs and indirectly rob American citizens to fund their lavish lifestyles.

Under this bill, which is not yet a law, if you show up to any of these fraudulent businesses, or if you show up to an immigration services center undercover, as the BBC did recently, the fraudsters can call the cops on you, call Newsom on you, and fine and imprison you for undercover journalism.

 

Read it.

A rather inefficient method of money-laundering, but Democrats were never known for their cleverness.

ATQUE: ‘Money Laundering’? Newsom Used Donations To Inflate Book Sales

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.

The Register.

Every now and then, a researcher comes up with something that sounds either wrong or unoriginal to outsiders – yet carries just enough of a chance of being correct, novel, and consequential to demand a closer look.

On this occasion, the honor goes to Andrzej Odrzywo?ek, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Jagiellonian University, Kraków.

In a recently updated, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, Odrzywo?ek says he has, in essence, developed a two-button calculator that can compute the standard repertoire of a scientific calculator familiar to a high school math and science student. You might have to push the buttons a number of times, but the point is the underlying simplicity.

A single two-input gate already suffices for all Boolean logic in digital hardware; Odrzywo?ek’s claim is that continuous mathematics may have an analogous primitive. It can generate elementary functions from a single operator that would otherwise require multiple distinct operations. These include trigonometric functions such as sine, cosine, and tangent; algebraic functions; and arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The two-input gate also produces constants including ?, e (Euler’s number, 2.71828…), and i (the square root of minus one).

The proposed operator is eml(x, y) = exp(x) – ln(y). Eml is the exponential-minus-log function, exp is the exponential function, and ln is the natural logarithm (or the logarithm to the base e).

“A calculator with just two buttons, EML and the digit 1, can compute everything a full scientific calculator does. This is not a mere mathematical trick. Because one repeatable element suffices, mathematical expressions become uniform circuits, much like electronics built from identical transistors, opening new ways to encoding, evaluating, and discovering formulas across scientific computing,” the paper says.

It even has a diagram showing how the functions cascade from the proposed operator.

Read it.

Science Daily.

A newly discovered molecule could reshape the future of weight loss treatments by mimicking the powerful appetite-suppressing effects of drugs like Ozempic — but without many of the unpleasant side effects. Identified using artificial intelligence, this tiny peptide, called BRP, appears to act directly on the brain’s appetite-control center, helping animals eat less and lose fat without nausea or muscle loss.

New York Post.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps fired on at least one ship in the waters near Oman after Tehran again closed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization.

Two IRGC gunboats approached a tanker about 20 nautical miles northeast of the Gulf country around 1 p.m. local time — and opened fire unprovoked, the tanker’s master reported.

A second vessel was attacked by an “unknown projectile” some two hours later in the same area, the UKMTO said.

Daily Telegraph (UK).

A judge has thrown out a ‘politically motivated’ attempt to bring a private prosecution against a British-Israeli soldier using Victorian-era law.

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) had tried to get the Westminster magistrates’ court to issue a summons to begin a prosecution against the dual British-Israeli national who served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF).
The group invoked the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 (FEA), which was enacted in the Victorian era to prevent British nationals from being deployed as mercenaries abroad.

But the court heard that the FEA, as interpreted, does not apply to a dual national serving in the armed forces of his other country.

Successive UK governments have also said the FEA does not apply to British nationals serving in the IDF.