DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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During the current but tenuous ceasefire, Iran has successfully managed to excavate multiple key sites tied to its missile program that were previously bombarded by the American-Israeli warplanes during the initial five weeks of Operation Epic Fury.

While the revelation is not exactly new, a fresh CNN report has confirmed through recent satellite imagery that more missile tunnels have been dug out than previously thought.

Tehran utilized basic construction equipment to dig out several missile launchers and reopen subterranean tunnels tied to its missile program. The visual analysis determined that Iran was able to successfully clear the entrances to 50 out of 69 targeted tunnels, alongside 18 distinct missile production sites.

“Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them,” CNN wrote. “Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.”

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Few stories highlight our country’s fall more clearly than that of Henry Nowak’s murder.

Henry was stabbed five times with a shastar, an eight-inch Sikh ceremonial blade by Vickrum Digwa.

As Henry bled on the streets of Southampton, the police arrived and arrested him. He died in the early hours of December 3rd, 2025, begin for help.

…

Digwa, brought up in Britain’s new moral order, told the police, as they arrived on the scene, that Henry had “shouted racist abuse” at him.

London Review of Books, a Voice of the Crust.

So where is all that cash, who’s using it, and for what? The answer proposed by Bullough is bizarre: nobody knows. ‘The number of banknotes is increasing, and the question of why the value of banknotes has increased so markedly remains unanswered.’ Central bankers don’t have much interest in the question. It is immensely valuable for any country to be able to produce currency that’s in worldwide demand: for the cost of printing a few bits of paper, a developed economy receives billions of dollars of value in pounds, dollars or euros. This is called seigniorage, and central bankers are as keen as anyone else on what is in effect free money. But the incuriosity they’ve developed around the question is remarkable. Especially when you home in on what all that cash is actually being used for. According to the Financial Action Task Force, which was set up in 1989 to fight financial crime at a global level, ‘it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the total amount of cash physically transported for money laundering purposes globally is in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.’ This seems to be the amazing answer to the question of the missing cash: it’s being used in criminal transactions.

One thing that comes clear in the article, and which the article appears to ignore, is that money laundering is totally a problem for government; no private citizen or business gives a damn where you got your money. And the reason governments worry about where you got your money is becuase they want to steal as much of it as possible from you through taxation. Who hates billionaires the most? Politicians, who don’t think that they are getting their Fair Share of Jeff Bezos’ money.

The rules are extensive, complicated and very expensive to transgress. The result is that in the US alone, banks file ten thousand SARs every single day. That’s 3.8 million reports a year. It is impossible for the authorities to act on every one of those. The outcome is a system that flags so much activity it functionally resembles one that doesn’t flag any activity at all. The scale of the system is flaw number three: all of this is extraordinarily expensive. Compliance – the process of following the rules – costs $206 billion a year globally, according to the research company LexisNexis. That’s a lot of money for a system that looks in the wrong place, doesn’t work even when it’s looking in the right place, and causes enormous amounts of friction to the law-abiding, who are the ones who ultimately bear the cost. Its processes are hugely intrusive (Bullough rightly wonders at how little fuss there is over the privacy implications of SARs), create bureaucratic obstacles to ordinary citizens and businesses, and don’t do what they are supposed to do: prevent money laundering.

Not to mention the eternal truth that evolution works even when you don’t want it to. All of this regulatory friction affects mostly the innocent bystanders, and rarely touches the objects of government affection. Natural selection works even faster in a hostile environment than in a comfortable one; all that these regulations do is speed up the process of eliminating the least clever.

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More than 10,000 federal lawyers have left the government since President Donald Trump returned to office, a 17% drop that has thinned legal staff across major agencies and pushed Democratic state attorneys general and advocacy groups to absorb the displaced talent.

Sounds as if we are getting rid of the right 10,000. A good start.

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How do you pass a bill into law that either you cannot pass or that the governor vetoed? Easy. Turn it into a part of the budget that must be passed (at some point).

In 2025 alone, several examples of this chicanery took place.

Then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin was blamed for several “skinny budget” periods during his term because he would veto budget items like the one creating a rental assistance pilot program, stating that the underlying legislation proposed during the 2025 session had failed to pass and that the General Assembly instead inserted the full proposal into the budget bill.

Similarly, a new first-time homebuyer assistance program was funded through the budget even though the underlying legislation had not passed. In his veto message, Youngkin said the proposal should be considered through separate legislation and noted that the legislative effort had failed.

Before the 2025 session ended, county-government advocates openly urged budget conferees to include language from SB 1307—which would levy a 1% local sales tax—in the budget because doing so would provide another route for implementation even if the bill itself were vetoed. A Virginia Association of Counties document explicitly noted that language from the bill had already been placed in the Senate budget proposal.

Guess what’s returned?

The Foundry.

When polled, Michigan voters express their disapproval of the masses of Third World migrants in the United States. In fact, by a stunning 6-to-1 margin, Michigan voters believe the state welcomes too many Islamic immigrants.

For decades, ever since the disastrous Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, America has invited in masses of migrants from the Third World, mostly based simply on family ties rather than skills, alignment with our values, and love of America. Now, new polling from the American heartland shows that voters have had enough and want to prioritize existing American citizens and fully assimilate the record number of immigrants already here.

Thankfully, President Donald Trump recognizes this unfolding movement in America. In fact, as The Heritage Foundation reported, 2025 was the first year with negative net migration since the 1960s, a huge accomplishment! A multi-layered “America First” agenda prioritizes citizens, including strong border control, internal immigration law enforcement, and more stringent controls over legal migration and work visas for foreigners.

This new trend counters decades of failures that attacked America’s culture, weakened societal cohesion, and saw an ever-lower share of U.S. economic output flow to regular workers. For too long, U.S. policies shaped by ruling-class elites seemed based on three inextricably linked blunders:

Ever notice how every delivery service except the Post Office delivers your stuff to your front porch—the way the Post Office used to do?

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The nonprofit Feeding Our Future claimed to have served 91 million meals to children across Minnesota. But as Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kline described in a recent court hearing, they were not feeding kids—they were instead “feeding the bank accounts of fraudsters.” FOF founder Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison for stealing close to $250 million in taxpayer dollars, orchestrating what the DOJ called the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.

Seventy-eight defendants and counting set up shell companies and phantom sites to feed nonexistent children. Former prosecutor Joe Thompson described the urgency of the FBI takedown: “I remember we took down the case on a Thursday because the following day, on a Friday, is when [the Minnesota Department of Education] paid out the money. Every Friday, they paid out about $20 million.” Twenty million dollars every Friday for meals the system never independently verified.

How exactly did a $4.1 billion federal program pay a quarter of a billion dollars for meals that were never served—and never notice?

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Florida is probably going to end residential property tax (on first 250k of value, growing to 500k of value), thus making the state an even-more attractive place to live. DeSantis is cleverly proposing that new out-of-state purchasers will have to pay 5 years of property tax before they “graduate” into the tax-free category. I suspect that this actually will accelerate migration into Florida, as new buyers will want to get the clock started earlier rather than later. In short: invest now and reap benefits later.

Israel, a country run and populated by the world’s most brilliant fools, have taken exactly the opposite approach. The first 10 years of Israeli tax residency comes with zero include tax on foreign-source income (though every dime must be reported). AND if you move in before the end of 2026, you are tax exempt for the first $250k of Israeli income as well for 2 years (tapering off to zero).

But after that, Israel will tax you in full. And unlike many other countries, the Israelis are incredibly good at collecting whatever they think is due. Immigrants do not get away with the kinds of nonsense that immigrants to the United States do: quite the contrary.

So: move to Israel, and get seized – in the long run. Move to Florida, pay the entrance fee, and it is smooth sailing from there.

This is not a hypothetical tradeoff. I know a lot of people who choose between Florida and Israel. It is a common dilemma. Florida now has more Jews than the entire New York/NJ area! And I am quite sure that this trend will accelerate with DeSantis’ initiative.

The Other McCain.

When I wrote about Trump Derangement Syndrome over the weekend, it was while following the discourse over the latest scandalous Graham Platner revelations. These are certainly not the first such revelations, nor will they be the last, as GOP operatives reportedly have a vast pile of opposition research on Mr. Nazi Tattoo they’re waiting to unload when the time is right. But the reaction from liberals to what came out over the weekend was to double-down, to dig their entrenchments deeper, to rationalize the necessity of defending Platner at all costs, no matter what.

The Gegister.

California has passed a controversial bill requiring 3D printer manufacturers to build in controls that block the production of firearm components – a move drawing sharp pushback from technologists and privacy advocates.

Lawmakers approved Assembly Bill 2047 on May 26. The bill requires manufacturers to embed a “firearm blueprint detection algorithm” in every model by July 2028. Printers that don’t support this algorithm would be banned from sale sale in California.

The bill must still pass through the California State Senate, and will pass through California governor Gavin Newsom’s desk if it clears the Senate. Newsom can then either sign it into law, or veto it.

What these algorithms will look like is not yet known, but the Department of Justice, and any other state agencies that get roped into the task of developing them, must publish written guidance on performance standards by January 2028.

The bill sets two core performance standards: the algorithm must block so-called “ghost gun” components – untraceable 3D-printed firearm parts – with a high degree of reliability, and the safeguards must be robust enough to resist circumvention even by technically skilled users.

Both of which requiements are impossible. Yet another reason not to live or work in California.

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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.

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Is there an official dictionary somewhere that translates all of these Woke shibboleths?

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Well, this is going to make the weeks-long ballot-counting process in Los Angeles a lot more interesting, isn’t it?

Super eaqsy to do—just get a book of matches, light it, and drop it in the box.

They’re setting fire to vote-by-mail boxes, because those are a big thing in California, and people are targeting voting centers for damage and destruction.

Third-world countries run their elections cleaner than this.

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Honestly, the ancient pagans that sacrificed their children to demons were way cooler than our modern demonic heresies.

Luther is no doubt rotating in his grave had high speed.

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When I see “African” I think ‘freeloader”. I have never seen any evidence that contradicts that.

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Anti-ICE demonstrations outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, an ICE immigration detention facility, escalated in the overnight hours as the far-left and well-funded maximum pressure campaign entered its ninth day on Saturday. The continued mobilization only suggests a coordinated pressure operation, with dark-money-funded NGOs appearing to provide organizational and financial support.

Citizen journalist Nick Sortor went undercover at the anti-ICE encampment outside Delaney Hall in Newark on Saturday night, documenting what he described as far-left revolutionaries training their so-called ‘woke warriors’ to combat ICE agents.

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

Roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been laid off or forced to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, crisis response experience and highly specialized language skills.

Raise your hand if you think that the Federal tovernment needs more of the type of peiole who ran American foreign policy prior to Trump’s election in 2016.

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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.

The Foundry.

Is the federal government still funneling taxpayer dollars to some of the leftist activist groups that called the shots during President Joe Biden’s administration?

The Trump White House is asking federal agencies to investigate past and potentially continuing funding for a host of nonprofits, many of which are associated with aggressive promotion of leftist causes.

On May 13, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a budget data request seeking comprehensive information on the federal tax dollars supporting 49 nonprofits.

In the document, OMB asks each federal agency to include all grants, cooperative agreements, loans, contracts, and other monetary awards, even if the provision of the funding is under litigation.

The request focuses on fiscal years 2024, 2025, and estimated obligations in fiscal year 2026.

A person familiar with OMB’s request told the Daily Signal that the request might capture data not accessible on USASpending.gov, the publicly-available database of federal grants and contracts.

The list includes many of the leftist activist groups that sent staff and policy ideas to the Biden administration, influencing the federal government in a “woke” direction.

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.

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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.

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In our cells, cytoskeletal proteins called tubulins snap onto each other to form soaring tubular arches and rails, capable of spanning entire cells, growing at one end while they fall apart at the other. These tubes, known as microtubules, form and bloom and decay in a dance that controls many aspects of eukaryotic life. They handle our chromosomes and help cells divide. They carry machines and act as tracks for motors. They push and pull cellular membranes, turning them into useful shapes.

Now, researchers have found that these proteins are in those mysterious cells. What are they doing there? And could they be part of what, so long ago, helped our ancestors strike out in new directions?

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By now, the hand-drawn feature was supposed to be dead. It’s been 25 years or more since the talk started.

Back in 1995, Toy Story proved that CG features could be great — and massively successful. Just a few years later, Pixar’s president (that is, Steve Jobs) was boasting that hand-drawn animation was outmoded. “The characters we make are far more expressive, so we tell better stories,” he said.3

The workers who created Pixar’s movies didn’t necessarily feel that way. “My first love is really 2D animation, so I’d like to think it’s not dead. And I don’t think it is,” said Pete Docter in 2001. He argued that it has its own strengths, techniques that “will never work in CG.” The studio’s Doug Sweetland agreed: “people didn’t stop painting” with the invention of photography, he noted.4

They made good points. But Hollywood is a strange business. Certain decisions get made based on the buzzwords or slogans going around the corporate offices that day. If it sounds good, and it appears to help the bottom line, even a myth can become common sense.

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A recent post from Daniel Lacalle, “How Keynesians Got The US Economy Wrong Again,” exposed the widening gap between John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory and reality. Despite the confident forecasts of leading Keynesian economists, the U.S. economy in 2025 continues to defy expectations. The Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle failed to trigger the widely predicted “hard landing,” and growth has proven more resilient. Simultaneously, inflation remains somewhat sticky, but still declining, and the economy refuses to follow the neat, linear pathways that textbook models suggest.

This latest embarrassment for Keynes’ orthodoxy is part of a much larger story. The failures aren’t isolated miscalculations but the predictable result of a flawed framework that policymakers have clung to for decades. Keynesian economics didn’t just “get it wrong” in 2025, but has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises for over forty years. And the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore.

At its core, Keynesian economics is deceptively simple. When demand for the private sector falls, the government should borrow and spend to fill the gap. The idea is that temporary fiscal stimulus injections will smooth business cycles, reduce unemployment, and quickly return the economy to full capacity.

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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.

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I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: “If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the data by name?”

My immediate thought was: If you have a JavaScript array with a million entries, you’re certainly doing something wrong.

The interviewer continued: “There are multiple fields that you should be able to sort by.”

This felt like a trick question. Surely the right answer was to explain why you shouldn’t be sorting millions of records in JavaScript. Pagination, database indexing, server-side filtering. So I said exactly that.

…

My crime? Prioritizing real-world efficiency over theatrical scale. The interviewer didn’t see a practical engineer, he saw a candidate who “lacked vision.”

I wish I had known this when I was interviewing for jobs. It would have saved me a lot of grief.

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Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change.

They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across many scales of life — seemingly wherever there’s a branching system of inherited modifications — in a dynamic not examined in traditional evolutionary models.

That’s the perspective emerging from a new mathematical framework published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that describes the pace of evolutionary change. The new model, part of a roughly 50-year-long reimagining of evolution’s tempo, is rooted in the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was introduced by the paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

Never trust a ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

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Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has guided research for more than 70 years.

Their study, published in Science Advances, presents “ousiometrics,” a quantitative approach to studying essential meaning. The work suggests that language is not organized mainly around emotion, but around a deeper pattern shaped by power, danger, and order.

The central finding is striking: across language, humans consistently lean toward safety.

Never trust any ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

This sprawling ancient metropolis in the jungle of Ecuador has revealed a unique form of urbanism found only in the Amazon. Sofia Quaglia visits the site for the story of this mysterious civilisation.

Of course, whenever a Narrative Media ‘journalist’ claims to be giving you The True Story, you ought to be especially on the lookout for The Agenda.

Naturally, being an instance of FemBot Journalism, it can’t start with anything except a Charming Anecdote before getting to the actual thing you came to read.

But persist—you may find an actual fact in the least likely location.

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Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz has ruled that companies in Delaware will be able to vote in elections just like people.

This is especially wacky for Delaware.

As per the US Census Bureau, the estimated human population of Delaware is just over 1 million.

But there are over 2 million corporations headquartered in the state, which means there are far more companies in Delaware than there are people.

According to Bloomberg Law, the ruling came up because the town of Fenwick Island was already letting corporations vote in its municipal elections (they own most of the property, after all).

The ACLU thought letting companies vote as if they were human beings might drown out the real people who actually live in the city of Fenwick Island, so they sued.

You can’t make this shit up.

The Washington Poop, paper of record for the Deep State.

Democratic state leaders around the country have an unusual strategy to stymie President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion settlement fund for people who claim they were wrongly investigated by the government.

Their plan: Tax the payouts at 100 percent.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has endorsed the idea, saying, “It’s an action we look forward to taking.” State legislators in New York and Wisconsin are crafting bills on the topic. And Democratic candidates are rallying behind the tactic in blue states.

Simple remedy: Don’t live in a Blue state. (Ask me a hard one.)

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The departure of more than 10,000 federal lawyers has left some agencies without sufficient staff and has boosted the ranks of state attorneys general offices and advocacy group

Raise your hand if you think that the Federal government needs more lawyers.

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When authorities tell you to be afraid of a virus, your mind can make symptoms real, even when no pathogen exists. This is not conspiracy theory; it’s documented science, and it has been weaponized against the public for decades. The nocebo effect — the evil twin of the placebo — is the key to understanding how pandemics are manufactured as psychological operations. The word “nocebo” means “I will harm” in Latin, and that’s exactly what this phenomenon does: it turns negative expectations into real physical harm.

The idea that a suggestion can make you sick is as old as medicine itself, yet it has been deliberately ignored by the scientific establishment because it threatens the entire foundation of the infectious disease model. Research on the nocebo effect in the context of COVID-19 shows that the pandemic produced a “nocebodemic effect” characterized by mass negative interpretation of health services and medical treatments. When combined with the fear narrative pumped out by governments and media, this creates a perfect storm of psychogenic illness that requires no actual virus to produce symptoms. The institutions that profit from sickness have learned to weaponize this effect on a scale never seen before.

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The ultimate claim to victimhood is the claim that a group of people are “refugees” from mass persecution or “genocide.” The political left covets this victim status more than anything else because, within first world liberal societies, refugees have immediate political capital and access to easy money. Within every leftist narrative there is an agenda for power and a life without adult responsibility.

It is perhaps ironic that thousands of progressive activists and LGBT advocates are leaving red states over imaginary oppression after they spent years attacking conservatives for escaping blue states over very real medical tyranny. At least conservatives never called themselves “refugees.”

Leftists specifically believe their rights are being violated in red states because conservative governments won’t allow them to mutilate their children with hormone therapy and sex change surgeries. This nightmare trend, which is increasingly proven by science to have a detrimental effect on the minds and health of the people who undergo gender therapies, is still heavily protected in leftist havens like Seattle.

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Needless to say, this version of “Christian” is not one that any of the Apostles would recognize.

For at least a decade the progressive movement has been obsessed with infiltrating every aspect of American life and culture, even going so far as co-opting Christian churches in an attempt to claim them as “safe spaces” for woke ideology. This might sound odd to those who grew up in the devoutly atheist era of liberalism, but those days are long gone and seem quaint in comparison to today’s cavalcade of circus freaks.

Well, despite their crushing defeat in 2024 the parade of unhinged woke Democrats has not abated. In fact, it seems to be getting worse. Numerous democratic socialists are running for office in blue states and cities and some are unseating more centrist Democrat incumbents. The party is being overrun with far-left fanatics, a predictable outcome when one accepts the fact that leftists never admit they are wrong and always double down.

A prime example, maybe the most egregious example, is James Talarico – A Democrat candidates for US Senate in Texas. Talarico is a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who has served in the Texas House of Representatives since 2018. Talarico has ties to an NGO called Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), which coaches potential civic leaders in far-left ideology.

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German remigration activist Maximilian Märkl, who was arrested by federal police on Friday as he prepared to board a flight to Portugal and forbidden to leave the country, defied the travel ban and was greeted as a hero when he arrived at the Remigration Summit in Porto after 22 hours of driving across Europe.

“It was a little European adventure,” Märkl said in an interview with alternative TV channel AUF1, adding that the drive through Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal reminded him of “just how beautiful our homeland is and how much it’s worth fighting for.”

While expecting legal consequences upon his return to Germany, the spokesman for Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland, said he’s counting on alternative media and the organization’s support network to stand behind him.

I would refuse to remain in a country that did that sort of shit.

Fortunately, America is not that bad … yet.

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In a small workshop in northern France, in Montreuil-aux-Lions, a very special kind of thread has been woven for seven generations: the silk threads of Maison Declercq, master trimmers, whose creations enable the restoration of some of the finest fabrics and pieces of furniture in the world.

Their story touches me particularly deeply, as I grew up between Saint-Étienne, the capital of ribbon and trimmings, and Lyon, the capital of silk, where the most prestigious historic silk houses, such as Prelle or Tassinari et Châtel, still thrive today. Even as a child, I never tired of admiring the incredible wooden looms invented by the craftsmen of my homeland, impressive cathedrals of thread that gave birth to a thousand-and-one wonders in shimmering colours. Tassels, rosettes, ribbons, tiebacks: all these seemingly useless trinkets, yet they once elegantly adorned a delicate bergère chair where Queen Marie-Antoinette used to rest, or a sumptuous curtain drawn by Empress Eugénie. The Declercq family hails from the North, yet shares the same heritage and the same expertise.

There are artisan Houses that do not merely produce objects but weave “the thread of history.” Houses where every gesture seems to defy the brutality of the centuries, where the craftsman’s hand extends that of his ancestors in a stubborn fidelity to beauty. The Declercq workshop, an artistic trimmings maker since 1852, belongs to that category of French companies that the whole world envies us for.

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Christians in Finland are having a hard time of it lately. On the heels of the Finnish Supreme Court convicting MP Päivi Räsänen of “hate speech” over a booklet on the biblical view on homosexuality, now the country is going after mentions of God in songs sung at school graduations.

The Finnish Discrimination and Equality Board has fined the city of Espoo for repeatedly discriminating against the same student by exposing him to Christian content in songs traditionally performed at Christmas and end-of-year celebrations in spring. The city was fined €10,000 and ordered to pay the student an additional €2,500 in compensation.

Parents of the student said in their complaint that they had not been informed ahead of time or given the opportunity to withdraw their student from the events.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

t has never been a great time to be an infantryman. But today’s conditions are especially pitiable. In the “kill zone” imposed by both sides’ drones in eastern Ukraine, the risk of finding yourself inside a lethal video game is omnipresent. In February Ukrainian troops trying to join the small number of their comrades still inside Myrnohrad, a town in Donetsk, knew that Russian drones operated by well-hidden pilots would make it impossible to do so in vehicles. They had to infiltrate gingerly through the forests. It could take weeks. They might not get out for months.

The after-effects might last years. Soldiers returned from the front keep their windows covered and lights dimmed even when hundreds of kilometres outside the zone. Trapped in what psychologists speak of as hypervigilance and hyperarousal, the sound of a drone can trigger fear and a feeling of helplessness. They glance up as they walk.

As the battle for Myrnohrad was grinding on, American and Israeli jets taking part in the other great-power war of the moment were bombarding Iran at will. Their pilots had everything they needed to pound, assess and pound again, all the sensors the world’s most advanced military forces could bring to bear—on-board infrared and radar, back-up from drones nearby and radar farther off, satellite oversight and more besides. Israel hacked traffic cameras in Tehran to track Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, as it closed in to kill him.

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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.

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In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

US tech billionaire Peter Thiel has temporarily moved his family to Buenos Aires, drawn by the libertarian ideology and regulation-busting agenda of Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
Thiel, the founder of data intelligence group Palantir, plans to spend roughly three months in Argentina initially and has enrolled his children in a local private school, said two people familiar with his plans.

Since arriving in Buenos Aires in April, Thiel has attended a Superclásico football match between the city’s two biggest teams and spent a Saturday at a local chess club, placing third in a tournament. Thiel told the club’s surprised young players he hoped to return, according to one member.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

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An American aircraft fired a Hellfire missile into a cargo ship’s engine room on Friday, disabling the vessel after it tried to break the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that the military took action against the Gambia-flagged M/V Lian Star after it tried sailing through the Gulf of Oman towards an Iranian port on May 29.

It’s the fifth time since early April that U.S. forces have directly fired on a ship to disable it as part of enforcing the blockade. The U.S. and Iran have maintained dual and competing blockades on the Strait of Hormuz, a major route for oil, gas and other important chemicals, for several weeks, and the status of transit through the strait has been a point of contention between the two countries.

American forces issued more than 20 warnings to the merchant ship, saying it was violating the blockade.

“A U.S. aircraft disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room after Lian Star’s crew failed to comply,” CENTCOM said in its statement. “The ship is no longer transiting to Iran.”

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape,
You walk onto the lawn,
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Don….

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Racing through dinner cleanup after a long day? Your dishwasher sits empty while you scrub plates by hand, joining millions of Americans quietly abandoning an appliance once considered essential. Despite smarter features and energy improvements, dishwashers are losing their grip on daily routines across the country.

Federal efficiency standards transformed dishwashers into marathon cleaners. Modern machines take 2.5 to 4 hours per cycle—a far cry from the quick turnarounds families actually need. The Department of Energy’s push for water conservation limits new models to 5 gallons per cycle, with proposals dropping that to 3.2 gallons by 2027. You get cleaner dishes eventually, but “eventually” doesn’t work when kids need their lunch containers ready for tomorrow morning.

Once again, government screws up everything it touches.

New York Post.

Five people were killed and 44 others were injured when a non-English speaking bus driver from Staten Island smashed into stopped traffic along I-95 in Virginia on Friday morning, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Jing S. Dong, a Chinese native who obtained US citizenship, was allegedly driving the motorcoach from New York City to Charlotte, NC, when it struck a Chevrolet Suburban in Stafford County, near Quantico, just after 2:30 a.m.

The crash sparked a chain reaction involving at least 6 vehicles, officials said. Traffic had slowed down for a work zone on the highway at the time of the crash.

Babylon Bee.

Democrats have forcefully condemned Republicans for going so low as to play videos of Senate candidate James Talarico saying things.