Two young German travelers expected their Hawaii trip to be the highlight of a months-long world adventure. Instead, their visit ended in handcuffs, jail time, and deportation — a stark reminder of the risks some international visitors face at U.S. borders. (more)

This reliance on readily available solutions, particularly for familiar problems, creates a real risk: engineers may inadvertently atrophy their own problem-solving skills, hindering their ability to tackle truly novel challenges.

A podcast on epic systems.

“No one would build a volume that’s a void like that anymore,” says Paul Aferiat, a former employee of Gwathmey’s, whose firm Stamberg Aferiat + Associates was tasked with expanding the barn in 1995 when it was bought by new owners Dana and Paul Caan. Gwathmey recommended Aferiat when the Caan’s asked who would be a good fit to work on the barn as they had run out of bedrooms for their three daughters.

The only thing the Fed seems to be good at is using its vast powers to inject trillions of dollars of liquidity into the financial system to bail out banks from a problem the Feds often “help” the banks create. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even called the subprime mortgage crises “largely contained” as late as May 2007 when the crisis was turning into an economic tsunami.

What has gotten less attention is that his case is an example of the self-defeating absurdities of our immigration system and, in particular, of how it hands out “humanitarian protection.”. When Abrego Garcia avoided deportation back in 2019, he didn’t take

Consider where we are in this debate: 20 years ago the cry from LGBT activists was “leave us alone, let us live our private lives.”. Now it’s “you will bake me the cake, and you will force your children to sit through our curriculum, regardless of your religious beliefs.”

DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security. Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot, offering users a way to generate text and answer questions, closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law. Equally troubling, the model appears to have been built using stolen U.S. technology on the back of U.S. semiconductor chips that are prohibited from sale to China without an export license and when it was released, PRC-affiliated social media accounts amplified and celebrated the model, according to Graphika research. This report documents some of the risks DeepSeek poses and explains how its development is based on common Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tactics designed to unlawfully undermine U.S. technological leadership and critical American policies to protect national security.

Should we expect a gale of chaos to continue blowing through American tariff policy for the next four years? Yes, we should. By imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella, Trump hopes to coerce the world into sharing what he sees as the burdens of providing public goods like the global dollar system and military protection. Within Trump’s White House, at least three factions are vying for influence on these matters. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, holds the most aggressive and hawkish views. The titles of his books, like The Coming China Wars (2006) and Death by China (2011), give a flavor of his approach, as does a document he circulated within the White House during Trump’s first term alleging that a “weakened manufacturing base” would cause a “higher abortion rate,” a “lower fertility rate,” and “increased spousal abuse.” The administration’s more technocratic figures, such as Miran and J.D. Vance, have a clearer set of goals and a more coherent, but still predatory, worldview. Their thinking rests on a nationalist critique of global finance, which they blame for deindustrialization and the long-term unemployment left unaddressed after 2008. Both camps are in tension with Elon Musk, the South African industrialist, whose multinational corporations will suffer from trade conflicts. At the moment, however, Navarro seems to be ascendant. 

SpaceX raised $10B. NASA spent $450B. Only one is reliably sending humans to orbit. I was bored this weekend so did some digging on where NASA’s $450B went since 2002.

A new profile on billionaire heir and socialite dilettante @AlexanderSoros details the noble and inspiring ways that the Democratic Party is combatting the evils of oligarchy (by @svzwood in @NYMag):

A Practical Way to Get More Out of Limited Foreign Assistance Budgets

Grades for Water Quality-Health, Infrastructure & Operations, and Finance are based on data provided by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) for the years 2022 and 2023. Grades for Communication are based on data the WWEP team collected in 2024. Some inaccuracies in grading may be due to accidental misreporting or errors in the underlying data. Water customers are encouraged to contact their utilities with questions or concerns.

Let’s summarize:

? Allies are being asked to pay
? IMF is being retooled
? U.S. assets are being monetized
? Tariffs are a negotiating tool, not a tax policy
? Dollar is being gradually reweighted
This is the setup year. The real game is 2025–2029.

NTT Corporation (Headquarters: Chiyoda, Tokyo; President and CEO: Akira Shimada; hereinafter “NTT”) has become the first in the world to successfully trigger and guide lightning using a drone. This experiment also demonstrated, under natural lightning conditions, the effectiveness of both the drone’s lightning protection technology and the electric field-based lightning triggering method. These results are expected to contribute to further research on the still-mysterious mechanisms of lightning and to help reduce lightning-related damage to cities and people.

The internet is littered with digital ghost towns—premium domains once associated with thriving businesses, now sitting dormant or parked, waiting for their next life. Some of the biggest companies in the world have made strategic acquisitions, only to shut down the businesses they bought, leaving behind valuable domain names that are either redirected, held indefinitely, or simply left in limbo. Let’s take a look at some high-profile cases where major corporations scooped up valuable domains, shut down the original companies, and left the URLs in the digital graveyard.

First BETA-collection of Berlin-based DeepTech Startups

Pick the cheapest geocoding API provider for your project. An impartial comparison of pricing for HERE, Google Maps Platform, Azure Maps, OpenCage, TomTom Maps, LocationIQ, and Nominatim.

The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Lionel Trains.

Sons had tried to disinhert murderer’s girlfriend,
their adoptive sister. The adopted daughter of Dr. Beth Potter and Robin Carre has settled out of court with her two siblings over the slain couple’s contested will. Miriam’s boyfriend, Khari Sanford, was convicted of their murder in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Sanford and a young accomplice abducted the two from their beds on the near West side of Madison on March 30, 2020. Sanford held a handgun on them as he directed the driver to the north entrance to the UW Arboretum. That is where Sanford shot each in the head, execution style, trial evidence showed. Joggers found the two the next morning, still in their night clothes on that frigid morning, Dr. Potter was alive but barely. She died in a hospital emergency room hours later.

Yet, in an era of airlines placing loose bets on aviation startups, United’s investment and interest in JetZero’s design stands out from its previous venture capital investments, which have been in aircraft whose market niches don’t target a spot in its current fleet. Notably, this JetZero investment is the first to offer a potential direct challenge to the Airbus and Boeing duopoly.

Yet even as the Chinese argument has some surface plausibility, many of its claims are dubious. While it’s true that China has sought to forge a new economic order through initiatives such as the BRI and agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership—and that its exports to BRI countries now exceed those to the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined—these figures tell only part of the story. A significant portion of these exports are transshipments ultimately destined for the U.S. market. These transshipments can take various forms: simple repackaging of Chinese-made goods, basic assembly using Chinese components in third countries, or even falsified export documentation listing obscure jurisdictions like Heard Island and McDonald Islands as the country of origin. As a result, the apparent decline in China’s direct exports to the United States—from 19.2 percent in 2018 to 14.7 percent in 2024—is likely overstated. In reality, the volume of Chinese goods reaching the United States might not have fallen much, if at all.

The IRS Tea Party scandal is about as black-and-white a scandal as you can imagine. All the information is out there and uncontested. If you think it’s fake, that is a problem you have with being able to digest plain factual information over partisan talking point.

The victims were in the courtroom ready for the pre-trial conference; they were waiting for justice. Judge Dugan found out that ICE agents were in the hallway. She put Flores-Ruiz in the jury box (unusual) & went to confront the federal agents in the hall.

How did we end up with a more than 5000 pound BMW M5 in the year of our Lord 2025?

The ex-ATF informant, Carol Howe—who warned her handlers in early 1995 that neo-Nazi extremists in Oklahoma were planning to attack federal buildings—had vanished in the late 90s after being acquitted from explosives charges. In the remaining years of her life, she was reportedly living in Sparta, Tennessee under the name “Sarah Collins.” She died in a house fire on Jan. 6, according to documentarian Jon Ronson.

‘I have an assumption that my chromosomes are probably XY but I don’t know.’

Arthur John Keeffe, ‘Practicing Lawyer’s Guide to the Current Law Magazines,’ 48 American Bar Asso. J. 491, 491 (1962) (explaining that during the American Civil War, federal authorities arrested Judge James L. Bartol of the Maryland Court of Appeals and Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael of the Maryland Circuit Court, and the “latter was arrested while conducting court”).

What is described above happened under President Obama and under President Lincoln. Judges are not above the law; judges cannot interpose their courthouse and personal rules and policies against federal officers. And when state judges violate the law, they must be arrested .  .  . like you and me and anyone else. We all know that—or, at least, we should. 

I must admit I did not realize that if you are a prior deport, you do not need to appear before a judge. I also learned that some who are not prior deports can be removed without a judge as part of the Expedited Removal System created by Bill Clinton in 1996. (verified by the American Immigration Council)

Shelter I spent the majority of nights on my trip inside a Naturehike Cloud-Up 1 Person Tent. I was happy with the volume of the assembled tent as a 5’11” person. It was also a small, light (~1500 grams) piece of luggage. That said, the tent didn’t make it through an overnight rainstorm without leaking water through the floor. I’d recommend finding another one :/ I also brought a 20-degree sleeping bag and a small sleeping pad. If I had taken the trip in the summer, a 40-degree bag would probably have sufficed.

Before I get to some supporting evidence for that statement, let’s recap what apertures really do:

• f/1.2 — let’s call this our new “baseline”
• f/1.4 — half stop slower (-0.5EV)
• f/1.8 — one and a third stops slower (-1.3EV)
• f/2 — one and a half stops slower (-1.5EV)
• f/2.8 — two and a half stops slower (-2.5EV)

“All you need are a good pair of tennis shoes or some sort of sneakers that you can run in, and they can come play,” Feldman said. 

In The Final Flight of Captain Forrester, Texas Monthly staff writer and podcast host Josh Alvarez takes listeners along Karoni’s harrowing journey to find her father. Traveling to Hawaii, Utah, Vietnam, and Washington, D.C., Alvarez chronicles Karoni’s fight for answers. Through interviews with American and Vietnamese government officials, Forrester’s family members, forensic scientists, anthropologists, military pilots, and a retired CIA spy, The Final Flight of Captain Forrester reveals the extreme challenges involved in finding missing soldiers decades after the fight has ended.

Over four weeks she drove 2,600 miles and visited hundreds of local breweries, restaurants and cheese shops throughout the state. The result is a 200-page highlight reel titled “Beer, Brats, and Cheese: A Wisconsin Road Trip.” “Was it crazy? In more ways than one. Did I question my life choices? Maybe just a few times. But was it worth it? Undoubtedly, 100 percent yes,” she wrote in the book.

At one of the milking robots, several cows are lined up, nose to tail, politely waiting their turn. The cows can get milked by robot whenever they like, which typically means more frequently than the twice a day at a traditional dairy farm. Not only is getting milked more often more comfortable for the cows, cows also produce about 10 percent more milk when the milking schedule is completely up to them. “There’s a direct correlation between stress and milk production,” Jacobs says. “Which is nice, because robots make cows happier and therefore, they give more milk, which helps us sell more robots.”

Typography is a discipline that studies the formation and appearance of letters, not only as symbols of verbal sounds but also as elements in design. The art of typography refers to the arrangement of letters as the main element (Wijaya, 1999). The difference between Japanese typography and Latin letter typography is based on the complexity of Japanese character writing. The Japanese language has a writing system that uses Chinese characters (kanji), ideograms; hiragana and katakana, and the Roman alphabet (Romaji (Igarashi, 2007)

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal. Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

Recently I was targeted by an extremely sophisticated phishing attack, and I want to highlight it here. It exploits a vulnerability in Google’s infrastructure, and given their refusal to fix it, we’re likely to see it a lot more. Here’s the email I got:

Divorce formularies from PBMs. Require them to come from independent organizations with no economic incentive from the formulary
Make them about wellness, not pay for play like a grocery store endcap. This ends rebates and allows for net pricing. It also allows for better care and wellness.

As promised, I have declassified the Biden Administration’s Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Mauch has made some upgrades to his operation. In our previous story, we described how Mauch was renting an air compressor to blow fiber through his conduits. He recently bought an industrial air compressor at a government liquidation auction, spending under $4,000 for equipment that often costs about $20,000, he said. He had previously spent $8,000 on a directional drill machine that installs cables or conduits under driveways and roads without digging giant holes.

California-based Natilus is on target to begin delivering its first aircraft for service in 2029, a Blended Wing Body (BWB) turboprop cargo aircraft, according to CEO Aleksey Matyushev.

What if UBER partnered with Hertz on an AV fleet roll out over time?

So it’s interesting that an American brand is trying to bring its concept to France. While France isn’t hurting for large chain stores, Costco is a different story. What they sell is more specialized, many items are their own brand, Kirkland, and almost all items are sold in larger quantities, such as 3-pound (1,35kg) bags of almonds vs. 4-ounce (125g) bags at Carrefour. When I see those tiny bags in my local grocery store, I wonder: Who buys a 1/2 cup of almonds? I eat that in one afternoon.

The Chinese growth and stability model also requires relatively secure energy supplies. For that it relies on the United States and its allies, as the Chinese programs for nuclear and solar power remain far from their final goals. If the Western alliance system collapses, who is to keep the Middle East relatively stable, at least stable from the point of view of procuring fossil fuels? China hardly seems up to that task, as the country has neither the means, the inclination, the experience, nor the allies to do the job.

Effective April 5, 2025, all shipments to the U.S. with a declared customs value over USD 800 require formal entry processing – down from the previous USD 2,500 threshold due to new U.S. Customs regulations.

They even possess many of the characteristics of a nation—all they need to become a network state is to recognize that they are part of a group that has the potential to have a political identity. Once they have this consciousness, they can create a state to represent and protect them.

Distributed filesystems provide two main advantages over local storage – they can serve massive amounts of data (up to petabytes) and provide high throughput that exceed the capabilities of a single machine. They offer fault tolerance (the system keeps running if one machine goes down) and redundancy (if data gets corrupted on one node, other nodes have original copies).

Those five values will replace Boeing’s current set of principles put in place by former CEO Dave Calhoun, who took over after two fatal MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 and then stepped down after the panel blowout last year. 

judyrecords is a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits.judyrecords has over 100x more cases than Google Scholar and 10x more cases than PACER, the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary.As of Jul 2022, judyrecords now features free full-text search of all United States patents from 1/1/1976 to 07/01/2022 — over 8.1 million patents in total.

Today, I bring you an interview with Ryan Allen. Ryan Allen is a professor of international education at University of America in Southern California and the author of the newsletter “College Towns,” which explores the intersection of higher education and urbanism. Our conversation covers his transition from academic publishing to public writing, the challenges facing higher education, and how colleges can better integrate with their communities through thoughtful urban design.

Peter felt as if he had stepped on to an alien planet. There were no billboards, the streets were vast and the signs were incomprehensible. In South America, Rudi and Peter had explored on foot; here, they were whisked around by stern men in black Volga limousines. After a day in Leningrad, Rudi and Peter were driven to the railway station, where a private compartment in an overnight express train to Moscow awaited them. On arrival, they took a drive to one of the Stalin-era skyscrapers on the river embankment. To Peter, it looked like a vast castle from a fantasy comic. A safe-house apartment in the building was to be their home in Moscow. Inge was already there. A housekeeper cooked meals for the family, and that first evening the table was set for eight with plates of local delicacies and three glasses per person, for tangy Borjomi mineral water, wine and vodka. Several handlers from Directorate S, which ran the illegals programme, soon arrived for dinner.

the thing about stuff like this (demonstrated here in replies) is that people will say, “that was different” which is true but also elides the part where the difference is of degree rather than kind, so the only argument you can make is for restraint rather than principle.

I’ve highlighted in red what I think won’t work, yellow, what I’m unsure about, and green what I think will work.

beautiful losers model of the respectable Right….

Gen. Caine said the military is too slow to integrate advanced technology into its weapons and other systems.

For Synology customers, the challenge of being vendor-locked into using Synology branded drives is not just about alleged firmware improvements. It is also about being able to keep data secure while finding easy replacements.

Because the information is suppressed.
The planning and execution of Brennan’s anti-Trump ops took place at Cambridge University, England. The word University and the country, UK with capital London was classified for 9 years until Pres Trump released the docs this month.

Criticism #4: “He’s pushing anti-vax conspiracy theories again!” This one is just false. Not once during his 27-minute speech did he mention vaccines. Instead, he discussed toxins such as mold, pesticides, and additives. But the media (who appear to hate him for past positions) decided to resurrect the vaccine angle even though he didn’t bring it up. This is yet another example of a targeted smear campaign by individuals more invested in promoting narratives than seeking the truth.

Edward Feser wrote a critique of President Trump’s new tariffs and his trade policy. A reader asked ChatGPT to respond to his critique as if it was me. And apparently AI now does non-fiction nearly as well as it does fiction.

1. Feser’s Overemphasis on Prudential Moderation over Existential Necessity

Vox Day might begin by pointing out that Feser’s argument is essentially one of technocratic prudence—tariffs might be useful in moderation, if well-targeted, in the right economic climate, with good timing, and clear justification. Vox would call this academic dithering in the face of civilizational crisis. From his view, America is not merely suffering a mild imbalance of trade—it is being gutted by decades of globalist betrayal that have systematically offshored its manufacturing capacity, hollowed out its industrial base, and turned its working class into wage-serfs of the service economy.

Forget “incrementally,” it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?

In the absence of a more senior officer, the surrender was accepted by Colonel Bùi Tín, a journalist who many years earlier had witnessed the departure of the French from Hanoi. Bùi Tín would eventually become disillusioned with the new order. He was destined to end his days in Paris, an exile from his homeland. His memoir Following Ho Chi Minh is one of the very few inside accounts of life in the upper reaches of the secretive Vietnamese Communist party.

“The threat to democracy, indeed the existential threat to democracy, is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.”

Final conclusion be: Some tariff be permanent, much America company move back. Trump say he victory. China increase better relation with other Asia countrys for increase trade to make up for lost America trade, China also cheat and steal less. China reputation enhance. Then Xijinping say he victory

MUSK: “People think that Biden was asleep at the switch. They weren’t asleep at the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and making it a deep blue one party state from which there would be no escape

Find new friends. I just left visiting my two youngest daughters, one with a 5 day old son and one with a 3 month old daughter. They are happier than I have ever seen them. Their joy was palpable.

A few months back Linneaus reached out to me on Twitter, asking if we could have a formal debate on the topic of Race. I agreed, and our opening arguments are published here (and on his website oldluth.com). 

The restaurant was broken into twice within three months, prompting Tarantino to spend thousands of dollars on reinforced security windows. Pink Tarantino was in the building in her office when the second break-in unfolded and saw the whole thing on their security cameras.

The statements the jury was not allowed to see demonstrate the FBI’s deep involvement in concocting not only the Whitmer plot but a separate one against VA governor Ralph Northam (by using same handlers and informant, Dan Chappell), organizing almost all of the events including the “recon” trip to Whitmer’s vacation cottage, and even disclosing exculpatory evidence.

Hurdles to convenient voting access once worked to the benefit of the Republican party in Wisconsin, whether deliberately or not. Now, the calculus appears reversed. The best chances for a GOP candidate will appear in an electorate of 3 million or more. As any Democrat working on campaigns in the Obama years could tell you, winning elections by maximizing turnout is possible, but hard.

Altair Basic.

1) 1996 Chuck Schumer says the number one reason illegals come to the US is to defraud Social Security

Does the Governor realize that since 2000 the number of Illinois manufacturing jobs has fallen from over 900,000 to less than 600,000?

Now you identify genuinely strategic areas. You do not care about French wine or Canadian maple syrup. You do care if the US military’s vendor’s vendors are located in China, as per this Pentagon-commissioned study: