News: Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, celebrated Mass for 500 participants (some pictured here) at the @OutrchCatholic conference for LGBTQ Catholics at @Georgetown today. We will post his homily, which moved many to tears, later. So grateful for His Eminence.

SPINACH isn’t a superfood! It’s a mineral trap. One cup can dump 650+ mg oxalates that binds calcium & magnesium so you absorb less of both. Beef gives iron, B12, & zinc your body actually uses. No crystals, no decoy nutrients. Leave the grass for the cows! Eat the STEAK!

After 9/11 I dropped out of college and joined the Marine Corps, volunteering for the infantry. I knew that “radical Islam” was responsible for the attack, and I wanted to have a rifle in my hand to go after those who were responsible for and in league with those who attacked us. Obviously in hindsight, our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were poorly executed with no achievable objective ever clearly articulated, devolving into nonsensical nation building exercises. In the 25 years since, all of my experiences, including multiple deployments, and decades of research, have led me to a more important realization… It wasn’t “radical Islam” that attacked the United States, it was just Islam. And more importantly, that virtually no society that has seen a large influx of Islam has remained intact, and otherwise survived it. Islam is the problem, and I realize how uncomfortable it is for Americans to speak in absolutes, and that there may be outliers, but at large scale, Islam has never resulted in a society that embraces and appreciates human liberty. In the wild Islam at scale destroys liberty, it doesn’t foster and build it. Islam is a political ideology doctrinally dedicated to the conquering and subjugation of all non-Muslims. Radical Islam isn’t a national security threat to the United States, Islam is, and people need to learn to be comfortable saying that, because if enough don’t, our children and grandchildren will not inherit liberty, they will inherit Islamic theocracy.

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer. Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships. He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management. Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn't building new things; it was making what we already have last longer. Andrew made what we already have last longer. He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending "Souvlaki" and "everything is alive" to anyone who'd listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair," and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend. He made music too. He'd been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released "Reflections" under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin's ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs. Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him "Busty Wimsatt" and, in their newsletters, "ever-alert," "indefatigable," and at least once "American hero." @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of "The Independents" so they wouldn't disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf's Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn's own jokes. "Boy did I feel special," Kirn wrote today. "Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement." He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people. He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog's Dave's Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin's science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin's "Director's Cut," and appears in it, briefly, as "Greeting Cop." He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage "No Step on Snek" hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it. The man lived. He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement. He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met. @greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person. @PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh. @NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic. A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone. Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty. His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer. His mother now has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone. He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange. Two days before he died, he was at a friend's house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do "The Crawling Hand." He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun. He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn't coming back next week.

🚨 ANOTHER Massachusetts mother accused of killing her young children is asking for full dismissal of her murder charges and her lawyer is citing "mental illness." Janette MacAusland, 49, is charged with the murder of her two children, Kai (6) and Ella (7). Her attorney, Joseph Krowski, is demanding prosecutors take a "different approach" for women suffering from mental health issues. Is "mental health" becoming an automatic pass for horrific crimes? Where is the justice for these kids?

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.