Steve Kelley retweeted
Fox: Why are you here this morning?
Trump rally attendee: Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I'll ever get, so that's why I'm here. There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front.
Steve Kelley retweeted
Let's talk about a longtime DC resident who owned a property for which she was unable to collect rent, and whether we think what she went through is just.
Veronica Hegens, 59, bought a row house in DC many years ago. Smart investment, right? She lived in it for years until she decided to rent it out when she had to move in with her own father to care for him. Hegens is a retired Army major.
At first, her renter, a participant in the city's voucher program, worked out fine. Most of his rent was paid by the city's taxpayers ($2,600/month). Her renter then notified her he would vacate. All good, Hegens was prepared to find another tenant. But the renter died shortly before his move-out date. Upon his unexpected death, Hegens discovered his girlfriend, who had never signed a lease, was occupying the property with no intent to leave. DC's rules for what qualifies one as a "tenant" are lax, so a person without a lease occupying the apartment gets a lot of legal considerations.
The girlfriend had not paid rent for 6 months at the time local news covered Hegens' plight. When Hegens, the owner of the property, changed the locks on the property, the girlfriend took her to court and received a temporary restraining order and was able to stay in the property.
Hegens fell behind on her mortgage without rental income, was coming close to foreclosure, and became less and less able to make repairs due to financial strain and the girlfriend's obstinate occupancy. Hegens had to pay for court expenses and was charged fines by the city for not keeping up with her responsibilities while the unemployed girlfriend lived in her property. There are groups that give free legal services to people like the girlfriend.
In March of 2026, Hegens and the girlfriend went to mandated mediation. The mediator told the girlfriend to vacate, but with ANOTHER 4 months to find new housing. She was asked to pay minimal rent during that time (about 1/5 of what the actual tenant had paid). The girlfriend finally moved out of the unit in June— a total of 9 months of zero or minuscule rent for Hegens on the property she owns. Hegens credits local news coverage with the resolution of her case in a relatively timely manner. A local advocate for small landlords says many such cases take more than a year to reach any kind of resolution.
Steve Kelley retweeted
Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, is the latest politician to suggest that the Second Amendment protects only flintlock muskets. It's a dumb argument. reason.com/2026/10/26/abdul-… via @reason
Steve Kelley retweeted
I was arrested, interviewed under caution for 2 hours by two sturdy lllllllesbians and my case sent to the @CPSUK for the crime of… ‘causing offence to myself’.
My sister Jan at Craters of the Moon in Idaho with our family car. Apologies for the soft focus of my Starflash camera. Thanks! davescaridservice
Steve Kelley retweeted
Myriam was a 7-year-old French Jewish girl. She witnessed a terrorist break into her school and kill two of her classmates.
She tried to run but tripped while grabbing her schoolbag, causing her ballet slippers to fall out. She stopped to pick them up. He chased her and grabbed her by the hair, shooting her in the head at point-blank range.
The man was Mohamed Merah, and a rap song honoring him and other Muslim terrorists has become the unofficial anthem of the ‘student protests’ in France.
🚨 ALERTE - Des élèves ONT BLOQUÉ le lycée François Villon, à Beaugency (45), en écoutant MRH, un titre faisant référence à des TERRORISTES ISLAMISTES.
« À la Mohamed Merah, v-esqui' les caméras. Bataclan, je l'ai shooter à l'œil, chasse à l'homme, Salah Abdeslam »
« J’ai pas peur, j’ai pas peur de l’enfer, le pacte est intact, à part Allah qui peut m’arrêter. Bataclan, faisaient les morts, allongez-vous, je vais en shooter à l’œil ».
Steve Kelley retweeted
Scorpions kill more than 3,250 people a year, mostly kids, and the cure is still made by milking venom from thousands of scorpions and injecting it into horses. Anthropic just let a team of investment researchers with zero biology background try to cut the horse out.
The horse method is over a century old. You immunize the animal for months, draw its blood, and purify out the antibodies its immune system made. Given early, it works against a narrow set of toxins, and because you're putting horse protein into a child, it can trigger anaphylaxis.
Barely anyone makes it, because the people getting stung can't pay enough to cover the factory. Mexico has about a quarter of the world's scorpion stings and relies on a single lab. Last year in Sonora, a 5-year-old was stung at preschool and rushed to a public hospital that had already burned through a shipment delivered days earlier. Staff found more 45 minutes later. She'd already gone into cardiac arrest twice.
So Citrini Research walked into Anthropic with a question. Could motivated amateurs with Claude make real progress on a disease the drug industry ignores?
An internal Claude model ran for 64 hours off one prompt and four follow-ups. It drove 12 protein design tools, generated 318,484 candidate molecules, ran 553,052 simulated matchups against five scorpion toxins, and picked 180 to build. Then it emailed the order to the lab itself.
Two labs made 211 of them. 17 latched onto their target toxin, covering scorpions from Mexico, North Africa and the Middle East. Brazil's yellow scorpion beat every single design. The best two grab a Mexican scorpion toxin at the same spot as an antibody already shown to protect mice.
The computer finished in under three days. The lab work stretched past a month, held up by contracts, shipping, and the hassle of sourcing the toxins themselves. One of the outside experts who reviewed the results said binding is no longer the main bottleneck.
There's no antivenom yet. None of these molecules has touched a living cell or a mouse.
Anascorp, the only scorpion antivenom the FDA has approved, took 35 years to go from a Mexican lab to US approval. The first candidate molecules for a horse-free successor took 64 hours, for a team whose day job is writing investment research.
New on our Science Blog: designing protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins.
Scorpions sting about 1.2m people every year, and antivenoms are often costly or in short supply. Claude has made an early step toward finding new treatments.
anthropic.com/research/claud…
Steve Kelley retweeted
This is Amit Soussana. Hamas terrorists brutally beat her, tied her up and dragged her away from her home into Gaza.
For 55 days, she lived through hell.
She was chained by her ankle in a darkened children's bedroom for weeks, forced to ask permission just to use the bathroom.
Her captor repeatedly groped her and questioned her about her menstrual cycle.
Then he pointed a gun at her forehead and sexually violated her at gunpoint.
She was moved between hiding places, beaten and terrorized.
After her release, Amit became the first Israeli hostage to publicly describe in detail the sexual abuse she suffered in Hamas captivity.
Where was the UN? Where was the Red Cross?
Where was the outrage when Israeli women were being sexually assaulted?
Amit survived 55 days of Hamas captivity and made sure the world heard what they did to her.
Share her story and follow!
Steve Kelley retweeted
On her second day in America as an immigrant from China, Fei-Fei Li went with her father to a gas station in New Jersey. Something was wrong with his car, and he needed her to explain it to the mechanic.
Li was fifteen. She had barely arrived and spoke little English herself. Her father had been in the country for three years, but he knew even less. Somehow, with a few words and a lot of gestures, she made herself understood.
It was a small errand. It was also an early lesson in what her family would ask of her: learn this new place quickly, then help us find our way through it.
Last month, the company AMD announced an agreement to buy World Labs, the artificial-intelligence company Li co-founded, for $8.2 billion. Do not convert that to Kenya shillings.
World Labs is the answer to a question Li had spent decades working on that sounds simple until you try to teach it to a computer: How do we understand the world we see?
Li grew up in Chengdu, China, reading science fiction, books about nature and European novels. Her father encouraged her curiosity. Her mother encouraged her to read widely. Their life was comfortable enough, but her mother’s opportunities had been constrained by the family’s political history, and Li’s parents began planning a future elsewhere.
Her father went first, leaving for America when Li was twelve. The plan was for Li and her mother to join him soon. Visa delays stretched their separation beyond three years. Li later recalled feeling, as a child, that her parents had chosen a dream she could not understand over the family being together.
When she and her mother finally reached Parsippany in 1992, the family had less than twenty dollars. Li found the suburb unnervingly quiet after Chengdu’s crowded streets. At high school, she studied unfamiliar subjects in a language she was still learning, relying on a dictionary so large she remembered it as a brick. After school, she worked in restaurants to help her parents.
Isitoshe,
Her math teacher, Bob Sabella, saw how far she could go. The school did not offer the advanced course she needed, so he taught her during lunch. One teacher, one student. When Princeton offered Li a scholarship, she asked two advisers to check the letter because she could hardly believe it.
College brought possibility, but her parents still needed an income. With borrowed money, including help from Sabella and his wife, Li bought a small dry-cleaning shop for the family. She studied physics at Princeton during the week and returned to Parsippany from Friday through Sunday to help run it. Because she spoke English, much of the business fell to her. She kept it going for seven years, including her first years of graduate school in California.
During her first year at Princeton, her mother needed heart surgery. Li arranged to take an exam at the hospital so she could stay nearby and translate for her mother and the doctors. Later, when a well-paid consulting job offered a way to ease the family’s financial strain, Li seriously considered leaving science. Her mother urged her to choose the work she loved.
That work led Li to study vision. People learn to recognize a cat whether it is facing them, hiding under a chair or partly lost in shadow. Computers at the time struggled with such changes. Li came to believe they needed many more examples of the world, not just better instructions.
As a professor at Princeton, she began building ImageNet with other researchers. They gathered and labeled millions of photographs so computer systems could learn to identify objects, and scientists could test their progress against the same images. Some colleagues doubted the value of spending years on a database. In 2012, another research team used ImageNet to make a dramatic leap in image recognition. The project Li had fought to build helped change the course of AI.
World Labs is her attempt to go further. Its first product, Marble, can take a written description, photograph or video and create a three-dimensional place a person can explore and edit. The company is researching how AI might understand spaces well enough to help with design, simulations and, eventually, robotics. AMD wants that research team to work alongside the people building the hardware on which such systems run.
Once the acquisition closes, Li will become AMD’s chief scientist.
The $8.2 billion for an immigrant who did not understand as a word in English at some point in her life.
May the day break
Steve Kelley retweeted
Remembering Tom Dawes
an American guitarist and
bassist who passed away OTD
10/13/2007. He was a founding
member, lead vocalist, lead
guitarist and bassist of the band
The Cyrkle (1961-1968). They
charted the US top 20 hits "Red
Rubber Ball" and "Turn-Down
Day".
(Cont.)
Steve Kelley retweeted
Marc Andreessen reveals why housing, health care, and education keep getting more expensive while everything else gets cheaper
"There's basically three components to the American dream. A house near great job opportunities, great health care for you and your family, and sending your kids to good schools"
"If you disaggregate the economy over the last 25 years, everything that technology touches basically collapses in price. Television sets, computer games, anything with electronics in it. But if you chart housing, education, and health care, the prices of those things are skyrocketing"
"The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices"
Steve Kelley retweeted
Russia is waging something destructive and deadly against Europe that officials dub "hybrid warfare" and that leaves them struggling to respond. reason.com/2026/10/12/europe… via @reason
Steve Kelley retweeted
Funny personal story I have about the late GOAT Mike Ditka...
When I was a toddler, my parents and I were on a flight and #MikeDitka happened to be on the flight a few years after the 1985 superbowl win.
My mom passed him in the aisle and I waved to him, and he said to my mom, "She's a beautiful little girl!" My mom said, "Oh just wait..."
In front of DA Coach she says, "Faran, who is the President of the United States?" ... I go, "Mike Ditka!"
20 years later when I danced for his team "The Chicago Rush," I met him at his Ditka's Steakhouse in downtown Chicago.
Upon meeting him, I go, "I actually met you when I was about 3 years old on a plane with my parents." He goes, "Wait, you're not the little girl who said I was the President of the United States, are you?" I told him, "Indeed I am."
He gave me the biggest hug and said, "I don't think you realize, I told everyone in my family that happened... I have been telling that story for decades! What a full circle moment that now you dance for the team!"
Rest in power Coach! You are and always will be a legend.
Steve Kelley retweeted
Seventy years ago today, America welcomed my dad (pictured center) and his family as Palestinian Christian refugees. It was the greatest blessing of his life.
Born Attallah Amash in 1940, my dad had an extremely difficult childhood. He was a victim of war, expelled from his home at just eight years old in 1948, moving from place to place to find shelter and living off scraps.
He never had new clothes except what was provided to him through charity. In the few years (on and off) that he was able to attend school, the other children didn’t want to associate with him. He couldn’t even play soccer with them because he didn’t have shoes.
His father made him sell coffee and tea as a young boy just to make a few cents that his dad would take. The first time my dad had a decent meal was when a family member died (an uncle, who lived and died in a dog house) and neighbors delivered food in his memory.
Even before the conflict, my dad’s family lived in abject poverty. His grandma, grandpa, aunt, and uncle died of starvation under Ottoman rule. They lived in horrendous conditions among rats. They were abused, uneducated, prone to superstitions, and struggled with mental illness.
The Amash family’s misfortune turned into triumph when Rev. & Mrs. Ralph Wagoner (pictured right), of the Muskegon Church of the Brethren, made the sacrifice to sponsor them to come to the United States. The incredible generosity of the Wagoners gave new life to the Amashes.
I’m forever grateful to the Wagoners for making my life in America possible. I’m forever grateful to America for opening its arms to poor refugees like my dad’s family.
This story is why I so dearly love our Constitution, which defends life, liberty, and property. It’s why I wanted to serve in Congress: to support, with my voice and votes, the great principles that define America. I was honored that my community here in Michigan gave me that opportunity.
Steve Kelley retweeted
President Zelenskyy tells Axios that the diesel deal President Trump brokered with President Putin “looks like a happy birthday present for Putin. It looks absolutely terrible.”
Steve Kelley retweeted
‼️ BREAKING: ZELENSKYY’S OFFICIAL REACTION TO THE TRUMP-PUTIN DIESEL DEAL!
ZELENSKYY: “At this very moment, when we are talking about peace, America is giving russia the opportunity to export diesel fuel. That’s millions, billions that will go toward the war against our people.
I believe they are simply using our team as a cover. And this is clearly unfair. This is clearly not acting in good faith as a partner.
And this, in my view, is a weak decision. A weak decision from strong partners.”
FULL STATEMENT:
“Right now, our Ukrainian team, our negotiating team, is in Florida for a two-day visit, holding talks with the American team about ending this terrible war, at minimum regarding a ceasefire. The start of a ceasefire could be an energetic ceasefire, an energetic cessation of hostilities. This is very important for our people, for our families. And at this very moment, while our team is meeting with the American team in Florida, the President of the United States is having a conversation with the Kremlin leader, the leader responsible for this war and this aggression, and they reach an agreement under which America gives russia the opportunity to export diesel fuel. This is additional money for this war. This is additional money for the suffering caused against us, without question. This only fuels Putin and gives him the powers to keep fighting even more. And at this very moment, when we are talking about peace, America is giving Russia the opportunity to export diesel fuel. That's, I don't know, that's millions, billions. In any case, all of this goes toward the war against our people, against Ukraine, against all of us. I believe they are simply using our team as a cover. And this is clearly unfair. This is clearly not acting in good faith as a partner. And this, in my view, is a weak decision. Unfortunately, unfortunately, it is a weak decision from strong partners. Glory to Ukraine!” - Ukrainian President on Friday, October 9th, 2026.
Steve Kelley retweeted
Can you deliver a pizza from NYC to New Jersey by kayak? Not without violating a century-old federal shipping law.
Follow the Cato Institute’s @scottlincicome as he tries to get his pizza across the Hudson River and explains why the Jones Act makes no sense today.
Steve Kelley retweeted
A startling fact: it's cheaper to ship fertilizer ingredients to Louisiana from Peru (2,300 nautical miles away) than from Florida (500 nautical miles away).
The reason: the Jones Act. Cato's @cpgrabow explains.
ow.ly/ze9Y50ZTi40
