A Miscellaneous Blog

Camila's investigation for Dropsite uncovered that the US Coast Guard is likely utilizing the Shield AI V-BAT drone to assist with the CIA's operations targeting Ecuadorian fisherman.

Jason Arday, a 41-year-old academic who resigned as Cambridge’s Professor of Sociology of Education, was found dead on Friday following intense scrutiny of many aspects of his qualifications and personal life by the majority of the established press. His coordinated targeting by an explicitly anti-black race science network did not come out of nowhere, Byline Times can reveal. Backed by the pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, this network has spent a decade penetrating Cambridge University before reaching Reform UK, Restore Britain, and the pan-European far-right. This phase of the campaign against Jason Arday began when academic and anti-black racist Nathan Cofnas raised claims of plagiarism in Arday’s work in a Substack post last month. The story it fuelled was then dissected in more than 200 articles across the majority of the British press in the weeks that followed, both in print and online. It was striking that many of these articles did not acknowledge that the central accusations were being made by a man who believes that inherited racial differences make black people less intelligent and would leave black people absent from virtually every elite position in public life outside of sport and entertainment.

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At the ideological centre of the network is Aporia, an online magazine which serves as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation – now known as Polygenic Scores. The Human Diversity Foundation was a rebranded and relaunched version of the Nazi-era Pioneer Fund, which sought to mainstream its eugenics doctrines through Aporia. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has cultivated ties to key actors in this network: to Cambridge Professor James Orr, through whom he channelled a donation to Cambridge; to Orr’s Cambridge circle; to online magazine Quillette which published attacks on Arday; and directly to Nathan Cofnas and Aporia senior editor Noah Carl. Orr linked this infrastructure to politics. Reform UK’s Head of Policy, and an advisor to the Free Speech Union organisation, he invited Aporia into national conservatism. At The Sanctuary, a right wing hub in Westminster, Aporia and the Orr-backed Cambridge Scrutonian Society have separate offices provided by cryptobillionaire Ben Delo. Delo gave Reform £4 million in early 2026. He has also sponsored the Free Speech Union. By understanding this network and its ideology, a more accurate picture can be developed of the motivations behind the disproportionate attacks on Jason Arday that continued even after his resignation from Cambridge University.

Scientists just 3D printed one of the hardest metals on Earth

Tungsten carbide-cobalt (WC-Co) is valued because it can withstand intense wear, pressure, and repeated use. That exceptional hardness makes it ideal for industrial tools, but it also creates a major manufacturing challenge. The material is difficult to shape, expensive to produce, and often requires more raw material than ultimately ends up in the finished component. Researchers have now tested a different way to manufacture WC-Co cemented carbide using additive manufacturing (AM, also commonly known as 3D printing). Their approach could reduce waste and lower production costs while preserving the strength and hardness that make the material so useful. The study was published in the International Journal of Refractory Metals and Hard Materials.

The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.

Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

-- tried to get insulin; had to pay out of pocket because former employer fucked up paperwork and never told me. and health insurance is tied to employment in the US. and diabetes meds aren't subsidized.

-- bike by city center, cops doing their morning scolding/intimidation of the two dozen homeless people that sleep near the steps/entrance of federal courthouse since city outlawed them from laying/sitting elsewhere

-- guy on bus watching insta clips of based-fascist vtubers

-- had to fill-out annual department hire paperwork at HR at school, there's a printed-out sign that says something about "the US Department of Homeland Security now REQUIRES that blah blah blah" with a big scary emblem

-- returning paperwork to counter, HR is like "you didn't fill out a SELECTIVE MILITARY SERVICE sheet?" and i was like "but i'm legally female at state/fed level?" in half-jest because may as well fill it out to avoid government scrutiny, and she's like "but you weren't always?" (how sure are you?) and i'm like "well i'm over 26 years of age" and she's like "well just to be safe" and then i was like "is there anything else the US Department of Homeland Security and/or armed forces would like from me?" but i was too deadpan for joke to land and she just went "i don't know?"

-- sit down to fill out some docs and a new foreign student is being guided through paperwork by an HR person. student is from Vietnam. he asks if he can claim a dependent for taxes. HR person is like "why, aren't you alone?" and he's like "i have nine-month-old daughter and a wife?" and she's like "oh well as a migrant here for under [x amount] of years, your wife and child don't technically count as dependents, so no"

-- biking to campus through super-sanitized "progressive" neighborhood. home with fancy landscaping obviously calculated to superficially appear somewhat in synch with local region landscape yet all shrubs/flowers actually from Europe and team of four guys just unloading pesticides all over the manicured yard (right next to "natural area" hiking trailhead)

-- frown and turn head other direction, directly across street and a cop is parked at the curb just sitting in driver's seat giggling and watching shit on his phone in like a giant military-esque black SUV

ENHANCE