On this day: 1868 President Andrew Johnson is acquitted in his impeachment trial by one vote in the United States Senate 1918 The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government an imprisonable offense. 1969 Venera program: Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus. 2005 Kuwait permits women’s suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote.
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A podcaster described Psul Skenes as "a chandelier in a haunted house."
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City Journal reports on "a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring." More than “unconscious bias” training, they are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher said, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.
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Gifts
There is debate over Qatar's offer of a plane gift to Trump. Some claim concerns over possible hidden, nefarious motives despite its blatant transparency. Democrats raise their heads from the mire of their corruption and cry, "corruption!" This is especially interesting in light of the enormous financial gifts the Middle East has given American Universities, which no one seems to object to.
A question.
Trump is trying to cobble together a Persian rug of Middle East leaders in hopes of preempting more conflict or, if Iran is a plus one to the party, World War III. Qatar is a principal in that effort.
So, what, in Middle Eastern culture, are the implications of refusing a gift?
On this day: 1536 Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, stands trial in London on charges of treason, adultery and incest. She is condemned to death by a specially-selected jury. 1567 Mary, Queen of Scots, marries James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, her third husband. 1648 The Treaty of Westphalia signed. 1776 American Revolution: the Virginia Convention instructs its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States Declaration of Independence. 1864 American Civil War: Battle of New Market, Virginia – students from the Virginia Military Institute fight alongside the Confederate Army to force Union General Franz Sigel out of the Shenandoah Valley. 1891 Pope Leo XIII defends workers’ rights and property rights in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching. 1963 Project Mercury: The launch of the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9 with astronaut L. Gordon Cooper on board. He becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space.
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Camp Century, a U.S. military base built under Greenland’s ice during the Cold War, was part of an ambitious and clandestine Pentagon plan for a network of nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. It was partially constructed in 1959, abandoned in 1967, and is now buried under at least 100 feet of ice.
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Pete Rose was posthumously removed from the Major League’s banned list yesterday. An Index for people.
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A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found.
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Tick Tock
In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok will challenge the law banning it from U.S. app stores. TikTok argues in its brief that the law demands a divestiture (from Chinese ownership) that is technologically and commercially impossible — and unprecedented: “Never before has Congress expressly singled out and shut down a specific speech forum. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.” In 2023, TikTok says, U.S. users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos were viewed worldwide more than 13 trillion times. TikTok argues that the ban violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee and the guarantee of equal protection under the laws.
Granted, any company beholden to China’s Leninist party-state will do what the Communist Party dictates. But labeling speech (often accurately, regarding TikTok) as foreign propaganda does not license government interference with it. In 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that burdened citizens’ “right to receive” communist propaganda mailed from a foreign adversary.
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The TikTok law asks us to trust the government that evidently thinks we cannot be trusted to cope with propaganda. Trust the government that tried to suppress as misinformation true criticisms of the government’s pandemic policies? The government, which in 12 months extending into this election year, overstated by 818,000 the number of jobs created during the Biden administration?--from wsj
The great problem with democracy is that it burdens the citizen with decisions. And those decisions will be influenced by their education and common sense. Free societies will always be faced with such problems that are not just homicidal, they are suicidal. The choice is obvious.
The American Revolution changed the world. But it came very late to the human social table, so it must not be a no-brainer. It is through education that the government should arm its citizenry. If it must protect them through control of its intellectual atmosphere, it is too late.
On this day: 1264 Battle of Lewes: Henry III of England is captured and forced to sign the Mise of Lewes, making Simon de Montfort the de facto ruler of England 1607 Jamestown, Virginia is settled as an English colony. 1787 In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, delegates convene a Constitutional Convention to write a new Constitution for the United States; George Washington presides. 1796 Edward Jenner administers the first smallpox vaccination. 1804 The Lewis and Clark Expedition departs from Camp Dubois and begins its historic journey by traveling up the Missouri River. 1948 Israel is declared to be an independent state and a provisional government is established. Immediately after the declaration, Israel is attacked by the neighboring Arab states, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
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“Maybe children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. --trump If this sounds like moralistically rallying the starving troops, it should; the classic socialist response to shortages of their own device.
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Research-intensive pharmaceutical companies have also warned that low prices paid by European health systems are driving new drug discovery efforts to the US and China.
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From Many, One
Edan Alexander was released by Hamas, a year and a half after being kidnapped. He is a man with dual citizenship, American and Israeli.
Dual citizenship is a curiosity. Who--or what--is his kidnapping aimed at? Who negotiates? Importantly, who retaliates? And is there something bigger here?
The essential problem is, what does citizenship mean? Is it geographic? Just an opportunity for a low-profile passport? A statement of solidarity with family history? Does it carry any obligation, like taxation or military service?
Is there a country identity? Could there be an inconsistency between the countries you have joined? Could you have citizenship in the U.S. and in Russia? America and Iran? Are the philosophies of some different countries innocuous, or are others incompatible?
Citizenship defines both the citizen and the state. There is an element of Lavoisier in France, of the U.S. in the Rosenbergs. In a serious country, citizenship is more than a colorful luggage sticker, it is a declaration, a statement of principle. Some are historic. An Italian declares for an ancient people with a history of evangelical law and a sacred, genius artistic vision. The British declare for struggling, tortured individualism torn from aristocratic hierarchy and mercantilism. The Russians, a grim materialistic autocracy salted with astonishing literary protest. Some, like Germany and the religious states, are autocratic, nationalistic, and bigoted. Others are ill-defined or intensely parochial.
But all nations and their citizens are amalgams, alloys, each taking and giving, one to the other. America 250 years ago initiated a New Age, an age of dignity--and responsibility--of the individual. Each citizen is part of that astonishing, revolutionary vision. It is hard to understand how such a concept could be diluted by dual citizenship, or why anyone would suggest it.
Can you imagine men or women of the Revolution requesting dual citizenship with Great Britain after the war?
On this day: 1515 Mary Tudor, Queen of France, and Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk are officially married at Greenwich. 1568 Battle of Langside: The forces of Mary, Queen of Scots, are defeated by a confederacy of Scottish Protestants under James Stewart, Earl of Moray, her half-brother. 1865 American Civil War: Battle of Palmito Ranch – in far south Texas, more than a month after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the last land battle of the Civil War ends with a Confederate victory. 1940 World War II: Germany’s conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse. Winston Churchill makes his “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to the House of Commons. 1943 World War II: German Afrika Korps and Italian troops in North Africa surrender to Allied forces. 1948 1948 Arab-Israeli War: The Kfar Etzion massacre is committed by Arab irregulars, the day before the declaration of independence of the state of Israel on May 14. 1960 Hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Thirty-one students are arrested, and the Free Speech Movement is born.
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The United States currently owns nearly 70 percent of the land in the State of Utah. The relative percentage of federal lands in Eastern states is trivial by comparison where the federal government owns less than 1 percent of the land in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, and less than 3 percent of the land in Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
About half of the federal land in Utah has been designated as National Parks, National Forests, National Conservation Areas, and the like, or is being used in service of one of the federal government’s enumerated powers—e.g., as a federal military installation, courthouse, office building, or the like. But the rest of the federal land in Utah—about 34% of the State’s territory—is “unappropriated” land that the United States is simply holding, without formally reserving it for any designated purpose.--Utah website
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Moderna and pharma giant Merck are developing an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, mRNA-4157 (V940), for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed. The results have been impressive. This targeted platform therapy is now being applied to other malignancies.
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Enlightenment/Romantic
A quick summary of the Enlightenment/Romantic conflict:
For a time, the rationality of the Enlightenment seemed to hail the final triumph of human reason. Soon, the laws that operated behind the universe would all be known, and humankind would be able to create the future it wanted. At least that is how it seemed for a while.
If Copernicus is the most easily identifiable figure to mark the start of the Enlightenment, then the German philosopher Immanuel Kant can be most readily recognized as signaling the beginning of the Romantic Revolution. Romanticism emerged from a sense of disillusionment with the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment thinkers, pursuing reason, had backed themselves into a corner. The philosopher David Hume took reason to its ultimate skeptical end. Hume showed that ultimately we can know nothing. We have only the perceptions of the senses, and there is no way to know if those perceptions correspond to any outside world, whether it be the physical world of time and space or any transcendent realm of spirit. In fact, there was no way to know if there was any reality outside of our sense perceptions at all. Hume fell into such despair over this profoundly skeptical trap that he was known to frequent public backgammon games to take his mind off humanity's predicament.
A second problem of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution disaster. What started as a revolt against tyranny with the aim to put in place a government created according to the highest principles of enlightened thought turned into a blood bath, demonstrating the lowest side of human character. What did it mean? What had gone wrong?
The Romantic thinkers began to feel that the Enlightenment was suffocating them and squeezing the spirit, passion, and morality out of existence. Kant, in response, created a new vision of reality. He rejected the universe of discoverable universal laws and instead envisioned a growing universe created in part by human choices and human will.
The Enlightenment saw a universe that was mechanical and run by fixed laws. The Romantics saw an organic universe, growing with acts of will. Human will and freedom were sacred, whereas the Enlightenment centered on human reason and rationality.
The Romantics were skeptical of science. In Frankenstein, the great Romantic novel by Mary Shelly, a scientist creates life only to discover that his creation is beyond his control and destroys him and those around him. The Romantics felt that the Enlightenment notion that the universe was knowable and controllable was naive. The universe was infinite, mysterious, and ultimately unknowable. Yet we are a part of it, and therefore, if we give ourselves to our deepest yearnings, we will be part of the creative part of the universe. For the Romantics, the highest human value was not rationality, but authenticity, moral integrity, and passion. The Romantics were the first to value these things for their own sake, regardless of where they were aimed. A Christian in the Middle Ages would never admire the zeal a Pagan demonstrated for a heathen faith. The Christian would simply see the zealous Pagan as more dangerous. The Enlightened thinker didn’t admire the passion of the monk’s love of God, instead, the monk seemed all the more foolish. The Romantic admires even the passion of her enemies. To die for one's ideals is the highest good, no matter what the ideal.
Robert E. Lee? A loyal Buchenwald guard?
If the Enlightenment thinkers had felt shackled by the superstition of the Middle Ages, the Romantic thinkers felt that the natural laws of the Enlightenment were a straitjacket. The Romantics loved to break rules, to snub laws, and live as utterly unconventionally as possible. They were unconventional in dress, in lifestyle, and in thinking. As poets, playwrights, and novelists, they broke literary styles, and their great musical composers, perhaps Beethoven, the greatest of all, were notorious for breaking musical convention.
In Germany, the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Goethe set the stage for a Romantic Revolution. This revolution would erupt in the English poets Byron, Shelly, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. All of these writers had a tremendous impact on the developing thought of America at the start of the 19th century and have become a deep part of the consciousness of America. The Transcendentalists of Concord represent the American Romantic Revolution. And they were reading all of the Romantic philosophy, literature, and poetry coming out of Europe. Can the American mind be understood without understanding Romanticism?-- from Carreira
So far this year, Fetterman has missed more votes than any other senator. According to GovTrack.us, he’s missed 174 of 920 roll call votes, or about 19 percent of them.
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On May 5 of last season, Aaron Judge was mired in one of the worst slumps of his career, sparking panic in the Bronx. So when he stepped to the plate for the first time, he decided to try something different. Up to that point, Judge had always used an open batting stance, which angled his left foot toward the third baseman. Against Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal that afternoon, Judge moved the placement of his front leg ever so slightly back toward the pitcher. He promptly blasted a home run into the right-center field bleachers, followed by a booming double a few innings later. The change to Judge’s setup was almost imperceptible at first, but it had an unimaginable impact: In the year since, he has put together one of the greatest stretches of hitting that baseball has ever seen.--WSJ
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Rack or Wrack?
A “rack” is a torture device, from its origin "to stretch." So, as a verb, it usually means “torture” or “cause distress.” However, as a noun, a rack can also be a frame used for storage (e.g., a “spice rack,” restraining the spice but causing it no pain). “Wrack” is an old word meaning “wreck.” It was used to describe a shipwreck and is associated with destruction.
Most of the time, “rack” will be correct. However, “wrack” is now widely accepted as a variant spelling when used as a verb. Generally, “wrack” is used in phrases like “wrack and ruin” and “storm-wracked.” The word “rack,” meanwhile, appears in terms like “nerve-racking” or "racked with pain."
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Education and the Lack of It
Universities screen teachers through ideological matrices, censor opinions within and outside the classroom, and permit violent and destructive acts on campus aimed at university students, without discipline or consequence.
In the face of such dangerous irresponsibility, should the university's freedom be compromised by the government's duty to protect its citizens and encourage the university's neutral and academic environment?
It may be the hallmark question of our time. The educational system creates the nation's future thinking and is frequently biased and often simply stupid. In the early years, it fails to develop a proper understanding of the nation's creation and its distinctive break with history. It also accepts fads as gospel--see transgender classes and modern reading teaching techniques--and promulgates provably untrue concepts that are anathema to the nation's philosophy and destructive to its nature--see the laughable 1619 Project.
The university has become the barricade of this propaganda and error. And, shortsightedly, the society sees this as a problem for the university and not the larger social problem it is. This country is not bound together by race or genes or history; it is a society maintained by an agreement among men, that all men hold certain rights in common that predate and preempt law. All of these strange educational deviations are guerrilla raids upon that belief.
What should we do? A real problem because, while the educational system is neither accurate nor socially responsible, both the correcting mechanisms--the press, and the government--are worse. The government has already demonstrated its failure in the lower school system. And the press won the Pulitzer Prize for The 1619 Project. And many problems are imported by foreign students with foreign ideologies who simply don't know--or believe--the lay of the new land.
I shudder at the notion of police on campus. But if the schools will not prosecute crimes like vandalism and assault on campus, maybe the government doing it would be a reasonable compromise. And perhaps an aggressive Civics program, grade school, high school, and university--mandatory and thoughtful--could offer a second opinion if not an antidote to the youthful confusion of the nature of this New Land.
You can be a good citizen without knowing how to read or write.
“I accept this role not as a throne, but as a vow.”--Said to be Leo XIV response to election as Pope.
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On this day:1310 In France, fifty-four members of the Knights Templar are burned at the stake as heretics. 1891 The Ōtsu incident: Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich of Imperial Russia (later Nicholas II) suffers a critical head injury during a sword attack by Japanese policeman Tsuda Sanzō. He is rescued by Prince George of Greece and Denmark. 1949 Israel joins the United Nations. 1953 The 1953 Waco tornado outbreak: an F5 tornado hits downtown Waco, Texas, killing 114. 1960 In Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents capture fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann who is living under the alias of Ricardo Klement 1996 The 1996 Mount Everest disaster: on a single day eight people die during summit attempts on Mount Everest. 1997 Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player in a classic match format.
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In America, we tell ourselves one kind of story — about the backlash to science, on one side, or the liberal overreach, on the other. But this is not just an American phenomenon. The measles outbreak in Canada, for instance, is even bigger than ours; in Europe, they’ve gone from 127 cases in 2022 to more than 35,000 in 2024. Routine vaccination rates went down almost everywhere. What’s happening?--from David Wallace-Wells, his NYT interview with Bill Gates.
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Sunday/Materialism
The Bible is filled with confrontations between the spiritual and the material, with Christ's quiet commentary. Human commentary is less quiet.
“If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.”
The Book? Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. The rub? Nagel, an avowed atheist and a professor of philosophy and of law at New York University with terrific standing in the scientific community, suggests that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and offers thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained by, its material dimensions. While “there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one,” he writes, “this may not be comforting enough” for the materialist establishment, which may find it impossible to tolerate also “any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part.”
"Not... comforting enough?" The materialist establishment has gone nuts. "The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker." (Pinker) "A bad book like this, by a philosopher with a good name, gives philosophers in general a bad name." (Alwin) "..will certainly lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism." ----the financial motive dismissal (Dupres) "No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection..."---no kidding (Leiter and Weisberg)
In The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr concedes that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. He then cites Colin McGinn’s suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Soooooo.....we should accept materialistic explanation on ....what? You guessed it: Faith! A solution as old as man to the God problem now must be applied to the materialism problem.
There is a lot of wonderfully ironic stuff here as you go through the responses to this book. The reviews are painful cries of tortured men. And there is no answer evident. But it is enlightening to see supposed "outside the box" thinkers congeal into a regiment and walk in lockstep as soon as possible. And heaven--or materialism--help you if you transgress the dogma.
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse imagined grievances.--Sowell
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If Trump thinks that Americans are going to support his party when his message shifts to “suck it up and buy less stuff for your kids this Christmas,” Republicans are headed to a Carter-sized catastrophe.--Nat Rev
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SatSats
Real median household income, for all American households, increased 73 percent from 1968 to 2024. That’s not stagnation. Interestingly, that figure is biased downward because of changing household characteristics, such as smaller families, an aging population, and more single people.
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Foreigners, especially in China, are already cutting back on purchases of our Treasury bonds—owning only 23% of our bonds vs. 34% in 2014.
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Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level. This is exaggerated by immigration, but still....
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Japan’s estimated child population has shrunk for the 44th straight year to a record low, government data showed Sunday, as the country grapples with a demographic crisis underscored by falling birth rates and a rapidly aging population.
The number of children aged 14 and under, was 13.66 million as of April 1, down 350,000 from a year ago, according to data released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications ahead of the country’s Children’s Day public holiday.
By comparison, the proportion of children to the population was roughly 21.7% for the US in 2023 and 17.1% for China in 2024
In 2024, the country recorded 1.62 million deaths, according to the Health Ministry – more than double the number of births.
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In the last 30 years, the percentage of people with <=1 close friend has nearly tripled to 20% of the population. The percentage of people who report 10+ close friends has dropped from 40% to 15%.
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The Pirates entered Friday with the third-worst winning percentage in baseball (.316), trailing only the White Sox (.263) and Rockies (.162). The Pirates rank 21st in MLB in ERA (4.31), 24th in fielding percentage (.981) and 27th in batting average (.219).
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There was an approximately 5% decrease in electric- car sales in April, according to estimates from research from Motor Intelligence, while the broader car market grew by 10%. Monthly EV sales in the U.S. have only declined three times since 2021. Tesla reported sales plummeting nearly 13%; Rivian’s R1T pickup and R1S SUV declined by half.
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More than 41 million Americans are on food stamps.
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Russian update from Don:
2 million young Russian men have died or been wounded in Ukraine or fled the country. Inflation report: 14% with a central bank rate of 21% GDP is zero.
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The drop in ocean-freight bookings from China to the U.S dropped 60% since the tariffs took effect, according to Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen.
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Columbia's annual cocaine crop is 3,000 tons.
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The U.S. needs massive amounts of electricity to power the AI race, but it’s getting harder to deliver. About 28% of planned wind, solar and battery projects in the U.S. have been delayed or canceled, up from 10% in 2022, according to an Atlas Public Policy analysis of government energy data.
