Diagnosis vs Illness

On this day:

1536
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII of England, is beheaded for adultery, treason, and incest.
1568
Queen Elizabeth I of England orders the arrest of Mary, Queen of Scots.
1649
An Act of Parliament declaring England a Commonwealth is passed by the Long Parliament. England would be a republic for the next eleven years.
1780
New England’s Dark Day: A combination of thick smoke and heavy cloud cover causes complete darkness to fall on Eastern Canada and the New England area of the United States at 10:30 A.M.
1848
Mexican-American War: Mexico ratifies the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo thus ending the war and ceding California, Nevada, Utah and parts of four other modern-day U.S. states to the United States for US$15 million.
1961
Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first man-made object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and did not send back any data).

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A report published two years ago by American think tank RAND Corporation, with close ties to the Pentagon, said China's defense industry had exported malfunctioning and defective military equipment in recent years — leaving countries short of what's needed for their security while also draining military budgets

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The big data planned economy is a paradox. Big data is the result of countless spontaneous actions by people in the market economy. If the planned economy is implemented so that every person follows government decrees, then big data itself will disappear!--Zhang

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Diagnosis vs Illness

The most important man in the West occupying the most important position in the West had, during his tenure, a common and easily diagnosed cancer which, by all modern scientific assumptions, was chronic and undiscovered.

There are many observations one could make here--most quite ugly--but this is a harder question than it appears.

Prostate cancer is common, and its incidence rises with age. It is biologically present in 30% of 50-65 year olds and 40% of men in their 70s. Its percentage in 80-year-olds is probably higher. The problem with prostate cancer is that it does not behave like a cancer; it just looks like one. And when it behaves like a cancer, it usually does so in slow motion.

The number of men who will benefit from active intervention for the disease is close to the number who will suffer serious consequences from the search for the disease. Most tread carefully in this area and usually do not search for the disease in men over 70.

It would be tempting to say that Biden's keepers were ignoring the man and polishing the shell. They probably were, but likely not in this instance.

Sunday/Feeling the Difficulty of Faith

On this day:
1152
Henry II of England marries Eleanor of Aquitaine.
1593
Playwright Thomas Kyd’s accusations of heresy lead to an arrest warrant for Christopher Marlowe
1860
Abraham Lincoln wins the Republican Party presidential nomination over William H. Seward, who later becomes the United States Secretary of State.
1896
The United States Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that the “separate but equal” doctrine is constitutional.
1980
1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens: Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington, United States, killing 57 people and causing $3 billion in damage.

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“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain. How is it possible?”--Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

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InventWood makes a carbon-based material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better, the company said. It’s also Class A fire rated, or highly resistant to flame, and resistant to rot and pests. With some polymer impregnated, it can be stabilized for outdoor use like siding, decking, or roofing. InventWood’s first products will be facade materials for commercial and high-end residential buildings.

Compressing the material also concentrates the colors. You end up with something that looks like rich, tropical hardwoods.

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Sunday/Feeling the Difficulty of Faith

“If there is a single painter with whom the new millennium has identified, it is without a doubt Caravaggio,” begins the catalogue for Caravaggio 2025, an extraordinary exhibition of twenty-four of the artist’s works, gathered at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini from museums and private collections across the world. The crowds are big.

This hasn’t always been the case. After falling into obscurity for several centuries, Caravaggio’s (1571-1610) star began to rise again in 1951 thanks to a similar exhibition organized in Milan by the great art historian Roberto Longhi.

The painter’s life fits the post-Byronic template for a tragic artist –- salacious liaisons, murder, exile, and an untimely death on the unforgiving (but romantic) Italian coast. Romanticism put a premium on artistic self-expression, and Caravaggio’s work was undeniably original because of the inner tumult that gushes from his figures. Those figures are not always conventionally beautiful, but they are compelling.

Yet these considerations don’t quite explain Caravaggio’s magnetic draw. Perhaps above all, Caravaggio was a great religious painter; something about his style resonates with the spiritual aspirations and shortcomings of our age. His works on secular themes are clever, but don’t convey the power of his later religious works. And none of those works are quite so powerful as the Flagellation, Supper at Emmaus, and Ecce Homo with Jesus Christ at their center. One feels a yearning for redemption in the darkness of the artist’s life.

Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon locates the roots of Caravaggio’s style in the reforms of Milan’s great archbishop St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584). Borromeo was the dominant cultural and religious figure in Caravaggio’s native Lombardy at the time of the artist’s birth. Guided by the Council of Trent’s emphasis on the sacraments and the imaginative prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, Borromeo favored an intense, dramatic, devotional style Graham-Dixon describes as “populist.”

These characteristics, alongside Borromeo’s awareness of the darkness that original sin casts over our existence, are distilled in Caravaggio’s mature work. In the Flagellation or the Conversion of St. Paul or St. Francis contemplating death, one feels no scholastic abstraction, but salvation worked out achingly in wounded flesh.

Another art historian, Alessandro Zuccari, points out that all available evidence indicates that Caravaggio’s religious beliefs were conventionally Catholic. He confessed and received Communion at Easter and participated in forty-hours Eucharistic devotions. The fiery temper that caused the artist so much grief is evidence of concupiscence, not heterodoxy.

St. Francis in Ecstasy by Caravaggio, c. 1595 [in the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut]

Exiled from Rome after killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio spent the rest of his life seeking papal forgiveness instead of fortune in the Protestant principalities of northern Europe. When his self-portrait appears in scriptural scenes, it has a haggard, yearning look. But feeling the difficulty of faith is not the same thing as unbelief. And that’s, I suspect, why the artist’s work so resonates today.

In Michelangelo’s muscular figures, we witness the robust marriage of faith and Renaissance humanism. The inky darkness of Caravaggio’s scenes anticipates an age when faith no longer feels so inevitable. At Caravaggio 2025, I was struck by the arrangement of St. Francis in Ecstasy – the saint, reclining in soft angelic arms, fills one side of the painting, but its center is all shadow. If you look closely, you can make out figures in the distance, but just barely.

Other works also seem sketched at the border between faith and unbelief. In Caravaggio’s two versions of the Supper at Emmaus, the disciples’ bodies reel with the shock of recognizing the risen Lord, but in both cases, a weary innkeeper looks on with faint irritation, as if hoping they’d just place their order and finish their meal. Not all have eyes to see.

The Conversion of St. Paul, across town in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, forces viewers to question their own vision. In it, the young Saul, on the ground with outstretched arms, has literally been floored by a vision of Christ, but Caravaggio doesn’t paint that vision. All the viewer sees is the rear end of Saul’s horse. Like an examination of conscience that stings, the painting asks, “Do you have eyes to see?”

An earlier version, on loan to Caravaggio 2025 from a private collection, is a less inventive (and busier) composition but poses a similarly uncomfortable challenge. The figure of Jesus, attended by a cherub, is visible in the sky and Saul is on the ground again, covering his eyes. His attendant, however, is upright and armed with shield and spear, which he aims at Christ, as if to fight him off. Not everyone welcomes the Lord’s appearance.--from Fr. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J. in Catholic Thing

SatStats

On this day:
1973
Watergate scandal: Televised hearings begin in the United States Senate.
1974
Dublin and Monaghan bombings: Thirty-three civilians are killed when the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) explodes car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, Republic of Ireland.
1974
Police in Los Angeles, California, raid the Symbionese Liberation Army’s headquarters, killing six members, including Camilla Hall.
1990
The General Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) eliminates homosexuality from the list of psychiatric diseases.

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Are there topics or subjects in academic study dangerous to young minds? 

Is this the basis of The Index?

Do we shield people from unpleasant observations for what is perceived as the Common Good?

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SatStats

The average age of a homebuyer has climbed to 56, almost double what it was 40 years ago.

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Not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China. Then it started to disappear.

Land sales measures, foreign investment data and unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone.

In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

In most cases, Chinese authorities haven’t given any reason for ending or withholding data. But the missing numbers have come as the world’s second biggest economy has stumbled under the weight of excessive debt, a crumbling real-estate market and other troubles—spurring heavy-handed efforts by authorities to control the narrative.

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43% of young people currently carry student debt, compared with 28% in 1993.

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A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, meaning they have a condition such as autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia, according to a leading psychologist.

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Jensen: “First thing to understand: 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese.”

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Between 2014 and 2021, prices paid for prescription drugs by Medicare Part D, after accounting for generic substitutions, increased by just 13 percent—less than the rate of inflation over that period. Drug spending takes up only 12 percent of total health-care payments in the U.S., and American consumers spend only 0.4 percent of their total consumption on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs. Both these figures are far less than the OECD average. Meanwhile, the cost of hospital services rose 30 percent between 2014 and 2021.

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Korea is facing a surge in suicides among men in their 30s to 50s, driven by worsening economic hardship, social isolation and high-profile celebrity deaths, highlighting urgent calls for stronger national suicide prevention measures.

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Women in midlife have upped their alcohol consumption in recent decades, as their lifestyles have changed. Doctors are now witnessing more hospitalizations of women for liver disease, and some researchers suspect alcohol consumption is contributing to rising rates of breast cancer. Alcohol-related deaths in women are increasing at a faster clip than in men, data show.

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Nielsen data show that traditional TV accounted for less than half of all US viewing time for the first time ever. But the shows most people are watching on services like Netflix and Disney+ are the ones made for traditional TV.

Cable and broadcast TV represented 29.6% and 20% of total US viewing time, respectively, while streaming services accounted for roughly 40%. The remaining piece of the pie was taken up by DVDs, video-on-demand, and gaming.

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Encouragingly for gas-powered cars, the 2022 model year saw the largest single-year improvement in CO2 emission rates and fuel economy in nine years. All while horsepower keeps going up.

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The S&P 500 index is meant to represent 500 companies. It has become so concentrated due to the rise of Mag 7 stocks that its effective diversification is less than 60 stocks.

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The risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period — a significant improvement from 1 per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017 and a far cry from the 1 per every 350,000 boardings that occurred in 1968-1977, an MIT study finds.

Gifts

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?

Tick Tock

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.

…..

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.

From Many, One

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?

Enlightenment/Romantic

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

Education and the Lack of It

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. 

Sunday/Materialism

“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.

SatSats

 

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

***

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

***

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.

***

Foreigners, especially in China, are already cutting back on purchases of our Treasury bonds—owning only 23% of our bonds vs. 34% in 2014.

***

Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level. This is exaggerated by immigration, but still....

***

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.

 ***

*** 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%. *** 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). *** 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. *** More than 41 million Americans are on food stamps. *** 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. *** 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. *** Columbia's annual cocaine crop is 3,000 tons. *** 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.

Fetterman's Reassessment

On this day:

1960
The Food and Drug Administration announces it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle’s Enovid, making Enovid the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill.
1979
Iranian Jewish businessman Habib Elghanian is executed by firing squad in Tehran, prompting the mass exodus of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran.
1980
In Florida, Liberian freighter MV Summit Venture collides with the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, making a 1,400-ft. section of the southbound span collapse. 35 people in six cars and a Greyhound bus fall 150 ft. into the water and die.

***

Until America goes into decline, there won't be an American pope.--Cardinal George from Chicago (from Chris)

***

The White House convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private mission to the moon after the largest group of Native Americans in the United States asked the administration to delay the flight because it would be carrying cremated human remains destined for a lunar burial.

***

Fetterman's Reassessment

There are changes afoot in the information cartel.

Fetterman has long been an interesting guy. Huge (6'8''), tattooed, and rough, he had an epiphany as a young man: when faced with the brevity and inequity of life, he decided it was not a fact of existence but injustice. Fault was involved. He changed his life, became a socialist, married the beautiful Gisele (who might be the brains of the outfit), and entered politics. Like all such political activists, he simply ignores the basic truth that the government power and devotion necessary for such political ambitions are as incompatible with the nation's origin and character as is monarchy. Instead, as all such visionaries, he follows the advice of Blackadder's Anthony Melchett: “If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.” Pigheadedness and the threat of violence.

Suffice it to say, he has been lionized. He became the Mayor of Braddock, a waystation on the bullet train of automation, clean energy, and outsourced labor, and now a violent shell disguised as a town. With no real demonstration of administrative ability or imagination, he ran for Pennsylvania lieutenant-governor and won.

Then he pitted his shallow public appeal against that of TV personality Dr. Oz and won the senate race. As a senator, his major accomplishment seems to be his refusal to follow dress codes. He's a maverick.

Then he had a stroke.

The following months were filled with news accounts of his struggle to return to normal. He could not speak. He required special electronics. Then he was hospitalized for depression, a serious event in any life.

Since then, he has had slow progress back to flouting dress norms.

But things have changed.

A recent news article worried about a shouting match he had at a meeting with the teachers' union.

That interaction at Fetterman’s Washington office, described to The Associated Press by the two people who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity, came the day before New York Magazine published a story in which former staff and political advisers to Fetterman aired concerns about the senator’s mental health.

That story included a 2024 letter, also obtained by the AP, in which Fetterman’s one-time chief of staff Adam Jentleson told a neuropsychiatrist who had treated Fetterman for depression that the senator appeared to be off his recovery plan and was exhibiting alarming behavior, including a tendency toward “long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues.”

And some who have worked closely with Fetterman question publicly whether his recovery is complete.

In the 2024 letter to Dr. David Williamson, Jentleson warned that Fetterman was not seeing his doctors, had pushed out the people who were supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan, and might not be taking his prescribed medications. Jentleson also said Fetterman had been driving recklessly and exhibiting paranoia, isolating him from colleagues.

“Overall, over the last nine months or so, John has dismantled the early-warning system we all agreed upon when he was released,” Jentleson wrote. “He has picked fights with each person involved in that system and used those fights as excuses to push them out and cut them off from any knowledge about his health situation.”

Aristocracies solve leadership questions by birth. Democracies must simply work harder. As the country has shown over the years, democracies pick pretty randomly and need to be lucky. This country has been.

But much of its luck has been tempered by a belief--even among its most incompetent--that the betterment of the nation was somehow at stake. With the Biden experience, the nation no longer has that buffer. Ambition and power have no default mechanism, no circuit breaker. The cabal-that-be will pursue power and keep it at any price, even if it means supporting an addled, demented old man as president of the country and leader of the free world.

What we saw was not simply outrageous lust; we were seeing a complete suppression of responsibility and conscience.

That is what makes this negative Fetterman publicity so shocking. What is going on here?

Thoughts

On this day:

1794
Branded a traitor during the Reign of Terror by revolutionists, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was also a tax collector with the Ferme Générale, is tried, convicted, and guillotined all on the same day in Paris.
1902
In Martinique, Mount Pelée erupts, destroying the town of Saint-Pierre and killing over 30,000 people. Only a handful of residents survive the blast.
1945
Hundreds of Algerian civilians are killed by French Army soldiers in the Sétif massacre.
1945
World War II: V-E Day, combat ends in Europe. German forces agree in Rheims, France, to an unconditional surrender.
1978
First ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler.

***

Thoughts 

The noble human search for knowledge continues.
The Russian site, called Sergiev Posad-6, has been quiet for decades, but it had a notorious Cold War past: It had once been a major research center for biological weapons, with a history of experiments with the viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola, and hemorrhagic fevers.

Satellite imagery— collected by commercial imaging firms Maxar and Planet Labs — shows construction vehicles renovating the old Soviet-era laboratory and breaking ground on 10 new buildings, totaling more than 250,000 square feet, with several of them bearing hallmarks of biological labs designed to handle extremely dangerous pathogens.

A 2023 Compliance Report, prepared by the United States Department of State, alleges that “Russia maintains an offensive [biological weapons] program and is in violation of its obligations under … the [Biological Weapons Convention] (BWC).”

But don't worry. As COVID has shown, you can always count on governments--especially aggressive, paranoid ones with homicidal philosophies--to do the right thing.

***

Sausage making, once an artisan’s craft, has become a compliance exercise that perhaps only corporations can realistically manage.--Tabarrok

***

 Donald Rumsfeld, who was serving at the time as the secretary of defense under former U.S. President George W. Bush, made a speech on Sept. 10, 2001. It is often referenced as stating that the Defense Department was a center of fraud. This is a misrepresentation.
At the 14:15 mark, Rumsfeld says, “Our financial systems are decades old. Some estimates show we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building. Because it's stored on dozens of different technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.”

He was referencing technical deficiencies, not theft.

***

Major League Baseball has never been a socialist utopia. But as a result of its wealth-sharing, the financial disparity between the sport’s 30 teams has never been greater, alienating fans and distorting the game. It is a teaching case on socialistic abuse as the whole sacrifices itself to support an inept segment and enrich a favored few.
Is a long work stoppage inevitable?

BTW, I think this might be the worst Pirate lineup and bench I've ever seen.

***

President Biden could argue that the lawful-but-unethical pardon precedent is now so deeply established, not least by his predecessor, that granting clemency to his own son could hardly be considered beyond political norms. If you doubt that, consider the pardon granted to Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, who is now on track to enjoy a stint in the ultimate offender rehabilitation program as U.S. ambassador to France.--(someone)

This opinion apparently calls upon the time-honored belief that crime and immorality can be made normal by repetition, essentially grandfathering criminality into the social norm. (This is not to be confused with the equally time-honored defense, "But Billy did it, too, Mom.")

***

Progressivism’s challenge to the American legal order arises not from misunderstanding but from a deep-rooted opposition to the Constitution’s original design. The Constitution’s separation of powers and its layered legislative process are deliberate impediments to the rapid societal changes progressives desire. Progressives rally behind the banner of equality and have come to see rights, such as property and even free speech, as pretexts for inequality, because individuals possess varying abilities to wield them. They fear these rights can act like levees holding back the flow of political transformation, empowering citizens to resist the sweeping reforms that progressives advocate.--McGinnis

Worth remembering.

***

My analysis reveals a significant change in political beliefs since being incarcerated. There is an increased effect of changing political beliefs for women and people of color incarcerated. The effect reveals that people of color are becoming, either for the first time or further aligned, with the Republican Party since being incarcerated.--a paper

***

“I’m not sure I have a full model of how this works, but the situation where nearly 100% of credentialed experts are Democrats seems to me to have made both parties’ epistemics worse than they were 20 years ago.” — from Matt Yglesias.

Deficits

On this day:
1429
Joan of Arc ends the Siege of Orléans, pulling an arrow from her own shoulder and returning, wounded, to lead the final charge. The victory marks a turning point in the Hundred Years’ War
1794
French Revolution: Robespierre introduces the Cult of the Supreme Being in the National Convention as the new state religion of the French First Republic.
1915
World War I: German submarine SMU U-20 sinks RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 people including 128 Americans. Public reaction to the sinking turns many formerly pro-Germans in the United States against the German Empire.
1942
During the Battle of the Coral Sea, United States Navy aircraft carrier aircraft attack and sink the Japanese Imperial Navy light aircraft carrier Shōhō. The battle marks the first time in the naval history that two enemy fleets fight without visual contact between warring ships.
1945
World War II: General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms at Reims, France, ending Germany’s participation in the war. The document takes effect the next day.

***

I am weary of the provocateur-in-chief.

***

ESPN is reporting that Pickens has been traded

***

The basic problem in the Middle East is the Nuclear Suicide Bomber, a nation willing to blow up the world because of its vision of the will of God. That risk has always been concentrated on Israel and its enemies. But this India-Pakistan fight has similar nihilistic potential. We see microcosms of it every day: morons with weapons.

***

The fight between the teen gang and the police in Times Square had a very São Paulo, Brazil feel. Very diverse and international.

***

Deficits

Free trade occurring without government management or interference had been a hallmark of American economics. Think of all those niggling trade bills the British used against New Englanders before the Revolution. Well, they're back.

Does Pennsylvania have a trade deficit with Alaska? California? Do you have a trade deficit with your dentist?

A nation indeed has more in play than simple numbers. But it is also true that some of the number debates are simply untrue.

There’s little obvious connection between the U.S. trade balance and economic output (gross domestic product). This chart from a recent Cato essay on the trade balance shows that the relationship between higher trade surpluses (or smaller deficits) and higher GDP growth is practically nonexistent, although I can't copy it well. (Much from Scott Lincicome)

If that hypothesis were correct, these two series would be rising and falling in concert.

One can’t judge whether a trade deficit is a problem without considering its underlying macroeconomic causes and how related foreign capital inflows are used. If those inflows are caused by a nation’s young population and its attractiveness as an investment destination—and if they’re invested productively in things like education, housing, or research—then the resulting trade deficit would be benign. If, on the other hand, the trade deficit is primarily driven by an elderly citizenry’s debt-financed consumption and by profligate government spending, then it could be more of a concern. 

In either case, however, the trade deficit remains a symptom, not a cause, of a nation’s underlying economic issues.

Aside from our government’s runaway deficit spending, none of the drivers of the U.S. trade deficit is necessarily “bad” for the U.S. economy, and many of them—portfolio investment, foreign direct investment, etc.—are objectively good and indicative of a thriving economy. (U.S. household debt is mostly home mortgages and has actually been trending down since the mid-2000s, while corporate debt has been basically flat for decades.)

This also explains why no serious economist thinks tariffs or trade deals will significantly reduce, let alone eliminate, the U.S. trade deficit. Tariffs can reduce both imports and exports, reducing a nation’s overall level of trade but leaving its trade balance unchanged in the long run”—a conclusion supported by research on dozens of different countries and the United States’ experience during the first Trump term.

Even imported consumer goods can boost U.S. output. Companies tasked with moving or selling imported items—in wholesale trade, retail trade, and transportation and warehousing —generate trillions of dollars of additional U.S. economic output. By reducing retail prices, moreover, imports can free consumer dollars for spending on American goods and services. And, as already noted, dollars spent on imports quickly return to the United States as either investment in U.S. assets or purchases of exports, both of which contribute to economic growth.

It’s similarly wrong to assert—as our president often does—that the U.S. trade deficit represents a loss of wealth for the United States or some kind of national “debt.” For starters, this ignores that dollars we send abroad to foreigners buy us real goods and services that we value (or else we wouldn’t buy them), and that—as discussed above— those same dollars eventually return to the United States as investment in the U.S. private or public sector (by mostly unrelated people). Some call the latter a “debt” we Americans must repay, but in many cases—portfolio investment, foreign direct investment, real estate, and basically anything else that isn’t actual public debt—that’s not really true. Corporate debt, for example, is owed by shareholders and employees of the company at issue, not by you and me. Foreign purchases of equity (stocks), property, or even entire U.S. companies isn’t “debt” at all—and can benefit most Americans and the nation if the investment spurs more hiring/production/innovation, causes stocks to rise, or causes similar, American-owned assets (e.g. property) to appreciate too. It’s not zero-sum. 

So Japanese investment in U.S. Steel is seen, on the accounting ledger, as a negative balance of trade and some sort of risk despite being obviously beneficial.

Another huge and common mistake is using bilateral trade balances—e.g. the U.S. trade deficit with China—as indicative of economic problems or as some sort of trade policy scorecard.  

Most basically, the world has more than two countries, so—just as my trade deficit with my grocery store tells us almost nothing about my overall financial position—a U.S. trade deficit with, say, Mexico tells us almost nothing about our own economy. 

A country's integrity might well be threatened by trade. Relying on your sworn enemy for your energy or bullets is a bad long-term plan. But historically, we have actually encouraged these imbalances. We suppress our own energy production in favor of that of Russia and the Middle East, certainly cultural unfriendlies. That is--or has been until now--purposeful. It was a hallmark of what passes as the Biden administration. 

It is certainly worth discussion, but a cynic might say that leadership does not understand the factors or doesn't think the citizenry capable of the debate. 

Both of those scenarios are a lot worse for the nation than trade deficits. 

Rumors of Solutions

This Day:1527
Spanish and German troops sack Rome; some consider this the end of the Renaissance. 147 Swiss Guards, including their commander, die fighting the forces of Charles V in order to allow Pope Clement VII to escape into Castel Sant'Angelo.
1863
American Civil War: The Battle of Chancellorsville ends with the defeat of the Army of the Potomac by Confederate troops.
1937
Hindenburg disaster: The German zeppelin Hindenburg catches fire and is destroyed within a minute while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-six people are killed.
1996
The body of former CIA director William Colby is found washed up on a riverbank in southern Maryland, eight days after he disappeared.

***

A study from the University of Washington found that soldiers became emotionally attached to robots used to disarm bombs. Many named their robots (usually after a celebrity or current wife or girlfriend) and some painted the robot’s name on its side. A few soldiers even held funerals for their robots when they “died.”

***

Some of the things that happened in the Pirate game on Sunday included Ke’Bryan Hayes getting picked off second base, Matt Gorski getting thrown out at home plate while attempting to score on a ground ball to the third baseman, starting pitcher Andrew Heaney not paying attention to the runners as the Padres executed a double steal, catcher Henry Davis letting a pitch right over home plate clank off his mitt for a passed ball and shortstop Jared Triolo misplaying a routine groundball.

Major League Baseball.

***



Rumors of Solutions

Kent Smetters is the Boettner Chair Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2024 election, he spoke with Srijana Mitra Das about economic measures offered in the election and the issue no one was addressing. This is culled from an Economic Times article and has the usual undertone of wide-eyed terror, but also a surprising assessment of the potential for solution:


At a broad level, I’d say former President Donald Trump is about cutting taxes, and Vice President Kamala Harris is about increasing spending. However, neither recognises that we are already on an unsustainable path — America’s debt relative to the size of our economy is exploding. As I would put it, our fiscal house is burning down — but both candidates are arguing over the furniture.

Historically, debt crises have never been only about economic pain — they’ve brought very serious social disruptions. Entire forms of government and social cohesion have changed. These impacts must be taken into account, but neither candidate is doing so. In fact, both will increase US debt, shortening the timeline of when the associated problems will materialise.

We have about 20 years left — after that, we will have so much debt, with such large interest payments, that the government won’t be able to cut spending enough to even make those. If they try to increase taxes, the distortions on the economy will be so large that it would be impossible to raise money because the base will contract.

The 20-year window also doesn’t mean we can wait till year 18 or 19 — even today, the cuts or increases in revenue required are substantial.  

Our Penn Wharton Budget Model study has shown three options — one is mostly tax increases. The second is spending cuts.

The third is broad-based new tax revenues, including a carbon tax and a value-added tax (VAT), alongside discretionary spending cuts. We could have sizeable debt reduction while growing the economy. It is a myth that to reduce debt, you need austerity measures that contract the economy. Our study shows a wide range of possibilities that could grow the economy.

***

So, according to him, cutting the debt and growing the economy are not incompatible. What is not compatible is a problem and the lying about the solutions. This debt will be resolved, one way or another, and the resolution spectrum is wide. And a small but intense minority in the culture wants a European solution for its ills: conflict, scapegoating, and revenge.

Clear-headed, flint-eyed honesty created this country and raised its head briefly during the Civil War, but has become less and less an element in public life. Everything from politics to religion is presented on a sales platform, with the assumption of insincerity and manipulation. Democracy, to be successful, must deal with the difficult times as well as the good; success only during good times is not reaffirming.

And most of the time spent falling from a great height is pain-free.

 

Tres Plus Dos Equals Cinco de Mayo

On this day:
1821
Emperor Napoleon I dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.
1961
The Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 3 – Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into outer space, making a sub-orbital flight of 15 minutes.

***

What is the "Global Engagement Center?"

***

Every horse in the Kentucky Derby is a descendant of Secretariat.

***

QB Kenny Pickett's fifth-year option has been declined by the Browns on Thursday's deadline, NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reported.

***

Tres Plus Dos Equals Cinco de Mayo

The painting, often identified as commemorating Cinco de Mayo in Mexico, actually depicts the Spanish War with Napoleon's France two generations before the French War in Mexico. Nor is the event of Cinco de Mayo of much political significance--other than ironic--although it was a shocking military one.

Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War, a savage affair fought by Spanish partisans against hard, regular French troops. This famous painting was The Third of May (along with its companion piece, The Second of May 1808 or The Charge of the Mamelukes.)

Third of May:



A half-century later, in 1862, Spain's creditors ran out of patience with her debts. France, eager to expand its territory and following the long-accepted custom of seizing a reluctant debtor's ports and collecting tax receipts in lieu of their loan, invaded the Mexican port of Veracruz, intending to collect customs receipts until the debt was repaid. They also had another aim: they hoped to make their stay permanent by placing Maximilian on a Mexican throne. The French marched inland. This was an experienced, tough group, and they proceeded virtually unopposed until confronted by a sizable Mexican force in the small town of Puebla. There, against all expectation and logic, on 5 May 1862, Mexican troops, led by Ignacio Zaragoza, defeated a larger force of the elite French Foreign Legion. Mexican President Benito Juarez declared 5 May a national holiday -- Cinco de Mayo -- although he certainly knew the truth. The French replaced their commander and sent thirty thousand reinforcements. In no time, they controlled the cities and orchestrated the election that made Maximilian Emperor of México.