On this Day:
622
The beginning of the Islamic calendar.
1054
Three Roman legates break relations between Western and Eastern Christian Churches through the act of placing an invalidly-issued Papal Bull of Excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during Saturday afternoon divine liturgy. Historians frequently describe the event as the start of the East-West Schism.
1779
American Revolutionary War: light infantry of the Continental Army seize a fortified British Army position in a midnight bayonet attack at the Battle of Stony Point.
1861
American Civil War: at the order of President Abraham Lincoln, Union troops begin a 25 mile march into Virginia for what will become The First Battle of Bull Run, the first major land battle of the war
1941
Joe DiMaggio hits safely for the 56th consecutive game, a streak that still stands as a MLB record.
1942
Holocaust: Vel‘ d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’d'Hiv): the government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13,152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz
1945
Manhattan Project: the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
1945
World War II: the leaders of the three Allied nations, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin, meet in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.
1948
The storming of the cockpit of the Miss Macao passenger seaplane, operated by a subsidiary of the Cathay Pacific Airways, marks the first aircraft hijacking of a commercial plane.
1950
Chaplain-Medic massacre: American POWs were massacred by North Korean Army.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11, the first manned space mission to land on the Moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
2007
2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake: an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 and 6.6 aftershock occurs off the Niigata coast of Japan killing 8 people, injuring at least 800, and damaging a nuclear power plant.
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Big P-G review of Palm Palm.
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The budget debate raises many diverting questions that detract from the underlying reality that we can not afford these things any longer. We should be in a period of triage where we start deciding what to get rid of first. Instead, we are acting like we did in the 1950s when we were trying to stabilize Europe in the face of homicidal, expansive nationalistic power.
One curiosity is that every problem should have a national solution. Your local Planned Parenthood should, for some reason, be part of a national discussion resulting in a national policy.
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Why is it that totalitarian central planning is doomed to fail while free nations can guide economies successfully?
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Israel attacks Damascus.
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The Mainau Declaration
The Mainau Declaration refers to any one of three socio-political appeals by Nobel laureates who participated in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, the annual gathering with young scientists at the German town of Lindau. These declarations were presented on Mainau Island in Lake Constance, the traditional venue of the last day of the one-week meeting.
The first Mainau Declaration was an appeal against the use of nuclear weapons. Initiated and drafted by German nuclear scientists Otto Hahn and Max Born, it was signed in 1955 by eighteen Nobel laureates and later co-signed by thirty-four others.
We, the undersigned, are scientists of different countries, different creeds, different political persuasions. Outwardly, we are bound together only by the Nobel Prize, which we have been favored to receive. With pleasure we have devoted our lives to the service of science. It is, we believe, a path to a happier life for people. We see with horror that this very science is giving mankind the means to destroy itself. By total military use of weapons feasible today, the earth can be contaminated with radioactivity to such an extent that whole peoples can be annihilated. Neutrals may die thus as well as belligerents.
If war broke out among the great powers, who could guarantee that it would not develop into a deadly conflict? A nation that engages in a total war thus signals its own destruction and imperils the whole world.
We do not deny that perhaps peace is being preserved precisely by the fear of these weapons. Nevertheless, we think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of these weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly, it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger, no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.
All nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort. If they are not prepared to do this, they will cease to exist.
--Mainau/Lake Constance/Germany, 3 July 2015
Two other such declarations have been made since then, one in 2015 that attempts to revive the anxiety over climate by feeding, vampire-like, on the importance of the initial declaration, and another, in 2024, that restates the original declaration from 1955, as if we had forgotten.
And so the elite discoverers of nuclear energy campaign for its non-use, as if it, and not the evil ambitions of man, were the problem. Like gun control and banning sodas imply, we poor men are but victims of tyrannical things.
And so the elite discoverers of nuclear energy campaign for its non-use, as if it, and not the evil ambitions of man, were the problem. Like gun control and banning sodas imply, we poor men are but victims of tyrannical things.
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