On this day:
1407
A truce between John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans is agreed under the auspices of John, Duke of Berry. Orléans would be assassinated three days later by Burgundy.
1820
An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story).
1945
Nuremberg Trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.
1947
The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.
1962
Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.
1969
Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
2008A truce between John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans is agreed under the auspices of John, Duke of Berry. Orléans would be assassinated three days later by Burgundy.
1820
An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story).
1945
Nuremberg Trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.
1947
The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.
1962
Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.
1969
Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
After critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level since 1997.
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"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American" - Reagan, 1988
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Aristotle had said that those who worked with their hands and especially those who worked for money lacked the capacity for virtue. This remained the common view until the American Revolution changed everything. The northern celebration of work made the slaveholding South seem even more anomalous than it was. ... Slavery required a culture that held labor in contempt.
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The US invested $7.8bn (£6bn) across Africa in 2023, compared with $4bn by China, according to the China Africa Research Initiative of Johns Hopkins University, which accessed official data.
It marks the first time since 2012 that the US has regained the lead.
"The lead" implies a direction and a goal.
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From Tech Live 2025:
1. A startup called Sandbar displayed its new $250 Stream Ring.
The ring, as founder Mina Fahmi puts it, is basically “a mouse for your voice.” Tap the touchpad, hold it up to your mouth and start talking—notes, thoughts, questions, whatever. You’ll hear the AI response through your phone. The twist: Fahmi wants it to feel like you’re talking to yourself, so the assistant’s voice is modeled on your own. During setup, you record a few samples and the voice you hear back sounds similar to yours.
2. The $699 Light Phone is intentionally limited: calls, texts, music, maps, cameras, and a few other simple tools. No feeds. No algorithmic rabbit holes.
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Things look a bit different with the anti-ICE demonstrations. This effort to interfere with returning illegals to their respective countries looks more and more coordinated with the original Biden open borders. The porous Biden border looks more intentional now, as if citizenship is arbitrary.
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From Tech Live 2025:
1. A startup called Sandbar displayed its new $250 Stream Ring.
The ring, as founder Mina Fahmi puts it, is basically “a mouse for your voice.” Tap the touchpad, hold it up to your mouth and start talking—notes, thoughts, questions, whatever. You’ll hear the AI response through your phone. The twist: Fahmi wants it to feel like you’re talking to yourself, so the assistant’s voice is modeled on your own. During setup, you record a few samples and the voice you hear back sounds similar to yours.
2. The $699 Light Phone is intentionally limited: calls, texts, music, maps, cameras, and a few other simple tools. No feeds. No algorithmic rabbit holes.
***
Things look a bit different with the anti-ICE demonstrations. This effort to interfere with returning illegals to their respective countries looks more and more coordinated with the original Biden open borders. The porous Biden border looks more intentional now, as if citizenship is arbitrary.
And, if true, does that make the original American vision 'arbitrary '?
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The Self-Inflicted Wound
A lecture last night on cyber scams. There seem to be several conclusions:
1. The American risk tolerance is insatiable, perhaps a legacy of our Wild West days. There is a true vision, accurate or not, of individuals grasping and forcing the future. It's a wild atmosphere, the downside of the confidence in the individual who created this country.
2. The failure of the education system extends through life and piles up with age, like a snowplow creates snowbanks
3. The danger of advancing technology is a true dialectic, with each advance creating a counter-measure, each counter-measure creating a counterattack. An inescapable, irresolvable vortex.
4. One would expect the internet to homogenize the technological attacks, but that does not seem to be the case. Rather, the West seems to be the mothership relentlessly dogged by small pirate ships, feeding off it like pilot fish.
5. The untold story here is societal malice, the ability and willingness to poison another's well at some point. This would be aimed at the huge national subset of those simply going about their lives, not military opponents. Its objective is civilian misery, not military defeat. This willingness to do harm because one can is seemingly the greatest risk of this phenomenon. (Think of Norway discovering that all its Made-in-China trucks could be remotely turned off by one center in China.)
6. While greed and hubris are crucial elements in the victim, anonymity is its core. There is no risk of retaliation, no revenge possible. This is coincident with the confidence a perpetrator must have in the morality of its victim: the victim is expected to hold its fire against a suspect because of the cascade of potential consequences that might involve the innocent. that confidence may be misplaced with some leaders.
7. The speed and advantage of this technology make the demand for it insatiable. The impatience is so immediate that no one is willing to delay its use to evaluate its provenance.
8. This anonymous, ubiquitous, muscular tool gives more power to the individual than the Gutenberg Bible.
9. Hide the women.
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