The Inadequacy of Truth

On this day:

455
Sack of Rome: Vandals enter Rome and plunder the city for two weeks
1692
Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Found guilty, she is hanged on June 10.
1763
Pontiac’s Rebellion: At what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan, Chippewas capture Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison’s attention with a game of lacrosse, then chasing a ball into the fort.
1774
Intolerable Acts: The Quartering Act is enacted, allowing a governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters are not provided.
1793
French Revolution: François Hanriot, leader of the Parisian National Guard, arrests 22 Girondists selected by Jean-Paul Marat, setting the stage for the Reign of Terror.
1919
Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight separate U.S. cities.
1962
During the 1962 FIFA World Cup, police had to intervene multiple times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
1966
Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft land on another world.
1967
Protests in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran turn into riots, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death results in the founding of the terrorist group Movement 2 June.
1995
United States Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady’s F-16 is shot down over Bosnia while patrolling the NATO no-fly zone.
1997
In Denver, Colorado, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

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“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”--Mamdani

***

Every member of the cat family Felidae, from the smallest domestic tabby to the largest Siberian tiger, shares the same broken gene. They cannot taste sweetness.

***

On Monday, Los Angeles traded for future Hall of Fame edge rusher Myles Garrett in exchange for draft picks and young edge rusher Jared Verse, completing a defense that had already added veteran defensive backs Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson this spring. Everybody is comparing this to the sea-changing Boston-Moss trade in 2007.

***

FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend has sued MS NOW, accusing the news organization of using “sham” anonymous sources to “push knowingly or recklessly false allegations” that she abused bureau resources.


***

These Delaney Hall riots over the quality of prison food are a wonderful metaphor for our society of innuendo.

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The Inadequacy of Truth

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
This is not political or economic or historical; this is daycare talk.
By collectivism, political theorists and their own champions have meant a social order in which the claims of the group—often defined and enforced by the state—override individual choice, property rights, and voluntary exchange. Production and distribution are guided not by prices and consent but by political priorities, and individual autonomy is tolerated only insofar as it serves collective ends. That is not a caricature; it is the standard definition of what’s espoused in fascist, socialist, and communist literature.

The word’s lineage matters. Zohran Mamdani is consciously drawing on a tradition that stretches from Karl Marx, who rejected “bourgeois individualism” in favor of collective ownership, through Vladimir Lenin, who implemented it via one-party rule, to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who enforced it at colossal human cost. Even outside the communist tradition, collectivism was proudly embraced by Benito Mussolini, who defined fascism as the negation of individualism in favor of the state as an ethical whole, and by strongmen such as Idi Amin, who expelled ethnic minorities and appropriated their land in the name of the national good.

The historical record is not ambiguous. Where collectivism has moved from rhetoric to reality, the results have been grim. The Soviet Union’s collectivized agriculture led to chronic shortages and mass famine through both disastrous economic policies and by design to suppress dissent. China’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Cambodia’s agrarian collectivism under Pol Pot destroyed a quarter of the population, resulting in the “killing fields” and perhaps the most brutal regime in modern history. In each case, politics replaced price signals, error correction was treated as dissent, and individuals weren’t free to exit the collective.--from Bourne

This reasonable summary is nonetheless a curious approach to this strange problem, which has recurrent outbreaks in the West, like malaria or Ebola, rising, killing, then receding. The basic notion is that if it worked, a martial-law approach to the economy would be acceptable. There is rarely a consideration of abstract value. Doesn't freedom have some value, too? Isn't a free economy indirectly an expression of us?

Certainly, collectiveism has a basic appeal to the species: our tribalness, our envy, our romantic and unreasonable optimism and magic, our deep, cold savagery. But these are the basics of the savannah, rooms in our much more glorious house. What we are is not any of these elements; we have transcended them. We are no longer wanderers looking for an Alpha.

The real question, at its heart, is: where does the struggle to justify an inhuman, oppressive, unsuccessful system come from? Infection? Aliens?

Unit 731.5

On this day:

1215
Zhongdu (now Beijing), then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Zhongdu.
1533
Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1648
The Roundheads defeat the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War.
1660
Mary Dyer is hanged for defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1943
British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 is shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German Junkers Ju 88s, killing actor Leslie Howard and leading to speculation the downing was an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

***

Tyranny can demand production but not innovation.

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A meteor exploded off the coast of Massachusetts, causing a loud boom that could be heard throughout the state Saturday afternoon.

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Bombs, drones, and missiles were exchanged over the weekend between the U.S. and Iran as they continue to redefine what a 'ceasefire' is.

***

Unit 731.5

Change within a free culture will always create new interfaces between the past and the future. Citizen interference with law enforcement, historically a recognized crime, is now apparently at least debatable. The vigilante now has an admired subtype, the vigilangione. Drone warfare has reshaped the requirements of the foot soldier. Technology — and a perceptible ethical slide — has changed our environment and us.

A biotech startup called Bexorg is extracting human brains just hours after death and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the tissue no longer has electrical activity, most of its key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

According to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.

Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive.

“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.

Sunday/Trinity

On this day:

1279 BC
Rameses II (The Great) (19th dynasty) becomes pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.
526
A devastating earthquake strikes Antioch, Turkey, killing 250,000.

1162 

Happy Birthday, Genghis Khan, Khagan of the Mongol Empire
1678
The Godiva procession through Coventry begins.
1889
Johnstown Flood: Over 2,200 people die after a dam break sends a 60-foot (18-meter) wall of water over the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
1921
Tulsa Race Riot: A civil unrest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, the official death toll is 39, but recent investigations suggest the actual toll may be much higher.
1935
A 7.7 Mw earthquake destroys Quetta in modern-day Pakistan: 40,000 dead.
1941
A Luftwaffe air raid in Dublin, Ireland, claims 38 lives.

1962

Adolf Eichmann is hanged in Israel.
1970
The Ancash earthquake causes a landslide that buries the town of Yungay, Peru; more than 47,000 people are killed.

***

The Flat Earth Facebook group has more than 100,000 members. They vote.

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Biblioclasm: the destruction of books, especially the Bible. — biblioclast.

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Sunday/Trinity

Today is Trinity Sunday, and its gospel is the gospel of John 3:16--18, made famous by baseball caps and signs held up in endzones by strange, bearded men with rainbow hair. It is also famous in the seminary. No one wants to give a sermon on this gospel; it always risks heresy.

John's lines summarize the two great difficulties in Christianity: the Trinity and Christ's motive. Muhammad was so bewildered by the Trinity that he solved it with polytheism. The Old Testament scholars expected a leader in the messiah. Conflict and victory.

But the New Testament offers neither. Rather, it creates an incomprehensible spiritual circular genealogy and the Christ who promises no justice, no judgment.

Mystery. And a mercy.

Stats

On this day:
70
Siege of Jerusalem: Titus and his Roman legions breach the Second Wall of Jerusalem. The Jewish defenders retreat to the First Wall. The Romans build a circumvallation, cutting down all trees within fifteen kilometers.
1431
Hundred Years’ War: in Rouen, France, 19-year-old Joan of Arc is burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal. Because of this the Catholic Church remembers this day as the celebration of Saint Joan of Arc.
1806
Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel after Dickinson had accused Jackson’s wife of bigamy.
1814
Napoleonic Wars: War of the Sixth Coalition – the Treaty of Paris (1814) is signed returning French borders to their 1792 extent. Napoleon Bonaparte is exiled to Elba.
1854
The Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law, establishing the US territories of Nebraska and Kansas.

1871
The Paris Commune falls.

***

Grownups report: President Trump's name must be removed from the Kennedy Center, according to an order signed Friday by a D.C. district judge.

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Claude Lemieux, who became a successful agent after his 21-season NHL career, in which he won four Stanley Cups, died by suicide on Thursday, according to authorities. He was 60.

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Astonishing:

Peter Thiel appears to have found a new spot. He isn't alone in looking beyond America's shores.

The PayPal and Palantir cofounder and prominent libertarian has been spending more time in Argentina, The New York Times reported, where he has enrolled his children in school and bought a home in one of Buenos Aires' wealthiest neighborhoods.

Among the ultrawealthy, that fits a larger pattern. The rich are treating their lives in America like part of an investment portfolio: still worth betting on, but increasingly in need of a hedge.--BI


***

Stats

In the days before the Memorial Day weekend, rates on 30 year Treasury bonds hit their highest level in 19 years at 5.2%, and the benchmark 10-year reached 4.7%, the top reading since mid-2007. If those kinds of yields take hold, the scenario for federal interest expense posited in the CBO’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036,” released in February, descends from dire to near-disastrous. Takeaway: America’s track to fiscal safety has lost all margin for error, and nothing demonstrates that better than the long-term impact of loftier-than-expected rates. --Fortune

*

Early results provide no clear evidence that a school's smartphone ban policy reduced screen time or improved psychological well-being.

*

Estimates of data center impact show positive effects on total employment, data-processing employment, construction employment, establishments, house prices, and electricity prices at different horizons after data center growth. We also find positive effects on tax returns, adjusted gross income, and wages, while annual payroll responds less robustly. The results suggest that data centers create measurable local activity, increase house prices, and affect local electricity markets through higher prices.

*

Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.

That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.- The president of MIT

*

U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $4.5-$5.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $237-$276 billion annually.

*

Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.

*

Chinese battery manufacturer Calb has broken ground on a €2 Billion gigafactory in southern Portugal which is expected to represent more than 4% of the country’s GDP when in full swing.”

*

Latin America is the new frontier for Old Colony Mennonites. They are spread across 200 colonies with 200,000 people in a combined area almost equal to that of the Netherlands and twice that of Israel.

*

Quality-adjusted AI production in the United States grew at over 2,000 percent per year in 2024 and 2025, driven by three compounding forces: expanding data-center capacity, hardware efficiency gains, and—the largest of the three—algorithmic progress.
Treating the AI sector as a coherent economic entity yields preliminary estimates of nominal AI GDP at approximately $250 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 2,600 percent per year in quality-adjusted real terms.
National economic statistics accounts were not designed to track this kind of activity. Statistics agencies should begin developing AI-focused satellite accounts now, before the measurement gap becomes a policy gap.

*

“For the first time in decades, new and recent graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree have consistently higher unemployment rates than the overall American workforce, according to data on 22-to-27-year-olds compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

*

Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.

*

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024.
According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan’s total population.

*

Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one-third of marital sorting by class but less than 5% by race.

*

Economic relocation to the US vs Europe:

Drones, People, and the Miniaturization of Violence

On this day:

1453
Fall of Constantinople: Ottoman armies under Sultan Mehmed II Fatih capture Constantinople after a 53-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire. Although the date of May 29, 1453, is that of the Julian Calendar, the event is commemorated in Istanbul on this day of the present Gregorian calendar.
1660
English Restoration: Charles II is restored to the throne of Great Britain.
1780
American Revolutionary War: At the Battle of Waxhaws, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacres Colonel Abraham Buford’s Continentals, allegedly after the Continentals' surrender. 113 Americans are killed.
1903
May coup d'etat: Alexander Obrenovich, King of Serbia, and Queen Draga, are assassinated in Belgrade by the Black Hand (Crna Ruka) organization.
1919
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington’s observation of a total solar eclipse in Principe and by Andrew Crommelin in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil.
1953
Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday.

***

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has said the alliance is “ready to defend every inch” of its territory after a Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania, a member state, during an overnight attack on neighbouring Ukraine.


***

Robinhood launched agentic trading and an agentic credit card today, allowing AI agents to trade equities and make credit card purchases on customers' behalf.

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Russia has passed a law authorizing its central bank and other financial institutions to repel drone attacks with their own defense systems, as the country struggles to defend against Ukrainian strikes.

The law, passed by Russia’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday, will allow staff at Russia’s central bank to be armed and to operate the systems used to down unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone) attacks without the involvement of special forces.

***

In Rome, actors could not vote, hold office, or be trusted to give an oath in legal proceedings.

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A Blue Origin rocket exploded on the launch tower in a fiery blast during a test of its engines on Thursday night, the company said.


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Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu is fund­ing a new pro­gram that gives “queer and trans” migrants up to $500 for mas­sages, yoga classes, and 'cre­at­ive heal­ing.'


***

Drones, People, and the Miniaturization of Violence

The Uyghurs are a Turkic and predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread across Central Asia but concentrated in China's far-western Xinjiang region. It is they who are always referenced as examples of Chinese oppression, in the U.S., called phonetically, wiː.ɡʊr.

Through circumstance and demographics, they have become the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria. They were responsible for the fall of Aleppo, indirectly responsible for the overthrow of Assad, and were gratefully integrated into the new Syrian military.

They have demonstrated serious military ability and hostility.

These are the same Uyghurs that the Chinese authorities have been suppressing at home, in the Xinjiang region, for years. Starting in 2017, authorities began sending hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs to "reeducation camps," where they were taught Mandarin and forced to memorize Chinese leader Xi Jinping's speeches, according to human rights organizations. Others were placed under house arrest, harassed, or subjected to extensive surveillance, or had their passports confiscated, according to prior NPR reporting and the findings of the United Nations and rights groups. In 2021, the U.S. labeled China's campaign a "genocide" aimed at eradicating Uyghur identity. (With the West's current infatuation with 'identity,' one would think they would care more.) Beijing slammed that decision and has defended the detention camps as a necessary facet of a wide-ranging de-radicalization effort in the region.

There is speculation that China is very unhappy that these people, an increasingly well-organized and disruptive group, have been welcomed in the Middle East. They also appear to hold a grudge. The belief is that China sees them as a potential destabilizing force within its own borders.

So it is in this new world where size doesn't matter, and no one is safe.

Not Caesar's Wife

On this day:
585 BC
A solar eclipse occurs, as predicted by Greek philosopher and scientist Thales, while Alyattes is battling Cyaxares in the Battle of the Eclipse, leading to a truce. This is one of the cardinal dates from which other dates can be calculated.
1533
The Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declares the marriage of King Henry VIII of England to Anne Boleyn valid.
1754
French and Indian War: in the first engagement of the war, Virginia militia under 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington defeat a French reconnaissance party in the Battle of Jumonville Glen in what is now Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania.
1830
President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act which relocates Native Americans.
1940
World War II: Norwegian, French, Polish and British forces recapture Narvik in Norway. This is the first allied infantry victory of the War.
1942
World War II: in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazis in Czechoslovakia kill over 1,800 people.
2002
NATO declares Russia a limited partner in the Western alliance.
2002
The Mars Odyssey finds signs of large ice deposits on the planet Mars.

***

Republicans and Democrats alike recently enacted a bill that allows taxpayer funds to help pay name, image, and likeness (NIL) funds to athletes at the University of Wisconsin.

***

The government is opening its interests, expanding from promising what is in unlimited supply to that which is in unlimited supply, but inconvenient.

The proposed “For the Fans Act” would mandate that professional leagues provide every local fan a way to watch every game played by every team in their state — no streaming blackouts, no platform exclusivity — or face legal consequences. The bill covers baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer.

***

Mamdani is the mayor/artist formerly known as Young Cardamom


***

An interesting little experiment comparing AIs:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYzu9ZZljj2/

***



Not Caesar's Wife

The Wall Street Journal published an immensely troubling dispatch on Thursday exposing how cryptocurrency networks — specifically, the formerly China-based crypto exchange Binance — have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Based on how terrorism-financing experts assess the purpose of trading accounts like Zanjani’s, the $850 million in Zanjani transactions, which included both deposits and withdrawals, likely means about $425 million moved through Binance to finance Iran’s military, according to foreign law-enforcement officials and other people familiar with the activity. Binance’s own investigators assessed the accounts were a money-laundering network to finance the regime, according to the compliance reports.


In 2023, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to charges relating to the violation of U.S. money-laundering statutes — a scheme that enriched child sex traffickers, international scamming operations, and terrorist groups, including “Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).”

Like a bolt from the blue, however, President Trump gave Zhao a pardon last October

Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.

The promise of cryptocurrency notwithstanding, if it serves merely as a vehicle for criminals and corrupt interests to strip the United States down and sell it off, piece by piece, to its enemies, you might expect the stewards of American interests to take a firmer line against it. And they might have if they hadn’t already gotten theirs.

If your gut response is to write this off as the usual innuendo and Trump hatred, be aware that this is from an article in The National Review.

Memorial Day

 

“I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

***

Scientists do not ridicule or hound those who disagree. Nor do they hold high-spirited rallies. These are particularly political and/or religious qualities. Anyone with a scientific mind would recognize such presumptuous intolerance as specifically unscientific.

***

For those of you who are low on anxiety, by 2030, according to a recent report, half of India's population — 700 million people — will lack adequate drinking water.
“If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water,” warns Ismail Serageldin, a former executive for the World Bank.

***

China launched the Shenzhou 23 spacecraft Sunday night, carrying three astronauts bound for its space station, including one set to stay in space for a year.

The spacecraft blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. The much-anticipated launch comes as China prepares for its first crewed lunar landing by 2030.

***

Vegas Golden Knights came back from a three-goal deficit to defeat the Colorado Avalanche 5-3 in Game 3 of the Western Conference Final at T-Mobile Arena on Sunday.

The Golden Knights lead 3-0 in the best-of-7 series.

***

Memorial Day

War is man's most evil pursuit. Every single human motive morphs into something horrible and destructive; the most noble of man's qualities become misapplied. Somehow, the diffident grasshopper becomes the predatory locust. 

Yet within the world of men, some things must be done. Individuals must live and act within the admitted abomination that is war. 

In the Second War, the Germans and the Japanese were asked to fulfill their destiny and complete history. This involved destroying or subjugating everyone who was not them. The Allies' children were asked to fight for their lives. Their behavior in this gargantuan struggle should always stand as a testament to man's higher elements in the midst of man's lowest. Yet questions are always raised by some.

When Obama was in Japan and visiting Hiroshima, new discussion of the WWII atomic bombing began. An article in the LA Times asserted the bombing was cruel, gratuitous, and not a factor in the ending of the war. "Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today," the article states. 

More, the cause of the Japanese surrender was actually the Russian invasion of Manchuria. 

The article explains: "It was not the atomic evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Pacific war. Instead, it was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies that began at midnight on Aug. 8, 1945 — between the two bombings." 

That is to say, after the Americans dropped the bomb, the Russians moved in; probably a coincidence. Indeed, the sentiment at least seems to be in line with current thinking; the majority of Americans in polls think the bombs should not have been dropped.

Of course, people will differ in their assessment of history. Some assessments will be more accurate--sometimes more honest--than others. And many military men did not want to use the weapons. But of all the wars in history, World War Two is the least ambiguous to analyze.

The History website has this summary:
Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device–a plutonium bomb–at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused. (Italics added)

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided, over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower, and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists, to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb–such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state–believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. (italics added)

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

So the Emperor cites the bomb as a factor. And the alternative was an island-by-island attack on Japan that the experts accepted would cost one million--MILLION--American lives.

The LA Times article suggests the U.S. ignored a Japanese peace approach to the U.S., requesting only that the Emperor survive. But that is not entirely true. Their proposal was to keep the Emperor and the current governing militaristic system intact, something the Allies thought nonnegotiable. Another element overlooked in the LA Times article is the continuity of events. Over 200,000 people were killed in the atomic attacks. Isolated, that is horrific. One wonders how the essayist saw those deaths in the context of the war itself. Or do they spare themselves the difficulty? China suffered between 15 and 17 million--MILLION--deaths directly related to combat--many described as "crimes against humanity." The Russians lost 25 to 27 million. MILLION. And there was Nanjing, an episode so savage that it drove its main historian, Iris Chang, crazy. And Unit 731.  

Certainly, we need kinder, gentler wars.

Nonetheless, the LA Times article was quite critical of American behavior and motives in one of the world's most easily evaluated conflicts, the American democracy vs. Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Applying morality to war is tricky and can be practiced only by our best and brightest. Fortunately, a look at the byline has the reassuring information that the LA Times article was authored by none other than Oliver Stone, the esteemed and award-winning movie director. He is certainly qualified. As a member of the exclusive self-absorbed entertainment cult and the reliable creator of the movie JFK, one of the cult's more astonishing productions of incoherent historical analysis, we can certainly rely upon his opinion.

And I'm sure he would have been willing to talk to the widows, the orphans, and the parents of those million Americans, explaining that those soldiers had to die assaulting the Japanese islands because we were true to our inner nature and did not drop the cruel bombs that could have ended the war. That was not who we are.

Sunday/Pentecost

The unemployment rate for those seeking work has risen for recent college graduates above that of older workers for the first time in history. This is also true of the non-college-graduate age group.

***

This $1.8 billion fund for people aggrieved over politically motivated legal action seems like a stupid response to a serious problem.

***

Why must Independents, a sizable portion of the American voters, be forced to vote for an antagonistic political party?

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Sunday/Pentecost

Today is Pentecost, observed 7 weeks after Easter. It is a complex day in the Church in history and meaning.
Literally, Pentecost means "fifty," as the fiftieth week of the year. It, in the Old Testament, refers to the giving of the Ten Commandments and, in the New Testament, signifies its new direction. Christ reappears to the fearful apostles, reinvigorates them and then breathes upon them, infusing the spirit of the New Testament and the abilities to carry out their evangelism. "Whose sins you forgive..." essentially creates a church structure.

In England, it is--or was--the feast of Whitsun, so changed after the Norman Conquest. Whitsun is a contraction of "White Sunday," attributed to the white vestments worn by catechumens on the day. Eventually, white (hwitte) began to be confused with wit or understanding, not entirely inappropriate for the occasion. It was a significant holiday and celebration in its time and began to substitute for more secular spring celebrations.

The word for "Spirit" in Greek has several meanings; it also can mean "wind" and "breath." Christ does breathe on the apostles, and the Spirit is often described as a great wind. One ancient writer describes the Holy Spirit as Christ's last expired breath on the cross.

Breath is, of course, different from wind, which can be destructive, even in the scorching Middle East. But Christ's breath is gentle; it seems there is no downside here, no risk. Unless to the recipient who internalizes it. Of the apostles--who all abandoned Christ to die alone--after Pentecost, all, save John, died for Christ's message.

In our cautious and uncertain world, Pentecost might be more safely observed from a window. Or online.

SatStats

Mamdani is the mayor/artist formerly known as Young Cardamom.

***

OpenAI pioneered a $20-per-month subscription three years ago, a price point many competitors matched. That price has not changed, even as features and performance have improved substantially.

One recent analysis found that “GPT-4-equivalent performance now costs $0.40/million tokens versus $20 in late 2022.” That is the equivalent of a 70 percent annual deflation rate — remarkable by any standard, especially in a time when affordability has become a dominant public concern.

And this is only the foundational model layer. On top of it sits a sprawling ecosystem of consumer applications, enterprise tools, device integrations and start-ups aiming to serve niches as specific as gyms and hair salons.

***

Another AI metaphor: Suppose you are the best maker of horse carriages in Belgium around the time the automobile is invented. You might want to take on as many orders as possible for new carriages because you know your future is precarious. Or, maybe you get your hands on one of these new-fangled automobiles as soon as possible and learn how fix them. Both options require you to WORK HARDER but these seem to be the two best options available. Paradoxical but true.

***

Vegas came back last night!

***

Only five of the Starship spacecraft’s six engines ignited, preventing it from reaching the correct orbital path, although the trajectory remained “within bounds” for a suborbital flight.

***

SatStats



The fertility rate in the Central African Republic is about 6 births per woman.

The fertility rate in China is about 1 birth per woman.


*


Only 30 percent of NYC's residents report being “happy” with Mamdani’s performance.


*


More than 500,000 American adolescents reported inhalant use in the past year,


*


Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least five million people were captured from hundreds of locations across Eastern Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. We hypothesize that, over time, raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies’ resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and related indicators of demographic and commercial development. --Cambridge


*


The City of Pittsburgh gained the highest number of new residents statewide between 2020 and 2025. More than 4,500 people were born or moved into the city in that period, an increase of 1.5%


*


Cumbria Police made 7.7 arrests per 10,000 people for 'malicious speech' over two years, about 2.5 times the national average. So 'malicious speech' can vary with region?


*


The Debt was 30% of GDP at the beginning of the Depression, 41% at the beginning of World War II, 122% in 1946, at the end of the war . . . and then fell gradually back to 30% by 1981.


*


In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results.


*


Bonded servants had virtually disappeared in America by 1800.

*

Canada has the largest decline in happiness in the world (along with the U.K.)

*

Nonsense in Education

SpaceX's newest version of its massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is scheduled to launch its critical test flight today, Friday, May 22, at 6:30 p.m. EDT from Starbase, Texas.

***

Health officials are furious at the U.S. for leaving WHO. They hold that act definitive in the emergence of the new Ebola episode--almost as if there were no other responsible nations in the world.

***

Colbert's exit is being framed as if Trump caused it.

***

"The Nakba" is the phrase Palestinians use to describe their displacement during the war of 1948. "Nakba” itself literally means “disaster,” and was coined by a Syrian professor who used it to describe not the Jews’ attempt at self-defense, but the sheer and gross stupidity of virtually all Arab states in waging war against Israel — and then losing badly, despite overwhelming numeric advantages.

***

Nonsense in Education

The DOE in NY is responsible for just 844,400 students, a huge drop from the 1.1 million as recently as 2012.

More surprising. NYC pays over $44,000 per student per year to "educate" them. Yet with staggering costs for fewer students, performance scores remain unchanged, at an estimated 30% to 40% of the expected achievement level.

Increased costs without increased benefits has become a virtual slogan of modern American government.

How can a democracy, which depends upon at least a passing knowledge of the world and its risks, survive when only 30% of its young people can read normally? 

Who benefits from this mess? 

One guess.

In this clearly disastrous system, the system itself is trying to decrease teacher work requirements.

NY education Chancellor Kamar Samuels warned that it’ll be “very difficult” for the city to meet the mandate of no more than 20-25 students per class, depending on grade level.

Compliance now stands at 64%, he says, but the city won’t even hit the 80% mark by September.

(In fairness, the chancellor surprisingly questioned the “hold harmless” policy, which requires giving every school at least as much funding as the year before, even when its enrollment keeps plummeting. Questioned, but did not change.)

A full 29% of the city’s budget, an astounding $39 billion, goes to a school system where enrollment is down, truancy is up, and achievement is inferior, but stagnant, while its major preoccupation seems to be decreasing teacher workload.

Those are not pigeons circling, waiting to roost; they are vultures.

 

Democracizing Power

Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final at Ball Arena on Wednesday.

***

A fossil discovery in Ethiopia shows that early Homo and a previously unknown Australopithecus species lived together around 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago.

***

Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final at Ball Arena on Wednesday.

***

Democracizing Power

In the short years of the Ukrainian War, there have been remarkable advances in accurate, cheap military murder and disruptions.  We are now blessed with affordable leverage in warfare, as we have seen in the advances of terrorism in the streets.

Here is one such change, reported by Perera.

"A Chinese AI startup called MizarVision is publishing high-resolution satellite imagery of every US military base, every carrier strike group, every F-22 deployment, every THAAD battery, and every Patriot missile position in the Middle East. Labelled. Geolocated. AI-annotated. Updated in near-realtime. Shared by PLA-linked accounts and Chinese state media to an audience of billions.

The Pentagon has downplayed the releases as “open-source.” This framing misses the point entirely. The value of MizarVision’s output is not the raw satellite image. Any government can purchase commercial satellite passes. The value is the AI processing layer that converts terabytes of imagery into labelled, searchable, cross-referenced intelligence products at a speed and scale that previously required the resources of a national intelligence agency. MizarVision is democratising military surveillance and publishing the output on social media, where Iran’s 31 autonomous IRGC provincial commands can access it from a mobile phone.

The next war will not begin with a missile launch. It will begin with an AI model labelling every target from orbit."

This is a rise in the influence of the individual that no democracy ever dreamed of. Power can increasingly be opposed affordably by the narrow and precise. 

Governments will soon argue that any deviation from common dogma carries risk.

It Is Known, Khaleese

 

Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. --McKENZIE 

***

What is this $1.6 billion slush fund for? Is it to compensate people who were unjustly targeted by the Biden Regency and had to spend a fortune to defend themselves from the people who created the Trump Russian conspiracy and the 'Hunter Biden computer is Russian disinformation?' What exactly is the penalty for a government agency attacking in court people they simply don't like?

***

According to the Post, one of the San Diego shooters wrote in their 'manifesto,' that he " lamented being short, which he said caused him great pain and humiliation."

***

New York City’s $125 billion budget is larger than the $115 billion the entire state of Florida is expected to spend this year. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

***

It Is Known, Khaleese

Critics this weekend point to investment patterns suggesting Trump is misusing his power to benefit from his own decisions. When he came to office, he said he would not take a salary, he built the ballroom with private money, and set aside his investment money in a private trust with management he could not influence. Is this a change? Is he now in control of his finances and betting on his own executive acts? Or is this charge just untrue?

It's reasonable to be cynical about government but, as Lily Tomlin said, it's hard to keep up. These people will take advantage of anything for influence or profit.
Regulators are seeking information from prediction-market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket over wagers tied to political events and military operations. Such bets pose a challenge for authorities because insider-trading laws weren’t designed for people who wager on the outcome of legislation, political races, and even U.S. military action.

Remember, these people have inside information, i.e. they are the insiders making these decisions.

Enter the innuendo. Is it possible that the administration has had the time to be as evil as is said? Trump is still said to be a Russian agent. There has been no reason to believe that, aside from the suggestion of a paid political opponent. Pedophile? That seems to be a specific charge with real definitions, but, again, no charges. 

Fascism. Fascism has a definition; does Trump qualify? Are these people confusing Fascism with authoritarianism? Trump is certainly that, but is he worse than, say, FDR? Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; was he a fascist?

All this has become political dogma, like the spiritual claims of religions, global warming, or aliens. The democracy functions on individual citizens' input. If its input is this flawed, democracy has little chance.

 

1-877-KARS4KROOKS

Israel also wants 'from the river ot the seas.'

***

Pennsylvania liquor control enforcement agents say they've stopped an illegal gambling operation in Washington County at a social club where they were playing Queen of Hearts. Officials said the club did not have a county-issued small games of chance license.

"The 52 cards are set out on a table," Officer Wright explained. "You buy chances to get the card. Obviously, getting the queen of hearts means you win and get the jackpot."

According to law enforcement, these games can actually last for a while.

"They can go on for various lengths of time," said Wright. "This specific game went on for 10 months approximately."

Stalking the state for 10 months. I know I feel safer.

***

Is Kash Patel taking blinking lessons?

***

Verizon seems to believe that politeness can substitute for insincerity and stupidity.

***

1-877-KARS4KROOKS

While the 1-877-KARS4KIDS song has been called one of the most memorable jingles in history, a court has ruled it is misleading.

Misleading

A California man took the group behind it to court, saying he donated an old car to Kars4Kids, thinking its value would be used to help underprivileged children. He didn't know the money generated was used to support Oorah, a Jewish organization that helps fund young adult trips to Israel.

Oorah actually runs a matchmaking program for Jewish youth and funds gap year trips to Israel for 17- and 18-year-olds. It does other things, too. The company used donations to purchase a $16.5-million building in Israel.

"The evidence also shows that children, especially needy or underprivileged children, are not the recipients of the proceeds of the donations," the ruling states. These 'donations' fund vague enterprises and infrastructure, including gap year vacations to Israel.

A recent Fox segment read the entire episode as antisemitic. One commentator talked about the maddening jingle. One laughed about its amateurish appearance. No one talked about what it was, a deceptive ad meant to bilk well-intentioned people out of money, then launder it. Nor did anyone suggest that it was representative of most of these charities: ways of making your personal plans and daily expenses tax-deductible with the help of unwitting accomplices.

Like the Westboro Church, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the  "National Council of Churches" (NCC), 1-877-KARS4KIDS is a deception for someone's betterment, but probably not yours. And mendacity, in this case, money laundering, often disguises more than one thing.

At the very least, it is not funny.

Sunday/The Ascension

The national debt is a constitutional crisis. A government of free men requires a balancing responsibility, and we have met only half of our requirements.

***

The Liberation Caucus describes itself as “a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus in Democrat Socialists of America.” That is to say, they believe in an inherent destructive conflict of castes among men which can be resolved only by the extermination of one class, their children, and their future.

***

NASA's Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars on Friday (May 15). The precisely timed maneuver was not designed to study Mars, but rather to use the planet as a celestial slingshot on its journey to its namesake, the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. The spacecraft passed within about 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of Mars to boost Psyche's speed and, more importantly, to shift its trajectory toward its destination, the asteroid 16 Psyche, which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

***

Mortgages are up, and talk is appearing about the national debt as if it is something recent. 

A typical 30-year mortgage costs over $500 more per month than it did in 2019. When the Federal Reserve cut rates by a full percentage point in late 2024, mortgage rates barely moved. Treasury yields, pushed up by the government’s relentless borrowing, overwhelmed the Fed’s easing entirely. The same dynamic drives up auto loans, credit card rates, and small business borrowing costs.
That is called "crowding out." It is not going to improve.

***

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighbouring Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern” after the virus killed nearly 90 people.

***

Sunday/The Ascension

The otherworldly Ascension of Christ is a curious event as reported in the gospels. It is the last event of Matthew's gospel. In Luke, it is mentioned but is elaborated on later in the Acts of the Apostles. More than miraculous, it is a culmination, the culmination, one would think, that would be emphasized. But the management of the Ascension is strangely distant. Almost unsure. Added on. Indeed, the old Church celebrated the period from Easter to the Ascension as a single event, as a unit.

The reporting during this period reflects the humanity of the reporters. What were they to think? The complexity of Christ's message, His spiritual world, was overwhelming. Revolutionary. Now the Messenger was gone. 

As always, there is humor in this relationship, a strange, understanding irony, gentle and personal, that prods us.
"While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going,
suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?" 

Things have shifted. To you. This is just the beginning. There is so much more to come.

The Ascension is described by men who have seen the Resurrection, yet seem stunned.

SatStats/China

Physics is actually too hard for physicists.--David Hilbert

***

What if they thought "The border is secure" was true?

***

A team at the University of Hong Kong has developed a new “super steel” that can survive the harsh conditions needed to make green hydrogen from seawater. The material uses an unexpected double-protection mechanism that resists corrosion far better than conventional stainless steel. Even more impressive, it could replace costly titanium parts used in today’s hydrogen systems.

***

SatStats/China

While the recent explosion in U.S. federal debt has raised numerous red flags, a broader measure of indebtedness across the public and private sectors shows borrowing as a share of GDP is actually down since 2010.

By contrast, China’s total debt-to-GDP ratio, excluding the financial sector, doubled in that span and has now topped 300%, according to Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics.

He pointed out that China’s debt surge has come despite weaker borrowing from households, which have been battered by the real estate market’s collapse.

But borrowing by companies as well as the central and local governments has continued to far outpace GDP growth, which has slowed in recent years, pushing the overall debt ratio higher.

Nearly 40% of outstanding debt is now owed by the public sector, including so-called local government financing vehicles, Williams calculated.

The result is total debt that surpasses the U.S., the eurozone, the U.K., and other emerging markets. Aside from some smaller economies, only Japan has more debt.

“China’s current level of indebtedness puts it in a league of its own,” Williams said.

U.S. federal debt has set its own grim milestones and is now more than 100% of GDP for the first time since the immediate aftermath of World War II.
But total public and private debt last year was about 265% of GDP, which has been robust lately. It’s also down sharply from pandemic-era highs, when governments unleashed a flood of stimulus. The eurozone and U.K. have similar trajectories.

But Chinese companies are borrowing more than they are selling. Business debt has doubled since 2019, while revenues are only 30% higher, according to Capital Economics.

Creditors continue to roll over loans to keep struggling firms afloat, even as nearly one-third of them are losing money, Williams noted. That worsens overcapacity and deflation, while preventing that capital from going to healthier borrowers.

China has been suffering from deflation for three straight years, the longest such streak since its transition to a market economy in the late 1970s.

“The irony is that one driver of both government borrowing and the lax lending standards of [state-owned] banks is the desire to prop up economic growth and prevent job losses,” Williams said. “But the product of a credit boom that has been underway for 18 years is a banking system propping up unproductive firms, widespread losses across industry, and entrenched overcapacity.” (From Fortune)

AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

 If you see your glass as half empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching. — Anon

***

The now-extinct Celtic language of Gaulish gave French its infamously tricky base-twenty counting system, where eighty is “quatre-vingts,” but only a few hundred Gaulish-origin words persist in modern Metropolitan French.
A now-extinct language of Frankish was a Germanic language, as English is. Though it contributed the names of France and the French people, it comprises only about 10% of modern French vocabulary.

***

“East of Eden” is a defining literary work, centered on California's Salinas Valley, and is deeply tied to the state’s geography and identity.

The seven-episode series, starring Florence Pugh, recently wrapped up filming in New Zealand.

***

Davis is hitting .151 through the first quarter of the season and just .177 with a meager .289 slugging percentage over his 218-game career.

***

AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

A multi-trillion-dollar bet on the development and acceleration of AI has become the biggest outlay of capital in the history of business.

That said, AI is becoming deeply unpopular. It has a 26% approval rating, which is below just about every institution, including ICE. Data centers are being protested around the country. Two people even decided to take a shot at Sam Altman’s house. The industry has spent $150 million in PAC money to purchase compliance from the two major parties, but that hasn’t stopped ordinary people from coming to their own conclusions.

More money is now being spent on data centers than on commercial office buildings.

The hyperscalers plan to spend $700 billion, including data centers, on AI infrastructure in 2026. A major sports arena costs a couple billion or so. So imagine 7 new sports stadiums being built in every one of the 50 states this year, and you have a sense of the scale of the investment. (From Yang)

So what's going on here? Are we to advance society and knowledge at the expense of jobs--or should we purposefully stop those advances for the unproven benefit of the few? Are technological changes really up for popular vote? If so, what about online betting and pornography? Are these workers just Luddites, impassioned and wrong? What are the ancillary, unimagined applications of the technology, good and bad? And the real, basic, and unspoken question: what are the non-economic implications of this technology?

What happens in an increasingly comfortable but workless culture? Will social disruption be caused by aesthetics? The barricades manned by librarians and psychologists?

And can this technology be ignored--or suppressed--when it might be commandeered by people of bad intent?

Robbing Peter and Paul

 

***


“Our series (against Philadelphia) ended on a Wednesday. That Sunday night, there was Tampa-Montreal Game 7 (Canadiens won 2-1), and then Colorado-Minnesota Game 1 of their series (Avalanche won 9-6). The Montreal-Tampa game, I question whether our team could compete in that environment defensively. When I flipped over to Colorado-Minnesota, I questioned whether our team could compete in that environment offensively. That’s really the way that I view everything.”--Pen's GM Kyle Dubas

***

A study published in Nature reported that the probability of an investor’s bankruptcy increases with the frequency of their leveraged trades. Investors have accumulated more than $1.22 trillion in margin debt to trade stocks as of May 2024. (Margin debt refers to money borrowed to purchase securities.)

***

The Murtaugh reversal should give us all pause in the trust we place in our government, particularly in our entrepreneurial legal system.

***

Chinese police stations in NYC, Sharia Law courts---anybody worried yet?

***

Good news: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an opinion on the Western Union merger plans.

***

Robbing Peter and Paul

In New York City, the socialists are taking credit for balancing the city's chronic budget deficit.

Mamdani has reportedly gotten the governor and state lawmakers to agree to change the way New York City’s underfunded public pension plans pay off debt they incurred a generation ago by making unwarranted, rosy assumptions about how their investments would perform.
The working state is subsidizing the socialist city.

The city wants to reduce those debt payments and instead pay them off over a longer period, likely well into the 2040s — meaning tomorrow’s workers will be taxed extra to pay for city services delivered before some of their parents were born.

Mamdani, like all these politicians, regardless of their "philosophy," is proud of this manipulation as if it were an achievement rather than just another procrastinating, distorting economic gimmick. (The kind of economic sleight-of-hand, by the way, the prim socialist is supposed to disdain.)

The Russian communist state lasted for three generations.
See? Socialism works.

Vigilangione, Continued

 

Joyce taught English at Berlitz schools in Pula and Trieste, and is supposed to have known up to thirteen different languages.

***


Vigilangione, Continued

Order is restrictive; when does it become oppressive? It certainly is convenient. If half the people literate in English wrote from right to left, we would have no fewer literate people, but they would not be comprehensible to one another. If half of Americans decided it was right to drive on the left side of the road, car travel would stop, the car would become useless, and its convenience would be replaced. What would happen to chess if activists tried to broaden its appeal by straightening out and simplifying the knight's move?

Mormon polygamy was seen in the nineteenth century as a threat to the U.S. moral structure and was fought, legislated against, and eventually bullied away with very little legal justification. In Europe, polygamy has become a significant socio-economic problem for the growing nurturing state as dependents logrithmically outstrip underpinning arithmetical working support.

The values of the West are increasingly impractical in the modern, expanding world. In America, the values of equality and freedom have become a threat to the stability of the culture. The Americans suffer domestic disruption by people who oppose the very laws that protect their outrage, even to the point of organized street opposition to legitimate law enforcement agencies. The British now have hate-speech laws that rival any communist country. Sitting in judgment of your fellow citizens has become very disruptive, even if you're right. And Americans are telling themselves that by taking products without paying—a behavior they call "microlooting' known to the rest of us as "stealing"—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.

Is this a trend percolating up or seeping down? What did the Americans do in Venezuela? They declared the country an outlaw — as they did with the Barbary states — and preemptively invaded it. The danger is that, in a larger view, Venezuela deserved it. American behavior in Iran is more illustrative. Iran is certainly a danger to the civilized world, and a nuclear weapon in its hands, according to its own philosophy and statements, would result in economic disruption and nuclear destruction to friends and enemies alike. That said, there is no obvious legal or moral reason Western nations should be able to control Iran's internal affairs simply because they fear the implications of its national ambitions. Nonetheless, the Americans and Israel preemptively destroyed most of Iran's military and scientific infrastructure.

Again, this was all in a good cause. The world's nonreaction even implied its tacit approval. The Americans want only stability and stable commerce. But is their action consistent with their values? Does the threat justify their extraordinary means? And, worse, what would have happened had the Americans not resorted to those extraordinary means?

So Mangioni, whoever shot Kirk, whoever attacked the Press Dinner, the gerrymanderer, Trump himself--all place their personal motives aside and, like the sin eater of ancient times, sacrifice themselves for what each knows is the greater good.