Law From a Great Distance

On this day:

1048
Protestantism: The villagers around today’s Baden-Baden elect their own priest in defiance of the local bishop.
1649
King Charles I of England is beheaded.
1661
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England is ritually executed two years after his death, on the anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed.
1703
The Forty-seven Ronin, under the command of Ōishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master.
1835
In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen.

1862
The first American ironclad warship, the USS Monitor is launched.
1933
Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany.
1945
World War II: The Wilhelm Gustloff, overfilled with refugees, sinks in the Baltic Sea after being torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, leading to the deadliest known maritime disaster, killing approximately 9,400 people.
1948
Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi known for his non-violent freedom struggle is assassinated by Pandit Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist.
1969
The Beatles’ last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert is broken up by the police.
1972
Bloody Sunday: British Paratroopers kill fourteen unarmed civil rights/anti internment marchers in Northern Ireland.
1996
Gino Gallagher, the suspected leader of the Irish National Liberation Army, is killed while waiting in line for his unemployment benefit.
***
More than four million Americans will turn 65 between now and 2027. “That’s over 11,000 people hitting this milestone every single day. The program's cash surplus is expected to run out in less than a decade,” according to NPR.

***

The fast-growing measles outbreak in South Carolina is now the largest in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated in this country more than two decades ago. 789 cases were reported as of Tuesday.

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The Left is whispering. They say last week in Brussels, Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister and one of Europe’s most vocal Trump supporters, pulled aside his fellow European leaders to share what he’d witnessed during a private meeting with the American president. The word he used to describe Trump’s demeanor? “Dangerous.”

Governing by rumor and innuendo is how the Left works now. We don't know if it's true, what he meant, or what accuracy governs Mr. Fico, but we do know that when you govern by rumor and innuendo, and you allow your President to abdicate his powers to a group of grad students for four years, you lose a lot of credibility.

***

Law From a Great Distance

Rules should be a relief to a culture.

The oldest known evidence of any law code are tablets from the ancient city Ebla (Tell Mardikh in modern-day Syria). They date to about 2400 B.C. — approximately 600 years before Hammurabi put together his famous code.

"An eye for an eye ..." is a paraphrase of Hammurabi's Code, a collection of 282 laws inscribed on an upright stone pillar. The code was found by French archaeologists in 1901 while excavating the ancient city of Susa, which is in modern-day Iran.

He ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E. And his laws seem to grow out of necessity: he was trying to organize an expanding empire of diverse groups with diverse rules and norms.

His was actually an effort to eliminate tribal justice that holds groups responsible for individual acts and individuals for group acts, for example, Hatfield and McCoy thinking. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the thinking of the modern, ironically named, Progressive.

Group identity is the most primitive of all legal forms. Hammurabi's genius was to overcome it, to apply individual crimes to individuals. There is a thesis that it influenced the Old Testament (through the Babylonian Captivity).

Group identity has never left the Middle East. And it's strong, the obverse of our bonding. We will always have the lurching monster staggering around, fed and encouraged by the Left in the American University Lab, as it seeks a place to apply its broad brush.

Its threat in places like Minneapolis is that it appeals to very early, unformed human thought because it requires so little of it. A complex problem can be quickly solved and acted upon without the hesitancy and uncertainty of unfocusing debate.

And in the softer mind, certainty is its own reward. Law is a unifying and stabilizing element in a culture. It takes advantage of that bonding tendency in us and focuses it towards a general, agreed-upon good.

In Minneapolis, the local government has officially denied the law, sits back while the Feds go in alone to enforce it, and then complains bitterly about the chaotic results.

That takes a special kind of high-minded cowardice.

Rising Above the Law and Those Left Behind

On this day:

1834
US President Andrew Jackson orders first use of federal soldiers to suppress a labor dispute
1886
Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile.

***

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mises

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Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund made $247 billion in 2025. Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) manages the fund on behalf of the Norwegian population. Set up in the 1990s to invest excess revenues from Norway’s oil and gas industry, the fund is currently an investor in more than 7,000 companies across 60 countries.The fund is worth the equivalent of $385,000 for every Norwegian man, woman and child and finances some 25% of the country's fiscal budget.

***

"But it does make a kind of sick sense that if Vance can’t have a white wife standing next to him as he clearly looks toward the 2028 presidential election, the next best thing is a pregnant one."

This is from Slate, and you can keep it in mind for those times when you are uncertain how bad the far Left really is.

***

Rising Above the Law and Those Left Behind

Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. spoke as she and Democratic Board chairman Robert Harvie, Jr., dismissed the earlier Pa. Supreme Court rulings in order to accept ballots without required signatures or mandatory dates. She declared that she would not second a motion to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, “mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

So a county commissioner thinks the law is optional, perhaps part of a continuum. A hint of what's to come.

This may help explain the current problems in Minnesota. The state has refused to enforce the immigration laws and has forced the Federal agents to work alone in the face of serious local opposition, including assaults, to protect Federal criminals living or arrested there.

This stance, called 'nullification,' was an early Southern position to resist anti-slavery laws, a charming precedent for the good citizens of Minnesota to adopt. Like the county commissioner, it rejects the law, in this case because the individual has a better idea. Importantly, the local officials have encouraged their citizens to encounter the Federal law enforcement with the hopes that the conflict will dramatize their position. Two have been killed, but sacrifices must be made. And they can sue.

One is struck by the confused thinking the violators use to explain themselves. It is a throwback to the pre-Hammurabi days, when Hammurabi's 'eye-for-an-eye' was a significant civilizing advance over the barbaric vendetta and vigilante arrogance. And, as the commissioner shows, the so-called political and social leaders are at least as dim-witted and irresponsible as their camp followers.

And, according to the news, these lemmings think Noam is the problem. There are plenty of problems.

It's hard to imagine how popular support for immigrant criminals will turn out, but while the nation will suffer, the immigrants--both legal and illegal--will suffer most. Biden let in over 10 million unvetted people--perhaps as high as 20 million--from all over the world. They will be of all sorts. Most will be just desperate, like their predecessors, although some, like the 70 battalions of young Chinese men, will be of more specific concern. The fate of the 300,000 unaccompanied children will be abandoned to...fate.

The criminals among them will eventually reveal themselves, but managing that number of people will be difficult without public support. We will probably have to accept the group and their social and criminal burden, and deal with the criminals one by one, as their new, emancipated selves fulfill their criminal destinies. And, we'll watch the others--and those that look like them--suspiciously. This will create in the national mind a second class of citizens, undermine the culture's cohesiveness, and accept the apparent unrest these people seem to be so comfortable with. And, of course, there's the success of the rioters and the lesson that will teach.

It would be great if Noam and the reaction of the law were the problem.

Procrustean Bed

On this Day:1547
Henry VIII dies. His nine year old son, Edward VI becomes King, and the first Protestant ruler of England.
1754
Horace Walpole coins the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann.
1909
United States troops leave Cuba with the exception of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base after being there since the Spanish-American War.
1977
The first day of the Great Lakes Blizzard of 1977, which severely affects and cripples much of Upstate New York, but Buffalo, NY, Syracuse, NY, Watertown, NY, and surrounding areas are most affected, each area accumulating close to 10 ft of snow on this one day
1986
Space Shuttle program: STS-51-L mission – Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart after liftoff killing all seven astronauts on board.

***

There is something obscene about people holding protest rallies in order to try to keep getting money that someone else has worked for.--Sowell

***

A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.

Options on things that don't exist in inaccessible places.

***

The shark cannot explain his hunger. Nor can the baby chick explain his urge to take the risk and fly.
Most forks in the road are not solved with decisions; they are of a shorter circuit. So ambition becomes passion; love becomes obsession.
It is this edge of transition, where assessment becomes generation, where comedy and tragedy are born, and we humans live.
Take a bunch of hot-blooded young men with righteous anger and automatic weapons that can stop an elephant and put them in conflict with a bunch of suburban moms with righteous anger who think that their moral passport is a library card, and you've got a real problem.

***

Procrustean Bed

With tariffs, U.S. farmers have higher costs for seeds and fertilizer, as well as new international competitors like Brazil. With a diminished competitive advantage and the loss of the Cold War’s cooperative infrastructure, U.S. farmers now face a more volatile global market. Indeed, Trump is now in Iowa as part of his Forever Campaign and went to a restaurant where he touted his new $12 billion farmer bailout to compensate.  

So a little tariff interference here requires a compensatory tweaking subsidy there. The $12 bilion subsidy must come from somewhere. Somehow. And a distorting, byzantine infrastructure grows.

We live in a world of growing suspicion that demands old lessons be retaught. Actions have consequences. We can only wait and see where the rewards of Minneapolis's experiment with selective law enforcement lead.

Because of a nail. 

Hoofbeats

On This Day:
661
The Rashidun Caliphate ends with death of Ali.
1593
The Vatican opens seven year trial of scholar Giordano Bruno.
1606
Gunpowder Plot: The trial of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators begins, ending with their execution on January 31.
1868
Boshin War: The Battle of Toba-Fushimi between forces of the Tokugawa shogunate and pro-Imperial factions begins, which will end in defeat for the shogunate, and is a pivotal point in the Meiji Restoration.
1961
Soviet submarine S-80 sinks with all hands lost.
1967
Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
1973
The Paris Peace Accords officially end the Vietnam War. Colonel William Nolde is killed in action becoming the conflict’s last recorded American combat casualty.

***

In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches.
But what percentage of points did I win?
54%
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half the points they play.--Federer, speaking at Dartmouth

***

Does anyone think that 'negotiations with Fry and Walz' is like a medieval meeting of warlords? The Califate meeting with the tribes?

***

Behind Klein's Abundance is the argument that much wrong in our society comes from manufactured scarcities. We have made it too hard to build and create the things people need more of, particularly housing, clean energy, and state capacity.

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Always look for the bottleneck. That's where things can be changed. Would you really expect the elite to release an honest Epstein report?

For example, Russia is preparing a new economics textbook for university students that aims to challenge what its authors call a “myth” that democracy drives economic growth and to revive the socialist economic theories of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
The Russians have an academic book on economics!

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In Ukraine in the early 1930s, collectivization led to such mass man-made starvation and cannibalism that Soviet authorities had to distribute posters that read, “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.”

***

Hoofbeats

What should we do about ICE? There is no longer a question about the seriousness of the problem. The insurgency is not a misunderstanding.  These people are not able to behave responsibly, even to protect their own lives. The risks are simply beyond them. They knowingly place themselves at the mercy of the people they are attacking. Sometimes they overestimate the goodwill of their opponent. Or, sometimes, an accident happens. Should ICE withdraw? Should we protect these people from themselves? Should we readjust the bar, like the Special Olympics?

We step over the homeless, we don't go after COVID fraudsters or Autism thieves, we don't pay our debts, we have no voter ID requirements, for four years we had an open border, we've never seen the Epstein Files, we have not demanded revenge for a committee of grad studebts taking over the presidency and shutting down the American economy and the education system for three years...we have crossed the River Tolerence into the Land of Lax. We demand no responsibility. We are very forgiving. Or indifferent.

Of course, things like this cannot go on forever. At some point, Comes a Horseman.

Policing a Feeding Frenzy

On this day:
1500
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot on Brazil.
1531
Lisbon, Portugal is hit by an earthquake--thousands die.
1564
The Council of Trent issues its conclusions in the Tridentinum, establishing a distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
1565
Battle of Talikota, fought between the Vijayanagara Empire and the Islamic sultanates of the Deccan, leads to the subjugation, and eventual destruction of the last Hindu kingdom in India, and the consolidation of Islamic rule over much of the Indian subcontinent.
1885
Troops loyal to The Mahdi conquer Khartoum.
1949
The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory sees first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope (until BTA-6 is built in 1976).
1978
The Great Blizzard of 1978, a rare severe blizzard with the lowest non-tropical atmospheric pressure ever recorded in the US, strikes the Ohio – Great Lakes region with heavy snow and winds up to 100 mph (161 km/h).
1998
Lewinsky scandal: On American television, U.S. President Bill Clinton denies having had “sexual relations” with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

***

When Theodore Roosevelt asked Attorney General Philander Knox to concoct a legal justification for the unsavory U.S. measures that enabled construction of the Panama Canal, Knox replied, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

***

I looked over old records of the Kent State shootings. While I found interviews in which the students thought the Guard's weapons had blanks, I found nothing to show the Guard thought so.

***

Why is the Minnesota fraud case a partisan investigation?

***

Spot prices of silver cracked past $103, while gold ran to as high as $4,988, just $12 shy of $5,000.

***

There was a dramatic selloff in the Japanese bond market last week, accompanied by wild swings in the yen. Inflation, long dormant in Japan, has taken hold, and, moreover, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is pushing fiscal stimulus plans that would swell a government debt pile that is already uncomfortably large. As a result, investors have been frantically sending bond yields up to levels once unthinkable — more than 4% on the longest-dated JGBs. That’s exerting upward pressure on interest rates from the US to Britain and Germany.
Higher Japanese yields will prompt domestic investors to bring much more of their money back home. Some $5 trillion of the country's capital is deployed overseas.

***

Policing a Feeding Frenzy

So the residents of Minnesota have organized into helpful little volunteer groups to monitor whether the Immigration Police are operating within the law. They are trying to make these encounters more difficult but more safe, a bit contradictory. Re the safety part, isn't that what the cops are supposed to do? Why do they need these standins? Apparently, the most recent shooting involved the victim intervening between ICE and an observer. They've been complaining that ICE is undertrained; are the self-appointed observers well-trained?

And the 'making the police action more difficult' part, how exactly does that fit in? Does that make things safer?

What's really happening is that amateurs are interfering with the cops. They are intervening in police actions against illegal immigrants. Dangerous stuff. Combustible. And unpredictable. Why would amateurs expose themselves to such risk? To pacify? Maybe they plan a religious conversion? Do they even know there is a risk? Do they think the good guys can shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand? Do they think that in a fight with the cops and someone yells "Gun!", that there will be several calm moments to debate if the cry is accurate or not?

We are seeing a growing number of militant busybodies who are trying to influence behavior in a shark tank. Why would any sensible person do such a thing? There may be some recent insight. A congressional representative recently said in an interview that ICE was not in Minnesota to enforce immigration law; they were there for 'intimidation.' The crack interviewer did not ask any clarifying follow-up questions, so we were not told who was being intimidated or why.

This is the opinion of an elected official. We can't explain what the thought process was here or its relationship to the militant observers. But we can accept the innuendo: the bell-shaped curve is a hell of a lot flatter and broader in this country than we thought.

 

Sunday/Amateurs

On this day:
1533
Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
1533
Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
1918
Ukraine declares independence from Bolshevik Russia.
1971
Charles Manson and three female “Family” members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders.
1981
Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong, is sentenced to death.
1993
Five people are shot outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia resulting in two murders.
1995
The Norwegian Rocket Incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
2011
Egyptian Revolution of 2011 begins in Egypt, with a series of street demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labour strikes, and violent clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and throughout other cities in Egypt.

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Long-run political policies are almost a contradiction in terms in societies where politicians are elected in the short run.--sowell

***

Carney argues that the decline in Europe has been forced upon it by the U.S. rather than being passively accepted. But have the Americans just filled the gap, trying to help?

A quick rebuttal to Carney's assessment of the West's recent past and unknowable future by Magnus:

The parallel between Havel’s moral argument for dissent under conditions of coercion in a totalitarian communist system makes for good oratory. But it offers a poor, and deeply misguided, illustration of our lives under the old liberal rules-based order, and cannot provide a guide for how we must now adapt. Personal and moral bravery in 1970s Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe isn’t quite the same as trying to wrestle military, technocratic and economic statecraft back from an over-reliance on the United States, which we all thought was a good idea for over seven decades.

***

The non-argument over 'tax the rich' is not about the money of the wealthy; it is about the power and the corruption of the politician and bureaucrats.

***

Sunday/Amateurs

In today's gospel, Christ begins to collect his disciples. They are Galileans--local men whose district was associated with a radical political sect--and fishermen. And this latter group will lead a revolution in human social and religious thought. To develop a universal rethinking of mankind, these are very parochial messengers.

This is not meant as a diversity joke, but this is a very limited group of evangelists in an ethnic community that will carry Christ's word across languages, races, and cultures. And the subsets of people most obviously absent are the intellectuals, the civic, and the religious leaders.

The notion that they were the most needful does not answer the other side of their conversion, the evangelical side, as the intellectuals and successful would presumably be the most persuasive.

It's like having the world changed by a bunch of Cajuns. 

SatStats

On this day:
41
Roman Emperor Caligula, known for his eccentricity and cruel despotism, is assassinated by his disgruntled Praetorian Guards. The Guard then proclaims Caligula’s uncle Claudius as Emperor
1679
King Charles II of England dissolves the Cavalier Parliament.
1848
California Gold Rush: James W. Marshall finds gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento.
1961
1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash: A bomber carrying two H-bombs breaks up in mid-air over North Carolina. The uranium core of one weapon remains lost.
1972
Japanese Sgt. Shoichi Yokoi is found hiding in a Guam jungle, where he had been since the end of World War II.

1978
Soviet satellite Cosmos 954, with a nuclear reactor onboard, burns up in Earth’s atmosphere, scattering radioactive debris over Canada’s Northwest Territories. Only 1% is recovered.
1990
Japan launches Hiten, the country’s first lunar probe, the first robotic lunar probe since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976, and the first lunar probe launched by a country other than Soviet Union or the United States.

***

The demonstration turnout in Minnesota was surprisingly large until you realize that if only a portion of the illegals had shown up, they could have had millions.

Does it count if you have a demonstration supporting criminals, and all the criminals show up?

***

“Order is not a pressure imposed upon society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.”--Ortega y Gasset

***

President Trump will personally control the so-called “golden share” that his administration has forced U.S. Steel to accept as part of the terms of a deal that will see the previously private company get acquired by Japan-based Nippon Steel. Is this different from Mamdani and his groceries?

Or is this just a tax by another name?

***

Gangs have attacked Guatemalan police after seizing control of three prisons in coordinated riots, The Associated Press (AP) reported.

***

Mattel has a new autistic Barbie

***

SatStats

There were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776

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Greenland held a referendum on 23 February 1982 and voted to leave the European Communities / European Economic Community (EEC) (about 52–53% for leaving).

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Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier, a report has revealed.



Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controlled polluter and ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter.

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Nemacolin laying off 150 emplotyees

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Almost one fifth of government revenues are now used to service foreign loans in Africa

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Walmart now does $100 billion per year in e-commerce sales.

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Spotify is now the #2 provider of audio books behind Audible.

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Americans throw away up to $68 million in coins a year.

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As of the end of 2022, there were more $100 bills than $1 bills in circulation.

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79 of the 100 most expensive U.S. zip codes in 2023 were in California.

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There are more than one billion Cricket fans in the world, but just 2% of them are in the United States.

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When men feel their masculinity is threatened, they are 24 percentage-points more likely to want to buy an SUV. They are also willing to pay $7,320 more than non-threatened men for the same vehicle. Similar vague and goofy numbers: Swearing improves grip strength by 9%, wall sit time by 22%, and plank time by 12%.

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Every culture has a word for black and white. If a culture has a third word for a color, it is always red. If it has a fourth word, it is either yellow or green.