D-Day

On this day:
1644
The Qing Dynasty Manchu forces led by the Shunzhi Emperor capture Beijing during the collapse of the Ming Dynasty. The Manchus would rule China until 1912 when the Republic of China is established.
1822
Alexis St. Martin accidentally shot in the stomach, which leads to William Beaumont’s studies on digestion
1832
The June Rebellion of Paris is put down by the National Guard.
2002
Eastern Mediterranean Event. A near-Earth asteroid estimated at 10 meters in diameter explodes over the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Libya. The resulting explosion is estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb.

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“We are forced to raid the rainy-day fund, the retiree health benefits trust reserve, and to increase property taxes.” --the mayor formally known as Young Cardamom


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Half of personal income taxes in NYC are paid by 2% of city dwellers.

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Global AI demand will require somewhere between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic metres of water withdrawal annually by 2027. The lower estimate is approximately the total annual water withdrawal of four Denmarks. The higher estimate approaches half the total annual water withdrawal of the entire United Kingdom.


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The most direct consequence of the US debt burden is one already unfolding in the federal budget every day. The government now spends more on interest payments than on Medicare, national defense, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food assistance, transportation, and science. Interest costs reached $476 billion in 2022 and nearly doubled by 2025, hitting $970 billion. As a share of federal revenues, interest has risen to 18.5%, eclipsing the previous record set in 1991, and will likely reach 25.8% by 2036. Nearly a third of every income tax dollar collected goes to purely servicing existing debt, leaving less room for everything else the government is supposed to do.--cartwright

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The annual “rich list” of Britain’s wealthiest, published last week by the Sunday Times of London (owned by the same company as the Journal), found a race for the exits. One-sixth of the people on the list two years ago have dropped off, and 111 of the British citizens on the 350-name list live offshore.

***

The Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus estimated that innovators keep only a small share of the social value—roughly 2%—produced by their innovations. Under that assumption, Mr. Bezos’ $275 billion fortune implies that Amazon created about $13.8 trillion in total value for society.

***

Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths.

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52 of California's 177 cities with at least 50,000 residents shrank every year between 2021 and 2025.
Seven of the top 10 fastest-shrinking cities are Los Angeles County suburbs. The remaining three are Bay Area suburbs (Union City, Pleasanton, San Leandro).
11 of the top 15 large U.S. cities with the steepest cumulative losses during that window were in California.

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In 1700, there were no more than 20,000 Cherokees, mostly in the southeast

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Data centers are now responsible for nearly half of Loudon County, VA's county tax revenue

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The most cited global estimate puts the number of trees on Earth at about three trillion. NASA gives the Milky Way somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars. Three trillion is more than seven times the high end of that range, so there are indeed more trees on Earth than stars in our galaxy.

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According to PIIE, average US tariffs on Chinese goods stand at 47.5 percent and cover all imports from China, while China’s average tariffs on US goods stand at 31.9 percent. This is no longer temporary leverage. It is structural protectionism.

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The evidence is by now overwhelming, compiled for example in works on economic history, among which my own, that liberty in equal permission has led over the past two centuries and especially over the past seventy years – speaking empirically, quantitatively, comparatively, scientifically – to equality, fairness, justice, better culture, and better ethics. Abridgments of liberty have worked the other way.

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This is Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. arguing, in a letter written about 80 years ago, at age 57, and with unstable angina, that he should be on the first wave at Utah Beach on D-Day.

"The force and skill with which the first elements hit the beach and proceed may determine the ultimate success of the operation.... With troops engaged for the first time, the behavior pattern of all is apt to be set by those first engagements. [It is] considered that accurate information of the existing situation should be available for each succeeding element as it lands. You should have when you get to shore an overall picture in which you can place confidence. I believe I can contribute materially on all of the above by going in with the assault companies. Furthermore I personally know both officers and men of these advance units and believe that it will steady them to know that I am with them."
He died of a heart attack shortly after D-Day, and is buried at the Normandy Cemetery ( Colleville ) above Omaha Beach.
I believe Patton said that he was the bravest man he ever knew

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D-Day

156,000 Allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy by the end of the day, June 6, 1944. Despite their success, some 4,000 Allied troops were killed by German soldiers defending the beaches. At the time, the D-Day invasion was the largest naval, air, and land operation in history, and within a few days about 326,000 troops, more than 50,000 vehicles, and some 100,000 tons of equipment had landed.
A European beachhead, a new military front, a perception of vulnerability. Normandy changed the War.

Some perspective.

July 1, 1916, was the first day of the Battle of the Somme, fought on the river Somme in France, early in the First World War, from July 1 to November 18. The estimate of British deaths on the first day of the battle, THE FIRST DAY, was 60,000. Sixty thousand men.

The original Allied estimate of casualties on the Somme, made at the Chantilly Conference on 15 November 1916, was that the Germans suffered 630,000 casualties, exceeding the 485,000 suffered by the British and French. In 4 1/2 months, over 1,000,000 men threw themselves into the gears of Europe's Perpetual War Machine.
The Machine's supervisors are back in Ukraine.

British, French, and German casualties
July–November 1916

Month	British	French	Sub- total	German	(% of Allied total)
July	158,786	49,859	208,645	103,000	49.4
August	58,085	18,806	76,891	68,000	88.4
September	101,313	76,147	177,460	140,000	78.9
October	57,722	37,626	95,348	78,500	82.3
November	39,784	20,129	59,913	45,000	75.0
Total	415,690	202,567	618,257	434,500	70.3

The Truth and Beauty Itch

On this day:
70
Titus and his Roman legions breach the middle wall of Jerusalem in the Siege of Jerusalem.
1967
Six-Day War begins: The Israeli air force launches simultaneous pre-emptive attacks on the air forces of Egypt and Syria.
1968
U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy dies the next day.
1981
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that five people in Los Angeles, California have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.
1989
The Unknown Rebel halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
1995
The Bose-Einstein condensate is first created.

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“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change.”--darwin

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The Maine Democrat Senate primary continues to fascinate. Is anybody vulnerable to the accusation of fascist except those who say they are and have Nazi tattoos? Does 'waiting for more information' mean 'OK so far'?

Has politics ever been this insincere and shameless? And can democracies survive without some element of high-mindedness?

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The main economic questions preoccupying Europe: How can the Continent navigate a demographic transition that will strain its social-welfare systems to the breaking point while also meeting the defense-spending demands of a more dangerous world? Any credible solutions hinge on Europe’s ability to purchase raw materials and technology on the open global market and to borrow from abroad.

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The Truth and Beauty Itch

Glamour, the word was originally a Scottish word meaning a literal magic spell. You 'cast a glamour' on someone and they saw things that were not there. Particularly, it transformed things that were bad into looking good. And so when the word came into English, first through writers like Sir Walter Scott, it was used in that way, and it gradually transformed. But it always preserved that sense of magic and illusion and fantasy, if you will. And so my analysis of glamour starts with the idea that it arouses a sense of projection and longing, which is based on your unarticulated longings, the things you don’t necessarily express to yourself, but then when you perceive a glamourous idea, it crystallizes it.
But I also analyze the elements that all these different forms of glamour have in common. One is a promise of escape and transformation. Another is an illusion. Glamour hides flaws, it hides difficulties, it hides boring things. And the third is mystery, and mystery encourages projection, and it also helps to hide flaws.

So whether you’re talking about old movie glamour or you’re talking about the glamour of aviation… aviators in the early twentieth century were described as glamour boys. That was one of the first uses of the word and the way we use it today. Glamour is not female-coded despite what people think. It is a human phenomenon whether you use the word or not.--wrenched from an interview with Virginia Postrel


There seems to be another element to glamor: ritual. Unspoken between the subject and the audience is the agreed-upon arbitrariness of it all. An assigned token of meaning, more religious embodiment than entertainment. A superficial representative of something hoped to be deeper and more permanent. Remember, the word originally meant a transformation. Kim and the girls.


A password to a spiritual testing ground.

The Too-Forgiving Bell Curve

On this day:

1411
King Charles VI granted a monopoly for the ripening of Roquefort cheese to the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, as they had been doing for centuries.
1783
The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their montgolfière (hot air balloon).
1876
An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California, via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
1896
Henry Ford completes the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run.
1913
Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness and dies a few days later.
1928
President of the Republic of China Zhang Zuolin is assassinated by Japanese agents.
1942
World War II: The Battle of Midway begins. Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo orders a strike on Midway Island by much of the Imperial Japanese navy.
1974
During Ten Cent Beer Night, inebriated Cleveland Indians fans start a riot, causing the game to be forfeited to the Texas Rangers.
1986
Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel.

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The pioneer liberals vindicated the supremacy of law over the arbitrary power of men. That is the abiding truth which we inherit from them.--Lippmann

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According to the Natural History Museum’s reference on mass extinctions, a mass extinction is conventionally defined as an event in which roughly 75 percent of the world’s species are lost over a short period of geological time — less than 2.8 million years. The Big Five mass extinctions are the End-Ordovician (~445 million years ago, glaciation and sea-level collapse), the Late Devonian (~360-375 million years ago, marine anoxia), the End-Permian “Great Dying” (~252 million years ago, the worst single event in life’s history), the End-Triassic (~201 million years ago, large-scale volcanism), and the End-Cretaceous K-Pg event (~66 million years ago, the asteroid impact that ended the non-avian dinosaurs).

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“Late-stage Kakistocracy” — the “phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of people who will work for it, and so the folks who aren’t qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified.”

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Obama wanted to "fundamentally change" America. What did he mean by that? 

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The Too-Forgiving Bell Curve

Lunatics come in many shapes and sizes, as do society's responses. Sometimes, a simple, small thing that goes wrong allows both totally crazy behavior and, strangely, a willingness of reasonable people to excuse the atrocity for its seemingly "symbolic" qualities. "Mad as it was, it was well-intentioned." So Mangioni has a fan club, Mamdani a mayorship, and Bill Gates a teaching position.

In 1914, Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery in London. It is said she wasn't crazy because there was a sort-of-recognizable, if disjointed, "purpose" behind this act. She was protesting the arrest of the charismatic Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragette movement in Britain. As a militant suffragette herself, Richardson decided to “destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for its role in the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women.”

She pursued her life as a militant suffragette with various arsons and once bombed a railway station. Richardson was at the Epsom races on Derby Day, 4 June 1913, when fellow suffragette Emily Davison jumped in front of the King's horse. Ms. Davison died in Epsom Cottage Hospital later.

Ms. Richardson later became the head of the women's section of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Sir Oswald Mosley.

Like pregnancy, craziness is an all-or-nothing affair, and it is in their deeds where people usually reveal themselves. As charming as he was and as talented a conversationalist, Ted Bundy was as crazy as a mud hen. But, in fairness to crazies, there is a grey area here. Crazies can not help themselves. Some people behave terribly or dangerously, not because they are crazy but because they are just plain vicious.

 

Strongman's Accomplices

On this day:

350
Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, proclaims himself Roman Emperor, entering Rome at the head of a group of gladiators.
1140
French scholar Peter Abelard is found guilty of heresy.
1839
In Humen, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroys 1.2 million kg of opium confiscated from British merchants, providing Britain with a casus belli to open hostilities, resulting in the First Opium War.
1932
Lou Gehrig and teammate Tony Lazzeri hit four home runs in one game, and hit for the natural cycle, respectively. These two feats are both less common than a perfect game, which has occurred twenty-one times in one hundred and twenty years.
1937
The Duke of Windsor marries Wallis Simpson.
1940
World War II: The Battle of Dunkirk ends with a German victory and with Allied forces in full retreat.
1940
World War II: The Luftwaffe bombs Paris.
1969
Melbourne-Evans collision: Off the coast of South Vietnam, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne cuts the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half.
1982
The Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, is shot on a London street. He survives but is permanently paralysed.
1989
The government of China sends troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.

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"[classics] teaches you 'to read difficult things. ... In a global environment of fact-dodging, misreporting, conspiracy theories, fake news, and outright lies, skills in reading difficult things are those that the world most needs."--Mary Beard

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Bass secured a spot on the November ballot and Pratt was running in second place as of early Wednesday morning, ahead of progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman. These are the best candidates for mayor in LA's drifting hulk.
The electoral talent search for Maine senator seems to settle between a 120-year-old career politician and a Nazi.

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Apparently, accusations of being a Nazi are true unless you have Nazi tattoos.

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Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist congressional candidate endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist.

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The metaphor of “running different software” that fathers sometimes use turns out to be a reasonable approximation of what the neuroimaging shows in new fathers.

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Tom Steyer, running for California governor, spent over $200 of his own money on the race. Is that reasonable?

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Strongman's Accomplices

The American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media, jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview in its entirety and unedited, "we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting.

This is not normal political combat. It isn’t just more of the partisan roughness that Mr. Dooley had in mind when he remarked that “politics ain’t beanbag.” This is unabashed White House thuggishness, a vengeful aggressiveness that makes no effort to disguise itself by pretending to care about constitutional norms or democratic values. And all of it is cheered by tens of millions of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of President Trump’s cascade of gratuitous cruelty, insults, and threats.

When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any check on his powers, he didn’t bother with euphemisms. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

For anyone who takes the American constitutional system seriously, that statement is genuinely terrifying. Not because Trump is wrong but because — let’s face it — he’s right.

The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.

But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. Built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.

…..

The Trump phenomenon isn’t an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned of what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.--from Jacoby

Jacoby's pretty rough on Trump because he's implying this dangerous phase of our republic is somehow limited to him, or characterized by him. Rather, the country has struggled with its ideals since its inception.  It is the basis of the Civil War, the battles between amoral political parties, the essence of those politicians who claim they plan on "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." These people are not ignoring America's principles; they don't like them.

Politicians eager to seize the wealth of citizens or gerrymander a state are not redirecting the nation; they are changing its nature. Politicians who would pack the court are trying to bypass the very checks and balances that have allowed the country to succeed. Trump is philosophy-free, but he is no aberration. You don't fight repeated, pointless wars, allow erosion of fundamental American rights, and amass $38 trillion in debt without true incompetence and a deep disregard for the citizenry. Trump is a problem, but he is only the current iteration of a long line of them. And, as the results of incompetence, greed, ambition, and cynicism circle the landing strip,  there will be more to come.

 

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

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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.

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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.

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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.


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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.

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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.

***

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.