Exceptional

On This Day:

1815
Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba.
1876
Japan and Korea sign a treaty granting Japanese citizens extraterritoriality rights, opening three ports to Japanese trade, and ending Korea’s status as a tributary state of Qing Dynasty China.
1935
Adolf Hitler orders the Luftwaffe to be re-formed, violating the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
1935
Robert Watson-Watt carries out a demonstration near Daventry which leads directly to the development of RADAR in the United Kingdom.
1936
In the February 26 Incident, young Japanese military officers attempt to stage a coup against the government.
1946
Finnish observers report the first of many thousands of sightings of ghost rockets.
1966
Apollo Program: Launch of AS-201, the first flight of the Saturn IB rocket
1993
World Trade Center bombing: In New York City, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center explodes, killing 6 and injuring over a thousand. A Pittsburgh mother of five is eventually part of the investigation.
1995
The United Kingdom’s oldest investment banking institute, Barings Bank, collapses after a securities broker, Nick Leeson, loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange using futures contracts.

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To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms. -John Leonard, critic (25 Feb 1939-2008)

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A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

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The FBI, during the Biden administration, subpoenaed Patel's phone records and those of the current White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

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“She is making money off the murder of Charlie Kirk by literally implicating his widow and everyone else at [Turning Point USA] in that murder, and then trying to dig up pseudo-dirt on the wife of the person who was murdered. I don’t know what to call that, other than evil trash.” --Ben Shapiro on Candice Owens

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Exceptional

Only 28 percent of NYC’s fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared with 31 percent nationally. In math, fourth-grade proficiency is 33 percent, behind the national average of 39 percent, while eighth-grade math proficiency is just 23 percent, well below the 28 percent national rate.

Some questions arise. What are the dynamics here? How are these numbers tolerated? Not just by parents but by the teachers themselves? How could an average person be associated with something so awful without disrupting their daily life and that of the organization to improve it? Integrity, aspiration, excellence, and nurturing the young are not particular American virtues, but they are very human virtues, and it would be difficult to have a successful America without them.

And the norm to which New York is compared is terrible. The goal they seem to want to attain is not remotely even mediocre.

Why isn't this a crisis? What is it about us that allows us to be so casual with such inferiority?

How Will We React When We All Know the Truth?

"It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the Communist Party leads the world." — General Chi Haotian, China's defense minister and vice chairman of the Party's Central Military Commission, reportedly secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans.

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Bill Mazeroski has died.

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Apparently, the animosity toward Melania is moral!

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Archaeologists have discovered Paleolithic glyphs in a German cave that could potentially push back the history of written communication by over 30,000 years, per a rock-solid study in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences.

According to the researchers, the symbols were engraved on artifacts that dated back some 40,000 years to the Stone Age, when early humans arrived in Europe from Africa and encountered the Neanderthals.

Despite their age, these ancient etchings boasted a complexity comparable to the early stages of the world’s oldest writing system, cuneiform, which originated around 5,000 years ago, the New Scientist reported.

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How Will We React When We All Know the Truth?

We have many news countdowns: the days Mrs. Guthrie has been missing, the days the Russians have been killing Ukrainians, and how long it's been since the U.S. won a gold medal in hockey. A new, highly symbolic one should be: how many days an open conduit of raw sewage has been draining into the river that runs through the national capital.

A serious issue has gradually become clear to Americans: with a $38 trillion national debt, the country faces enormous expenses, and the large taxes needed to cover these costs are either poorly managed or stolen. In other words, there is a conflict of interest between the country's needs and the personal desires and competence of the people's representatives.
 
A smaller view sometimes helps. New York City's budget is $127 billion. For perspective, this is similar to the annual expenditures of a mid-sized nation, with all the expenses a country requires, like Greece or Thailand, devoted to governing one city.

In little more than a decade, New York's budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth.
The city's population remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024.

New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles, and more than double that of Houston.

In Los Angeles, the Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015, and 80 percent in the city.

All this amid a public frustration because, despite billions spent, an audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Read that again.

How hard is it to have safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation, and adequate housing for the middle class in the world's richest nation? Apparently, very.

Solutions will not appear until the ostensible leaders put aside stupidity and avarice, and substitute some concern for the general good. But you can't teach stupidity and, ancient Greeks aside, teaching virtue to politicians has yet to be demonstrated.

The hard-working, good-natured American has shouldered a lot: intervention in strange, inexplicable wars, supporting non-productive but demanding fellow citizens and immigrants, hard-earned taxes stolen and/or redirected, third-world education for his kids, ridicule of his values, and his history.

One can only wonder what will happen when this governing model sheds her potemkin disguise, and the horrors of this dishonesty and neglect become fully understood.

Ghost students.

Essentially, it's a transfer payment. I basically believe that anything that would take Social Security payments below their present guaranteed level is a mistake. I think that in this country -- extraordinarily rich country -- that the people in their productive years can take care of those outside in both areas, even though the ratio of productive to non-productive has changed and is changing. But we take care of our young. And a rich country takes care of its young, and it takes care of its old.--Buffett on Social Security

He favors raising the cap. He doesn't explain how the demographics play into this opinion.

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Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.
Abundance is about the category of goods for which the government has lost the ability to deliver, even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. --Klein, Abundance's author. 

So maybe incompetence is just a force of nature?

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By as late as 1940, the federal and state governments’ investment in research amounted to only 23 percent of U.S. R&D and 10 percent of U.S. basic science, and the nature of that investment could have had little or no impact on rates of American economic or health growth: Defense R&D has almost no economic benefit, while the agricultural R&D was surplus to requirement.--Kealey


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When people say Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, they are not making a metaphysical claim. They are pointing out that there is no external source from which its value is derived. Gold retains value because it has physical and industrial uses regardless of price. Equities derive value from businesses. Debt derives value from repayment. Fiat currency derives durability from taxation, legal-tender laws, and institutional enforcement. Bitcoin derives value only from the expectation that someone else will want it later. That expectation can sustain a price for long periods, but it is not a reference. There is nothing for valuation to converge toward.--Lincoln Square

And...Research cited by CryptoNews found that more than 60 percent of Trump-themed meme coins have effectively failed, losing most of their value and trading activity. CoinDesk has reported that at least one high-profile Trump coin is down more than 80 percent from its launch price.

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Ghost students.

Community colleges cannot decline high school graduates under most circumstances. Imagine what can happen.

Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by "ghost student" schemes

The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money -- robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims of the stolen identity. 

In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state's administrative body for the community college system.
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those "students" were real people trying to get an education.

More than 200 investigations have opened nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars.
3 women, using prison inmates' IDs, made $1 million in one year.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.

California has been particularly vulnerable.
California does not require ID.
Pierce College's student body shrank 36% when ghost students were purged.

$9 billion stolen from day care centers by people who don't speak English.

Does anybody have a job anymore?

 

Sunday/Temptation

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

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From Glanmore:

The corrugated iron growled like thunder
When March came in; then as the year turned warmer
And invalids and bulbs came up from under,
I hibernated on behind the dormer,
Staring through shaken branches at the hill,
Dissociated, like an ailing farmer
Chloroformed against things seasonal
In a reek of cigarette smoke and dropped ash.

Lent came in next, also like a lion
Sinewy and wild for discipline,
A fasted will marauding through the body;
And I taunted it with scents of nicotine
As I lit one off another, and felt rash,
And stirred in the deep litter of the study. (Seamus Heaney)

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Sunday/Temptation

First Sunday of Lent

Today's gospel is The Temptation in the Desert. Christ is asked by the Devil to change stone into bread, is offered dominion over the earth, and is offered the opportunity to summon angels. 

Sustenence. Glory. Power.

The temptation of God is unsettling even if we can rationalize it under Christ's duality. This event has been translated as the temptation of Israel but there is a peculiarity here that does not go away: Who is Christ proving Himself to? He is not being asked to change stone to bread because He is hungry but to prove He can do it. Ditto the display of throwing Himself from the precipice. These are displays of proof, confirmation of His divinity. And, as Christ does not need the Devil for dominion, one thinks the Devil is superfluous.

What the devil is going on?

What this really looks like is a heavenly internal debate (and a joy to the Manichees): "I could do it this way, but won't. This way, but won't. Nor this way." 

But Christ is not being asked by the Devil for proof.

The Devil is us.

SatStats

 

The tariffs have been ruled unconstitutional. Efficiency will not trump process yet. 

This will result in a wonderful boondoggle that will be mediated by a feeding frenzy of countless predatory lawyers and their predatory assistants.

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Is ICE itself a problem, or is it the power of the government and its efficiency and integrity in using that power?

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Over the last two seasons, Ke'Bryan Hayes is the only player to record at least 900 plate appearances and an OPS under .600.

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And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.
One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.--Noah Smith

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Pirate outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia's nickname is 'the password.'

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SatStats

Google Play Store has over 2.6 billion apps and games

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Bill Gates' total land holdings are widely estimated between roughly 242,000 and 270,000 acres nationwide, making him the largest private farmland owner in the U.S.

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By one estimate, almost 80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue is collected in stablecoins like tether, a local economist, Asdrúbal Oliveros, said on a recent podcast.

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Today, a simple vial of blood can be used to measure more than 13,000 different proteins; ten years ago, this was nearly zero.

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Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?
But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.

We can trust it to do the right thing.

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Among the cohort who began college in 2004, 38% never took economics. Among the 2012 cohort, only 26% took economics.

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Spending Distribution at the Federal Level:

From 1959 to 2024, the portion of federal government outlays that were spent on:
--national defense and veterans’ benefits declined from 55% to 17%.
--social programs—including healthcare, income security, education, housing, and recreation—rose from 20% to 60%.
--general government and debt service—including the executive & legislative branches, tax collection, financial management, and interest payments—rose from 17% to 25% and then declined to 18%.
--economic affairs—including transportation, general economic & labor affairs, agriculture, natural resources, energy, and space declined from 8% to 3%.
--public order and safety—including police, fire, law courts, prisons, and immigration enforcement—rose from 0.3% to 1.2%.

Regrettably, there is no section for theft.

The Freedom to Approve, Not Decide

Alysa Liu survived hard work and no drama to win Olympic figure skating gold, the first U.S. woman to do so in over two decades.

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Pro-Trump ads are flooding the TV, sponsored by Homeland Security. The government is advertising for the government.

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Nearly one in four adults in that generation currently identify as something other than heterosexual. This is in contrast to older Americans, among whom LGBTQ+ identification remains relatively uncommon.

Pick the sci-fi plot you like best.

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Government debt is projected under the CBO’s baseline scenario to balloon from nearly $31 trillion today to $56 trillion over the next decade.

If that is true, why is it not a topic of conversation, an interview subject, or an election issue?

What are the options to deal with it?

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The U.S. trade deficit hit a near-historic high of $901 billion last year.

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The Freedom to Approve, Not Decide

Every so often, the popular world teaches a lesson. Science is harder than people say. Dogs that 'never bite' sometimes do. Bread usually falls jelly-side down.

The recent American display at the Munich Security Conference was such a teaching experience. The Pretty Girl Representative (PGR) showed up for no good reason and behaved like a moron. When asked, she did not know the basic geography of her continent, did not know the dramatic origin of the modern American horse, and was unable to say anything beyond "Uhh....." to a simple — and expected — political question. Watching this stirred a feeling of recognition. What was this?

It was a replay of something many teenagers experienced: a friend who showed up at an uncle's business for a token interview before getting a summer job. It was an audition where the required qualities were assumed.

For the nephew, the required qualities were being a blood relative and not drooling. For the PGR, the qualities were...not drooling. The PGR was auditioning for the international stage. She has been a successful American politician, and she was the PGR. She just needed a nod of approval, and she would move on.

Her failure is beside the point. The real question is what she was doing there in the first place? How did the PGR advance to be considered at this level? It makes you think she was picked somehow in advance, sometime earlier, that let her onto the scene. If that sounds a little too conspiratorial, remember that after she exploded on the audition stage, she rushed in tears to call her uncle NYT.

 

So AOC thinks Venezuela is south of the equator. Probably thinks all South Americans are alike.

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What's with Netanyahu's low-profile visit to the U, S. recently? Avoiding the long arm of the UN court? A great idea from Kathy A.: They're planning heavy-duty Iran action, but they don't trust their domestic electronic security.

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What would happen to a farmer who polluted a waterway a fraction of the degree the government has polluted the Potomac?

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The president of a Florida insurance brokerage firm and the CEO of a marketing company were sentenced Wednesday to 20 years each in prison for leading a sprawling, $233 million Affordable Care Act fraud scheme

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Outrage. Surrender. Despair.

Overwhelming national and personal debt. Governments that can't prevent fires or rebuild after the damage. People who immigrate here because the filthy streets and rivers look just like home.

Growing evidence that what people do is ineffective and that government is a foolish backup plan.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitude that could arise in a nation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion. Once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.

Enervation eventually gives way to frustration, and then to rage, as soft despotism fails to achieve utopia. Then the people are left with a stark choice: a reversion to freedom, or the embrace of autocracy. As de Tocqueville concluded, “The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.”