O. Henry

On this day, many things:

1148
Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.
1411
Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland, takes place.
1487
Citizens of Leeuwarden, Netherlands strike against ban on foreign beer.
1534
French explorer Jacques Cartier plants a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and takes possession of the territory in the name of Francis I of France.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and is replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1715
A Spanish treasure fleet of 10 ships under Admiral Ubilla leaves Havana, Cuba for Spain. Seven days later, 9 of them sink in a storm off the coast of Florida. A few centuries later, treasure is salvaged from these wrecks.
1847
After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City. Celebrations of this event include the Pioneer Day Utah state holiday and the Days of '47 Parade.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Kernstown – Confederate General Jubal Anderson Early defeats Union troops led by General George Crook in an effort to keep them out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1901
O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank.
1911
Hiram Bingham III re-discovers Machu Picchu, “the Lost City of the Incas”. Was it lost?
1915
The passenger ship S.S. Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. How is that possible?
1922
The draft of the British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; and which came into effect on 26 September 1923. The beginning of the end.
1923
The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1929
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers). This is truly precious.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian airplanes bomb Hamburg by night, those of the Americans by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974
Watergate scandal: the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
And, finally, 2009
The MV Arctic Sea, reportedly carrying a cargo of timber, is allegedly hijacked in the North Sea by pirates, but much speculation remains as to the actual cargo and events. An astonishing story that might be gun-running.

***

“It’s very hard to distinguish AI security incidents from AI marketing, and that’s actually a big problem going forward,” --Matthew Green, a security expert at Johns Hopkins University.

***

The “paperclip maximiser” is a thought experiment invented by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003.

He describes a scenario in which people invent an AI whose only goal is to make as many paperclips as possible. But he illustrates how that could quickly become horrifying: it might wipe out the humans that could potentially switch it off and stop it making paperclips, for instance, or it could realise that the human body contains material that could be turned into paperclips and so decide to harvest them and use them for that.

***

A six-year-old, who had a genetic mutation that affected her neurodevelopment, received a gene therapy treatment designed to correct the underlying defect at Shanghai Xinhua Hospital in March 2025, according to an investigation by Science and Retraction Watch. She died days later from a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, the magazine reported, citing documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents.

***

Has anyone heard a coherent, sensible argument against Voter ID laws?

***

Only two companies from the Dow Industrial Average in 1976 remain on the Dow today, Procter & Gamble and Chevron, nee Standard Oil.

***

What in heaven's name is the government doing testing the testosterone levels of its citizens?

***

O. Henry

This day has some gravity. The S.S. Eastland. Operation Gomorrah. The Kellogg-Briand Pact. The British Mandate. The return of Apollo 11.  The MV Arctic Sea hijacking. 

And O. Henry, the talented author, was released from prison on this day.

O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of “The Gift of the Magi,” was one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation. His legacy is celebrated every year by the O. Henry Prize for Fiction. He got his start in prison, while serving time for embezzling funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, where he had worked as a teller.

Much later, a 1916 report characterized the bank in question as “carelessly managed,” and revealed that “the patrons used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars and say a week later, ‘Porter, I took out $200, last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to.’” The Times report claims that Porter, who by the time he was charged had moved to Houston and taken a job as a columnist with The Daily Post, resigned before one of the “misappropriations with which he was charged,” and that if he had simply gone back to Austin when he was summoned to stand trial, he would have been acquitted.

Instead, he took a train to New Orleans, and then hopped on a fruit steamer headed for Honduras, where the law could not reach him. But in February of 1897, he learned that his wife was very ill, and he returned to the States to care for her. His wife died in July, and Porter was convicted the following year, and in March 1898, sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement.

In prison, Porter “did his first serious literary work,” as the Times puts it. In order to be able to send money home to support his daughter Margaret, he wrote and published 14 short stories, under pen names, including the one with which he would become famous: O. Henry.

Porter was released early for good behavior on July 24, 1901, and returned to Pittsburgh to live with his daughter and his in-laws, before moving on to New York City. Most importantly, he kept writing, and in 1904 published his first collection of short stories, Cabbages and Kings, followed two years later by The Four Million, which would include some of his most enduring tales, including “The Gift of the Magi.” He was incredibly prolific; he would keep publishing until he died in 1910.
(from Lit Hub)

Democracy Before Socialism

On this day

1821
While the Mora Rebellion continued, Greeks captured Monemvasia Castle and massacred nearly 3000 Turkish inhabitants.
1903
The Ford Motor Company sells its first car.
1914
Austria-Hungary issues an ultimatum to Serbia demanding Serbia to allow the Austrians to determine who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbia will reject those demands, and Austria will declare war on July 28.
1929
The Fascist government in Italy bans the use of foreign words.
1936
In Catalonia, Spain, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia is founded through the merger of Socialist and Communist parties.
1967
12th Street Riot: in Detroit, Michigan, one of the worst riots in United States history begins on 12th Street in the predominantly African American inner city. It will leave 43 killed, 342 injured, and 1,400 buildings burned.
1968
Glenville Shootout: in Cleveland, Ohio, a violent shootout between a Black Militant organization led by Ahmed Evans and the Cleveland Police Department occurs. During the shootout, a riot begins and lasts for five days.
1968
The only successful hijacking of an El Al aircraft takes place when a Boeing 707 carrying 10 crew and 38 passengers is taken over by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The aircraft was en route from Rome, Italy, to Lod, Israel.
1984
Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown after nude photos of her appeared in Penthouse magazine.
1992
A Vatican commission, led by Joseph Ratzinger, establishes that it is necessary to limit the rights of homosexual people and non-married couples.

***

The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the reach of mere majorities. We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them." (from somewhere)

 

***

With all we have seen, why would we assume that elections are not tampered with?

***

OpenAI claimed responsibility for a security breach of the model platform Hugging Face, in which an agent, driven by a combination of OpenAI models, compromised the platform's infrastructure, while internally testing models on ExploitGym, a benchmark for cybersecurity capabilities. That is to say, in a test sequence to assess a defense program, it breached and attacked it.
We are giving an infant a handgun.

***

There is an effort in Hong Kong to punish booksellers. Several stores have been raided and workers there imprisoned. (A popular protest t-shirt reads "I am a bookstore employee.")
Hong Kong’s security chief, Chris Tang, said that booksellers had a responsibility to ensure their books were lawful, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick”.
So the totalitarian sterilizes our world to keep us safe.

***

Vogue's Culture Writer is a socialist. Vogue.

***

Remember, democracy fans, you chose Katie Porter and the Maine Nazi. What's next?

***

Democracy Before Socialism

The rising interest in "Democratic Socialism" is likely due to several factors, none of them flattering. It provides another mindless answer to the unending and robotic political drone for 'change.' It masquerades as a solution for inept and disheartened lives. (Current demographics imply the true Left in America are the well-educated unsuccessful.)

Contributing to these fantasies is the underlying ignorance as to what a commitment to "democratic socialism" really means. The current citizens, despite access to immeasurable volumes of information, simply have no idea the demon they are embracing.

But they have the marketing down. Democratic sounds modern and up-to-date. And responsive. But there is nothing inherently good or decent in democracy. Hitler was elected.

Nor does the majority have some moral high ground. Democracy is only a process by which leadership is selected; a means. It is the culture and those elected to lead it that always do the damage. The nature and value of a culture and its governing is not measured by how it is chosen but by what that culture holds dear.

The demand that the majority have its way will never end. That's why the Constitution was written and why it has been such a success. Majority vote is not sacred without a hard, basic framework of individual rights, which majority vote always intentionally tries to supersede. Otherwise, we would glorify lynching and gang rape. Doing something by vote is neither right nor good any more than voting to sack Canada is. 

A majority vote is only as meaningful as the guidelines that restrain it.

Socialism is a silly idea, but it is not made any less silly--or given any more dignity--by voting for it. Nor is a bad idea made any better by dying for it.

Artificial Insemination

 On this day:

1099
First Crusade: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1298
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Falkirk – King Edward I of England and his longbowmen defeat William Wallace and his Scottish schiltrons outside the town of Falkirk.
1706
The Acts of Union 1707 are agreed upon by commissioners from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, which, when passed by each country’s Parliaments, lead to the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1797
Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Battle between Spanish and British naval forces during the French Revolutionary Wars. During the Battle, Rear-Admiral Nelson is wounded in the arm and the arm had to be partially amputated.
1937
New Deal: the United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
1942
Holocaust: the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
1946
King David Hotel bombing: a Zionist underground organisation, the Irgun, bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the civil administration and military headquarters for Mandate Palestine, resulting in 91 deaths.
2003
Members of 101st Airborne of the United States, aided by Special Forces, attack a compound in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, along with Mustapha Hussein, Qusay’s 14-year-old son, and a bodyguard.
2005
Jean Charles de Menezes is killed by police as the hunt begins for the London Bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the 21 July 2005 London bombings.
2011
Norway is the victim of twin terror attacks, the first being a bomb blast which targeted government buildings in central Oslo, the second being a massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utøya.

***

Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies.--Lemieux

***

How are Kash Patel's blinking lessons going?

***

Two National Institutes of Health researchers have been charged with allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying to federal authorities.

Vincent Munster, chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, and research fellow Claude Kwe were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after returning from the Republic of Congo.

***

There is an undercurrent of criticism toward Lionel Messi because he hasn't publicly addressed the unspoken national generalizations about Argentina's unspoken racial generalizations.

***

A whale population spontaneously drops its entire repertoire every few years and collectively adopts an entirely new song from thousands of miles away—long-range cultural transmission outside humanity.

***

Artificial Insemination

Radio belly. Cat shovel.

Peculiar junctions of normal adjectives and nouns are always a tipoff; you are dealing with either a Beat poet or a progressive. The poet jars, the progressive inculcates.

With a progressive, one term is being infused with the other. A hybrid is being created, and the alloy is usually a monster. "Health care justice." "The criminal community." "Democratic socialism." Linguistic square pegs are forced into conceptual round holes.

Our lives have become so inundated with opinion and conflict that we are becoming calloused. Do illegal immigrants demand the assumption of innocence? Does an illegal immigrant have to commit another crime before we take him seriously? Can a vicious criminal be abused by the law? Are 'fraudsters' different from thieves? Our whole nation is founded on the right of the individual to defy the majority; does that empower a crazy foreign student?

So we suffer through tortuous legal wranglings and debates. And we know that the system is geared to fairness, so we let these debates play themselves out. A man sues a casual girlfriend for alimony, a group demands dolphin voting rights--and we get up and go to work. We turn the page.

These verbal shotgun marriages wear us down. What is 'social justice," really? The right of people to join a club? To marry whoever you want? To attend any school? It's like hybridization across species; you know the product will be sterile anyway.

What follows is an event reported by Megan McArdle in the WashPo. That this is not a topic of daily conversation is proof of the notion's malignancy.

"In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.

This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories."

In the political laboratory, no experiment is innocuous, no noble lie without consequence, particularly as the fifth column and the press make the inane or the revolutionary routine.

The Enemies of the Good

 On this day:

365
A tsunami devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by the Crete earthquake, estimated to be 8.0 on the Richter Scale. 5,000 people perished in Alexandria, and 45,000 more died outside the city.
1403
Battle of Shrewsbury: King Henry IV of England defeats rebels to the north of the county town of Shropshire, England.
1861
American Civil War: First Battle of Bull Run – at Manassas Junction, Virginia, the first major battle of the war begins and ends in a victory for the Confederate army.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1961
Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission – Gus Grissom piloting Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space (in a suborbital mission).
1969
Space Race: Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission (July 20 in North America).
1973
In the Lillehammer affair in Norway, Israeli Mossad agents kill a waiter whom they mistakenly thought was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.
2005
Four terrorist bombings, occurring exactly two weeks after the similar July 7 bombings, target London’s public transportation system. All four bombs fail to detonate and all four suspected suicide bombers are captured and later convicted and imprisoned for long terms.
2011
NASA’s Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135

***

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.---Lord Acton

***

Since we have become a people who hope to shape our nature through the adoption and criminalization of words like "Washington Redskins," shouldn't we do something to soften the aggressive and dangerous name inherent in the State of Delaware?

***

Gymnasium is a Latinisation of the Greek, meaning to exercise. Its root word is the same as for 'nude.'

The Greeks banned women from the gymnasium but, I believe, the Etruscans did not.

***

John Scopes found guilty, the Americans land on the moon, both on the same day in history. I wonder if we could start a political study, deductible of course, on how days of the year contain inherent historical leanings, like a horoscope. We could meet in Acapulco every six months and discuss our findings, maybe get a university chair or two.

***

The full cost of making America a welfare state wasn’t fully recorded in the federal budget deficits of the 1970s because inflation and bracket creep tax increases transferred much of the cost to the family budget.

***

The Enemies of the Good

Cultures are always threatened by envy, madness, the restless need to change into some imagined good. (The old saw, 'the enemy of good is better.') The Americans are particularly subject to assault because their philosophy allows the revolutionary the freedom to try it.

The American foundation is tough, though. The Founders recognized whimsy as a weak and inaccurate  (and adolescent) motive in political change. And common and shape-changing. They demanded a philosophy and a slow process of foundational restructuring. This may explain the frustrated frenzy of contemporary revolutionaries. Any more, the Americans seem willing to import them.

The current threat from the Left seems to have coalesced into incoherence. America is so brilliantly constructed that its enemies have simply stopped trying to replace it and devolved into emotional tantrums. The objections to America have become geographic, like Israel. Or religious, like Islam. Or historic, like slavery. None of these points are actionable as they are peripheral to the country itself. Their energy is resentment, not constructive. So they would overthrow the British government over the Corn Laws. These are people who hate Catholicism because of the Crusades and Blacks because of the Congo Wars. America's domestic enemies are people without context.

Mamdani will be risky for them because he is real. The Netanyahu kerfluffle is silly but instructive. Mamdani wants to enforce an international edit the country doesn't recognize. This raises practical questions. Who will enforce the edit? Local police? Would they fight Israeli regulars? State cops? National Guard? Where would they put him? Would Israeli special forces counter? Are we going to ask American boys to die for the Hague over some incoherent international cult?

The Left is on the wrong side of all this, but they don't care about much other than winning and blood in the streets. Their incoherence, though, might give them a strange advantage as no sensible person would take such a crew seriously.

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

On this day:

70
First Jewish-Roman War: Siege of Jerusalem – Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, storms the Fortress of Antonia north of the Temple Mount. The Roman army is drawn into street fights with the Zealots.
1807
Nicéphore Niépce is awarded a patent by Napoleon Bonaparte for the Pyréolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine, after it successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône in France.
1903
The Ford Motor Company ships its first car.
1944
World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
1950
Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.
1960
The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.
1969
Apollo Program: Apollo 11 successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on another world almost 7 hours later.
1976
The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1977
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is hit by a flash flood that kills eighty and causes $350 million in damage.
1977
The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments.

***

There is no legitimate use case for crypto. They’ve had 18 years to come up with one. They keep throwing things up like “an inflation hedge” or “source of stability.” Every one of them has turned out to be baseless.

The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering, and crime. It’s the preferred mechanism of choice for global terrorists, sex traffickers, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

You have to ask yourself why crypto has basically hijacked the political agenda of Washington. It’s because they followed the Sam Bankman-Fried model of buying bipartisan support by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns. --Krugman

***

In May, Mamdani’s administration released a map meant to celebrate the city's ethnic diversity and immigrant roots. The chart included Little Palestine and Little Pakistan but omitted Little Italy, one of the best-known neighborhoods in Manhattan. The map included Little Mexico, Little Guyana, and Little Bhod-Tibet, but failed to recognize well known Irish enclaves like Woodlawn and Sunnyside. Not surprisingly, the map omitted Jewish neighborhoods.
Welcome to the 'some are more equal than others' phase.

***

The use of subatomic particles to process data could represent a breakthrough that’s unmatched in modern human history, according to analysts at Bank of America, who compared it to the discovery of fire. “A technology that can perform endless complex calculations in zero-time, warp-speeding human knowledge and development.”

***

Just to be fair:
An 18-year-old has more at stake in an election than an 80-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?
An 80-year-old has more money at stake than an 18-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?

***

A detector buried a kilometre underground in Japan may have caught the faintest signal ever recorded: the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the entire universe, a background hum of stellar death that scientists have been straining to hear for decades.--Headline  at Space Daily. I suppose they could have said "background hum of stellar creation", too 

***

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

Socialism has been around in some form or other forever. Cain shared Abel's production. Pirates share the spoils. The prospect of sharing the product of another's efforts makes for a terrific recruiting poster. It has been the default system for failing individuals forever. But it is a ridiculous socio-economic system that has deteriorated everywhere it's been tried. From the schoolyard to Jamestown and Plymouth to the early religious conclaves to Mafia protection rackets, sharing others' production has changed only the mailing addresses of the rich.

The modern adaptation--sharing by voting mandate--cleverly sidesteps group sharing's basic flaw: enforcement. If 51% of the population wants to share production, a sizable portion does not. If a citizen has no essential right to the results of his work, and his neighbor has a statutory right to it, how is that conflict resolved? Force.

Democracies have their own flaws. Is a 90% vote more important in a society than a 52% vote? Can a 90% vote make farms communal? Wives? Slaves? Is lynching OK if the correct process is followed?

Ants are very productive and organized. But we are not ants. 

The socialist starts with a superficial notion--property--and works down to organize his culture. The revolutionary geniuses in America started with the basic rights of the nation's citizens--life, liberty, the striving for happiness--and worked up. It is because socialism is so tenuously but fervently moored by property that it is so unstable and dangerous.

So, when one votes for socialism, the job is nowhere near finished. The disenters and countless inconsistencies have to be identified and, in some fashion, attacked. The vote is meaningless until it is forcibly imposed.

So, is democratic socialism an oxymoron?

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

On this day:
64
Great Fire of Rome: a fire begins to burn in the merchant area of Rome and soon burns completely out of control. According to a popular, but untrue legend, Nero fiddled as the city burned.

711
Umayyad conquest of Hispania: Battle of Guadalete – Umayyad forces under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeat the Visigoths led by King Roderic. This began the successful invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, less than 100 years after the death of the Prophet.
1333
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Halidon Hill – The English win a decisive victory over the Scots.
1545
The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982, the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
1553
Lady Jane Grey is replaced by Mary I of England as Queen of England after only nine days of reign.
1701
Representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sign the Nanfan Treaty, ceding a large territory north of the Ohio River to England.
1843
Brunel’s steamship, the SS Great Britain, is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller and also becoming the largest vessel afloat in the world.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid – At Buffington Island in Ohio, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s raid into the north is mostly thwarted when a large group of his men are captured while trying to escape across the Ohio River.
1864
Taiping Rebellion: Third Battle of Nanking – The Qing Dynasty finally defeats the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
1942
World War II: Battle of the Atlantic – German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the last U-boats to withdraw from their United States Atlantic coast positions in response to the effective American convoy system.
1963
Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 metres (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.
1981
In a private meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French Prime Minister François Mitterrand reveals the existence of the Farewell Dossier, a collection of documents showing that the Soviets had been stealing American technological research and development.
1997
The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army resumes a ceasefire to end their 25-year campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

***

"Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals."--Norberg

***

The country of Peru has seen an influx of babies named after the star of Norway’s World Cup team, Erling Haaland, with over 500 newborns having been named after the forward.

***

Tulsi Gabbard’s older brother allegedly tried to lure several young children into a hotel room with money and gum at a Hawaiian hotel resort.

***

The new Democrat bent is that the Constitution, the very declaration of the values that underlie the nation, is "nostalgic." It's appearing as a common talking point among national candidates. This is brazen, iconoclastic stuff, containing the seeds of a real disaster. And it would not be tried without some support in polling.

***

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it, rivers, rain, clouds, lakes, and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock. It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.

***

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

A week after the Parable of the Sower comes today's gospel, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows his wheat and, in the night, an enemy oversows the field with weeds. (The weeds are darnel, strangely a name taken by football players and actors. Its historical meaning is "disorder.") The farmer decides to wait and harvest them all together for fear that extracting the weeds will harm the good wheat as well. Christ, in an unusual move, then explains the parable. A hard reading of it should be very alarming.

This is a significant insight into Christ's message. There is a Good. But there is also an Evil. And that Evil is sown by an Enemy, an active Enemy of the Good. The Enemy is surreptitious, and the Evil he sows is inextricably interwoven with the Good so that separating them is injurious to the Good. That is, Good and Evil are linked. There are incidental slaves in this parable--without comment--and the eventual harvesters are Angels. 

Angels.

This is a battlefield, a struggle over the soul of man. Good and Evil are real and hard to separate, but separation will happen. And God is patient; His patience comes from a sincere interest in protecting the Good.

This is the picture of a religion with principals, not simply abstract principles, with active virtue and evil, and both have proponents.


Sowing Seed

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy--bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

ROBERT LAURENCE BINYON
1869-1943 / England

SatStats

 On this day:

390 BCE
Roman-Gaulish Wars: Battle of the Allia – a Roman army is defeated by raiding Gauls, leading to the subsequent sacking of Rome.
1290
King Edward I of England issues the Edict of Expulsion, banishing all Jews (numbering about 16,000) from England; this was Tisha B'Av on the Hebrew calendar, a day that commemorates many Jewish calamities.
1870
The First Vatican Council decrees the dogma of papal infallibility.
1925
Adolf Hitler publishes his personal manifesto Mein Kampf.
1942
World War II: the Germans test fly the Messerschmitt Me-262 using only its jet engines for the first time.
1944
World War II: Hideki Tojo resigns as Prime Minister of Japan due to numerous setbacks in the war effort.
1966
Human spaceflight: Gemini 10 is launched from Cape Kennedy on a 70-hour mission that includes docking with an orbiting Agena target vehicle.
1969
After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.

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"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."--Thomas Jefferson

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The Kopechne affair ended the myth of even-handedness in the American political culture, essentially its very raison d'etre. How could the Democrats have survived it?

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New York City government is using racial classifications to guide more than two hundred goals across nearly every agency. Among other things, the plan commits specific percentages of city contracts to be doled out based on race, a continuation of the city’s longstanding policy. Indeed, for the past several years, the city has operated one of the largest race-based contracting programs in the country.

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China is about to open a hotel that runs itself. On an artificial island off the coast near Shenzhen, Pudu Robotics is building the world's first fully robot-serviced hotel, opening in 2027, where every job in the building, from check-in to cooking to cleaning your room, will be handled by machines working in concert.

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Wealthy American families are increasingly seeking to book assets outside the United States — a shift so pronounced that one of Citi’s top wealth executives says she’s never seen anything like it in her career.

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SatStats

BlackRock's assets under management crossed a record $15 trillion.

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Spirits companies face challenges as consumers reduce drinking, though ready-to-drink cocktails gain popularity.

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The Trump family earned more than $1.4B from crypto last year and moved most of it into stocks and bonds. Retail investors in Trump-backed tokens have lost $2.3B.

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World Cup 2026 hit a record 43M viewers with Fox and Telemundo viewership up 92-122%.

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On the national “gold standard” NAEP exams, NYC's citywide 4th-grade reading proficiency stands at 28%, math at 33%. But black and Hispanic students have proficiency rates less than a third of those of white and Asian students.

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From July 2024 through June 2025, NYC Housing Authority plumber supervisor Jakub Markowski earned $465,000, including $332,000 for nearly 2,600 hours in overtime — more than the mayor and City Council speaker make combined.

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Masayoshi Son has ridiculed opponents of AI for “spitting upwards” as the SoftBank billionaire predicted the technology would account for 20 per cent of global output by 2040.

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66% of higher- and middle-income countries surveyed by Pew Research now have a more favourable view of China than the US, with respondents across 36 nations variously citing US meddling and backsliding.

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Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year, driven largely by datacentre construction.

In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted 119 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, or about a third of France's total.

The previous year, they emitted roughly 101 metric tons, roughly equivalent to the 2024 emissions of Czechia.

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Canada's per capita charity rate is about one-half that of the U.S.

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India is still the world's fastest-growing major economy at 6.4%

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Today, the annual cost per NYC student has increased to roughly $49,500.