Saluting the Uniform

On this day:

1803
The United States Senate ratifies the Louisiana Purchase.
1910
The hull of the RMS Olympic, sister-ship to the ill-fated RMS Titanic, is launched from the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
1917
The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, in charge of preparation and carrying out the Russian Revolution, holds its first meeting.
1935
The Long March ends.
1941
World War II: Thousands of civilian men and boys in Kragujevac in German-occupied Serbia are killed in the Kragujevac massacre, a reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of ten German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others.
1943
The German cargo vessel Sinfra is attacked by Allied aircraft at Suda Bay, Crete, and sunk. 2,098 Italian prisoners of war died, most by German gunfire.
1944
Liquid natural gas leaks from storage tanks in Cleveland, then explodes; the explosion and resulting fire level 30 blocks and kill 130.
1947
The House Un-American Activities Committee begins its investigation into Communist infiltration of Hollywood, resulting in a blacklist that prevents some from working in the industry for years.
1951
The “Johnny Bright Incident” occurs in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a
violent on-field assault against African-American football player Johnny Bright by white player Wilbanks Smith during a college game 
1968
Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy marries Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
1973
“Saturday Night Massacre”: President Richard Nixon fires U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus after they refuse to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who is finally fired by Robert Bork.
1977
A plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd crashes in Mississippi, killing lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines along with backup singer Cassie Gaines, the road manager, pilot, and co-pilot.
1981
Two police officers and an armored car guard are killed during an armed robbery in Rockland County, NY, carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground.
1982
During the UEFA Cup match between FC Spartak Moscow and HFC Haarlem, 66 people are crushed to death in the Luzhniki disaster.
2011
The former leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, and his son Moatassem Gaddafi are killed shortly after the battle of Sirte (2011) while in the custody of NTC fighters.

***

Where there is no property, there is no justice.”--Locke

***

Jalen Hurts was originally diagnosed with having a superficial blood clot, according to a team statement released on Oct. 15, which was discovered following an ultrasound in London before the Eagles' Week 5 game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. It was deemed that mobility was important and Hurts could safely play in the game, per the statement. A follow-up ultrasound last Wednesday showed the blood clot had moved, the team said. Hurts was subsequently ruled out of Sunday's Week 6 game against the Carolina Panthers and has since been put on injured reserve.

They let him play.

***

Kimberly Guilfoyle pleaded with three influential men to help save her job as U.S. ambassador to Greece. One was Hegseth. Hegseth.

***

A fascinating story from WSJ.
Bill Gross has dedicated his life to democratizing entrepreneurship. A serial entrepreneur himself, he is the founder of Idealab, which spawned nearly 200 startups, including as many as 10 unicorns.
Now he believes AI is about to supercharge his life’s mission. Speaking today at the Cloudflare conference in San Francisco—and tomorrow at the Masters of Scale Summit in the same city—Gross will demonstrate his new platform, Idealab.ai, which provides free access to more than a million new business ideas designed to address the world’s problems.
Gross trained Idealab.ai on a huge database of journalistic and professional articles, with an eye toward finding problem statements and then proposing business ideas to solve them. He also trained it on a massive amount of patent and other data to identify problems that haven’t yet been addressed.

***

Authorities have identified 43-year-old Brendan Nugent, a local activist and family friend, as the suspect in custody following the deliberate ramming of Australian parliamentarian Helen Haines. She remains in critical condition, with no word yet on the suspect’s motive.

***

Saudis secretly executed a Bangladeshi couple on indecency charges. This new playground image might be tough to maintain.

***

A Russian military satellite has maneuvered to within metres of a US-registered radar satellite believed to provide intelligence to Ukraine, according to space-tracking data reported by The War Zone, a US defence news site.

***

The single greatest act for peace might be if the Nobel Committee would just give Trump the Peace Prize so he can re-ally with Ukraine. Then, next year, the Nobel Committee could give the Peace Prize to itself.

***

Saluting the Uniform

Science wears a sort of armour. Like the university chair, it carries gravity; it earns respect simply by arriving. But science also developed lobotomy and eugenics.

In 1960, Science, one of the world’s leading science journals, published an article with an unambiguous title: "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." It predicted that on this future date the human population would approach infinity and effectively annihilate itself.

The outlandish claim drew widespread public attention. More surprisingly — because its underlying research and math seemed sound — it also received careful and sustained scientific attention, like a pronouncement from a prominent family, 

The authors — Heinz von Foerster, an Austrian-American professor and cybernetics expert, and two of his students, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot — argued that human populations are exceptional and might grow beyond an exponential rate, at an ever-increasing one.

Heinz von Foerster was, at one point in his life, a stage magician. Never overlook presentation.--culled from somewhere

Lessons of International Crises

 

On this day:
1469
Ferdinand II of Aragon marries Isabella I of Castile, a marriage that paves the way to the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain.
1512
Martin Luther becomes a doctor of theology (Doctor in Biblia).
1781
At Yorktown, Virginia, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’ sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau.
1789
Chief Justice John Jay is sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the United States.
1805
Napoleonic Wars: Austrian General Mack surrenders his army to the Grand Army of Napoleon at the Battle of Ulm. 30,000 prisoners are captured and 10,000 casualties inflicted on the losers.
1812
Napoleon I of France retreats from Moscow.
1813
The Battle of Leipzig concludes, giving Napoleon Bonaparte one of his worst defeats.
1900
Max Planck, in his house at Grunewald, on the outskirts of Berlin, discovers the law of black body emission (Planck’s law).
1950
The People’s Republic of China joins the Korean War by sending thousands of troops across the Yalu river to fight United Nations forces.
1956
The Soviet Union and Japan sign a Joint Declaration, officially ending the state of war between the two countries that had existed since August 1945.
2005
Saddam Hussein goes on trial in Baghdad for crimes against humanity.

***

“Make no mistake: What we are dealing with is a real mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine. And like all the best fairy tales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.”--Jack Clark, whose official title at Anthropic is head of policy

***

Another political concept often heard in our times is “solution.” Early in these essays, I argue that there are no real solutions in politics – only trade-offs. That theme also recurs in the essays that follow, and extends to foreign policy as well as domestic issues, to economics as well as law, to educational issues no less than to issues of race and sex.--Sowell, in a preface

***

A tablet, known as Plimpton 332, was discovered in the early 1900s in Southern Iraq by the American archaeologist and diplomat Edgar Banks, who was the inspiration for Indiana Jones. The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now, but new research by the University of New South Wales, Australia, has shown it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, which was probably used by ancient architects to construct temples, palaces, and canals. However, unlike today’s trigonometry, Babylonian mathematics used a base 60, or sexagesimal system, rather than the 10 that is used today. Because 60 is far easier to divide by three, experts studying the tablet found that the calculations are far more accurate.
The tablet, which is thought to have come from the ancient Sumerian city of Larsa, has been dated to between 1822 and 1762 BC.

***

This is from a Substack that believes the Pens have made an unspoken decision and that this year is not unplanned: 

"They still need to find their next franchise player, or somehow get into a position for it. Maybe this will be the year it happens.
In the meantime, they are clearing long-term cap space, stockpiling picks, and trying to find some hidden gems.
Do you know what that is? That is rebuilding."

***

In California, one of the richest, tech-savvy populations in the world, only 38.4% of public school students showed math proficiency on tests this spring. Only 49.3% met or exceeded state standards in English.

***

Noah Adams, a writer, broadcaster, and storyteller who hosted All Things Considered for 18 years, has died.

***

Strange episode of a car weaponized in Wichita.

***

Lessons of International Crises

Communication changes have allowed us to see more of the world's processes and decisions. It's not reassuring. The two more obvious and dangerous problems are Israel and AI.

There is violence in the street over more than Israel's policies; there is debate over its very existence. Evidence encompasses UN resolutions, the history of the Holocaust, even Old Testament precedent. But, of course, there is no deed to the Promised Land.

AI has scared everyone witless. AI executives are calmly suggesting that AI might initiate the end of the world. That, of course, is worst case. A happier compromise, best case, would be humanity's enslavement. The problem is, AI is everywhere, even in the hands of people less enlightened than Washington. And, like Israel, everyone is assuming good intentions. Who would be so foolish as to use it for ill?

The debates are very heartfelt, and sometimes the losers in the debates can become quite righteous. But both of these arguments exemplify the essence of modern conflict: these intense problems are never clean problems. Often there are collateral elements, never discussed, that are more important.

Israel debates will never be resolved without this unasked--and probably totally unresolvable--question: After whatever dissolution-destruction-evaporation of the Israel problem, what will be done with Israel's 200 nuclear weapons? Why does this question never come up?

And with AI, what will happen if the Americans develop and control it? Or ban it? Will everybody accept their decisions? Will there be no efforts at rogue use? Is there a good history of agreements among nations that have allowed for the effective control of dangerous technologies?

Or are these just two more wistful, bell-the-cat notions, shallow and self-congratulatory, whose main impact is to call attention to the hand-wringing virtuous and, preemptively, absolve them of responsibility?

Sunday/Caesar

 

On this day:

320
Pappus of Alexandria, a Greek philosopher, observes a solar eclipse and writes a commentary on The Great Astronomer (Almagest).

1356

Basel earthquake, the most significant historic seismological event north of the Alps, destroys the town of Basel, Switzerland.

1851
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London.
1860
The Second Opium War finally ends at the Convention of Peking with the ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin, an unequal treaty.
1867
United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million. Celebrated annually in the state as Alaska Day.
1898
United States takes possession of Puerto Rico.
1945
The USSR’s nuclear program receives plans for the United States plutonium bomb from Klaus Fuchs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1967
The Soviet probe Venera 4 reaches Venus and becomes the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet.

***

“The problem with consensus societies is that sometimes the consensus is wrong, and when it is, there is no corrective mechanism.”-- Wolfgang Münchau, author of “Kaput—The End of the German Miracle.”

***

China’s total R&D expenditure exceeded $583 billion in 2025, and according to state news agency Xinhua, spending grew at an average annual rate of 10% over the five years through 2025, making China one of the fastest-growing major research investors

***

In "the greatest good for the greatest number," is there a definition of "good," and does it have any limits?

***

Reports indicate Trump has expanded his personal net worth by $2.2 billion during his second term. His elder sons, Eric and Donald Jr., have joined investment firms, while twenty-year-old Barron Trump reportedly accumulated a $150 million cryptocurrency fortune.

***

Every dollar added to the debt shifts resources from productive enterprise to debt maintenance.

***

An “extremely reliable” informant told authorities about the missing murder weapon, according to newly unsealed records. The informant’s brother told The Times his sibling was at the crime scene.--NY Times

***

A former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist won a legal victory this week after losing his position following sexual misconduct allegations made by a female colleague.
Dr. David Sabatini, a former MIT biology professor and prominent biomedical researcher, was awarded $6 million in damages Friday after a jury found that his former colleague, Dr. Kristin Knouse, had defamed him.
Quite a story.

***

Sunday/Caesar

 “[O]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”--John Adams

The Gospel today is the "Give unto Caesar..." gospel. The wolves are circling. Christ has delivered three parables since his return to Jerusalem, and all are grim assessments of the organized Jewish religion; in the middle one about the tenants and the vineyard, he identifies himself as the Son of God. The Caesar question is asked to isolate him from either Rome or his religious followers. When asked a difficult "either-or" question, Christ answers "Yes." Almost vaudevillian.

If everything were not so serious, it would be funny. But this implies the government has certain responsibilities, certain authority that might be seen as "divine right." It certainly is not an anarchistic view.

Christ shows himself to be very understanding of our lives. He is willing to give the material world--the bustling business and marching political world--its place. But it is a limited place. The world has its demands, practical and real--working on the sabbath to rescue the family cow from a ditch. Christ does not begrudge us our practical anxieties. But he follows with the hugely diminishing clincher: While you understandably must render to Caesar what is his, so must you render what is God's to God. God and Caesar are not competitors because Caesar is part of the whole.

And so the great Caesar and giant Rome are allowed a large shadow, but in their very small world.

SatStats

On this day:
539 BC
Cyrus the Great marches into the city of Babylon, releasing the Jews from almost 70 years of exile. Cyrus allows the Jews to return to Yehud Medinata and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
1346
Battle of Neville’s Cross: King David II of Scotland is captured by Edward III of England near Durham, and imprisoned in the Tower of London for eleven years.
1448
Second Battle of Kosovo, where the mainly Hungarian army led by John Hunyadi is defeated by an Ottoman army led by Sultan Murad II.
1604
Kepler’s Star: German astronomer Johannes Kepler observes a supernova in the constellation Ophiuchus.
1660
Nine Regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of Charles I, are hanged, drawn, and quartered.
1777
American Revolutionary War: British General John Burgoyne surrenders his army at Saratoga, New York.
1781
American Revolutionary War: British General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrenders at the Siege of Yorktown.
1907
Guglielmo Marconi’s company begins the first commercial transatlantic wireless service between Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada and Clifden, Ireland.
1961
Scores of Algerian protesters (some claim up to 400) are massacred by the Paris police at the instigation of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, then chief of the Prefecture of Police.

***

If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. -Samuel Adams, revolutionary

***

Re Zacharia: When was it decided that not becoming a lawyer was a bad thing?

***

Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, now thinks AI that can build its own successor is more likely to arrive in 2027 than 2028. I’ve followed Jack for years, and I think he’s right. If anything, he might be understating it. You think AI is improving quickly now? Just wait… this is going to accelerate things even further.

***

Lewis's Moneyball was about baseball talent evaluation. There was a history of subtle subjectivity, the belief in a baseball physiognomy, an American 'baseball face.' The jury's out, but talent from DR and Venezuela may require a little fine-tuning.

That said, what do you think were the factors in Katie Zacharia's appointment?

***

Dyson, on the prehistoric brain: "It was not helpful to have brains questioning whether the stories were true." That is an extremely provocative idea and directly opposes the aims of the Enlightenment.

***


SatStats

Sudan’s artisanal gold mining sector employs about two million people.

*

Analysis of 857 Chinese open model releases between September 2021 and September 2026, including 741 product models and 116 research models. Of that pool, only 31 models, or about 3.6%, had safety reports attached, and only 9 of them were available at or before release.

*

The U.S. arrested two Americans accused of helping North Korea run a tech worker impostor scheme.
The scheme touched more than 70 U.S. employers and made about $3 million for the fake workers. 

Fake workers?

*

The proportion of people unable to "use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements" (which includes logic skills, not just arithmetic) has risen by 25% worldwide. But it's up by 35% in the U.S.

*

Space:

For the Earth to become a black hole, it would have to be condensed down to about the radius of an olive.

*

For every one of the roughly 436 quadrillion seconds since the Big Bang, there are roughly 160,000 stars. There are roughly 1.6X as many planets as stars. For that reason alone, it’s highly improbable that we are alone in the universe.

*

Normal matter only accounts for around 5% of the contents of the Universe. Around 25% is Dark Matter — we can’t see it (ie it has no interaction with light), but we can see its indirect gravitational effects. And the rest is Dark Energy, completely unrelated to Dark Matter; that is the term we use for what is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate.

*

At the speed of light to Proxima Centauri it would take 4.24 years for someone watching from Earth. For you, it would be instant. Time stops at the speed of light

*

There are more stars in the observable universe than there have been seconds since the Big Bang.

*

A 'magnetar' is a highly magnetized neutron star. It is the ultra-dense core left behind when a massive star collapses whose magnetic field decays by emitting high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.

*

95% of stars that have, or ever will be born, have already been born. We are at the end of the age of star formation.
*

95% of all the stars/galaxies we can see are forever unreachable, even if we could travel at the speed of light, due to the expansion of space.

*

95% of all the mass-energy in the universe is dark. All the light from all the stars and galaxies we see only makes up 5 percent of the universe.

*

The nearest star is so far away that if the Voyager II (the fastest and farthest ship we have) were headed to it, it would take 82 THOUSAND years to get there.

Representative from Bristol

On this day:

1529
The Siege of Vienna ends as the Austrians rout the invading Turks, turning the tide against almost a century of unchecked conquest throughout eastern and central Europe by the Ottoman Empire.
1582
Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year is followed directly by October 15.
1764
Edward Gibbon observes a group of friars singing in the ruined Temple of Jupiter in Rome, which inspires him to begin work on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
1783
The Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon marks the first human ascent, by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, (tethered balloon).
1793

Queen Marie-Antoinette of France is tried and convicted in a swift, pre-determined trial in the Palais de Justice, Paris, and condemned to death the following day.
1815

Napoleon I of France begins his exile on Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean.
1863
American Civil War: The H. L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink a ship, sinks during a test, killing its inventor, Horace L. Hunley.
1880
Mexican soldiers kill Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists.
1888
The “From Hell” letter sent by Jack the Ripper is received by investigators.
1894
The Dreyfus affair: Alfred Dreyfus is arrested for spying.
1917
World War I: At Vincennes outside of Paris, Dutch dancer Mata Hari is executed by firing squad for spying for the German Empire.
1934
The Soviet Republic of China collapses when Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army successfully encircles Ruijin, forcing the fleeing Communists to begin the Long March.
1945
World War II: The former premier of Vichy France Pierre Laval is shot by a firing squad for treason.
1951
Mexican chemist Luis E. Miramontes conducts the very last step of the first synthesis of norethisterone, the progestin that would later be used in one of the first two oral contraceptives.
1956
Fortran, the first modern computer language, is shared with the coding community for the first time.
1997
The Cassini probe launches from Cape Canaveral on its way to Saturn.
2001
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter’s moon Io.
2003
China launches Shenzhou 5, its first manned space mission.
2008
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 733.08 points, or 7.87%, the second worst day in the Dow’s history based on a percentage drop.

***

From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living, nothing in my eyes is better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad. -Ivo Andric, novelist, Nobel laureate (9 Oct 1892-1975)

***

There's a movement growing aimed at Peter Theil's legal use of a legal government tax program devised to help people avoid impoverishment in their old age by the tax and spend governmental system and the failing government social security plan.

***

Sally Rooney, the very successful Irish novelist has had her book royalties impounded by the British government because of her support of an organization they have declared 'terrorist.'

***

Beyond Understanding Department:

Moscow accused Ukraine of launching its first strike against a Russian oil refinery in the Ryazan region since Trump abruptly declared an “energy ceasefire” that neither Russia nor Ukraine said they had agreed to. Sort of an incomplete Memorandum of Understanding.
Zelenskyy said Russia had attacked Ukraine with more than 850 Shahed drones at a time when the speed of Ukraine’s defensive capabilities was being “artificially restricted”, a reference to the sudden limitations on Ukraine’s use of the Starlink and Starshield mobile internet terminals.
Tech mogul Elon Musk has suggested that the US government could be behind the decision to restrict the speed of SpaceX’s satellite-technology used by Ukraine’s military.

***

Vast numbers of nonwhites are being raised to believe that America hates them. This, itself, should be a hate crime.

***

Representative from Bristol

On November 3, 1774, the great quasi-liberal conservative member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, delivered his immortal “Speech to the Electors of Bristol.” He was responding to a claim by his opponent in an election that a representative ought to be a mere servant of the self-interested opinions of their voters. Burke declared, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. . . . Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”

That is to say, the representative from Bristol gives Bristol's voice to the national debate.

The Gospel According to Munger

 On this day:

1066
Norman Conquest: Battle of Hastings – In England on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, the Norman forces of William the Conqueror defeat the English army and kill King Harold II of England.
1322
Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King Edward II of England at Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland’s independence.
1586
Mary, Queen of Scots, goes on trial for conspiracy against Elizabeth I of England.
1656
Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The marriage of church-and-state in Puritanism makes them regard the Quakers as spiritually apostate and politically subversive.
1867
The 15th and the last military Shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate resigns in Japan, returning his power to the Emperor of Japan and thence to the re-established civil government of Japan
1912
While campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the former President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, is shot and mildly wounded by John Schrank, a mentally-disturbed saloon keeper. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Mr. Roosevelt still carries out his scheduled public speech.
1913
Senghenydd Colliery Disaster, the United Kingdom’s worst coal mining accident, occurs, and it claims the lives of 439 miners.
1943
The American Eighth Air Force loses 60 B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers in aerial combat during the second mass-daylight air raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories in western Nazi Germany.
1947
Captain Chuck Yeager of the U.S. Air Force flies a Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the Glamorous Glennis, faster than the speed of sound - over the high desert of Southern California - and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.
1962
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins: A U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane and its pilot fly over the island of Cuba and take photographs of Soviet missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads being installed and erected in Cuba.
1968
Jim Hines of the United States of America becomes the first man ever to break the so-called “ten-second barrier” in the 100-meter sprint in the Summer Olympic Games held in Mexico City with a time of 9.95 seconds. He generally did not run out of blocks.
1994
The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, The Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Foreign Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the establishment of the Oslo Accords and the framing of the future Palestinian Self Government. And some wonder why Peace Prizes are not taken seriously.
2003
Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman becomes infamously known as the scapegoat for the Cubs losing game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins. This has become known as the Steve Bartman incident.

***

Eric Trump's book documents that he and his family received 112 subpoenas and spent 400 million dollars in their defense during the Biden Regency's legal attack on Trump and his family. The shocking intensity and the volume of these attacks in a free nation make Trump's response look less churlish.


***

As of August 28th, 170 billionaire families have spent over $1.7 billion to influence the outcome of the 2026 federal midterm elections.

***

An error by Guardians All-Star José Ramírez, who is their reliable and constant hero, and Peralta's six scoreless innings, allowed the Rays to even the playoffs with Cleveland, 1-1.

***

The Pope's cancer is adenocarcinoma, a more random, and generally more aggressive, lung primary. It sounds early.

***

Well, Guilfoyle is gone, as if it would make a difference. The Greeks called her removal "an issue of national dignity." 

The ethics of the political charade are simple: do not let them see behind the disguise. But Trump seems to relish it. No wonder his representatives can get confused.
"National dignity."

***

Across the board, affecting everything from attention spans to problem-solving skills and numeracy, or the ability to work with and understand numbers and mathematical concepts, the OECD's Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies shows declines among all age groups.

It is, however, worse here in the U.S. in some cases than in the rest of the world.

***

The Gospel According to Munger

Munger was a great success and thought about it a lot. Here are some of his suggestions from several sources, organized by Burns.

 

1. Let Go of High Expectations

“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. That’s one you can easily arrange. And if you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable all your life.” –- Charlie Munger

This does not suggest low effort. People hear “low expectations” and picture someone who has quit trying. Munger meant something closer to realism. You can work as hard as you want on a goal but accept that the world owes you nothing for the effort.

2. Let Go of Envy and Social Comparison

“Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is no great tragedy.”--Charlie Munger

Aquinas defined envy as sadness at the success of others. Sadness.

Munger had a low opinion of envy. In his words, “Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at.”

Yet it can be relished and sometimes turned into a lifestyle or a job in politics.

3. Let Go of Resentment and Self-Pity

“Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought.” --Charlie Munger

Self-pity feels comforting for about a day. After that, it keeps you parked in the same mental spot, replaying how unfair things were while the problem sits there untouched.

Resentment is worse because it hands your mood to someone else. The coworker who took credit for your project probably isn’t thinking about you at all, and neither is the relative who said something cruel at Thanksgiving. Munger’s fix was practical. Take whatever lesson the hit offers and focus on what you can still change.

4. Let Go of Bad Habits Through Inversion

“Invert, always invert.” – Charlie Munger

Munger picked up this habit from the German mathematician Carl Jacobi and applied it to stock picks and to his own life. Instead of asking how to be happy, you ask what reliably makes people miserable. Then you stop doing those things.

He liked to put it in a joke: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

Make a short list of what reliably leaves you worse off. For a lot of people, that list includes spending money they don’t have, saying yes to plans they’ll bail on, scrolling at 1 a.m., and one friend who always leaves them drained. Pick the worst item and quit it first.

Munger thought avoiding dumb mistakes beat chasing brilliance. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

5. Let Go of Stagnation and Become a Learning Machine

“They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.” – Charlie Munger

Learning, you can see yourself getting better at something even when the rest of life is flat.

The Melting Pot

On this day:

54
Roman Emperor Claudius is poisoned to death under mysterious circumstances. His 17-year-old stepson Nero succeeds him to the Roman throne
409
Vandals and Alans cross the Pyrenees and appear in Hispania.
1307
Hundreds of Knights Templar in France are simultaneously arrested by agents of Phillip the Fair, to be later tortured into a “confession” of heresy.
1773
The Whirlpool Galaxy is discovered by Charles Messier.
1884
Greenwich, in London, England, is established as Universal Time meridian of longitude.
1917
The “Miracle of the Sun” is witnessed by an estimated 70,000 people in the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal.
1972
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashes in the Andes mountains, near the border between Argentina and Chile. By December 23, 1972, only 16 out of 45 people lived long enough to be rescued. Survival can be a mixed blessing.
2010
The 2010 Copiapó mining accident in Copiapó, Chile comes to an end as all 33 miners arrive at the surface after surviving a record 69 days underground awaiting rescue.

***

“There’s nothing Christian about Christian nationalism.” -- James Talarico. Strong answers to unasked questions are always political fun.

***

Unknown hackers have remotely compromised industrial refrigeration systems across hundreds of French supermarkets, forcing cooling units into continuous defrost cycles and spiking temps up to 50°C (122°F). (Le Monde) Imagine waking up in the morning with the sole goal of gratuitously harming strangers.

***

The U.S. is a net diesel exporter.

"...if Trump were really concerned about the price burden on Americans (and the midterm prospects of Republicans), he could simply end his imbecilic trade war with Canada, our ally and neighbor. Because of the complexities of the global diesel market, as well as such inane American policies as the Jones Act and the discouragement of new refining capacity, we do import some diesel despite being a net exporter. The vast majority of those imports come from Canada — from which we could easily import more if necessary without violating sanctions laws and lending comfort to our Russian enemy. But Trump being Trump, he’d rather appease Putin than admit that his trade policies antagonize our allies while crushing Americans."--from a NR article on Trump's strange decisions on diesel, which includes this: 

"The second reason for doing the diesel deal with Putin is, as ever, corruption. In early October, the New York Times reported that Trump is working on an even more execrable multibillion-dollar oil deal with Putin: The U.S. would waive sanctions so that an investor group could buy up oil fields, refineries, and gas stations around the world that are owned by Lukoil, the Russian energy giant. The deal has been negotiated by Trump’s aforementioned emissaries, Kushner and Witkoff. Among the major beneficiaries are said to be one of Trump’s major donors (Todd Boehly, who has donated $2 million to Trump political causes) and Middle Eastern executives who have business ties to Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff. These include Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the top security official of the United Arab Emirates — who, as I detailed in a series earlier this year, is a part owner of the Trump and Witkoff families’ crypto enterprise, into which Tahnoon has poured $2.5 billion. (That enterprise is the main explanation for the jaw-dropping increase in Trump’s net worth during his second term in “public service” — well over $2 billion in just 20 months.)

***

There's a movement growing aimed at Peter Thiel's legal use of a legal government tax program devised to help people avoid impoverishment in their old age by the tax and spend governmental system and the failing government social security plan. 

Seemingly the demand for equality does not cut both ways.

***

A Six Flags Over Georgia park visitor died after an incident on the Goliath roller coaster on Monday. Four others were injured in the incident.

*

Bednar is a free agent.

*

The Melting Pot
 
My seventh grade teacher would repeat her mantra daily as she wagged a bony finger at us: "Remember, children, America is not a melting pot of culture." 

I puzzled over this at the time, and it was years before I understood what she meant. Her point is, years later, a basic question in this country: what binds the people of this country together? How does a free people not spin off in all directions? Do the individual cultures transplanted here have to be managed and constrained? Where does the nation-state start to conform to unify? What must be lost?

Wasn't America the great melting pot?

No, not of culture, but there has been a melding. The essence is that the men and women of America have come together and agreed that all men are created equal, that all men have an inherent value that makes them equal among each other and before the law. And, as a result, every man can pursue his life freely as long as he adheres to this essential principle. That is the country's foundation and it allows the separate cultures to develop as they will. It permits the diverse peoples in the country to pursue their different lives and beliefs, to pursue their separate cultures, and not surrender their many cultures into a common alloy. The Americans are joined in the mind, not at the hip.

Other cultures are joined by a common history. Or ethnicity. Or religion. It will be difficult for an Algerian to be French. Sadaharu Oh was never truly Japanese. A Mormon will not find peace in Saudi Arabia.

America's unity is not in a melting pot of culture. It is a philosophy, an a priori agreement of its citizens of the rights and responsibilities of man.

“What do We mean by the Revolution? The War?” Adams wrote to Jefferson in his old age. “That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.”