New American Science

 On this day:

55
Roman forces under Julius Caesar invade Great Britain.
1346
Hundred Years’ War: the military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armoured knights is established at the Battle of Crécy.
1429
Joan of Arc makes a triumphant entry into Paris.
1768
Captain James Cook sets sail from England on board HMS Endeavour.
1789
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is approved by the National Constituent Assembly of France.
1883
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa begins its final, paroxysmal stage.
1920
The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote.
1942
Holocaust in Chortkiav, western Ukraine: At 2.30 am the German Schutzpolizei starts driving Jews out of their houses, divides them into groups of 120, packs them in freight cars and deports 2000 to Belzec death camp. 500 of the sick and children are murdered on the spot.
1999
Russia begins the Second Chechen War in response to the Invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.

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It is liberty which is ancient, and despotism which is modern.--Germaine de Staël


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A source familiar with the matter alleged to Reuters that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House because of her ongoing opposition to the Iran war.

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In a recent Science study, a hibernation-like state in mice erased the state of more than half of their synapses, and yet the mice apparently kept their memories. Think anesthesia.

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a 2028 presidential hopeful, had welcomed data centers as an economic-development boon, boasting last year that an Amazon plan to build $20 billion in AI infrastructure was the "largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania."
On Tuesday, Shapiro, whose Republican opponent in November is campaigning on halting data-center development, went from AI cheerleader to critic and signed an executive order imposing stringent new requirements for data-center developers.
He did the same thing with school vouchers, in favor while campaigning, opposed while governing.

 Calculatingly cynical.

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Musk recently said Anthropic was leading the AI race, his company, Grok, was behind, and that soon AI would become too advanced for humans to control.

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Paul Skenes pitched six innings of three-hit ball, and Oneil Cruz hit the first homer allowed by Mason Miller in over a year with two outs in the ninth Tuesday night, giving the Pittsburgh Pirates a 1-0 victory over the San Diego Padres.


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New American Science

There is a plan to reorganize the country's science funding.

'American science has long been state-funded but not state-directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue: the system was decentralized and not under state control. This ..{new} ..rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science.'--Taborrok

The bureaucrat is, by his own assessment, confident, insightful, and high-minded. He is deaf to what history has stammered over and over: short-term control does not lead to long-term direction.

Arday in the Mist

On this day:

1609
Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
1835
The New York Sun perpetrates the Great Moon Hoax.
1894
Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.
1898
700 Greek civilians, 17 British guards and the British Consul of Crete are killed by a Turkish mob in Heraklion, Greece.
1914
World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.
1944
World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies.
1945
Ten days after World War II ends with Japan announcing its surrender, armed supporters of the Communist Party of China kill Baptist missionary John Birch, regarded by some of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.
1948
The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: “Confrontation Day” between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

***

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.
Nothing earlier came remotely close.
It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.--mccloskey

***

On August 25, 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.
Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day. Herschel had in fact traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. It was purported to be a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University. Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.
Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. Edger Allen Poe was deeply involved.

*** 

A surprising graph, ineptly reproduced:

American wages have fallen to roughly 43% of national income, the lowest share since 1970. For every dollar the U.S. economy produces, workers are receiving less of it than at any point in more than five decades.

The remainder has flowed increasingly toward corporate profits.

Interesting, especially when compared to McCloskey's quote.

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South Carolina Republicans will decide Tuesday who will replace Sen. Lindsey Graham on the ballot in November's midterm election, after a rushed campaign in the wake of his sudden death in July. Graham's sister, Sen. Darline Graham, faces Rep. Ralph Norman in Tuesday's runoff vote.

The position is hereditary, right?

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Combined spending related to old age and illness accounted for around 70% of total social spending in Germany last year, pushing the social budget to a new record high, according to an analysis by the Ifo Institute published on Monday.

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2026 appears to be the first year in human history where the global population falls below replacement fertility. This includes times of war and epidemics. While many worry about climate change, Musk repeatedly argues that a collapsing birth rate is actually the biggest danger human civilization faces today.

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Quebec's desire to preserve the declining French language has been a big factor in the trade dispute with Canada. For example, Bill 96 requires products sold in Quebec to have a French description and for trademarks using generic terms to be translated into French, while Bill 109 compels media services such as Netflix, Spotify and Apple to promote and prioritize French content for Quebec users.

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Arday in the Mist

A note on Arday, abused and abuser:

Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.-- John McWhorter

"Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry..."

Now the academic who exposed all the fraud has been suspended, and crowds of Arday sympathizers have gathered to mourn him. This is sadder than the twisted Mangioni support. This is empathy in defiance of effort and quality, the same open-mindedness that tolerates goofy but harmless positions like Flat Earth groups and abolish-the-Constitution politics.

But a lack of intellectual and moral standards has erosive consequences at the bottom of the slippery slope.

Afghanistan and Vietnam as Long-Term Investments

On this day:

79
Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash (note: this traditional date has been challenged, and many scholars believe that the event occurred on October 24).
410
The Visigoths under King Alaric I begin to pillage Rome.
1349
Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz after being blamed for the bubonic plague.
1391
Jews are massacred in Palma de Mallorca.
1456
The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
1662
The Act of Uniformity requires England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.
1682
William Penn receives the area that is now the state of Delaware, and adds it to his colony of Pennsylvania
1814
British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings.
1857
The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in United States history.
1929
Second day of the two-day Hebron massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attacks on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, result in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city.
1949
The treaty creating NATO goes into effect.
1991
Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1991
Ukraine declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.

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“Every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.”--Latin American author Eduardo Galeano

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When Vesuvius erupted, 20,000 people lived in Pompeii, including merchants, manufacturers, and farmers who exploited the rich soil of the region with numerous vineyards and orchards. None suspected that the black fertile earth was the legacy of earlier eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Herculaneum was a city of 5,000 and a favorite summer destination for rich Romans. According to Pliny the Younger’s account, the eruption lasted 18 hours. Pompeii was buried under 14 to 17 feet of ash and pumice, and the nearby seacoast was drastically changed. Herculaneum was buried under more than 60 feet of mud and volcanic material. Today, Mount Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Its last eruption was in 1944, and its last major eruption was in 1631.

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The trial of the woman who killed her children includes testimony from medical professionals who saw her the day before the murders, and they said she was perfectly sane. Assuming they are competent, these murders imply that a lot of threatening and violent behavior is performed by people who are very different from their fellows but not clinically insane. That should worry everybody.

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Full decompression kills an astronaut primarily through oxygen reversing direction, leaving the blood and diffusing backward into collapsed, unpressurized lungs, a process that can cause unconsciousness in as little as ten seconds. And his saliva boils.

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You have to show your identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor, or check out a library book and rent a video, but not to vote for who runs the government. But you are assuming that your vote helps run the government and is not a placebo.

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Afghanistan and Vietnam as Long-Term Investments

Trump has invested federal dollars in private companies, thirty so far. This is not new, clever, or innovative. This is contrary to every idea in a free society, and the Americans have fought an endless rearguard action against it. Not only does interference in the economy violate basic American principles, it also doesn't work. It's bad enough when the government is just predatory; it is a disaster when it gets entrepreneurial.
Two observations on recent events.

--Shapiro has done a U-Turn. He now opposes data centers. He did this with school vouchers, as well. He looked like a promising guy, so this is extremely disappointing. Is he just part of the current rage of politicians unrestrained by any real philosophy, like Trump? Does comfort with contradiction just make you agile in politics? Or do multiple U-Turns mean you're just a guy running in circles?

This looks like a significant political opportunity for someone. Data centers are coming, either fast or slow. And this astonishing and dangerous technology is going to be something the world will have to learn to live with. Why not develop a policy that accepts that reality, design and build a template to manage the new technology, and allow it to develop efficiently and safely? You might even create a template that presents risk management ideas for future technologies that are beyond the average politician's myopic ken.

Accept the challenge, create a management plan, then beat those politicians--whose idea of management is suppression--to a pulp with it.


--There is a weird dichotomy with successful people. Everyone is mad at them. The rich and successful are somehow on the outs. We vilify them; we suspect them of harboring aristocratic philosophies and cabalistic plans; we farm them for taxes.


But when they have an idea or want to start a business or a laboratory program, we suddenly think they are needy and desperate for our help. The country will lose its international edge without our tax support of these selfsame successful, rich, and creative people.

Why should the most capable, productive people in the land get money from taxes? Why should their efforts be underwritten by the average guy, struggling along? If a business idea or research is insightful and promising, the free market will be standing in line to support it and benefit. Yet these politicians think these people need their help. Somehow politicians and their bureaucratic assistants think all the smart, successful, hard-working highest quintile guys in society who have already proven their value just can't get along and achieve anything without the approval and help of the lower quintile of the high school class.

Sometimes the fussy State intrudes just because it can. There is a big difference between "I need..." and "I could use..." And sometimes the government just thinks it's crucial to everything

But the day is coming when financial restraint will not be voluntary.

Sunday/A Question

 On this day:

79
Mount Vesuvius begins stirring, on the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
1305
Sir William Wallace is executed for High Treason at Smithfield in London.
1572
Mob violence against Huguenots in Paris – St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
1775
King George III declares that the American colonies exist in a state of open and avowed rebellion.
1839
The United Kingdom captures Hong Kong as a base as it prepares for war with Qing China. The ensuing 3-year conflict will later be known as the First Opium War.
1914
World War I: Japan declares war on Germany and bombs Qingdao, China.
1927
Sacco and Vanzetti are executed.
1929
Hebron Massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attack on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, continuing until the next day, resulted in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city.
1939
World War II: Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret addition to the pact, the Baltic states, Finland, Romania, and Poland are divided between the two nations.
1942
World War II: Beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad.

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"The caroms of trade aggressions and retaliations call to mind an experience Gulliver had when his travels took him to the grand academy of Lagado. There he met a man who had worked "eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers." To those who say this is as plausible as trying to produce prosperity with protectionism — correctly likened to pursuing wealth by blockading one's own ports — today's trade warriors respond: Have patience. Given sufficient time, protectionism will pay.

But as the comedian Steven Wright says, " Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." (will)

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a 2028 presidential hopeful, had welcomed data centers as an economic-development boon, boasting last year that an Amazon plan to build $20 billion in AI infrastructure was the "largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania."
On Tuesday, Shapiro, whose Republican opponent in November is campaigning on halting data-center development, went from AI cheerleader to critic and signed an executive order imposing stringent new requirements for data-center developers.

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A 15th-Century epic poem by Blind Harry (Harry the Minstrel) was responsible for much of the legend of William Wallace. It was nine books long and was said to be second only to the bible in Scottish homes.

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Sunday/A Question

Today's gospel is the declaration of Peter. It contains a rare use of the word "church," in the Greek meaning a religious assembly. It also contains a startling question by Christ, for what does Christ not know?


“But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter said in reply,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.


This is, again, another example of Christ's demanding a determination from what has been seen, a collection of observations leading to a result. It is an edgy problem, creating local conclusions from small events when a gigantic, far-reaching event could have convinced the world. And it allows for a profound uncertainty, "Who do you say that I am?" as if part of the story is the quest.



The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


Gerard Manley Hopkins

SatStats

On this day:

565
St. Columba reports seeing a monster in Loch Ness, Scotland, in first recorded alien sighting.
1485
The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet.
1642
Charles I calls the English Parliament traitors. The English Civil War begins.
1780
James Cook’s ship HMS Resolution returns to England (Cook having been killed on Hawaii during the voyage).
1831
Nat Turner’s slave rebellion commences just after midnight in Southampton, Virginia, leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who are killed in retaliation for the uprising.
1910
Korea is annexed by Japan with the signing of the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, beginning a period of Japanese rule of Korea that lasted until the end of World War II.
1922
Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army is shot dead during an Anti-Treaty ambush at Béal na mBláth, County Cork, during the Irish Civil War.
1963
American Joe Walker in an X-15 test plane reaches an altitude of 106 km.
1992
FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

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The hard work of reading, writing, and thinking is not a problem to be solved.”--Rosenweig

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Communism has never been popular in the United States, and the only politician calling for state takeover of private industries is Trump, under whom the government has taken stakes in at least nine companies involved in steel, minerals, nuclear energy, and semiconductors, costing at least $10 billion in taxpayer money.--Cox

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Reynolds, a City University of New York historian, uses his subtitle — “Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America” — to assert this: The White Lion, the ship that first brought slaves to Virginia, and the Mayflower, which brought to New England Puritans in flight from monarchical absolutism and Anglican bossiness, incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures.

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The dismantling of Harvard University’s writing center, and the laying off of Rosenzweig, its director—both announced last month—has been seen as a human surrender in the ongoing wrestling match between human and AI creative content and expression.

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If Democrats are victorious in the fall, expect a whole-of-Congress approach to driving President Donald Trump from office next year.--WSJ

***

SatStats

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022.

*

The day after the news, the Daily Mail had nine separate stories on the Sussexes' return leading its homepage; coverage in the Sun took up the first seven pages of its print edition.

*

In July, US spending on its e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop, was greater than online spending at major retailers like Target, Costco, and The Home Depot, according to US credit and debit card transaction data compiled by the customer-intelligence firm Consumer Edge.

TikTok Shop accounted for about 2% of online US retail spending last month, up from around 1.2% a year ago, per Consumer Edge's analysis.

*

Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centres powering artificial intelligence.

Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top US export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades.

Mexico is the second-largest provider of enterprise servers to the US so far this year, with sales reaching $46.9bn, behind Taiwan, which sold $53.5bn, though Mexico became the largest on a monthly basis in May.

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Spain and Germany between them account for close to 40% of the EU's pigs, and Denmark is the only member state where pigs outnumber people, at 215 pigs for every 100 inhabitants.

*

Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

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The Balkans may be the only region other than central Asia where fertility has increased from 2015 to 2026.
All of the highest fertility rates in Europe are in the Balkans. As of 2024: Montenegro (1.8), Bulgaria (1.73) Moldova (1.73), and Serbia (1.64) are top four. France was next at 1.61.

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By some estimates, more than 50,000 pieces of artwork are stolen each year, amounting to annual losses of around $6 to $8 billion globally. This makes art theft one of the most valuable criminal enterprises around, exceeded only by drug trafficking and arms dealing.

*

In the journal Venture Capital, an all-male team is about four times more likely to get funding than teams with any women on them.

*

In 2024, Washington Metro said about 70 percent of bus riders didn’t pay.

*

At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.

Enemies of Success

 On this day:

1689
The Battle of Dunkeld in Scotland.
1770
James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales
1808
Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeat French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot near the village of Vimeiro, Portugal, the first Anglo-Portuguese victory of the Peninsular War.
1831
Nat Turner leads black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion.
1863
Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre.
1879
The Virgin Mary, along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, reportedly appears at Knock Shrine in Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.
1918
World War I: The Second Battle of the Somme begins.
1942
World War II: a Nazi flag is installed atop Mount Elbrus.
1942
World War II: the Guadalcanal campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru
1945
Physicist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. is fatally irradiated in a criticality incident during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1961
Motown releases what would be its first #1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes.
1963
Xa Loi Pagoda raids: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces loyal to Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem, vandalises Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands and leaving an estimated hundreds dead.
1968
Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring; on the same day, Nicolae Ceauşescu, leader of Communist Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet maneuver, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.
1991
Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses.

***

Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera

***

When President Biden's mental faculties declined, his responsibilities were subsumed by those around him. Taken over. By the same people proclaiming threats to voting honesty and to democracy itself.
Biden's implosion, a threat to the integrity of the government, the very foundation of the government, was not seen as a crisis; it was seen as an opportunity, a breach in the constitutional dam restraining man's tyrannical tendencies to exploit.
That is a coup. Treason.

And yet, no response.

Why has there been no reaction? No leap to the barricades? Where are the wild-eyed street radicals? The cold, intense legal guardians of the republic?

Was that less important than whatever is in the Epstein Files? Than who Natalie Harp is?

***

During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago.
Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033.

***

Alice's report from Wonderland: NYC has suggested using tax dollars to prop up private grocers hurt by competition from Mamdani’s city-owned supermarkets — a program anticipated to cost $70 million for five stores across the boroughs. Ah, redistribution.

***

U.S. Treasury buybacks are like paying your mortgage with your credit card.--Morgan's Sullivan

***

Enemies of Success

California has become the fourth-largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan's.

Think about that. A state with Karen Bass running one of its largest cities, that actually encourages the immigration of homeless, unemployed foreigners, whose infrastructure encourages the native homeless and insane, a state that is subject to terrible natural risks, continues to be one of the most productive economies in the world.

Or consider this: The poorest American state, Mississippi, has a higher per capita GDP than Britain, France, or Japan. Mississippi.

Any serious student of government would want to explain this economic success. As would any serious politician. One would expect flag-waving and chest-thumping.

So why would anyone consider the policies of America's declared economic and military enemies, policies that historically have led to death, destruction, and ruin? How could anyone even consider its vacuous standard-bearers like Hong or Mamdani as serious political leaders? 

With all the threats to democracy that are identified every minute in this country, is this not the obvious, dangerous one?

Great Britain and Mississippi

On this day:

20
Agrippa Postumus, adoptive son of the late Roman Emperor Augustus, is executed by his guards while in exile under mysterious circumstances
636
Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid seize Syria and Palestine from the Byzantine Empire, marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests and the rapid advance of Islam outside Arabia.
1308
Pope Clement V pardons Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, absolving him of charges of heresy.
1672
Former Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis are brutally murdered by an angry mob in The Hague.
1858
Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory.
1998
U.S. embassy bombings: the United States launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

***

Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to.

***

Louisiana requires florists to be licensed. Are their arrangements better? More pleasing to the eye? Better for the environment? Safer? Is there a national security reason?

***

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows, and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat.

***

Pittsburgh in Esquire:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a73444112/insiders-guide-pittsburgh/

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Great Britain and Mississippi

"How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi" is a good piece in the Atlantic by Idrees Kahloon:

Some colorful anecdotes of a nation in decline:

The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care.

Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Does this sound familiar?

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.

…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.

Upon closer inspection, the United States looks a lot less like a shining city on a hill and a lot more like a declining Great Britain, appendaged with one or two dynamic sectors, most notably AI. The similarities are especially obvious in the retrograde solutions Britain has lumbered into, namely attacking immigrants and trade—Brexit being the equivalent of a high tariff regime. Nations in decline, like people, tend to lash out at others rather than deal with their real problems. Needless to say, neither immigrants nor trade explain Britain’s—or California’s—inability to build high-speed rail or other infrastructure.

It is discomforting to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and free speech—the nation that once built the railways, the steam engines, the factories that remade the world—lose the capacity to build much of anything, or even to tolerate people speaking their minds. In parallel, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right gets literally hysterical over symbolic culture-war questions like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and progress movements are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.