Spiting Your Face in New York

 On this day:

1190
Third Crusade: Frederick I Barbarossa drowns in the river Saleph while leading an army to Jerusalem.
1793
French Revolution: Following the arrests of Girondin leaders, the Jacobins gain control of the Committee of Public Safety, installing the revolutionary dictatorship.
2003
The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

***

Is charity with borrowed money morally superior to self-indulgence with borrowed money?

***

Is the SPLC a Reichstag Fire organization funded with tax-deductible contributions for the purpose of fighting political opponents through de-banking, government defunding, and prejudice?

***

Let me in out of the rain, dude, or I'll kill you?

***

The Platner nomination must mean something.

***

Spiting Your Face in New York

Trump was on the way to Game 3 of the NBA Championship, with the executive order in his pocket. He was excited. The President can't be above everything. After all, the Knicks hadn't won a championship in over 40 years. And the Spurs had won 5 in the last 25. Talk about inequality!!!

Of course, the Constitution doesn't mention the NBA; that gave him some leeway--if it's a living document and all. And the success of the Spurs and the failures of the Knicks is worth something--maybe a reparations argument. 

New Yorkers had suffered some tough times, and with goofy Mamdani, more were coming; they needed a win. He stepped out of the limo.

Later that night, in an interview with FOX News, a Trump spiritual advisor explained, "Yeah, he was gonna give the Knicks 10 points by executive order, but when the fans booed him, he got pissed and bagged it."

With the final score Spurs 115--Knicks 111, those ten points would have made all the difference. 

Getting Into the Henhouse

On this day:
53
Roman Emperor Nero marries Claudia Octavia.
62
Claudia Octavia is executed.
68
Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide after quoting Homer’s Iliad, thus ending the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and ushering in the civil year known as the Year of the Four Emperors.
721
Odo of Aquitaine defeats the Moors in the Battle of Toulouse.
1924
In the second attempt to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappear, possibly having first made it to the top.
1973
Secretariat wins the Triple Crown.

***

This nation must be taken seriously because it is powerful. It used to be taken seriously because it was virtuous.

***

A remarkable story out of Russia. A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for “truth” — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed. By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.

This infection of Western chatbots was foreshadowed in a talk that American fugitive-turned-Moscow-based propagandist John Mark Dougan gave in Moscow in January at a conference of Russian officials, when he told them, “By pushing these Russian narratives from the Russian perspective, we can actually change worldwide AI.”

***

Take a single sheet of ordinary paper, about a tenth of a millimetre thick. Fold it in half, and it is twice as thick. Fold it again, and it is four times as thick, then eight, then sixteen. Keep going in the mathematical ideal, and by the forty-second fold, the stack would be tall enough to reach the Moon.

It would save a lot of fuel.

***

Admitted serial rapist and former National Football League champion Darren Sharper has been transferred from federal prison to a halfway house program.

All better.

***

WSJ's opinion of Trump's 'autocratic-like spread' of his image:

"This sort of leader-worship is common among autocrats. In Cuba, Vietnam, and China, images of Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong have long been present in government buildings, schools and private businesses. (Not to mention T-shirts and key chains for despot tourist kitsch.) In North Korea, citizens are expected to hang pictures of Kim Jong Un in their homes. 

Sober observers of our democracy note that these mundane flights of Mr. Trump’s ego don’t rise to the level of consequential decisions on policy or foreign affairs. But they are assaults on the country’s character as a republic born from distrust of monarchical grandiosity."

Assaults on the country's character. And they encourage the use of an old word that real autocracies don't allow: tasteless. With any luck, it might bring back another near-extinct word: shame.

***

***

Getting Into the Henhouse


What is it that makes the Left pursue policies that have been proven to be the enemies of individual and societal success and freedom everywhere they've been applied? Dependence, economic need, and social division are not the consequences of Leftist policies; they are the objectives.

How could anyone who hides Biden's infirmities, appoints --appoints!--Harris as a presidential candidate, or offers Platner as a senator, pretend they have the betterment of the citizens and their country in mind?

They do not; they have their own political well-being and their personal and economic rewards in mind. Theirs is a very small window overlooking a small terrain.

And how could anyone accept that the argument above is true, but that their opposition party has fewer of these characteristics and so deserves support?

These are not lady-and-tiger choices; they are baboon-and-mandrill choices.

Assault on the Liberty

 

On this day:

793
Vikings raid the abbey at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, commonly accepted as the beginning of the Scandinavian invasion of England.
1794
Robespierre inaugurates the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large, organized festivals all across France.
1967
Six-Day War: The USS Liberty "incident" occurs, killing 34 and wounding 171
1972
Vietnam War: Associated Press photographer Nick Ut takes his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road after being burned by napalm.

***

Agroterrorism is a subdivision of bioweapons. Aside from its anti-human savagery, it is a metaphor for the power of the individual, like drones, a dark side of the Enlightenment's legacy, which emphasizes the tension between freedom and virtue.

The thoughtful well-poisoner expresses himself.

***

Improvements in aggregate tax competitiveness are positively and significantly associated with real GDP per capita growth, and this association is robust to a wide range of controls. (From a paper with a deep dive into the obvious.)

***
 

If a nation is unable to define itself, what is it?

***

More than 20,000 people are currently working on AGI — artificial general intelligence — while fewer than 200 are focused specifically on AI safety.

***

Ceasefire episodes broke out in the Middle East.

***

How did Platner get picked for this job? Who did that? Does he really represent the Dems? Even if his deficits are ignored, can anyone be enthusiastic about him? Or has American politics become some weird parallel universe dominated by a black hole of power distribution benefiting a sliver of avaricious iconoclasts?

***

Assault on the Liberty

Every so often, the political animal shows its stripes. And national ambition will always trump friendship. Something like this story always gives a little context, although this is more than an insight into America's friendships, it is an insight into its leadership.

Most of this is from St. Clair's summary of "Assault on the Liberty," a first-hand account by James Ennes Jr. whose book of the event is a hair-raising story of betrayal by America's presumed friends and its own leadership. On this day in history, June 8, 1967.

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six-Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived, it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over three hours. The Liberty flew a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

An easily identified, lightly armed American surveillance ship in international waters.

Soon, more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later, a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which pelted the ship with gunfire and napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire, and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.

The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found, and the Liberty got out a message to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier, that it was under attack
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gunfire. 

Strafed the life rafts.

Nobody was going to get out alive that way. 

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”
The Israeli boat turned and left.

A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.

The Russians offered help first.

Finally, 16 hours after the attack, two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 were injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.

The following morning, Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.

The Children of Israel are never alone. But sometimes it's hard to see why.

Sunday/Manna

 

On this day:
1099
The First Crusade: The Siege of Jerusalem begins.
1494
Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divides the New World between the two countries.
1892
Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the “whites-only” car of a train; he would lose the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.
1893
Mohandas Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience.
1899
American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas
1944
World War II: Battle of Normandy – At Abbey Ardennes members of the SS Division Hitlerjugend massacre 23 Canadian prisoners of war.
1944
World War II: The steamer Danae carrying 350 Cretan Jews and 250 Cretan partisans is sunk without survivors off the shore of Santorini.
1971
The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment.

***

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has three terms, not one, and only the last has to do with income – though no Founding Father, and certainly not the Virginians, nor for that matter any political economist at the time, predicted the enormous fruit in economic growth from primary liberalism. Life and liberty reject supervising human masters.--mccloskey

***

The impact of the Iran War on gas prices in the U.S. is said to threaten to move elections. How is that different from years of policies designed to substitute unconventional energy for fossil fuels, which have led to a sharp increase in costs as well? Both are attacks on national wealth and the well-being of ordinary people.


***

A new report showing that real hourly wages have risen by 3% since 2019 while profits have risen by 50% has some worried “about the political stability of an economy in which ever more output flows toward shareholders instead of employees.”
Old rhetoric. Nothing prevents employees from being shareowners. More than half of American workers already own corporate shares through their retirement plans. Nor could it be easier.


***

In 'Under the Skin', a sci-fi movie starring Scarlett Johansson, an alien creature, "the Female," takes on human form and hunts the streets of Scotland, looking for men.
Many scenes were unscripted, filmed with hidden cameras, including those at the nightclub, the shopping center, and those in which the Female picks up men in her van. The crew purpose-built their own cameras to pull this off, hiding eight cameras in the Female's van that could accurately capture the reactions and responses of both her and her prey. The unsuspecting men were informed later that they had been filmed and gave permission for their scenes to be included in the movie's final cut.
'Under the Skin' is truly an exploration of the human condition, brought to the fore by the fact that Johansson was interacting with real people, unaware they were being filmed. --from CBR

***

Sunday/Manna

In today's gospel, Christ hammers away at His Bread of Life metaphor; He just will not give it up.

Today is the continuation of the manna/"bread of heaven" writings, starting with the very difficult:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;..."
This is very upsetting and must have caused a crisis among those listening. It is, in retrospect, pointed to as support for communion and the organization of the Church. But the audience did not know that at the time. What could they have thought? "The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'”
And Christ gets more specific, more graphic:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day."

This is grisly stuff. Isolated, it sounds very much like a reference to the ancient human sacrifice period among the early Jews.
It is.

In juxtaposing the manna from heaven and the Bread of Life, Christ is distinguishing the material from the immaterial, the physical from the spiritual, in the debate that has repeated itself since recorded time. He is saying that the materialists have a firm grasp of one appendage of the elephant of life.

The fatal one.

D-Day

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

***

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


***

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

***

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


***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

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

***


D-Day

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

Some perspective.

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

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

British, French, and German casualties
July–November 1916

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

The Truth and Beauty Itch

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

The Truth and Beauty Itch

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

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


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


A password to a spiritual testing ground.

The Too-Forgiving Bell Curve

On this day:

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

The Too-Forgiving Bell Curve

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

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

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

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

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