Erlich

On this day:
1687
Explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle, searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River, is murdered by his own men.
1863
The SS Georgiana, said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser, is destroyed on her maiden voyage with a cargo of munitions, medicines and merchandise then valued at over $1,000,000.
1945
World War II: Adolf Hitler issues his “Nero Decree” ordering all industries, military installations, shops, transportation facilities and communications facilities in Germany to be destroyed.
1945
World War II: Off the coast of Japan, a dive bomber hits the aircraft carrier USS Franklin, killing 724 of her crew. Badly damaged, the ship is able to return to the U.S. under her own power.
1965
The wreck of the SS Georgiana, valued at over $50,000,000 and said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser, is discovered by then teenage diver and pioneer underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence, exactly 102 years after its destruction.
1982
Falklands War: Argentinian forces land on South Georgia Island, precipitating war with the United Kingdom

***

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind, always.--Robin Williams

***

In the stare of the huge cold eyes of a $39 trillion debt, we risk a Hormuz closure that could ratchet all the world economies down. Then what?

***

Pierre Berton wrote of La Salle, "no other man had crammed so much adventure, so much excitement, so many triumphs, and so many heartbreaks into a single career. Though he died at the hands of some of his quarrelling followers in the mud of reeds of the Gulf of Mexico lowlands, he was essentially a man of the lakes, of Ontario and Erie, Huron and Michigan....

***

The private credit sector has been growing for years, and is now estimated to be a $3 trillion industry, according to Morgan Stanley. Two companies backed by private credit companies declared bankruptcy in September.

***

Seven new cases of meningitis in Kent have been confirmed, taking the total number of cases to 27, the UK Health Security Agency has said.

***

Two women said that Cesar Chavez sexually abused them as children and labor icon Dolores Huerta alleges he raped her during the height of the farmworker labor union movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

***

Erlich

Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, the most influential Chicken Little of the last century, died at the age of 93 this week. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” launched decades of institutional panic in government, entertainment, and journalism.

Ehrlich’s core neo-Malthusian argument was that overpopulation would exhaust the supply of food and natural resources, leading to a cascade of catastrophes around the world. “The Population Bomb” opens with a bold prediction, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000,” Ehrlich prophesied during a speech in 1971. He also said that the U.S. would be rationing water by 1974, and food by 1980. That smog in L.A. and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year. That Americans born after World War II wouldn’t live past 50.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the grip Ehrlich and his followers had on elite opinion and the popular imagination. A founder of Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection), Ehrlich inspired the modern population control movement.

As Charles Mann chronicled in Smithsonian magazine, Ehrlich inspired global efforts to push abortion, birth control, and even sterilization by governments, the United Nations, and other international organizations and foundations. “The results were horrific,” Betsy Hartmann, author of “Reproductive Rights and Wrongs,” told Mann.

“Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives,” Mann writes. “In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.”

In the U.S., the Ehrlicheans talked about requiring licenses for babies and putting birth control in the (dwindling) water supply.

Earlier, I said it’s difficult to exaggerate the grip Ehrlich’s thesis “had” on elite opinion. The truth, however, is that the grip endures. The sub-headline of the New York Times’ obituary reads, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

Premature?

England still exists. Life expectancy in the U.S. just set a record high of 79 (in Europe it’s 81.5). There is no country in the world with a life expectancy under 50. Air and water quality are much better today than they were in 1968. Global food production has exploded. Famine is rare, and almost always a product of war or the backward command-and-control economic thinking Ehrlich supported. And fertility rates are worrisomely declining throughout the developed world, and far beyond. Slightly more than half the world’s nations have sub-replacement birthrates. We have not run out of any resources and America has more forests than it did a century ago.

So, which predictions were “premature,” exactly?

There’s something about Malthusian dread that is simply too seductive to shake. For instance, a few years ago, I noticed something weird. On the 50th anniversary of “Soylent Green,” a dystopian, Ehrlichean film about overpopulation and food shortages, a number of writers opined how “prescient” the movie was. No less than the normally reasonable magazine, The Economist wrote, “It is impossible to watch the film today without weighing up how accurate its predictions turned out to be.” It’s an “eerie prophecy,” they declared.

Really? It’s “impossible to watch” a movie about mass state-sponsored euthanasia that turns human beings into high-protein crackers to fend off starvation — set in 2022! — without marveling at the accuracy of its predictions?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that Ehrlich turned out to be so wildly wrong, but that he was so obviously wrong from the beginning. My old boss Ben Wattenberg battled Ehrlich throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His feud began with a 1970 article for the New Republic titled, “The Nonsense Explosion,” in which Wattenberg explained that even as Ehrlich was writing about soaring birthrates, birthrates were already declining.

Ehrlich’s defenders — and they are legion — argue that he was a true prophet in that prophets issue apocalyptic warnings that, if heeded, can be avoided. This is more nonsense. He said mass “die-offs” were unavoidable with even the best policies, and the anti-growth fads he supported largely made things worse.

Simply put, his pessimism was simply too big to fail. (From the LA Times)

There seems to be a great eagerness to flock to the philosophies of doom. Look at the eagerness of Freud's acceptance on the flimsiest of evidence, or the willingness of so many to murder their neighbors to fulfill a Marxian apocalypse-- despite no evidence at all and the failure of his French test case.

But while The Dire sells (look at the success of horrified stock letters), Jeremiah is not always believed. The American debt, national and personal, is an unfolding nightmare that is stared at with awe, but no energy. 

And Jeremiah's curse was not simply that he was ignored, he lived through his predictions.

Civility

On this day:

37
The Roman Senate annuls Tiberius’s will and proclaims Caligula emperor.
235
Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother Julia Mamaea are murdered by legionaries near Moguntiacum (modern Mainz). The Severan dynasty ends.
1229
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor declares himself King of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade.
1241
Mongols overwhelm Polish armies in Kraków in the Battle of Chmielnik and plunder the city.
1314
Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake.
1834
Six farm labourers from Tolpuddle, Dorset, England are sentenced to be transported to Australia for forming a trade union.
1871
Declaration of the Paris Commune; President of the French Republic, Adolphe Thiers, orders evacuation of Paris.
1915
World War I: Massive naval attack in Battle of Gallipoli. Three battleships are sunk during a failed British and French naval attack on the Dardanelles.
1922
In India, Mohandas Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience. He would serve only 2 years.

1942
The War Relocation Authority is established in the United States to take Japanese Americans into custody.
1962
The Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War of Independence, which began in 1954.
1965
Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space.
1968
Gold standard: The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.
1990
In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings, collectively worth around $300 million, are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

***

What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.--Sowell

***

We are asked to suffer at TSA by politicians for a greater cause they cannot articulate. When will they ask us for the sacrifices necessary to offset the problems of the national debt they created?

***

This is an ad for AI DJs. If this is true, it is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reR71FQExxo

***

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday. He wrote about his wife in his resignation letter. She was an NSA linguist killed in Syria.

On Jan. 16, 2019, Chief Kent was meeting with a source at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, when a suicide bomber killed her and three other Americans.

Chief Kent was posthumously promoted to senior chief.

“She should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there,” Mr. Kent said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. “And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts.”

In his resignation letter, Mr. Kent cited what he said was Israel’s influence over the Trump administration’s policies.

***

From an article on Cesar Chavez:
"Insiders hinted the explosive allegations — the details of which have yet to be released — had been been a long time coming."

***

Your government at work.

On this day in 1937, a massive explosion caused the steel-framed school building in New London, in Rusk County, to collapse, killing a reported 298 people. It was the worst school disaster in United States history.
Of the 500 students in the building, only about 130 escaped serious injury. The explosion, which was heard four miles away, occurred when a manual-arts teacher turned on a sanding machine and inadvertently ignited a mixture of gas and air.
Three days after the explosion, inquiries were held to determine the cause of the disaster. Investigators learned that in January 1937, to save gas expenses of $300 a month, the school board and superintendent had authorized plumbers to tap a residue gas line of H. L. Hunt's Parade Gasoline Company. Apparently, gas had escaped from a faulty connection and accumulated beneath the building.


***

Civility

Imagine you patronize a local grocery where you notice the butcher regularly puts a finger on the scale. He distorts your purchase. And your relationship.

Trade is more than an exchange of goods. It goes beyond social conviviality. It creates — and is the result of — trust. It makes fair exchange possible, which ordinarily entails the risk of loss. That trust is built and reinforced over time, trade after trade, so that basic principles of fairness under mutually agreed-upon rules become assumed and expected. They don't have to be negotiated and renegotiated in an atmosphere of suspicion. A good relationship has developed through predictable honesty, and the trade is mutually beneficial. The trade is shared. And that fairness spreads.

Trade is not just civilized, it is civilizing.

Now, apply these observations to tariffs.....

The Middle East Minuet of Death

On this day:

180
Marcus Aurelius dies leaving Commodus the sole emperor of the Roman Empire.
624
Led by Muhammad, the Muslims of Medina defeat the Quraysh of Mecca in the Battle of Badr.
1776
American Revolution: British forces evacuate Boston, Massachusetts, ending the Siege of Boston, after George Washington and Henry Knox place artillery in positions overlooking the city.
1780
American Revolution: George Washington grants the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence”
2008
Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer resigns after a scandal involving a high-end prostitute. Lieutenant Governor David Paterson becomes New York State governor.

***

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.--Lincoln

***

The Pens-Colorado game last night was terrific. Colorado is really big and fast.

***

There is some talk that Russia's Shahed drone with its self-guidance system can be jammed--or even taken over and pirated to be redirected against its original user--and Russia is turning to control them better by using Starlink.

***

Fernando Tatis Jr., Ketel Marte, Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Junior Caminero, and Manny Machado. That's part of the batting lineup of the Dominican World team.

***

Is there some sort of gene coupling in politicians, like fair skin and red hair? Do they all act with just a little bit of Spitzerism? And how do they know, like Stalwell, that the electorate will rarely hold them responsible for their bad judgment? Or compulsion?

***

The Middle East Minuet of Death

Is the "conventional weapons shield" of Iran's nuclear production that so demanded American interference a new concept? A new moniker, a new buzzphrase to capture the Press's imagination? Or is a shift afoot? Was the mother-of-all-bombing-raids inadequate? Or is there a true policy shift? Or, as it looks, did the Israelis unearth new information that made them decide to attack Iran, and did the U.S. tag along to give the appearance of calling the tune?

Certainly, the resulting Iranian response must have been a surprise to most. The international spiteful suicide bomber was felt to be the sole default setting of Israel; to have Iran unmask itself as willing to destroy as much of the world as it could in defeat was unexpected.

And why, while brandishing their indiscriminate, destructive threats, do they want to appear so thoughtful and precise?

The Other 51%

On this day:
597 BC
Babylonians captured Jerusalem, replaced Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king.
37
Caligula became Roman Emperor after the death of his great uncle, Tiberius.
1244
Over 200 Cathars are burned after the Fall of Montségur
1521
Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines.

1621

Samoset, a Mohegan, visited the settlers of Plymouth Colony and greets them, “Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset.”

1861
Edward Clark became Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston, who has been evicted from the office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.
1865
American Civil War: The Battle of Averasborough began as Confederate forces suffer irreplaceable casualties in the final months of the war.
1912
Lawrence Oates, an ill member of Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition, left the tent to die, saying: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
1935
Adolf Hitler ordered Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.
1945
Ninety percent of Würzburg, Germany is destroyed in only 20 minutes by British bombers. 5,000 are killed.
1945
World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima ended, but small pockets of Japanese resistance persisted.
1968
Vietnam War: In the My Lai massacre, between 350 and 500 Vietnamese villagers (men, women, and children) are killed by American troops.
1988
Halabja poison gas attack: The Kurdish town of Halabjah in Iraq is attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents on the orders of Saddam Hussein, killing 5000 people and injuring about 10000 people.
1995
Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment is officially ratified in 1865.

***

"The point to remember is that what the government gives, it must first take away."--John S. Coleman, address to the Detroit Chamber of Commerce

***

After Columbus, the English came late to settle America with their successful colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. But traders and explorers sailed the coast. In 1524, the Florentine seaman and explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano mapped the entire eastern seaboard of North America and provided the first map of the region later known as New England.
The Mayflower landed off the coast of modern-day Massachusetts in November 1620. They were supposed to have landed in Virginia and were unprepared for the harsh New England winter, and with so many of them sick, building the settlement progressed slowly.
Samoset was the Abenaki Native American who first approached the English settlers of Plymouth Colony in friendship, introducing them to natives Squanto and Massasoit,   who would help save and sustain the colony.

***

Is capitalism failing most Americans? Median hourly wages (for men and women), annual earnings (for men and women), and family and household incomes are at all-time highs.

***

Cuba looks to be waking up. The Americans never forgave them for the Missile Crisis. Israel is devastating Lebanon with cluster bombs. Russia is getting resistance in the southeast.

Of 16,000 strikes in Iran, 9,000 have been Israeli.

***

The Other 51%

From the swamps to the savannah to the modern world, competition has driven advances, with its failures. The creation of a sense of place and its defense, first as individuals, then gangs, then clans, then larger. The common thread has been war, on some scale.

Reading about this Darwinism applied genetically, one usually thinks of males either in combat or in combat's more subtle forms of integrity, place, and achievement.

The evolution of males from hunter/defender to farmer, then corporate--trying to establish himself and his future with periodic forays into combat--might be understandable as a sliding analog development, as physical Darwinism becomes more social. These thoughts and images always seem to be one-sided, male-dominated generalizations. But what about women? It always seems as if the contributor of 50% of the genetic future is just along for the combative ride. 

Does the female bring the same edgy competition to the selective process and the future? What is her competitive advantage on the savannah, and how is it recognized, encouraged, and advanced? 

And when she arrives in the modern world of glass and towers, will the same male rewards of success, power, and influence that he brought from the savannah reward her? Does her law degree tickle some atavistic site in her analog slide into modernity?

Or has she always taken independent, unsupported steps into each new future? Has she always been a wide-eyed captive in every new world?

     

Sunday/Blind

On this day:
44 BC
Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, is stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March.
1545
First meeting of the Council of Trent.
1781
American Revolutionary War: Battle of Guilford Courthouse – Near present-day Greensboro, North Carolina, 1,900 British troops under General Charles Cornwallis defeat an American force numbering 4,400.
1783
In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asks his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. The plea is successful and the threatened coup d'état never takes place.
1917
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates the Russian throne and his brother the Grand Duke becomes Tsar.
1933
Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss keeps members of the National Council from convening, starting the Austrofascist dictatorship 

1952

In Cilaos, Réunion, 1870 mm (73 inches) of rain falls in a 24 hour period, setting a new world record (March 15 through March 16).
1985
The first Internet domain name is registered (symbolics.com).

***

"Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind." This is Washington, putting on his glasses and reading his response to the "Newburgh Conspiracy" raised in his officer corps against the American civil government.

***

The great problem in assessing recent years is not that Trump is a resurgence of the common man. Nor is his assumption of power greater than the government's assumption during the Biden Regency. Biden was non compos but someone--or many someones--thought they were competent to run the government without public approval or oversight, too. One is a governing blusterer, the other a governing, blustering shadow.

***

Researchers discover ketogenic diet prevents seizures by altering gut bacteria, stabilizing brain activity in epilepsy patients.

***

The nighttime habit that wrecks memory? Checking your phone and sleep fragmentation. Even brief awakenings and light exposure can impair the brain’s overnight memory consolidation.

***

This year, there will be over 9 billion--BILLION--trips from China.

***

This is not a war. And the border is closed.

Are these people any different, ever?

***

Sunday/Blind

Today was known as Lumen Christi, "The Light of Christ." It was accompanied by a ceremony of light-bearing and exchange.

Today's gospel is rich with metaphor, symbolism, and a hint of revolution, all delivered in a peculiar vaudevillian tone. It mixes light and dark, the physical and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible. In it, Christ encounters and heals a blind man on the Sabbath. First, He dismisses the old idea that the man's infirmities are due to his or his parents' sin. Then, the man presents himself to the priests, who are divided—some are amazed, others indignant that the healing was done on the Sabbath. Finally, Christ flips the lesson, suggesting that sin is a kind of blindness of the soul that hampers the spirit. Throughout, there is the revolutionary idea of human freedom and responsibility, and the danger of rigid social constructs—this was two thousand years ago.
The debate is funny, almost a parody of bureaucracy and decision-making. and eventually, the blind man's provenance is established by Christ's detractors.

And there's another provocative thing: After the blind man is cured, Christ seeks him out.



Going Blind by Rainer Maria Rilke

She sat just like the others at the table.
But on second glance, she seemed to hold her cup
a little differently as she picked it up.
She smiled once. It was almost painful.

And when they finished and it was time to stand
and slowly, as chance selected them, they left
and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),
I saw her. She was moving far behind

the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon
have to sing before a large assembly;
upon her eyes, which were radiant with joy,
light played as on the surface of a pool.

She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way;
and yet: as though, once it was overcome,
she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.


On His Blindness by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

SatStats

On this day:

44 BC
Casca, Cicero, and Cassius decided, in the night before the Assassination of Julius Caesar, that Mark Antony should stay alive.
1757
Admiral Sir John Byng is executed by firing squad aboard HMS Monarch for breach of the Articles of War.
1780
American Revolutionary War: Spanish forces capture Fort Charlotte in Mobile, Alabama, the last British frontier post capable of threatening New Orleans in Spanish Louisiana.
1942
Orvan Hess and John Bumstead became the first in the world to successfully treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.
1964
A jury in Dallas, Texas, finds Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, assumed assassin of John F. Kennedy

***

Voltaire referred to Byng’s execution in his satirical novel Candide: “In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”

***

"The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money," Trump said Thursday on his social media site.
It was only last month, in his State of the Union address, that Trump had bragged about gas prices at $2.30 a gallon, a figure that has since soared more than 50% to a national average of $3.60 a gallon, according to AAA.

It's wonderful to be in a country where both contradictory options are the greatest ever seen.

***

Modern economic growth in its global form has done more for workers and the environment than any army of government inspectors, regulators, customs officers, or IRS accountants. We Americans are rich not because of unions or anti-trust or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but because, on the whole, we have let capitalism work.--mccloskey

***



SatStats

Only 1% of Americans identify as vegans, according to Gallup, while the same poll showed that 3% consider themselves vegetarian. Vegetarian restaurants have had a hard time of it.

*

   Environment:

Contrary to the EPA 2009 predictions, there has been a decline in smog levels from 1980 to 2024.

There has been no trend in hurricane numbers or intensities since 1973. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no change in global flooding.

There has been no trend in the EPA heat wave index since 1895, except for the 1930s.

Several studies show a decline in net mortality from heat and cold.

U.S. wildfires have declined sharply since 1926, and global wildfire acreage declined 24% between 1998 and 2015.

Global droughts have declined about 0.5% per decade since 1950.

Global per capita food production has increased 40% since 1980.

And the latest peer-reviewed research reports no acceleration globally in sea-level rise.

*

   Immigtation

15% of the population of Ireland entered the US between 1851 and 1860

9% of the population of Norway entered the US in the 1880s

6% of the population of Italy entered the US from about 1900-1910

*

Re: California's proposed 5% wealth tax: “Over 100,000 simulations with varying discount rates, wealth tax revenues, and lost income tax revenues associated with departures, we find that 71% of scenarios in which the Act is instituted yields a negative [net present value], signaling the Act would generate a net cost to the state of California,” the researchers wrote in a Thursday Substack post. The “average across these draws,” they say, “is –$24.7 billion.”

*

Iran is the size of Europe

*
 Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.

But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.

Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.

*

People born in 1990 have double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer compared with people born in 1950

*

Germany’s population is projected to shrink by nearly 5 per cent within 25 years — a significantly steeper decline than previously forecast, according to an Ifo study.

*

In ten-generation world calibrations, Muslims become the largest tradition.

*

In 2025, roughly 60,000 new swimming pools were built in the U.S. That's down about 40% from 2022 and approximately half the peak seen during the Covid-era boom.

Lies and Policy

On this day:

624
Battle of Badr: a key battle between Muhammad’s army, the new followers of Islam, and the Quraish of Mecca. The Muslims won this battle, known as the turning point of Islam, which took place in the Hejaz region of western Arabia.
1781
William Herschel discovers Uranus.
1865
American Civil War: The Confederate States of America agree to the use of African American troops.
1881
Alexander II of Russia is killed near his palace when a bomb is thrown at him. (Gregorian date: it was March 1 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia.)
1921
Mongolia, under Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, declares its independence from China.
1938
Anschluss of Austria to the Third Reich.
1954
Battle of Điện Biên Phủ: Viet Minh forces attack the French.
1964
American Kitty Genovese is murdered, reportedly in view of neighbors who did nothing to help her, prompting research into the bystander effect.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.

***

“Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order” and needs a “more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy”--Ursula von der Leyen

***

Not developing our own shale gas reserves has a huge opportunity cost.
It got a lot huger this week--Ridley

***

The Bank of England has confirmed Sir Winston Churchill will be scrapped from banknotes and replaced with images of wildlife.

***

Is trade across the borders of Ohio and Pennsylvania economically distinct from trade between Ohio and Alaska? France?

***

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has issued a sharp rebuke to the US government over its decision to temporarily lift sanctions on the sale of Russian oil in the wake of sharply rising energy prices, saying the decision was wrong.

***


Lies and Policy

Chris Coyne recently reviewed The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations. One snippet:

"Since Kissinger did not intend his transcripts to be public, the collection is a window both into him as a person and into the operations of the U.S. national security state. Four themes stand out.

The first is the sheer prevalence of systematic deception. For Kissinger, lies weren’t a strategic tool limited to selective uses in international statecraft. They appear to have been part of his personal makeup. Wells notes that he was “a habitual and easy liar.” Throughout the transcripts, he deceives his foreign counterparts, his colleagues, and the media."

The border is secure, the President is sharp as a tack, 1619, Anna Anderson is Princess Anastasia, “Russians Hungry But not Starving,” there would be no war if the Sudeten lands were turned over to Germany, the Chernobyl evacuation was precautionary and temporary,“ Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction,” American boys will not be asked to fight an Asian war...

We poor Americans are inundated by the free speech avalanche of self-serving mendacity

Lies are Procrustes' solution to stubborn truths. As with Kissinger, they have become part of our marrow.