The Merging of Stupid and Madness

On this day

622
Prophet Muhammad completes his hijra from Mecca to Medina.
1180
Manuel I Komnenos, last Emperor of the Komnenian restoration, dies. The Byzantine Empire slips into terminal decline.
1645
Battle of Rowton Heath, Parliamentarian victory over a Royalist army commanded in person by King Charles
1780
Benedict Arnold flees to British Army lines when the arrest of British Major John André exposes Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point.
1869
“Black Friday”: Gold prices plummet after Ulysses S. Grant orders the Treasury to sell large quantities of gold after Jay Gould and James Fisk plot to control the market.
1890
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially renounces polygamy.
1957
President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends 101st Airborne Division troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce desegregation.
2009
The G20 summit begins in Pittsburgh with 30 global leaders in attendance. It marks the first use of LRAD in U.S. history.
2025
Sara Jane Moore, a Ford would-be assassin, dies.

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"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Douglas Adams

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Wealth Tax? The numbers are terrible. Wealth is not cash sitting idle in a bank account. It is the factories, companies, technologies, and investments that generate future income for millions of people. Taxing wealth at punitive rates may satisfy a desire to punish the rich, but it risks shrinking the very economic base from which future prosperity will come. It's a self-imposed tariff on comfort.

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The Dark Ages implies that television and phones are the main cause of cognitive decline. This fails to explain the patterns in PISA scores. Why did England and Scotland fall so precipitously from 2000 to 2005 whilst America improved? Why did England and Estonia hold steady after 2015 whilst most other OECD countries declined? How have Singapore, Taiwan, and ,Japan avoided decline altogether?

A better explanation is that a country’s education system is more important than its television diffusion.--Thompson

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American Revolution stated the rights of man were preordained, not granted or inflicted upon man by the government. This created the world's first written democratic constitution and the world's longest existing democracy. Those eager to overturn this dramatic redirection of human direction are counter-revolutionaries.

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Sara Jane Moore died Sept 24, 2025. She fired a shot at President Gerald Ford on Sept. 22, 1975 as he exited the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, but missed by inches due to a faulty sight on her gun
She served 32 years of her life sentence before being released from custody in 2007, and said she believed that killing a sitting president would spark a revolution in the U.S.
Moore, who had four children and was married five times, passed away at the age of 95 in a Tennessee nursing home.

This is an old post:

The Merging of Stupid and Madness  

“It was kind of an ultimate protest against the system. There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.” 

Clyde Barrows? Trotsky?

These are the words of Sara Jane Moore, a doctor's wife, mother of five, who, in 1975, tried to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. Why? There are explanations. She became interested in the crazy Symbionese Liberation Army. Squeaky Fromm, one of the crazy Manson girls, had just tried to kill Ford. But can you catch crazy?  

You can't get crazy by reading about crazies. Nor can you just sign up. One of the rules of psychology is that crazies do not join groups. A defining characteristic of madness is that they cannot bond. 

Manson might be mesmerizing, but lunatics will not line up shoulder to shoulder with him. Wendy Masako Yoshimura might be interesting and provocative, but...

Yet there they were, lining up, sacrificing for each other, doing horrible things to strangers... just like a real group of normal killers. But, of course, Sara Jane didn't have the one characteristic of normal killers: she had no motive--or, at least, had no good one. She said she was opposed to the Vietnam War, but Ford had nothing to do with the War, and it was already over when Mrs. Moore tried to kill him. And what about one of the victims joining the team? Patty Hearst was a quiet upper-class girl kidnapped and raped by one of these groups, and after a while, she was guarding the bank door with an automatic.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? 

One of the staples of modern thinking is that the bell curve inevitably allows for the festering of a certain number of lunatics who will eventually act to the detriment of the culture. The culture's defense, it is said, is testing and vigilance. But testing and vigilance would not find the staid suburban Sara Jane. Or Hearst. Or Kirk's killer, apparently a good citizen with no real history. 

We might mainstream the peripheral and hope to identify the dangerous outlier. But Mrs. Moore and Kirk's killer point to something new under the sun. These are relatively average people moved to vicious acts by deep passion and righteousness. People who are unbridled by societal constraints once they have come to grips with their virtue. Like Old Testament holy men, they recognize their calling and make the sacrifice. But they sacrifice you.

A culture where the unreasonable bleeds into the irrational.

"There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun." That sounds like a culture with a problem.

Canaanites

On this day:

1122
Pope Calixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V agree to the Concordat of Worms to put an end to the Investiture Controversy, essentially a struggle between the church and the European ruling houses over who could appoint local religious leaders. The state controlling the church!
1409
Battle of Kherlen, the second significant victory over Ming China by the Mongols since 1368.
1459
Battle of Blore Heath, the first major battle of the English Wars of the Roses, is fought at Blore Heath in Staffordshire.
1641
The Merchant Royal, carrying a treasure worth over a billion US dollars, is lost at sea off Land’s End.

1780
American Revolution: British Major John André is arrested as a spy by American soldiers, exposing Benedict Arnold’s change of sides.
1806
Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis after exploring the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
1821
Tripolitsa, Greece, falls and 30,000 Turks are massacred during the Greek War of Independence.
1857
The Russian warship Lefort capsizes and sinks during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard.

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Let us start with the obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it. --cooke

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According to leaked documents released by Edward Snowden, British intelligence spied on Israeli diplomats and military officials in 2008 and 2009, warning that "the Israelis constitute a true threat to regional security, notably because of the country’s position on the Iran issue."

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"During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened.

China also broke off meaningful arms control talks. You may think it is their right to play catch-up, and to be cynical of our motives, but that is what happened.

How well did China share timely information about Covid and cooperate to stop its initial spread?

Get the picture?"--cowen

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Large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics.

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Jaxson Dart could miss the rest of the season after tests showed that the New York Giants quarterback's knee injury is more severe than initially anticipated

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The typical house cat kills somewhere between 50 and 139 animals a year.

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Two University of Mississippi students died this week and packaged kratom was found during the separate death investigations, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

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Can we just agree that mendacity and egomania are simple facts of modern politics and our first job as citizens is to limit their impact, not look for a 'purer version '?

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Canaanites

In the Bronze Age, between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, a diverse group of people called the Canaanites lived in the Middle East. Despite their culture and influence — one of the only golden calf idols discovered was found in the Canaan seaport of Ashkelon — they left behind little information about themselves. Other civilizations made records of them, such as the Greeks, Egyptians, and the authors of the Hebrew Bible. But, without Canaanite texts to cite, scholars view the ancient people as a bit of an enigma. The Hebrew Bible offers one explanation for the destiny of the Canaanites: annihilation. The Israelites, per Deuteronomy 20:16-18, were commanded to “utterly destroy” the cities of various tribes, including the Canaanites.
Some information has emerged from the petrous bone, a region of the skull behind the ear that's also the densest bone in the body. It protects DNA like a strongbox and has, in recent years, advanced the study of ancient DNA.
DNA was taken from the petrous bone of five Canaanite people who lived 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. Though the skeletal remains were buried in a hot and humid region along the Mediterranean, the scientists were still able to extract genetic material.  
They sequenced the Canaanite genome and compared it to genomes of modern people, including Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and others from around the world. The comparison revealed that 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of people in Lebanon came from the Canaanites. (The other 10 percent was of a Eurasian steppe population.)
There was more genetic continuity in Lebanon than in England.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court

On this day:

1598
English playwright Ben Jonson kills an actor in a duel and is indicted for manslaughter.
1692
Last people hanged for witchcraft in Britain’s North American colonies.
1776
Nathan Hale is hanged for spying during American Revolution.
1784
Russia establishes a colony at Kodiak, Alaska.
1792
Primidi Vendémiaire of year 1 of the French Republican Calendar as the French First Republic comes into being.
1823
Joseph Smith, Jr. states he found the Golden plates on this date after being directed by God through the Angel Moroni to the place where they were buried.
1941
World War II: On Jewish New Year Day, the German SS murder 6,000 Jews in Vinnytsya, Ukraine. Those are the survivors of the previous killings that took place a few days earlier in which about 24,000 Jews were executed.
1975
Sara Jane Moore tries to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford, but is foiled by Oliver Sipple.
2011
CERN scientists announce their discovery of neutrinos breaking the speed of light

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"Greg [Abel, the CEO] runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values — both worth more than anything on our balance sheet. Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against." This was Warren Buffett explaining his appointment of his son, Howard, to Berkshire. But The FT disagreed, calling the decision nepotism "But culture and values do not exist separately from the balance sheet. It is in making balance-sheet decisions where culture and values are tested and realised. That is why experience, not just decency, is required of a chair."

FT doesn't like Buffett's decision-making.

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Start with the hardest number in Washington. Medicare costs about $1 trillion in fiscal 2026. Eliminate it entirely — as politically unthinkable as that is — and you close only about half of the current deficit. Social Security, at $1.7 trillion and rising every year, is even further off the table. Wipe out every domestic federal agency most people call “waste” — the EPA, the Department of Education, the State Department, foreign aid, all of it — and you’ve touched only 13–14 percent of the federal budget. There is no spending-cut path that closes this gap. The math forces the conversation onto revenue.--The Hill, arguing for VAT, acting as if politicians will do the right thing

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When children are the 'tip of the spear':
Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to an inferior school on purpose to do her part to right what she saw as an educational wrong, just as she sacrificed the truth in her advancement of the nonsense 1619 "Project" to right a wrong. So the innocent,--culture, history, and her daughter--suffered for a greater cause. Ms. Hannah-Jones, however, lives in a $1.5 million NY townhouse and did pretty well.

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Despite my criticism: Cruz has become the third Pirates player to have three straight 20-20 seasons, along with outfielders Barry Bonds (1990-92) and Andrew McCutchen (2011-13). He's been fantastic since coming back from his broken hand, hitting .318/.407/.533 for an OPS of .940 in 29 games, with 34 hits in 107 at-bats, three doubles, a triple, six home runs, 23 RBI and seven stolen bases on 10 attempts.

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Vladimir Putin is preparing to escalate his war against Ukraine and intensify hybrid attacks on Kyiv’s allies in Europe.--Telegraph

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The Alien Terrorist Removal Court

Sometimes principles are sacrificed on the altar of expediency.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court was created by Congress in 1996 following the Tim McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City. A judge reviews the government’s classified evidence alone, in chambers, and neither the accused nor the public may learn what it is or where it came from beyond an unclassified summary. The government may use the results of FISA wiretaps and warrantless physical searches, and the accused is specifically denied the right to suppress evidence. That is, the Federal Rules of Evidence don’t apply. The court allows the government to use classified information, where disclosing that information to the public would pose risks to national security. So there is no due process.

The statutory provisions that establish the court provide paid counsel to the aliens if necessary and also permit either party to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In the first-ever case before the United States Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC), Nazira Haji Zada, 47, an Afghan national previously residing in Fort Worth, Texas, was removed from the United States after conceding that she is an alien terrorist. Zada was arrested and appeared before the ATRC’s Chief Judge, Joan N. Ericksen, in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, July 30, at 11:00 a.m.

As the matriarch in her family, she supported a plot to commit an ISIS-inspired mass shooting on Election Day in 2024 for which her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, were previously arrested and convicted. The ATRC issued an order of removal on Aug. 20 that was unsealed following her return to her country of origin.

This was the first case ever brought before the ATRC, which Congress established decades ago, and which no previous administration had used. Zada is now permanently inadmissible to the United States.

According to court documents, Tawhedi admitted that between June 2024 and October 2024, he conspired with at least one other individual to purchase two AK-47 rifles, 500 rounds of ammunition, and 10 magazines, with the intent to carry out a mass-casualty attack on or around Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, on behalf of ISIS.

According to the criminal complaint, to raise funds for their attack, in 2024, the family started selling off their property, including furniture, computers, a mobile phone, and the family’s two vehicles. Zada signed a contract to sell the family house. The family also purchased one-way airfare for travel to Kabul, Afghanistan shortly before Election Day 2024 for its members, including for Zada and other minor children but not Abdullah and Tawhedi.

In compliance with the ATRC statute, the government used classified information to establish that Zada is an alien terrorist. Additionally, the government provided Zada and her lawyers, two federal public defenders, with approximately half a terabyte of documents supporting the government’s case. With her lawyers, Zada conceded that she is an alien terrorist and waived her appeal of the removal order, terminating her previous status.

Rumblings on the Left suggest this law runs counter to American tradition and values, and this particular case has fascist qualities. Trump is held responsible--though he is five decades from the writing of it. The usual clichés trot out: ICE, misogynist white supremacists, "Whiskey Pete Hegseth" makes an appearance, Trump's tech bro billionaires--in general, a bigoted, power-obsessed, autonomous and reactionary power structure with a lot of free time.

Indeed, it has the feel of a military court in wartime, a legal system of a country under attack, stressed and afraid, turning to a junta for advice. And does the impractical distort the ideal? Once 20 million illegal immigrants, with their unknown proportion of national enemies, are here, what mechanism can deal with the risks? What principles will have to be sacrificed?

Does the citizenry not have some protection through due process themselves? Can't they at least try to protect themselves, interview immigrants, screen them before welcoming them into the country and the paid benefits the country will be responsible for? If an immigrant has entered the country with the admitted purpose of destroying it, does the intended victim have no recourse? "Now that you're here, you get to play by our rules?" Once the immigrant has evaded detection and is ensconced in the victim's home, is he now afforded the same protection as his legal target, shielded by the very concepts he hopes to overthrow? Does he become that strangely American protected species, the squatter?

Horribly, these questions get to be managed by the land's most ambiguous subset who worship the naturalistic fallacy that is the law: politicians and their familiars, lawyers. Seeing a room of ugliness, they would outlaw beauty.  

But 20 million illegal immigrants can't be wrong.

PACs

 On this day:

1780
American Revolutionary War: Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.
1792
The National Convention declares France a republic and abolishes the monarchy.
1823
Joseph Smith is reportedly visited by the angel Moroni, who told him the location of gold plates, which Smith obtained four years later and partially translated into The Book of Mormon.
2003
The Galileo mission is terminated by sending the probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where it is crushed by the pressure at the lower altitudes.

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"Joseph Smith an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and "unlaughing" boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a little road south of Palmyra [N.Y.] in 1827. . . . There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the Book of Mormon. With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the "revised" Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he insisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain."--William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways.

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A book on Madame de Staël (by Biancamaria Fontana) offers some interesting observations.
de Staël was a towering personality (and Necker's daughter) who, in addition to her loud and tumultuous life, was a keen and prolific political and social commentator. She wrote from before the French Revolution to after the Napoleonic government. Beyond partisan politics and poor leadership, what had gone wrong in France in the 1790s?
Fontana argues that, for Staël, one answer lay in the abstraction that had so engrossed Necker: public opinion. She addressed the topic in her first published political intervention in 1791, when she asked how the opinion of the majority of the nation could be ascertained and, when known, judged as based on fear or reason. Convinced that most people were moderate and wanted stability, she argued that this majority should be kept at the center of representative government. So how did it happen that a small radical faction had led it by the nose? By the end of the revolutionary decade, she had to conclude that the French public had been simply too uneducated and badly informed to assume political responsibility. And de Staël usefully reminds us that nothing in politics is inevitable or fated, that everything must be analyzed, and that politicians should always be held accountable.

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President Trump complains that trade with China is “one-sided.” Does he speak English or what? One-sided trade is like a one-sided triangle: you can say it, but you can’t mean (think) it.--Richman

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Douglass Academy High School on Chicago’s West Side was designed for more than 1,000 students. Today it enrolls 27. The school employs 28 staff members, a one-to-one student-to-staff ratio. Per-pupil spending exceeds $90,000. With that kind of money, one might expect stellar academics and high engagement. Reality is the opposite. Nearly 66 percent of the enrolled students are chronically absent. Not a single child scores proficient in math or reading.

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A new breed of websites known as “dopamine sites,” a trend that emerged in South Korea, is emerging to protect you from yourself. These websites — like Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes — recreate the entire ritual of online shopping: You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery.

Then … nothing happens. No money changes hands. No package arrives.

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PACs

The following is excerpted from an article by one Adam Bonica, "a political scientist who studies money in politics." He is a concerned Democrat; this is from a site by another serious long-term Democrat, reproduced here with some delicate editing. The concern of both is the exploitative, dishonest nature of fundraising. They are concerned about the corrosive effect it could have on their party.

The politics has already been profoundly contaminated by money and ambition. It's a little disturbing that these people seem surprised.

--Spam PACs rarely operate in isolation. My analysis of FEC data shows that they cluster into networks linked by a small number of treasurers who oversee multiple committees at once. . . .

--[From 2011] through 2025, Harry Pascal’s network of eight PACs raised more than $390 million from individual donors. According to my analysis of FEC filings, roughly $20 million of that went directly to Democratic candidates, or funded independent expenditures supporting them. Another $100 million or so covered field and get-out-the-vote programs and the payroll to staff them, and roughly $20 million went to administrative costs. The rest — an estimated $249 million, or 64 cents of every dollar raised — went to fundraising itself. (italics added)

“Among the fundraising ads run by the largest spam PACs,” Bonica found, “between 70 and 85 percent of impressions are delivered to users 65 and older.”

--Whether or not those who operate this fundraising model recognize or intend it, fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that the FBI and AARP identify as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation: manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated account or profile statuses that look like official notices, and relentless pressure to give before there’s time to think.

Only about 20 percent of Democratic congressional candidates hire the high-volume digital fundraising firms used by spam PACs. But those candidates raised a combined $570 million from captive spam donors. The remaining 80 percent of Democratic candidates who stayed outside the spam ecosystem raised just $37 million from these donors.

--This fundraising model is a parasite on the party, enriching outside consultants while steadily starving the host. Republicans succumbed to it first, watching their own grassroots donor base hollow out in real time. If Democrats don’t change course, they are headed into the exact same donor death spiral.

So, an outpouring of regret and improvement? Not so fast:

--The party’s platform champions protecting the vulnerable. Its fundraising apparatus exploits them. The party’s official campaign committees, which should set the standard, are instead some of the worst offenders. Emails and texts from the DCCC and the DSCC feature similarly aggressive fundraising pleas and draw heavily from captive spam donors.

Sunday/Equality

On this day:

1187
Saladin begins the Siege of Jerusalem.
1378
Cardinal Robert of Geneva, called by some the Butcher of Cesena, is elected as Avignon Pope Clement VII, beginning the Papal schism.
1519
Ferdinand Magellan sets sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with about 270 men on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe.
1863
American Civil War: The Battle of Chickamauga ends.
1893
Charles Duryea and his brother road-test the first American-made gasoline-powered automobile.

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Pornography, in particular, is “not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.” This desecration, “which spoils the experience of freedom, is also a denial of love. It is an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it.”--Scruton

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All five people at dinner last night expect the Republicans to lose the House.

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KLVN Coffee Lab in Larimer announced on social media that it will close on Thursday.
A team led by John Graf is acquiring Penn Brewery.

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Margin debt in the US increased by 2.6% in August, reaching $1.45 trillion after a decline the previous month. This represents a 37.2% increase compared to the same period last year, or 33.1% when adjusted for inflation.

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Pirate's second baseman Lowe's qualifying offer for next year is $24 million.

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The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. A major theme of the book—I would say the major theme—is how strong and competitive the rivalries have been between Dario, Altman, and Musk. Each believes that the others cannot be trusted to gain super-powerful AI capabilities.

Thus, when you observe these individuals and their companies jockeying for position and preeminence, it is too cynical to think it is just about the money (each of them already has plenty). The actions of each are rooted in the sincere belief that their own company would best serve the world by winning the race toward very powerful AI.

So when these CEOs plead altruism, you should actually believe them...from Cowen

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A crazy case in Britain in its "equal value" case at Next. Next has won its appeal and may go on paying warehouse workers more than “equal value” retail workers.
The landmark ruling allows the retailer to pay warehouse workers more than shop staff on the basis that it costs more to recruit and retain them.
Pay more to recruit and retain people? Eight years of litigation to establish that wages have something to do with supply and demand.

But there are gender questions too. That should be more complex than just eight years of legal give-and-take. England is Bleak House.

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When the book of goofy things Trump has said is written, this will be right up there: Trump: We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries. We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year.

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Sunday/Equality

I am not the first to notice that the moral imagination of the modern world feels, in certain respects, flattened. Not long ago, after immersing himself in nineteenth-century novels, Matthew Yglesias remarked on how foreign the language of honor now sounds to us and how distant from the moral world of someone like Dorothea in Middlemarch. Think about it: when was the last time you praised someone for being noble or honorable? Even “good” has been replaced by the epithets “kind” or “nice”.

The ends we pursue now tend to cluster around three dominant aims: safety, utility, and equality. Of these, only equality still gestures toward something like a moral ideal; the others are entirely managerial and materialistic in nature.

Having noticed this, I began to wonder: why equality? Why the persistent fixation on oppression and the moral drama of victim and perpetrator? Why, out of all the possible goods, has this one become so central?

Nietzsche suggested that egalitarianism was the afterglow of Christianity—a moral residue lingering after faith itself had faded. But Christianity bequeathed many values to the modern world: humility, charity, forgiveness, self-sacrifice. Why did equality, in particular, survive as the organizing principle?

It seems to me that equality functions as a kind of consolation prize in a secular age. The shift from an “enchanted” premodern cosmos to a “disenchanted” secular order has undoubtedly expanded individual freedom. Yet in casting off the old metaphysical scaffolding, we have also stripped the so-called “losers” of society of any sense of inherent dignity rooted in a larger cosmic story.

At the same time, secular narratives place an immense weight of responsibility on the individual. In a world without providence and fate, outcomes appear to flow almost entirely from human choice and human systems. Nothing is “meant to be” or cosmically allotted.

The contemporary fixation on oppression narratives—closely allied with the language of equality and often emerging from the same moral circles—can be understood, in part, as a response to this strain. By locating suffering within structures of domination, it externalizes at least some portion of the otherwise crushing responsibility modernity places on the self.
Man shall not live by bread alone

“She appeared at daybreak one rainless morning, at the top of a hill on the road from Quijingue, carrying a wooden cross on her back. She was twenty years old, but she had suffered so much she looked ancient. She was a woman with a broad face, bruised feet, a shapeless body and mouse-colored skin (…)

She had cut all her hair herself after being raped for the fourth time.”

So begins the story of Maria Quadrado in The War of the End of the World, one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious and unsettling novels. On her journey through the Brazilian backlands she is violated repeatedly — by a constable, a cowboy, two hunters, and finally a goatherd who had offered her shelter. The first three times she feels only revulsion and prays she will not be left pregnant. But the fourth time something more troubling occurs: she feels pity for her assailant. Horrified by this flicker of compassion, she punishes herself by cutting off her hair, remaking herself into something grotesque, as if to extinguish the last trace of tenderness within her.

Maria Quadrado is not an isolated tragedy in the novel. She is one among many broken figures who gather in the doomed settlement of Canudos. Set in late nineteenth-century Brazil, the novel recounts the rise and annihilation of this community in the arid sertão of the northeast. Around a wandering ascetic known as the Counselor, the destitute and displaced assemble: former slaves, bandits, prostitutes, the mutilated and abandoned — those for whom the promises of the modern republic – secular, rationalizing and impatient with religious fervor – mean nothing.

At the heart of the novel lies the most important question: what does the modern world offer to such people? The republic promises progress, order and rational administration. But these abstractions do not feed the souls of “the wretched refuse” that constitute the citizens of Canudos. In this social order, they would be losers anyway.

The Counselor offers something the Republic cannot. He does not promise comfort or prosperity, but dissolution — the surrender of the isolated self into a transcendent design. And he encourages this dissolution quite explicitly:

“Although he mentioned God and said that it was important for the salvation of a person’s soul that the person destroy his or her own will - a poison that gave everyone the illusion of being a little god who was superior to the other gods round about him – and put in its place the will of the Third person, the one that built, the one that labored, the Industrious Ant, and things of that sort, he spoke of these things in clear language, every word of which they understood”.

In Canudos, the wretched give away their will and in return, they are no longer superfluous. Instead, they inhabit a cosmic narrative, brought on Earth by the Counselor.

The newly established Brazilian Republic interprets Canudos as a threat to order and modernity and it dispatches military expeditions to crush the settlement. Yet again and again, these better-armed and professionally trained forces falter against the ragged defenders of the town. The defeats acquire an almost fantastical quality: a modern state, armed with technique and confidence, undone by a people who possess little but belief.

For a brief season, the annihilation of the isolated will — the surrender of individuality into a single, sacred purpose — seems to generate a force capable of holding even the republic’s army at bay. In losing themselves, the inhabitants of Canudos discover an intensity that they did not know existed.

And yet Canudos ultimately falls. Surrounded, starved, and overwhelmed, it is finally obliterated.

The disenchanted world

The inhabitants of Canudos are not equals in any modern sense. The settlement does not rest on the fiction of symmetry. It is hierarchical, ordered and shaped by charisma and submission.

One of the Counselor’s most impressive powers is precisely this: men who once lived by violence and appetite — the bandit Pajeú among them — bend before him without coercion or the need or persuasion. Their obedience arises as though it were the most natural fact in the world. What he offers to them is simple: in Canudos, each person occupies a place, and that place, however lowly, is intelligible within a sacred whole.

The disenchanted, secular world has killed Canudos for most people. So what is left for them? As a consolation prize, a sterile “equality.”

In a disenchanted world, a world that has lost its connection to transcendence, an obsession with equality is born out of a desperate structural necessity. This is the only remaining safety net preventing the autonomous self from sliding into total dehumanization.

This goes the other way too. In earlier times, even the powerful, kings included, understood themselves as subordinate to God. Now, it is one’s talent and will, or agency, if one is to speak in currently popular terms, that brings about their fortune.

There are many other ways, in my mind, in which the disenchanted world makes things hard for the “losers” of this world. One obvious loss is eschatological. In the older, enchanted imagination, earthly failure did not exhaust a life’s meaning. The poor, the humiliated, the obscure could inhabit a story whose resolution lay beyond mortal time. Salvation, not success, was the final measure. An inversion of status, even, was heavily hinted at: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Yet disenchantment also robs “the weak” of dignity in this life. In the enchanted world, society was as it was due to a divinely ordained order, as per Taylor: “A kingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere human action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of various associations which made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds and so on, were interwoven with ritual and worship (...) One could not help but encounter God everywhere”. In this divinely ordered world, one’s station, not matter how limited, was not arbitrary, but was understood to participate in a cosmic design.

Medieval society could thus be imagined as a hierarchy of complementary functions: the clergy praying for all, the lords defending all, the peasants laboring for all. The roles were unequal in honor, yet mutually necessary. Even the humblest life had intelligibility within a larger whole.The buffered, modern self stands in a different landscape. There is no divinely ratified structure into which one is fitted. There is only the immanent frame: a social world understood as the product of human construction, revisable and contingent.

What, then, consoles the weak? Very little. Without transcendence, there is no deferred compensation. Without a sacred order, there is no given place of inherent dignity that one might inhabit in the world. And with radical responsibility comes the realization that some might “deserve” to be the losers of this world.

And more disturbingly, without all these, it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that some lives contribute less, matter less, and perhaps even, are less necessary.

It is in erecting barriers to reaching this conclusion that post World War II modernity’s moral energy gathers. The relentless pursuit of equality, the acute sensitivity to oppression and the refusal to accept hierarchy as natural are not merely fashions. They are attempts to supply, through political means, what religion once provided: an assurance that no life is negligible. In a world where dignity no longer descends from heaven, it must be constructed on earth. Or else the weak are left with nothing at all.

The classical liberal dilemma

We still glimpse fragments of enchantment in modern life. Meaning has not entirely disappeared. In fact, it is now most accessible through work and especially work that presents itself as larger than the individual, as participation in a mission rather than the mere earning of a wage.

Nowhere is this more visible than in start-ups. In such spaces, even the pretense of equality is often suspended in practice. Employees willingly subordinate themselves to a founder, often investing that figure with a quasi-prophetic aura. An entire mythology around the figure is born. "Founder-mode” might be the closest we get in the modern era to a grand hero narrative.

This hierarchy is accepted, even celebrated, because it promises belonging to a grand narrative: building the future and bending the arc of history through innovation. In recent years, companies like Anthropic have inspired precisely this kind of near-religious devotion in their employees.

For the fortunate — the talented and the educated— this becomes a form of salvation. One may dissolve oneself into “the mission”, much like the inhabitants of Canudos.

But such salvation on Earth is rarely available to “the weak”. In modern America, where meritocracy has taken perhaps its most uncompromising form, the psychological weight of absolute personal responsibility grows even heavier. The Statue of Liberty may welcome the “wretched refuse,” but even that promise carries an implicit demand: that they transform themselves, that they succeed. The refuge it offers is also a challenge.

And so the final excuse disappears. For those less endowed by talent or circumstance, for those who chose poorly or were never given real choices at all, possibility itself becomes more of a burden.

The high-IQ classical liberal often fails to perceive the existential strain this creates. He speaks of growth, mobility and opportunity — of the long arc of history bending favorably. In doing so, he resembles the bewildered journalist at the end of The War of the End of the World, who confronts the doomed inhabitants of Canudos with incredulity: “I don’t understand, I don’t understand. What sort of creatures are you all anyway? What are you doing here, why didn’t all of you flee before they had you surrounded? What madness to wait in a rat trap like this for them to come kill you all!”

And the reply, given by the deformed Lion of Natuba, cuts through the incomprehension: “There isn’t anywhere to flee to. That’s what we kept doing before. That’s why we came here. That was the place we fled to.”

There is nowhere left to flee and retreat to. The secular age has dismantled the old sanctuaries that once shielded people from the full weight of responsibility. There is nowhere to hide from the self. And in the absence of a grand narrative, sterile equality is itself a rather pathetic consolation prize.
-- from Ruxandra Teslo's Substack

SatStats

On this day:

1356
Battle of Poitiers: an English army under the command of Edward, the Black Prince, defeats a French army and captures the French king, John II.
1676
Nathaniel Bacon's forces burn Jamestown to the ground during Bacon’s Rebellion.
1692
Giles Corey is pressed to death after refusing to plead in the Salem witch trials.
1777
American Revolutionary War: British forces win a tactically expensive victory over the Continental Army in the First Battle of Saratoga.
1796
George Washington’s farewell address is printed across America as an open letter to the public.
1846
Two French shepherd children, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, experience a Marian apparition on a mountaintop near La Salette, France, now known as Our Lady of La Salette.
1863
American Civil War: Battle of Chickamauga.
1870
Franco-Prussian War: the Siege of Paris begins, which will result on January 28, 1871 in the surrender of Paris and a decisive Prussian victory.
1881
U.S. President James A. Garfield dies of wounds suffered in a July 2 shooting.
1934
Bruno Hauptmann is arrested for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr.
1990
Delhi University student Rajiv Goswami attempts self-immolation during Anti-Reservation agitation in India. Though he survived, his self-immolation inspired nearly 150 self-immolation bids and indirectly led to the resignation of the V. P. Singh Govt.

***

“Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I’ll show you a crook.” — Harry Truman

***

The Senate tradition of reading Washington's Farewell Address to the Nation aloud in the Chamber began on February 22, 1862, as a morale-boosting gesture during the dark days of the Civil War. Every year since 1896, the Senate has observed Washington's birthday by selecting one of its members, alternating parties, to read the 7,641-word statement in legislative session.

***

A minority opinion: When female reporters objected that male reporters had an advantage because they could enter football locker rooms for post-game interviews, the culture demurred. Women were allowed in, causing surprised guys coming out of showers, a scramble for towels, and annoyed interviews with half-naked men flexing.

It was sold as a women's rights question. I don't recall any concern over those men's comfort. So men and women mixed in the locker rooms behind the towel of women's rights. The camel's nose was under the tent. Good taste was discriminatory. Manners were next.

***

74% Say President Trump’s Tariffs Have Raised Prices; 53% Say Tariffs Have Weakened the Economy; 70% Say the President Needs Congressional Approval to Impose Tariffs.

***

The now-standard workweek — five eight-hour days with a two-day weekend — was not a union creation. Rather, it was innovated by Henry Ford at his company’s strictly non-union Highland Park Plant. The productivity revelation that was the assembly line first permitted Ford to give workers one day off a week in 1922, then two days off in 1926.

***

SatStats

(a lot of agriculture)

A Lancet study showing heat deaths in Europe are rapidly rising, reaching 63,000 a year. This study shows that European heat-death risk has risen 82% since 1990.
But the study and the commission report both ignore a crucial factor: Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths.

*

In 1939, 93.3 percent of Black children were in poverty. By 2023, it was 5.7 percent.

*

The water bill has risen more than 27 percent over the past five years and is increasing at roughly twice the rate of inflation.

*

Between 2011 and 2023, the number seeking mental health treatment rose from 31.6 million to 59.2 million — about 1 in 6 Americans.

*

These points appear on the website of 412 Food Rescue, a non-profit devoted to redirecting unused food away from the waste system:

In the United States, we waste 62.5 million tons and spend $218 billion a year (or 1.3% of our GDP) in growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never eaten.
In the United States, 1 in 7 are hungry. According to the United Nations, if we recover all the food that is lost or wasted, we will have enough to feed all those who are hungry, four times over.

*

Food production uses 10% of the energy budget, 50% of the land, and 80% of all fresh water consumed in the U.S.

*

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over 97% of food waste generated ends up in the landfill.
This comprises the single largest component of municipal solid waste —generating a large portion of U.S. methane emissions (a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 52% of fruits and vegetables go to waste—food that supplies that highest quality nutrition required to prevent obesity and disease.
40% of food going to waste translates to 20 pounds of food per person per month, worth $165 billion a year.

*

Real median family income in the U.S. has roughly tripled since 1947, climbing from about $34K to over $105K in today’s dollars.

*

Despite all the doom and gloom, American families are far more prosperous than their grandparents were:

*

In 1901, the average American family spent 42% of its disposable budget on food, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

*

In 1945 it was 23%. In 1965 it was 15%. In 1985 it was around 12%.
Today, per Agriculture Department calculations, it’s 9.7%.
That number is driven by a historically high rate of dining out and having food delivered.

Food is diverse and no longer subject to seasonality

If we remove eating out from the equation and measure only grocery and supermarket shopping, the average family spends just 7.9% of its budget on food — and a discriminating shopper can probably do better. Less income goes to food for Americans than for people in any other nation on Earth, the USDA has found.

Predatory Business

On this day:

14
Tiberius is confirmed as Roman Emperor by the Roman Senate following the natural death of Augustus
324
Constantine the Great decisively defeats Licinius in the Battle of Chrysopolis, establishing Constantine’s sole control over the Roman Empire.
1812
The 1812 Fire of Moscow dies down after destroying more than three-quarters of the city. Napoleon returns from the Petrovsky Palace to the Moscow Kremlin, spared from the fire.
1885
Riots break out in Montreal to protest against compulsory smallpox vaccination.
1895
Daniel David Palmer gives the first chiropractic adjustment.
1944
World War II: The British submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoes Junyō Maru, 5,600 killed.
1975
Patty Hearst is arrested after a year on the FBI Most Wanted List.
2001
First mailing of anthrax letters from Trenton, New Jersey in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

***

People who came to Hollywood used to want to be "great — a great singer, great actor, great comedian. Now it’s just fame, and the greatness is almost assumed."--Chris Rock

***

History shows that free exchange is constantly at risk of being infected and captured by parasites and predators who live off productive people through taxes, tithes, rents, slavery, subsidies, war, and theft. This is what killed the goose in ancient Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Italy and Holland’s golden age. From time to time anti-oligarchic insurgents are needed to purge the parasites, expel the predators, and free the economy from their burden.
Now, says Carswell, in his book Rebel, is such a time.--ridley

***

Is competition from Alaska more or less damaging than competition from Mexico? Should they have tariffs?

***

A short on GDP:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnkEhPBMZcEO0QGu51fDFDg

***

Predatory Business

There was a time when social trajectory and limits led to what was called 'the underclass,' a small group of traditional social and economic failures whose solution to their problems was to prey on the achievers. This has been true in both individual and national conditions. How this disparity was accommodated determined much of the direction of international and national affairs. So Cuba and North Korea became little bullies and international threats, but bribes and subsidies 'gave peace a chance.' Much of Africa became social charity labs. Modern America became a vast economic transfer system where the unproductive were bribed with trillions of taxed and borrowed dollars to leave the productive people alone, like the Barbary pirates of long ago.

When these unproductive predators organize, it is called a riot. When a lot of them riot, it is called socialism.