The Enemies of the Good

 On this day:

365
A tsunami devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by the Crete earthquake, estimated to be 8.0 on the Richter Scale. 5,000 people perished in Alexandria, and 45,000 more died outside the city.
1403
Battle of Shrewsbury: King Henry IV of England defeats rebels to the north of the county town of Shropshire, England.
1861
American Civil War: First Battle of Bull Run – at Manassas Junction, Virginia, the first major battle of the war begins and ends in a victory for the Confederate army.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1961
Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission – Gus Grissom piloting Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space (in a suborbital mission).
1969
Space Race: Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission (July 20 in North America).
1973
In the Lillehammer affair in Norway, Israeli Mossad agents kill a waiter whom they mistakenly thought was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.
2005
Four terrorist bombings, occurring exactly two weeks after the similar July 7 bombings, target London’s public transportation system. All four bombs fail to detonate and all four suspected suicide bombers are captured and later convicted and imprisoned for long terms.
2011
NASA’s Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135

***

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.---Lord Acton

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Since we have become a people who hope to shape our nature through the adoption and criminalization of words like "Washington Redskins," shouldn't we do something to soften the aggressive and dangerous name inherent in the State of Delaware?

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Gymnasium is a Latinisation of the Greek, meaning to exercise. Its root word is the same as for 'nude.'

The Greeks banned women from the gymnasium but, I believe, the Etruscans did not.

***

John Scopes found guilty, the Americans land on the moon, both on the same day in history. I wonder if we could start a political study, deductible of course, on how days of the year contain inherent historical leanings, like a horoscope. We could meet in Acapulco every six months and discuss our findings, maybe get a university chair or two.

***

The full cost of making America a welfare state wasn’t fully recorded in the federal budget deficits of the 1970s because inflation and bracket creep tax increases transferred much of the cost to the family budget.

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The Enemies of the Good

Cultures are always threatened by envy, madness, the restless need to change into some imagined good. (The old saw, 'the enemy of good is better.') The Americans are particularly subject to assault because their philosophy allows the revolutionary the freedom to try it.

The American foundation is tough, though. The Founders recognized whimsy as a weak and inaccurate  (and adolescent) motive in political change. And common and shape-changing. They demanded a philosophy and a slow process of foundational restructuring. This may explain the frustrated frenzy of contemporary revolutionaries. Any more, the Americans seem willing to import them.

The current threat from the Left seems to have coalesced into incoherence. America is so brilliantly constructed that its enemies have simply stopped trying to replace it and devolved into emotional tantrums. The objections to America have become geographic, like Israel. Or religious, like Islam. Or historic, like slavery. None of these points are actionable as they are peripheral to the country itself. Their energy is resentment, not constructive. So they would overthrow the British government over the Corn Laws. These are people who hate Catholicism because of the Crusades and Blacks because of the Congo Wars. America's domestic enemies are people without context.

Mamdani will be risky for them because he is real. The Netanyahu kerfluffle is silly but instructive. Mamdani wants to enforce an international edit the country doesn't recognize. This raises practical questions. Who will enforce the edit? Local police? Would they fight Israeli regulars? State cops? National Guard? Where would they put him? Would Israeli special forces counter? Are we going to ask American boys to die for the Hague over some incoherent international cult?

The Left is on the wrong side of all this, but they don't care about much other than winning and blood in the streets. Their incoherence, though, might give them a strange advantage as no sensible person would take such a crew seriously.

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

On this day:

70
First Jewish-Roman War: Siege of Jerusalem – Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, storms the Fortress of Antonia north of the Temple Mount. The Roman army is drawn into street fights with the Zealots.
1807
Nicéphore Niépce is awarded a patent by Napoleon Bonaparte for the Pyréolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine, after it successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône in France.
1903
The Ford Motor Company ships its first car.
1944
World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
1950
Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.
1960
The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.
1969
Apollo Program: Apollo 11 successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on another world almost 7 hours later.
1976
The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1977
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is hit by a flash flood that kills eighty and causes $350 million in damage.
1977
The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments.

***

There is no legitimate use case for crypto. They’ve had 18 years to come up with one. They keep throwing things up like “an inflation hedge” or “source of stability.” Every one of them has turned out to be baseless.

The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering, and crime. It’s the preferred mechanism of choice for global terrorists, sex traffickers, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

You have to ask yourself why crypto has basically hijacked the political agenda of Washington. It’s because they followed the Sam Bankman-Fried model of buying bipartisan support by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns. --Krugman

***

In May, Mamdani’s administration released a map meant to celebrate the city's ethnic diversity and immigrant roots. The chart included Little Palestine and Little Pakistan but omitted Little Italy, one of the best-known neighborhoods in Manhattan. The map included Little Mexico, Little Guyana, and Little Bhod-Tibet, but failed to recognize well known Irish enclaves like Woodlawn and Sunnyside. Not surprisingly, the map omitted Jewish neighborhoods.
Welcome to the 'some are more equal than others' phase.

***

The use of subatomic particles to process data could represent a breakthrough that’s unmatched in modern human history, according to analysts at Bank of America, who compared it to the discovery of fire. “A technology that can perform endless complex calculations in zero-time, warp-speeding human knowledge and development.”

***

Just to be fair:
An 18-year-old has more at stake in an election than an 80-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?
An 80-year-old has more money at stake than an 18-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?

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A detector buried a kilometre underground in Japan may have caught the faintest signal ever recorded: the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the entire universe, a background hum of stellar death that scientists have been straining to hear for decades.--Headline  at Space Daily. I suppose they could have said "background hum of stellar creation", too 

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Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

Socialism has been around in some form or other forever. Cain shared Abel's production. Pirates share the spoils. The prospect of sharing the product of another's efforts makes for a terrific recruiting poster. It has been the default system for failing individuals forever. But it is a ridiculous socio-economic system that has deteriorated everywhere it's been tried. From the schoolyard to Jamestown and Plymouth to the early religious conclaves to Mafia protection rackets, sharing others' production has changed only the mailing addresses of the rich.

The modern adaptation--sharing by voting mandate--cleverly sidesteps group sharing's basic flaw: enforcement. If 51% of the population wants to share production, a sizable portion does not. If a citizen has no essential right to the results of his work, and his neighbor has a statutory right to it, how is that conflict resolved? Force.

Democracies have their own flaws. Is a 90% vote more important in a society than a 52% vote? Can a 90% vote make farms communal? Wives? Slaves? Is lynching OK if the correct process is followed?

Ants are very productive and organized. But we are not ants. 

The socialist starts with a superficial notion--property--and works down to organize his culture. The revolutionary geniuses in America started with the basic rights of the nation's citizens--life, liberty, the striving for happiness--and worked up. It is because socialism is so tenuously but fervently moored by property that it is so unstable and dangerous.

So, when one votes for socialism, the job is nowhere near finished. The disenters and countless inconsistencies have to be identified and, in some fashion, attacked. The vote is meaningless until it is forcibly imposed.

So, is democratic socialism an oxymoron?

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

On this day:
64
Great Fire of Rome: a fire begins to burn in the merchant area of Rome and soon burns completely out of control. According to a popular, but untrue legend, Nero fiddled as the city burned.

711
Umayyad conquest of Hispania: Battle of Guadalete – Umayyad forces under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeat the Visigoths led by King Roderic. This began the successful invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, less than 100 years after the death of the Prophet.
1333
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Halidon Hill – The English win a decisive victory over the Scots.
1545
The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982, the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
1553
Lady Jane Grey is replaced by Mary I of England as Queen of England after only nine days of reign.
1701
Representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sign the Nanfan Treaty, ceding a large territory north of the Ohio River to England.
1843
Brunel’s steamship, the SS Great Britain, is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller and also becoming the largest vessel afloat in the world.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid – At Buffington Island in Ohio, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s raid into the north is mostly thwarted when a large group of his men are captured while trying to escape across the Ohio River.
1864
Taiping Rebellion: Third Battle of Nanking – The Qing Dynasty finally defeats the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
1942
World War II: Battle of the Atlantic – German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the last U-boats to withdraw from their United States Atlantic coast positions in response to the effective American convoy system.
1963
Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 metres (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.
1981
In a private meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French Prime Minister François Mitterrand reveals the existence of the Farewell Dossier, a collection of documents showing that the Soviets had been stealing American technological research and development.
1997
The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army resumes a ceasefire to end their 25-year campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

***

"Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals."--Norberg

***

The country of Peru has seen an influx of babies named after the star of Norway’s World Cup team, Erling Haaland, with over 500 newborns having been named after the forward.

***

Tulsi Gabbard’s older brother allegedly tried to lure several young children into a hotel room with money and gum at a Hawaiian hotel resort.

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The new Democrat bent is that the Constitution, the very declaration of the values that underlie the nation, is "nostalgic." It's appearing as a common talking point among national candidates. This is brazen, iconoclastic stuff, containing the seeds of a real disaster. And it would not be tried without some support in polling.

***

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it, rivers, rain, clouds, lakes, and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock. It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.

***

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

A week after the Parable of the Sower comes today's gospel, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows his wheat and, in the night, an enemy oversows the field with weeds. (The weeds are darnel, strangely a name taken by football players and actors. Its historical meaning is "disorder.") The farmer decides to wait and harvest them all together for fear that extracting the weeds will harm the good wheat as well. Christ, in an unusual move, then explains the parable. A hard reading of it should be very alarming.

This is a significant insight into Christ's message. There is a Good. But there is also an Evil. And that Evil is sown by an Enemy, an active Enemy of the Good. The Enemy is surreptitious, and the Evil he sows is inextricably interwoven with the Good so that separating them is injurious to the Good. That is, Good and Evil are linked. There are incidental slaves in this parable--without comment--and the eventual harvesters are Angels. 

Angels.

This is a battlefield, a struggle over the soul of man. Good and Evil are real and hard to separate, but separation will happen. And God is patient; His patience comes from a sincere interest in protecting the Good.

This is the picture of a religion with principals, not simply abstract principles, with active virtue and evil, and both have proponents.


Sowing Seed

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy--bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

ROBERT LAURENCE BINYON
1869-1943 / England

SatStats

 On this day:

390 BCE
Roman-Gaulish Wars: Battle of the Allia – a Roman army is defeated by raiding Gauls, leading to the subsequent sacking of Rome.
1290
King Edward I of England issues the Edict of Expulsion, banishing all Jews (numbering about 16,000) from England; this was Tisha B'Av on the Hebrew calendar, a day that commemorates many Jewish calamities.
1870
The First Vatican Council decrees the dogma of papal infallibility.
1925
Adolf Hitler publishes his personal manifesto Mein Kampf.
1942
World War II: the Germans test fly the Messerschmitt Me-262 using only its jet engines for the first time.
1944
World War II: Hideki Tojo resigns as Prime Minister of Japan due to numerous setbacks in the war effort.
1966
Human spaceflight: Gemini 10 is launched from Cape Kennedy on a 70-hour mission that includes docking with an orbiting Agena target vehicle.
1969
After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.

***

"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."--Thomas Jefferson

***

The Kopechne affair ended the myth of even-handedness in the American political culture, essentially its very raison d'etre. How could the Democrats have survived it?

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New York City government is using racial classifications to guide more than two hundred goals across nearly every agency. Among other things, the plan commits specific percentages of city contracts to be doled out based on race, a continuation of the city’s longstanding policy. Indeed, for the past several years, the city has operated one of the largest race-based contracting programs in the country.

***

China is about to open a hotel that runs itself. On an artificial island off the coast near Shenzhen, Pudu Robotics is building the world's first fully robot-serviced hotel, opening in 2027, where every job in the building, from check-in to cooking to cleaning your room, will be handled by machines working in concert.

***

Wealthy American families are increasingly seeking to book assets outside the United States — a shift so pronounced that one of Citi’s top wealth executives says she’s never seen anything like it in her career.

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SatStats

BlackRock's assets under management crossed a record $15 trillion.

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Spirits companies face challenges as consumers reduce drinking, though ready-to-drink cocktails gain popularity.

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The Trump family earned more than $1.4B from crypto last year and moved most of it into stocks and bonds. Retail investors in Trump-backed tokens have lost $2.3B.

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World Cup 2026 hit a record 43M viewers with Fox and Telemundo viewership up 92-122%.

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On the national “gold standard” NAEP exams, NYC's citywide 4th-grade reading proficiency stands at 28%, math at 33%. But black and Hispanic students have proficiency rates less than a third of those of white and Asian students.

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From July 2024 through June 2025, NYC Housing Authority plumber supervisor Jakub Markowski earned $465,000, including $332,000 for nearly 2,600 hours in overtime — more than the mayor and City Council speaker make combined.

***

Masayoshi Son has ridiculed opponents of AI for “spitting upwards” as the SoftBank billionaire predicted the technology would account for 20 per cent of global output by 2040.

***

66% of higher- and middle-income countries surveyed by Pew Research now have a more favourable view of China than the US, with respondents across 36 nations variously citing US meddling and backsliding.

***

Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year, driven largely by datacentre construction.

In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted 119 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, or about a third of France's total.

The previous year, they emitted roughly 101 metric tons, roughly equivalent to the 2024 emissions of Czechia.

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Canada's per capita charity rate is about one-half that of the U.S.

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India is still the world's fastest-growing major economy at 6.4%

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Today, the annual cost per NYC student has increased to roughly $49,500.

Equality and its Enemies

 On this day:

180
Twelve inhabitants of Scillium in North Africa are executed for being Christians. This is the earliest record of Christianity in that part of the world.
1762
Catherine II becomes tsar of Russia upon the murder of Peter III of Russia.
1791
Members of the French National Guard under the command of General Lafayette open fire on a crowd of radical Jacobins at the Champ de Mars, Paris, during the French Revolution, killing as many as 50 people.
1794
The sixteen Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne are executed 10 days prior to the end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
1918
On the orders of the Bolshevik Party carried out by Cheka, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his immediate family and retainers are murdered at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
1918
The RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the 705 survivors from the RMS Titanic, is sunk off Ireland by the German SMU U-55; 5 lives are lost.
1936
Spanish Civil War: An Armed Forces rebellion against the recently-elected leftist Popular Front government of Spain starts the civil war.
1938
Douglas Corrigan takes off from Brooklyn to fly the “wrong way” to Ireland and becomes known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.
1989
First flight of the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.
1996
TWA Flight 800: Off the coast of Long Island, New York, a Paris-bound TWA Boeing 747 explodes, killing all 230 on board.
1998
A diplomatic conference adopts the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing a permanent international court to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. 

***

“Those who dislike AI have essentially refused their own evolution. Those who condemn AI are themselves spitting upwards.”--Masayoshi Son

***

The Democratic Socialists of America are calling to scrap the U.S. executive branch, the Senate and the Electoral College in a radical manifesto aiming to end “the two-party system.”

The “Workers Deserve More” declaration would expand the House of Representatives, which would select the president and members of the Supreme Court — tearing up the Constitution and switching to a European-style parliamentary system.

Think of it as replacing Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton with Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and the consultants who came up with Platner.

***

The creation of the ICC (above), lauded by many for its supposed good intentions, is a genuine, Old World artifact.

In this particularly non-American event, self-appointed people appointed unelected bureaucrats to exert power over others. Like colonizers.

***

This is the anniversary of the murder of the Romanovs. It must be remembered that these child-killers were only fulfilling the Marxist vision of caste warfare. Exterminating a genetic enemy, root and branch. Of course, babies would have been easier....

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Equality and its Enemies

Apparently, income inequality--or yacht inequality or good looks inequality-- continues to stalk this great land, and we will meet it with relentless cosmetic intervention. But who really is the great threat to the average guy? Here's a refreshing and clarifying take:

"While discussions around income inequality often target billionaires — and now a trillionaire — it is crucial to recognize that the most profound economic control lies not in the hands of a few rich Americans such as Musk, but rather within the halls of government.

Consider Congress. This joint assembly of just 535 individuals — less than 0.00016% of the U.S. population — spends approximately $7 trillion every year, accounting for about 23% of the more than $31 trillion U.S. economy. This Congress leaves just 77% of the income for the remaining 99.99984% of us. The 535 members exert economic influence that dwarfs that of the wealthiest individuals.

Based on the latest Forbes 400 list, along with reasonable estimates for the next wealthiest 135 people, an estimate of the combined net worth of the wealthiest 535 individuals in the United States, the same number as members of Congress, is about $7.2 trillion, which translates roughly to around $400 billion in annual income.

Thus, the 535 members of Congress spend 17.5 times more annually than the richest Americans. But wait. It gets worse. While the richest Americans spend their time running their businesses and vacationing on their luxury yachts, they mostly leave the rest of us alone to live as we please.

These rich Americans mostly don’t even know each other, don’t have meetings to coordinate their actions and don’t meddle in our lives on a daily basis. In contrast, Congress meets regularly not only to decide how to spend those trillions but also to conspire to regulate so many facets of our lives: what drugs we can take, what health insurance we can buy and even what light bulbs we are allowed to use in our homes.

Everyone who thinks the rich should do more to solve our social and economic problems should instead be asking why Congress, with 17.5 times as much money to spend every single year, hasn’t yet solved any of these problems.

…..

If we are genuinely concerned about the concentration of wealth and power, our focus must shift — from the billionaires and trillionaire among us to our elected officials in Washington. They are the real oligarchs."--from Lawson

Is Socialism a Hate Crime?

On this Day:

622
The beginning of the Islamic calendar.
1054
Three Roman legates break relations between Western and Eastern Christian Churches through the act of placing an invalidly-issued Papal Bull of Excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during Saturday afternoon divine liturgy. Historians frequently describe the event as the start of the East-West Schism.
1779
American Revolutionary War: light infantry of the Continental Army seize a fortified British Army position in a midnight bayonet attack at the Battle of Stony Point.
1861
American Civil War: at the order of President Abraham Lincoln, Union troops begin a 25 mile march into Virginia for what will become The First Battle of Bull Run, the first major land battle of the war
1941
Joe DiMaggio hits safely for the 56th consecutive game, a streak that still stands as a MLB record.
1942
Holocaust: Vel‘ d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’d'Hiv): the government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13,152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz
1945
Manhattan Project: the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Happy Anniversary!
1945
World War II: the leaders of the three Allied nations, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, and Joseph Stalin, meet in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.
1948
The storming of the cockpit of the Miss Macao passenger seaplane, operated by a subsidiary of the Cathay Pacific Airways, marks the first aircraft hijacking of a commercial plane.
1950
Chaplain-Medic massacre: American POWs were massacred by North Korean Army.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11, the first manned space mission to land on the Moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
2007
2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake: an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 and 6.6 aftershock occurs off the Niigata coast of Japan killing 8 people, injuring at least 800, and damaging a nuclear power plant.

***

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.--tupi

***

Chipotle announced that it is opening its first location in Mexico

***

Conspiracy alert: Some of the coldest objects currently listed as stars in the Milky Way may not be stars at all. A new study by astrophysicist Amirnezam Amiri from the University of Arkansas suggests that these extremely cold objects could instead be giant energy-harvesting structures built by advanced alien civilisations. According to the research, these objects match the expected behaviour of engineered systems that collect a star's energy and release the leftover heat as infrared radiation.

***

At the centre of Earth is a solid metal sphere smaller than the Moon, probably heavier than it, and still accreting new layers from a surrounding ocean of liquid metal.

***

Lindsey Graham’s sister is to fill his South Carolina Senate seat. (Keep repeating, 'There is no hereditary, aristocratic class.)

***

Anthony Mantha, who scored a career-high 33 goals last season for the Pittsburgh Penguins, has signed a two-year contract worth $9.5 million with the New Jersey Devils, the latter team announced Wednesday.

***

The Houston Astros optioned highly-rated, former Pirate, Mike Burrows to Triple-A Sugar Land on Tuesday.

***

Is Socialism a Hate Crime?

Revolutionaries are forward-looking; they step over the bodies with their eyes on the horizon. But taking someone else's property and production is not passive; that's why it's always sold as an evolution, an inevitable and natural process. Nor are people recruited to work for the betterment of others; they are pressed into the service of the ship of state. That sounds much like another state, the state of slavery.

The socialist glibly talks around these grim realities by appealing to some vague construct like 'social justice', a recently coined fancy that is hard to attack because it is so insubstantial. But all of the various redistributive notions can be identified by their dark heart. Behind their curiously Christian-like vision breathes a very un-Christian-like motive: revenge.

Freedom, electronics, and anonymity have allowed the growth of absurd ideas that ordinary people in ordinary times would kill in their cradle. People will actually say, with a collective straight face, that some people are guilty of a crime other people committed before anybody thought it was a crime, and that a third party should be compensated for it. (Unsurprisingly, money, not incarceration, is the punishment.) A president is incapacitated for four years, and no one cries 'wolf.' And they offer him for reelection without shame and, when caught out, offer no contrition. We shut the entire social and economic world down for two years because some people got sick. A border declared closed is obviously not. An education system that denies it benefits teachers, not students, obviously does. Child rapists are pardoned. A Supreme Court justice cannot define a woman. Innuendo and rumor are presented unchallenged. A guy with a Nazi tattoo is nominated for the Senate. The culture is besieged by notions that are both silly and horrifying.

This is a perfect time for the resurrection of the socialists.

The communists have a reason for their revolution. True, it is inevitable. Like gravity, it's a law. It is also genetic. Who knew? Darwin didn't. But, apparently, some people have, like in the Indian caste system, certain inescapable genetic socio-economic-political groupings that their children share as well. These qualities do not go away. Or educated away. Nor can those so afflicted just go away and allow the socialist dawn to flower. Nor can they be driven away--or even put in camps. These regressives must be derascinated, branch and root. They must be killed, along with their children, to exterminate that regressive element that weighs, like a newly discovered group of moronic homo habilis living in their own camp, on the future. (You can see how this madness morphs so nicely into purges and pogroms.)

So the enemy is the productive and successful, and they must be killed so the society can become successful and productive.  

A philosophy whose time has come. Again.

Is Hormuz, Suez?

 On this Day:

1099
First Crusade: Christian soldiers take the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after the final assault of a difficult siege
1381
John Ball, a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt, is hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of King Richard II of England.
1685
Monmouth Rebellion: James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, is executed at Tower Hill, England, after his defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685.
1799
The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.
1806
Pike expedition: United States Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike begins an expedition from Fort Bellefontaine near St. Louis, Missouri, to explore the west.
1815
Napoleonic Wars: Napoléon Bonaparte surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon
1838
Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers the Divinity School Address at Harvard Divinity School, discounting Biblical miracles and declaring Jesus a great man, but not God. The Protestant community reacts with outrage.

1975
Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was both the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft and the last launch of a Saturn family rocket.

***

Socialism is "the result of an unrelenting negativity, carping spirit, and lack of appreciation for achievement and greatness." (cowan)

***

The Keres people, who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico, speak a language totally unrelated to that of their neighbors, and their origins have been frequently disputed.
Aliens.

***

Replacing the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Mamdani is going to straighten New Yorkers' ties and cancel their subscriptions.

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Roughly 27% of Americans — and 52% of men ages 18–49 — say they have an active account with an online sportsbook

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Researchers at the University of Linz in Austria demonstrated that the color red significantly decreases cognitive functioning in men. The combination of the colors red and yellow together can induce hunger, which has been capitalized on by several chain restaurants.

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Charitable gifts by individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations to U.S. charities increased 5.7% in current dollars (3.0% adjusted for inflation) to an estimated $617.20 billion in 2025.

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U.S. Treasury has borrowed $155 billion every month of this fiscal year—and is now paying $24 billion a week in interest on its debts.

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Is Hormuz, Suez?

A short history of the modern Middle East conflict and what Dalio in Fortune thinks is its direction and destructive outcome:

In late October 1956, Britain and France — alongside Israel — invaded Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital trade artery connecting Europe to Asia. Militarily, the operation was a success. Within days, Anglo-French forces controlled the northern portion of the canal, but it unraveled off the battlefield.

The United States, alarmed by the unilateral action and unwilling to allow its allies to destabilize the Cold War equilibrium, applied crushing pressure. Washington threatened to withhold emergency IMF loans as the British pound came under speculative attack. It was financial warfare, and it worked. Eden, facing a currency crisis, withdrew from Egypt in humiliation within weeks.

The military had won. The empire had lost. And what followed was a cascade that Dalio, in Bridgewater’s research, describes as the classic sequence of imperial decline: allies stopped deferring to London; creditors reassessed British debt; the pound sterling — which had served as the world’s reserve currency for over a century — began its long retreat. Within four years of the Suez Crisis, Britain had granted independence to Ghana, Malaya, Nigeria, and Cyprus. Within a decade, Harold Macmillan’s “winds of change” speech had formalized what Suez had revealed: the British Empire was in managed retreat, not strategic expansion.

Yet certainly Britain had exceeded anyone's expectations. A tiny island ruled the waves and the world as a military leader, a commercial powerhouse.

And it still is. Today, Britain is a prosperous, mid-sized economy of nearly 70 million people, with a GDP that ranks fifth globally — behind the United States, China, Germany, and Japan. It is a respected member of NATO and the G7, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and home to London, one of the world’s great financial centers. But its “special relationship” with the U.S. is not the same as it was before the Suez Crisis.

Dalio compared the Hormuz standoff directly to the Suez crisis in March. “We are in the early stages of a world war that isn’t going to end any time soon,” he wrote on his Substack — arguing the Iran conflict was not a standalone episode but a systemic reorganization of global power, one in which the financial and military contests are inseparable.

Two key factors behind the decline are the “petrodollar” system and the national debt. To get the former, you have to flash forward to a 1974 handshake that the public wouldn’t learn about for another 42 years.

President Nixon had dispatched Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret arrangement. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil exclusively in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees. Other OPEC members followed, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world and giving rise to the “petrodollar” system.

Britain’s pound had been the anchor of global trade since the Napoleonic era; it took two world wars, a Great Depression, and a humiliation in Egypt to finish it off. The dollar’s own arc runs roughly 80 years, from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, where the victorious United States anchored the postwar monetary order to a simple promise: every dollar was redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. It mutated again in 1971, when the costs of Vietnam and the Great Society had so strained American finances that Nixon unilaterally slammed the gold window shut — ending dollar convertibility overnight and untethering the currency from any hard constraint. What replaced the gold anchor was something more abstract and more fragile: the credibility of American power itself, significantly boosted by the forthcoming secret Petrodollar deal.

What is different now — what makes the Iran war more than just another Middle East misadventure — is the convergence: a $39 trillion debt load, a 30-year low in the dollar’s share of foreign reserves, a physically threatened petrodollar chokepoint, and a domestic political climate that has made endurance nearly impossible.

7/15/26