From Pipe-Dreams to Pipe Bombs and Back

 On this day (yesterday, actually):

1533
Atahualpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, dies by strangulation at the hands of Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors. His death marks the end of 300 years of Inca civilization.
1581
Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (Act of Abjuration): the northern Low Countries declare their independence from the Spanish king, Philip II.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid ends – At Salineville, Ohio, Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan and 360 of his volunteers are captured by Union forces.
1941
World War II: in response to the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the seizure of all Japanese assets in the United States.
1944
The first German V-2 rocket hits Great Britain.
1944
World War II: the Soviet army enters Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine, liberating it from the Nazis. Only 300 Jews survive out of 160,000 living in Lviv prior to occupation.
1945
The Labour Party wins the United Kingdom general election of July 5 by a landslide, removing Winston Churchill from power.
1945
The Potsdam Declaration is signed in Potsdam, Germany.
1953
Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle orders an anti-polygamy law enforcement crackdown on residents of Short Creek, Arizona, which becomes known as the Short Creek Raid.

1953

Fidel Castro leads an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, thus beginning the Cuban Revolution. The movement took the name of the date: 26th of July Movement
1956
Following the World Bank’s refusal to fund building the Aswan High Dam, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal sparking international condemnation.
1989
A federal grand jury indicts Cornell University student Robert T. Morris, Jr. for releasing the Morris worm, thus becoming the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

***

Random attacks prove only that the state cannot protect its citizens, challenging the citizenry's basic belief.

***

Three people were killed and four others wounded in a shooting at a food festival near Seattle's Space Needle on Sunday evening, police said. A suspect was arrested, and another was being sought, they said.
Seattle Assistant Police Chief Tyrone Davis said at a late-night press conference that the incident involved two people they believe were shooting at each other. One was taken into custody, and the other was still on the loose.

***

Where is the $800 million de Blasio gave his wife?

***

Global households added a record $40 trillion in wealth in 2025, pushing total household net worth to $570 trillion—a 7.3% jump that outpaced the 5.9% average growth rate seen since 2000—as the world’s overall balance sheet of assets swelled to nearly $1.8 quadrillion, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s newly released “Global Balance Sheet 2026: Imbalance and Divergence” report.

These are astonishing numbers for a world crying out for revolution.

***

The Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that “The Roberts Court sees only white.” It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that “overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.”
This is from a court.

***

From Pipe-Dreams to Pipe Bombs and Back

Communism was doomed from its inception. Adherents who sneered at the "invisible hand" saw a mysterious invisible force in history that picked its fights toward an idyllic endpoint of incentive-less, motiveless production of peace and wealth, leaving behind a path littered with the bodies of those poor souls only placed on this earth to facilitate as antagonists to communism's great march. This strange, murderous idealism violated all the laws of human reality yet staggered on, storming trenches, deracinating appropriate families, and slashing and burning the present to plant the seeds of the future. It is said that it attracted the idealist--but who could say its mayhem and murderous creed was, in any way, idealistic? No, it attracted the foolish, the embittered, the cynically ambitious, the irrational, and the overtly psychopathic, who unsurprisingly rose in its hierarchy. But eventually, after years of misery and death, the cause flagged, failed, and died.

The death of communism was perfectly predictable, and those critics who predicted it can be rightfully proud. But they must be surprised by its stubborn death throes. How many people were drafted into its horrible, morbid experiment? How many had to die to prove this was a stupid, unworkable, and unnatural pipe-dream? And what are the responsibilities of those clear-thinking observers who coolly watched this nightmare without interfering? After all, it took the Russian communist state three generations to die.

The cockroach has survived by perfecting itself and enduring; Marxism has survived by entirely changing. It no longer speaks to the proletariat and their work; it speaks to the landed, to those whose expensive educations, trust funds and parents' influence are inadequate for their ambitions.

What used to be a fierce warfare born from convoluted economics and history has become simple sociology and envy. We are no longer required to rise up against inevitable historical enemies; those enemies, disappointed and bitter, have become the oppressed. Their enemy is social imbalance; their engines are bigotry and unequal outcome. These social distortions must be righted for the good of 'the Commons' by those of vision and fortitude.

After years of defeats, the upper class wants their aristocracy back.

Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

 

On this day:
1054
Siward, Earl of Northumbria invades Scotland and defeats Macbeth, King of Scotland, somewhere north of the Firth of Forth.
1794
French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre is arrested after encouraging the execution of more than 17,000 “enemies of the Revolution”.
1919
The Chicago Race Riot erupts after a racial incident occurred on a South Side beach, leading to 38 fatalities and 537 injuries over a five-day period.
1964
Vietnam War: 5,000 more American military advisers are sent to South Vietnam bringing the total number of United States forces in Vietnam to 21,000.
1974
Watergate Scandal: the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee votes 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment (for obstruction of justice) against President Richard Nixon.
1996
Centennial Olympic Park bombing: in Atlanta, United States, a pipe bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics. One woman (Alice Hawthorne) is killed, and a cameraman suffers a heart attack fleeing the scene. 111 are injured.
2005
STS-114: NASA grounds the Space Shuttle, pending an investigation of the continuing problem with the shedding of foam insulation from the external fuel tank. During ascent, the external tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery sheds a piece of foam slightly smaller than the piece that caused the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; this foam does not strike the spacecraft.

***

The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night. It may not matter much now, but as the children grow up and assume a larger role in the world, it will.-- Cowen

***

Two of the most substantially used words in the current global vocabulary of mathematics and computing come from the same 9th-century Persian scholar working in the same Baghdad library across approximately the same twenty-year period between 813 and 833 CE.


The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name.

***

The Pirates lost 11-0 to the Cubs last night in front of a full stadium.

***

Zakaria's Sunday editorial on CNN is often good. Today it was not, but his interview with Microsoft's CEO Nadella was really worth watching.

***

Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

In today's gospel, more parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a pearl of great price. These are interesting similes, physical representations of the spiritual. And strange suggestions. Both are appropriated, not created, found and not earned. More, they are both of oblique origin; the treasure is someone else's, the pearl the reaction to an impurity.

Maybe he meant these treasures were within.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas

Satstats

On this day:

306
Constantine I is proclaimed Roman emperor by his troops.
1603
James VI of Scotland is crowned as king of England (James I of England), bringing the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into personal union. Political union would occur in 1707.
1609
The English ship Sea Venture, en route to Virginia, is deliberately driven ashore during a storm at Bermuda to prevent its sinking; the survivors go on to found a new colony there.
1755
British governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council order the deportation of the Acadians. Thousands of Acadians are sent to the British Colonies in America, France and England. Some later move to Louisiana, while others resettle in New Brunswick.
1759
French and Indian War: in Western New York, British forces capture Fort Niagara from the French, who subsequently abandon Fort Rouillé.
1783
American Revolutionary War: The war’s last action, the Siege of Cuddalore, is ended by a preliminary peace agreement.
1799
At Aboukir in Egypt, Napoleon I of France defeats 10,000 Ottomans under Mustafa Pasha.
1814
War of 1812: Battle of Lundy’s Lane – reinforcements arrive near Niagara Falls for General Riall’s British and Canadian forces and a bloody, all-night battle with Jacob Brown’s Americans commences at 18.00; the Americans retreat to Fort Erie.
1861
American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the war is being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
1934
The Nazis assassinate Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in a failed coup attempt.
1943
World War II: Benito Mussolini is forced out of office by his own Italian Grand Council and is replaced by Pietro Badoglio.
1978
Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby” is born.
1993
Israel launches a massive attack against Lebanon in what the Israelis call Operation Accountability, and the Lebanese call Seven-Day War.
1994
Israel and Jordan sign the Washington Declaration, which formally ends the state of war that had existed between the nations since 1948.

***

"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.

***

Who could have imagined that the marketplace would create price pressures in warfare? See the Barracuda missile.


***

Source:Los Alamos National Laboratory Summary:

Researchers have created quantum control techniques that can make a system appear to run backward in time. By precisely managing quantum measurements, they can reshape the system's arrow of time and even harvest energy from the measurement process itself. The breakthrough could lead to more powerful quantum computers, quantum batteries, and other advanced technologies.

***

So Platner was nominated by Maine voters, but that nomination was cancelled by the Democrat party, which will now choose the new nominee. Just like the Biden-to-Harris nomination/handoff. 

Ah, democracy.

***

Another madman in the streets, this one with a screwdriver and a knife. He stabbed a Jewish guy and an Asian.

Why is it being reported as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel crime? Why is the Asian guy eclipsed?

***

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, has been removed from office after the court’s governing body concluded in June that he had committed serious misconduct in connection with allegations of sexual abuse. 

That will give the Netanyahu warrant a lot of credence.

***

Satstats

Burry revealed in a recent post that he's passed the milestone of 300,000 subscribers

***

We are paid more and have an unemployment rate of 4.3% while Europeans are paid less and have an unemployment rate of 6.0%


***

Between 2022 and 2023, left-wing governments held power in 13 countries across Latin America. Today, that number has collapsed to roughly five.

***

According to Pew Research Center data from 2025, public agreement with Republicans on handling crime has risen from 40 percent in 2023 to 45 percent. Over the same period, agreement with Democrats fell from 30 to 28 percent.

***

An estimated 24.6 million older Americans, or 44% of the country's retirement-age population, depend on the Social Security program for 100% of their income.

***

Transgender national vs. state stats:

0.98 percent of minors—1.51 percent of girls and 0.46 percent of boys—received a “transgender-related diagnosis” (typically “gender dysphoria”) 2015-2023. In other words, about one in every 65 adolescent girls in Oregon is a potential candidate for medical “sex reassignment.”
When the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) was published in 2013, it reported a diagnostic prevalence of gender dysphoria among adults as 0.002 percent to 0.003 percent for females and 0.005 percent to 0.014 percent for males.
Last year, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics reported that approximately one in 1,000 American teens was prescribed cross-sex hormones by age 17. The Oregon rate was two to three times higher than that. Indeed, a closer look at the data revealed that hormone prescriptions in Oregon were four to five times the national rate among 14- and 15-year-olds, while puberty-blocker uptake was up to six times the national rate at age 14. Thus, teens in Oregon are not only being medicalized more, but also at earlier ages.

Diagnostic trends, Oregon versus national

***

The U.S. military was the world's 17th largest in April 1917, smaller (less than 250,000) than Romania's, and smaller than Britain's casualties in one battle. America's military became a melting pot for a nation in which one-third of the population had been born abroad or whose parents had been. Forty-three languages were spoken in one Army division raised in New York. (Will)

That "melting pot" unleashed a flu pandemic that killed more people in a year — somewhere between 20 million and 50 million — than the war killed in four years.

***

The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

O. Henry

On this day, many things:

1148
Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.
1411
Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland, takes place.
1487
Citizens of Leeuwarden, Netherlands strike against ban on foreign beer.
1534
French explorer Jacques Cartier plants a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and takes possession of the territory in the name of Francis I of France.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and is replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1715
A Spanish treasure fleet of 10 ships under Admiral Ubilla leaves Havana, Cuba for Spain. Seven days later, 9 of them sink in a storm off the coast of Florida. A few centuries later, treasure is salvaged from these wrecks.
1847
After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City. Celebrations of this event include the Pioneer Day Utah state holiday and the Days of '47 Parade.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Kernstown – Confederate General Jubal Anderson Early defeats Union troops led by General George Crook in an effort to keep them out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1901
O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank.
1911
Hiram Bingham III re-discovers Machu Picchu, “the Lost City of the Incas”. Was it lost?
1915
The passenger ship S.S. Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. How is that possible?
1922
The draft of the British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; and which came into effect on 26 September 1923. The beginning of the end.
1923
The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1929
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers). This is truly precious.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian airplanes bomb Hamburg by night, those of the Americans by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974
Watergate scandal: the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
And, finally, 2009
The MV Arctic Sea, reportedly carrying a cargo of timber, is allegedly hijacked in the North Sea by pirates, but much speculation remains as to the actual cargo and events. An astonishing story that might be gun-running.

***

“It’s very hard to distinguish AI security incidents from AI marketing, and that’s actually a big problem going forward,” --Matthew Green, a security expert at Johns Hopkins University.

***

The “paperclip maximiser” is a thought experiment invented by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003.

He describes a scenario in which people invent an AI whose only goal is to make as many paperclips as possible. But he illustrates how that could quickly become horrifying: it might wipe out the humans that could potentially switch it off and stop it making paperclips, for instance, or it could realise that the human body contains material that could be turned into paperclips and so decide to harvest them and use them for that.

***

A six-year-old, who had a genetic mutation that affected her neurodevelopment, received a gene therapy treatment designed to correct the underlying defect at Shanghai Xinhua Hospital in March 2025, according to an investigation by Science and Retraction Watch. She died days later from a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, the magazine reported, citing documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents.

***

Has anyone heard a coherent, sensible argument against Voter ID laws?

***

Only two companies from the Dow Industrial Average in 1976 remain on the Dow today, Procter & Gamble and Chevron, nee Standard Oil.

***

What in heaven's name is the government doing testing the testosterone levels of its citizens?

***

O. Henry

This day has some gravity. The S.S. Eastland. Operation Gomorrah. The Kellogg-Briand Pact. The British Mandate. The return of Apollo 11.  The MV Arctic Sea hijacking. 

And O. Henry, the talented author, was released from prison on this day.

O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of “The Gift of the Magi,” was one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation. His legacy is celebrated every year by the O. Henry Prize for Fiction. He got his start in prison, while serving time for embezzling funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, where he had worked as a teller.

Much later, a 1916 report characterized the bank in question as “carelessly managed,” and revealed that “the patrons used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars and say a week later, ‘Porter, I took out $200, last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to.’” The Times report claims that Porter, who by the time he was charged had moved to Houston and taken a job as a columnist with The Daily Post, resigned before one of the “misappropriations with which he was charged,” and that if he had simply gone back to Austin when he was summoned to stand trial, he would have been acquitted.

Instead, he took a train to New Orleans, and then hopped on a fruit steamer headed for Honduras, where the law could not reach him. But in February of 1897, he learned that his wife was very ill, and he returned to the States to care for her. His wife died in July, and Porter was convicted the following year, and in March 1898, sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement.

In prison, Porter “did his first serious literary work,” as the Times puts it. In order to be able to send money home to support his daughter Margaret, he wrote and published 14 short stories, under pen names, including the one with which he would become famous: O. Henry.

Porter was released early for good behavior on July 24, 1901, and returned to Pittsburgh to live with his daughter and his in-laws, before moving on to New York City. Most importantly, he kept writing, and in 1904 published his first collection of short stories, Cabbages and Kings, followed two years later by The Four Million, which would include some of his most enduring tales, including “The Gift of the Magi.” He was incredibly prolific; he would keep publishing until he died in 1910.
(from Lit Hub)

Democracy Before Socialism

On this day

1821
While the Mora Rebellion continued, Greeks captured Monemvasia Castle and massacred nearly 3000 Turkish inhabitants.
1903
The Ford Motor Company sells its first car.
1914
Austria-Hungary issues an ultimatum to Serbia demanding Serbia to allow the Austrians to determine who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbia will reject those demands, and Austria will declare war on July 28.
1929
The Fascist government in Italy bans the use of foreign words.
1936
In Catalonia, Spain, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia is founded through the merger of Socialist and Communist parties.
1967
12th Street Riot: in Detroit, Michigan, one of the worst riots in United States history begins on 12th Street in the predominantly African American inner city. It will leave 43 killed, 342 injured, and 1,400 buildings burned.
1968
Glenville Shootout: in Cleveland, Ohio, a violent shootout between a Black Militant organization led by Ahmed Evans and the Cleveland Police Department occurs. During the shootout, a riot begins and lasts for five days.
1968
The only successful hijacking of an El Al aircraft takes place when a Boeing 707 carrying 10 crew and 38 passengers is taken over by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The aircraft was en route from Rome, Italy, to Lod, Israel.
1984
Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown after nude photos of her appeared in Penthouse magazine.
1992
A Vatican commission, led by Joseph Ratzinger, establishes that it is necessary to limit the rights of homosexual people and non-married couples.

***

The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the reach of mere majorities. We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them." (from somewhere)

 

***

With all we have seen, why would we assume that elections are not tampered with?

***

OpenAI claimed responsibility for a security breach of the model platform Hugging Face, in which an agent, driven by a combination of OpenAI models, compromised the platform's infrastructure, while internally testing models on ExploitGym, a benchmark for cybersecurity capabilities. That is to say, in a test sequence to assess a defense program, it breached and attacked it.
We are giving an infant a handgun.

***

There is an effort in Hong Kong to punish booksellers. Several stores have been raided and workers there imprisoned. (A popular protest t-shirt reads "I am a bookstore employee.")
Hong Kong’s security chief, Chris Tang, said that booksellers had a responsibility to ensure their books were lawful, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick”.
So the totalitarian sterilizes our world to keep us safe.

***

Vogue's Culture Writer is a socialist. Vogue.

***

Remember, democracy fans, you chose Katie Porter and the Maine Nazi. What's next?

***

Democracy Before Socialism

The rising interest in "Democratic Socialism" is likely due to several factors, none of them flattering. It provides another mindless answer to the unending and robotic political drone for 'change.' It masquerades as a solution for inept and disheartened lives. (Current demographics imply the true Left in America are the well-educated unsuccessful.)

Contributing to these fantasies is the underlying ignorance as to what a commitment to "democratic socialism" really means. The current citizens, despite access to immeasurable volumes of information, simply have no idea the demon they are embracing.

But they have the marketing down. Democratic sounds modern and up-to-date. And responsive. But there is nothing inherently good or decent in democracy. Hitler was elected.

Nor does the majority have some moral high ground. Democracy is only a process by which leadership is selected; a means. It is the culture and those elected to lead it that always do the damage. The nature and value of a culture and its governing is not measured by how it is chosen but by what that culture holds dear.

The demand that the majority have its way will never end. That's why the Constitution was written and why it has been such a success. Majority vote is not sacred without a hard, basic framework of individual rights, which majority vote always intentionally tries to supersede. Otherwise, we would glorify lynching and gang rape. Doing something by vote is neither right nor good any more than voting to sack Canada is. 

A majority vote is only as meaningful as the guidelines that restrain it.

Socialism is a silly idea, but it is not made any less silly--or given any more dignity--by voting for it. Nor is a bad idea made any better by dying for it.

Artificial Insemination

 On this day:

1099
First Crusade: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1298
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Falkirk – King Edward I of England and his longbowmen defeat William Wallace and his Scottish schiltrons outside the town of Falkirk.
1706
The Acts of Union 1707 are agreed upon by commissioners from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, which, when passed by each country’s Parliaments, lead to the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1797
Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Battle between Spanish and British naval forces during the French Revolutionary Wars. During the Battle, Rear-Admiral Nelson is wounded in the arm and the arm had to be partially amputated.
1937
New Deal: the United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
1942
Holocaust: the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
1946
King David Hotel bombing: a Zionist underground organisation, the Irgun, bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the civil administration and military headquarters for Mandate Palestine, resulting in 91 deaths.
2003
Members of 101st Airborne of the United States, aided by Special Forces, attack a compound in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, along with Mustapha Hussein, Qusay’s 14-year-old son, and a bodyguard.
2005
Jean Charles de Menezes is killed by police as the hunt begins for the London Bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the 21 July 2005 London bombings.
2011
Norway is the victim of twin terror attacks, the first being a bomb blast which targeted government buildings in central Oslo, the second being a massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utøya.

***

Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies.--Lemieux

***

How are Kash Patel's blinking lessons going?

***

Two National Institutes of Health researchers have been charged with allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying to federal authorities.

Vincent Munster, chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, and research fellow Claude Kwe were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after returning from the Republic of Congo.

***

There is an undercurrent of criticism toward Lionel Messi because he hasn't publicly addressed the unspoken national generalizations about Argentina's unspoken racial generalizations.

***

A whale population spontaneously drops its entire repertoire every few years and collectively adopts an entirely new song from thousands of miles away—long-range cultural transmission outside humanity.

***

Artificial Insemination

Radio belly. Cat shovel.

Peculiar junctions of normal adjectives and nouns are always a tipoff; you are dealing with either a Beat poet or a progressive. The poet jars, the progressive inculcates.

With a progressive, one term is being infused with the other. A hybrid is being created, and the alloy is usually a monster. "Health care justice." "The criminal community." "Democratic socialism." Linguistic square pegs are forced into conceptual round holes.

Our lives have become so inundated with opinion and conflict that we are becoming calloused. Do illegal immigrants demand the assumption of innocence? Does an illegal immigrant have to commit another crime before we take him seriously? Can a vicious criminal be abused by the law? Are 'fraudsters' different from thieves? Our whole nation is founded on the right of the individual to defy the majority; does that empower a crazy foreign student?

So we suffer through tortuous legal wranglings and debates. And we know that the system is geared to fairness, so we let these debates play themselves out. A man sues a casual girlfriend for alimony, a group demands dolphin voting rights--and we get up and go to work. We turn the page.

These verbal shotgun marriages wear us down. What is 'social justice," really? The right of people to join a club? To marry whoever you want? To attend any school? It's like hybridization across species; you know the product will be sterile anyway.

What follows is an event reported by Megan McArdle in the WashPo. That this is not a topic of daily conversation is proof of the notion's malignancy.

"In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.

This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories."

In the political laboratory, no experiment is innocuous, no noble lie without consequence, particularly as the fifth column and the press make the inane or the revolutionary routine.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.