The Nobles and Nobility

On this day:
1305
William Wallace, who led the Scottish resistance against England, is captured by the English near Glasgow and transported to London where he is put on trial and executed.
1583
Sir Humphrey Gilbert establishes the first English colony in North America, at what is now St John’s, Newfoundland.
1620
The Mayflower departs from Southampton, England on its first attempt to reach North America.
1689
1,500 Iroquois attack the village of Lachine in New France.
1735
Freedom of the press: New York Weekly Journal writer John Peter Zenger is acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, on the basis that what he had published was true.
1763
Pontiac’s War: Battle of Bushy Run – British forces led by Henry Bouquet defeat Chief Pontiac’s Indians at Bushy Run.
1862
American Civil War: Battle of Baton Rouge – along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Confederate troops drive Union forces back into the city.
1864
American Civil War: the Battle of Mobile Bay begins – at Mobile Bay near Mobile, Alabama, Admiral David Farragut leads a Union flotilla through Confederate defenses and seals one of the last major Southern ports.
1884
The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island) in New York Harbor.
1916
World War I: Battle of Romani – Allied forces, under the command of Archibald Murray, defeat an attacking Ottoman army under the command of Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, securing the Suez Canal and beginning the Ottoman retreat from the Sinai Peninsula.
1944
World War II: The Nazis begin a three-day massacre of anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000 civilians and prisoners of war in Wola, Poland.
1979
In Afghanistan, Maoists undertake an attempted military uprising.
1981
Ronald Reagan fires 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work.

***

“Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials”--some guy named Climperman

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The rising value of women’s time is largely counterbalanced by declining motherhood penalties in earnings and work hours, so forgone market work adds little to relative cost growth.--a paper that believes this is clear.

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Kenny Pickett is on his fifth NFL team since entering the 2022 NFL draft. Pickett signed a $4 million contract with Carolina in March.

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This year, like last year, “the European Union will again make more money from fining US tech companies than from the total tax income from Europe’s own public tech companies!”
Read that again.

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The New Yorker has an article on "Discrimination against the unattractive"

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The Nobles and Nobility

Fauci is beginning to change before our eyes into a weird alloy of his public service past and his new, careless and duplicitious present. But
Fauci, a man of parts, should raise some questions as to where the real dangers to us poor working stiffs come from. Is it the businessman? The capitalist? The farmer? Even the soldier? This will prove to be a tough assessment because the sort-of-free-Press is intimately involved in Fauci's image.

This quote is from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith is not a capitalist apologist but a true philosopher, an integral part of the Scottish Enlightenment that included Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. His Moral Sentiments was viewed at the time as being more important than his economic writings.

"The violence and injustice of great conquerors are often regarded with foolish wonder and admiration; those of petty thieves, robbers, and murderers, with contempt, hatred, and even horror upon all occasions. The former, though they are a hundred times more mischievous and destructive, yet when successful, they often pass for deeds of the most heroic magnanimity. The latter are always viewed with hatred and aversion, as the follies, as well as the crimes, of the lowest and most worthless of mankind. The injustice of the former is certainly, at least, as great as that of the latter; but the folly and imprudence are not near so great. A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes through the world with much more credit than he deserves."

"A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes through the world with much more credit than he deserves." And so the high-minded and the high-born are forgiven. 

We learn in school of warriors and warlords, the kindly beard-stroking teachers of homicidal philosophies--the cold and heartless man of parts and influence--and not the thoughtful, learned man of goodwill striving for a noble life. And, in any culture, what good can come of that?

Fauci versus Kennedy

 

On this day:

70
The destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans.
1265
Second Barons’ War: Battle of Evesham – the army of Prince Edward (the future king Edward I of England) defeats the forces of rebellious barons led by Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, killing de Montfort and many of his allies.
1327
First War of Scottish Independence: James Douglas leads a raid into Weardale and almost kills Edward III of England.
1704
War of the Spanish Succession: Gibraltar is captured by an English and Dutch fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir George Rooke and allied with Archduke Charles.
1789
In France, members of the National Constituent Assembly take an oath to end feudalism and abandon their privileges.
1914
World War I: Germany invades Belgium. In response, the United Kingdom declares war on Germany. The United States declare their neutrality.
1964
American civil rights movement: civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are found dead in Mississippi after disappearing on June 21.
1964
Gulf of Tonkin Incident: U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy report coming under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.

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"The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore. Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it."--The French mission to the UN groping for some invisible-to-most moral high ground

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The heavy drone saturation on the battlefield has prevented either side from capturing any meaningful territory in years. What seems more impactful now are deep strikes: for Ukraine, mid- to long-range drone attacks on Russian logistics, supply routes, and energy infrastructure.--Business Insider field report from Ukraine

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Pirates:

Keller out for the year.

Valdez walked more than any other NL player since the All-Star Game

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Information leaked from DOD states the military hardware stores--particularly drones and missiles-- have been bled down to critical levels. Several news outlets published this. Had the average citizen revealed such information, would he be a spy? Are governmental and journalist personnel held to different standards?

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Fauci versus Kennedy 

Rival political positions have rarely had such tarnished champions. Fauci is now a hero for standing up to the Senate and taking the Fifth countless times, and Kennedy, recovering from a 'troubled past' for leading a very important government department eccentrically. Both have been symbolically publicly dueling, the former in a Senate hearing, the latter on Dana Bash's TV show.

Which of these sorcerer's apprentices is most admirable?

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaking about the measles vaccine, said that “people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves. And what we need to do is give them the best information and encourage them to vaccinate. The vaccine does stop the spread of the disease.”

But Kennedy also downplayed the safety of the vaccine and wrongly told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that measles outbreaks could be driven in part by people who have waning immunity from the vaccine.

There’s some dispute among experts about how much protection may wane, if at all. However, they all agree that in most cases, the vaccine confers lifelong immunity against the virus.

The current outbreak “is absolutely being driven and started by unvaccinated individuals,” said Dr. Michael Mina, chief scientific officer of the telehealth company eMed and an expert in the epidemiology, immunology and spread of infectious disease.

Even those who may have waning immunity will not transmit large amounts of virus, he said.

This is only the fifth year since 2000 that an outbreak has led to more than 100 cases and only the third year with more than 200 cases.

“The goal of a vaccine is to induce the immunity that is a consequence of natural infection without paying the price of natural infection,” Offit said.

The price of infection can be high: One in five unvaccinated people with measles will be hospitalized, 1 in 20 children with measles will develop pneumonia, and 1 in 1,000 children with measles will develop encephalitis or swelling of the brain.

One to three in 1,000 children who have measles will die from complications, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kennedy also inaccurately said vaccine-induced immunity may not be passed through breast milk to nursing infants the way natural immunity is.

“He is wrong. Maternal antibody transfer is a key form of neonatal protection against infectious diseases,” said Dr. Lynn Yee, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. “Even when a mother had vaccination many years ago, antibodies still transfer.”

Kennedy also incorrectly described adverse events from the MMR vaccine, saying it “causes deaths every year. … It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes: encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”

Measles infection can cause encephalitis and blindness, but only a handful of these kinds of illnesses related to vaccination have ever been reported.

A study in which the US Food and Drug Administration and the CDC reviewed reports from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, in addition to medical records, death certificates, and autopsy reports, did not find evidence to suggest “a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and death.”

Fauci's impact was far more reaching, and we know only the most glaring of inconsistencies. Still, it is quite obvious in his tenure as the nation's chief physician that neither hard science nor the public's health were very high on his priority list.

All this is in the setting of Fauci's recent testimony. And the Dems, with their Press PR department, are outraged. Articles and interviews compare Fauci, a man who has dedicated his life to public service, with Kennedy, who is, charitably, a nutball.

It's almost as if Fauci had not linked America to a lab run by autocratic sociopaths and facilitated the genetic engineering of a novel virus that then killed 15 million people in what, in most situations, would be a war crime, and we, the hapless American employers, would be accomplices.

The Scarce and the Non-scarce

On this day:

1492
Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain.
1852
Harvard wins the first Boat Race between Yale and Harvard. The race is also the first American intercollegiate athletic event
1914
World War I: Germany declares war against France.
1921
Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis confirms the ban of the eight Chicago Black Sox, the day after they were acquitted by a Chicago court.
1934
Adolf Hitler becomes the supreme leader of Germany by joining the offices of President and Chancellor into Führer.
1948
Whittaker Chambers accuses Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.

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"The future is disorder. A door like this had cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."--Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

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In the top of the sixth inning, Arizona Diamondbacks utility man Tim Tawa attempted to bunt for a base hit with Guardians ace Gavin Williams working on a perfect game. Chaos followed. Then a single.

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Why have grocery stores at all? Why not just give food away?

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Are the scientists on the Shroud of Turin looking for the DNA of God?

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According to Ken Rosenthal and Will Sammon of The Athletic, the Pirates remain active in trade discussions involving not only bullpen help but also a right-handed-hitting outfielder. That looks like a team that thinks they can play in the playoffs. The team that played this weekend did not.

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The Scarce and the Non-scarce


Economics is the study of the allocation of limited resources.

In an article in AIER, Tucker discusses Munger's explanation of the distinctions between capitalism and socialism. The pro-capitalist camp believes in ownership, the evolution of prices, and production structures for scarce goods. There is no better, more peaceful, more productive way to deal with the fact that sometimes there is not enough of everything for everyone. The best solution is to adopt a peaceful method of exchange and production, allowing for more wealth to be distributed among everyone over time.

At the same time, capitalists believe in the universal sharing of non-scarce goods like knowledge. This distinction between scarce and non-scarce helps explain so much about the world around us. We have to learn to distinguish them so that we can apply tools of production and allocation in the proper way. Scarce goods absolutely require the application of economizing; non-scarce goods can be freely and expansively shared without the need for economizing.

The socialist left makes a mess of this distinction, mixing up the two things. They want socialism for scarce goods and private ownership for non-scarce goods. How so? They want free college for everyone, health care for everyone, food for everyone, and they advocate all this with near-zero appreciation for the reality that these are scarce goods and so there are massive costs associated with these plans, and everyone must bear them, not to mention endless force to make people do what they would otherwise not want to do.

At the same time, these same people apply the limitations of scarcity where it need not apply. They say there can be no cultural appropriation even though culture is a non-scarce good that is malleable and universally shareable. They demand identity politics even though identity is something anyone can adopt without taking away anything from anyone else. Identity is a non-scarce good and need not be commodified like a physical good.

Socialists are mostly intellectuals. Their most valued personal production is within the realm of ideas. They share these ideas constantly with anyone who will listen. Their goal is to seek influence, which can occur without the need for allocating and apportioning their product. They are producing goods that are non-scarce.
They can’t understand why doctors, colleges, food growers, and factories cannot do the same. The problem of scarcity does not present itself in their profession, so they remain oblivious to the reality that scarcity exists for every single good other than ideas.

Why the rising popularity of socialism? Munger suggests, “Much of the new wealth is digital, and takes the form of music, movies, or other entertainment or software, code that once written down can be reproduced at no cost and transmitted worldwide essentially for free.”

The great migration from the physical world to the digital world has vastly expanded the realm and pool of non-scarce wealth. That’s a wonderful thing. But this might tempt intellectuals to believe the same thing can happen in the physical world. And yet no matter how much we digitize, it doesn’t obliterate the essential distinction between scarce and non-scarce.

If a Twitter post can be universally distributed, why not vegan dinners and brain surgeries? Now you know the answer; it is the difference between scarce and non-scarce. One can be shared into infinity and the other can't. That’s a huge difference. And those rules will not change whether or not a person understands them.

Not understanding this will sentence a person to struggle with the square peg and the round hole forever, with ever-increasing energy.

If we can’t get that straight, we can never learn to think rationally about economics. Even worse, failing to understand this and barreling ahead, mixing the two up, we can destroy both prosperity and liberty.

Sunday/Picnic

On this day:
216 BC
Second Punic War: Battle of Cannae – The Carthaginian army led by Hannibal defeats a numerically superior Roman army under the command of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro.
338 BC
A Macedonian army led by Philip II defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony in Greece and the Aegean.
1776
The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence took place.
Although the Second Continental Congress declared its intention for independence on July 2, 1776, no one signed the Declaration of Independence that day. Congress did sign the Lee Resolution, named after Virginian Richard Henry Lee, on July 2. This resolution had three parts: separating from the British Crown, a call to form foreign alliances, and a plan for confederation. Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4, 1776, and the call for freedom was announced at Independence Hall with the Liberty Bell. Americans celebrated as news spread throughout the newly independent states. Although independence had been declared, delegates of the Continental Congress had not yet signed the document. On August 2, 1776, when most delegates signed the Declaration, it became official.
1798
French Revolutionary Wars: the Battle of the Nile concludes in a British victory.
1869

Japan’s samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant class system (Shinōkōshō) is abolished as part of the Meiji Restoration reforms.
Edo Japan frequently diverged from the Shinōkōshō model. Wealthy merchants exercised influence, financially struggling samurai took secondary jobs, and farmers engaged in side industries or trade. Interaction across social categories was common, particularly in cities.
1934
Gleichschaltung: Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany.
1939
Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.
1945
World War II: the Potsdam Conference, at which the Allied Powers discuss the future of defeated Germany, is concluded.
1964
Vietnam War: Gulf of Tonkin incident – North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly fire on the U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy.
1990
Iraq invades Kuwait, eventually leading to the Gulf War.

***

America is not a hiding place or a refugee camp; it is a place of purpose.

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Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years.

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America did not become the richest nation in history because Washington, D.C., was exceptionally good at directing the economy. It thrived because its institutions largely prevented Washington from interfering. The rule of law and constitutional limits have allowed millions of individuals to make sound decisions that no central authority could possibly coordinate.--deRugy

***

Biden’s interviews with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, conducted four years before he would be elected president, show that Biden was already having trouble remembering names and dates.

***

At the age of three, Jason Arday was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay. He was unable to speak until he was 11 and could not read or write until 18. Despite that, he forged an impressive academic career, mostly focusing on race and education, with stints at Roehampton, Glasgow and Durham universities, and is now a professor at Cambridge. His astonishing story is cautiously described in a recent Guardian article.

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"Drew Allar has plenty of progress left in front of him."--Yahoo

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Sunday/Picnic

Today's gospel is the Loaves and Fishes gospel, the only miracle appearing in all four evangelists. It is a lovely mixture of the worldly and the spiritual.

Christ seeks refuge and quiet after the murder of John the Baptist, so He takes the apostles to "a deserted place." This is not just for contemplation but for prudence; the authorities are interested in them. They go to an area just out of Herod's jurisdiction. The geography is known and described, the sea and the journey to the small town, the race by the locals to catch up with them is all quite clear and detailed. Local slang appears in the original Greek. And Christ is not put out by the interruption of His plans when the crowd arrives; He is, on the contrary, welcoming and concerned. 

And, as Christ so often does, He has an almost humorous exchange with the disciples when they want to let the crowd go to eat. He says, "There is no need for them to go: give them something to eat yourselves." Is that a joke? Is he teasing them? Is He listening to some second, parallel script like the line to Pilate, "That's what you say."

Then he creates a meal for 5000, a miracle of essential things, and makes sure everyone cleans up after.

 

SatStats

On this day:

30 BC
Octavian (later known as Augustus) enters Alexandria, Egypt, bringing it under the control of the Roman Republic.
1800
The Act of Union 1800 is passed in which merges the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1801
First Barbary War: The American schooner USS Enterprise captures the Tripolitan polacca Tripoli in a single-ship action off the coast of modern-day Libya.
1834
Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.
1894
The First Sino-Japanese War erupts between Japan and China over Korea.
1927
The Nanchang Uprising marks the first significant battle in the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and Communist Party of China. This day is commemorated as the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army
1944
The Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation breaks out in Warsaw, Poland.
1966
Charles Whitman kills 16 people at The University of Texas at Austin before being killed by the police. A remarkable story.
2004
A supermarket fire kills 396 people and injures 500 in Asunción, Paraguay.

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“Where there is no property, there is no justice.”--Locke

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Against Killer Asteroids!

In the Double Asteroid Redirection Test [DART], NASA sent a 1340-pound spacecraft to collide with the Dimorphos asteroid in 2022. The results exceeded expectations, as the impact slowed the asteroid’s orbit around another asteroid [Didymos] by 32 minutes—well above the pre-defined success threshold of 73 seconds. The mission cost only $330 million.


***

Cash, subsidies, and long parental leave have had no impact on fertility rates.
Sweden has adopted a suite of “pro-family” policies including heavily subsidized day care, with lower-income families paying nothing, and its birth rate has stayed well below replacement.
One suggestion is that parenting competes with other 'ambitions.' Time is a limited asset, forcing triage decisions.


***

The former Olympian who was accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool will no longer face charges after federal prosecutors said there is information suggesting the damage was caused by construction and installation failures.

***

Should the Pirates really be buyers at this stage?

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Arizona State University has introduced a new Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, allowing students to earn a four-year degree focused on becoming professional content creators, digital storytellers and influencers.

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SatStats

White people make up 15% of the world's population.

*

Studies have shown that less than 5% of “intentional communities”, which are set up away from the usual systems in an assumed “self-sustaining” fashion, last longer than five years. What does work are organically formed communities of roughly 20 to 30 families, or an apartment block.

*

Twenty-first-century fathers are spending far more time “washing, feeding and preparing food, putting to bed, supervising and playing with children” than they did in earlier generations. In fact, fathers in the United States now spend as much (less-than-college-educated) or more (college-educated) time with their children than mothers did a half century earlier—even though family sizes are smaller.

 

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More than half a million personal bankruptcies were filed last year, a nearly 50% jump from three years earlier, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

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The South Korean benchmark KOSPI index dived as much as 12.6% before reversing some losses to close down 6%, extending Tuesday’s near-11% rout and putting the market on course for its steepest monthly decline on record. The slide has erased almost 40% of the index's value from a peak reached little more than a month ago.

*

Visa-holders founded half of today’s Fortune 500 companies and a majority of billion-dollar startups.

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Canada has reported about 3,500 wildfires so far this year, which is in line with recent historical averages. As for the effects of climate change, a paper in the journal Nature Communications last year reported that fires in recent decades in North America are running far below historical levels (between 1600 and 1880).

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In a March 2025 government survey, 24% of seniors reported that Social Security supplies 90% or more of their income. But when Census Bureau researchers matched responses with IRS filings and benefits records, they found that retirees frequently omitted their 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, making the real figure only about 14%. Meanwhile, 58% of retirees draw less than half their income from the program.

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In 2024, American shipyards accounted for just 0.04 percent of global commercial shipbuilding.

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Individual plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges are projected to spike by about 14 percent in 2027, according to recent insurer filings.
As of 2025, 93 percent of enrollees in the exchanges received subsidies, up from 86 percent in 2021. If nearly everyone on the exchanges needs subsidies, that’s a clear sign that the product being sold is not affordable.


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More than $1 of every $10 in SNAP benefits went to people who didn’t qualify in 2025.

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A survey:

1. Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis)--in Hebrew, unfortunately, Bereshit-- or the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
2. More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Chris­tians believe that "God helps those who help themselves" is a Bible verse.
3. More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.
4. One in ten adults believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. (My personal favorite.)

Economic Decisions

On this day:

30 BC
Battle of Alexandria: Mark Antony achieves a minor victory over Octavian’s forces, but most of his army subsequently deserts, leading to his suicide.
1492

The Jews are expelled from Spain when the Alhambra Decree takes effect.
1790
The very first U.S. patent is issued: to inventor Samuel Hopkins for a potash process.
2007
Operation Banner, the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and the longest-running British Army operation ever, comes to an end.


***

Slavery was “peculiar” in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.--the always underestimated Sowell

***

All 55 European (soccer) football associations have now unanimously agreed to boycott FIFA events if Gianni Infantino pushes ahead with his polarising plan to sell parts of the World Cup to private investors.

***

From the NATO Department of Pretend Control:
Cobalt is critical in a Li-ion battery since it forms the cathode (positive electrode), which gives the battery its high energy density and stability. The Copperbelt is the Congo (DRC ) is where most of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from. However, in this region, cobalt naturally co-occurs with uranium. Unless the uranium is removed from the cobalt, it stays along with it during the extraction and processing and is exported as raw material.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton in the US have found that between 2000 and 2024, large quantities of uranium were extracted, concentrated and exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the country’s cobalt supply chain. Estimates suggest that 2,000-5,000 metric tons (4.4 – 11 million pounds) of radioactive material were exported, even as the DRC has not reported uranium production in decades.

China is home to about 95 percent of the world’s cobalt refineries. So, much of this uranium was sent to China. The estimated 2,000-5,000 metric tons of uranium is sufficient to produce anywhere between 600-1,500 nuclear warheads.

The researchers do not think that this was done intentionally. The team also estimates that between 1,000-4,000 metric tons of uranium was released in mine tailings – waste stream from mining, which raises health concerns for miners and communities near the mines.

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Reverse warrants are a technology-driven version of a general warrant. “Reverse location warrants” (or “geofence warrants”) allow the government to demand the identity of an unlimited number of people based on their electronic devices’ location tracking data. “Reverse keyword warrants” operate similarly but identify people based on the words they type into internet search engines.

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Economic Decisions

Adam Smith explained how wealth develops. von Mises explained pricing.

Without the market forces of supply and demand (the trade that creates these forces) and private ownership of the means of production (which enables supply and demand to operate), all factories and industries would lose access to meaningful profit-and-loss accounting. Accounting signals relay information to owners about the success or failure of their enterprises. Without such accounting, there is no basis for managers to make informed decisions. You have no data on which to base your purchases, investments, production, hiring, wages, inventories, or anything else. You lose touch with the reality of the world around you. Such a system will be, quite literally, irrational and thereby subject to the whims of political elites. (Tucker)

Since pricing cannot guide purchasing, producers cannot anticipate demand or assign products. This creates shortages. And shortages substitute bribery for pricing and create a culture of corruption.

It is not necessary to destroy an economy, as in Venezuela, to prove the point. There are all sorts of examples of "Socialism Lite" which disable pricing signals and create shortages and distortions. Rent control fixes the price of rental units, diminishing the surplus available for repair and enhancement. So rent control leads to disrepair and shortage. Price controls on gasoline in the 1970s led to gasoline shortages. 

Wage controls in California will reduce job availability.

If you want to eliminate smoking, fix the price of cigarettes.

These are not theories. These relationships are well understood.

We know that violating these specific economic laws leads to a virtuous glow, followed by disaster. Yet somehow in our information-obsessed culture, this crucial knowledge is ignored. Somehow these politicians purposefully create these socially destructive scenarios despite knowing full well what will happen.

How can anyone be so casual about such risks? And how can anyone supporting the agent of such dangers present themselves as "moral?"

Or, is it possible these people purporting to be our leaders really just don't know?

The Shepherd's Coup

On this day:

1419
First Defenestration of Prague: a crowd of radical Hussites kill seven members of the Prague city council.
1502
Christopher Columbus lands at Guanaja in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras during his fourth voyage.
1608
At Ticonderoga (now Crown Point, New York), Samuel de Champlain shoots and kills two Iroquois chiefs. This was to set the tone for French-Iroquois relations for the next one hundred years.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of the Crater – Union forces attempt to break Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia by exploding a large bomb under their trenches.
1945
World War II: Japanese submarine I-58 sinks the USS Indianapolis, killing 883 seamen.
1971
Apollo program: Apollo 15 Mission – David Scott and James Irwin on the Apollo Lunar Module Falcon land on the Moon with the first Lunar Rover.
1975
Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again, and will be declared legally dead on this date in 1982.

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"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."--Frank Borman

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In such a small-scale society [as colonial North America], privacy as we know it did not exist, and our sharp modern distinction between private and public was as yet scarcely visible. Living quarters were crowded, and people who were not formally related – servants, hired laborers, nurses, and other lodgers – were often jammed together with family members in the same room or even in the same bed.--somewhere

***

The staggering debt will bring to a head many triage decisions that are more than philosophical. One will be the willingness of future taxpayers to impose taxes on themselves to finance benefits of comfortable retirees.

***

On Friday, Thinking Machines released its first manifesto, outlining its vision for a future in which AI was decentralized and built on local knowledge. The company, whose CEO, [Mira] Murati, witnessed the collapse of communism in her native Albania as a child, compared the current dominant AI paradigm of closed-source frontier labs to “central planning”—great for bounded tasks like chess and math, but not for the real work humans do every day.

***

If the DSA wants to ensure that “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses,” but instead make them “common goods,” they will have to make it illegal to provide those goods and services for profit and punish people who violate the relevant laws. That is, they will have to expect the emergence--or widening--of the relatively small American Black Market.

That will be fun.

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The Shepherd's Coup

The Editor of The Atlantic spoke smugly on the BBC about Fauci and his Senate appearance, dismissing the U.S. connection with the Wuhan lab as small-minded political jousting, in a MasterClass of condescension. The nature of American involvement in a viral change-of-function project looking awfully like a malignant bioweapons program was not mentioned.

So, Fauci is petty and dishonest. I am truly sorry. I wish he were dashing and grand with insight and easily understood observations on how we live and what social and governmental leaders can do to protect us and improve our lives. But we must understand the real meaning of Fauci's slow public dissolution because it is elemental.

The Americans, with the West trailing, have created and developed the most astonishingly successful society of free men in history. The American unique vision of mankind, with inalienable rights neither granted nor fungible, has allowed for the gradual development of a dominant, innovative and generally benign economy and social state of accomplished citizens that improves health, education and comfort, and which is, amazingly, available to anyone.

During its evolution, the country has seen a subset of its citizens grow up along with it, claiming responsibility for its success and inculcating into the culture the belief that they are essential to its future. Politicians and their attendants, along with a new parallel culture of bureaucratic drones and parasitic governmental entrepreneurs, now shape our lives, limit our freedoms, and try to shape our futures. The basic guiding principles in the society have been undermined and now are blatantly opposed by new prophets and half-wits.

There has been a slow-motion revolution in the hive, and the Queen is dead.

Fauci is the poster child of this disaster. Self-important, ambitious beyond his reach, and confident in matters he does not--and, perhaps, cannot--understand, he creates leadership and guidance that appears, in retrospect, almost randomly simplistic.

And dangerous. Dangerous. Not just to the philosophical nature of the country but to the very health and wellbeing of the world.

15 million people died as a direct result of the Wuhan virus, and countless others were destroyed as governments slashed around like a wild giant trying to stop it. Now they are lying about it, patiently explaining to us poor rubes to let the visionaries alone to do their good work. But there is no 'good work.' You cannot kill 15 million people, then point to the success you've had legalizing a new right 'to turn-right-on red' breakthrough.

The lesson is not that demagogues are dangerous; the lesson is that they are incapable of making good decisions. And the lower 3% are of bad intent

And, of course, these people pardon each other. The general is responsible for the dying young man in the field but never to him.

And it will get worse. Shallow 'grand visions.' New revolutions to kill and die for. Half-baked ideas advanced by the presumptuous sorcerer's apprentices from the lowest quintile of everyone's high school class. These so-called leaders will have new leverage to whet their hunger. Gene editing. AI. Miniaturized weaponry. New threats to the working guy are emerging from the elemental slime of men's minds. But no threat yet can match that of the arrogant, ambitious, hubristic, preening political leader and his entourage.