SatSats

 On this day:

1972
Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex
2009
During the Iranian election protests, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video and spreads virally on the Internet, making it “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.

***

Nobody is needy in the market economy because some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody. The process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.--von Mises

***

AI must be a worry; the NYT is quoting the Pope about it.
Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI—that is, discredit “the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”

Man's relentless quest for incomplete knowledge?
Can AI paper over our faults, order our moral chaos, solve our 'original sin' in a technologically inspired spiritual dictatorship?
Is AI the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge or just another branch?

***

The new records detail at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX years ago through a middleman firm in the U.S. called Tomales Bay Capital. The investments are relatively small, ranging from $800,000 to $40 million, and were made between 2018 and 2021.


***

From a recent article in City Journal:

Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met in person for the National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing body. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

***

China may soon be the world's biggest producer of foie gras. The French are worried.

***


SatSats

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that the Justice Department is investigating more than 8,000 fraud cases, which he said represent over $1 trillion in taxpayer funds potentially stolen each year by "increasingly sophisticated and opportunistic fraudsters."

*

Last year, executives at Swiss bank UBS spoke of the beginnings of the "largest private wealth migration in history," during which 44% of their billionaire clients under age 55 had moved once or more within the previous 12 months.

*

11% of marriages in the US are between Blacks and Whites, yet Black-White couples in TV ads would make you think that mixed racial marriages were much more common. Since identification of the audience with the ad is a basic, that peculiarity is hard to explain.

*

A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer’s risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable

*

Of all 46 chromosomes contained in most human cells, the Y chromosome is the only one that can be lost without the cell dying.

*

Ozempic may increase human lifespan by 3-5 years.

*

New York City’s $125 billion budget is that it is bigger than the $115 billion expected to be spent this year by the entire state of Florida. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

*

Mobile phone theft in London:

• An estimated 90,000 mobile devices were officially reported stolen to the Metropolitan Police over the previous calendar year.
• *
• The successful recovery rate for stolen electronic hardware currently languishes at an abysmal margin of under 2 percent.
  
  
• *
• Cybersecurity experts estimate the secondary extortion market generates tens of millions of dollars in untraceable cryptocurrency revenues annually.
• Ransom demands typically range from $500 to $2,000, depending on the perceived financial status 

Neither Out Far Nor in Deep

 On this day:

1269
King Louis IX of France orders all Jews found in public without an identifying yellow badge to be fined ten livres of silver.
1306
The Earl of Pembroke’s army defeats Bruce’s Scottish army at the Battle of Methven.
1586
English colonists leave Roanoke Island, after failing to establish England’s first permanent settlement in North America.
1846
The first officially recorded, organized baseball match is played under Alexander Cartwright’s rules on Hoboken, New Jersey’s Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23-1. Cartwright umpired.
1953
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.
1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.
1982
The body of God’s Banker, Roberto Calvi is found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.

***

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)

***

A lot has happened in the Iran War, but two lessons seem particularly significant: a nation will act contrary to the well-being of its people in deference to a few in power, and efforts to protect the unfortunate citizens of the predatory juggernaut will be borne at one's own expense.

***

Hemingway's has been sold to Pitt. Likely, it will only be digested.

***

Neither Out Far Nor in Deep

Lake Vostok sits beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet at roughly 78 degrees south, almost exactly under the geomagnetic south pole. The surface station above it, founded in 1957, is the same place that recorded the coldest natural temperature ever measured on Earth: minus 89.2 degrees Celsius in July 1983.

The lake itself, though, is liquid. Heat from the Earth’s interior, combined with the immense pressure of the ice above, keeps the water in a slim, dark, freshwater layer between bedrock and glacier. Estimates of its isolation vary, but the last contact with the atmosphere occurred around 15 million years ago, when Antarctica’s ice sheet thickened into the form it holds today.

To put that in perspective: when Vostok was last open to the sky, the ancestors of modern humans had not yet diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees.

Any microbes living in Vostok would have spent millions of generations adapting to a place with no light, no fresh nutrients from above, and extreme water pressures. Ice cores trapped bubbles of ancient air from four glacial cycles, making them one of the most-cited paleoclimate archives in science.

On 5 February 2012, at a depth of 3,769.3 metres, a drill broke into the lake.

DNA sequencing revealed more than 3,500 unique gene sequences, the majority bacterial, but including fungi and traces consistent with multicellular eukaryotes. Some matched microbes known from deep-sea hydrothermal systems. Others matched nothing in any database. Another subglacial lake, Lake Whillans, sampled cleanly by an American team in 2013 using hot-water drilling, came back full of living microbes that metabolised iron and sulfur compounds from ground-up bedrock. Iron and sulfur!

Life, in other words, had found a way to make a living in total darkness, drawing energy from rocks instead of sunlight.

Vostok draws planetary scientists as much as it draws glaciologists is that it is the closest analogue Earth offers to two of the most promising places in the solar system to look for life: Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Both worlds hide global oceans beneath thick ice shells. Both are dark, cold, and chemically active at the rock-water boundary.

A microbe that can survive 15 million years of darkness in Vostok is a working proof that biology does not require sunlight or fresh organic matter from above to persist.

A record of evolution running in a closed room for longer than the Mediterranean Sea has existed. A lineage of organisms that never saw the sun set on the dinosaurs because they were already underground when the dinosaurs were still around. A small dark ocean that survived the rise of the Himalayas, the drying of the Sahara, and the entire human story, and was only opened, briefly, by a drill bit from a station built on top of it by accident. --(from Space Daily of all places)

A question: Is there any risk to our species from a microbe that might emerge, essentially, from another world?

Clearly Clouded

 

On this day:
1673
French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reach the Mississippi River and become the first Europeans to make a detailed account of its course
1775
American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.This was a significant encounter, a planned battle, and the British famously bayonetted the American wounded. It became a focal point and rallying cry. The important Patriot leader, Dr. Joseph Warren, was also killed.
1930
U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law.
1939
Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison
1940
The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
1944
Iceland declares independence from Denmark and becomes a republic.
1972
Watergate scandal: five White House operatives are arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in an attempt by some members of the Republican party to illegally wiretap the opposition.
1994
Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O.J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

***
What, then, should be the primary-liberal rule in the footrace of life?
It should be – for natural justice to the individual and for the consequent flourishing of the individual’s family and fellows and trading partners and society through loving care and peaceful exchange and liberal conversation – an equality of permission, or allowance, or approval for a general right to do, to venture. Let no obstacles of human design be placed in your path. It is to be permitted to enter the race as an adult, and to accord to others the same permission. It is [Adam] Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”--mcclosky

***

In 2025, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Singapore, and the UAE are "traditionally popular destinations for migrating millionaires, especially for those operating in the financial services sector," due to their absence of capital gains tax.

***

Chick-fil-A, which topped the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in 2025, fell to second place this year. Jersey Mike's claimed first place.

***

Clearly Clouded

A modifier is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as "a word or phrase that is used with another word or phrase to limit or add to its meaning." "The tall girl" distinguishes one girl from the others based on height.

Sometimes the effect is not clarifying, it's funny. George Carlin made a living on contradictory modifying phrases, oxymorons, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, acting naturally, and civil war. Sometimes it's a great literary device: with “Oh, brawling love, O loving hate,” Shakespeare describes the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet.

And sometimes it's purposely obfuscating.

What are we to think of "mostly peaceful demonstrations?" Is it like almost warm, generally bloodless, sort of clean, pretty honest, usually safe, generally accurate, nearly won, mostly pasteurized? Unlike "the tall girl," a phrasing meant to refine meaning, these phrases are meant to diffuse meaning and detract from the word's specificity.

Now, that said, what are the implications of a modifier applied to a virtue?

Like a battle cry on a screaming field or a whispered password in the quiet dark, words arise filled with meaning, expressing the unexpressible. A tight, gravid couplet. Often articles or even books emerge to refine a complex notion, surround an idea and herd it into some more understandable--or imaginable--form, sometimes paring it down, explaining, at least, what it is not. The Holy Trinity. Entangled Particles.

And sometimes the task is accepted as just too much, and we are left with recognizable words cobbled together into an unrecognizable whole — social justice, minority rights — tantalizingly close, but not quite right.

Owners and Squatters

On this day:
363
Emperor Julian marches back up the Tigris and burns his fleet of supply ships. During the withdrawal, Roman forces suffered several attacks from the Persians. Did anybody ever beat these guys?
1755
French and Indian War: The French surrender Fort Beauséjour to the British, leading to the expulsion of the Acadians.
1816
Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, and inspires his challenge that each guest write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness.
1858
Abraham Lincoln delivers his House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.
1871
The University Tests Act allows students to enter the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham without religious tests (except for those intending to study theology).
1904
Irish author James Joyce begins a relationship with Nora Barnacle and subsequently uses the date to set the actions for his novel Ulysses; this date is now traditionally called “Bloomsday”. Barnacle. She must have been quite a woman to overcome that name with a word guy like him.
1940
World War II: Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain becomes Chief of State of Vichy France (Chef de l'État Français).
1963
Soviet Space Program: Vostok 6 Mission – Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.

***

"Some hold that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name."--Mamet

***

The SpaceX IPO has resurrected the zero-sum argument of wealth, the only redistribution claim that has no mythology to enshroud its baselessness.

***

The first three AI IPOs will have a value greater than the GDP of France.

***

Platner's defense seems to be he is "anti-establishment," of the Obamian "fundamental change" school. Being "anti" is a lot less demanding a position.

***

The story about the White House Attack Conspiracy is a frightening look into the future of rising technology available to smaller and smaller groups. And 22 conspirators are too many for them all to be crazy.

***

Owners and Squatters


Israel and its enemies is more complex than simple jealousy, although it plays a part. It is the worst of tribalism, expansionism, greed, unforgiving historical resentment--the Hatfields and the McCoys writ large, armed to the teeth and blinded by righteous fury over something most can't remember.


The West, horrified by the murderous WWII, tried to set aside a self-contained political and cultural entity where Jews could enrich and protect themselves. They chose a desert occupied by ill-defined, wandering nomads who had just lost a war. Losing a war has consequences, usually a lot worse than losing some desert.


But drawing borders and appointing kings have a lot to overcome. See Korea, Vietnam, the Ottoman Empire, the 100 Years' War, and much of Africa. And while the Jewish claim to the area is well documented, everything in history has a precedent. Jewish claims in the Middle East are more literate than the Irishman's claim to London, but no more valid. And how old is national sovereignty anyway? The Treaty of Westphalia? So, all borders start from 1648?


There should be a statute of limitations on national sovereignty. Everyone has some claim or other if you go back far enough. Right now, publicity and PR trump everything. But, as time goes by, big weapons in the hands of a few will trump everything. If the world thinks Gaza is a problem now, imagine what will happen when Iran has a nuclear weapon. When every basement revolutionary group has drones. How will these problems be resolved?


Israel was created out of whole cloth by a sympathetic Britain--ratified by the UN--in a land they conquered, for the benefit of a culture that had suffered horribly. Tough but historically common. (minus the kindness) And the conquered people were displaced. (unsympathically) So, which injustices will we right? Greece-Turkey? The Falklands? The defeat of the Anglo-Saxons? The defeat of a Stone Age people without the wheel or alphabet by the European People of Steam?


Do the Picts want Edinburgh back? The Chiricahua want Austin? It was said seriously by a commentator about the LA riots that California was originally Mexico's. That is, they stole it first.


Putin is a metaphor for this world: cynical, virtueless, grasping, homicidal, self-absorbed ambition. He and people like him will destroy the house to evict the squatters. But in Israel, the squatter is similarly armed. And if Israel can't keep what they were given, they will respond Sampson-like and reduce the Middle East to a smoldering, lifeless radioactive trinitite.


"If everyone lights just one little candle," also starts a zillion small fires. Not seeing the realities here and ignoring the risks is childish. And, on a global scale, life-threatening.


Even extension-level.

Catch Up on the Iranian/US Problem

On this day:

763 BC
Assyrians record a solar eclipse that is later used to fix the chronology of Mesopotamian history.
1215
King John of England puts his seal to the Magna Carta.
1389
Battle of Kosovo: The Ottoman Empire defeats Serbs and Bosnians.
1667
The first human blood transfusion is administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys.
1752
Benjamin Franklin proves that lightning is electricity (traditional date, the exact date is unknown).
1775
American Revolutionary War: George Washington is appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
1785
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, co-pilot of the first-ever manned flight (1783), and his companion, Pierre Romain, become the first-ever casualties of an air crash when their hot air balloon explodes during their attempt to cross the English Channel.
1896
The deadliest tsunami in Japan’s history kills more than 22,000 people.
1919
John Alcock and Arthur Brown complete the first nonstop transatlantic flight when they reach Clifden, County Galway, Ireland.
1985
Rembrandt’s painting Danaë is attacked by a man (later judged insane) who throws sulfuric acid on the canvas and cuts it twice with a knife.
1996
The Provisional Irish Republican Army explodes a large bomb in the middle of Manchester, England.
2002
Near-Earth asteroid 2002 MN misses the Earth by 75000 mi, about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

***

What used to be envy has been chewed upon by unoccupied academic minds and has become a philosophy

***

A new study published in the journal Current Biology recently found that octopuses can learn how to use mirrors to locate food hidden from view in an impressive feat of spatial thinking never before observed in invertebrates.

***

Carolina Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy for most valuable player in the Stanley Cup playoffs, becoming the oldest player to win it at age 37.

***

A "Memorandum of Understanding." A "Framework." Huh?

***

Catch Up on the Iranian/US Problem

It is difficult to get any informative news from the US that is not ludicrously laden with righteous bias. Here are some opinions from the BBC, which may have no more value than US news. But the beliefs are surprising and, if untrue, just more international nonsense highlighting the universal mendacity of the makers of war and opinion. But if true...

1. Israel does not want the Middle East fighting to stop, and its attacks on Lebanon are intentionally provocative and disruptive.

2. The U.S. is the country that is constantly changing the rules and discussion, not Iran.  

3. The objective of the current discussions is to open the Straits and create a nonbelligerent environment for further discussions regarding the nuclear ambitions of Iran. If agreed to, the Straits will open, and the negotiating conditions will return to the way they were before the US attacked. Nothing more. So the objective of the talks is to create the pre-attack conditions.

These ideas are certainly contrary to what is being said in the US.

Sunday/Tension at the Abyss

 On this day:

1645
English Civil War: Battle of Naseby – 12,000 Royalist forces are beaten by 15,000 Parliamentarian soldiers.
1775
American Revolutionary War: the Continental Army is established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Army.
1789
Mutiny on the Bounty: Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 7,400 km journey in an open boat.
1800
The French Army of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in Northern Italy and re-conquers Italy.
1807
Emperor Napoleon I’s French Grande Armee defeats the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland in Poland (modern Russian Kaliningrad Oblast) ending the War of the Fourth Coalition.
1830
Beginning of the French colonization of Algeria: 34,000 French soldiers begin their invasion of Algiers, landing 27 kilometers west at Sidi Fredj.
1846
Bear Flag Revolt begins – Anglo settlers in Sonoma, California, start a rebellion against Mexico and proclaim the California Republic.
1940
The Soviet Union presents an ultimatum to Lithuania resulting in Lithuanian loss of independence.
1940
World War II: Paris falls under German occupation, and Allied forces retreat.
1941
June deportation, the first major wave of Soviet mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, begins.
1947
Roswell UFO incident: A supposed UFO crashes in Roswell, New Mexico

***

Disagreements and protests are inherent to freedom and democracy. But are confrontations inherent to democracy?  Aren't elections the alternative to confrontation?

***

CNN reporter Christine Amanpour stated she was fearful to visit the U.S. to speak at Harvard, comparing her anxiety to that of visiting North Korea. Does that kind of judgment disqualify her opinions elsewhere?

***

Sunday/Tension at the Abyss

There is worry in the writings today, worry over the desperation of mankind.

The gospel opens with, "At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd." 

Christ creates the solution, the Apostles' mission is to go among the people of Israel so, as the Old Testament message in the desert says, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”
He is specific, strangely tribal. “Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

Does he change his mind with time? Is he giving Israel the free choice, only to move on to include the Gentiles?

Paul makes Christ's decision very personal.

"Christ, while we were still helpless,
yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person
one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

 

SatStats

On this day:
1525
Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns.
1966
The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
1983
Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune (the furthest planet from the Sun at the time).

***

“Sick of his arrogance and Trump-like condescension to the media he begs for money to every time he gets fired!” --Jimmy Murphy on Tortorella, bringing what everyone wants in sports: more politics.

***

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is revealing new evidence of longstanding United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries.

***

Smith then inquired into the causes of wealth. He didn’t inquire into the causes of poverty. Smith understood that poverty is humanity’s default mode. Nearly all people before Smith’s time — and still most people during his time — were mired in poverty. Poverty is simply the condition we suffer when wealth isn’t created. Wealth, not poverty, demands explanation because wealth, not poverty, has causes.--Post


***





SatStats

Among 70-year-old men, roughly 40 percent show loss of Y in their blood cells, and among 93-year-olds, that number rises to 57 percent.

*

The middle class is shrinking, but so is the proportion of Americans below the middle class — because the upper-middle class is growing. As of 2022, they report, the share of wealth held by the middle class had fallen to 8% from 24% in 1989, while the share held by the top 3% rose from 26% in 1989 to 53% in 2022.

*

“No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public.”

*

Albert Einstein’s estate was worth just $65,000 when he died.

*

A study by GCheck found that, faced with anxiety about how automation could impact job security, 63% of 1,500 workers surveyed reported that they exaggerate their AI skills to appear more up-to-date. That number shot up to 80% among Gen Z workers as the tech threatens early-career and entry-level roles more drastically.

*

Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas globally for the first month ever in April 2026, according to data analysed by global energy think tank Ember. Together, wind and solar generated 22% of global electricity in April 2026, compared with 20% from gas.

*
New York City’s $125 billion budget is that it is bigger than the $115 billion expected to be spent this year by the entire state of Florida. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

*

Swedish intel on Russia

 While Russia has claimed GDP expanded by about 13% between 2020 and 2024, Sweden’s analysis of nighttime luminosity suggests the economy actually shrank by 8% during that span.

Moscow has also lowballed inflation substantially, according to Stenergard, who pointed out that Russia’s official inflation figure in 2024 was 10% while the central bank hiked interest rates to 21% that year.

Similarly, Sweden’s military intelligence chief has estimated that today’s inflation is likely closer to the current benchmark borrowing cost of 15% than the government’s official reading of 5.2%.

“This would mean Russia is overstating its purchasing power, and that its military spending capacity is weaker than it appears,” Stenergard wrote.

But Swedish intelligence believes Russia would need the average price for Urals oil to stay above $100 a barrel for the rest of the year to provide a meaningful benefit to the government’s finances,

At the same time, more advanced Ukrainian drones with longer ranges have evaded air defenses and attacked Russian oil export terminals, limiting the gains from higher oil prices.

Ukraine has been making battlefield gains in recent months and has inflicted 1.2 million casualties on Russia since the war started, with new recruits increasingly difficult to find.

“Russia’s economy, in nominal terms, is barely bigger than the State of New York’s, smaller than that of Texas and fragile,” she said. 

Putin’s approval rate has fallen to 65.6% from 77.8% at the start of the year and prewar levels well above 80%.

Inflationary pressures will persist for years amid a demographic downturn, military mobilizations, and the high demand for labor in the defense industry.

Russia’s government has estimated the workforce will need 3.1 million more workers by 2030, according to Interfax. And in the next five years, the total shortfall will hit 11 million jobs when including a ramp-up in retirement.