Out of Egypt

On this day:

476
Romulus Augustulus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed when Odoacer proclaims himself King of Italy, thus ending the Western Roman Empire.
1797
Coup of 18 Fructidor in France.
1862
Civil War Maryland Campaign: General Robert E. Lee takes the Army of Northern Virginia, and the war, into the North.
1886
Indian Wars: after almost 30 years of fighting, Apache leader Geronimo, with his remaining warriors, surrenders to General Nelson Miles in Arizona.
1957
American Civil Rights Movement: Little Rock Crisis – Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Central High School.
1967
Vietnam War: Operation Swift begins: U.S. Marines engage the North Vietnamese in battle in the Que Son Valley.
1972
Mark Spitz becomes the first competitor to win seven medals at a single Olympic Games.
1998
Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.

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The Sussexes return to England: A Royal Recall--Brian

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The French Revolution reads like a sci-fi novel of religious excess.
In the Coup of 18 Fructidor, the Directory arrested political opponents and invalidated the previous election.
The Directory was instituted on 2 November 1795 under the Constitution of the Year III, drafted in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794, aiming to forge a moderate republican framework that curbed Jacobin radicalism while safeguarding bourgeois property interests through a five-member executive and bicameral legislature comprising the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. 

The Directory perceived an existential threat from resurgent royalists following the 1797 elections, fearing a coordinated effort to restore the monarchy with foreign assistance amid ongoing wars against coalitions including Britain.
This unconstitutional action, supported indirectly by Napoleon Bonaparte's provision of military reinforcements from Italy, temporarily consolidated Directory power, reinstated anti-clerical measures against nonjuring priests and émigrés, and foreshadowed further executive overreaches culminating in the Brumaire coup two years later.

Fructidor. The Directory. The Year III. Thermidor. Council of Five Hundred. The Council of Ancients. Ah, democracy.

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Prudence has been one of the great classical virtues, along with wisdom, courage, and justice. Has prudence become more of a behavioral suggestion than its original designation as an ethical obligation?

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According to the media watchdog Status, after Trump gave a speech in July about election interference, Fox Business officials ordered the network’s top stars to stay clear of Trump's unsubstantiated claims. Several outlets noted that Fox gave little airtime to Trump’s speech in the hours and days that followed.
Bartiromo then leaked the company directive to the White House, according to Status. It's unclear if she reached out first, or the Trump team made the request.

The Press leaks to the government.

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European officials accuse Russia of years of hybrid warfare, from attempted arson outside the British prime minister's home, to firebombing warehouses in Latvia storing aid for Ukraine, to an assassination plot against a German weapons manufacturer, as well as drones that cross into NATO territory and have destroyed property. Recently, these attacks are increasing...
"You have the Leipzig attack. You have arson, sabotage, murder, attacks on critical infrastructure also. And Russia has more than one service likely engaged in this campaign. You have military intelligence in the GRU, and you have the FSB..."--David Cattler, Former U.S. Intelligence Official (PBS)

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From Axios:

                "AI models are becoming unknowable."

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Out of Egypt

Science has always walked the edge of mysticism. The original great Greek thinkers were as abstract as you could get with demiurges and the like. Newton had some astonishing beliefs well away from mass and acceleration. Science and its very unscientific stepbrothers have been a provocative topic and creep into many publications and articles, from The DaVinci Code to Benjamin Breen.

Thelema was one of the New Age foundational notions. The law of Thelema is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." The law of Thelema was developed in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley, an English writer and ceremonial magician. He believed himself to be the prophet of a new age, the Æon of Horus, based upon a spiritual experience that he and his wife, Rose Edith, had in Egypt in 1904. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal or "praeterhuman" being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated a text known as The Book of the Law or Liber AL vel Legis, which outlined the principles of Thelema. (These things happen in the Middle East. And New York.) An adherent of Thelema is a Thelemite. (From Wiki)

Jack Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first castable, composite solid rocket propellant and pioneered the advancement of both liquid and solid-fuel rockets, important contributions to eventual rocket flight.
For a while, Parsons was a Marxist. Then he became a Thelemite. Yes, he did.

Before Parsons accidentally blew himself up in his home lab in 1952, he had welcomed into his Pasadena home a Second World War veteran who’d been expelled from the Navy for psychological instability: L Ron Hubbard. The two men shared a love for science fiction and black magic. But in 1946, Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ mistress Sara, and his yacht. Parsons invoked a Babylonian god and (he believed) stirred up the typhoon that caused their boat to capsize, but Hubbard and Sara survived.

The next year, Hubbard would begin writing Dianetics, which mingled occultism with Atomic Age scientific jargon. By this time, Hubbard was claiming to be a nuclear physicist. Scientology would emerge a few years later.

 

 

Redoing Socialism

 On this day:

1260
The Mamluks defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine, marking their first decisive defeat and the point of maximum expansion of the Mongol Empire.
1650
Third English Civil War: in the Battle of Dunbar, English Parliamentarian forces led by Oliver Cromwell defeat an army loyal to King Charles II of England and led by David Leslie, Lord Newark.
1651
Third English Civil War: Battle of Worcester – Charles II of England is defeated in the last main battle of the war.
1658
Richard Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of England
1777
American Revolutionary War: during the Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, the Flag of the United States is flown in battle for the first time.
1783
American Revolutionary War: the war ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain
1939
World War II: France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, forming the Allies.
1941
The Holocaust: Karl Fritzsch, deputy camp commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, experiments with the use of Zyklon B in the gassing of Soviet POWs.
1976
Viking program: The American Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis – day 3: the Beslan hostage crisis ends with the deaths of over 300 people, more than half of which are children.

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Anthropic did a controlled study of a blindly reward-seeking system. They got a very competent, dangerous machine. As a result, both Anthropic and OpenAI have intentionally slowed down AI development in light of these risks.

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Gloria Steinem has died.

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People 65 and older now outnumber children ages 5 and younger worldwide for the first time in recorded history, according to a new report by the U.S. Census.

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Redoing Socialism

Socialism is back. Apparently there is some debate over how it's been working. There's an interesting article on this by Kristian Niemietz. This is a portion:

"This socialist revival is, of course, neither a homogeneous movement, nor a fully worked-out policy program. But if there is a common thread, it is the belief that emerging forms of socialism could be completely different from anything that has flown under that ideological banner in the past. For these new socialists, socialism doesn’t necessarily mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. Nor does it mean a command-and-control economy, directed by a distant, technocratic elite. It means experimenting with new forms of social ownership and democratic decision-making, devolving power to the grassroots, and empowering ordinary working people.

When explaining away the failures of the past, it was assumed that the hierarchical, stratified character of failed socialist projects had been a result of some deliberate political choice. Which is to say: It was believed that previous socialist experiments had failed because the leaders of these movements caused them to be centralized and autocratic as a matter of design—as opposed to a democratic socialist system based on mass participation and a radical decentralisation of power.

But the truth is that mass participation and radical democratization always had been idealized by socialists, including by socialist leaders who led successful national movements. But these dreams never survived, because it simply isn’t feasible to run a large society and a complex economy in this kind of participatory way. Democratic socialism works perfectly fine in small, self-selecting and homogeneous high-trust communities with relatively simple economies, the prime example being the Israeli Kibbutz. But that model is not scalable (and hasn’t even aged particularly well in Israel itself). There is a reason that, even at the height of the Kibbutz movement, Kibbutzim never grew beyond a certain size. There seems to be an upper limit of around 1,500 people, and even that is rare: Most Kibbutzim have fewer than 500 members.

Regardless of what socialists say they want to build, socialism can only mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. It can only mean a command-and-control economy directed by a distant, technocratic elite. The reason it always turns out that way isn’t because revolutions are “betrayed” by selfish or undisciplined actors, but because no other path is possible. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that every generation needs to learn for itself..."

As Mr. Williams says, "Sharing is fine when you know everybody's name."

So socialism's problem is a lot bigger than its cruel, unmanageable, and unachievable distribution system. It is believed that socialism, in its implementation, somehow becomes inexplicably bent. Distorted. There persists this curious search for what goes wrong with socialism, why it turns on those it says it wants to help, and why, on a large scale, it becomes so dangerous, as if this were not the very nature of the beast. Sure, socialism is adopted as a crusade by homicidal, self-obsessed psychopaths, but certainly not all socialists are nuts, they say.

This is similar to the search for why dogs bite; they are so cute and playful when they are young. And lions are so docile in the womb.

Nostalgia

On this day:
31 BC
Final War of the Roman Republic: Battle of Actium – off the western coast of Greece, forces of Octavian defeat troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
44 BC
Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion.
44 BC
Cicero launches the first of his Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. He will make 14 of them over the following months.
1666
The Great Fire of London breaks out and burns for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings including St Paul’s Cathedral.
1792
During what became known as the September Massacres of the French Revolution, rampaging mobs slaughter three Roman Catholic Church bishops, more than two hundred priests, and prisoners believed to be royalist sympathizers.
1864
American Civil War: Union forces enter Atlanta, Georgia, a day after the Confederate defenders flee the city.
1870
Franco-Prussian War: Battle of Sedan – Prussian forces take Napoleon III of France and 100,000 of his soldiers prisoner.
1885
Rock Springs massacre: in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 150 white miners, who are struggling to unionize so they could strike for better wages and work conditions, attack their Chinese fellow workers killing 28, wounding 15 and forcing several hundred more out of town.
1945
World War II: Combat ends in the Pacific Theater: the Instrument of Surrender of Japan is signed by Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and accepted aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
1958
United States Air Force C-130A-II is shot down by fighters over Yerevan in Armenia when it strays into Soviet airspace while conducting a SIGINT mission. All crew members are killed.

***

"Follow a tip from a company's president and you will lose half your money. Get a tip from the chairman and you'll lose all of it."
--Bennett Goodspeed (The Tao Jones Averages)

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The German government on Tuesday blamed Russia for an attempted attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport last month using a drone laden with explosives, and announced that it would shut down a Russian consulate among other measures.

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In Cuba, government permission is needed to have a boat. The fishermen's boats are smaller than a normal rowboat and therefore too small to take far from shore (e.g., to another country). Or to fish. So most seafood has to be imported.

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Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) is an extensive reconstruction of Marx as a thinker and philosopher. One of his observations: Partly as a result of the influence of Engels, Marx has often been seen as an admirer of Darwin. But in fact Marx disliked Darwin’s theory of natural selection because it left human progress ‘purely accidental’, preferring the work of the forgotten French ethnographer Pierre Trémaux, who argued that racial differences have ‘a natural basis’ in biology and geology – a common view at the time.
Is that like Critical Theory?

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So, let's just say we recognize that data centers, their energy demands and their negative downstream AI effects, influence voters--and therefore their so-called leaders--to stop data center production.
Then what?

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Nostalgia

If the principles of the Constitution are nostalgic, what should be done?. Can you replace principles? What replaces them? And why? If we scrap the Constitution and its well-defined rights of man, will we find new rights? Will there be a vote on them first before the plans of implementing their protection are enumerated? Can you imagine the likes of Kamala Harris and AOC rewriting the works of Madison and Jefferson?

Perhaps a Memorandum of Understanding.

Kamala Harris recently insisted that opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court is mere “nostalgia” for a system that is no longer working. “I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,” she said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also declared that “nostalgia is not working” and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work.”

Marxists had long rejected calls to preserve institutions and citizens’ rights as “nostalgia” and “sentimentality,” standing in the way of needed progress. (See Mao.)

For the Democratic Socialist of America organization, nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate, presidency, and the Supreme Court to fundamentally change the republic.

A choir of 'nostalgia awareness.'

After Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent working in the media, defected in 1970, he revealed the four stages by which the Soviets hoped to bring about revolutionary change in the U.S. It began with undermining our institutions and values, with the help of journalists and academics.

In a New York Times op-ed — “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” — law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

In yet another New York Times editorial, Jennifer Szalai denounced “Constitution worship” and claimed that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”

Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky insists that it is time to trash the Constitution in favor of “radical changes.”

The Constitution is a foundation and a framework to confine the ambitions of men. Instead of relying on 'the angels' we elect with their embodiment of the virtues of man, we should provide our leaders with electric dog collars to keep them in their place. After all, many of them are from the lower quintile of the class and will need help in dealing with the lowest 3% of the class.

Without those protections, we will unleash the self-destructive forces that have been tearing apart other democratic systems since Athens. It is our Constitution that spared us from that fate. As James Madison observed, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Measures of Success in America

 On this day, a busy day in history:

1864
American Civil War: Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuates Atlanta, Georgia, after a four-month siege by General Sherman
1923
The Great Kantō earthquake devastates Tokyo and Yokohama, killing about 105,000 people.
1939
Adolf Hitler signs an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people
1939
World War II: Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning World War II.
1972
In Reykjavík, Iceland, American Bobby Fischer beats Russian Boris Spassky to become the world chess champion.
1983
Cold War: Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board die, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.
1985
A joint American–French expedition locates the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis commences when armed terrorists take children and adults hostage in Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia.

***

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~H. L. Mencken

***

Daniel Defoe's pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was an attack on High Churchmen, satirically written as if from the High Church point of view but extending their arguments to the point of foolishness. Both sides of the dispute, Dissenters and High Church alike, took the pamphlet seriously, and both sides were outraged to learn it was a hoax. Defoe was arrested for seditious libel in May 1703. He was put in the pillory. The townspeople, instead of throwing rocks, threw flowers.

***

In January 2013, CNN reported that then Secretary of State Clinton was treated with blood thinners at a New York hospital to help dissolve a blood clot in her head.

***

Men With Guns Report: Officers entered the Elsberry Riding and Farm pasture at about 12:45 a.m. while searching for a missing person. A baby donkey named HeeHaw approached them. The farm described HeeHaw as a beloved pet who had been bottle-raised and participated in petting zoos.
The farm alleges officers attempted to use a Taser on the donkey before an officer shot and killed him. Authorities have not independently confirmed those details.

***

Wendell Berry has died.

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Measures of Success in America

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”--Coolidge

These are tough times in the U.S. Everything is being questioned. And since there are no qualified people with answers, we are seeing many unusual answers. So it's refreshing to see some optimism here:

"The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.

SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.

These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.

Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.

Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.

The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.

In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people."--Hillen

This does not appear to be a system that needs dismantling. But sometimes a singer has a song despite what music is played.

Comparable Oppression

 

On this day:
1056
After a sudden illness a few days previous, Byzantine Empress Theodora dies without children to succeed the throne, thus ending the Macedonian dynasty.
1803
Lewis and Clark start their expedition to the west by leaving Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at 11 in the morning. 

Is there an event in the city to commemorate that?
1864
During the American Civil War, Union forces led by General William T. Sherman launch an assault on Atlanta, Georgia.
1888
Mary Ann Nichols is murdered. She is the first of Jack the Ripper’s confirmed victims
1939
Nazi Germany mounts a staged attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, creating an excuse to attack Poland the following day, thus starting World War II in Europe.
1997
Diana, Princess of Wales, her companion Dodi Al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul die in a car crash in Paris.

***

"Pozzolan concrete is a great example.... The recipe to make it was lost for over 400 years when Rome fell, but we have every act that Caligula did or thought of." --Brian McCague

***

A refined value of pi was obtained by the Chinese much earlier than in the West. The Chinese had two advantages over most of the world: they used decimal notations and they used a symbol for zero. European mathematicians would not use a symbolic zero until the late Middle Ages through contact with Indian and Arabic thinkers.

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Sacagawea was the teenage wife of a French-Canadian fur trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, who had purchased her from Hidatsa kidnappers. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as an interpreter for their projected expedition to the Pacific and back, provided he agreed to bring along his young wife and the child, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. No war party, the Indians reasoned, would bring along a mother and infant. When the Corps of Discovery returned east in 1805, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Jean Baptiste resumed the fur-trading life. Little is known of Sacagawea’s subsequent fate, though a fur trader claimed she died of a “putrid fever” in 1812 at a Missouri River trading post. True to a promise he had made to Sacagawea during the expedition, Clark paid for Jean Baptiste’s education at a St. Louis Catholic academy and became something of an adoptive father to the boy. A bright and charismatic young man, Jean Baptiste learned French, German, and Spanish, hunted with noblemen in the Black Forest of Germany, traveled in Africa, and returned to explore further the American West. He died in 1866 en route to the newly discovered gold fields of Montana.

***

Green Bay traded for Steelers RB Kaleb Johnson in exchange for a 2028 sixth-round pick on Sunday. And Jones gone, too.
And Novak Djokovic was knocked out of the U.S. Open in the first round.

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Comparable Oppression

'Comparable worth' refers to the principle that different jobs requiring similar skills, effort, and responsibility should receive equal pay, regardless of the job's field. This concept aims to address wage disparities, particularly between traditionally male and female occupations. There is little argument that people doing the same job should get the same pay.

Some of these conflicts receive surprisingly uniform support. Female tennis players get the same prizes in tournaments despite playing a different game with different balls, shorter matches, and- significantly- much smaller audiences than men. Soccer players get the same prizes with almost no popularity in the female game. So, how is that equal work concept determined?

And what about different jobs? What should an ICU nurse make in a comparable salary? Like a truck driver? An accountant? What about a guy on a trading desk?

One can imagine how many bureaus and profound Credentialed Ones would be required to assess different fields and occupations and grade their degree of equality.

Tabarrok writes that Hayek, in The Mirage of Social Justice, says justice is about conduct — how one person treats another. An employer who defrauds his workers, an employee who steals from the till, a product sold under false pretenses — condemn them, take them to court. But the pattern of prices that emerges from millions of voluntary trades is nobody’s conduct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The constellation of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Tabarrok says demanding that prices be just is a category error, like suing the weather. Prices don’t grade our merit; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first, and they can no longer do the second.

"Category error."

Judge Anthony Kennedy said in the Ninth Circuit ruling: “neither law nor logic deems the free market system a suspect enterprise.”

The job of our government managers should be to keep those free markets free.

Sunday/Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

On This Day:

1363
Beginning date of the Battle of Lake Poyang; the forces of two Chinese rebel leaders — Chen Youliang and Zhu Yuanzhang — are pitted against each other in what is one of the largest naval battles in history, during the last decade of the ailing, Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty.
1791
HMS Pandora sinks after having run aground on a reef the previous day.
1813
Creek War – Fort Mims massacre: Creek “Red Sticks” kill over 500 settlers (including over 250 armed militia) in Fort Mims, north of Mobile, Alabama.
1862
American Civil War – Battle of Richmond: Confederates under Edmund Kirby Smith rout Union forces under General Horatio Wright.
1909
Burgess Shale fossils are discovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott.
1918
Fanny Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for the Red Terror.
1984
STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery takes off on its maiden voyage.

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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now 70% go for launch this morning (Aug. 30). The observatory is on the launch pad, sitting atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, and is set for liftoff at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT) from Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

***

Trump has invested taxpayer money in 30 companies so far. Just between you and me, would you hire the guys who planned the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Invasion of Libya, Afghanistan, and now Iran, as well as the Social Security System and the Great Society to be your investment advisor?

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Sunday/Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Today, right after Christ names Peter as the foundation of His church, Christ turns on him. Christ explains that He must go to Jerusalem, suffer, and die. Peter is horrified:
Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him,
“God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”
Christ fires back at Peter in a phrase that is dripping with irony:
He turned and said to Peter,
“Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Here Christ is comparing Peter's view to that of Satan in the desert, tempting Him with the world and life. And for the word for "obstacle," he uses the word "rock," meaning "stumbling block," as on the road.
Would Christ really pun like that under these circumstances? 

It seems that Christ's gigantic universal view always creeps into our small world. 

What follows, though, is not funny; it is the he who would "save his life will lose it" segment followed by the threatening:
"For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory,
and then he will repay all according to his conduct.”

There, too, is a theme within last week's gospel and today's. Last week Christ asked, "Who do they think I am?" Then "Who do you think I am?" The first answer is opinion. "Thinking as human beings do.“ "Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” People who seem Christ-like. The second answer is not. It is an answer of essence, not appearance. It is thinking under the influence of revelation. As in last week's gospel, Christ demonstrates that true understanding can not be attained without help from God.

Doing a good human job is not enough. One can not be saved by default.

SatStats

On this day:
1758
The first American Indian Reservation is established at Indian Mills, New Jersey.
1786

Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers, begins in response to high debt and tax burdens.

1825

Portugal recognizes the Independence of Brazil.

1831
Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction.
1833
The United Kingdom legislates the abolition of slavery in its empire.
1842
Treaty of Nanking signing ends the First Opium War.
1910
The Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910, also known as the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, becomes effective, officially starting the period of Japanese rule in Korea.
1911
Ishi, considered the last Native American to make contact with European Americans, emerges from the wilderness of northeastern California.
1915
US Navy salvage divers raise F-4, the first U.S. submarine sunk in an accident.
1949
Soviet atomic bomb project: The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
1966
The Beatles perform their last concert before paying fans at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
1970
Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, East Los Angeles, California. Police riot kills three people, including journalist Ruben Salazar.
1982
The synthetic chemical element Meitnerium, atomic number 109, is first synthesized at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany.
1991
Libero Grassi, an Italian businessman from Palermo is killed by the Mafia after taking a solitary stand against their extortion demands.
1991
Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party.
2005
Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,836 and causing over $80 billion in damage.
2007
United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident: six US cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads are flown without proper authorization from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base.

***

"You talk, my good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is not government. Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once."--Washington, in a letter to Henry Lee commenting upon the uprising called Shays' Rebellion, which contributed to the Federalist--anti-Federalist argument and led to the Constitutional Convention. 

It was this rebellion that caused Jefferson to write to James Madison on January 30, 1787, that occasional rebellion serves to preserve freedoms. In a letter to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787, Jefferson wrote in his famous, disturbingly detached letter, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

***

Electromagnetic induction refers to the generation of an electromotive force in a conductor when it experiences a change in magnetic flux. Einstein noticed that the two situations both corresponded to a relative movement between a conductor and a magnet, and the outcome was unaffected by which one was moving. This was one of the principal paths that led him to develop special relativity.

***

Cale Makar and the Colorado Avalanche agreed to a $163.2 million, eight-year extension on Friday that will make him the highest-paid player in league history.

***

There is growing pushback on AI as an intrusive, inefficient, and plagiarizing tool whose major application is espionage.

“This harvesting of our work, scraping and impersonating our styles, it’s the same as a parasite that sucks the light out of its host without invitation.” --a photographer on AI.

The most recent AI crisis: Everything it reads is input, and every input is a potential instruction.

Somehow, though, it sounds as if resisters will end up like the Amish.

***

There was an extensive comment on the Aug. 5th post.

***

SatStats

About 300,000 people in Israel are American citizens.

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More cops have been arrested for stalking women using Flock cameras than there are trans athletes in sports.

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Housing starts, a gauge of new residential construction, dropped 12.4% in July to 1.239 million.

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Indian-American investor Vivek Wadhwa recently said that he's aware that 20-25% of people who come to the US on H-1B are frauds.

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If you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables, among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to first in life expectancy. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.

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Jobs:

Nearly 44% of American men aged 16 to 24 are neither working nor looking for work, up from 31% in 2000, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics participation data.

The July jobs report put the national unemployment rate at 4.1%, its lowest reading of 2026. Employers shed 23,000 jobs that month and the civilian labor force contracted by 264,000, CNBC reported.

Overall participation fell to 61.4%, its weakest since early 2021 and, outside the Covid period, the lowest since 1976.

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American wages have fallen to roughly 43% of national income, the lowest share since 1970. For every dollar the U.S. economy produces, workers are receiving less of it than at any point in more than five decades. The remainder has flowed increasingly toward corporate profits, * The five blocks just around the proposed free NYC grocery Harlem site contain 15 bodegas and groceries. * According to a New York Post article (May 22, 2016), in just two years, Hillary Clinton — former first lady, senator from New York and secretary of state — collected over $21 million in speaking fees. These fees were paid by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, UBS, Bank of America and several hedge fund companies.In 2015, lobbyists spent $3.22 billion lobbying Congress. In 2013 and 2014, just 10 chemical companies and allied organizations spent more than $154 million lobbying the federal government. The Center for Responsive Politics in 2013 reported that the Dow Chemical Co. “posted record lobbying expenditures” in 2012, “spending nearly $12 million,” and was “on pace to eclipse” that amount. Fourteen labor unions were among the top 25 political campaign contributors between 1989 and 2014. Why do you suppose people give good money away to politicians? * The projected payroll for baseball’s top-spending team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, is $407 million, with a luxury tax payroll of $417 million. The Mets’ $359 million payroll is next, followed by the Yankees’ $310 million and the Phillies’ $290 million. The Dodgers’ payroll alone is more than the combined payrolls of the Marlins, Guardians, Rays and White Sox. The payrolls of the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees ($1.07 billion) is more than the four teams already mentioned, plus the A’s, Cardinals, Nationals, Pirates, Twins and Rockies ($967 million). * The US government’s equity portfolio now consists of THIRTY COMPANIES – up from ZERO just a year ago. (MP Materials was the 1st last July.)  We are all Young Cardamoms now.