Memorial Day

 

“I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

***

Scientists do not ridicule or hound those who disagree. Nor do they hold high-spirited rallies. These are particularly political and/or religious qualities. Anyone with a scientific mind would recognize such presumptuous intolerance as specifically unscientific.

***

For those of you who are low on anxiety, by 2030, according to a recent report, half of India's population — 700 million people — will lack adequate drinking water.
“If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water,” warns Ismail Serageldin, a former executive for the World Bank.

***

China launched the Shenzhou 23 spacecraft Sunday night, carrying three astronauts bound for its space station, including one set to stay in space for a year.

The spacecraft blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. The much-anticipated launch comes as China prepares for its first crewed lunar landing by 2030.

***

Vegas Golden Knights came back from a three-goal deficit to defeat the Colorado Avalanche 5-3 in Game 3 of the Western Conference Final at T-Mobile Arena on Sunday.

The Golden Knights lead 3-0 in the best-of-7 series.

***

Memorial Day

War is man's most evil pursuit. Every single human motive morphs into something horrible and destructive; the most noble of man's qualities become misapplied. Somehow, the diffident grasshopper becomes the predatory locust. 

Yet within the world of men, some things must be done. Individuals must live and act within the admitted abomination that is war. 

In the Second War, the Germans and the Japanese were asked to fulfill their destiny and complete history. This involved destroying or subjugating everyone who was not them. The Allies' children were asked to fight for their lives. Their behavior in this gargantuan struggle should always stand as a testament to man's higher elements in the midst of man's lowest. Yet questions are always raised by some.

When Obama was in Japan and visiting Hiroshima, new discussion of the WWII atomic bombing began. An article in the LA Times asserted the bombing was cruel, gratuitous, and not a factor in the ending of the war. "Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today," the article states. 

More, the cause of the Japanese surrender was actually the Russian invasion of Manchuria. 

The article explains: "It was not the atomic evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Pacific war. Instead, it was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies that began at midnight on Aug. 8, 1945 — between the two bombings." 

That is to say, after the Americans dropped the bomb, the Russians moved in; probably a coincidence. Indeed, the sentiment at least seems to be in line with current thinking; the majority of Americans in polls think the bombs should not have been dropped.

Of course, people will differ in their assessment of history. Some assessments will be more accurate--sometimes more honest--than others. And many military men did not want to use the weapons. But of all the wars in history, World War Two is the least ambiguous to analyze.

The History website has this summary:
Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device–a plutonium bomb–at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused. (Italics added)

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided, over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower, and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists, to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb–such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state–believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. (italics added)

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

So the Emperor cites the bomb as a factor. And the alternative was an island-by-island attack on Japan that the experts accepted would cost one million--MILLION--American lives.

The LA Times article suggests the U.S. ignored a Japanese peace approach to the U.S., requesting only that the Emperor survive. But that is not entirely true. Their proposal was to keep the Emperor and the current governing militaristic system intact, something the Allies thought nonnegotiable. Another element overlooked in the LA Times article is the continuity of events. Over 200,000 people were killed in the atomic attacks. Isolated, that is horrific. One wonders how the essayist saw those deaths in the context of the war itself. Or do they spare themselves the difficulty? China suffered between 15 and 17 million--MILLION--deaths directly related to combat--many described as "crimes against humanity." The Russians lost 25 to 27 million. MILLION. And there was Nanjing, an episode so savage that it drove its main historian, Iris Chang, crazy. And Unit 731.  

Certainly, we need kinder, gentler wars.

Nonetheless, the LA Times article was quite critical of American behavior and motives in one of the world's most easily evaluated conflicts, the American democracy vs. Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Applying morality to war is tricky and can be practiced only by our best and brightest. Fortunately, a look at the byline has the reassuring information that the LA Times article was authored by none other than Oliver Stone, the esteemed and award-winning movie director. He is certainly qualified. As a member of the exclusive self-absorbed entertainment cult and the reliable creator of the movie JFK, one of the cult's more astonishing productions of incoherent historical analysis, we can certainly rely upon his opinion.

And I'm sure he would have been willing to talk to the widows, the orphans, and the parents of those million Americans, explaining that those soldiers had to die assaulting the Japanese islands because we were true to our inner nature and did not drop the cruel bombs that could have ended the war. That was not who we are.

Sunday/Pentecost

The unemployment rate for those seeking work has risen for recent college graduates above that of older workers for the first time in history. This is also true of the non-college-graduate age group.

***

This $1.8 billion fund for people aggrieved over politically motivated legal action seems like a stupid response to a serious problem.

***

Why must Independents, a sizable portion of the American voters, be forced to vote for an antagonistic political party?

***

Sunday/Pentecost

Today is Pentecost, observed 7 weeks after Easter. It is a complex day in the Church in history and meaning.
Literally, Pentecost means "fifty," as the fiftieth week of the year. It, in the Old Testament, refers to the giving of the Ten Commandments and, in the New Testament, signifies its new direction. Christ reappears to the fearful apostles, reinvigorates them and then breathes upon them, infusing the spirit of the New Testament and the abilities to carry out their evangelism. "Whose sins you forgive..." essentially creates a church structure.

In England, it is--or was--the feast of Whitsun, so changed after the Norman Conquest. Whitsun is a contraction of "White Sunday," attributed to the white vestments worn by catechumens on the day. Eventually, white (hwitte) began to be confused with wit or understanding, not entirely inappropriate for the occasion. It was a significant holiday and celebration in its time and began to substitute for more secular spring celebrations.

The word for "Spirit" in Greek has several meanings; it also can mean "wind" and "breath." Christ does breathe on the apostles, and the Spirit is often described as a great wind. One ancient writer describes the Holy Spirit as Christ's last expired breath on the cross.

Breath is, of course, different from wind, which can be destructive, even in the scorching Middle East. But Christ's breath is gentle; it seems there is no downside here, no risk. Unless to the recipient who internalizes it. Of the apostles--who all abandoned Christ to die alone--after Pentecost, all, save John, died for Christ's message.

In our cautious and uncertain world, Pentecost might be more safely observed from a window. Or online.

SatStats

Mamdani is the mayor/artist formerly known as Young Cardamom.

***

OpenAI pioneered a $20-per-month subscription three years ago, a price point many competitors matched. That price has not changed, even as features and performance have improved substantially.

One recent analysis found that “GPT-4-equivalent performance now costs $0.40/million tokens versus $20 in late 2022.” That is the equivalent of a 70 percent annual deflation rate — remarkable by any standard, especially in a time when affordability has become a dominant public concern.

And this is only the foundational model layer. On top of it sits a sprawling ecosystem of consumer applications, enterprise tools, device integrations and start-ups aiming to serve niches as specific as gyms and hair salons.

***

Another AI metaphor: Suppose you are the best maker of horse carriages in Belgium around the time the automobile is invented. You might want to take on as many orders as possible for new carriages because you know your future is precarious. Or, maybe you get your hands on one of these new-fangled automobiles as soon as possible and learn how fix them. Both options require you to WORK HARDER but these seem to be the two best options available. Paradoxical but true.

***

Vegas came back last night!

***

Only five of the Starship spacecraft’s six engines ignited, preventing it from reaching the correct orbital path, although the trajectory remained “within bounds” for a suborbital flight.

***

SatStats



The fertility rate in the Central African Republic is about 6 births per woman.

The fertility rate in China is about 1 birth per woman.


*


Only 30 percent of NYC's residents report being “happy” with Mamdani’s performance.


*


More than 500,000 American adolescents reported inhalant use in the past year,


*


Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least five million people were captured from hundreds of locations across Eastern Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. We hypothesize that, over time, raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies’ resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and related indicators of demographic and commercial development. --Cambridge


*


The City of Pittsburgh gained the highest number of new residents statewide between 2020 and 2025. More than 4,500 people were born or moved into the city in that period, an increase of 1.5%


*


Cumbria Police made 7.7 arrests per 10,000 people for 'malicious speech' over two years, about 2.5 times the national average. So 'malicious speech' can vary with region?


*


The Debt was 30% of GDP at the beginning of the Depression, 41% at the beginning of World War II, 122% in 1946, at the end of the war . . . and then fell gradually back to 30% by 1981.


*


In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results.


*


Bonded servants had virtually disappeared in America by 1800.

*

Canada has the largest decline in happiness in the world (along with the U.K.)

*

Nonsense in Education

SpaceX's newest version of its massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is scheduled to launch its critical test flight today, Friday, May 22, at 6:30 p.m. EDT from Starbase, Texas.

***

Health officials are furious at the U.S. for leaving WHO. They hold that act definitive in the emergence of the new Ebola episode--almost as if there were no other responsible nations in the world.

***

Colbert's exit is being framed as if Trump caused it.

***

"The Nakba" is the phrase Palestinians use to describe their displacement during the war of 1948. "Nakba” itself literally means “disaster,” and was coined by a Syrian professor who used it to describe not the Jews’ attempt at self-defense, but the sheer and gross stupidity of virtually all Arab states in waging war against Israel — and then losing badly, despite overwhelming numeric advantages.

***

Nonsense in Education

The DOE in NY is responsible for just 844,400 students, a huge drop from the 1.1 million as recently as 2012.

More surprising. NYC pays over $44,000 per student per year to "educate" them. Yet with staggering costs for fewer students, performance scores remain unchanged, at an estimated 30% to 40% of the expected achievement level.

Increased costs without increased benefits has become a virtual slogan of modern American government.

How can a democracy, which depends upon at least a passing knowledge of the world and its risks, survive when only 30% of its young people can read normally? 

Who benefits from this mess? 

One guess.

In this clearly disastrous system, the system itself is trying to decrease teacher work requirements.

NY education Chancellor Kamar Samuels warned that it’ll be “very difficult” for the city to meet the mandate of no more than 20-25 students per class, depending on grade level.

Compliance now stands at 64%, he says, but the city won’t even hit the 80% mark by September.

(In fairness, the chancellor surprisingly questioned the “hold harmless” policy, which requires giving every school at least as much funding as the year before, even when its enrollment keeps plummeting. Questioned, but did not change.)

A full 29% of the city’s budget, an astounding $39 billion, goes to a school system where enrollment is down, truancy is up, and achievement is inferior, but stagnant, while its major preoccupation seems to be decreasing teacher workload.

Those are not pigeons circling, waiting to roost; they are vultures.

 

Democracizing Power

Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final at Ball Arena on Wednesday.

***

A fossil discovery in Ethiopia shows that early Homo and a previously unknown Australopithecus species lived together around 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago.

***

Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final at Ball Arena on Wednesday.

***

Democracizing Power

In the short years of the Ukrainian War, there have been remarkable advances in accurate, cheap military murder and disruptions.  We are now blessed with affordable leverage in warfare, as we have seen in the advances of terrorism in the streets.

Here is one such change, reported by Perera.

"A Chinese AI startup called MizarVision is publishing high-resolution satellite imagery of every US military base, every carrier strike group, every F-22 deployment, every THAAD battery, and every Patriot missile position in the Middle East. Labelled. Geolocated. AI-annotated. Updated in near-realtime. Shared by PLA-linked accounts and Chinese state media to an audience of billions.

The Pentagon has downplayed the releases as “open-source.” This framing misses the point entirely. The value of MizarVision’s output is not the raw satellite image. Any government can purchase commercial satellite passes. The value is the AI processing layer that converts terabytes of imagery into labelled, searchable, cross-referenced intelligence products at a speed and scale that previously required the resources of a national intelligence agency. MizarVision is democratising military surveillance and publishing the output on social media, where Iran’s 31 autonomous IRGC provincial commands can access it from a mobile phone.

The next war will not begin with a missile launch. It will begin with an AI model labelling every target from orbit."

This is a rise in the influence of the individual that no democracy ever dreamed of. Power can increasingly be opposed affordably by the narrow and precise. 

Governments will soon argue that any deviation from common dogma carries risk.

It Is Known, Khaleese

 

Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. --McKENZIE 

***

What is this $1.6 billion slush fund for? Is it to compensate people who were unjustly targeted by the Biden Regency and had to spend a fortune to defend themselves from the people who created the Trump Russian conspiracy and the 'Hunter Biden computer is Russian disinformation?' What exactly is the penalty for a government agency attacking in court people they simply don't like?

***

According to the Post, one of the San Diego shooters wrote in their 'manifesto,' that he " lamented being short, which he said caused him great pain and humiliation."

***

New York City’s $125 billion budget is larger than the $115 billion the entire state of Florida is expected to spend this year. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

***

It Is Known, Khaleese

Critics this weekend point to investment patterns suggesting Trump is misusing his power to benefit from his own decisions. When he came to office, he said he would not take a salary, he built the ballroom with private money, and set aside his investment money in a private trust with management he could not influence. Is this a change? Is he now in control of his finances and betting on his own executive acts? Or is this charge just untrue?

It's reasonable to be cynical about government but, as Lily Tomlin said, it's hard to keep up. These people will take advantage of anything for influence or profit.
Regulators are seeking information from prediction-market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket over wagers tied to political events and military operations. Such bets pose a challenge for authorities because insider-trading laws weren’t designed for people who wager on the outcome of legislation, political races, and even U.S. military action.

Remember, these people have inside information, i.e. they are the insiders making these decisions.

Enter the innuendo. Is it possible that the administration has had the time to be as evil as is said? Trump is still said to be a Russian agent. There has been no reason to believe that, aside from the suggestion of a paid political opponent. Pedophile? That seems to be a specific charge with real definitions, but, again, no charges. 

Fascism. Fascism has a definition; does Trump qualify? Are these people confusing Fascism with authoritarianism? Trump is certainly that, but is he worse than, say, FDR? Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; was he a fascist?

All this has become political dogma, like the spiritual claims of religions, global warming, or aliens. The democracy functions on individual citizens' input. If its input is this flawed, democracy has little chance.

 

1-877-KARS4KROOKS

Israel also wants 'from the river ot the seas.'

***

Pennsylvania liquor control enforcement agents say they've stopped an illegal gambling operation in Washington County at a social club where they were playing Queen of Hearts. Officials said the club did not have a county-issued small games of chance license.

"The 52 cards are set out on a table," Officer Wright explained. "You buy chances to get the card. Obviously, getting the queen of hearts means you win and get the jackpot."

According to law enforcement, these games can actually last for a while.

"They can go on for various lengths of time," said Wright. "This specific game went on for 10 months approximately."

Stalking the state for 10 months. I know I feel safer.

***

Is Kash Patel taking blinking lessons?

***

Verizon seems to believe that politeness can substitute for insincerity and stupidity.

***

1-877-KARS4KROOKS

While the 1-877-KARS4KIDS song has been called one of the most memorable jingles in history, a court has ruled it is misleading.

Misleading

A California man took the group behind it to court, saying he donated an old car to Kars4Kids, thinking its value would be used to help underprivileged children. He didn't know the money generated was used to support Oorah, a Jewish organization that helps fund young adult trips to Israel.

Oorah actually runs a matchmaking program for Jewish youth and funds gap year trips to Israel for 17- and 18-year-olds. It does other things, too. The company used donations to purchase a $16.5-million building in Israel.

"The evidence also shows that children, especially needy or underprivileged children, are not the recipients of the proceeds of the donations," the ruling states. These 'donations' fund vague enterprises and infrastructure, including gap year vacations to Israel.

A recent Fox segment read the entire episode as antisemitic. One commentator talked about the maddening jingle. One laughed about its amateurish appearance. No one talked about what it was, a deceptive ad meant to bilk well-intentioned people out of money, then launder it. Nor did anyone suggest that it was representative of most of these charities: ways of making your personal plans and daily expenses tax-deductible with the help of unwitting accomplices.

Like the Westboro Church, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the  "National Council of Churches" (NCC), 1-877-KARS4KIDS is a deception for someone's betterment, but probably not yours. And mendacity, in this case, money laundering, often disguises more than one thing.

At the very least, it is not funny.