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.

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"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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

The Twelve Good Men and True of Democracy

 On this day:

1521
The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade.
1862
American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas.
1955
Black teenager Emmett Till is murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.
1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech
1968
Riots in Chicago, Illinois, during the Democratic National Convention.
1979
An IRA bomb explodes on the Grand Place in Brussels.
1991
Collapse of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
1991
Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1996
Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales divorce.

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"It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion."--John Kenyon’s 1983 volume, The History Men

***

Many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s English that is odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

***

Some kid named Lucas McGill flew a drone into the sky to measure CO2 levels and found, surprisingly, that ground-level CO2 in cities was lower than in rural areas. That's good because we should be able to shut down the farms more easily than cars.

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The Twelve Good Men and True of Democracy

Is it wise to assume that silly opinions will dissolve in the light of public scrutiny?

A few weeks ago, Karen Bass, the once-and-future mayor of LA, patiently explained the dynamics of homelessness to wide-eyed Americans. It seems that the drug-addled, criminal vagrants plaguing American streets have a cause we had overlooked and we can treat. The real problem is they have no teeth. 

We'll see the effect of militant Dental Activists that will surely follow.

A DSA spokesman gave an interview attacking rental property, claiming there is no constitutional provision for double-digit returns on investment.

Some successful recent campaigns promise the end of the Supreme Court and the Senate; some promise to end the Presidency. And, of course, no police, prisons, or borders.

Several senatorial candidates plan to establish 50% national ownership of the nation's largest companies.

A power company rerouted its lines to avoid the site of house-elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, which contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby.” 

Are the shallowness and scope of these opinions and promises self-disruptive? When you hear opinions like diverting a multi-zillion-dollar power line because it complicates the non-existent gravesite of a non-existent character representing a non-existent species in a children's fantasy book —your tendency is to turn off the critical-thinking part of your brain and rest. You do not join in the fray. You can not imagine any consequence of this non-storm in this non-existent teapot.

This may be an underestimating the foolishness of humanity.

Imagine children reporting being abused in mysterious tunnels under a daycare center or teachers killing rabbits and turtles to intimidate them. Or a baby being sacrificed in a church. Barnyard animals being sacrificed in schoolrooms. A student taken to a graveyard, where he helped unearth a coffin and saw a body that was then cut with knives. "Bad Clowns," "robots," ritualized abuse, "magic rooms," and "Satanic practices." Preschool teachers who flew in the air while dressed as witches.

This was not Salem three hundred years ago; this was California and New Jersey a generation and a half ago.

Margaret Kelly Michaels, a teacher at the Wee Care Nursery School, was indicted for 299 offenses in connection with the sexual assault of 33 children and eventually convicted and sentenced to 47 years in prison. Albert Algerin, employed at the Praca Day Care center, was sentenced to 50 years for rape and sexual abuse. Bernard Baran, working at Early Childhood Development Center in Pittsfield, was convicted on January 30, 1985, of three counts of rape of a child and five counts of indecent assault and battery. He was sentenced to three life terms, plus 8 to 20 years on each charge. At Fell Acres, Gerald Amirault was convicted of assaulting and raping nine children, and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in state prison. In a separate trial, his mother, Violet Amirault, and sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, were also convicted of similar charges, and sentenced to jail for 8 to 20 years. (Reporting on this case won Dorothy Rabinowitz the Pulitzer Prize.)

All of these cases were brought by educated American citizens, prosecuted by adult law graduates (including Janet Reno), and all the victims were convicted by 12 good men and true. All of those convicted went to prison; Margaret Kelly Michaels went to prison for five years before she was rescued by a bloodied and battered common sense.

In this context, perhaps it is unwise to be confident that political positions that are clearly nuts will be easily sterilized by the purifying air of our sacred democracy.

So, start handing out the toothbrushes.

'39

On this day:

479 BC
Greco-Persian Wars: Persian forces led by Mardonius are routed by Pausanias, the Spartan commander of the Greek army in the Battle of Plataea.
410
The sacking of Rome by the Visigoths ends after three days.
1776
The Battle of Long Island: in what is now Brooklyn, New York, British forces under General William Howe defeat Americans under General George Washington.
1793
French counter-revolution: the port of Toulon revolts and admits the British fleet, which lands troops and seizes the port leading to Siege of Toulon.
1859
Petroleum is discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania leading to the world’s first commercially successful oil well.
1883
The eruption of Krakatoa
1928
The Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war is signed by the first 15 nations to do so. Ultimately sixty-one nations will sign it. (Can you imagine?)
1962
The Mariner 2 unmanned space mission is launched to Venus by NASA.
1979
A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb kills British World War II admiral Louis Mountbatten and three others while they are boating on holiday in Sligo, Republic of Ireland. Shortly after, 18 British Army soldiers are killed in an ambush near Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland

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"In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time — none, zero." --Charlie Munger.

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Cybercriminals are utilizing AI to create high-quality fake websites, imitating prominent retailers such as Amazon and PayPal, as well as financial institutions. Some cybersecurity experts worry AI tools will supercharge these scams by enabling criminals with limited technical skills to create nearly perfect fake sites in minutes.--WSJ

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Stovepiping: noun

Multiple meanings, including firearm and computer application.

In its information management context, stovepiping refers to the practice of passing or channeling information up and down within a hierarchy or organization without sharing it across different levels or departments. This can lead to isolated 'silos' of information, lack of communication, and inefficiency in the organization. With people with guns, this can be dangerous.

This was the term applied to the separated functions of CIA and FBI believed to contribute to the 9-11 disaster.

It seems to be the desire of local municipalities in their nullification policy toward federal officers acting locally.

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“Your Social Security is safe. You can write that down and take it home to mama,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said this summer. “All we got to do is go take the money out of the general fund, which we always do.”
There will be a crisis of financing the idiotic social benefits in this country. Social security will be the first major test of the country's coming financial problems. This is the opinion of an influential Senator: The solution to one of America's great problems is to keep doing what we're doing.

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And, with the same needle in the same vein, Rocket Labs, at $68 per share, is 3,225X forward PE.

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A federal judge in Houston has blocked Texas’ law prohibiting explicit sexual performances in front of children, finding it unconstitutional.

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'39

These are the lyrics of the song "'39" by Queen, about very rapid travel into space and the stars, with time-dilation effects on the return voyage and the attendant regret on return, where all he knows is gone. It's a strange song with a sea chanty lilt.

The songwriter is Brian May, the group guitarist who has a Ph.D in astrophysics.

Lyrics '39

In the year of '39, assembled here the volunteers
In the days when lands were few
Here the ship sailed out into the blue and sunny morn
The sweetest sight ever seen
And the night followed day
And the story tellers say
That the score brave souls inside
For many a lonely day sailed across the milky seas
Ne'er looked back, never feared, never cried
Don't you hear my call though you're many years away
Don't you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew
In the year of '39 came a ship in from the blue
The volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the Earth is old and grey, little darling, we'll away
But my love, this cannot be
Oh, so many years have gone though I'm older but a year
Your mother's eyes, from your eyes, cry to me
Don't you hear my call though you're many years away?
Don't you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand for the day I take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew
Don't you hear my call though you're many years away?
Don't you hear me calling you?
All your letters in the sand cannot heal me like your hand
For my life
Still ahead
Pity me