Team Construction and AI

On this day:

1572
Marriage in Paris of the future Huguenot King Henry IV of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois, in a supposed attempt to reconcile Protestants and Catholics.
1587
Virginia Dare, granddaughter of governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, becomes the first English child born in the Americas.
1590
John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
1634
Urbain Grandier, accused and convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France.
1963
American civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

***

“The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.”--George Gordon Byron, Act III, scene iv. Manfred (1817)

 

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There is a notion among the foolish that prosperity is, somehow, a problem and not a solution.

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The sound of the langur monkey is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc, and mimicking that difficult call has become a dependable occupation.

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We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design—women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators—and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.--working paper

***

Berkshire Hathaway increased its stake in Alphabet by 83% in the second quarter, making the Google parent its third-largest equity holding.
The company ended 14 quarters as a net stock seller, buying nearly $20 billion more equities than it sold.

***

Team Construction and AI

The identification of information sources and culling that information will always be of value. But ambition has neither a pathway nor a momentum. There is a very human conclusion here in this analysis of building success.

From a Harvard's Working Knowledge piece on AI and Sports:

"The draft and free agency are not just events. They show you what a team learned about itself last season and what it believes it should be next.

You can see it in this year’s Finals, too. It was a great matchup.

The Knicks and Spurs were two very different team-building stories. The Knicks took a focused approach to building that roster: they were deliberate with their trades, the players they targeted, and the type of team they wanted around Jalen Brunson.

San Antonio followed a different path. That’s more of a homegrown, asset-management story: draft well, develop well, manage your picks and contracts, and build the kind of organization that can win without the advantages of a bigger market.

AI and data can help both of those situations, but only if you already know what you’re trying to build. AI can now help you process more information and test more scenarios. It can be as tailored to your specific situation as you’re willing to define. It can help you compare players, lineups, contracts, and trade-offs faster than before. But it cannot answer the first question for you: What kind of team are we trying to become?"

The Alaskan Microcosm

On this day:

1807
Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
1862
American Civil War: Major General J.E.B. Stuart is assigned command of all the cavalry of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
1862
Indian Wars: The Dakota War of 1862 begins in Minnesota as Lakota warriors attack white settlements along the Minnesota River.
1918
Bolshevik revolutionary leader Moisei Uritsky is assassinated. This, and the attempted assassination of Lenin by Fanny Kaplan, initiates the Red Terror
1943
World War II: The Royal Air Force begins Operation Hydra, the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign against Germany’s V-weapon programme.
1943
World War II: The U.S. Eighth Air Force suffers the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission.
1943
World War II: The U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrives in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, thus completing the Allied conquest of Sicily.
1950
Hill 303 massacre: American POWs were massacred by North Korean Army.
1970
Venera Program: Venera 7 launched. It will later become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus).
1998
Monica Lewinsky scandal: US President Bill Clinton admits in taped testimony that he had an “improper physical relationship” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. On the same day, he admits before the nation that he “misled people” about the relationship.
2005
Over 500 bombs are set off by terrorists at 300 locations in 63 out of the 64 districts of Bangladesh
2008
American swimmer Michael Phelps becomes the first person to win eight gold medals in one Olympic Games.

***

They [these leftists] seem to want a regression to the Dark Ages: an unsophisticated economy with no landlords, no insurers, no complex markets. They see complexity in the economy, the reason for which is beyond their comprehension, as parasitic.--Wolfe

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"Turning Point"

***

Imagine, if you will, outrageously wealthy men suddenly declaring their devotion and their lives to the well-being of the average guy.

***

The Moroccan migration into Ceuta has caused a ripple in the EU.
While France and other countries tightened border checks, Italy went further and announced it had suspended the EU’s free-movement Schengen agreement with Madrid. Now, in Italian airports, passengers from Spain are asked to join a different line.
Spain retaliated by imposing checks on travelers from Italy.

***

One of America's stranger official creations, the Memorandum of Understanding, has expired. All those politicians and journalists, with their somber declarations and comments, will be missed.

***

The Alaskan Microcosm

Sometimes politics seems to be too big a task for politicians.

Dan S. Sullivan is the incumbent Republican senator from Alaska running for reelection. A late addition to the race is one Daniel J. Sullivan.

Though Dan J. Sullivan, AKA "Decoy Dan," is running as a Republican, he was not associated with the party until two days before filing to run under the GOP banner. He also asked the state to be listed on the ballot as "Dan S. Sullivan," though he does not share Sen. Sullivan's middle initial.

Majority Forward, the nonprofit affiliate of Schumer's Senate Majority PAC, began running ads for the Democrat candidate, using the man who nominated "Decoy Dan" in the ad. He is a romantic partner of an Alaska Democrat operative.

Republicans challenged Dan J. Sullivan's candidacy, arguing that he was running in "bad faith." The Alaska Division of Elections disqualified him in June, determining that his campaign served "the purpose of confusing or misleading voters." Dan J. Sullivan appealed the decision, which a lower court reversed. This means Dan J. Sullivan will appear on the Aug. 18 primary ballot alongside Sen. Sullivan.

This is a clear effort by the Democrats, at the local and national levels, to split the Alaskan Sullivan vote and allow their candidate to sneak in. That subversion of the Alaskan vote is a matter of national Democrat policy. Policy. Nor does the judicial system have the moral wherewithal to protect the voter from their politicians. Like gerrymandering. Like packing the court.

In some way, this is reminiscent of college fraternity rivals; it has a funny element. But our republic gives the citizen a say. On the assumption that being a national senator has national and international implications, and this brazen act is obviously an attempt to confound and blunt the voters' choice, it is a serious matter and should be remembered every time a Democrat somberly intones his concerns about 'saving democracy.'


 

Sunday: the Canaanite

On this day:
1792
Maximilien Robespierre presents the petition of the Commune of Paris to the Legislative Assembly, which demanded the formation of a revolutionary tribunal.
1793
French Revolution: a levée en masse is decreed by the National Convention.
1812
War of 1812: American General William Hull surrenders Fort Detroit without a fight to the British Army.
1819
Seventeen people die and over 600 are injured in cavalry charges at a public meeting at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, England.
1841
U.S. President John Tyler vetoes a bill which called for the re-establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members riot outside the White House in the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.
1869
Battle of Acosta Ñu: A Paraguayan battalion made up of children is massacred by the Brazilian Army during the War of the Triple Alliance.
1896
Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack and Dawson Charlie discover gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.
1920
Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is hit on the head by a fastball thrown by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees, and dies early the next day. Chapman was the second player to die from injuries sustained in a Major League Baseball game, the first being Doc Powers in 1909.
1929
The 1929 Palestine riots break out in the British Mandate of Palestine between Arabs and Jews and continue until the end of the month. In total, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs are killed.
1942
World War II: The two-person crew of the U.S. naval blimp L-8 disappears without a trace on a routine anti-submarine patrol over the Pacific Ocean. The blimp drifts without her crew and crash-lands in Daly City, California.

***

“Frank Conroy, who directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for almost twenty years, reportedly believed a workshop wasn’t a success if nobody cried..."--Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor and alumnus Garth Greenwell

***

All this and Karen Bass:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mQiQcDS3ECQ

***

Germany’s broadband woes did not result from a lack of capital or engineering talent at Deutsche Telekom. Instead, government ownership produced a fundamental alteration of the company’s incentive structure. With state backing, Deutsche Telekom had fewer reasons to take risks, cannibalize its own infrastructure, or accept short-term losses in favor of long-term technological leadership and more reasons to cultivate political relationships that protected its existing revenue streams. This dynamic is reliably produced by partial government ownership of private companies.

***

Cardinals rookie Joshua Báez made MLB history by hitting a home run in each of his first three career plate appearances.

***

Sunday: the Canaanite

The gospel of the Canaanite woman: She is a Hellenistic Syro-Phoenician woman, a descendant of the ancient Canaanites, the bitter biblical enemies of Israel whose paganism had often led Israel into idolatry. Interestingly, Melchizedek is an old Canaanite name.

In the Bronze Age, between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, a diverse group of people called the Canaanites lived in the Middle East. Despite their culture and influence — one of the only golden calf idols discovered was found in the Canaan seaport of Ashqelon — they left behind little information about themselves. Other civilizations made records of them, such as the Greeks, Egyptians and the authors of the Hebrew Bible. But, without Canaanite texts to cite, scholars view the ancient people as a bit of an enigma. The Hebrew Bible offers one explanation for the destiny of the Canaanites: annihilation. The Israelites, per Deuteronomy 20:16-18, were commanded to “utterly destroy” the cities of various tribes, including the Canaanites.

DNA was examined from five Canaanite people who lived 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. Though the skeletal remains were buried in a hot and humid region along the Mediterranean, the scientists were still able to extract genetic material. They mined the petrous bone, a region of skull behind the ear that's also the densest bone in the body. (The discovery that the tough petrous bone protects DNA like a bank vault has greatly advanced the study of ancient DNA in recent years.)

The geneticists sequenced the Canaanite genome and compared it to genomes of modern people, including Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and others from around the world. The comparison revealed that 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of people in Lebanon came from the Canaanites. (The other 10 percent was of a Eurasian steppe population.)
There was more genetic continuity in Lebanon than in a place like England.

In today's gospel, this woman from this ancient people pleads for the health of her daughter.

Christ ignores her- indeed, I can think of no other situation in the gospels where Christ does not respond to a direct appeal. Not only does He ignore her, but He also insults her; He states His mission was to the people of Israel (the "children") and not the Gentiles (the "dogs "). This is very local speech, the vernacular of the time. But it is surprising. The usual analysis is that of Christ demonstrating how His mission is really much larger; His mission is the world. (Indeed, the Canaanite is Phoenician, and Tyre is one of their ports, a portal to the world.) The provincial vision is over.

But it is a harsh lesson. Is Christ staging the scene so He can reverse it to make His larger point? Is He testing her? Can man make God change His mind?

SatStats

On this day:

293 BC
The oldest known Roman temple to Venus is dedicated.
1040
King Duncan I is killed in battle against his first cousin and rival, Macbeth. The latter succeeds him as King of Scotland.
1057
King Macbeth is killed at the Battle of Lumphanan by the forces of Máel Coluim mac Donnchada.
1185
The cave city of Vardzia is consecrated by Queen Tamar of Georgia.
1281
Mongol invasion of Japan: The Mongolian fleet of Kublai Khan is destroyed by a “divine wind” for the second time in the Battle of Kōan.
1461
The Empire of Trebizond surrenders to the forces of Sultan Mehmet II. This is regarded by some historians as the real end of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor David is exiled and later murdered.
1483
Pope Sixtus IV consecrates the Sistine Chapel.
1534
Saint Ignatius of Loyola and six classmates take initial vows, leading to the creation of the Society of Jesus in September 1540.
1549
Jesuit priest Saint Francis Xavier comes ashore at Kagoshima (Traditional Japanese date: July 22, 1549).
1914
A male servant of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright sets fire to the living quarters of the architect’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin, murders seven people and burns the living quarters to the ground.
1914
The Panama Canal opens to traffic with the transit of the cargo ship SS Ancon.
1920
Battle of Warsaw, so-called Miracle at the Vistula.
1935
Will Rogers and Wiley Post are killed after their aircraft develops engine problems during takeoff in Barrow, Alaska.
1939
13 Stukas dive into the ground during a disastrous air-practice at Neuhammer. There are no survivors.
1940
An Italian submarine torpedoes and sinks the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbour during peacetime, marking the most serious Italian provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in October.
1945
World War II: Japan surrenders to end the war.
1948
The Republic of Korea is established south of the 38th parallel north.
1965
The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City, in an event later seen as marking the birth of stadium rock.
1969
The Woodstock Music and Art Festival opens.
1971
President Richard Nixon completes the break from the gold standard by ending convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors.
1974
Yuk Young-soo, First Lady of South Korea, is killed during an apparent assassination attempt upon the President of South Korea, Park Chung-hee.


***

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (25 Jul 1902-1983)

***

Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor who was at the centre of ​a plagiarism scandal, has been found dead.

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America’s still-multiplying embarrassments are rank weeds fertilized by the manure of populism. And by populism’s inherent, aggressive disdain for the importance of character in politics. Populism is almost everything rejected by America’s unsentimental Founders, who, a few days ago, the nation briefly, and often uncomprehendingly, celebrated.

The clear-eyed Founders, steeped in sobering histories of short-lived republics, constructed a sophisticated constitutional architecture that blends democracy and distrust. They built a bulwark against populism because they believed this: Majorities must rule in the end, but their opinions must be mediated — and cooled — by being filtered through institutions. Those institutions must be occupied by people possessing “republican virtue,” an attribute not evenly distributed among “the people.”

What animated the Founding was the antonym of American populism. Populism celebrates popular passions incited by, and channeled swiftly into action by, an unconstrained executive.--Will

***

Can the State protect its citizens from random attack? If not, and that circumstance is accepted by all, what should the response of a free people be?

***

Trump also has an opinion on aircraft carrier catapult systems.

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SatStats

About 46,000 objects are tracked around Earth. One collision can create thousands more.

*

Incode Technologies reports that agentic fraud—scams run autonomously by AI—now accounts for 40% of attempts and is projected to exceed 90% by 2028, driving record global losses.

*

Humans may soon be a minority on the internet, says Elon Musk, after Cloudflare's CFO, Thomas Seifert, predicted that humans will soon be nothing more than a rounding error in internet traffic.

*

Americans filed 5.7 million applications last year to start new businesses, according to the Census Bureau, the most in the two decades the government has kept track. New business applications through the first half of this year continued to climb.

More recently, there are signals that A.I. is adding fuel.

*

"We are 1,000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country, without AI and robots," Musk said. "Nothing else will solve the national debt."

According to the Treasury Department, U.S. national debt now stands at roughly $39.6 trillion — and it continues to grow as federal spending outpaces revenue. Through the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, the federal deficit has climbed to around $1.37 trillion.

Without a productivity breakthrough from artificial intelligence and robotics, Musk painted a bleak picture of what lies ahead, saying the country is "actually totally screwed because the national debt is piling up like crazy."

*

There are only 20,000 great white sharks in the world. An endangered species?

*

Ukraine has only a tenth of the interceptor missiles it urgently needs from the United States to stop surging Russian ballistic missile attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN. He added that if the US “sell us 5%, we will go through the winter and save people’s lives. If they can sell us 10%, we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles. I have 1%.”

*

The British health service now has to spend more money settling maternity malpractice claims than it does on providing maternity care.

*

By examining the changes between each successive cohort, Stollard calculates that dementia rates have been declining by 2.5-3% for each calendar-year cohort.

*

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of Manhattan, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970.
In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed.

*

India
We estimate pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets. This pattern holds across road types, and private mobility does not explain the gap; women’s share on two-wheelers is lower still (8.4% and 5.7%). These results provide the first large-scale measurement of gender disparities in urban public life that self-reported data cannot capture.

“The median married women in India leaves home for 30 minutes per day. On a typical day, 45% of married women don’t leave home at all.”--2 papers

*

According to MTA data, 48.5% of NYC bus riders did not pay the fare in the second quarter of this year

The Assumption of Innocence

On this day

1183
Taira no Munemori and the Taira clan take the young Emperor Antoku and the three sacred treasures and flee to western Japan to escape pursuit by the Minamoto clan. (Traditional Japanese date: Twenty-fifth Day of the Seventh Month of the Second Year of Juei).
1842
Indian Wars: Second Seminole War ends, with the Seminoles forced from Florida to Oklahoma.
1900
The Eight-Nation Alliance occupies Beijing, in a campaign to end the bloody Boxer Rebellion in China.
1935
United States Social Security Act passes, creating a government pension system for the retired.
1945
Japan accepts the Allied terms of surrender in World War II and the Emperor records the Imperial Rescript on Surrender (August 15 in Japan standard time).

1994
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as “Carlos the Jackal,” is captured.

***

The Sound of Science:
“Phylogeny should be approached as a multidimensional, multimodal, processual system subject to continuous change and interaction — in other words, a hierarchy of stabilized processes actively maintained over different timescales.”
(From, “Common Ancestry, Contemporary Phylogenetics, and Process Ontology”, reprinted, slack-jawed and amazed, in Systematic Biology, with the caveat, "You are hereby double dared to parse.. {this}.. sentence ..., in relation to the testing of phylogenetic hypotheses.")

***

Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month. Trump tapped his Justice Department to forge a potentially lucrative and sketchy deal to settle a $10bn lawsuit by Trump against the IRS over a leak of his tax returns, giving him and his family immunity from IRS audits of prior tax returns and potentially saving him $100m. Unlike prior presidents, Trump has declined to put his assets in a completely blind trust or divest from his businesses.

The crypto venture World Liberty Financial, which Trump and his sons launched in the fall of 2024 with the family of Steve Witkoff, who now is Trump’s special Middle East envoy, brought in $799m in 2025 for Trump, according to public filings.

Last year, too, Trump earned another $636m from his novelty memecoin $Trump, which he began marketing just days before his inauguration in 2025.

(From a hostile, one-sided, and disturbing article in the Guardian)

***

During pregnancy, cells and genetic material move in both directions across the placenta. Some maternal cells enter the fetus. Some fetal-origin material enters the mother. A small population can remain after delivery, creating a condition known as microchimerism.

***

Spe·cious
adjective

1. superficially plausible, but actually wrong: "a specious argument"

 
Etymology: late 14c., "pleasing to the sight, fair," from Latin speciosus "good-looking, beautiful, fair," also "showy, pretended, plausible, specious" (source also of Old French specieux, specieuse), from species "appearance, form, figure, beauty" (see species). Meaning "seemingly desirable, reasonable or probable, but not really so; superficially fair, just, or correct" in English is recorded from 1610s.

"Specious" is superficially fair, just, or correct, appearing well at first view but easily proved unsound. "Plausible" is applied to that which pleases the ear or the superficial judgment, but will not bear severe examination

Is our species specious?

***

Pink Floyd Drummer Nick Mason collects cars. His One-of-a-Kind 1996 McLaren F1 GTR will probably sell for over $35 million this week.

***

Highlights from a ProPublica article:
Ready, Fire, Aim: In a rushed process exempted from normal rules, the Army hired General Dynamics, which brought on a Turkish subcontractor with little vetting, to make artillery shells.
Money for Nothing: Despite being paid $533 million, General Dynamics did not produce a single usable shell at its new factory — and has not been held publicly accountable.
Wages of Failure: Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion.

***



The Assumption of Innocence

For four years, a political party ruled this country through a demented president, hiding his mental state from the citizens. At the end of his term, they tried to reelect him until his decline crossed the Rubicon of suspension of disbelief. Only then did they offer- not nominate- an alternative candidate who, for some reason, did not think or speak well, and it showed.

We have seen the growth of astonishing amounts of money that enter political races from special interest groups. Some of these groups are foreign nations! Many of them hate us.

The CBO estimates that 6% of money designated to be spent in federal programs is stolen--stolen--before the money is deployed from Washington, D.C.

 

Then there is gerrymandering, where the politician picks the voter.

With all of this, why would we assume that elections are not tampered with?

A Decline of More Than Numbers

On this day:

3114 BC
According to the Lounsbury correlation, the start of the Maya calendar.
1521
Tenochtitlán (present day Mexico City) falls to conquistador Hernán Cortés.
1792
King Louis XVI of France is formally arrested by the National Tribunal, and declared an enemy of the people.
1831
Nat Turner sees a solar eclipse, which he believes is a sign from God. Eight days later he and 70 other slaves kill approximately 55 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.
1868
A massive earthquake near Arica, Peru, causes an estimated 25,000 casualties, and the subsequent tsunami causes considerable damage as far away as Hawaii and New Zealand.
1937
The Battle of Shanghai begins.
1942
Major General Eugene Reybold of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorizes the construction of facilities that would house the “Development of Substitute Materials” project, better known as the Manhattan Project.
1962
Representatives from the Russian Orthodox Church and the Holy See meet in Metz, France, and come to an agreement wherein the Russian church would send observers to the Second Vatican Council and in exchange, the Roman Catholic Church would refuse to condemn Communism.

***

Quotes from Mamdani’s top aide, Cea Weaver: ‘If you don't believe in the government's sacred right to seize property, it's over’, and ‘Impoverish the White middle class’.

Thinking is, apparently, harder than governing.

***

The Pittsburgh airport plans to replace two people movers with additional seating in the concourses.

***

A TikToker and Instagram user (whose account is now unavailable) claims that "On August 12, 2026, the world will lose gravity for 7 seconds. NASA knows. They're preparing but won't tell us why." The video has had almost 62,000 likes and has been shared 268,000 times on Instagram alone and is now creeping into feeds. Why this nonsense is preferred in the huge reservoir of internet nonsense is unknown.

***

Longtime NASA astronaut Mike Fincke is leaving NASA months after he lost the ability to speak for roughly 20 minutes aboard the International Space Station, an incident that forced a premature end to his and three crewmates' journey.
Fincke’s last day at the space agency is Wednesday, NASA said in a news release.

***

Forbes fired its top editor after discovering that he had accepted a seven-figure payment from a businessman whose company had a lucrative relationship with the magazine.

Randall Lane, Forbes’ chief content officer, received roughly $6 million from RJ Shook, the founder of Shook Research, a company that has worked with Forbes on the magazine’s rankings of the top financial advisers for a decade, according to a New York Times report.

***

A Decline of More Than Numbers

Humanity has never lived in a time of long-term secular population decline. There have been sudden demographic shocks, like the Black Death, but those were short-lived and came at times when the human population as a whole was much younger on average. To a degree we probably cannot even fathom, human civilization and human psychology are built upon notions of growth, youth, renewal, and hope. What would it mean to live in a shrinking world, where most people will have no direct connection to future generations? Where innovation and creativity, disproportionately supplied by younger people, are not only increasingly scarce but perhaps even seen as increasingly undesirable? Where the very notion of sacrificing for the future becomes obsolete? Unlike the economic consequences of demographic decline, these are some of the harder-to-quantify aspects of the problem that society, by and large, has not even begun to reckon with. But they might prove far more important, especially if it turns out that the techno-optimists are right about the role technology can play in the economy of the future. In short, we are on the precipice of arguably the most fundamental shift humanity has ever experienced. And right now, for the most part, we are going into that shift blind.--Jeremy Friedman

This might be the largest of the Left's many blind spots. Struggle is a condition of man. It has always been with us. But achievement has not. What Friedman is writing about here is not production or the financial balance of entitlement demands. It is even possible that AI will be able to meet those demands. What this population trend heralds is the gradual loss of struggle, the human fight to achieve and provide. The threat of scarcity and its liberating human efforts to overcome and succeed. Achievement. 

Shrinking effort and success. Narrowing dreams. And a disconnection of us from the future. It sounds like we'll be better fed and less sick, but it also sounds like a return to the emotional Dark Ages.

What Politics Is

On this day:

30 BC
Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last ruler of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty, commits suicide, allegedly by means of an asp bite.
1099
First Crusade: Battle of Ascalon Crusaders under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon defeat Fatimid forces led by Al-Afdal Shahanshah. This is considered the last engagement of the First Crusade.
1676
Praying Indian John Alderman shoots and kills Metacomet, the Wampanoag war chief, ending King Philip’s War. ('Praying Indian' refers to an American Indian convert to Christianity.)
1914
World War I: the United Kingdom declares war on Austria-Hungary; the countries of the British Empire follow suit
1944
Waffen SS troops massacre 560 people in Sant'Anna di Stazzema.
1952
The Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow.
1960
Echo 1A, NASA’s first successful communications satellite, is launched.
1976
Between 1,000 and 3,500 Palestinians are killed in the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, one of the bloodiest events of the Lebanese Civil War
1982
Mexico announces it is unable to pay its enormous external debt, marking the beginning of a debt crisis that spreads to all of Latin America and the Third World.
1994
Major League Baseball players go on strike. This will force the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
2000
The Oscar-class submarine K-141 Kursk of the Russian Navy explodes and sinks in the Barents Sea during a military exercise. 

***

The sinking of the Kursk was a MasterClass in a state's self-absorbed disdain for those it professes to represent and to care for. And, of course, an insight into its glorious leader, Putin.

***

"We’ve generated the first early human eggs derived from stem cells. This is a big deal -- the potential to redefine fertility is real."

This is a post on X from a guy in a lab.

***

The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.--Cowen

*** 

Termarr Johnson, who is one of the top prospects for the Pittsburgh Pirates, suffered a serious injury.

***

Mayor Zohran Mamdani blamed a “miscommunication” Tuesday after an awkward public clash between City Hall and NYPD officials over whether the department would provide security for his wife Rama Duwaji’s upcoming Middle East trip.
He's got to be the only socialist in history who doesn't know that revolutionaries take over the police first.

***

In 2024, Nancy Pelosi earned more from investments than any large hedge fund in the United States.

***

The Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a Roman shipwreck in 1901 turned out to be a hand-cranked bronze computer that could predict eclipses and track the irregular orbit of the Moon, and nothing of comparable mechanical complexity would appear anywhere on Earth for another 1,400 years

***

Recently, the government gave $500 million to the coal industry, mostly in West Virginia. Now that's a lot of money, but that's less than the people of NYC gave to the wife of the Ex-mayor when they left office. That's consoling.

***

The goofy Ms. Hong lost in the Democrat primary for Governor in Wisconsin, despite support from the GOP PACs. One wonders if she was finally recognized as an incompetent by Democrats or alienated her foolish base by compromising on her foolish positions.
And Flanagan won in Minnesota, proving voters don't care what you do or don't do in office.

***

Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled organism that can only reproduce sexually inside cats, rewires the fear circuits in rodent brains to make them attracted to cat odors rather than repelled by them.

Researchers have spent decades investigating whether this same parasite, which lives dormant in hundreds of millions of people, might subtly influence human behavior and preferences in ways we don't recognize.

That may be unconstitutional!

*** 

What Politics Is

A very ugly podcast is being rebroadcast on a website I like. It is an interview with a trans-prostitute and her story of an encounter with Lindsey Graham. I'm sure there will be many opinions about this, especially on the very confused Left. 

I know little about Graham. I thought he was funny, and I've heard the rumors. And I don't care about his personal life — aside from the security risks it presents. But I do care about scandalmongering, especially the dead, as a political tool, and I think that it characteristically appears late and in the absence of substance or courage. And I hate the idea that this kind of attack substitutes for political debate and reduces serious, threatening government problems to personal quirks and inconsistencies.

AI, The Debt, Censorship, Suspicion of Achievement, The Iran War, Russia in Ukraine, Open Borders, Mystery Cabinet Appointments, Children's Academic Test Scores, The Electoral Success of Shallow Revolutionary Thought — and we get this.

It confirms my opinion of the perpetrators and changes my opinion of the website that rebroadcast it.