Afghanistan and Vietnam as Long-Term Investments

On this day:

79
Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash (note: this traditional date has been challenged, and many scholars believe that the event occurred on October 24).
410
The Visigoths under King Alaric I begin to pillage Rome.
1349
Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz after being blamed for the bubonic plague.
1391
Jews are massacred in Palma de Mallorca.
1456
The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
1662
The Act of Uniformity requires England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.
1682
William Penn receives the area that is now the state of Delaware, and adds it to his colony of Pennsylvania
1814
British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings.
1857
The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in United States history.
1929
Second day of the two-day Hebron massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attacks on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, result in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city.
1949
The treaty creating NATO goes into effect.
1991
Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1991
Ukraine declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.

***

“Every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.”--Latin American author Eduardo Galeano

***

When Vesuvius erupted, 20,000 people lived in Pompeii, including merchants, manufacturers, and farmers who exploited the rich soil of the region with numerous vineyards and orchards. None suspected that the black fertile earth was the legacy of earlier eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Herculaneum was a city of 5,000 and a favorite summer destination for rich Romans. According to Pliny the Younger’s account, the eruption lasted 18 hours. Pompeii was buried under 14 to 17 feet of ash and pumice, and the nearby seacoast was drastically changed. Herculaneum was buried under more than 60 feet of mud and volcanic material. Today, Mount Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Its last eruption was in 1944, and its last major eruption was in 1631.

***

The trial of the woman who killed her children includes testimony from medical professionals who saw her the day before the murders, and they said she was perfectly sane. Assuming they are competent, these murders imply that a lot of threatening and violent behavior is performed by people who are very different from their fellows but not clinically insane. That should worry everybody.

***

Full decompression kills an astronaut primarily through oxygen reversing direction, leaving the blood and diffusing backward into collapsed, unpressurized lungs, a process that can cause unconsciousness in as little as ten seconds. And his saliva boils.

***

You have to show your identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor, or check out a library book and rent a video, but not to vote for who runs the government. But you are assuming that your vote helps run the government and is not a placebo.

***

Afghanistan and Vietnam as Long-Term Investments

Trump has invested federal dollars in private companies, thirty so far. This is not new, clever, or innovative. This is contrary to every idea in a free society, and the Americans have fought an endless rearguard action against it. Not only does interference in the economy violate basic American principles, it also doesn't work. It's bad enough when the government is just predatory; it is a disaster when it gets entrepreneurial.
Two observations on recent events.

--Shapiro has done a U-Turn. He now opposes data centers. He did this with school vouchers, as well. He looked like a promising guy, so this is extremely disappointing. Is he just part of the current rage of politicians unrestrained by any real philosophy, like Trump? Does comfort with contradiction just make you agile in politics? Or do multiple U-Turns mean you're just a guy running in circles?

This looks like a significant political opportunity for someone. Data centers are coming, either fast or slow. And this astonishing and dangerous technology is going to be something the world will have to learn to live with. Why not develop a policy that accepts that reality, design and build a template to manage the new technology, and allow it to develop efficiently and safely? You might even create a template that presents risk management ideas for future technologies that are beyond the average politician's myopic ken.

Accept the challenge, create a management plan, then beat those politicians--whose idea of management is suppression--to a pulp with it.


--There is a weird dichotomy with successful people. Everyone is mad at them. The rich and successful are somehow on the outs. We vilify them; we suspect them of harboring aristocratic philosophies and cabalistic plans; we farm them for taxes.


But when they have an idea or want to start a business or a laboratory program, we suddenly think they are needy and desperate for our help. The country will lose its international edge without our tax support of these selfsame successful, rich, and creative people.

Why should the most capable, productive people in the land get money from taxes? Why should their efforts be underwritten by the average guy, struggling along? If a business idea or research is insightful and promising, the free market will be standing in line to support it and benefit. Yet these politicians think these people need their help. Somehow politicians and their bureaucratic assistants think all the smart, successful, hard-working highest quintile guys in society who have already proven their value just can't get along and achieve anything without the approval and help of the lower quintile of the high school class.

Sometimes the fussy State intrudes just because it can. There is a big difference between "I need..." and "I could use..." And sometimes the government just thinks it's crucial to everything

But the day is coming when financial restraint will not be voluntary.

Sunday/A Question

 On this day:

79
Mount Vesuvius begins stirring, on the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
1305
Sir William Wallace is executed for High Treason at Smithfield in London.
1572
Mob violence against Huguenots in Paris – St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
1775
King George III declares that the American colonies exist in a state of open and avowed rebellion.
1839
The United Kingdom captures Hong Kong as a base as it prepares for war with Qing China. The ensuing 3-year conflict will later be known as the First Opium War.
1914
World War I: Japan declares war on Germany and bombs Qingdao, China.
1927
Sacco and Vanzetti are executed.
1929
Hebron Massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attack on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, continuing until the next day, resulted in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city.
1939
World War II: Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret addition to the pact, the Baltic states, Finland, Romania, and Poland are divided between the two nations.
1942
World War II: Beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad.

***


"The caroms of trade aggressions and retaliations call to mind an experience Gulliver had when his travels took him to the grand academy of Lagado. There he met a man who had worked "eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers." To those who say this is as plausible as trying to produce prosperity with protectionism — correctly likened to pursuing wealth by blockading one's own ports — today's trade warriors respond: Have patience. Given sufficient time, protectionism will pay.

But as the comedian Steven Wright says, " Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." (will)

***

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a 2028 presidential hopeful, had welcomed data centers as an economic-development boon, boasting last year that an Amazon plan to build $20 billion in AI infrastructure was the "largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania."
On Tuesday, Shapiro, whose Republican opponent in November is campaigning on halting data-center development, went from AI cheerleader to critic and signed an executive order imposing stringent new requirements for data-center developers.

***

A 15th-Century epic poem by Blind Harry (Harry the Minstrel) was responsible for much of the legend of William Wallace. It was nine books long and was said to be second only to the bible in Scottish homes.

***

Sunday/A Question

Today's gospel is the declaration of Peter. It contains a rare use of the word "church," in the Greek meaning a religious assembly. It also contains a startling question by Christ, for what does Christ not know?


“But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter said in reply,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.


This is, again, another example of Christ's demanding a determination from what has been seen, a collection of observations leading to a result. It is an edgy problem, creating local conclusions from small events when a gigantic, far-reaching event could have convinced the world. And it allows for a profound uncertainty, "Who do you say that I am?" as if part of the story is the quest.



The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


Gerard Manley Hopkins

SatStats

On this day:

565
St. Columba reports seeing a monster in Loch Ness, Scotland, in first recorded alien sighting.
1485
The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet.
1642
Charles I calls the English Parliament traitors. The English Civil War begins.
1780
James Cook’s ship HMS Resolution returns to England (Cook having been killed on Hawaii during the voyage).
1831
Nat Turner’s slave rebellion commences just after midnight in Southampton, Virginia, leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who are killed in retaliation for the uprising.
1910
Korea is annexed by Japan with the signing of the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, beginning a period of Japanese rule of Korea that lasted until the end of World War II.
1922
Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army is shot dead during an Anti-Treaty ambush at Béal na mBláth, County Cork, during the Irish Civil War.
1963
American Joe Walker in an X-15 test plane reaches an altitude of 106 km.
1992
FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

***

The hard work of reading, writing, and thinking is not a problem to be solved.”--Rosenweig

***

Communism has never been popular in the United States, and the only politician calling for state takeover of private industries is Trump, under whom the government has taken stakes in at least nine companies involved in steel, minerals, nuclear energy, and semiconductors, costing at least $10 billion in taxpayer money.--Cox

***

Reynolds, a City University of New York historian, uses his subtitle — “Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America” — to assert this: The White Lion, the ship that first brought slaves to Virginia, and the Mayflower, which brought to New England Puritans in flight from monarchical absolutism and Anglican bossiness, incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures.

***

The dismantling of Harvard University’s writing center, and the laying off of Rosenzweig, its director—both announced last month—has been seen as a human surrender in the ongoing wrestling match between human and AI creative content and expression.

***

If Democrats are victorious in the fall, expect a whole-of-Congress approach to driving President Donald Trump from office next year.--WSJ

***

SatStats

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022.

*

The day after the news, the Daily Mail had nine separate stories on the Sussexes' return leading its homepage; coverage in the Sun took up the first seven pages of its print edition.

*

In July, US spending on its e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop, was greater than online spending at major retailers like Target, Costco, and The Home Depot, according to US credit and debit card transaction data compiled by the customer-intelligence firm Consumer Edge.

TikTok Shop accounted for about 2% of online US retail spending last month, up from around 1.2% a year ago, per Consumer Edge's analysis.

*

Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centres powering artificial intelligence.

Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top US export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades.

Mexico is the second-largest provider of enterprise servers to the US so far this year, with sales reaching $46.9bn, behind Taiwan, which sold $53.5bn, though Mexico became the largest on a monthly basis in May.

*

Spain and Germany between them account for close to 40% of the EU's pigs, and Denmark is the only member state where pigs outnumber people, at 215 pigs for every 100 inhabitants.

*

Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

*

The Balkans may be the only region other than central Asia where fertility has increased from 2015 to 2026.
All of the highest fertility rates in Europe are in the Balkans. As of 2024: Montenegro (1.8), Bulgaria (1.73) Moldova (1.73), and Serbia (1.64) are top four. France was next at 1.61.

*

By some estimates, more than 50,000 pieces of artwork are stolen each year, amounting to annual losses of around $6 to $8 billion globally. This makes art theft one of the most valuable criminal enterprises around, exceeded only by drug trafficking and arms dealing.

*

In the journal Venture Capital, an all-male team is about four times more likely to get funding than teams with any women on them.

*

In 2024, Washington Metro said about 70 percent of bus riders didn’t pay.

*

At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.

Enemies of Success

 On this day:

1689
The Battle of Dunkeld in Scotland.
1770
James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales
1808
Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeat French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot near the village of Vimeiro, Portugal, the first Anglo-Portuguese victory of the Peninsular War.
1831
Nat Turner leads black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion.
1863
Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre.
1879
The Virgin Mary, along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, reportedly appears at Knock Shrine in Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.
1918
World War I: The Second Battle of the Somme begins.
1942
World War II: a Nazi flag is installed atop Mount Elbrus.
1942
World War II: the Guadalcanal campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru
1945
Physicist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. is fatally irradiated in a criticality incident during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1961
Motown releases what would be its first #1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes.
1963
Xa Loi Pagoda raids: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces loyal to Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem, vandalises Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands and leaving an estimated hundreds dead.
1968
Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring; on the same day, Nicolae Ceauşescu, leader of Communist Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet maneuver, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.
1991
Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses.

***

Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera

***

When President Biden's mental faculties declined, his responsibilities were subsumed by those around him. Taken over. By the same people proclaiming threats to voting honesty and to democracy itself.
Biden's implosion, a threat to the integrity of the government, the very foundation of the government, was not seen as a crisis; it was seen as an opportunity, a breach in the constitutional dam restraining man's tyrannical tendencies to exploit.
That is a coup. Treason.

And yet, no response.

Why has there been no reaction? No leap to the barricades? Where are the wild-eyed street radicals? The cold, intense legal guardians of the republic?

Was that less important than whatever is in the Epstein Files? Than who Natalie Harp is?

***

During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago.
Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033.

***

Alice's report from Wonderland: NYC has suggested using tax dollars to prop up private grocers hurt by competition from Mamdani’s city-owned supermarkets — a program anticipated to cost $70 million for five stores across the boroughs. Ah, redistribution.

***

U.S. Treasury buybacks are like paying your mortgage with your credit card.--Morgan's Sullivan

***

Enemies of Success

California has become the fourth-largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan's.

Think about that. A state with Karen Bass running one of its largest cities, that actually encourages the immigration of homeless, unemployed foreigners, whose infrastructure encourages the native homeless and insane, a state that is subject to terrible natural risks, continues to be one of the most productive economies in the world.

Or consider this: The poorest American state, Mississippi, has a higher per capita GDP than Britain, France, or Japan. Mississippi.

Any serious student of government would want to explain this economic success. As would any serious politician. One would expect flag-waving and chest-thumping.

So why would anyone consider the policies of America's declared economic and military enemies, policies that historically have led to death, destruction, and ruin? How could anyone even consider its vacuous standard-bearers like Hong or Mamdani as serious political leaders? 

With all the threats to democracy that are identified every minute in this country, is this not the obvious, dangerous one?

Great Britain and Mississippi

On this day:

20
Agrippa Postumus, adoptive son of the late Roman Emperor Augustus, is executed by his guards while in exile under mysterious circumstances
636
Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid seize Syria and Palestine from the Byzantine Empire, marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests and the rapid advance of Islam outside Arabia.
1308
Pope Clement V pardons Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, absolving him of charges of heresy.
1672
Former Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis are brutally murdered by an angry mob in The Hague.
1858
Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory.
1998
U.S. embassy bombings: the United States launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

***

Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to.

***

Louisiana requires florists to be licensed. Are their arrangements better? More pleasing to the eye? Better for the environment? Safer? Is there a national security reason?

***

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows, and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat.

***

Pittsburgh in Esquire:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a73444112/insiders-guide-pittsburgh/

***

Great Britain and Mississippi

"How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi" is a good piece in the Atlantic by Idrees Kahloon:

Some colorful anecdotes of a nation in decline:

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

Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Does this sound familiar?

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.

…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.

Upon closer inspection, the United States looks a lot less like a shining city on a hill and a lot more like a declining Great Britain, appendaged with one or two dynamic sectors, most notably AI. The similarities are especially obvious in the retrograde solutions Britain has lumbered into, namely attacking immigrants and trade—Brexit being the equivalent of a high tariff regime. Nations in decline, like people, tend to lash out at others rather than deal with their real problems. Needless to say, neither immigrants nor trade explain Britain’s—or California’s—inability to build high-speed rail or other infrastructure.

It is discomforting to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and free speech—the nation that once built the railways, the steam engines, the factories that remade the world—lose the capacity to build much of anything, or even to tolerate people speaking their minds. In parallel, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right gets literally hysterical over symbolic culture-war questions like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and progress movements are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.

Behind the Mayor's Smile

On this day:

43 BC
Octavian, later known as Augustus, compels the Roman Senate to elect him Consul.
1561
An 18-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots, returns to Scotland after spending 13 years in France.
1612
The “Samlesbury witches”, three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, are put on trial, accused for practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in English history.
1692
Salem witch trials: in Salem, Massachusetts, Province of Massachusetts Bay five people, one woman and four men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.
1745
Prince Charles Edward Stuart raises his standard in Glenfinnan – the start of the Second Jacobite Rebellion, known as “the 45”.
1782
American Revolutionary War: Battle of Blue Licks – the last major engagement of the war, almost ten months after the surrender of the British commander Lord Cornwallis following the Siege of Yorktown.
1812
War of 1812: American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, earning her nickname “Old Ironsides”.
1848
California Gold Rush: the New York Herald breaks the news to the East Coast of the United States of the gold rush in California (although the rush started in January).
1934
The creation of the position Führer is approved by the German electorate with 89.9% of the popular vote.
1960
Cold War: in Moscow, downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Soviet Union for espionage.
1991
Dissolution of the Soviet Union, August Coup: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is placed under house arrest while on holiday in the town of Foros, Crimea.
1999
In Belgrade, tens of thousands of Serbians rally to demand the resignation of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milošević.

***

"Many bad men, for sure, are rich, and many good men poor; yet will we not change our virtue for these men's wealth, seeing that virtue endureth but possessions belong now to this man and now to that." - Theognis of Megara, 6th/5th century bc., apparently a zero-sum guy. More than half of the extant elegiac poetry of Greece before the Alexandrian period is his. (He also wrote that he wanted to drink the blood of his enemies, mostly pro-democratic revolutionaries.)

***

It is reported that China is now arresting economics professors at their own universities who tell the truth about China’s stagnating economy in their classes

***

Former President Obama’s drone assassinations of American citizens were non-issues because observers knew Obama “meant well.” When Obama decided to bomb Libya in 2011, his appointees made it clear that he would ignore the War Powers Act of 1973, enacted to prevent presidents from launching wars on their whim. When a federal judge ruled in May 2016 that the Obama administration’s consumer subsidies under the Affordable Care Act violated the Constitution, the decision was almost completely ignored — perhaps because Obama’s illegalities were progressive. When President Trump ended the subsidies, he was denounced for trampling Congressional prerogatives.
This is possible only if people are not paying attention or do not care.

***

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi is travelling to South Korea today (Wed) for his first official visit there in five years. Why now?

***

Trebuchets reached the peak of their development in medieval times, probably the most famous example being Edward I’s massive machine, Warwolf. This terrifying device was over sixty feet (18 meters) high and was capable of throwing a three-hundred-pound (140-kilogram) rock several hundred yards, projecting some five hundred kilojoules of energy, a thousand times the power of Roman ballistas and five thousand times as powerful as a single person. Edward used it just once, in 1304 during his wars of conquest against the Scots, to attack Stirling Castle, the last stronghold of the Scottish armies. The defenders were so petrified by the prospect of the attack that they sued for peace before Warwolf could be used, but Edward refused to let them surrender until he had tested the machine; in four days it totally destroyed one of the castle’s curtain walls.--Ennos

***

Shackleton Crater near the moon's South Pole has high rims that create permanently shadowed regions known as “cold traps,” where it’s thought that water (in the form of ice) and other useful materials may have accumulated over billions of years. In all of NASA’s and China’s plans for long-term settlement on the Moon, relatively few square miles at the Moon's South Pole matter most.

If they are successful, what will China's territorial decisions be?

***

An eight-year Finnish study found that children who spent more time on screens tended to show better cognitive processing as teenagers, challenging common assumptions about screen use. 

***

Behind the Mayor's Smile

Mamdani's biggest asset seems to be his smile. And his incongruity. (He's speaking Chinese.) But...

NYC sent out letters to people thought to be eligible for the second home pied-à-terre tax. Then NYC published it. Why would they do that?

Malice. They want to identify their enemies to their base. With luck, they will personalize their outrage. Maybe even show up and vent their anger. There might be violence- just enough to imply the war the Left believes in and cherishes.

These are bad people who do not wish us or our culture well.

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)

 

***

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

***

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.

***

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?"