After Socialism

On this day:

1834
In New York City, four nights of rioting against abolitionists began.
1846
Mexican-American War: American troops occupy Monterey and Yerba Buena, thus beginning the U.S. acquisition of California.
1863
United States begins its first military draft; exemptions cost $300.
1865
American Civil War: four conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln are hanged.
1928
Sliced bread is sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
1930
Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser begins construction of the Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam).
1946
Howard Hughes nearly dies when his XF-11 spy plane prototype crashes in a Beverly Hills neighborhood.
2002
A scandal breaks out in the United Kingdom when news reports accuse MI6 of sheltering Abu Qatada, the supposed European Al Qaeda leader.
2005
A series of four explosions occurs on London’s transport system killing 56 people, including four alleged suicide bombers, and injuring over 700 others.

***

Failure is also information.

***

Is there a reason why this particular allegation against Platner should be taken more seriously than the previous ones? Or have we defaulted to the volume of insight as a criterion for decisions?

***

Headline: "A 21-year-old influencer, known as DreamDoll Brii, has died after being shot while in a lime green Lamborghini."
Neither her outfit nor its color was described.

***

The men's soccer team was badly outclassed by Belgium last night. They went as far in the tournament as they could, and that should be the end of it--some more than expected success, with some frantic bad moments. But it won't be. The cloud of Trump's buffonish intervention because he disagreed with the game's rules will make America look again like rubes and cowboys. And bad sports.

***


After Socialism

Alan Charles Kors's article, “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?”, written for the Atlas Society (An Objectivism/Rand group), is an old article but interesting because it is so accurate and heartfelt. It also highlights the absence of any reflective examination of socialism's obvious disasters:

"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them.
….

The record is truly plain. Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, always culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor. It was, at its best, the ability, through horror and servitude, to build Gary, Indiana, once, without the good stuff, and without the ability even to maintain it.
…..

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.
…….

We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire “socialist experiment,” by contrast, ended in stasis; ethnic hatreds; the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal; and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison."

7/7/26

A Kind, Painless, Stable Life

On this day:

1535
Sir Thomas More is executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
1557
King Philip II of Spain, consort of Queen Mary I of England, sets out from Dover to war with France, which eventually results in the loss of the City of Calais, the last English possession on the continent, and Mary I never seeing her husband again.
1777
American Revolutionary War: Siege of Fort Ticonderoga – After a bombardment by British artillery under General John Burgoyne, American forces retreat from Fort Ticonderoga, New York.
1885
Louis Pasteur successfully tests his rabies vaccine. The patient is Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog
1892
3,800 striking steelworkers engage in a day-long battle with Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike, leaving 10 dead and dozens wounded.

***

“We are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air. We know at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors, wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking — what time is it? But none of the clocks have hands.” George Goodman, who wrote as 'Adam Smith,' writing, in 1968, of a high-flying stock market in “The Money Game.”

***

In 1660, John Milton faced numerous obstacles as he worked on his epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” His role as an advocate for republicanism left him politically disgraced during the Restoration reign of Charles II. His second wife had recently died. And, of course, he had gone blind. Lying in bed at night, he composed verses of a vast poem that encompassed nothing less than the creation of the world and the fate of mankind. In the morning, he would dictate fresh lines to his daughters.

***

A cockroach can survive for about a week without its head, dying eventually of thirst rather than injury. Any parallels with states or governments is coincidental.

***

Pennsylvania’s public-school employees’ pension fund is $41 billion short of what it needs to pay promised benefits. Promised.

***

Were Jim Crow laws as restrictive of voters as Gerrymandering?

***

A Kind, Painless, Stable Life

The autocrat cannot help himself; he's got to interfere. If it can appear to be virtuous, all the better. And nothing draws the autocrat like disparity.

So Trump steps across all boundaries to intrude into international sports, fouling the World Cup and contaminating the game, regardless of the outcome.

Is nothing safe from these people?

Socialism despises competition and its fallout of failure. In a way, it is an intolerance of the nature of life with its ups and downs--and eventual fatal denouement. Those who relentlessly try to interfere with all social and economic events are actually attempting to smooth the uncertainties of living and homogenize the outcomes of social and economic interactions.

We see encountering risk and overcoming it as success. They see risk as a basic enemy of life. And they are willing to sacrifice progress--the result of risk-taking--to eliminate it. In the back of their self-declared kind minds, they believe their ingenuity can substitute for the creative destruction of the marketplace. It's a wonder that they allow our dangerous social interactions, like school and romance. Clearly, they hate sports.

Perhaps this explains the Left's hysterical, aggressive reaction to the chaotic Virus.

But the Left is tolerant; they do allow for some disorder. They are quite willing to endure the messy period of social disruption as they sort out whom they will allow to assist their leadership. And, of course, the purges. The New State must eliminate all those incapable of seeing the new future. Unanimity is the enemy of risk; the creation of unanimity is not.

Creative disorder, for all its positives, is disorder and will leave pain and failure in its wake. The socialist prefers their own power to create pain and failure.

The Sequence To Independence

 On this day:

1687
Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
1830
France invades Algeria.
1934
“Bloody Thursday” – Police open fire on striking longshoremen in San Francisco.
1947
Larry Doby signs a contract with the Cleveland Indians baseball team, becoming the first black player in the American League. (Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League 11 weeks earlier.)
1962
Algeria becomes independent from France.
1996
Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.
1998
Japan launches a probe to Mars, and thus joins the United States and Russia as a space-exploring nation.

***

At least two-thirds of federal spending can be described as Congress’ taking the rightful property of one American and giving it to another American, to whom it does not belong. So-called mandatory spending totaled $2.45 trillion in 2015. Thus, two-thirds of the federal budget goes toward Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food assistance, unemployment and other programs and benefits that fall into the category of taking from some and giving to others. (Williams)

***

The FBI says it has seized more than 600 drones near FIFA World Cup sites after authorities determined the devices violated restricted airspace since the tournament began on June 11. The total number of seized drones nationwide has doubled in less than two weeks.

***

CBS reports Pelosi's husband a suspect in a hit-and-run.

***

John Adams thought that July 2nd would be remembered as the great day in America."The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America," Adams exulted in a letter to his wife."I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."


***

The Sequence To Independence


The Declaration of Independence came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. It was a long time coming.

The first major colonial opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a measure to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of “no taxation without representation,” colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766.

It was a while before the next problem, the result of the British effort to aid the faltering East India Company. Parliament enacted the Tea Act in 1773 which greatly lowered its tea tax and granting the Company a monopoly on the American tea trade. Many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant Patriots in Massachusetts organized the “Boston Tea Party,” which saw British tea valued at some 18,000 pounds dumped into Boston Harbor.

Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops in their homes. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.

June 17, 1775 Major General William Howe defeated the Americans at Bunker Hill, the first time the Americans stood and fought. It was a Pyrrhic victory. 140 colonists were killed and 271 wounded. 226 British were dead and 828 wounded. The vast majority of Rebel deaths came from bayoneting the wounded in the field by British soldiers, furious at their losses. The behavior of the British soldiers enraged the colonists and tipped most away from reconciliation with the crown and into separation. Historian Richard Ellis says that the Battle at Bunker Hill scarred Gen. Howe, one of the crown's elite generals. Never again would he be comfortable with assaulting rebel fixed positions and he yearned for reconciliation--a feeling many believe hampered his generalship, especially in the siege of New York.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an influential political pamphlet that convincingly argued for American independence and sold more than 500,000 copies in a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence swept the colonies, the Continental Congress called for states to form their own governments, and a five-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration.

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for separation from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence. Two days later, on July 4, the declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York approved it on July 19. On August 2, the declaration was signed.

The American War for Independence would last for five more years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga, the bitter winter at Valley Forge, the intervention of the French, and the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.

Under America’s first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, the national government was weak and states operated like independent countries. The debate over the power of a unifying federal government went on until 1787 when a convention was held in Philadelphia presided over by George Washington. There delegates devised a plan for a stronger federal government with three branches–executive, legislative and judicial–along with a system of checks and balances to ensure no single branch would have too much power. It was signed on September 17, 1787. The Bill of Rights–10 amendments guaranteeing basic individual protections such as freedom of speech and religion–became part of the Constitution in 1791.

The first presidential election electing Washington was held from Monday, December 15, 1788 to Saturday, January 10, 1789, five years after the Treaty of Paris.

The Fourth

 On this day as well:

1054
A supernova is seen by Chinese, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri. For several months, it remains bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.
1187
The Crusades: Battle of Hattin – Saladin defeats Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem.
1754
French and Indian War: George Washington surrenders Fort Necessity to French Capt. Louis Coulon de Villiers.
1863
American Civil War: Siege of Vicksburg – Vicksburg, Mississippi surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant after 47 days of siege. 150 miles up the Mississippi River, a Confederate Army is repulsed at the Battle of Helena, Arkansas.
1863
The Army of Northern Virginia withdraws from the battlefield after its loss at the Battle of Gettysburg, signalling an end to the Southern invasion of the North.
1918
Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family (Julian calendar date).

1943
World War II: Beginning of the Battle of Kursk, the largest full-scale battle in history and the world’s largest tank battle at Prokhorovka village.
1976
Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all but four of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists
1997
NASA’s Pathfinder space probe lands on the surface of Mars.

***

Fourth of July


America had an exceptional revolution, one that did not attempt to define and deliver happiness, but one that set people free to define and pursue it as they please.--Will

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Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος (law) would make them equal. --Arendt

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The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

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Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.--Thacher

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Jay Leno had a recurring skit where he asked questions to passers-by on the street--questions most people think are rather simple and obvious. He asked several people what the Fourth of July celebrated, when independence was declared, and from whom the country separated. Of course, the results were embarrassing to most of those interviewed. One was particularly interesting. A college instructor knew nothing about the Revolution at all, thought it occurred in the 1920s, and thought China might have been involved.

*
A recent survey found that 27% of the people questioned were unaware that the American Revolution was waged against the British.

*

Both former U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826–the day of the Jubilee–the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, in an extraordinary and eerie coincidence. Jefferson died shortly after noon at the age of 83 in Monticello, Virginia. Several hours later, Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the age of 90. According to newspaper reports, Adams’s last words were, “Jefferson still lives.”

Exactly five years later, on July 4, 1831, former U.S. President James Monroe died.

*

The Fourth

When I was a child in the '50s, the Fourth of July was a great event. The kids decorated their bikes, small local parades were held--every community had some commemoration, and the larger communities had fireworks. It was unlike other secular events like Thanksgiving, which were delightfully family-oriented; this was a commonly held social event. It was a birthday party. And it was heartfelt. Everyone felt that years ago, something of value had been accomplished, something special in the world created. There was a glow.

When Obama was first campaigning, he was asked about American Exceptionalism. (The phrase was de Tocqueville's, from Democracy in America, 1835: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.")

American exceptionalism is a description of how America developed, not what it was. I'm unsure de Tocqueville--or Europeans then and now thought it complementary. It was special. It was unique.

The phrase has been used since by those who saw America as a point of reference in man's search for freedom and liberty. (It was also used by Stalin as a slur, decrying America's self-held belief that it was somehow excluded from the Marxian class warfare generality.) Obama saw the question as a trap--it would not do to talk of "exceptionalism" when we want all people to be the same, all nations indistinguishable. So, he hedged and said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He, unlike those Americans of just a generation or two earlier, does not think that America is unique.

Unique. If that element is lost in this country, a lot has been lost. So, buy a small flag. Decorate your bike.

july 4, 2026

Democratic Socialism

On this day:
987
Hugh Capet is crowned King of France, the first of the Capetian dynasty that would rule France until the French Revolution in 1792.
1754
French and Indian War: George Washington surrenders Fort Necessity to French forces.
1775
American Revolutionary War: George Washington takes command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1778
American Revolutionary War: British forces kill 360 people in the Wyoming Valley massacre.
1863
American Civil War: The final day of the Battle of Gettysburg culminates with Pickett’s Charge.
1898
Spanish-American War: The Spanish fleet, led by Pascual Cervera y Topete, is destroyed by the U.S. Navy in Santiago, Cuba.
1913
Confederate veterans at the Great Reunion of 1913 reenact Pickett’s Charge; upon reaching the high-water mark of the Confederacy, they are met by the outstretched hands of friendship from Union survivors.
1940
World War II: the French fleet of the Atlantic, based at Mers el Kébir, is bombarded by the British fleet from Gibraltar, resulting in the loss of three battleships: Dunkerque, Provence, and Bretagne. One thousand two hundred sailors perish.

***

Hilary Clinton, in discussing her loss to Trump, offered this incomprehensible mixed religious/biologic non sequitur: "Certainly, misogyny played a role; I mean that just has to be admitted. The things that come out of some of these men's mouths, like why do we have to cover maternity care? Oh, I don't know, maybe you were dropped by immaculate conception?"

***

Three men have been found not guilty of the murder of journalist Lyra McKee in Derry in 2019.

***

We have become obsessed with the outlier.
A gift from Critical Theory: an individual cannot escape or transcend his group. Strange and outrageous behavior by one individual has become generalized to represent a larger group. So one lunatic cop is representative of all cops. And those cops are representative of all society.
The wide generalization from small experiences to large populations is a virtual definition of bigotry.

***

Darializa Avila Chevalier is 32 years old and has never not been in school, including more than 14 years of post-secondary education.

***

Democratic Socialism

The phrase "democratic socialism" mixes two entities, a governing system and an economic one. But the freedom of the vote in no way bleeds any freedom into the economic system. Democracy is the process by which the hierarchy--for good or ill--is chosen. Socialism is the very unfree government ownership and management of formerly public assets, a state usually requiring force to achieve and maintain.

"Democratic socialism" is, at best, a misunderstanding, and, at worst, malicious marketing.

So voting for socialism displaces a lot of the decision-making, by definition. It's not necessarily an oxymoron; the vote always creates a new reality. But individual freedom stops at the ballot box. The power to rule is transferred to another. The "representative." That happens in spades in democracies in wartime. The outrage over the internment of the Japanese in WW11 misunderstands this fundamental change. The vote allows citizens to choose their tyrant. Once the tribe votes for the war chief, individual decision-making is over.

"Democracy" implies "virtue" to our arrogant minds. It is not. It is a simple way of deciding. In the American example, it is ingenious--but only because of the limits created by its founders. The potential for tyranny is constrained by the Constitution. But this structure is not a characteristic of democracy; it is unique. Russia votes. Hitler was elected.

In democratic socialism, the citizens vote to surrender the national assets to a third party and accept the consequences.

Gettysburg and The Somme

On this day, June 2:

626
Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong of Tang, Emperor of China, ambushes and kills his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng in the Incident at Xuanwu Gate.
1644
English Civil War: Battle of Marston Moor.
1698
Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine.
1776
The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence is not approved until July 4.
1777
Vermont becomes the first American territory to abolish slavery.
1839
Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinqué take over the slave ship Amistad.
1853
The Russian Army crossed the Pruth river into the Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia—providing the spark that set off the Crimean War.
1881
Charles J. Guiteau shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President James Garfield, who eventually dies from an infection on September 19.
1897
Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi obtains a patent for radio in London.
1900
The first Zeppelin flight takes place on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany.
1934
The Night of the Long Knives ends with the death of Ernst Röhm.
1937
Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan are last heard from over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight.
1964
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant to prohibit segregation in public places.
1976
Fall of the Republic of Vietnam; Communist North Vietnam declares their union to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

***


"To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of Freedom itself."-- Burke

***

French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX ( Society of Saint Pius X) in 1970 in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the 1960s meetings known as Vatican II revolutionized the church’s relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.

Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent in 1988. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four bishops and declared the consecrations a “schismatic act.”

Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 lifted the excommunications as part of his yearslong outreach to the group.

Leo XIV has a shorter fuse.

During a ritual-filled, five-hour Mass on Wednesday, attended by some 15,500 people and their children, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV, who had urged the SSPX to hold off for the sake of the church’s unity.

In a decree, the Vatican excommunicated the four new bishops and the two bishops who participated in the ceremony. It declared the consecrations a “schismatic act” and declared the society itself had created a schism, or intentional rupture with the Catholic Church.

***

One consequence of a wealth tax: When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn’t go back into payroll or business expansion.

Inherent to taxation is the ability to destroy. That is one of the rationales for the tax exclusion of religions. A wealth tax destroys...wealth.

***

Gettysburg and The Somme

Today is the anniversary of Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg and Day 2 of the Battle of the Somme.

Gettysburg was a three-day fight.

Nearly one-third of the total forces engaged at Gettysburg became casualties. George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac lost 28 percent of the men involved; Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia suffered over 37 percent.

Of these casualties, 7,058 were fatalities (3,155 Union, 3,903 Confederate). Another 33,264 had been wounded (14,529 Union, 18,735 Confederate) and 10,790 were missing (5,365 Union, 5,425 Confederate).

The Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in all of human history, was fought between July and November 1916 during World War I.

The battle involved more than three million men, of whom one million were either wounded or killed. 20,000 British died on the first day. The total casualties, estimated to be more than 1,000,000, included 650,000 German casualties, 420,000 British, and 195,000 French. Enough to give war a bad name.

The Civil War in the U.S. was fought to preserve the Union and eventually succeeded in ending slavery in the country. WWI would be difficult to categorize; it was a result of complex allegiances and accidents.
Its main effect was to create the foundations for World War II.

The Civil War in the U.S. had some significant long-term value despite the horror, but WWI?

My point here, two days before Independence Day, is to highlight our astonishing good fortune to be removed from Europe's homicidal history and to ask the question: Why do the Europeans have such confidence in the wisdom and leadership of their rulers? Looking at WWI as an example, why would anybody trust these people, who marshal their benighted citizens to fight in inexplicable wars named in decades and centuries? Why would the world not be dominated by laws limiting the damage governments and their minions could do?

And why would any group concerned about the abuse of power that relentlessly victimizes the ordinary people of the world not emphasize the time-honored, obvious, dangerous source of real power: the warlord and the domestic leaders? Those unable to satisfy their ambition and greed through their own talents.

No one in the history of man has ever run into town screaming, "Run for your lives, the farmers are coming!"

june 2

The Cutting Edge of Bad Ideas

On this day:

1690
Glorious Revolution: Battle of the Boyne (as reckoned under the Julian calendar).
1770
Lexell’s Comet passed closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 a.u.
1858
Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers on evolution to the Linnean Society.
1863
American Civil War: the Battle of Gettysburg begins.
1879
Charles Taze Russell publishes the first edition of the religious magazine The Watchtower.
1898
Spanish-American War: the Battle of San Juan Hill is fought in Santiago de Cuba.
1916
World War I: First day on the Somme – On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 19,000 soldiers of the British Army are killed and 40,000 wounded.
2004
Saturn orbit insertion of Cassini-Huygens begins at 01:12 UTC and ends at 02:48 UTC.

***

This book (All Quiet on the Western Front) is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. -Erich Maria Remarque, novelist (22 Jun 1898-1970)

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1-877-KARS4KROOKS Report:
"The evidence also shows that children, especially needy or underprivileged children, are not the recipients of the proceeds of the donations," the legal ruling against the sham charity 1-877-KARS4KIDS states. These 'donations' fund vague enterprises and infrastructure, including gap year vacations to Israel.
You would think they would scatter in fear and shame. Yet they ran an ad just yesterday.


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There is no essential difference between Trump and the myriad of other politicians the nation has seen. They all ignore significant politically generated problems and believe they can control other problems, thus generating new political problems to ignore.


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The Cutting Edge of Bad Ideas

No nation or dogma threatens the average man like the sly advance of government power and those who volunteer to shoulder its burden. One technique of these 'reluctant volunteers' is that the notions they propose are so vast and so fantastic —like a silly horror movie — that no one takes them seriously until the dismissive victim is completely stuck.

Here's a typical example from de Rugy:

In early June, Piketty—the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations, and cherry-picked baselines—and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan. It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept. But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty’s plan would cap gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430. The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent, and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent. There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist. This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.--de Rugy

So we listen to grand plans that promise equality, wealth in decline, success by cultures that have never experienced it--all run anomalously by benign holy people.