Report from Hell's Heart

 On this day:

109
Roman emperor Trajan inaugurates the Aqua Traiana, an aqueduct that channels water from Lake Bracciano, 40 km north-west of Rome.
637
The Battle of Moira is fought between the High King of Ireland and the Kings of Ulster and Dalriada. It is the largest battle in Irish history. The high point of Irish warfare.
1374
A sudden outbreak of St. John’s Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion. In the modern day, this is called Middle East Negotiations.
1916
World War I: The Battle of the Somme begins with a week-long artillery bombardment on the German Line.
1947
Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington.

***

Equality of outcomes or opportunity is the hope of simple denial--or worse, ambition.
Equality of permission, in contrast, is quite feasible. Achieving in practice something close to such equality requires only that the state abandon all efforts to dispense privileges.--McClosky

***

The socialist success in New York yesterday does not simply rearrange the landscape of political personalities, it resurrects the age-old question of the competence of the agent of democracy, the voter.

***

Stephanie Hockridge is still not in jail.

***

The Five Eyes cybersecurity alliance, which includes intelligence agencies from the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, warned that AI models capable of taking down businesses and governments are mere months away. But the assumed global government-business conspiracy has control of all this, right? Right?

***  

According to the DSA website, there are about 95,000 dues-paying DSA

members. That's the size of the American Institute of Architects.

***

France-based Prix Versailles announced this week that PIT was named to its World’s Most Beautiful Airports list, joining only six other airports from around the globe. The honor is one of the most prestigious architecture and design recognitions in the world, presented in association with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, better known as UNESCO. PIT is one of only two airports in the U.S. to make the list.

***

Report from Hell's Heart

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

                                                    *

Fight for peace. Buy more, save more. We blockade your ports; no, we blockade our own ports. Our world reverberates with Orwellian weirdness, but nowhere as much as the Middle East, where the intensity of feelings overrides all logic and practicality. Iran has had the very purpose of its government removed by the American air attack. The nuclear destruction of the hated Israelis is no longer possible, and the inability to recreate the circumstances necessary to attempt it again has been revealed.

Now Iran is fighting off its back, violating ceasefires, and allowing Israel to rationalize restarting Iran's punishment. Iran must be convincing even the dithering Press of the danger they present. Iran's willingness to suffer for an unachievable goal should be alarming to all. But their enemies are paralyzed by success. Battered, leaderless, smoldering in smoking defeat, Iran arrives at the negotiating table trim, powered, cologned, and with a condescending smile, like Caesar requesting his daily calendar after his final wound. 

If anything, it proves Trump's point and justifies his actions. Iran is beyond all restraint in its obsession. The sensible argument that Iran would not destroy the Straits of Hormuz because that would destroy their own economy and their own people clearly does not apply.

Conniving Israel may be the only reasonable player in the field: Iran cannot be hurt too much.

Ahabism is not in the OED, so we are not constrained by a definition. Our definition of Ahabism: narrow, focused, monomaniacal, tyrannical, homicidal, and single-minded pursuit of a goal that results in self-destruction and risks the ruination of all.

Ahab's destruction is probably deserved, but he does take the Pequod with him.

Righteous Vigilante

On this day:
47 BC
Ptolemy Caesarion of Egypt, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, is born
1314
First War of Scottish Independence: The Battle of Bannockburn (south of Stirling) begins.1611
The mutinous crew of Henry Hudson’s fourth voyage sets Henry, his son and seven loyal crew members adrift in an open boat in what is now Hudson Bay; they are never heard from again.1758
Seven Years’ War: Battle of Krefeld – British forces defeat French troops at Krefeld in Germany.
1760
Seven Years’ War: Battle of Landeshut – Austria defeats Prussia.
1917
In a game against the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox pitcher Ernie Shore retires 26 batters in a row after replacing Babe Ruth, who had been ejected for punching the umpire.
1942
World War II: the first selections for the gas chamber at Auschwitz take place on a train full of Jews from Paris.
1959
Convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs is released after only nine years in prison and allowed to emigrate to Dresden, East Germany where he resumes a scientific career.
1972
Watergate Scandal: U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman are taped talking about using the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into the Watergate break-ins.
1982
Chinese American Vincent Chin is beaten to death in Highland Park, Michigan, by two auto workers who had mistaken him for Japanese and who were angry about the success of Japanese auto companies.

***

Socialism, which had never really taken root in America, is now in danger of becoming the secular religion of many voters — especially disillusioned young people.--Fund, in NR

***

A blogger referred to the Tkachuk brothers as "thumb-shaped."

***

According to the startup Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster, cheaper, and uses a lot less energy than any other model on the market. The company also claims that SubQ is able to process up to 12 times as much text at once as most other models, allowing it to carry out a range of data-heavy tasks, such as analyzing hundreds of documents or entire code bases. These results, reported in MIT Technology Review, rely on in-house studies.

***

Alphabet shares dropped 5% and lost $225 billion in market value after Nobel laureate John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic.

***

This daily news out of the Middle East would be comic if it were not such a scary indicator for the future. Taken individually, the plublic statements could all be unrelated. The common thread is that everybody is lying to everybody else at breakneck speed.

***

Righteous Vigilante

Nothing in a culture is more dangerous than allowing the courts and the law to become a sword rather than a shield. Or to allow for that perception.

And Democracy's sword is two-edged.

Jury nullification occurs when a jury believes a defendant is guilty but renders a “not guilty” verdict because it regards the relevant law as unjust.

John Adams said about jurors, “It is not only his right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

It has been said that such an attitude prevailed in the pre-Revolution period when English law was thwarted in the colonies because it was felt the individual was guilty of violating the law, but that the law was wrong. Conscience is a difficult bellwether when the culture does not have common ground. How would someone advocating jihad vote on a matter of terrorism, for example?

States and cultures are organized on basic precepts. That is, basic assumptions. This unanimity among people's beliefs on the nature of life--or the organization of life, the state--is the state's DNA. Law and the courts are a culture's epicenter.
How much latitude can such a system tolerate and maintain its integrity?

What would be the consequences, for example, if a jury thought that Mangione had a point?

Truth Inequity

 

On this day:
1633
The Holy Office in Rome forces Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe.
1848
Beginning of the June Days Uprising in Paris, France.
1898
Spanish–American War: United States Marines land in Cuba.
1941
Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.
1944
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill.
1945
World War II: The Battle of Okinawa ends when the organized resistance of Imperial Japanese Army forces collapses in the Mabuni area on the southern tip of the main island.

***

If the Democrats came up with a plan for all Americans to jump off a thousand-foot cliff tomorrow, some Republicans would come up with an 'alternative’ plan in which we would all jump off a 500-foot cliff next week.--Sowell

***

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that he will stand down as Labour leader and prime minister, ending months of political turmoil and opening a contest to replace him.

***
• In 2024, the academic journal Nature Human Behavior (NHB) published a study that claimed anti-transgender laws increased suicide attempts among young people by 72 percent. The media touted the findings as evidence that Republican-led laws are creating an epidemic of self-harm among youth, while the study authors promoted the research as a cause-and-effect narrative.
  
  Now, the study is crumbling under reexamination. A criticism published in the NHB last month shows that the research was pulled from a small sample in Idaho, and at a time when the state’s “anti-transgender” laws weren’t even in effect.
***

McCarthy in NR on Trump and Iran:

A close second on the ridiculous meter is the insistence by Trump and Vice President Vance that Iran will not be getting a dime of U.S. taxpayer money. That’s a straw man. The point is that Iran gets access to funds — through sanctions relief and whatever cockamamie “investment fund” the administration is conjuring. That the funds are not coming directly out of the U.S. treasury is beside the point.
The most ridiculous nonsense (admittedly, there’s a lot of competition here) is that Iran has foresworn nuclear weapons. Iran has always publicly foresworn nuclear weapons and emphasized that it is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That is what NPT members who aspire to nuclear weapons do. And as I recounted yesterday, just to make bigger fools out of us, Iran has also maintained that Ayatollah Khamenei even issued a fatwa against nukes (Khamenei was not qualified to issue fatwas, there wasn’t one in any event, and the regime zealously went about its nuclear weapons program even as it publicly claimed it neither wanted nor needed them). To see the president beating his chest that “Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon!” is really quite something.

***

Conservatives rightly blasted the use of sue-and-settle tactics employed by progressive groups during the Obama administration. Instead of fighting lawsuits brought by environmentalists, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency would enter into settlements that gave it what it wanted. The goal was to use the illusion of an adversarial legal process to lock in progressive policy wins without formal rulemaking that couldn’t pass muster or legislation that couldn’t pass either chamber.--WSJ

***

Mother Jones has an article on why there is no real Social Security crisis. It is breathtakingly shallow.

***

Truth Inequity

An essay by Astra Taylor in the New York Times opens with this sentence:  “Since 2020, the richest 1 percent has captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth globally — almost twice as much money as the rest of the world’s population”

Nobel-laureate emeritus, Vernon Smith, composed this insightful response:  

"The opening sentence implies that wealth is produced independently of human action, which is devoted mainly to capturing it. If that is your understanding of the world, you can only feel insecure, fear it, and write of your terror.

And what does it reveal about the NYTimes that it wallows and champions this perspective? A truly dedicated mission to spread gloom and unhappiness. It is one thing to report bad news, it’s another to glory in it."

Envy is making a good run at mendacity as the nation's defining quality. Here it masquerades as economic theory. There's a charming Old World quality about income disparity where, like the Third World, there is a huge spread between people with everything versus those with nothing. But warlords, demagogues,  and divine right are not economic theories any more than a highwayman is a traffic cop. These are simple suppression and theft. 

And, somehow, this all correlates with a guy driving an F-150 not having a Dreamliner.

Sunday/Fear

 On this day: 

217 BC
The Romans, led by Gaius Flaminius, are ambushed and defeated by Hannibal at the Battle of Lake Trasimene.
1734
In Montreal in New France, a slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of the city.
1791
King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family begin the Flight to Varennes during the French Revolution.
1798
Irish Rebellion of 1798: The British Army defeats Irish rebels at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
1877
The Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrants convicted of murder, are hanged at the Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons.
1900
Boxer Rebellion. China formally declared war on the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, as an edict issued from the Dowager Empress Cixi.
1942
World War II: A Japanese submarine surfaces near the Columbia River in Oregon, firing 17 shells at nearby Fort Stevens in one of only a handful of attacks by the Japanese against the United States mainland.
1964
Three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, United States, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
2001
A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicts 13 Saudis and a Lebanese in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.
2004
SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.

***

“We no longer have business cycles, we have credit cycles.” --Boockvar


***

There is a book called Dark Money, about the Koch brothers. It is an awkward topic. The Kochs are generally seen as the bankers of the "Radical Right." But they are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass incarceration” policies. So, how are they the Radical Right? The answer is probably that they are outspoken opponents of top-down government-mandated change. Real enemy of the powers-that-be. 

Let's call them "Elitist deniers." And such are always high-priority targets in any hierarchy.

***

Brendan Sorsby is withdrawing his lawsuit against the NCAA and will enter the NFL Supplemental Draft later this Summer.

***

Researchers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have designed a new 3D printing method that prints in 0.6 seconds.

***

There are said to be 600,000 homeless in the U.S., 37% are Black, 27% are Hispanic, and 90% are men.

***


Sunday/Fear

"Have no fear" appears, in some form, 365 times in the New and Old Testaments. One of those entrees opens today's "birds of the air" sermon.  

Indeed, the sheep's weakness does not allow for many enemies, but each one generates an ancestry of close or distant fears, trivial or crippling, to haunt his life.

Christ's offer of solace is startling.

Here are two views, Whitman's confident American anxiety before a challenge, Yeats much more grimly existential.

Long, too long America

By Walt Whitman

Long, too long America,

Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,

(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)

 

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

SatSats

 On this day:

1972
Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex
2009
During the Iranian election protests, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video and spreads virally on the Internet, making it “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.

***

Nobody is needy in the market economy because some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody. The process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.--von Mises

***

AI must be a worry; the NYT is quoting the Pope about it.
Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI—that is, discredit “the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”

Man's relentless quest for incomplete knowledge?
Can AI paper over our faults, order our moral chaos, solve our 'original sin' in a technologically inspired spiritual dictatorship?
Is AI the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge or just another branch?

***

The new records detail at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX years ago through a middleman firm in the U.S. called Tomales Bay Capital. The investments are relatively small, ranging from $800,000 to $40 million, and were made between 2018 and 2021.


***

From a recent article in City Journal:

Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met in person for the National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing body. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

***

China may soon be the world's biggest producer of foie gras. The French are worried.

***


SatSats

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that the Justice Department is investigating more than 8,000 fraud cases, which he said represent over $1 trillion in taxpayer funds potentially stolen each year by "increasingly sophisticated and opportunistic fraudsters."

*

Last year, executives at Swiss bank UBS spoke of the beginnings of the "largest private wealth migration in history," during which 44% of their billionaire clients under age 55 had moved once or more within the previous 12 months.

*

11% of marriages in the US are between Blacks and Whites, yet Black-White couples in TV ads would make you think that mixed racial marriages were much more common. Since identification of the audience with the ad is a basic, that peculiarity is hard to explain.

*

A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer’s risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable

*

Of all 46 chromosomes contained in most human cells, the Y chromosome is the only one that can be lost without the cell dying.

*

Ozempic may increase human lifespan by 3-5 years.

*

New York City’s $125 billion budget is that it is bigger than the $115 billion expected to be spent this year by the entire state of Florida. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

*

Mobile phone theft in London:

• An estimated 90,000 mobile devices were officially reported stolen to the Metropolitan Police over the previous calendar year.
• *
• The successful recovery rate for stolen electronic hardware currently languishes at an abysmal margin of under 2 percent.
  
  
• *
• Cybersecurity experts estimate the secondary extortion market generates tens of millions of dollars in untraceable cryptocurrency revenues annually.
• Ransom demands typically range from $500 to $2,000, depending on the perceived financial status 

Neither Out Far Nor in Deep

 On this day:

1269
King Louis IX of France orders all Jews found in public without an identifying yellow badge to be fined ten livres of silver.
1306
The Earl of Pembroke’s army defeats Bruce’s Scottish army at the Battle of Methven.
1586
English colonists leave Roanoke Island, after failing to establish England’s first permanent settlement in North America.
1846
The first officially recorded, organized baseball match is played under Alexander Cartwright’s rules on Hoboken, New Jersey’s Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23-1. Cartwright umpired.
1953
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.
1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.
1982
The body of God’s Banker, Roberto Calvi is found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.

***

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)

***

A lot has happened in the Iran War, but two lessons seem particularly significant: a nation will act contrary to the well-being of its people in deference to a few in power, and efforts to protect the unfortunate citizens of the predatory juggernaut will be borne at one's own expense.

***

Hemingway's has been sold to Pitt. Likely, it will only be digested.

***

Neither Out Far Nor in Deep

Lake Vostok sits beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet at roughly 78 degrees south, almost exactly under the geomagnetic south pole. The surface station above it, founded in 1957, is the same place that recorded the coldest natural temperature ever measured on Earth: minus 89.2 degrees Celsius in July 1983.

The lake itself, though, is liquid. Heat from the Earth’s interior, combined with the immense pressure of the ice above, keeps the water in a slim, dark, freshwater layer between bedrock and glacier. Estimates of its isolation vary, but the last contact with the atmosphere occurred around 15 million years ago, when Antarctica’s ice sheet thickened into the form it holds today.

To put that in perspective: when Vostok was last open to the sky, the ancestors of modern humans had not yet diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees.

Any microbes living in Vostok would have spent millions of generations adapting to a place with no light, no fresh nutrients from above, and extreme water pressures. Ice cores trapped bubbles of ancient air from four glacial cycles, making them one of the most-cited paleoclimate archives in science.

On 5 February 2012, at a depth of 3,769.3 metres, a drill broke into the lake.

DNA sequencing revealed more than 3,500 unique gene sequences, the majority bacterial, but including fungi and traces consistent with multicellular eukaryotes. Some matched microbes known from deep-sea hydrothermal systems. Others matched nothing in any database. Another subglacial lake, Lake Whillans, sampled cleanly by an American team in 2013 using hot-water drilling, came back full of living microbes that metabolised iron and sulfur compounds from ground-up bedrock. Iron and sulfur!

Life, in other words, had found a way to make a living in total darkness, drawing energy from rocks instead of sunlight.

Vostok draws planetary scientists as much as it draws glaciologists is that it is the closest analogue Earth offers to two of the most promising places in the solar system to look for life: Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Both worlds hide global oceans beneath thick ice shells. Both are dark, cold, and chemically active at the rock-water boundary.

A microbe that can survive 15 million years of darkness in Vostok is a working proof that biology does not require sunlight or fresh organic matter from above to persist.

A record of evolution running in a closed room for longer than the Mediterranean Sea has existed. A lineage of organisms that never saw the sun set on the dinosaurs because they were already underground when the dinosaurs were still around. A small dark ocean that survived the rise of the Himalayas, the drying of the Sahara, and the entire human story, and was only opened, briefly, by a drill bit from a station built on top of it by accident. --(from Space Daily of all places)

A question: Is there any risk to our species from a microbe that might emerge, essentially, from another world?

Clearly Clouded

 

On this day:
1673
French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reach the Mississippi River and become the first Europeans to make a detailed account of its course
1775
American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.This was a significant encounter, a planned battle, and the British famously bayonetted the American wounded. It became a focal point and rallying cry. The important Patriot leader, Dr. Joseph Warren, was also killed.
1930
U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law.
1939
Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison
1940
The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
1944
Iceland declares independence from Denmark and becomes a republic.
1972
Watergate scandal: five White House operatives are arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in an attempt by some members of the Republican party to illegally wiretap the opposition.
1994
Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O.J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

***
What, then, should be the primary-liberal rule in the footrace of life?
It should be – for natural justice to the individual and for the consequent flourishing of the individual’s family and fellows and trading partners and society through loving care and peaceful exchange and liberal conversation – an equality of permission, or allowance, or approval for a general right to do, to venture. Let no obstacles of human design be placed in your path. It is to be permitted to enter the race as an adult, and to accord to others the same permission. It is [Adam] Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”--mcclosky

***

In 2025, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Singapore, and the UAE are "traditionally popular destinations for migrating millionaires, especially for those operating in the financial services sector," due to their absence of capital gains tax.

***

Chick-fil-A, which topped the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in 2025, fell to second place this year. Jersey Mike's claimed first place.

***

Clearly Clouded

A modifier is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as "a word or phrase that is used with another word or phrase to limit or add to its meaning." "The tall girl" distinguishes one girl from the others based on height.

Sometimes the effect is not clarifying, it's funny. George Carlin made a living on contradictory modifying phrases, oxymorons, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, acting naturally, and civil war. Sometimes it's a great literary device: with “Oh, brawling love, O loving hate,” Shakespeare describes the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet.

And sometimes it's purposely obfuscating.

What are we to think of "mostly peaceful demonstrations?" Is it like almost warm, generally bloodless, sort of clean, pretty honest, usually safe, generally accurate, nearly won, mostly pasteurized? Unlike "the tall girl," a phrasing meant to refine meaning, these phrases are meant to diffuse meaning and detract from the word's specificity.

Now, that said, what are the implications of a modifier applied to a virtue?

Like a battle cry on a screaming field or a whispered password in the quiet dark, words arise filled with meaning, expressing the unexpressible. A tight, gravid couplet. Often articles or even books emerge to refine a complex notion, surround an idea and herd it into some more understandable--or imaginable--form, sometimes paring it down, explaining, at least, what it is not. The Holy Trinity. Entangled Particles.

And sometimes the task is accepted as just too much, and we are left with recognizable words cobbled together into an unrecognizable whole — social justice, minority rights — tantalizingly close, but not quite right.