China Hand

On this day:

1683
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to the Royal Society describing “animalcules”: the first known description of protozoa.
1778
The Treaty of Fort Pitt is signed. It is the first formal treaty between the United States and a Native American tribe (the Lenape or Delaware Indians).
1787
The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1862
American Civil War: George B. McClellan halts the northward drive of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army in the single-day Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history.
1862
American Civil War: The Allegheny Arsenal explosion results in the single largest civilian disaster during the war.
1908
The Wright Flyer flown by Orville Wright, with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge as passenger, crashes killing Selfridge. He becomes the first airplane fatality.
1928
The Okeechobee Hurricane strikes southeastern Florida, killing upwards of 2,500 people. It is the third deadliest natural disaster in United States history, behind the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
1939
World War II: The Soviet Union joins Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland during the Polish Defensive War of 1939.
1940
World War II: Following the German defeat in the Battle of Britain, Hitler postpones Operation Sea Lion indefinitely.
1948
The Lehi (also known as the Stern gang) assassinates Count Folke Bernadotte, who was appointed by the UN to mediate between the Arab nations and Israel.
1949
The Canadian steamship SS Noronic burns in Toronto Harbour with the loss of over 118 lives.
1961
The world’s first retractable-dome stadium, the Civic Arena, opens in Pittsburgh.

***

"I guess the joke's over"--said to be Tom Leaher's last words

***

Annie Dillard has died.

***

Charles Spencer's book about his sister will be out next week. Apparently, he is furious at the royal family. Early reports are that they are furious right back.

***

Trump has said the Russians and Ukrainians have agreed not to target energy sources--perhaps they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding.

***

One of the curiosities of the erratic Trump administration is its response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which appears to be a continuation of Biden's "It's only an excursion" approach. But Russia may be intent on clarifying the problem for Trump. The most recent offense involved a Russian drone strike on a train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson just miles from the Polish border. Former CIA director David Petraeus was on the train as well. The Russians have also recently hired a hitman for an operation within American borders.

***

The night sky isn't dark. Trillions of stars are shining bright in our direction. We just can't see the frequencies of light arriving here. The light has been "stretched" by the expansion of the universe, so it's no longer within the range of the visible spectrum.

***

The Allegheny Arsenal in Lawrenceville, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh, was originally built in 1814 and was critical in the U.S. Army supply chain to the West. The Arsenal spanned a 38-acre complex and manufactured gunpowder, cartridges, harnesses, and other equipment critical to the Civil War effort.

On the day of the explosion, the day of the Battle of Antietam, 186 workers were on site; 156 were young girls and women. Many children worked in arsenals and factories across the country throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century as child labor laws had not been established yet. In the case of the Allegheny Arsenal, there used to be primarily young boys and men working on the factory floor, however, many were fired because “supervisors often caught the boys with matches… after three warnings to get rid of the smoking material, the arsenal dismissed most of the boys and hired women and girls instead…” Supervisors even preferred to hire the young girls as they were reportedly more reliable and they did not smoke.

Workers were making cartridges as normal, and many were lined up to collect their wages as it was payday. At 2:00 PM, the first explosion went off. Panic struck the workers and there was a rush to exit the Arsenal campus. Shortly afterwards, a second explosion occurred, and then a third moments later. The fire spread quickly throughout the building known as the Laboratory. The fire was so intense that some witnesses reported seeing bright white bone where charred flesh would have been. As the fires spread, many of the cartridges that had already been assembled started to explode, followed by several hundred Parrott-gun projectiles.

Fire brigades arrived from Lawrenceville and the surrounding communities in an attempt to quell the massive fire but to no avail. 19th century fire brigades were no match for the monstrosity in front of them. Despite their best efforts, they could only watch as the Laboratory blackened and crumbled.

By the time the fires had died down, the aftermath of the explosion left 78 killed and over 150 injured. The Allegheny Arsenal Explosion became the worst industrial accident and the worst civilian accident during the Civil War.

Colonel John Symington was the commandant of the Arsenal and had ordered a macadamized road constructed on the grounds; “this type of road contained pieces of hard, flinty stone, and the workers warned management about the potential for an explosion.”

The cause of the blast was believed to be either the iron horseshoe or iron-rimmed wagon wheel creating a spark and setting fire to the powder on the ground.--from the National Museum of Civil War Medicine

***

American troops need to prepare for combat not only in Earth’s orbit but around the moon, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser said Wednesday.
These guys can mix horror with silliness that Shakespeare would envy.
But don't worry: King Charles is meeting with AI execs.

***

Texas has disbanded the Trinidad Police Department because it "failed to meet minimum standards" and "was unable to provide evidence that the agency provides public benefit to the community."
"unable to provide evidence that the agency provides public benefit to the community."
Now here's a concept we might encourage.

***

China Hand

It's likely that, if the Democrats win the midterms, the nation will be treated to several more years of righteous political theater aimed at Trump and anyone else near the blast area of impeachment. Here's a sort-of related opinion.

From the book: ‘Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World’ via The Epoch Times,.

"In 2018 the well-connected Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin pointed out that China had been building networks of influence in the United States over many years, and that the U.S. government “is preparing for the possibility that the Chinese government will decide to weaponize” them to get what it wants. (Although Beijing is not known to use Russian-style “active measures” in the West, deploying them is only a matter of political calculation.)

One of the CCP’s most auda­cious penetration operations, Chinagate in 1996, saw a top intelligence operative meeting a naive President Clinton in the White House, along with donations to the Clinton campaign made through people with ties to the Chinese military.

Until recently, almost all players in Washington D.C. and beyond were convinced by the “peaceful rise of China” trope, and the value of “constructive engagement.” The common belief was that as China developed economically, it would naturally morph into a liberal state. This view was not without foundation, because the more liberal factions within the CCP did struggle with the hardliners, but in the U.S. it reinforced a kind of institutional naivety that was exploited by Beijing. Many of those who stuck to this view even after the evidence pointed firmly to the contrary had a strong personal investment in defending Beijing.

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin argued that “his [Bloomberg’s] misreading of the Chinese government’s character and ambitions could be devastating for U.S. national security and foreign policy. He would be advocating for a naive policy of engagement and wishful thinking that has already been tried and failed.”

In May 2019 Joe Biden distinguished himself from all of the other candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination by ridiculing the idea that China is a strategic threat to the United States. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” he told a campaign crowd in Iowa City. Biden had for years adopted a soft approach to China. When President Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was taking a tougher position towards China’s adventurism in Asia, Vice President Biden was urging caution. Biden had formed a warm personal relationship with Xi Jinping when Xi was vice president and president-in-waiting.

So does it matter if Joe Biden has a different view of China? It does, because there is evidence that the CCP has been currying his favor by awarding business deals that have enriched his son, Hunter Biden. One account of this is given by Peter Schweizer in his 2019 book “Secret Empires.” Some of his key claims were subsequently challenged and Schweizer refined them in an op-ed in the New York Times (famous for fact-checking). In short, when Vice President Biden traveled to China in December 2013 on an official trip, his son flew with him on Airforce Two. While Biden senior was engaging in soft diplomacy with China’s leaders, Hunter was having other kinds of meetings. Then, “less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter’s firm … which he founded with two other businessmen [including John Kerry’s stepson] in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners, whose largest shareholder is the government-run Bank of China, even though he had scant background in private equity.”

The Bank of China is owned by the state and controlled by the CCP. Hunter Biden’s exact role in the company is disputed, but one expert has said that his share in it would be worth around $20 million.

However, the point here is not the ethics of the Bidens (as the news media have framed it) but the way in which the CCP can influence senior politicians. This “corruption by proxy,” in which top leaders keep their hands clean while their family members exploit their association to make fortunes, has been perfected by the “red aristocracy” in Beijing.

In the crucial years 2014 and 2015, Beijing was aggressively expanding into the South China Sea while Obama, Kerry, and Biden were sitting on their hands..."

One guy's opinion...

Human Destruction Olympics

On this day:

1620
The Mayflower starts her voyage to North America
1701
James Francis Edward Stuart, sometimes called the “Old Pretender”, becomes the Jacobite claimant to the thrones of England and Scotland.
1776
American Revolutionary War: the Battle of Harlem Heights is fought.
1812
The Fire of Moscow (1812) begins shortly after midnight and destroys three quarters of the city days later.
1893
Settlers make a land run for prime land in the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma.
1920
The Wall Street bombing: a bomb in a horse wagon explodes in front of the J. P. Morgan building in New York City – 38 are killed and 400 injured.
1941
World War II: Concerned that Reza Pahlavi the Shah of Persia is about to ally his petroleum-rich empire with Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union invade Iran in late August and force the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
1978
An earthquake measuring 7.5 to 7.9 on the Richter scale hits the city of Tabas, Iran, killing about 25,000 people.
1990
The railroad between the People’s Republic of China and Kazakhstan becomes complete at Dostyk, adding a sizable link to the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge.
2007
Mercenaries working for Blackwater Worldwide allegedly shoot and kill 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad; all criminal charges against them are later dismissed, sparking outrage in the Arab world.

***

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.--Hayek

***

Ukraine has destroyed two irreplaceable Russian bombers with long-range drone strikes.
Satellite images show that at least two Tu-95 ‘Bear’ nuclear-capable bombers were targeted at a Russian airbase, Engels-2, in July and August, putting both Soviet-era aircraft out of action, The Telegraph reported.
Oryx, an open-source intelligence research group, has recorded that at least 10 Tu-95s have been targeted since the invasion began in February 2022, not counting the two strikes at Engels-2 this summer.

***

The further out you look in space the faster things appear to be moving away from us. Some objects are flying away from us faster than the speed of light because the space between is actually growing that fast. The furthest objects appear more and more red until the wavelengths vanish into the infrared. Anything beyond this cosmic horizon will never be seen again.

***

The Pirates' Fan Appreciation Weekend is not long enough.

***

America’s AI buildout is pushing up prices on everything from smartphones to electricity. One chart showed consumer prices for computer software and accessories had climbed roughly 15% from a year earlier.

***

Human Destruction Olympics

There's been a debate over who is most to be feared: government or business. (The New Singularity Tech, the creature of business, may be a new candidate.) The academic world holds business as the most dangerous, and they offer all sorts of wacky economic policies to hamper business, despite the mountains of bodies governments are stack, stack, stackin' at heaven's door. Nor do businesses have armies. And there's debate over whether Fauci qualifies as government or business or academia or what. Anyway...

New evidence has arrived in the government vs. business Human Destruction Olympics:

---Fauci insisted time and again that the “lab leak hypothesis” was a wacky conspiracy theory, that the virus had jumped naturally from animals to humans, presumably at the “wet market” in Wuhan, China.

Yet the diaries reveal that he knew early on the beast had not come from the wet market. More, he was confronted with scientists he’d selected who argued that the “lab leak” was the truth — and that the bug was likely bio-engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Bioweapon.

---Fauci himself referred to research at WIV that he had funded with federal cash as “GOF,” meaning “gain of function,” altering viruses to make them more deadly or contagious to humans, though he later testified time and time again under questioning by Sen. Rand Paul that he’d never funded such work.

--Fauci lied to the public to discourage them from using masks that were in short supply so they could be saved for hospital workers. Apparently, all citizens are not actually created equal.

---He pushed hard for media and social-media companies to suppress or ban contrarian voices about COVID’s origins, and even worked with Beijing to ensure that international investigations would never get close to being able to examine the evidence. He engaged in the same information control to stomp on experts who questioned the wisdom of locking everything down to fight COVID,

Years later, he turned around and claimed he’d never pushed for mass lockdowns:

---And his personalization of scientific debate fed into the lunatic politicization of COVID policy, such that America kept its schools closed longer and tighter than the Europeans, and insisted on masking toddlers who were never at risk.

That politics led to the similarly lunatic Biden presidential pardon that likely immunizes Fauci from criminal charges for his perjury, abuses of government power, and so on. The basic change seems to be that one can pursue as dangerous a plan as is imaginable, without the fear of noble justice or simple retribution.

So the only thing worse than government or business is a government-business partnership. Or was the partnership with Fauci really a business partnership?

Maybe what's worse is a government-anything partnership.

The Cat Wants to be Belled

On this day:668
Eastern Roman Emperor Constans II is assassinated in his bath at Syracuse, Italy.
921
At Tetin Saint Ludmila is murdered at the command of her daughter-in-law.
1440
Gilles de Rais, one of the earliest known serial killers, is taken into custody upon an accusation brought against him by the Bishop of Nantes.
1776
American Revolutionary War: British forces land at Kip’s Bay during the New York Campaign.
1812
The French army under Napoleon reaches the Kremlin in Moscow.
1835
HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, reaches the Galápagos Islands. The ship lands at Chatham or San Cristobal, the easternmost of the archipelago.
1950
Korean War: United States forces land at Inchon
1962
The Soviet ship Poltava heads toward Cuba, one of the events that sets into motion the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1963
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing: Four children killed at an African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, United States
1968
The Soviet Zond 5 spaceship is launched, becoming the first spacecraft to fly around the Moon and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
2008
Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

***

"We never leave the circle of perspectives." --Rovelli

***

A new study suggests that evolving groups can develop robustness and resilience, almost as a side effect, without any specific evolutionary pressure.

The study team also argues that slight biological variations might be more important than previously thought, perhaps revealing the underlying shape of the fitness landscape and how a population has traveled along it through evolutionary history.

***

Is the sudden, apocalyptic concern over AI's dangers another scare to keep everyone unsettled? Is it another Covid-Commie-Warming -Inflation-National Debt-Aliens-China-Russia-Oil Shortage-Oil Glut-Houthis press-induced panic? After all, if you were doing something you thought was a threat to your family, friends, and neighbors, would you run in the street and cry for help or would you just stop doing it?

***

A Pittsburgh-area man is facing a terrorism-related charge after the FBI believed he was planning an attack in support of ISIS.

According to the criminal complaint, Jonathan Kramer of Valencia was arrested outside a hotel in Cranberry where he allegedly paid cash to stay for a week.

After a search of Kramer's hotel room and house, agents said they found a semi-automatic rifle, loaded rifle magazines, a rifle scope and boxes of ammunition, along with 30 knives and a note.

The note told people not to look for him, saying "I cant live In constant Fear," court paperwork said.

***

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Monday at the the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference that the service has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against “hostile adversary action.”

Meink declined to comment on the type of weapons or why the announcement was made now.

***

A factoid is a small bit of information, or an idea that seems like a fact and has been repeated often but may not actually be true. Norman Mailer coined it and defined factoid in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, as “facts which have no existence before."

***

The Cat Wants to be Belled

Everyone is upset over AI. Everyone wants to regulate it. But, as always, risk to society and man is never philosophy or technology; the risk is men.

September 4, 1954, in a top-secret nuclear test, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber dropped a 40-kiloton atomic weapon just north of Totskoye village, exposing some 45,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians to nuclear fallout. On purpose.

The Wuhan lab worked on changing a virus's genetic structure to change its behavior- on purpose-, allowed it to escape the lab, infect the entire world, and cause 8 million deaths.

A Broken Arrow is a term for an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons, such as accidental launching, theft, or loss. Accidentally launched? Launched? The U.S. acknowledges 32 official Broken Arrows, but other sources indicate many more incidents. The number of such events by less open, less competent armed organizations is unknown.

To this day, six U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered. Lost. Nuclear weapons.

The Biopreparate labs for bioweapons development in Russia were so lax they all allowed their viruses to infect the surrounding forest creatures.

Now we are faced with a new technology, artificial intelligence, conceived in liberty or authoritarianism, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, and so incompetent, can long endure.

And we want to give the keys to the lab to the sorcerer's apprentice. Let's just give control to the Simpson jury.

Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI

On this day:

1607
Flight of the Earls from Lough Swilly, Donegal, Ireland. A strange event in which the Irish earls Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, permanently departed Rathmullan in Ireland for Catholic Europe during a period of extreme political tension with the English Crown. The Flight's exact motivation was and is unclear but, apparently, the Irish are prone to this type of thing.
1812
Napoleonic Wars: French grenadiers enter Moscow. The Fire of Moscow begins as soon as Russian troops leave the city.
1847
Mexican-American War: Winfield Scott captures Mexico City.
1901
President of the United States William McKinley dies after an assassination attempt on September 6, and is succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt.
1917
Russia is officially proclaimed a republic. Hysterical.
1954
In a top-secret nuclear test, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber drops a 40-kiloton atomic weapon just north of Totskoye village, exposing some 45,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians to nuclear fallout. Read that again. Then think about the risk to human life from bioweapons and AI being controlled by these people.
1959
The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.
1960
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded.
1994
The Major League Baseball season is canceled because of a strike.

***

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (9 Sep 1828-1910)

***

Kamala Harris won 74,999,166 votes, or 48.3 percent of the votes cast in 2024.

***

There is a book on the threat of technology and the Silicon Valley "tech-authoritarian movement" called The Nerd Reich.

***

The Denisovans who later interbred with modern human populations were carrying an older layer of mixed ancestry themselves, according to a new reconstruction of ancient genomes. UC Berkeley researchers estimate that 3 to 5 percent of Denisovan DNA came from an unidentified “super-archaic” population whose lineage diverged from the modern human lineage about 1.8 million years ago.


***

The five oldest Steelers starters on the defense — Heyward, Jalen Ramsey, T.J. Watt, Jamel Dean and Alex Highsmith — combined for 4 sacks, 5 tackles for loss, 5 passes defended, 2 forced fumbles and Watt's interception return for a touchdown.

***

Who is Uju Anya?


***

President Trump on Sunday called on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian refineries, saying the attacks are causing a shortage of diesel.
Now, think about that for a minute.

***

Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI

Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi believed they could use radio to communicate with Martians, claiming to have detected signals from them. This was in the late 1800s.

Cocconi, an Italian physicist who was director of the Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva, and Morrison argued in 1979 that radio telescopes had become sensitive enough to pick up transmissions that might be broadcast into space by civilizations orbiting other stars. Such messages might be transmitted at a wavelength of 21 cm (1,420.4 MHz), the wavelength of radio emission by neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. They reasoned that other intelligences might see this as a logical landmark in the radio spectrum.

Seven months after Cocconi and Morrison published their article, Astrophysiicist Frank Drake began searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in an experiment called Project Ozma. It was the first systematic search for signals from communicative extraterrestrial civilizations, using the 85 ft (26 m) dish of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia.

The SETI Project has created a lot downstream. Movies mostly. All fiction. But some stabs at science. Drake's Equation, for example, purporting to objectify the chance of a planet sustaining life.

But no scientist takes Drake's equation, N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL, seriously. Every factor is a guess. Made up.

And sending out random blasts of obvious non-random communication efforts has its downside; it's like Bambi calling out "Hello" in the forest during hunting season. Only Dr. Pangloss and his band The Very Naive would be optimistic enough in this hostile universe to advertise the whereabouts of its fragile bodies and tender home.

Bad science and suicidal danger aside, we have been indulgent toward SETI. After all, what’s the big deal? There's probably nothing out there within attacking distance. It’s kind of fun. If people want to look, let them.  

We do a lot of this now. Flat Earth Society. The 1619 Project. Rent control. Tariffs. We have developed, presumably from our reverence for free speech, a tolerance for real, serious nonsense.

As if ignoring reality didn't hurt.

Sunday/Utilitarianism and Spirituality

On this day:
1541
After three years of exile, John Calvin returns to Geneva to reform the church under a body of doctrine known as Calvinism.
1759
Battle of the Plains of Abraham: British defeat French near Quebec City in the Seven Years’ War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War.
1814
In a turning point in the War of 1812, the British fail to capture Baltimore, Maryland.
1847
Mexican-American War: Six teenage military cadets known as Niños Héroes die defending Chapultepec Castle in the Battle of Chapultepec. American troops under General Winfield Scott capture Mexico City in the Mexican-American War.
1848
Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage survives a 3 ft-plus iron rod being driven through his head; the reported effects on his behavior and personality stimulate thinking about the nature of the brain and its functions.
1862
American Civil War: Union soldiers find a copy of Robert E. Lee’s battle plans in a field outside Frederick, Maryland. It is the prelude to the Battle of Antietam.
1922
The final act of the Greco-Turkish War, the Great Fire of Smyrna, commences.
1942
World War II: Second day of the Battle of Edson’s Ridge in the Guadalcanal campaign. U.S. Marines successfully defeated attacks by the Imperial Japanese Army with heavy losses for the Japanese forces.
1987
Goiânia accident: A radioactive object is stolen from an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, Brazil, contaminating many people in the following weeks and causing some to die from radiation poisoning.

***

What did the Russian Marxists sacrifice when they made common cause with the nazis in WWII?  What did the nazis sacrifice?

***

An interesting little story.  Springshot, in 2011, created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on time and airlines can operate as smoothly as possible. Hundreds of airports use it globally. Google just bought Spirit at auction, including a massive dataset and intellectual property (IP) that Springshot says it owns—not Spirit. In an email to Ars, Springshot summarized its fears as the court possibly creating “a precedent where startups see massive amounts of IP transferred to the world’s richest and most monopolistic companies via bankruptcy courts.”

***

The idea of AI regulation has been suggested as "a cynical effort at 'regulatory capture.'" Using the law and the courts to advance yourself at the expense of the culture. What a concept!

***

A major California school district is facing a potentially costly enrollment crisis after nearly 1,200 students unexpectedly vanished from its rolls.
The drop at San Juan Unified School District was nearly four times what officials anticipated for the new school year.
The sudden 2% drop could have serious financial consequences for the Sacramento County district; much of its state funding is tied to daily student attendance.

***

In Japan, the market for adult diapers is larger than the market for infant diapers

***


Sunday/Utilitarianism and Spirituality

"It is old news that the practice of Christianity and the study of the humanities have been declining for decades. Their falls, however, are rarely considered together. One has not caused the collapse of the other. The two are suffering because the spirit of our age despises the goal they share – the shaping of the human mind and soul for transcendent goods.

Limitless technology has deepened and accelerated the trend that predated it.

This trend is utilitarianism, the belief that only things and ideas with practical application in “the real world” have value. With its supernatural orientation, Christianity has no purpose in this view. Nor do the humanities, with their focus on poetry, history, and literature, which distract from the pursuit of money, comfort, and prestige. Utilitarianism presents a truncated vision of the human person – whose value is measured by what he produces materially. Hence, it cannot understand religion and the humanities, as witnessed by the one question every liberal arts major must endure: “What are you going to do with that?”

Periods of spiritual and cultural rebirth have occurred where faith and the humanities rose together – the fourth century Church, the Carolingian renaissance, the high Middle Ages, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the building of American Catholicism – overcoming a Dark Age, closed to faith and to learning."--culled from David G Bonagura, Jr. in Catholic Thing

Materialism generally refers to physical comfort and possessions, but, in political theory, it implies a conflict, a progression to a different form through the resolution of ancient antagonisms, specifically caste conflict and righteous homicide, in the view of the nineteenth century and the murderous Marxists. A foundational state. And, of course, it never speaks to its foundational law: that a closed system tends to a maximum level of disorder. Entropy. Cold and lifeless chaos. And, I would guess, despair.

Satstats

 On this day:

490 BC
Battle of Marathon: The conventionally accepted date for the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians and their Plataean allies defeat the first Persian invasion force of Greece.
1213
Albigensian Crusade: Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, defeats Peter II of Aragon at the Battle of Muret.
1683
Austro-Ottoman War: Battle of Vienna – several European armies join forces to defeat the Ottoman Empire.
1846
Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning.
1857
The SS Central America sinks about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew, including Captain William Lewis Herndon. The ship was carrying 13–15 tons of gold from the San Francisco Gold Rush.
1940
Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.

***

"The Supreme Court blocked me; it will not stop me."--Trump, right? No. Joe Biden. Our authoritarian problem is not a crisis; it is an epidemic.

***

911 yesterday marked a significant national threat from a tiny external group. The Kirk murder is an internal threat by an individual. So as the means of attack improves, the critical mass of attackers shrinks. 

The bow becomes the rifle, the six-gun, the shoulder-fired missile, then the drone. It's only a matter of time before we have 'a boy and his nuke.'

***

The historian-economist Niall Ferguson believes that global trading has caused some jobs to naturally move to Third World countries. Americans are happy, right? The improvement in global income levels and the flattening of income distribution are what we want, right?
Apparently not.
A 2017 study from the Brookings Institution found a strong correlation between job losses from the financial crisis and increased support for anti-establishment political parties in Europe. This populist backlash shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. During a recent discussion, Niall pointed out that: “If one looks at all the elections back to 1870, financial crises lead to backlashes against globalization that erode to the political center.”

***

Neanderthals stopped existing as a distinct population around 40,000 years ago, but a whisper of them persists.
Most people of non-African ancestry still carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA today
Some people of East Asian descent carry both a 1-4% Neanderthal share and up to 0.1 per cent of their genome from the Denisovans.

***

In her first government population policy statement, Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared that promoting the birth rate would be a political priority for her government and appointed a birth minister. A birth minister. 

***

Satstats


Home Sales
Home sales slipped 0.6% year-over-year in August and fell sharply from July, Zillow says. Mortgage rates holding above 6.5% kept many buyers on the sidelines. Newly pending listings, a forward-looking measure of demand, fell 2.6% from a year ago, suggesting the slowdown could continue through the rest of the year. The typical U.S. home value rose 1.3% from a year ago to $369,678, and the monthly mortgage payment on the typical home was 2% higher than last year, Zillow says. Inventory continues to offer a modest bright spot, with 1.41 million homes for sale nationwide, up 3% from a year ago.

*

Forbes ranked Johns Hopkins University the 11th-ranked college among 500 schools nationwide for 2027.

*

In NYC, 63 people are responsible for 5000 arrests.

*

More than 60 fatalities have been linked to Tesla’s driver-assistance systems.

*

About half of Israel’s children – among them haredim, Arab Israelis, and those living in Israel’s geographic and socioeconomic peripheries – are receiving a third-world level education.
And as if that were not enough, these children belong to the fastest-growing segments of the population.

*

2.1 children per woman is the population replacement rate, then those countries with the lowest birth rates – China at 0.63, Japan at 0.6, and South Korea at an incredible 0.46 – are projected by 2050 to experience population declines of 20-30 per cent relative to 2023; their share of the population aged 65 and over to reach 30-40 per cent; and older workers (aged 45 and over) to comprise 60 per cent of the labour force.

*

For most of the past decade, anti-billionaire language was a niche product. Democratic emails invoked billionaires in the mid-single digits through 2017 and 2018, spiked briefly to around 14 percent during the Warren and Sanders primary surge in 2019, and then settled back down—through the entire Biden presidency, the billionaire appeared in roughly one of every twenty to twenty-five Democratic fundraising emails, barely more than in Republican ones.
Then came January 2025. In the weeks after an inauguration that seated tech CEOs in the front row and the dizzying drama of Elon Musk’s ill-fated DOGE experiment, billionaire mentions in Democratic emails quadrupled, peaking above 20 percent of all emails sent and holding around 15 percent ever since. Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging.

*

Spain makes up 65% of Europe's population growth. Are they Spanish children or immigrant adults?

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After the 1850s gold rush, up until the 1890s depression, Australia had the highest per capita income in the world

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The share of hungry people has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded

*

9.2 million Medicaid enrollees do not qualify.

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China has dug more than 300 new missile silos.

Great Kanto Earthquake

 

On this day:
1297
Battle of Stirling Bridge: Scots jointly led by William Wallace and Andrew Moray defeat the English.
1649
Siege of Drogheda ends: Oliver Cromwell’s English Parliamentarian troops take the town and execute its garrison
1708
Charles XII of Sweden stops his march to conquer Moscow outside Smolensk, marking the turning point in the Great Northern War. The army is defeated nine months later in the Battle of Poltava, and the Swedish empire ceases to be a major power
1829
Surrender of the expedition led by Isidro Barradas at Tampico, sent by the Spanish crown in order to retake Mexico. This was the final consummation of Mexican independence.
1857
The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Mormon settlers and Paiutes massacre 120 pioneers at Mountain Meadows, Utah.
1921
Nahalal, the first moshav in Palestine, is settled as part of a Zionist plan to colonize Palestine and creating a Jewish state, later to be Israel.
1922
The British Mandate of Palestine begins.
1944
World War II: RAF bombing raid on Darmstadt and the following firestorm kill 11,500.
1978
U.S. President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel meet at Camp David and agree on the Camp David Accords, a framework for peace between Israel and Egypt and a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
1997
14 Estonian soldiers die in the Kurkse tragedy, drowning in the Baltic Sea
2001
The September 11 attacks take place in the United States. Airplane hijackings result in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, damage to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the crashing of a passenger airliner near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

***

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)

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9/11: The notion that life is sacred, that highminded conflict can be limited to combatants, and that civilians are to be avoided is shown to be untrue. Indeed, the more innocents, the better.

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Kirk: The notion that our national problems need only a respectful engagement with your opponent, discussion, debate, and good-humored withdrawal to a neutral corner is shown to be untrue. Surprise and incoherent viciousness are leverage.

***

Dinner at Lilith. Better decor. That dining car feel is gone. Still with the hurried atmosphere. Food: quirky choices indifferently done, especially at the price. Their second place is coming at the old Station.

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A Bahrain-based United States military installation has sustained severe damage during recent months of fighting with Iran, the acting secretary of the US Navy has said, prompting Washington to evaluate what to do with its headquarters in the Middle East.

“They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” Hung Cao said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Wednesday.

***

From The Information Tusamani:

There is so much out there, some crazy, some dangerous, so much interesting. This is an experiment on provocative links. When I find one, I will include it. Just one. Not because I necessarily agree with it, but because I think it's interesting. Some of these might bother people — these first two probably will — and sometimes the sources are crazy, but I hope you think there is enough value in it. I'll try to avoid outright lies, but as you can see in this first one, sometimes the provenance is difficult. This is on Palantir's "Manifesto."

https://blog.pebblous.ai/story/palantir-technological-republic/en/

***

Great Kanto Earthquake

At one minute before noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck the Kanto area, including Tokyo and Yokohama. Its epicenter was in Sagami Bay, 50 miles southeast of Tokyo near the island of Oshima. The initial shaking lasted for about five minutes and was followed by a tsunami that washed people and houses out to sea. In some of the smaller inlets, the tsunami reached heights of up to 40 feet. Many were drowned, but the tsunami extinguished many fires that otherwise would have been uncontrollable.

Tokyo’s largest building, the twelve-story Asakusa Tower, split in two and collapsed. The earthquake knocked out the seismograph at the central weather bureau in Tokyo. The seismograph at Tokyo Imperial University, still functioning, recorded a series of 1,700 earthquakes and aftershocks that struck the Tokyo area over the following three days.

Fires followed the initial quake and did more damage than the quake itself. Since the city was built largely of wood, the fires burned out of control. Gas mains ruptured by the quake, and leaking oil from above-ground storage tanks added to the conflagration. A condition called a 'fire tornado' was soon created, with a wind of such velocity that it would lift a person off the ground. These crisscrossed the city and either burned people alive or suffocated them with dense fumes of carbon monoxide. More than 30,000 people were reportedly killed at a single location, a park on the east bank of the Sumida River, when a firestorm descended on refugees gathered there. Firefighting equipment was destroyed or could not be moved because of the rubble that blocked the roads. Water was not available to fight the fire because the water mains were ruptured by the quake. Bridges and narrow streets became deathtraps as fleeing people could neither go forward nor turn back. Hundreds of people who had attempted to cross one of the large bridges that spanned the Sumida River found themselves trapped and incinerated when walls of fire swept the bridge from both banks.

A party of 200 children on an excursion train trip were buried alive by a falling embankment. Hundreds of people tried to escape in small boats, only to be drowned by waves caused by aftershocks or to be burned to death in burning oil slicks. The liner Empress of Australia saved several thousand people by loading them aboard and heading out to sea to ride out the disaster.

The quake devastated 45,000 square miles. In Yokohama, Japan’s chief port, communications were completely destroyed, as was the Imperial University Library, which contained one of the world’s great collections of rare books, original documents, and priceless art objects.

The flexible Japanese wood-and-paper house withstood the shaking, but their heavy tile roofs often collapsed and trapped the occupants. For the most part, steel-framed and reinforced concrete buildings remained standing with only moderate damage, but altogether 60 percent of the buildings in Tokyo and 80 percent in Yokohama were flattened by the quake or destroyed by the fires that followed.

Aftershocks continued to shake the region following the quake. A soaking rain followed on the third day, which helped extinguish the fires that were still raging. Food shortages were rampant, and riots broke out, but there was no looting and little profiteering. Members of the Korean community were attacked as rumors accused them of setting fires and poisoning the wells. Several hundred were killed by vigilantes before the authorities could reestablish order.

A week after the quake, 25,000 people were still living in the open. One of the biggest problems was disposing of dead bodies, many still undiscovered in the rubble. When found, they would be piled up and cremated. The Sumida River was full of bloated and discolored corpses.

144,000 were killed. 144,000

Rebuilding costs were ruinous.