Artificial Insemination

 On this day:

1099
First Crusade: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1298
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Falkirk – King Edward I of England and his longbowmen defeat William Wallace and his Scottish schiltrons outside the town of Falkirk.
1706
The Acts of Union 1707 are agreed upon by commissioners from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, which, when passed by each country’s Parliaments, lead to the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1797
Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Battle between Spanish and British naval forces during the French Revolutionary Wars. During the Battle, Rear-Admiral Nelson is wounded in the arm and the arm had to be partially amputated.
1937
New Deal: the United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
1942
Holocaust: the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
1946
King David Hotel bombing: a Zionist underground organisation, the Irgun, bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the civil administration and military headquarters for Mandate Palestine, resulting in 91 deaths.
2003
Members of 101st Airborne of the United States, aided by Special Forces, attack a compound in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, along with Mustapha Hussein, Qusay’s 14-year-old son, and a bodyguard.
2005
Jean Charles de Menezes is killed by police as the hunt begins for the London Bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the 21 July 2005 London bombings.
2011
Norway is the victim of twin terror attacks, the first being a bomb blast which targeted government buildings in central Oslo, the second being a massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utøya.

***

Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies.--Lemieux

***

How are Kash Patel's blinking lessons going?

***

Two National Institutes of Health researchers have been charged with allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying to federal authorities.

Vincent Munster, chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, and research fellow Claude Kwe were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after returning from the Republic of Congo.

***

There is an undercurrent of criticism toward Lionel Messi because he hasn't publicly addressed the unspoken national generalizations about Argentina's unspoken racial generalizations.

***

A whale population spontaneously drops its entire repertoire every few years and collectively adopts an entirely new song from thousands of miles away—long-range cultural transmission outside humanity.

***

Artificial Insemination

Radio belly. Cat shovel.

Peculiar junctions of normal adjectives and nouns are always a tipoff; you are dealing with either a Beat poet or a progressive. The poet jars, the progressive inculcates.

With a progressive, one term is being infused with the other. A hybrid is being created, and the alloy is usually a monster. "Health care justice." "The criminal community." "Democratic socialism." Linguistic square pegs are forced into conceptual round holes.

Our lives have become so inundated with opinion and conflict that we are becoming calloused. Do illegal immigrants demand the assumption of innocence? Does an illegal immigrant have to commit another crime before we take him seriously? Can a vicious criminal be abused by the law? Are 'fraudsters' different from thieves? Our whole nation is founded on the right of the individual to defy the majority; does that empower a crazy foreign student?

So we suffer through tortuous legal wranglings and debates. And we know that the system is geared to fairness, so we let these debates play themselves out. A man sues a casual girlfriend for alimony, a group demands dolphin voting rights--and we get up and go to work. We turn the page.

These verbal shotgun marriages wear us down. What is 'social justice," really? The right of people to join a club? To marry whoever you want? To attend any school? It's like hybridization across species; you know the product will be sterile anyway.

What follows is an event reported by Megan McArdle in the WashPo. That this is not a topic of daily conversation is proof of the notion's malignancy.

"In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.

This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories."

In the political laboratory, no experiment is innocuous, no noble lie without consequence, particularly as the fifth column and the press make the inane or the revolutionary routine.

The Enemies of the Good

 On this day:

365
A tsunami devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by the Crete earthquake, estimated to be 8.0 on the Richter Scale. 5,000 people perished in Alexandria, and 45,000 more died outside the city.
1403
Battle of Shrewsbury: King Henry IV of England defeats rebels to the north of the county town of Shropshire, England.
1861
American Civil War: First Battle of Bull Run – at Manassas Junction, Virginia, the first major battle of the war begins and ends in a victory for the Confederate army.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1961
Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission – Gus Grissom piloting Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space (in a suborbital mission).
1969
Space Race: Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission (July 20 in North America).
1973
In the Lillehammer affair in Norway, Israeli Mossad agents kill a waiter whom they mistakenly thought was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.
2005
Four terrorist bombings, occurring exactly two weeks after the similar July 7 bombings, target London’s public transportation system. All four bombs fail to detonate and all four suspected suicide bombers are captured and later convicted and imprisoned for long terms.
2011
NASA’s Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135

***

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.---Lord Acton

***

Since we have become a people who hope to shape our nature through the adoption and criminalization of words like "Washington Redskins," shouldn't we do something to soften the aggressive and dangerous name inherent in the State of Delaware?

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Gymnasium is a Latinisation of the Greek, meaning to exercise. Its root word is the same as for 'nude.'

The Greeks banned women from the gymnasium but, I believe, the Etruscans did not.

***

John Scopes found guilty, the Americans land on the moon, both on the same day in history. I wonder if we could start a political study, deductible of course, on how days of the year contain inherent historical leanings, like a horoscope. We could meet in Acapulco every six months and discuss our findings, maybe get a university chair or two.

***

The full cost of making America a welfare state wasn’t fully recorded in the federal budget deficits of the 1970s because inflation and bracket creep tax increases transferred much of the cost to the family budget.

***

The Enemies of the Good

Cultures are always threatened by envy, madness, the restless need to change into some imagined good. (The old saw, 'the enemy of good is better.') The Americans are particularly subject to assault because their philosophy allows the revolutionary the freedom to try it.

The American foundation is tough, though. The Founders recognized whimsy as a weak and inaccurate  (and adolescent) motive in political change. And common and shape-changing. They demanded a philosophy and a slow process of foundational restructuring. This may explain the frustrated frenzy of contemporary revolutionaries. Any more, the Americans seem willing to import them.

The current threat from the Left seems to have coalesced into incoherence. America is so brilliantly constructed that its enemies have simply stopped trying to replace it and devolved into emotional tantrums. The objections to America have become geographic, like Israel. Or religious, like Islam. Or historic, like slavery. None of these points are actionable as they are peripheral to the country itself. Their energy is resentment, not constructive. So they would overthrow the British government over the Corn Laws. These are people who hate Catholicism because of the Crusades and Blacks because of the Congo Wars. America's domestic enemies are people without context.

Mamdani will be risky for them because he is real. The Netanyahu kerfluffle is silly but instructive. Mamdani wants to enforce an international edit the country doesn't recognize. This raises practical questions. Who will enforce the edit? Local police? Would they fight Israeli regulars? State cops? National Guard? Where would they put him? Would Israeli special forces counter? Are we going to ask American boys to die for the Hague over some incoherent international cult?

The Left is on the wrong side of all this, but they don't care about much other than winning and blood in the streets. Their incoherence, though, might give them a strange advantage as no sensible person would take such a crew seriously.

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

On this day:

70
First Jewish-Roman War: Siege of Jerusalem – Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, storms the Fortress of Antonia north of the Temple Mount. The Roman army is drawn into street fights with the Zealots.
1807
Nicéphore Niépce is awarded a patent by Napoleon Bonaparte for the Pyréolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine, after it successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône in France.
1903
The Ford Motor Company ships its first car.
1944
World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
1950
Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.
1960
The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.
1969
Apollo Program: Apollo 11 successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on another world almost 7 hours later.
1976
The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1977
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is hit by a flash flood that kills eighty and causes $350 million in damage.
1977
The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments.

***

There is no legitimate use case for crypto. They’ve had 18 years to come up with one. They keep throwing things up like “an inflation hedge” or “source of stability.” Every one of them has turned out to be baseless.

The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering, and crime. It’s the preferred mechanism of choice for global terrorists, sex traffickers, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

You have to ask yourself why crypto has basically hijacked the political agenda of Washington. It’s because they followed the Sam Bankman-Fried model of buying bipartisan support by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns. --Krugman

***

In May, Mamdani’s administration released a map meant to celebrate the city's ethnic diversity and immigrant roots. The chart included Little Palestine and Little Pakistan but omitted Little Italy, one of the best-known neighborhoods in Manhattan. The map included Little Mexico, Little Guyana, and Little Bhod-Tibet, but failed to recognize well known Irish enclaves like Woodlawn and Sunnyside. Not surprisingly, the map omitted Jewish neighborhoods.
Welcome to the 'some are more equal than others' phase.

***

The use of subatomic particles to process data could represent a breakthrough that’s unmatched in modern human history, according to analysts at Bank of America, who compared it to the discovery of fire. “A technology that can perform endless complex calculations in zero-time, warp-speeding human knowledge and development.”

***

Just to be fair:
An 18-year-old has more at stake in an election than an 80-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?
An 80-year-old has more money at stake than an 18-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?

***

A detector buried a kilometre underground in Japan may have caught the faintest signal ever recorded: the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the entire universe, a background hum of stellar death that scientists have been straining to hear for decades.--Headline  at Space Daily. I suppose they could have said "background hum of stellar creation", too 

***

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

Socialism has been around in some form or other forever. Cain shared Abel's production. Pirates share the spoils. The prospect of sharing the product of another's efforts makes for a terrific recruiting poster. It has been the default system for failing individuals forever. But it is a ridiculous socio-economic system that has deteriorated everywhere it's been tried. From the schoolyard to Jamestown and Plymouth to the early religious conclaves to Mafia protection rackets, sharing others' production has changed only the mailing addresses of the rich.

The modern adaptation--sharing by voting mandate--cleverly sidesteps group sharing's basic flaw: enforcement. If 51% of the population wants to share production, a sizable portion does not. If a citizen has no essential right to the results of his work, and his neighbor has a statutory right to it, how is that conflict resolved? Force.

Democracies have their own flaws. Is a 90% vote more important in a society than a 52% vote? Can a 90% vote make farms communal? Wives? Slaves? Is lynching OK if the correct process is followed?

Ants are very productive and organized. But we are not ants. 

The socialist starts with a superficial notion--property--and works down to organize his culture. The revolutionary geniuses in America started with the basic rights of the nation's citizens--life, liberty, the striving for happiness--and worked up. It is because socialism is so tenuously but fervently moored by property that it is so unstable and dangerous.

So, when one votes for socialism, the job is nowhere near finished. The disenters and countless inconsistencies have to be identified and, in some fashion, attacked. The vote is meaningless until it is forcibly imposed.

So, is democratic socialism an oxymoron?

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

On this day:
64
Great Fire of Rome: a fire begins to burn in the merchant area of Rome and soon burns completely out of control. According to a popular, but untrue legend, Nero fiddled as the city burned.

711
Umayyad conquest of Hispania: Battle of Guadalete – Umayyad forces under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeat the Visigoths led by King Roderic. This began the successful invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, less than 100 years after the death of the Prophet.
1333
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Halidon Hill – The English win a decisive victory over the Scots.
1545
The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982, the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
1553
Lady Jane Grey is replaced by Mary I of England as Queen of England after only nine days of reign.
1701
Representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sign the Nanfan Treaty, ceding a large territory north of the Ohio River to England.
1843
Brunel’s steamship, the SS Great Britain, is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller and also becoming the largest vessel afloat in the world.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid – At Buffington Island in Ohio, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s raid into the north is mostly thwarted when a large group of his men are captured while trying to escape across the Ohio River.
1864
Taiping Rebellion: Third Battle of Nanking – The Qing Dynasty finally defeats the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
1942
World War II: Battle of the Atlantic – German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the last U-boats to withdraw from their United States Atlantic coast positions in response to the effective American convoy system.
1963
Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 metres (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.
1981
In a private meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French Prime Minister François Mitterrand reveals the existence of the Farewell Dossier, a collection of documents showing that the Soviets had been stealing American technological research and development.
1997
The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army resumes a ceasefire to end their 25-year campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

***

"Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals."--Norberg

***

The country of Peru has seen an influx of babies named after the star of Norway’s World Cup team, Erling Haaland, with over 500 newborns having been named after the forward.

***

Tulsi Gabbard’s older brother allegedly tried to lure several young children into a hotel room with money and gum at a Hawaiian hotel resort.

***

The new Democrat bent is that the Constitution, the very declaration of the values that underlie the nation, is "nostalgic." It's appearing as a common talking point among national candidates. This is brazen, iconoclastic stuff, containing the seeds of a real disaster. And it would not be tried without some support in polling.

***

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it, rivers, rain, clouds, lakes, and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock. It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.

***

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

A week after the Parable of the Sower comes today's gospel, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows his wheat and, in the night, an enemy oversows the field with weeds. (The weeds are darnel, strangely a name taken by football players and actors. Its historical meaning is "disorder.") The farmer decides to wait and harvest them all together for fear that extracting the weeds will harm the good wheat as well. Christ, in an unusual move, then explains the parable. A hard reading of it should be very alarming.

This is a significant insight into Christ's message. There is a Good. But there is also an Evil. And that Evil is sown by an Enemy, an active Enemy of the Good. The Enemy is surreptitious, and the Evil he sows is inextricably interwoven with the Good so that separating them is injurious to the Good. That is, Good and Evil are linked. There are incidental slaves in this parable--without comment--and the eventual harvesters are Angels. 

Angels.

This is a battlefield, a struggle over the soul of man. Good and Evil are real and hard to separate, but separation will happen. And God is patient; His patience comes from a sincere interest in protecting the Good.

This is the picture of a religion with principals, not simply abstract principles, with active virtue and evil, and both have proponents.


Sowing Seed

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy--bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

ROBERT LAURENCE BINYON
1869-1943 / England

SatStats

 On this day:

390 BCE
Roman-Gaulish Wars: Battle of the Allia – a Roman army is defeated by raiding Gauls, leading to the subsequent sacking of Rome.
1290
King Edward I of England issues the Edict of Expulsion, banishing all Jews (numbering about 16,000) from England; this was Tisha B'Av on the Hebrew calendar, a day that commemorates many Jewish calamities.
1870
The First Vatican Council decrees the dogma of papal infallibility.
1925
Adolf Hitler publishes his personal manifesto Mein Kampf.
1942
World War II: the Germans test fly the Messerschmitt Me-262 using only its jet engines for the first time.
1944
World War II: Hideki Tojo resigns as Prime Minister of Japan due to numerous setbacks in the war effort.
1966
Human spaceflight: Gemini 10 is launched from Cape Kennedy on a 70-hour mission that includes docking with an orbiting Agena target vehicle.
1969
After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.

***

"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."--Thomas Jefferson

***

The Kopechne affair ended the myth of even-handedness in the American political culture, essentially its very raison d'etre. How could the Democrats have survived it?

***

New York City government is using racial classifications to guide more than two hundred goals across nearly every agency. Among other things, the plan commits specific percentages of city contracts to be doled out based on race, a continuation of the city’s longstanding policy. Indeed, for the past several years, the city has operated one of the largest race-based contracting programs in the country.

***

China is about to open a hotel that runs itself. On an artificial island off the coast near Shenzhen, Pudu Robotics is building the world's first fully robot-serviced hotel, opening in 2027, where every job in the building, from check-in to cooking to cleaning your room, will be handled by machines working in concert.

***

Wealthy American families are increasingly seeking to book assets outside the United States — a shift so pronounced that one of Citi’s top wealth executives says she’s never seen anything like it in her career.

***

SatStats

BlackRock's assets under management crossed a record $15 trillion.

***

Spirits companies face challenges as consumers reduce drinking, though ready-to-drink cocktails gain popularity.

***

The Trump family earned more than $1.4B from crypto last year and moved most of it into stocks and bonds. Retail investors in Trump-backed tokens have lost $2.3B.

***

World Cup 2026 hit a record 43M viewers with Fox and Telemundo viewership up 92-122%.

***

On the national “gold standard” NAEP exams, NYC's citywide 4th-grade reading proficiency stands at 28%, math at 33%. But black and Hispanic students have proficiency rates less than a third of those of white and Asian students.

***

From July 2024 through June 2025, NYC Housing Authority plumber supervisor Jakub Markowski earned $465,000, including $332,000 for nearly 2,600 hours in overtime — more than the mayor and City Council speaker make combined.

***

Masayoshi Son has ridiculed opponents of AI for “spitting upwards” as the SoftBank billionaire predicted the technology would account for 20 per cent of global output by 2040.

***

66% of higher- and middle-income countries surveyed by Pew Research now have a more favourable view of China than the US, with respondents across 36 nations variously citing US meddling and backsliding.

***

Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year, driven largely by datacentre construction.

In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted 119 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, or about a third of France's total.

The previous year, they emitted roughly 101 metric tons, roughly equivalent to the 2024 emissions of Czechia.

***

Canada's per capita charity rate is about one-half that of the U.S.

***

India is still the world's fastest-growing major economy at 6.4%

***

Today, the annual cost per NYC student has increased to roughly $49,500.

Equality and its Enemies

 On this day:

180
Twelve inhabitants of Scillium in North Africa are executed for being Christians. This is the earliest record of Christianity in that part of the world.
1762
Catherine II becomes tsar of Russia upon the murder of Peter III of Russia.
1791
Members of the French National Guard under the command of General Lafayette open fire on a crowd of radical Jacobins at the Champ de Mars, Paris, during the French Revolution, killing as many as 50 people.
1794
The sixteen Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne are executed 10 days prior to the end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
1918
On the orders of the Bolshevik Party carried out by Cheka, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his immediate family and retainers are murdered at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
1918
The RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the 705 survivors from the RMS Titanic, is sunk off Ireland by the German SMU U-55; 5 lives are lost.
1936
Spanish Civil War: An Armed Forces rebellion against the recently-elected leftist Popular Front government of Spain starts the civil war.
1938
Douglas Corrigan takes off from Brooklyn to fly the “wrong way” to Ireland and becomes known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.
1989
First flight of the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.
1996
TWA Flight 800: Off the coast of Long Island, New York, a Paris-bound TWA Boeing 747 explodes, killing all 230 on board.
1998
A diplomatic conference adopts the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing a permanent international court to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. 

***

“Those who dislike AI have essentially refused their own evolution. Those who condemn AI are themselves spitting upwards.”--Masayoshi Son

***

The Democratic Socialists of America are calling to scrap the U.S. executive branch, the Senate and the Electoral College in a radical manifesto aiming to end “the two-party system.”

The “Workers Deserve More” declaration would expand the House of Representatives, which would select the president and members of the Supreme Court — tearing up the Constitution and switching to a European-style parliamentary system.

Think of it as replacing Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton with Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and the consultants who came up with Platner.

***

The creation of the ICC (above), lauded by many for its supposed good intentions, is a genuine, Old World artifact.

In this particularly non-American event, self-appointed people appointed unelected bureaucrats to exert power over others. Like colonizers.

***

This is the anniversary of the murder of the Romanovs. It must be remembered that these child-killers were only fulfilling the Marxist vision of caste warfare. Exterminating a genetic enemy, root and branch. Of course, babies would have been easier....

***

Equality and its Enemies

Apparently, income inequality--or yacht inequality or good looks inequality-- continues to stalk this great land, and we will meet it with relentless cosmetic intervention. But who really is the great threat to the average guy? Here's a refreshing and clarifying take:

"While discussions around income inequality often target billionaires — and now a trillionaire — it is crucial to recognize that the most profound economic control lies not in the hands of a few rich Americans such as Musk, but rather within the halls of government.

Consider Congress. This joint assembly of just 535 individuals — less than 0.00016% of the U.S. population — spends approximately $7 trillion every year, accounting for about 23% of the more than $31 trillion U.S. economy. This Congress leaves just 77% of the income for the remaining 99.99984% of us. The 535 members exert economic influence that dwarfs that of the wealthiest individuals.

Based on the latest Forbes 400 list, along with reasonable estimates for the next wealthiest 135 people, an estimate of the combined net worth of the wealthiest 535 individuals in the United States, the same number as members of Congress, is about $7.2 trillion, which translates roughly to around $400 billion in annual income.

Thus, the 535 members of Congress spend 17.5 times more annually than the richest Americans. But wait. It gets worse. While the richest Americans spend their time running their businesses and vacationing on their luxury yachts, they mostly leave the rest of us alone to live as we please.

These rich Americans mostly don’t even know each other, don’t have meetings to coordinate their actions and don’t meddle in our lives on a daily basis. In contrast, Congress meets regularly not only to decide how to spend those trillions but also to conspire to regulate so many facets of our lives: what drugs we can take, what health insurance we can buy and even what light bulbs we are allowed to use in our homes.

Everyone who thinks the rich should do more to solve our social and economic problems should instead be asking why Congress, with 17.5 times as much money to spend every single year, hasn’t yet solved any of these problems.

…..

If we are genuinely concerned about the concentration of wealth and power, our focus must shift — from the billionaires and trillionaire among us to our elected officials in Washington. They are the real oligarchs."--from Lawson

Is Socialism a Hate Crime?

On this Day:

622
The beginning of the Islamic calendar.
1054
Three Roman legates break relations between Western and Eastern Christian Churches through the act of placing an invalidly-issued Papal Bull of Excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during Saturday afternoon divine liturgy. Historians frequently describe the event as the start of the East-West Schism.
1779
American Revolutionary War: light infantry of the Continental Army seize a fortified British Army position in a midnight bayonet attack at the Battle of Stony Point.
1861
American Civil War: at the order of President Abraham Lincoln, Union troops begin a 25 mile march into Virginia for what will become The First Battle of Bull Run, the first major land battle of the war
1941
Joe DiMaggio hits safely for the 56th consecutive game, a streak that still stands as a MLB record.
1942
Holocaust: Vel‘ d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’d'Hiv): the government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13,152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz
1945
Manhattan Project: the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Happy Anniversary!
1945
World War II: the leaders of the three Allied nations, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, and Joseph Stalin, meet in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.
1948
The storming of the cockpit of the Miss Macao passenger seaplane, operated by a subsidiary of the Cathay Pacific Airways, marks the first aircraft hijacking of a commercial plane.
1950
Chaplain-Medic massacre: American POWs were massacred by North Korean Army.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11, the first manned space mission to land on the Moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
2007
2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake: an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 and 6.6 aftershock occurs off the Niigata coast of Japan killing 8 people, injuring at least 800, and damaging a nuclear power plant.

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When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.--tupi

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Chipotle announced that it is opening its first location in Mexico

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Conspiracy alert: Some of the coldest objects currently listed as stars in the Milky Way may not be stars at all. A new study by astrophysicist Amirnezam Amiri from the University of Arkansas suggests that these extremely cold objects could instead be giant energy-harvesting structures built by advanced alien civilisations. According to the research, these objects match the expected behaviour of engineered systems that collect a star's energy and release the leftover heat as infrared radiation.

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At the centre of Earth is a solid metal sphere smaller than the Moon, probably heavier than it, and still accreting new layers from a surrounding ocean of liquid metal.

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Lindsey Graham’s sister is to fill his South Carolina Senate seat. (Keep repeating, 'There is no hereditary, aristocratic class.)

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Anthony Mantha, who scored a career-high 33 goals last season for the Pittsburgh Penguins, has signed a two-year contract worth $9.5 million with the New Jersey Devils, the latter team announced Wednesday.

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The Houston Astros optioned highly-rated, former Pirate, Mike Burrows to Triple-A Sugar Land on Tuesday.

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Is Socialism a Hate Crime?

Revolutionaries are forward-looking; they step over the bodies with their eyes on the horizon. But taking someone else's property and production is not passive; that's why it's always sold as an evolution, an inevitable and natural process. Nor are people recruited to work for the betterment of others; they are pressed into the service of the ship of state. That sounds much like another state, the state of slavery.

The socialist glibly talks around these grim realities by appealing to some vague construct like 'social justice', a recently coined fancy that is hard to attack because it is so insubstantial. But all of the various redistributive notions can be identified by their dark heart. Behind their curiously Christian-like vision breathes a very un-Christian-like motive: revenge.

Freedom, electronics, and anonymity have allowed the growth of absurd ideas that ordinary people in ordinary times would kill in their cradle. People will actually say, with a collective straight face, that some people are guilty of a crime other people committed before anybody thought it was a crime, and that a third party should be compensated for it. (Unsurprisingly, money, not incarceration, is the punishment.) A president is incapacitated for four years, and no one cries 'wolf.' And they offer him for reelection without shame and, when caught out, offer no contrition. We shut the entire social and economic world down for two years because some people got sick. A border declared closed is obviously not. An education system that denies it benefits teachers, not students, obviously does. Child rapists are pardoned. A Supreme Court justice cannot define a woman. Innuendo and rumor are presented unchallenged. A guy with a Nazi tattoo is nominated for the Senate. The culture is besieged by notions that are both silly and horrifying.

This is a perfect time for the resurrection of the socialists.

The communists have a reason for their revolution. True, it is inevitable. Like gravity, it's a law. It is also genetic. Who knew? Darwin didn't. But, apparently, some people have, like in the Indian caste system, certain inescapable genetic socio-economic-political groupings that their children share as well. These qualities do not go away. Or educated away. Nor can those so afflicted just go away and allow the socialist dawn to flower. Nor can they be driven away--or even put in camps. These regressives must be derascinated, branch and root. They must be killed, along with their children, to exterminate that regressive element that weighs, like a newly discovered group of moronic homo habilis living in their own camp, on the future. (You can see how this madness morphs so nicely into purges and pogroms.)

So the enemy is the productive and successful, and they must be killed so the society can become successful and productive.  

A philosophy whose time has come. Again.