The Constitutional Flaw

On this day:

1503
Disfida di Barletta – famous challenge between 13 Italian and 13 French knights near Barletta.
1542
Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII of England, is executed for adultery.
1692
Massacre of Glencoe: About 78 Macdonalds at Glen Coe, Scotland are killed early in the morning for not promptly pledging allegiance to the new king, William of Orange.
1935
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.
1945
World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment.
2000
The last original “Peanuts” comic strip appears in newspapers one day after Charles M. Schulz dies.

***

Buffett: On Focus. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

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The Pirates' All-Star reliever Elroy Face has passed away at 97.

***

The parody continues. Nevada is the only state where people can legally purchase sex, and now 'sex workers' at one of the state’s oldest brothels are fighting to become the nation’s first to be unionized.

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The Constitutional Flaw

For the last year, the winds of lies, innuendo, and manipulative conspiracies directed against Trump have reaped their poetic whirlwind.
A man, and a political group, who have been maligned and ridiculed by a small elite for as long as they can remember, have the upper hand for the first time since Reagan.

Jacoby summarizes it. "In just the past few weeks, the American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview complete and unedited, we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting."

Jacoby calls this vengeful thuggishness, and to some degree, he's right. But how much Federal rummaging through your wife's underwear can a guy take? How much journalistic-approved lying vitriol are you supposed to tolerate?

In El Salvador, not much; in America, a lot.

This country is not an accident of geography, not a religious or ethnic redoubt. It is a philosophical creation, an embodiment of ideas and principles long debated. It is complicated because its citizens do not recognize each other in the street by their color, their physiogonomy, or their religious apparel. They are united by belief, a belief that, until recently, any man in history could only dream of. But there is a change in the country, a change that Trump does not epitomize but only represents. It is an essential defect in the Constitution.

The Constitution makes an assumption, an assumption of a precondition in its citizens and its leaders. Virtue. And the preference for the betterment of the nation over the whims of the few. 

These last years have revealed a loss of virtue. People do not take the Constitution's morality seriously.

Many of our problems--particularly foreign ones--are missteps. Bad judgment. With good intent, they will self-correct. But the real problems that threaten the nation are simple moral laxity and malice. A disregard of-- or overt animosity to--the guiding principles of the country--and how they impact the very health and well-being of the nation.

How could the national debt not be a front-page discussion topic? The topic? How could the Biden Regency — the complete takeover of the executive branch by a small cabal — not be in the daily conversation? How could Obama amend environmental legislation without a word of objection? How could Trump's gratuitous insults and chest-thumping--however gratifying to those who have been ignored, belittled, and insulted for so long--not be rejected? 

How have the politics of El Salvador immigrated here?

When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any checks on his powers, he was his direct self in response: “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The fatal flaw of the U.S. Constitution is revealed. The law of the land must start with reverence for it. Its virtues. It's not a tool in a shed; it is a relic in a tabernacle. And it is worthless when it takes itself more seriously than do the people it is supposed to guide.

 

Señor Bunny

 

On this day:

1554
A year after claiming the throne of England for nine days, Lady Jane Grey is beheaded for treason.
1593
Japanese invasion of Korea: Approximately 3,000 Joseon defenders led by general Kwon Yul successfully repel more than 30,000 Japanese forces in the Siege of Haengju.
1689
The Convention Parliament declares that the flight to France in 1688 by James II, the last Roman Catholic British monarch, constitutes an abdication.
1999
President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the United States Senate in his impeachment trial.
2001
NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touchdown in the “saddle” region of 433 Eros becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.

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“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”-- Sharma, on AI

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1976 Senate special committee charged with emergency powers reform was appalled that four national emergencies were in effect at that time, yet “today we live under 50 active national emergencies, several of which date back decades and all of which unlock broad executive powers—under IEEPA mainly but also several other US laws—that are typically reserved to Congress or delegated to the president in a much narrower fashion.” --Lincicome

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Greenland's strategic importance—missile defense, Arctic access, and denial of Chinese or Russian influence—is real and longstanding.
Why must it be confrontational now?

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Señor Bunny

The NFL made history with the Superbowl show in two ways. For the first time, it had a performer who sang in a language that about 85 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t speak, a victory for gratuitous inscrutability. (Were none of the stars who sing in English available?)

Also, for the first time ever, the NFL gave its stage to a performer who sought to put the country in its place. So often, inept builders resort to tearing down their surroundings, seeing the relative change as an enhancement of their position. So Mr. Bunny sought to undermine the US claim to be called “America.” That is, to make America generic. To make the world's first written democratic republic one of many faux democracies. And, in the New World, to make freedom geographical. As Obama said, American exceptionalism was a provincial thought. After all, aren't we all El Salvadore?

To think that, once upon a time, the likes of Prince and Katy Perry simply aimed to put on a good show.

In an echo of singer Billie Eilish inveighing at the Grammys against America stealing land, Mr. Bunny said of his language proficiency in a pre–Super Bowl press conference, “English is not my first language. But it’s okay; it’s not America’s first language either.” Like so many bumper stickers, this sounds clever until you give it a moment’s thought. Mr. Bunny’s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492. If the rapper wanted to associate himself with languages before this wave of European settlement, he’d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.

The Spanish language indeed got a head start over English in what’s now the United States, when Ponce de Leon showed up on the Florida peninsula in 1513. But so what? English speakers forged a permanent presence at Jamestown in 1607. They then populated the Eastern Seaboard, won their independence, stood up enduring institutions of representative government, and made English the most important and widely spoken language in the world.

That the country they founded goes by “America” is an affront to elements in Latin America and on the left. They consider it insulting to everyone else living in North America or South America. Aren’t they Americans, too?

Certainly not everyone feels this way. The Canadians have as little interest in being called “Americans” as they do in becoming the 51st state. It is people hypersensitive to any Yanqui imperialism, including “linguistic imperialism,” who complain about us hogging the name “America.”

Sad to say, they are late to the game. Americans began calling themselves Americans in the 1700s to set themselves apart from the British. An anonymous writer in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776 referred to “the united states of America,” and Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence said it was a statement of “the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (subsequently changed to “the thirteen united States of America”).

Once we were the U.S.A., the question became how to refer to our people. As “United States men and women”? Various solutions were tried out before we settled on “American,” which now denotes not just our country but a set of clearly defined cultural traits. And political concepts.

It’s bizarre that the NFL had a half-time show that questioned this understanding, although in the league’s defense, surely, few people picked up on it — or understood anything else said.

And why do the Spanish-speaking countries want to be named after an Italian cartographer anyway? Maybe it's just an attempt to ride on the success of others.--much from NR

Sound, Fury, et al

 

On this day:

660 BC
Traditional date for the foundation of Japan by Emperor Jimmu.
55
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus, heir to the Roman Emperorship, dies under mysterious circumstances in Rome. This clears the way for Nero to become Emperor.
1531
Henry VIII of England is recognized as supreme head of the Church of England.
1861
American Civil War: United States House of Representatives unanimously passes a resolution guaranteeing noninterference with slavery in any state.
1978
Censorship: the People’s Republic of China lifts a ban on works by Aristotle, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.

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There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. -James Thurber, writer, and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)


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Until 2009, India was poorer than Pakistan on a per capita basis. India truly became richer than Pakistan after 2009 and since then it hasn’t looked back. If trends continue for a decade, India will be more than twice as rich as Pakistan soon…
So why has India pulled ahead in GDP per capita? The reason is simple. Pakistan’s high fertility has driven population growth faster than India’s. In 1952 Pakistan had about one-tenth of India’s population; by 2025 it had grown to nearly one-seventh.

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The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury's mother was Churchill’s personal secretary, married a businessman, had an affair with Churchill’s other secretary, and Justin was the result (he didn’t learn this until he was 60!). He went to Cambridge, had a mystical experience that converted him to Christianity, worked for an oil company in Nigeria for 11 years, then quit to get ordained as a priest. He says he can speak in tongues – “It’s just a routine part of spiritual discipline – you choose to speak and you speak a language that you don’t know, it just comes” – and has written a book called “Can Companies Sin?”. He lost his archbishop position last month for the most stereotypical possible reason – failed to investigate sex abuse by a church leader who was a friend of his. (Wiki)

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Sound, Fury, et al

10 days of speculation about the missing Guthrie woman. 10 days of preempted programs explaining what is not known. This is a metaphor of modern America, of politicians, political parties, Hall of Fame voting, and things like the Epstein Files.

Suspicion. Guesswork. Possibilities.

This has become the substitute for information in this country, what we do when we circle some worrisome thing...at a respectable distance. Until we start to sell the nooses.

Breaking News: El Paso airport is shut down for 10 days. One TV expert suspects a "Pearl Harbor-type event."

China/US Economies

On this day:
1258
Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed.
1306
In front of the high altar of Greyfriars Church in Dumfries, Robert the Bruce murders John Comyn, his leading political rival, sparking revolution in the Scottish Wars of Independence
1567
An explosion destroys the Kirk o' Field house in Edinburgh, Scotland. The second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley is found strangled, in what many believe to be an assassination.
1933
In round 13 of a boxing match at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Primo Carnera knocks out Ernie Schaaf, killing him.
1996
The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov for the first time.
2009
The communication satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251 collide in orbit, destroying both.

***

Common sense tells us that restraints on business are generally bad, that red tape strangles enterprise, that taxes on goods in transit will reduce the volume of transactions, that wage earners will suffer if the things they buy are made artificially dear, that legislation to increase the cost of living and production must be especially disastrous to a populous manufacturing and commercial country like ours.--Hirst

***

A newly released federal memo reveals Ohio’s richest man accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein stole or misappropriated several hundred million dollars from him over their decades-long financial relationship.

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The U.S. attack on Iran was shocking and unprecedented. Why is there so little talk about it?

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China/US Economies

Analysis of commercial and political patterns suggests China’s broader AI ecosystem operates according to a different logic than the “US-China AI race” framing implies.

First, development and deployment remain private-led, with state participation filling infrastructure and application gaps rather than competing directly for frontier capabilities.

Second, frontier developers are pursuing diverse technical and commercial strategies rather than converging on LLMs as the path to AGI. The data shows specialization in modalities, vertical domains, and applications. This reflects a market where companies are optimizing for deployability and commercial viability, not just pushing frontier capabilities.

Third, China’s AI ecosystem is actively shaped by local policy competition and fiscal incentives, rather than solely by market forces or central planning. This creates geographic inequality but also reveals how innovation actually gets governed in practice through decentralized competition for activity and talent. It also raises concerns of potential resource waste, especially given that many local governments are currently short of money.

This assessment (from somewhere) emphasizes local, private incentives and less central control (although they influence incentives), more free markets and less command economies. The strength of the West has always been its freedom to evolve, so China may be woodenly adapting here, allowing some risk. Compare this to Trump's recent demand that defense contractors freeze dividends and buybacks until their inventories rise.

We are back to the old arguments. A government, in the words of Zohran Mamdani, that can “replace the rigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”; a government, in the words of Adrian Vermeule, that will “enjoy a capacious scope of public discretion to promote the common good.”

But there is no "warmth" in government, no "discretion."

The Constitution creates political structures and then limits them within those structures because self-restraint in politics does not exist.

Vaudvillain

On this day:

1555
Bishop of Gloucester John Hooper is burned at the stake.
1775
American Revolutionary War: The British Parliament declares Massachusetts in rebellion.
1825
After no presidential candidate receives a majority of electoral votes in the election of 1824, the United States House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams President of the United States.
1861
American Civil War: Jefferson Davis is elected the Provisional President of the Confederate States of America by the Confederate convention at Montgomery, Alabama.
1942
Year-round Daylight saving time is re-instated in the United States as a wartime measure to help conserve energy resources.
1964
The Beatles make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing before a “record-busting” audience of 73 million viewers.
1965
Vietnam War: The first United States combat troops are sent to South Vietnam.

1971
Apollo program: Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third manned moon landing

***

February 5 saw the release of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex.
What makes these new models so important is the fact that much of the programming work behind them was done by artificial intelligence rather than humans. Anthropic insiders are claiming, for instance, that effectively 100 percent of the code behind their products is written by Claude itself.

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Jordon Hudson — Bill Belichick’s girlfriend — was photographed wearing an “Orchids of Asia Day Spa” shirt while standing next to the former Patriots head coach at the UNC-Duke basketball game on Saturday night.

***

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has shut off Russian pirated access on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The issue has fuelled anger in Moscow that, four years into the war, the Russian army remains heavily dependent on western technology.

***

Elon Musk says SpaceX is shifting focus from Mars to a moon city.

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Vaudvillain


Epstein’s attorneys have formally demanded that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) release all records related to any potential intelligence ties involving the disgraced financier.

There is anxiety in the air.

The Epstein Files don't show much. There are a lot of rich creeps, but we knew that. There are creeps, and a lot of money just makes them worse.

Epstein information must be incomplete. Crucial information must be withheld. Blood sacrifice may be involved. The information we get is curated for the benefit of a cabal. Epstein himself may be alive.

ICE agents are not over-responding to being obstructed and attacked while performing their rightful job; they are part of a larger, unadmitted Nazification program in the U.S. The rising debt in the U.S. is not stupid, weak, and self-indulgent; it is part of a plan by persons unknown to undermine the currency and to leave them wealthy. No election is valid. Scientific studies are manipulated to benefit Pharma. The COVID disaster was a trial run.

This kind of thinking stems from the same creative center in all of us, the source of caution, suspicion, and poetry. Our need for order, explanation, and creativity.

And our regard for omerta. The hard, defensive shell of the outsider.

What we're seeing is a staggering loss of trust. The reason is our leaders' disregard — not of the truth — of us. We have moved from the Biden Regency of total disregard of reality, truth, and adherence to our basic legal concepts to Trump's vaudevillian buffoonery. We, the citizens, have become outsiders.

Tolstoy thinks this element in us is funny. In War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov fiddles with the math and “discovers” that, when rendered into French and assigned various numerical values, the letters of his own name add up to 666, the “number of the beast” from the book of Revelation. How, exactly, he was connected to the events foretold in the Bible, Pierre did not know, but “he did not doubt that connection for a moment” and reveled in the knowledge that he was somehow involved in affairs of world-historical importance.

But it ain't all funny. Official, outrageous lies and distancing of the public carry a social risk and deserve a name.

I propose "Vaudevillain."

 

 

Sunday/Flavor

On this day:

1587
Mary, Queen of Scots, is executed on suspicion of having been involved in the Babington Plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
1904
Battle of Port Arthur: A surprise torpedo attack by the Japanese at Port Arthur, China starts the Russo-Japanese War.
1942
World War II: Japan invades Singapore.
1952
Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom.
1962
Charonne massacre. Nine trade unionists are killed by French police at the instigation of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, then chief of the Paris Prefecture of Police.
1963
Travel, financial and commercial transactions by United States citizens to Cuba are made illegal by the John F. Kennedy administration.
1983
The Melbourne dust storm hits Australia’s second largest city. The result of the worst drought on record and a day of severe weather conditions, a 320 m deep dust cloud envelops the city, turning day to night.

***

Can anyone explain the decision to put the vile Obama parody out from the White House?

***

American skier Lindsey Vonn crashed seconds into her downhill Olympic race on Sunday after she decided to compete despite rupturing her left ACL in a prior crash during a World Cup event in the Swiss Alps a week ago.

***

Honey bee colonies across the United States collapsed at the highest rate ever recorded between April 2024 and April 2025. More than half of all managed colonies were lost, with especially severe impacts during winter. The USDA confirmed the findings in a press release, stating that colony collapses had been driven by “virus-infected, miticide-resistant parasitic mites.”

***

Sunday/Flavor

In the gospel today, Christ calls his disciples "the salt of the earth." There is a lot to it. Salt has several connotations of value and meaning. The phrase itself raised an interesting concept: Did the spirituality Christ and his followers were offering add an element to mankind or was it revealing mankind's essence?

Christ is certainly saying that the salt is its own essence, its own common denominator. It cannot be flavored.

And the passage has some unfortunate elements too, especially as an "evolutionary" passage. The Catholic Church has tried to update the language, arguing that the bible is not primarily literature.

Compare the original King James with the more accessible version:

"Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." (Tough stuff.)

vs.

“You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

How long do you think they debated over "savour" vs. "taste"? And whether to remove "of men?"

There are sacrifices egalitarianism demands.

SatStats

On this Day:

1497
The bonfire of the vanities occurs when supporters of Girolamo Savonarola burn thousands of objects like cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, Italy.
1898
Émile Zola is brought to trial for libel for publishing J'Accuse.
1900
Second Boer War: British troops fail in their third attempt to lift the Siege of Ladysmith.
1986
Twenty-eight years of one-family rule ends in Haiti when President Jean-Claude Duvalier flees the Caribbean nation.
1990
Dissolution of the Soviet Union: The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agrees to give up its monopoly on power.

***

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see."--Arthur Schopenhauer


***

The Olympics promises respect we don't always see in popular competitive sports. Or competitive ideas.

***

Vonn is said to have a plateau fracture, the support of the femur. Unbelievable risk at skiing force of up to 6 Gs.

***

Benghazi's been avenged. Any plans for The Liberty?

***


SatStats

Over the past century, the length of Oscar speeches has ballooned, peaking in the 2010s at almost 300 words per speech.

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Mammals and non-human primates follow a clear scaling of body mass to brain mass. Humanoids break that trend.

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People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch

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At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires accounted for 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they accounted for 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).

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National Debt

A recent report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that interest payments on America’s national debt will surpass $1.5 trillion in 2032 and reach $1.8 trillion by 2035.

According to the Treasury Department, U.S. national debt now stands at $38.56 trillion — and it continues to grow as federal spending outpaces revenue.

So far in fiscal year 2026, the government has already spent about $602 billion more than it has collected.

The interest payments on the national debt exceed the military budget, which is $1 trillion.

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100 South Koreans will have an estimated 15 grandchildren

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Overall, our findings challenge popular narratives and suggest that pet ownership may support, rather than displace, fertility.---a paper

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Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed.

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At the end of 2025. Berkshire Hathaway's marketable equity portfolio was valued at about $320 billion, and the business has about $354 billion of cash to deploy on top of that.

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This is the toughest market for PhD economists in recent memory. JOE listings are down 20% from last year. Worse: they are 19% below COVID levels.