Nuclear Power, Microbes, and Government Oversight

On this day:

1912
The frozen bodies of Robert Scott and his men are found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
1927
Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.
1948
In Tokyo, an international war crimes tribunal sentences seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, to death for their roles in World War II.
1969
Vietnam War: My Lai Massacre – Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the My Lai story.
1980
The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes the first images of its rings.
1981
Space Shuttle program: mission STS-2, utilizing the Space Shuttle Columbia, marks the first time a manned spacecraft is launched into space twice.
1997
Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

***

"This fishing tackle manufacturer I knew had all these flashy green and purple lures. I asked, 'Do fish take these?' 'Charlie,' he said, 'I don't sell these lures to fish.'"--Berkshire Hathaway's Charles T. Munger, as quoted in FORTUNE

***

The assumption that virtue is woven throughout each man to one degree or another is a classical idea: men are made, for better or worse, from a pure or less pure metal. Plato's men are of gold, silver and bronze. Events--and life--'test a man's mettle' (originally a different spelling of metal.). A man who is mostly honest will be mostly brave. A man who can not be trusted in business cannot be trusted in love. So we seek moral advice from people successful in unrelated fields. What does the popstar think of deficit spending? How does the linebacker view our diplomatic approach to Brazil? Strangely, the converse is unusual. Rarely do we ask, what does the math teacher think of Cover 2?

***

Yakult Lady – one of tens of thousands across Japan who deliver the eponymous probiotic drinks directly to people's homes. On paper they're delivery workers, but in practice they're part of the country's informal social safety net. In a country grappling with a rapidly ageing population and a deepening loneliness crisis, Yakult Ladies have become an unlikely source of community, helping to reduce the problem of isolation one drop-off at a time.

***

A summary: Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, rents out computing capacity in Southeast Asia. Bloomberg found it imported 50,000 more Nvidia chips than Nvidia tallied in its data centers, plus at least 17,544 GB300s worth about $787 million in November 2025, five months after the June 2025 ban Nvidia says it imposed. The Information reported that Huang’s years-long ties to Alice Huang enabled more than $7 billion of Nvidia chip sales to China, through companies she, her sister, and her husband built in China and Singapore. Megaspeed says inspections found “no evidence of any violations.”--wsj

***

A very disturbing, worthwhile interview with Eva Moskowitz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdzOsszZ9bc

***

Eight people are dead, and 17 others are hurt, two critically, after part of a three-story building collapsed into a construction site at the corner of Flatbush and Bedford avenues in Flatbush, Brooklyn, just after 4 p.m. Wednesday, according to the FDNY.

***

The Working Families Party, usually a vehicle for left-wing candidates to grow their vote, has pulled ahead of the Republican Party — with 34 endorsed candidates in the Senate and 65 in the Assembly, and will outnumber the GOP in both NY state chambers in January. Read that again.

***

Agent Scott Boras continues to try to wag the baseball dog.

***

Nuclear Power, Microbes, and Government Oversight 

A recent article discussed the impact of outside influence on progress, both technical and scientific. The discussion starts with nuclear power, then settles on microbiology:

Construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more.

What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energies estimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.

In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.

What have we lost? We can’t know for sure, but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals, and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al. write:

Promising many societal benefits, emergent products of biotechnology involve releasing genetically modified microbes (GMMs) into the environment. However, regulatory challenges limit their use. So far, GMMs have mainly been tested in agriculture and environmental cleanup, with few approved for commercial purposes. Current government regulations inadequately address modern genetic engineering and limit the potential of gut therapeutics, skin products, self-repairing materials, ocean pollution treatment, anti-corrosion coatings, etc.

And those are just some of the plausible first-stage losses. Perhaps even more importantly, we learn by doing. Thus, no doing, no learning. The first approved product is rarely the safest or the best but when we fail to approve the first we don’t get the much better 5th. Forty years of that process could have taken us well beyond the applications McCarty describes. We must build to build better.

Nuclear power at least left us enough reactors to get some idea of what we lost. With microbes, I needed McCarty to tell me there was something missing even though I study these issues for a living. And note one reason new microbe loss was invisible. No vote was ever taken. No debate was ever had. Officials in the 1980s reasoned that genomes are made of chemicals and chemicals are covered, and that doctrine has governed the field ever since despite being overly broad and excessively costly.

How many other gaps in our technology have explanations buried in the Federal Register?--from Tabarrok

And, unsaid, what would be gained by raiding these documents with AI?

David Senra

On this day:

1215
The Fourth Lateran Council meets, defining the doctrine of transubstantiation, the process by which bread and wine are, by that doctrine, said to transform into the body and blood of Christ. .
1620
The Mayflower Compact is signed in what is now Provincetown Harbor near Cape Cod

1675
Gottfried Leibniz demonstrates integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of y = ƒ(x).
1778
Cherry Valley Massacre: Loyalists and Seneca Indian forces attack a fort and village in eastern New York during the American Revolutionary War, killing more than forty civilians and soldiers.
1831
In Jerusalem, Virginia, Nat Turner is hanged after inciting a violent slave uprising.
1864
American Civil War: Sherman’s March to the Sea – Union General William Tecumseh Sherman begins burning Atlanta, Georgia to the ground in preparation for his march south.
1887
Anarchist Haymarket Martyrs August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel are executed. Importing European grievances to a disinterested America.

1918
World War I: Germany signs an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car in the forest of Compiègne, France. The fighting officially ends at 11:00 a.m., (the eleventh hour in the eleventh month on the eleventh day), and this is annually honoured with a two-minute silence. The war officially ends on the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28th June, 1919.
1930
Patent number US1781541 is awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for their invention, the Einstein refrigerator.
1940
World War II: Battle of Taranto – The Royal Navy launches the first aircraft carrier strike in history, on the Italian fleet at Taranto.
1942
World War II: Nazi Germany completes its occupation of France.
1942
World War II: The British win the Second Battle of El Alamein in El Alamein, Egypt.
1961
Thirteen Italian Air Force servicemen, deployed to the Congo as a part of the UN peacekeeping force are massacred by a mob in the course of the Kindu atrocity.
1967
Vietnam War: In a propaganda ceremony in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, three American prisoners of war are released by the Viet Cong and turned over to “new left” anti-war activist Tom Hayden.

***

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” —William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice 1939-1975

***

Research shows that, on average, people experience thirty-six disorder events in the course of their adulthood-or about one every eighteen months. We tend to think that change and disorder are the exceptions when, in reality, they are the rules. Look closely, and you’ll see that everything is always changing, including us. Life is flux. Change is not the exception. It’s the rule. Yet we endlessly fight it, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self.--Shah

***

40% of household net worth is in equities.

***

David Senra

David Senra launched Founders in 2016. He read one business biography per week—hard copy, with a pen and a six-inch ruler and a stack of Post-its—photographed his annotations, recorded his thoughts alone in a room, and published the result. No audience. No income. No feedback worth mentioning. Hidden inside the code for Founders is a single line still bearing the podcast's original title: Autotelic—a word that means an activity done purely for its own sake. Founders began in Senra's Miami kitchen with a hundred-dollar microphone.

"The only unbroken habit I've had my entire life is reading," he says. "If you maintain control and really care about the quality of your product, you wind up with the money anyway. It just takes a little longer."

He attracts the successful. According to Senra, his listeners now include Jeff Bezos, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Michael Dell, and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Brad Jacobs, the serial acquirer who has launched eight separate billion-dollar companies, wrote in his book How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars that a single Founders episode in which he was interviewed directly resulted in $750 million in investments from listeners. He has called himself "addicted" to the show. He texts Senra. He invites him to his home. Founders generates, by Senra's own description, millions of dollars a year in profit—he declines to be more specific—and he is the lone employee. Ramp, the corporate card and expense management company backed by Iconiq and valued at $44 billion, is Senra's largest advertiser.

He is building a new show. "Where do elite people in the world go—especially in business—to have intelligent conversations multiple times a week? That's what I'm trying to build."

Most of this is indirectly from Fortune. What follows is a collection of Senra's notes from art dealer Larry Gagosian

 

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Conversation

David Senra

@FoundersPodcast

My notes from Larry Gagosian (Billionaire Art Dealer) turned into maxims: 1. The best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it. 2. The competitive drive of self-made billionaires does not go into remission once they've made a fortune. 3. You can be so successful selling to the masters of the universe that you *become* one. 4. Art is just money on walls. 5. Genius is easy to understand. 6. Genius has the fewest moving parts. 7. Genius lies in ignoring the unimportant. 8. No shareholders. No one to answer to. Retention of complete control. 9. You can sell things that aren’t for sale. 10. Read biographies. There’s always a blueprint. Gagosian read every biography of Joseph Duveen. Duveen was the art dealer to the Robber Barons. Gagosian is that today. 11. Self-reflection is how you lose your edge. A shark keeps swimming. 12. Disinhibition can be a superpower. 13. A cold call can change your life because relationships run everything. 14. Don’t forget that relationships run everything. 15. Bluntness is appealing to busy people. 16. What is the establishment of an existing industry ignoring? The answer is an opportunity hiding in plain sight. 17. Expanding a market is the first step to owning it. 18. Find information asymmetries. Don’t tell other people about them. Not even your lover. 19. Earned secrets produce treasure maps. 20. Be default aggressive and never forget that everything is for sale. 21. A sharp eye for who matters is the skill of an industrialist. 22. Industrialists build large financial empires. 23. You can build a billion dollar business without formal meetings, protocol, bureaucracy, and hierarchy. 24. Sales solves everything. 25. Make 100 calls a day. 26. If you love what you do the only exit strategy is death. 27. Hire a scholar. More companies should hire the Samwell Tarly of their industry. 28. Don’t allow other people to burnish their ethics on your hide. 29. Go to where your customers are. Gagosian opened a gallery at a private jet airport. 30. Be as liquid as the day is long. You can buy things at a heavy discount in recessions. 31. Money flows fast when the customer believes the opportunity is fleeting. 32. Pricing is guesswork. 33. There is always somebody somewhere making a lot of money. Find them. Sell to them. 34. Five hundred years ago people were complaining money ruined art. They say the same thing today.

Ice Age

On this day

1619
René Descartes has the dreams that inspire his Meditations on First Philosophy.
1793
A Goddess of Reason is proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Chaumette.
1871
Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, famously greeting him with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.
1975
The 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board.
1979
A 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train carrying explosive and poisonous chemicals from Windsor, Ontario, Canada derails in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada just west of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, causing a massive explosion and the largest peacetime evacuation in Canadian history and one of the largest in North American history.

***

An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose.--sowell

***

With surrogacy illegal in China, an industry of agencies, consultants and fertility clinics has emerged to connect clients with women overseas willing to carry their children. While there is no data on the number of children born to Chinese parents via surrogacy, a recent study showed nearly a third of intended parents for surrogate babies in the US were international and some 40 per cent of those were from China.

Early demand largely came from couples struggling with fertility. But there was growing interest from younger women physically capable of becoming pregnant but reluctant to accept its impact on their bodies and careers, said consultants, clients and doctors interviewed by the FT…

Other destinations include Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, where packages can cost as little as $63,000.

***

We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them.--somewhere

***

Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

With US exports falling and Brazil’s rising — they increased 6 per cent in the first half of this year to hit a new record of $87bn — 2026 could prove the year in which America loses its agricultural ascendancy.--FT

***

The Apollo-class asteroid 1998 KY26 is about 11 meters in diameter. Its orbit crosses Earth’s, and astronomers detected an unusual acceleration in its motion in 2023. Acceleration?

***

Calley Means, a former top aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alleged in a Sunday interview with CBS News' "Face the Nation" that Ballard Partners "controlled" White House policy. Mr. Trump's former chief of staff, Susie Wiles, worked at the firm for nearly a decade as a managing partner, leaving in 2019.
Means claimed Ballard Partners' rise to become the top-earning lobbying firm "did not happen by accident." He accused Wiles and other top advisers to Mr. Trump of catering to industries that funded Republicans ahead of the midterms. Ballard and Wiles both called the claims false.
Ballard Partners' more than $88 million in lobbying revenue last year was, at the time, the most any firm had reported since the Lobbying Disclosure Act took effect in 1996, even after adjusting for inflation, a CBS News analysis of Senate lobbying disclosures found.

***

Ring Robotics is launching with two firsts: Ring Drone, a flying indoor security camera, and Ring Rover, an autonomous security robot designed for business.

***

Ice Age

The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of Canada and the northern United States from about 95,000 to 20,000 years ago. At its largest, it stretched from above the Arctic Circle to Illinois, and in places the ice was over two miles (3.2 kilometers) thick. Two miles thick.

The last vestige of the Laurentide still survives as the Barnes Ice Cap, now a Delaware-sized ice cap located on central Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Technically, we are still living in an ice age—the Late Cenozoic Ice Age—which started about 34 million years ago. Within it, colder glacial periods alternate with warmer interglacial ones, including the one we live in now. What people casually call an "ice age" is usually a glacial period. The last glacial period ended about 11,700 years ago. It was that period that created the Ohio River and allowed the Allegheny to reverse its flow from the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic to the Ohio and west.

Two thousand years ago, the Arctic remnants of a once-vast ice sheet started to grow again.

It would have taken thousands of years for the cooling to be noticeable, and about 30,000 years for the Laurentide to regain its continent-sprawling mass, but the next glaciation had started.

It was the beginning of a new glacial period, more commonly known as the next ice age—but by the 1960s, summer temperatures were already so high that the ice sheet started to shrink. In other words, global warming ended a period of glaciation that had already begun. 

An interglacial period interrupted a glacial period during an Ice Age. Put that in your model.

You Can't Go Home Again

On this Day:

1620
Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sight land at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
1764
Mary Campbell, a captive of the Lenape during the French and Indian War, is turned over to forces commanded by Colonel Henry Bouquet.

1799
Napoleon Bonaparte leads the Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire ending the Directory government, and becoming one of its three Consuls (Consulate Government).
1851
Kentucky marshals abduct abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, and take him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave escape.
1867
Tokugawa Shogunate hands power back to the Emperor of Japan, starting the Meiji Restoration.
1888
Jack the Ripper kills Mary Jane Kelly, his last known victim.

1913
The Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the most destructive natural disaster ever to hit the lakes, destroys 19 ships and kills more than 250 people.
1923
In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crush the Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria. The failed coup is the work of the Nazis.
1938
Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath dies from the fatal gunshot wounds of Jewish resistance fighter Herschel Grynszpan, an act which the Nazis used as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht.
1970
Vietnam War: The Supreme Court of the United States votes 6 to 3 against hearing a case to allow Massachusetts to enforce its law granting residents the right to refuse military service in an undeclared war.
1989
Cold War: Fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist-controlled East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany. This key event led to the eventual reunification of East and West Germany.

***

"In the immortal words of Oliver Cromwell, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”--Andrew Sullivan, urging Trump to resign because, "You are simply incapable of governing in the system of government our Founders set up. You cannot follow the rule of law; you cannot compromise; you cannot negotiate; you actually cannot make a deal. Every day that passes reinforces your unfitness. . . . And no one believes or should ever believe a word of what you say. . . .
You’ve destroyed your party, molested the Constitution, turbo-charged the debt, laid waste to our allies, and empowered our enemies. Your legitimacy is over. Your cult is in the Kool-Aid phase. You can spend the next two years in an ever-deepening cycle of political reckoning and disgrace, or you can spare yourself — and us! — the ordeal."

***

Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation after reports that CEO Jensen Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort.
Shares fell in premarket trading as investors assessed leadership risk around Huang.

***

J.K. Rowling announced that Harry Potter fans can pick up two new Harry Potter books on February 23, 2027.

***

Researchers in the field of swarm robotics are training machines to behave like ants, bees and even slime molds—simple creatures that achieve remarkable feats through collective intelligence.

This is fascinating stuff. A great fictional take is in Crichton's 'Prey', where nanobots undergo epigenetic change.

***

A male emperor angelfish lives together with up to five female mates. If the emperor angelfish dies, one of the females turns into a male fish and becomes the leader of the group.

***

Jack Ham, Steelers Hall of Famer and current Penn State sports analyst, has been hospitalized, according to Penn State Athletics.

***


You Can't Go Home Again

Charles Darwin's horrible wasps are a gruesome success story. Rather than simply hunting other animals, these parasitic wasps lay their eggs on or inside living hosts, including caterpillars, beetles, and spiders. Their larvae then feed on their hosts, gradually consuming them and eventually killing them. Think "Alien."

In an 1860 letter to American botanist Asa Gray, Darwin questioned how a benevolent God could have deliberately created creatures that feed "within the living bodies of caterpillars." This famous observation later inspired the name "Darwin wasps" for the insect family Ichneumonidae, which includes more than 25,000 described species.

Some wasps permanently paralyze their hosts before laying their eggs, effectively turning them into immobile food supplies for their offspring. Others adopt a more intricate approach: they allow their hosts to remain alive, feeding and growing even as the developing wasp larvae consume them.

These contrasting strategies raise a fundamental question in evolutionary biology: how predictable is evolution? Similar adaptations can arise independently in different organisms, suggesting that evolution sometimes arrives at the same solutions again and again. But a related question asks: when evolution takes a particular direction, how easily can it turn back?

Researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of these strategies. They discovered a striking pattern: the transition from paralyzing hosts to allowing them to continue developing occurred independently at least 23 times, but they found no evidence of reversals. Similarly, the evolution of larvae developing inside rather than outside their hosts occurred repeatedly but was only rarely reversed.

"Evolution doesn't necessarily keep all its options open," explains Bernardo F. Santos, lead author of the study and researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. "Once a wasp lineage evolves a close relationship with a living, developing host, returning to its ancestral strategy seems extremely difficult. It's something like an evolutionary ratchet: you can move forward, but going backward becomes nearly impossible."

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, provides compelling evidence that evolution can be both remarkably repeatable and strongly directional. Different lineages independently arrived at similar solutions, yet rarely returned to their previous ways of life.

The findings highlight that evolution is shaped not only by chance and natural selection but also by the constraints imposed by an organism's evolutionary history. Rather than an unlimited exploration of possibilities, evolution may follow paths that become increasingly difficult to abandon once taken.

So evolution both opens and closes doors. And it's very difficult to return to the path not taken.--much from Steiner

Sunday/Bridesmaids

 On this day:

1519
Hernán Cortés enters Tenochtitlán, and Aztec ruler Moctezuma welcomes him with a great celebration.
1576
Eighty Years’ War: Pacification of Ghent – The States-General of the Netherlands meet and unite to oppose Spanish occupation.
1602
The Bodleian Library at Oxford University is opened to the public.
1605
Robert Catesby, ringleader of the Gunpowder Plotters, is killed.
1745
Charles Edward Stuart invades England with an army of ~5000 that would later participate in the Battle of Culloden.
1861
American Civil War: The “Trent Affair” – The USS San Jacinto stops the United Kingdom mail ship Trent and arrests two Confederate envoys, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the UK and US.
1895
While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray.
1923
Beer Hall Putsch: In Munich, Adolf Hitler leads the Nazis in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government.
1942
World War II: French resistance coup in Algiers, in which 400 civilian French patriots neutralize Vichyist XIXth Army Corps after 15 hours of fighting, and arrest several Vichyist generals, allowing the immediate success of Operation Torch in Algiers.
1942
World War II: Operation Torch – United States and United Kingdom forces land in French North Africa.
1950
Korean War: United States Air Force Lt. Russell J. Brown, while piloting an F-80 Shooting Star, shoots down two North Korean MiG-15s in the first jet aircraft-to-jet aircraft dogfight in history.

***

“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind”--ANNA JULIA COOPER

***

Does there come a time when government is so embarrassing that able people don't want to be associated with it?

***

In 1959, Venezuela’s GDP per capita was 10% higher than America’s.

***

President Donald Trump on Saturday said he wants UFC executive Dana White to be the next White House press secretary, adding that he already offered White the job.
If true, it seems little has changed since the election.

***

A new study suggests that managers are less likely to trust workers who use ChatGPT and other AI tools.

***

On JetBlue, a family of four checking one bag each at the airport over the holidays will pay $680 round-trip just for their bags.

***

NYC ‘principal’ — who’s also a rapper — being paid nearly $200K to run a school that doesn’t exist.

***

As the perception of France’s inability to pay future debt obligations increases, the more expensive it will be for them to borrow. Instead of paying about 3.3 percent in February 2026, they now need to pay nearly 5 percent as of October 26th, 2026.

As late as 1995, French and American GDP per capita were nearly even. Today Americans produce almost twice as much per person.


***

Sunday/Bridesmaids

Today's gospel is the ten bridesmaids gospel, five wise and five foolish. It's a bit harsh, as the wise do not share with the foolish, who are then locked out of the ceremony. The Second Coming is strangely ominous.

But “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” (Tagore)

On the other hand:

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
 

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

--Robert Herrick

SatStats

On this day:

1775
John Murray, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, starts the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by issuing Lord Dunmore’s Offer of Emancipation, which offers freedom to slaves who abandoned their colonial masters in order to fight with Murray and the British.
1811
Tecumseh’s War: The Battle of Tippecanoe is fought near present-day Battle Ground, Indiana, United States
1872
The ship Mary Celeste sails from New York, eventually to be found deserted
1908
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reportedly killed in San Vicente, Bolivia.
1917
The Gregorian calendar date of the October Revolution, which gets its name from the Julian calendar date of 25 October. On this date in 1917, the Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace.
1919
The first Palmer Raid is conducted on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists are arrested in twenty-three different U.S. cities.
1941
World War II: Soviet hospital ship Armenia is sunk by German planes while evacuating refugees and wounded military and staff of several Crimean hospitals. It is estimated that over 5,000 people died in the sinking.
1973
The U.S. Congress overrides President Richard M. Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, which limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval.
1983
United States Senate bombing: a bomb explodes inside the United States Capitol. No people are harmed, but an estimated $250,000 in damage is caused.

***

 "Obviously we wouldn't want to be owning anything that we thought was in a currency that was really going to hell. And that's the big thing we worry about with the United States currency."-- Warren Buffett at his final shareholders meeting as Berkshire Hathaway CEO in 2025.

***

Mary Louise Kelly hosted her final show Friday on All Things Considered after an NPR career that goes back 25 years.


***

Hackers linked to the Chinese government used AI to break into major banks in India, according to India’s top cyber agency. The attacks used publicly available AI tools, including Artex, PentAGI, Cairn and CyberStrikeAI, to help steal data and money, officials said.


***

Sen. Chris Murphy announced Friday that he has been released from the hospital after suffering a stroke last week but will miss “several weeks” of Senate votes while he continues to recover. So we'll soon have the advantage of a continuing political career of another brain-damaged guy.

***

FDA reports involving caffeine- and stimulant-containing energy drinks and supplements were about 11 times more likely to mention cardiac arrest and 4.5 times more likely to mention heart attacks than reports involving products without these ingredients.

***

SatStats

Economists estimate China’s annual growth at just 0% to 3%, well below Beijing’s official 4.5%, accusing Xi Jinping of concealing a slowdown with data blackouts and censorship.

*

AI errors align with the authors' ideology 97% of the time.

*

TARP:

When Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, its U.S. operations had 1.2 million derivatives transactions outstanding with 6,500 trading partners.
In all, the contracts, which were tied to interest rates, bonds, currencies, commodities, and stocks, had a "notional," or theoretical, value of $39 trillion. (wsj)
The notional value of the world's derivatives actually was estimated at more than $600 trillion. Yes, $600 trillion. Notional value is the total value of a leveraged position's assets.

*

Wealthy households make up about 10% of the entire rent-stabilized stock, according to a Citizens Budget Commission analysis of 2023 data.

*

Mortality rates for cardiovascular diseases are approximately 30 percent higher among black adults than among white adults. Cervical cancer rates are almost five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as it is among white men.
When does vigilance in subsets become profiling?

*

The top 10 percent already pay more taxes, estimated at 75 percent of federal income taxes, than the bottom 90 percent combined.

*

The Norwegian state produces about 120 barrels of oil for every man, woman, and child living in the country. If the U.S. could produce that much oil per person through a state-controlled entity, it would be more oil than the entire world produces today and worth enough money to replace all federal individual and corporate income tax revenue.

*

Following the application of rent caps in Berlin, the supply of rental apartments collapsed, falling by 52 per cent.

*

Margin debt stands at $1.50T in the June 2026 report, up 49% in a year — growth that fast has appeared in 15 of 342 months on record, every earlier cluster inside the run-up to the 2000, 2007 or 2021 peaks.

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Education in the NYC school system:

The Success Academy charter-school network has just released a report on the New York City public school system.

They enroll 409,379 kids, or 43% of all NYC public school children. In 503 of them, the majority of students failed both math and reading last year, some for a whole decade. And the more a school fails, the more categorical federal aid it qualifies for. The criteria used to identify failing schools “do not create accountability”; instead, the system “creates eligibility,” charge the authors.

Mayor Mamdani is handing the Department of Education $38.6 billion this year — an increase of almost $4 billion from last year, despite plummeting enrollment — with no strings attached.

Today, the per-student cost has soared to roughly $49,500 per pupil, among the highest in the nation.

“What is missing is not money . . . [but] honesty — honest measurement, honest reporting, and honest consequences when schools consistently fail,” say the authors.

Here’s the conclusion: The New York bureaucracy that runs the system—DOE officials, Albany officials, and the unions that control them—intentionally misleads and obscures failures, mostly to protect the adults.

Repealing the Bell Curve

 

On this day:

1865
American Civil War: CSS Shenandoah is the last Confederate combat unit to surrender after circumnavigating the globe on a cruise on which it sank or captured 37 vessels.

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Excellence is a habit, not an act.--Aristotle

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There has always been a 'make-work' element in government, but usually not at this level. Those days are long gone. Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia are all electing people who could not run a toll booth. Government can be shielded from incompetence for only so long, especially if the society is rich. But a society under any stress needs some element of competence. That does not seem to be a priority anymore.

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The education system's problems are beginning to show. The peculiar voting patterns of what used to be called the educated class should be a worry to all thoughtful people. But maybe not if that poor education benefits you.

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The Americans created the first lasting democracy based upon basic, agreed-upon principles that protected free people to express and improve their lives. Militant philosophies and beliefs that do not tolerate dissent are incompatible with the nation's philosophy. This is a problem with collectivism because it assumes disparities are the undeserved consequences of a conflict inherent to the culture. Often, that conflict is resolved with righteous violence. It is crucial to understand that this cleansing violence is, in many redistributionist philosophies, a necessary part of the 'economic change.'

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Trump should be an easy guy to negotiate with since he is philosophy-free.

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This is a risky time. Huge, economy-changing debt. A battle over nuclear weapons in the hands of fanatics in the Middle East. Culture-changing immigration. Maybe a baseball strike. The next two years might be more effectively managed by the Democrats, as they are combative and inconsolable, so they are both beyond help and beyond helping. That conflict might allow them to show their true nature without doing too much damage.

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Bomb threats targeted more than a dozen flights in Europe on Thursday, leading to a slew of emergency landings and military escorts in some cases, authorities said. Authorities found no hazardous or suspicious materials in what a British official called “malicious” hoaxes.
This was the second such episode in a week.

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Repealing the Bell Curve

The American voters are true believers in the American dream. In the big IPO. They want, indeed deserve, success. They want charming partners and lovers. They want to live in New York. They know people who know people who do.

They do not want to hear about a long grind, sacrifice, sleeplessness, failure, and luck.

Weirdly, in a nation of growing Critical Theory, they feel success is their birthright. Privilege. They deserve to live in New York.  

Others might move somewhere more affordable, more in tune with their circumstances. But these guys know that if they don't have what they want, it is someone's fault. Who can argue with universal health care? With free transportation? Free child care?

If you don't have it, then the leaders neglected you. Vote them out.

Their disappointments in the next years will be interesting to watch.