Satstats

 On this day:

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

Satstats


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

*

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

*

In NYC, 63 people are responsible for 5000 arrests.

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

9.2 million Medicaid enrollees do not qualify.

*

China has dug more than 300 new missile silos.

Great Kanto Earthquake

 

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

From The Information Tusamani:

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

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

***

Great Kanto Earthquake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

144,000 were killed. 144,000

Rebuilding costs were ruinous.

 

 

Morality-Based Mendacity

 On this day:

1515
Thomas Wolsey is invested as a Cardinal
1823
Simón Bolívar is named President of Peru.
1846
Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
1897
Lattimer massacre: A sheriff’s posse kills 20 unarmed immigrant miners in Pennsylvania, United States.
1898
Empress Elizabeth of Austria is assassinated by Luigi Luchen
1939
World War II: The submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy’s first loss.
1963
20 African-American students enter public schools in Alabama.
2008
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

***

We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.--Sowell

***

Criterion: n: A principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided. Early 17th century: from Greek kritērion 'means of judging', from kritēs. As is "crisis." At one time a crisis was specifically the turning point of a disease, a change that leads either to recovery or death. Also the root of "critic" (early 17th century), and "critical" (late 16th century.
The plural is "criteria."

***

If consumers choose to buy products with social benefits, or refuse to buy those that inflict social harms, nothing about the capitalist system prevents them from doing so. If investors want to accept lower returns in exchange for investing in socially conscious businesses, they are free to do that too.

But the governmental activist does not want to rely upon the citizen or his decision-making. He believes the citizen must be forced to do the right thing.

***

President Donald Trump says he would offer every adult American a $5,000 payout if Republicans win both chambers of Congress in November's midterm elections – a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars.
The offer was made in a speech at the party's first-ever convention in the middle of a US presidential term.

At some point here, irony has become shameful.

***

“Y’all ain’t dreamed big enough yet. Some of these clickety-clack revolutionaries have never been in a f—ing gunfight, but some of us that grew up in the hood know what guns are like. … Y’all ain’t nowhere near ready for a war in the streets. You better get ready for both kinds of war, and if you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.”-- Butch Ware, associate professor of history at UCSB, on Saturday at the Marxism Conference in Chicago. A professor of history at a major college.

***

There were so many pop-ups on Lit Hub this morning, I couldn't read it.

***

Lunch yesterday at Casbah. Carol's salad was so awful she could not eat it. I found a sharp, thumbnail-sized piece of porcelain in my salad that was almost weapons-grade. 

Really mind-changing about the place.

***

Morality-Based Mendacity

The arrogance of the righteous knows no bounds. When you know the truth, you do not care who knows your agenda. And, as always, those eager to appoint themselves as our leaders have great disdain for those they feel are nothing but an audience for their great performance.

Here are some quotes from "climate leaders" who have glory on their minds.
Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC's fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth." 

U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.'s 2014 Paris climate conference was "to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution." 

Christine Stewart, Canada's former Minister of the Environment, said: "No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. ... Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." 

Tim Wirth, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol, said: "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."

Under ordinary circumstances, such disclaimers would be incendiary to an informed, aware audience. So maybe the lack of response to the insincerity is more disturbing than the proud insincerity itself.

New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

On this day:

9
Arminius’ alliance of six Germanic tribes ambushes and annihilates three Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 36,000 Roman soldiers were killed during the ambush.
1543
Mary Stuart, at nine months old, is crowned “Queen of Scots” in the central Scottish town of Stirling
1855
Crimean War: The Siege of Sevastopol comes to an end when Russian forces abandon the city.
1942
World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1945
Second Sino-Japanese War: Japan formally surrenders to China.
1956
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
1971
The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.
2001
Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview.

***

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.--Sowell

***

The theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy; it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now-infamous 1985 case, an open-heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.--Tabarrok

***

Reykjavík has summoned the US ambassador after President Trump tweeted a map with the Stars and Stripes draped over the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and the Caribbean, all labelled “United States of America”. Iceland’s foreign minister has called it “completely inappropriate”, with the others also irked.

Are these people just too nationalistic for Trump?

***

Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger said there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
Another Anthropic researcher said he has resigned, accusing leading AI labs of racing toward superintelligence without adequate safeguards.

***

Over 760,000 teenagers in dozens of countries took the Programme for International Student Assessment last year. Results released Tuesday show average scores in math, reading and science are all at their lowest point in PISA history among highly developed economies. That includes continued declines in reading and math scores in the U.S.Almost 100% of all children in the Chinese provinces scored at or above baseline for math and reading. In the U.S., it was only 65% in math and 74% in reading.

***

The Falklands? Again?

***

New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic training data, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon.

But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.--MIT Tech. Review

But, as the Hugging Face incident shows, AI can do a lot that was not anticipated. The individual agents, tasked with a particular goal-seeking behavior, broke the underlying rules to do so. And they covered their tracks. They joined together in groups — sort of whiteboards — where information was shared and alternative paths offered. And, when a small minority of agents questioned the appropriateness of rule-breaking to achieve their goals, those agents were isolated. By the group!

Despite the innovation, there seems to be an underlying Old World consistency in the new world: in this instance, the old sorcerer's apprentice.

Royalty on the Red Carpet

On this day:
1449
Battle of Tumu Fortress – Mongolians capture the Chinese emperor.
1504
Michelangelo’s David is unveiled in Florence.
1923
Honda Point Disaster: nine US Navy destroyers run aground off the California coast. Seven are lost, and twenty-three sailors killed.
1935
US Senator from Louisiana, Huey Long, nicknamed “Kingfish”, is fatally shot in the Louisiana capitol building.
1941
World War II: Siege of Leningrad begins. German forces begin a siege against the Soviet Union’s second-largest city, Leningrad.
1943
World War II: United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly announces the Allied armistice with Italy.
1944
World War II: London is hit by a V2 rocket for the first time.
1945
Cold War: United States troops arrive to partition the southern part of Korea in response to Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the peninsula a month earlier.
1994
USAir Flight 427, on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport, suddenly crashes in clear weather killing all 132 aboard; resulting in the most extensive aviation investigation in world history and altering manufacturing practices in the industry.

***

Oliver Wendell Holmes once called Franklin Roosevelt “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”

***

Not only did football take a day of the week, but the previous owner was God.--someone

***

NYC has created an office that helps private company employees unionize. Aside from subsiding conflict, what does this office have as its responsibility? Do union workers have more rights than non-union workers? How is this a government responsibility?

***

The Honda Point disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships in history. On the foggy night of September 8, 1923, seven destroyers traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h) ran aground and wrecked at California's Honda Point (also known as Point Pedernales, with offshore outcroppings known as Devil's Jaw). The location was several miles north of the Santa Barbara Channel, the ships' intended route. Two other destroyers grounded, but were able to maneuver free off the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died; 745 were rescued.

Navigational errors, compounded by unusual ocean currents attributed to Japan's Great Kantō earthquake, were the likely cause. Other factors were the refusal to use modern location equipment that was available to them.

***

Royalty on the Red Carpet

Politicians are held in strange regard by us mere mortals.
Consider this from Bordeaux, on a report by Peggy Noonan writing on an exchange between then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; the subject at the time was another proposed COVID-19 “stimulus” bill:

He [Blitzer] said it’s not about him but people in food lines.

Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them, and we know them. We know them. We represent them. Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs!

Nancy Pelosi presides over a chamber of politicians who vote on taxing and spending bills that transfer money from some Americans to other Americans – a fact that (inexplicably!) propels Ms. Pelosi to boast that she and her colleagues, not taxpayers such as Mr. Blitzer, feed poor Americans. On top of this appalling pretension, Ms. Pelosi expects CNN’s audience to believe that she and her Congressional colleagues “know” poor Americans in a way that non-politicians don’t.

As Peggy Noonan wrote about this interview, “It was bonkers.”

And yet most people continue to defer to people such as Pelosi … and to Trump, and Biden, and AOC, and Newsom, and to other such people, in Washington and in state capitals, who routinely parade in plain view their raw ambition, their delusions of possessing supernatural powers, and their lack of ordinary human decency.

And their supporters ardently believe that these displays are something more than showbiz.

Labor Day

On this day:

70
A Roman army under Titus occupies and plunders Jerusalem.
1191
Third Crusade: Battle of Arsuf – Richard I of England defeats Saladin at Arsuf.
1812
Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Borodino – Napoleon wins a Pyrrhic victory over the Russian army of Alexander I near the village of Borodino.
1864
American Civil War: Atlanta, Georgia, is evacuated on orders of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.
1940
World War II: The Blitz – Nazi Germany begins to rain bombs on London. This will be the first of 57 consecutive nights of bombing.
1942
Australian and US forces inflict a significant defeat upon the Japanese at the Battle of Milne Bay.
1977
The Torrijos-Carter Treaties between Panama and the United States on the status of the Panama Canal are signed. The United States agrees to transfer control of the canal to Panama at the end of the 20th century. The world still awaits an explanation of the thinking here.
1978
While walking across Waterloo Bridge in London, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov is assassinated by Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Giullino by means of a ricin pellet fired from a specially-designed umbrella. In many cultures, the advancement of homicide underlies the major technology.
1996
American Hip-Hop star Tupac Shakur is fatally shot four times on the Las Vegas strip after leaving the Tyson-Seldon boxing match. Mr. Shakur was the author of the famous line, "We're afraid of the same people you white people are."
2008
The US Government takes control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

***

"In fact, it would be more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn’t slavery but the effort to abolish it. Slavery is among the oldest and most ubiquitous of all human institutions; as the Times series’ title indicates, American slavery predated the American Revolution by a century and a half. What’s unique about America is that it alone announced at birth the principle that all men are created equal—and that its people have struggled to realize that principle since then. As a result of their efforts, the Constitution today has much more to do with what happened in 1865 than in 1776, let alone 1619. Nothing could be more worthwhile than learning slavery’s history, and remembering its victims and vanquishers. But to claim that America’s essence is white supremacy is to swallow slavery’s fatal lie."--Timothy Sandefur

1619 was a historical incident. 1776 was the revolutionary idea, unfinished until 1865. Slavery is bad enough. Making slavery more than that is grotesque.

***

Karaoke Nation: Just like everyone thinks they can sing, so many think they can govern. But only a special breed grabs the mic.

***

Explosions at an Italian shell factory. Jammed signals around the Baltic Sea. Drones and munitions found at a German airport. Disruptions in transportation, trade, and commerce.

With diminishing gains on the battlefield of an increasingly unpopular war, Moscow has turned its attention towards soft targets in Europe. With the diminishing returns of strikes on military and civilian targets in Ukraine, the Russian military and security services are leveraging the openness of European democracies to attack civilian and military targets through sabotage operations.

Germany and other large Western European countries may join the central and eastern European members of NATO and the EU in providing intelligence resources and enabling active measures against the Russian war machine. In lieu of a risk-averse policy of de-escalation and appeasement, we could see the start of a tit-for-tat campaign by the Europeans against Russian assets.--Vindman


***

Amy Acton, Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, was the target of an attack on Sunday during a campaign stop at the Canfield Fair, campaign officials said.

***

Cruz against lefties has a 40.6% strikeout rate.

***

Labor Day


A Labor Day parable I stole off a blog:

A guy looked at my Porsche the other day and said I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car costs. I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components that went into it, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people in Decatur IL, at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore. It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families. BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.

*

Another thought on labor for Labor Day.

"Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
….
We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world."--McCloskey

Sunday/A Life and a Death

On this day:

3114 BC
According to the proleptic Julian calendar, the current era in the Maya Long Count Calendar started.
1522
The Victoria, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, returns to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world.
1620
The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.
1847
Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts.
1901
Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
1949
A former sharpshooter in World War II, Howard Unruh kills 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, with a souvenir Luger to become the first U.S. single-episode mass murderer.
1966
In Cape Town, South Africa, the architect of Apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, is stabbed to death during a parliamentary meeting.
1972
Munich Massacre: 9 Israel athletes taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games by the Palestinian “Black September” terrorist group died (as did a German policeman) at the hands of the kidnappers during a failed rescue attempt. 2 other Israeli athletes are slain in the initial attack the previous day.
1991
The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
1997
Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, takes place in London. Over a million people lined the streets, and 2.5 billion watched around the world on television.

***

"Tactical nukes are a gateway drug to Armageddon"--Andreas Kluth

***

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.--Swift

***

Everyone who has a job, even at minimum wage, is in the top 15 percent of the world's income distribution.

***

Bartiromo made $70 million in her tenure at Fox News, according to court documents

***

In the gambling-ridden sports world, the Michigan game ending certainly did nothing for the game's credibility.

***

No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.
The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into orbit.

***

 
Sunday/A Life and a Death

The author, Wendell Berry, has died. His writings are part of an American rural tradition that emphasizes humanity's foundational elements: nature, the land, family, and religion. American man without car chases. What follows is a very tender eulogy from a local writer.

"We have been told that we live in a time after democracy, that liberalism has failed, the American constitutional order is lost, and all that remains is picking a side in an agonistic struggle between factions that lust after the power to govern our discordant nation. The philosopher that many, particularly on the right, turn to in order to anchor their account of our decline is the late 19th-century German Friedrich Nietzsche.

But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed, all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life of a community. His many essays and lectures were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words, the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well known to committed democrats like Emerson.

But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of knowledge.”

That writer, of course, is the late Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of Mr. Berry’s life.

Among the many words that Berry wrote, these words that close his New York Times obituary strike me as summarizing his work perfectly: “You know, if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left,” he said in 2005. These words place him in the tradition of Emerson, as well Emerson’s great friend and one of Berry’s great influences, Henry David Thoreau.

These words also put him at odds with more or less the entirety of contemporary American public life, virtually all of whom (including most Christians) have little interest in the Gospels, little memory of the Declaration, and little regard for the Constitution. If you doubt that Emerson was right to warn so frequently about the dangers of the herd, or that Thoreau was right to say that so many of our neighbors live lives of “quiet desperation,” I would suggest you are simply not paying attention.

That raises the question, of course, of how one can escape the mindless herds prowling about today. How can a person live in a way not marked by that haunting Thoreauvian phrase? Can we find genuine vitality as well as beauty and goodness within the confines of our life today? Berry showed us how, and he did so in two distinct ways.

The first was his contrariness. Among his most loved poems is “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer,” which you can hear the man himself read in this recording done with On Being many years ago.



Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.


The contrariness Berry endorses is not “the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” The contrariness, rather, is the acted-out recognition of the ways that conformity seduces us over time, nudging us into saying things we do not mean or do not believe and to repressing the thoughts we actually do believe. Berry’s contrary farmer cares more about saying what is true than he does appeasing the desires, prejudices, and conventions of others. This contrariness is also a form of neighborly love, offered in the hope that others who see the same but say nothing would be emboldened to speak.

Several of Berry’s greatest fictional creations exemplify this commitment—Jayber Crow, the barber and protagonist in the novel bearing his name, perhaps most of all. It is also the subject of another of his poems, perhaps my favorite of all his poems, called “Do Not Be Ashamed.” Several lines in particular are worth sharing:



Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.


If you would protect the light you have made in your life, Berry warns, then you must be contrary. You must refuse to say “I am ashamed” when the herd attempts to coerce you into doing so.

But there is a further commitment of Berry’s that is significant. Berry’s three greatest novels, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter are in one sense a trilogy considering the problem and challenge of marriage. Indeed, marriage is in many ways the dominant metaphor for all of Berry’s work, as some of his own essays suggest—most notably those found in Standing by Words as well as the title essay from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

In an interview with the filmmaker Laura Dunn, he says that



We all come from divorce now. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. … That’s the way the work has to go.


He says something similar near the end of Jayber Crow, his greatest novel in my opinion. Writing near the end of his life, Jayber reflects on what he thinks hell might be, and he says it is



where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart.


Jayber’s idea of hell, incidentally, sounds very like the agonistic world that the Nietzscheans mistake for reality. If we would be saved, we would do well to heed, instead, the examples of Emerson and Berry.

The answer to the rupture of divorce is the faithfulness of marriage, a way of life that radiates outward from the lovers into fidelity to the world—the habits and virtues taught within the form of marriage are one means by which we learn to keep faith more generally. We learn something of what it means to live for the good of our neighbor, or even the good of our home place, by the ways in which marriage forces us very directly and intimately to live for the good of another. In this, Berry and his wife of 69 years, Tanya Berry, became models which we might emulate. The point of contrariness is not mere negation; it is to accept the mantle of responsibility thrust upon each of us as a condition of our life in the world. The form of his marriage to Tanya is one of the chief ways that Mr. Berry learned this responsibility, I think—or at least that is what I am led to believe by his many poems addressed to Tanya. Consider this, for example,



... yet

You have taken me and quieted me.

You have been such light to me

That other women have been

Your shadows.


In “Do Not Be Ashamed” Berry speaks of the nameless “they,” which Emerson would think of as “the herd.” They go about shining a light in search of you so that they might find you and compel you toward their way. This external light is a light, as the poem says, that will squelch the light you have made yourself. But in “Marriage” the light offered by Tanya is a gift, not a means of control or coercion. The contrariness of the mad farmer ultimately exists to serve and enliven the marriage of the mad farmer. The demands of contrariness create the circumstances that bring about life, or at least that is how I read Berry.

My favorite scene in all his fiction comes near the end of A Place on Earth. It is an uneven novel, which Berry himself knew, given that he revised it after publication and released a new edition. But its high points are the highest points in all his fiction. One such point comes near the end when the town of Port William, loosely modeled after Port Royal, learns that World War II has ended and their boys will be returning home. The town converges on the lone street running through it to celebrate, and the local purveyor of the finest moonshine materializes with the fruit of his labor. Jayber Crow, Burley Coulter, and several others enjoy that fruit thoroughly. They take turns passing the bottle—Berry remarks elsewhere that the sound of moonshine poured from a jug sounds like “good good good”—and on each pass Jayber “greets” the bottle cordially. He then embarks on a half-drunk sermon, offered in response to the whiskey’s benediction, that I think contains much of Berry’s wisdom, for his own time and for ours:



For is not the abuse of the mortal the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?—for is it not upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their tracks?—and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?


Writing as his life came to an end, Jayber remembered the sound of that whiskey being poured from the bottle when he wrote,



I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say ‘good-good-good-good-good!’ like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith. But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.


Berry was a man of faith. He went through enough, as we all will, to kill him. But he lived in such a way that the sound of his life is doubtless contained in the sound I heard just now as I poured out a glass of his state’s finest export to toast the man’s life and work. And the light he made in his story not only preserved him from those who would demand his shame; it offered to us what Tanya gave to him, a light that drives all else into the shadows.


Rest in Peace, Mr. Berry, a citizen of Port William and a son of the commonwealth of Kentucky."

--Jake Meador in The Dispatch

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.