SatStats

"Yeah, I mean, they’ve been to a lot of games over the years, and they’ve sacrificed so much and been so supportive. So, to have them here for a moment like this is really special, and, you know, it’s the least I can do."--Sidney Crosby on breaking Gretzky's record in front of his family. "The least I could do."!!!

*** 

A proposition is said to be tautological if its constituent terms repeat themselves or if they can be reduced to terms that do, so that the proposition is of the form “a = a” (“a is identical to a”). Such propositions convey no information about the world, and, accordingly, they are said to be trivial, or empty of cognitive import. A proposition is said to be significant if its constituent terms are such that the proposition does provide new information about the world.

In the so-called ontological argument for the existence of God, St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34–1109) attempted to derive the significant conclusion that God exists from the tautological premise that God is the only perfect being together with the premise that no being can be perfect unless it exists. As Hume and Kant pointed out, however, it is fallacious to derive a proposition with existential import from a tautology, and it is now generally agreed that from a tautology alone, it is impossible to derive any significant proposition.

Or, in English, circular reasoning.

***

SatStats

The government added $838 billion to the national debt in just the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January).

*

In this fiscal year’s first five months, beginning Oct. 1, the government borrowed $1.1 trillion — almost $8 billion a day. In February, the first full month of Musk’s government-pruning “revolution,” borrowing was $308 billion because spending was $40 billion more — a 7 percent increase — over February 2024.

*

Since 1965, between shorter workweeks and longer vacations, the average American gained 300 leisure hours per year – but the poorest Americans have gained twice that. Meanwhile, the quality of that leisure time has improved considerably...--landsburg

*

2024 (Q4), the average U.S. household’s real net worth was:

– 232% higher than it was in 1975
– 140% higher than it was in 1994
– 78% higher than it was in 2001.

*

The Pittsburgh tech ecosystem saw a total of $999 million in venture capital funding in 2024, up from $644 million in 2023.

*

Park Avenue’s office vacancy rate, 8.9%, is its lowest since the end of 2018, according to data firm CoStar. Manhattan and U.S. office vacancy overall sits at 16.1%.

*

Although Alphabet’s Waymo has a big lead in the industry, with its driverless taxis operational in several U.S. cities, Amazon-owned Zoox is now competing against Elon Musk’s Tesla for the No. 2 spot.

*

Notes from DOGE:

     HHS has 27 Science Centers, 27 CEOs and 700 IT systems

     65% of HHS grants go to scientists, 35% ti the university.

     40% of incoming calls to SS involve attempts at fraud that will deprive the SS recipient.

     Debt interest > Defense budget

     Treasury pays 580 separate agency bills without any verification.

     There are about 85 billion dollars in improper Entitlement payments

     From 2019 to 2025 there was a rise in U.S. population of 2.2% with rise in the budget of 55%.

Keystone

Private equity funds—which pool money from a few exclusive investors to purchase privately held companies with “little to no public reporting”—may not be a good fit for the relative safety that workers expect from 401(k) plans that typically invest in public companies whose performance is routinely reported and measured.--Hopkins study

OR

“We are seeing institutions worldwide blend public and private markets, and in many cases, it’s been a great investment,” said Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock at a summit on retirement that the company sponsored last week. More than half of the $11.6 trillion in assets under management at BlackRock are in retirement products.

Fink and other proponents say a key reason for including private assets in the $12.5 trillion workplace retirement plan market is the need for greater portfolio diversification.

***

A stabbing rampage has occurred in Amsterdam, leaving five victims wounded at the famed Dam Square, including two Americans.

***

Musk and some of his outriders were interviewed by Baier yesterday and said some remarkable things about the government. It is a mistake not to have him explain what they are doing. One little nugget: when HHS gives research grant money, only 65% goes to the scientist. The rest goes to the university.

***

Keystone

Keystone XL is a 2,000-mile tar sands pipeline that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

The pipeline is designed for one thing—to send oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf coast, and from there to overseas markets.

Its owner is TransCanada, a Canadian oil company.

The original petition for permit was denied on January 18, 2012 due to environmental concerns. Specifically, the original pipeline route would have passed through an environmentally sensitive area of Nebraska known as the Sand Hills region. This area has highly porous soil and shallow groundwater. The Ogallala aquifer is also in this region and the pipeline would have posed a potential threat to the drinking water. A revised permit was resubmitted in May 2012 which contained an alternate route. It was denied.

The Keystone Pipeline already exists. In fact, the Keystone Mainline is 1,353 miles of 30" pipe which extends from Hardisty, Alberta to refineries in Wood River and Peoria, Illinois. This segment has been in service since June 2010. The Cushing Extension is 298 miles of 36" pipe which runs from Steele City, Nebraska to crude oil terminals and tank farms in Cushing, Oklahoma. This portion has been flowing since February 2011.

The Keystone XL Pipeline consists of two parts. The first is the Gulf Coast Project. This portion would transport oil over 435 miles through 36" pipe running from Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas. The second segment, called the Keystone XL, would run 1,179 miles from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska.

Although the argument against the pipeline centers on environmental concerns, the real reason may have to do with the disdain for fossil fuels felt by environmental groups and others. Keystone XL is a relatively small issue compared to the entirety of the existing U.S. pipeline system. Hence, opponents of this project have taken a well-anticipated route, claiming that it will harm the environment. The question is, if the thousands of miles of existing pipeline has been in use and the environment seems to be unaffected, why should Keystone XL suddenly be the project that ruins the planet?

The project’s corporate backer—the Canadian energy infrastructure company TC Energy—officially abandoned the project in June 2021 following President Joe Biden’s denial of a key permit on his first day in office.

The latest twist is President Donald Trump’s 2025 rescission of Biden’s executive order that revoked the pipeline’s permit—despite a lack of interest from the would-be developer.

And another question. Since this is a Canadian project in which the U.S. contributes only access and convenience, and since it is a sizable project with some military implications to an embattled Europe, and since it is obviously arbitrary--why weren't the Canadians filled with wild-eyed indignation as they have been with the equally obnoxious tariffs?

Abundence

Local. District. National. These are the areas of judicial catchment and influence. A local judge cannot influence national policy. Foreign residents' due process ends with the executive administrators.
These judges may well start interfering with battlefield decisions.

***

Kermit the Frog will deliver the address to the University of Maryland’s graduates this summer.

***

This security leak molehill shows the real impact devoted media accomplices can have on the national stage.

*** 

Abundence

A recent review in--I think 'The Atlantic'--skims the debate that has roiled this country since its creation: efficiency vs. freedom, fiat vs. evolution, great vs. small, central vs. local. How is power distributed within an organizing entity and its constituent parts? There are vaults of debates on the topic but apparently nothing is new. This is a running commentary on that review.

Two new books are at the heart of this discussion. One is  Abundance, by Ezra Klein, the star New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a journalist at the Atlantic. The other, Why Nothing Works, comes from Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All three writers are Democrats or sympathetic to the Democratic cause. All dislike Donald Trump. All want blue cities, blue counties, and blue states from coast to coast. 

These books have been very well-hyped. Many feel they offer the Left new direction and hope, the next years' Democrat blueprint.

All three feel the United States, despite its inordinate wealth, is not matching its twentieth century dynamism. Could this government — Republican or Democratic-run — stand up another interstate highway system? A network of railroads? Could this Department of Defense effectively invent the internet?

The Klein-Thompson duo argues that an “anti-growth” mentality has constrained the left for the last several decades. NIMBYism and aggressive regulations have strangled housing supply and innovation. As government support for research and development dried up, science produced fewer society-wide breakthroughs. Once, we built whole subway systems in a decade, sent human beings to the moon, and created the internet. Klein and Thompson do blame neoliberalism — a long-running retreat from government investment and a foisting of responsibilities on the private sector. But they’d prefer lighter zoning and environmental laws to speed up growth.

The dynamism and growth here are obviously not the growth that everyone sees with the nation knocking on the moon's door or developing medications, developing new energy sources, or improving water efficiency. Their growth is more targeted and moral. Like equal housing or educational outcomes. These may well be desirable to many, but their rationale is faith-based and, in our increasingly secular world, that is a hard sell. More, it demands an extension of the traditional constitutional guarantees of equality of all men before the law to equity for all men in growing areas of social sensitivities like housing, more charity-based than legal.

Dunkelman’s thesis is similar. For New Yorkers, there’s plenty in Why Nothing Works to devour. He begins with the great bête noire of the modern left, Robert Moses, and argues that the master builder’s legacy is somewhat misunderstood. Or, at least, we’ve overlearned the lessons of the Moses era. Moses, of course, ran roughshod over much of New York, ramming highways through thriving neighborhoods and thwarting the expansion of mass transit. He behaved like a tyrant and cared little for conventional democracy. Politicians couldn’t move him, nor could protest. For 40 years, he was emblematic of an imperial approach to governing, and it was Robert Caro’s The Power Broker that exposed, finally, many of his excesses.

Under Moses, the government could be unfeeling — but it worked. And it was not Moses-style development that triggered New York’s decline in the 1970s, as Caro strongly intimated. Rather, it was the collapse of the manufacturing sector, white flight, and fiscal mismanagement. The public works Moses left behind were necessary for New York’s post-fiscal crisis renaissance.

Mussolini made the trains run on time. All autocracies struggle with the limited vision of their citizens.  

Dunkelman frames American views of governance as a centuries-long clash between Hamiltonians, who argue for stronger centralized authority, and Jeffersonians, who are wary of government overreach.

But the trouble began when the Jeffersonians kept winning. Beginning in the 1970s, skepticism of government power began getting baked into both political parties.

And projects like the California high-speed train--estimated in 2008 at a cost of $33 billion with a completion date in 2020 is now estimated at over $100 billion, with completion in 2030 and no ridable track exists yet (currently, $10 billion has been spent.)--for some reason are not cautionary tales for these people.

The review, at this point, takes a strange turn. It argues that the Left’s role is poorly understood, and Dunkelman is a wonderful guide. 

Watergate taught a generation of young progressives to distrust federal power, and the left began to favor hamstringing government whenever possible. Numerous new chokepoints, some of them well-meaning, were invented, from arcane local laws to community boards that could stifle building that alienated locals. Preservationists warred to freeze urban neighborhoods in place, hoping to avoid catastrophes like the obliteration of the old Penn Station — but they also, in their zeal for saving the Old, helped to ensure these cities would grow less affordable. Building new affordable housing, commuter railways, or any other type of large infrastructure project became far harder in the era of community control.

If only the stubborn citizenry would succumb to the benign and creative overarching vision of the Left. But it is a lot more complicated than that. There are all sorts of motives in the community movements. One is the aesthetics of government housing. One is energy efficiency. One is the snail darter. One is community home value, i.e., selfishness. And, while a home is a quintessential Amerian achievement, it may not be a successful gift. Housing is more than a construction project; it comes with people. I would bet that the unreliability of government--a huge problem--is way, way down the list.

It gets stranger. 

How to make America dynamic again, he asks? How to build here like they do in China and Japan, where it’s routine to throw up new high-speed rail lines every decade? And if we solved these problems, would it be enough? 

But we are not China nor Japan. We are unique, conceived in liberty and equality before the law. And the deep regard for personal property. These are not impediments to be overcome; these are what we are. The success of this nation is a result of these concepts, an escape from those of the feudal East and Old Europe. These books complain that restoring the grand old days of fiat governments and religious wars will be an uphill fight.

David Sirota, the founder of Lever News and a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, summed up one stinging progressive critique of the whole project: “Abundance being defined as ‘kill zoning laws and corporate regulation’ but not ‘give everyone decent medical care’ — that’s the tell, and you’re the mark.” It’s true that this is not a focus among the advocates of abundance. Relaxing zoning laws won’t do anything to bring us universal healthcare or bolster the social safety net. It may not even, in the short-term, do enough to create affordable housing. One of the great divides within the YIMBY movement, which can be folded into the abundance push, is how much regulation should exist around what people pay in rent. Some YIMBYs do back stronger tenant protections and versions of rent control while others, like Klein ally Matthew Yglesias, plainly do not. Yglesias is also skeptical of lifting the federal law that effectively bans the construction of new public housing.

Abundance, then, can hold different meanings for different advocates. If the belief is that a robust, efficient federal government should do more to help working class Americans, then we need a new program of mass home-building like we saw in the 1930s and 1940s. Without the New York City Public Housing Authority, the largest city in America would probably have an unfathomably large amount of homeless, the tent cities in the five boroughs making the Tenderloin and Skid Row look like minor, quasi-pastoral encampments. If you believe zoning reform is enough — and the government need only get out of the way — then how much housing must be built, exactly, for rents to start falling enough so a family making well under $100,000 can comfortably afford a market-rate apartment? Turning New York (or any city) into Tokyo is easier said than done.

So neither book nor Sirota accept the idea that local political events and national faith-based concepts are in any way separate. Rather, they are reflections in the same mirror, the expression of an activist core, based upon government-imposed faith-based equity. The stagnation they see is very focused and, dangerously, concentrated in a pinpoint devotion to equity at any cost.

Then, the bland "conclusion:" 

"What abundance advocates do get right is that governments — federal, state, and local — must do far better. We have fallen a long way from the twentieth century; we led the world in building and innovation until we didn’t. We are still a remarkably wealthy nation and we must find a way, as we persevere in this new century, to beat back stagnation. Otherwise, the future is going to be much more frustrating."

Freedom and property as impediments, government as a competent prime mover; little is new.

Notes

The DOGE play is much ado about nothing. It will not stop us from getting to where the government can no longer borrow enough to fund its spending, including the ever-rising share of interest payments. At that point, we will be staring in the face the threat of Weimar-era hyperinflation, confronting our political leaders with the need to suddenly do something serious and substantive. The curtain will come down on the political theater.--Kling

***

Capitalism is based on companies competing for the favour of consumers with better goods and services, but unfortunately many companies choose instead to compete for the favour of politicians to get subsidies, tariffs, regulatory benefits, and bailouts so that they do not have to worry about consumers.--Norberg

***

Great book title: A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims:

***

Notes (others)

Very interesting, if true:

A period of dedicated rest after learning improves memory.

For offline waking rest to be comparable to post-learning sleep in terms of its effect on recall, the key is to make your breaks as similar to sleep as possible. No music. No screens. No chatting with friends.

Just quiet downtime, preferably with your eyes closed, or if that’s not possible, doing something mindless. Taking a walk. Looking out the window.

Or even exercising. A study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise found that exercising after learning significantly improves memory, recall, and retention.

In fact, a study published in Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2023 found that just six to 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise can improve your working memory and significantly improve higher-level cognitive skills like organization, prioritization, and planning – regardless of when that exercise session takes place.

***

We all want clean air and water, don’t we? The only problem is that there has never been any such thing.

Any one of us could make the air in his own home cleaner by installing all sorts of costly filters, and we could eliminate many impurities in water by drinking only water that we distilled ourselves. But we don’t do that, do we? We think it is too costly, whether in money or in time.

Only when we are putting costs on other people do we go hog wild like that. Making us pay is one way to make us think.--Sowell

***

In an executive order last week, President Trump directed White House security advisers to draw up a national resilience plan for critical infrastructure that shifts more responsibilities to the state and local level.

About a week earlier, the Department of Homeland Security cut about half of the federal funding, or $10 million, to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which shares threat intelligence among states.

***

USAID

Kim Strassel is one of the WSJ's very able editorialists. She recently wrote an article on USAID, its history, the attempt to fix it, and the validity of the attacks on those efforts. There's no real reason to revise it so I've pasted it here in its entirety for anyone who missed it.

Dismantling USAID

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced an end to his review of U.S. Agency for International Development programming, resulting in a cancellation of 5,200 contracts, or some 83% of USAID programs. The headlines covering this “culling” and “purge” of USAID works, suggest a ramshackle process that is already resulting in vast “human costs” and “unnecessary deaths.” Much of the frenzy stemmed from a memo blasting the cuts as a recipe for disease and destabilization, drafted and shared by a USAID employee, Nicholas Enrich (who was then put on leave). Media outlets admitted they couldn’t verify Enrich’s warnings of “death and disability,” though that didn’t stop them from publishing. If only they’d put the same effort into researching the administration’s USAID review, presented in detail in court documents filed in response to litigation against the foreign-aid pause. Those papers present an orderly evaluation, complete with notice and procedures, clear objectives, levels of oversight, and a process for waivers or exemptions. It’s unclear if this State review is emblematic of Donald Trump’s efficiency drive in other agencies—or an anomaly. Yet it’s a strikingly different view of proceedings than that generally supplied by the press. Here’s what the documents show: Timing: Trump on Day One issued an executive order requiring a 90-day pause on new foreign-development assistance in order to evaluate it for efficiency and realign it with his objectives. Rubio four days later issued a stop-work order on existing awards (not just new ones). The review began Jan. 27, and over the ensuing weeks, State issued waivers to allow money back to critical missions, including AIDS and other global health programs, refugee assistance, and narcotics, peacekeeping and antiterror operations. Rubio on March 10 announced the completion of his six-week review, beating the Trump deadline. Process: Court documents note that each award was examined on “an individual basis and through a multi-step process.” USAID’s Deputy Administrator Pete Marocco explained in an court attestation that policy staff initially reviewed every grant/program—including information about the recipient, dollar amounts, subject matter and description of the project—to determine whether it aligned with Trump’s foreign-policy priorities. These recommendations for cuts were reviewed by a senior policy official. The ensuing lists were then reviewed by Marocco, who factored in whether a program might still be worthwhile based on broader “institutional and diplomatic equities”—say, the “location of the project or the general subject matter.” Final termination recommendations were reviewed and finalized by Rubio. The Secretary of State’s Monday announcement that he was retaining nearly 1,000 programs (and folding them into the State Department) shows the cuts weren’t blanket. Details: Throughout this process, court attachments show, employees were provided timelines, technical guidance on how to handle the pause, as well as FAQs addressing obscure government-process questions. Documents also explained the perimeters of waivers and the procedure for asking for exceptions. Reviewing staff received guidance on judging programs against Trump priorities. An intriguing side note: The documents direct questions to State Department offices—not anyone from the Department of Government Efficiency. Obligations: Contrary to media reports, the government isn’t bailing on obligations; guidance allows for payment of “legitimate expenses incurred” prior to Rubio’s stop-work order, and State says it is also working with counterparties on disputes. The government also hinted that one reason for the initial hard stop on continuing projects was to pre-empt a flood of demands, since “grant recipients frequently submit payment requests before they are due,” and moreover “recouping” money sent improperly “would be extremely difficult.” That puts in a new light a federal judge’s orders that USAID pay out for “work” up to Feb. 13 (in litigation that continues). What’s left: State hasn’t released a list of the programs that were cut or kept. DOGE and the White House already gave Americans a glimpse of the more ridiculous or counterproductive USAID projects (a transgender opera in Colombia; DEI initiatives in Ireland and Serbia; nonprofits linked to terror groups), which presumably are gone. Critics are now warning the cuts could include health initiatives for malaria, tuberculosis or AIDS, for instance—yet they don’t know that, and Rubio’s decision to offer waivers for these during the review suggest they could be among the 1,000 kept. The final measure ought to be the value of the programs retained, not the number of those axed. (And 1,000 distinct foreign-aid programs is still a lot.) The law: Rubio’s review might be complete, but the saga isn’t. The Trump administration has been sued numerous times over USAID and its foreign-aid freeze. In his recent decision ordering the administration to pay recipients through mid-February, Judge Amir Ali claimed Trump had an obligation to spend funds Congress provided for USAID—though didn’t go so far as to insist it revive programs it has now canceled. The case seems to be shaping up as one of several centered on “impoundment”—a president’s ability to delay or cancel spending—now barreling toward the Supreme Court. No doubt this review and realignment contained some bumps and flubs. The Trump administration is the first to tackle a government resizing of this magnitude, so everything is new. The State Department’s decision to shut down many programs—and Rubio’s decision to fold USAID programs into the State Department—will also infuriate those who want programs on auto-pilot. But the impression that media and Democrats are deliberately building—that the process has no rational basis beyond “destroying” government and “firing” everyone—simply isn’t true. Trump campaigned on a change in foreign aid, won and is now—going by the State Department review—methodically implementing big changes that align with his vision. Agree or disagree with that vision, but don’t suggest it doesn’t exist.

Lie Detectors

The son of the Yankee player, Miller Gardner, 14, apparently died by asphyxia "after a possible intoxication after apparently ingesting some food," an official with Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Agency told NBC News. No child is safe.

***

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek words “episteme” and “logos”. “Episteme” can be translated as “knowledge” or “understanding” or “acquaintance”, while “logos” can be translated as “account” or “argument” or “reason”. Just as each of these different translations captures some facet of the meaning of these Greek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet of epistemology itself. 

Although the term “epistemology” is no more than a couple of centuries old, the field of epistemology is at least as old as any in philosophy. In different parts of its extensive history, different facets of epistemology have attracted attention. Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower. Locke’s epistemology tried to understand the operations of human understanding, Kant’s epistemology was an effort to understand the conditions of the possibility of human understanding, and Russell’s epistemology was an attempt to understand how modern science could be justified by appeal to sensory experience. Much recent work in formal epistemology attempts to understand how our degrees of confidence are rationally constrained by our evidence.

***

This self-inflicted security breach proves the risks inherent in well-armed nation-states. It is present even in the most publicly cautious of political entities.

***

Lie Detectors

 

"Epistemic vigilance" argues that we possess tools to identify and call out lies. In a seminal paper, Sperber et al. argued that “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others.” We have a built-in lie detector.

The problem is that humans have been shown, time and again, to be especially bad at telling truth from falsehood. As Shieber puts it, “Despite many decades of research, the findings are remarkably consistent in demonstrating that humans are quite poor at deception detection.”

One could argue that we humans have developed in the circumstance of an open mind, and that disputes are, by our nature, inconclusive. Debate and speculation simmer to conclusions, and crucial questions are solved by habit, reflex, and prejudice. Reflective gunslingers.

We also aren’t very good at telling whether someone is competent. Two studies — from 1996 and 2005 — showed how people use non-epistemic factors to determine whether someone is good at their job. Looks and posture are relied upon, but deceptive. An entire baseball scouting bias is built into a baseball face, an athletic 'look,' that was overthrown in 'Moneyball.'

Shieber coined the expression “The Nietzsche Thesis,” arguing that “our goal in conversation is not primarily to acquire truthful information… [but] self-presentation.” In other words, we accept or reject statements based on utilitarian goals, not on their truthfulness. In Nietzsche’s words, we will accept and look for truth only when it has “pleasant, life-preserving consequences.” Conversely, we are hostile “to potentially harmful and destructive truths.” We do not have epistemic vigilance, but a Machiavellian one.

Dyson, a renowned genius, once casually suggested truth among homo sapiens, in terms of evolution, had a context. Abstract truth on the savannah was simply impractical, whereas the meaning of a rustling in the bushes might mean life or death. Consequently, the immediate threat had significant truth importance, the cause of storms might be less practical and more likely seen in terms of myth.

And, as Aristotle showed,  we do love a well-constructed story.

 

Black Bag Review

23andMe filed for bankruptcy late Sunday night and announced the resignation of its chief executive, capping a precipitous fall for the DNA-testing company.

CEO Anne Wojcicki, who is stepping down from her position but remaining on the board, has so far tried unsuccessfully to rescue the business by buying it back.

***

The youngest son of former New York Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner and his wife, Jessica, has died after falling ill during a family vacation. Miller Gardner was 14.

Miller Gardner died in his sleep Friday morning, according to a statement from the couple that was released by the Yankees on Sunday. The Gardners said they “have so many questions and so few answers at this point.”

***

Golfing hero Tiger Woods on Sunday confirmed his relationship with Vanessa Trump, the former daughter-in-law of President Donald Trump, by declaring that "love is in the air."

Woods posted a picture of him alongside Trump to his Instagram and X accounts, with the caption: "Love is in the air and life is better with you by my side! We look forward to our journey through life together. At this time we would appreciate privacy for all those close to our hearts."

Vanessa Trump was married to Donald Trump Jr. from 2005 to 2018, and the couple has five children together.

***

One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets.

Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity’s intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system.

“We’re kind of playing Russian roulette,” says Michele Mosca, who coauthored the most recent “Quantum Threat Timeline” report from the Global Risk Institute, which estimates how long we have left. “You’ll probably win if you only play once, but it’s not a good game to play.” When Mosca and his colleagues surveyed cybersecurity experts last year, the forecast was sobering: a one-in-three chance that Q-Day happens before 2035. And the chances it has already happened in secret? Some people I spoke to estimated 15 percent—about the same as you’d get from one spin of the revolver cylinder.--from Wired

***

Black Bag Review (with a spoiler or two)

"The result is absolutely delicious, a svelte piece of entertainment that feels like a vintage yarn yet very much represents our own current anxieties, questions of sustaining trust in relationships and high-stake careers."--Monica Castillo at Ebert

Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, and Pierce Brosnan are just some of the names in Steven Soderbergh's newest spy thriller, which has been met with positive reviews. Black Bag follows the British Intelligence agents and married couple George (Fassbender) and Kathryn (Blanchett) into a world of secrets and intrigue as they race to find the traitor in their organization.

The movie title refers to the code word "Black Bag," which the spies in the film use to avoid divulging confidential or top-secret information.

There are personal and professional secrets and lies throughout Black Bag, which begins when George is ordered by his superior, Meachum (Gustaf Skarsgard), to find the culprit inside their organization who has leaked a top-secret software known as Severus, which could result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

Cat-and-mouse games abound. The clandestine software theft, a clandestine effort to counter the theft, a plan to implicate Kathryn by giving her access to the bribery money (I missed how) but apparently motivated by both a misdirection effort and some poorly explained reason to attack Kathryn and George's marriage, the murder of Meachum which I thought motiveless. (Maybe misdirection?}

Wide lens, dark lighting, and short sentences all contribute to concentrated tension in a story with little--but occasionally shocking--action. The actors are uniformly excellent, although Fassbender's robotic intensity only masquerades as depth. The marriage theme is curious, as if inserted after focus group meetings.

There is a tight, set-piece quality here, as if conceived for the stage. The atmosphere and technique demand attention and some of the story is easy to miss in the darkness and the British accents. That often makes the effort more than the film is worth.

Betting on the Pope

“When money is free, crazy ideas get funded. When money has a price, funders and investors want to see a direct link to value. That means ideological pet projects are the first to go.”--Greene

***

The Pirates have optioned catcher Henry Davis, infielder Nick Yorke, and outfielder Billy Cook to Triple-A.

***

A fascinating review of Snow White centers on the famous question before the talking mirror, "Who is the fairest," which has always been about beauty. But in the remake, fair is fairness; the queen isn't fair because queens benefit from unequal and unfair economic distribution. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen's economic policies. She's not fair because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people!

***

Betting on the Pope

The Sixteenth Century was a golden era of gambling in Italy, especially in Church affairs and choosing a new Pope.

Sensali — essentially bookies — took bets on everything from the outcome of pregnancies to the identities of new cardinals. Like a Renaissance version of the Polymarket comments section, newsletters sprang up promising insider information on the Vatican’s current thinking. These bets straddled the line between savvy financial hedging and complete degeneracy:

“Throughout the entire first half of 1584, Rome remained stirred by the possibility that Gregory XIII would make an important trip to his hometown of Bologna. Brokers took bets on whether he would go or not, when he would go, and for how long he would go. The wagering centered on part of a larger discussion. Gregory XIII was very sick throughout that year, and many clergy and papal officials — even Philip II of Spain — worried he might die in Bologna and what repercussions that event could have for the city of Rome.”

— J. Hunt, Betting on the Papal Election in Sixteenth-Century Rome

In theory, the cardinals were locked in; in reality, brokers were constantly informed on the results of voting, and newsletters circulated with the latest updates from the conclave. Attempts to stop this, including reinforcing the walls of the conclave and arresting brokers, only slowed the process.

Unsurprisingly, these practices undermined the spiritual authority of the process — and the Church wanted it stopped. In response to poor Cardinal Carafa (the guy falsely accused of being dead), the cardinals ordered the rumor-spreaders to the gallows, and their possessions seized. Meanwhile, popes started issuing bulls trying to shut down the betting markets as early as 1562.

In 1591, the hammer came down. Pope Gregory XIV issued Cogit Nos, a bull punishing a bet on papal duration or conclave outcomes with excommunication.--from No Dumb Ideas

SatStats

So, of the unelected public figures, Musk and the District Federal judges who have stopped the deportation of illegals or changed USAID dispersions, which has the most unelected power?

***

Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust reportedly aims to build a “more inclusive museum experience” and will “decolonize” William Shakespeare’s hometown Stratford-upon-Avon because his work advanced “white supremacy” and also contains language that is “racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful.”

***

SatStats

Germany opened its doors a decade ago to nearly 1 million Syrians, taking in more than any other country in Europe. Today, some 6,000 Syrian doctors make up the single largest group of foreign-born physicians, filling vital gaps in care at hospitals and clinics from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. That is especially true in rural areas, where attracting doctors can be hard. But even in big cities, Syrian doctors now make up the majority of attending physicians at some medical practices.

***

Parts of Birmingham and the northeast of England are worse off than even the poorest parts of Slovenia and Lithuania.

***

“One in four new recruits to the German armed forces drops out within six months of joining, according to the nation’s military watchdog who warned that personnel shortages were pushing troops “to breaking point”.”

***

White Male Fiction
From The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. 

In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

The literary pipeline for white men:

Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. 

The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

***

The number of times people visit the doctor per year varies tremendously across OECD countries from a low of 2.9 in Chile to a high of 17.5 (!) in Korea. It doesn’t seem that there is much correlation between medical spending per capita and life expectancy.

***

The cost of child care now exceeds the price of college tuition in 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to a new analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute.

***

After remaining almost constant for 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic. This surge has persisted even as many conditions have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

***

Views of 'Bioethicists':
• 18% — paying organ donors is OK
• 63% — all extensions of life are equally good regardless of length
• 66% — someone's life being worth living gives no reason to create them
• 40% — being blind is only a disadvantage because society is unjustly designed

***

Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, will end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.

The decision ends 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 postboxes will start to disappear from the start of June.

***

German borrowing costs surged by the most in 17 years on Wednesday, as investors bet on a big boost to the country’s ailing economy from a historic deal to fund investment in the military and infrastructure.

The yield on the 10-year Bund surged 0.21 percentage points to 2.69 percent, its biggest one-day move since 2008, with markets braced for extra government borrowing.

 

Notes

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25 per cent on average in high-income countries, and 35 per cent in the US.

***

Sir Keir Starmer is abolishing NHS England as Labour embarks on the biggest reorganization of the health service for more than a decade.
NHS England will now be brought back under the control of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and the two organizations will be merged over the next two years, leading to about 10,000 job cuts.

***

Poland will look at gaining access to nuclear weapons and also ensure that every man undergoes military training as part of an effort to build a 500,000-strong army to face off the threat from Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the parliament on Friday.

****

Notes (by others)

Every day, thousands of transactions take place in which Americans and Canadians consent to exchange currency for goods.

[Commerce] Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks there is someone they forgot to ask.

“We don’t want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada,” Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “We want to bring [aluminum production] to America.”

Lutnick’s phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no “royal we” n the marketplace—that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border.

There is, indeed, no reason to think about those transactions in a nationalist way at all. The economy is not a World Cup match. When Canadian companies exchange their aluminum for American companies’ money, both sides win.

About 60 percent of the aluminum used by American companies to make all manner of products comes from Canada. That should be none of Lutnick’s business. --Boehm

***

A body of literature called the New History of Capitalism argues (incorrectly, I believe) that Western prosperity is built on legacies of exploitation like colonialism and slavery. Economists are very skeptical because the New Historians of Capitalism rest much of their case on fundamental misunderstandings of basic economic concepts like national income accounting. Economists have criticized some of the movement’s foundational texts in the blogosphere and scholarly journals.

There is a related body of work I’ve called the New Intellectual History of Capitalism, focusing on post World War II neoliberalism and the alleged conspiracy beginning with Mont Pelerin Society’s first meeting in April 1947. Examples of this genre include Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, which stirred public choice circles in 2017 by attempting to link James M. Buchanan to Virginia segregationism in the 1950s and which Michael Munger called “speculative historical fiction.” Other contributions include work by Quinn Slobodian purporting to locate fascist sympathies in the judiciously selected and carefully minced words of Ludwig von Mises.--Carden

***

The principles of liberty provided a revolutionary cause but not a blueprint for designing a government that could preserve liberty. The institutions of governance evolved over time, sometimes through deliberate changes and sometimes as unintended consequences that those who advocated institutional changes did not foresee. Often, they were driven by the desires of citizens to have a louder voice in the operation of the government under which they lived. Thus began the transformation of American government from one based on the ideology of liberty to one based on the ideology of democracy.--Holcolmbe

***

The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.

…..

Especially in the U.S.—where the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—it is stunning that liberty fell so quickly and thoroughly by government decree and with public assent.

Why did free people accept Draconian and illogical lockdowns? The answer reveals the reason for the silence on the pandemic. Censorship and propaganda are part of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two lies—that there was a consensus of experts in favor of lockdowns, and that dissent from that false consensus was dangerous.

Yet that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is also that so many smart and influential people were complicit. They bought into and even advocated irrational measures that defied data, biology and common sense. That acquiescence—frankly, cowardice—and the failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that, understandably, no one wants to revisit.--Atlas

***

As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. You might think that this was an absurd thing to believe given that babies cry and exhibit all the features of pain and pain avoidance. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed as “pre-scientific” by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. There was very little evidence for this theory beyond some gesturing’s towards myelin sheathing. But anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was “no evidence” that babies feel pain (the conflation of no evidence with evidence of no effect).

Most disturbingly, 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

***

U.S. Education

Lydia Mugambe, a UN & Ugandan judge, has been convicted of bringing a woman into England illegally and then forcing her to work as a slave. Mugambe tried to evade justice by claiming she had diplomatic immunity, which has now been removed
Mugambe was an African U.N. Criminal Tribunal judge, was a fellow at Columbia University, and has written extensively about human rights. 

She has been convicted of slavery. Slavery.

***

In 1940 Gen. Henry Arnold, head of the U.S. Army Air Corps, said using incendiary bombs against cities was “contrary to our national policy of attacking only military objectives.” As the war with Japan went on, American military planners came to believe such tactics would be needed for victory. In March 1945, a fleet of B-29 bombers lit Tokyo on fire, killing more civilians in a night than died during the entire eight-month Blitz on Britain. The use of atomic weapons would follow.--Jonathan W. Jordan in wsj on “Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan” by Richard Overy.

***

The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover accidentally blown off the test shaft during a nuclear test in Nevada 38 days earlier. It reached speeds equal to six times Earth’s escape velocity and was never found. (Wikipedia). Operation Plumbbob! I find I believe every AI sent to me but if you can't believe Wiki, what can you believe?

***

U.S. Education

The educators have set "truancy" as the absence of more than 10% of school days. 10%.

New York City's truancy rate was 25%; it is now 34%.

So over one-third of students are truants.

In 2024, thirty-nine percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the mathematics assessment. Proficient.

Twenty-four percent tested below basic. Basic

Sixty-one percent tested below proficient. Proficient.

72% of eighth graders tested below proficient, 39% below basic.

Why is no one screaming?

These alarming numbers will weigh heavily upon those students who have decided not to attend school. Those students who did not learn math and/or read poorly will also suffer. But the nation will suffer the most. This nation can not tolerate the number of unachieving kids becoming unachieving adults. No nation can. It's as if 40% of the nation had become addicts. These are pre-industrial age levels of staring, shuffling, and nonproductive outsiders living below subsistence levels in a vibrant, demanding productive world.

This large group will not develop to offer their individual skills and talents to the culture.

Then what? They will need to be supported by those participating members of the culture. Money will be leeched from investment, maintenance, defense, education, and lifestyle.

And, of course, the sequela of personal failure--drug use, depression, criminality, family irresponsibility, and violence--will rise with their concomitant financial and social demands.

This is a country whose fire bells are becoming background music.

Eclipse

 

The ancestors of all modern humans split off from a mystery population 1.5 million years ago and then reconnected with them 300,000 years ago, a new genetic model suggests. The unknown population contributed 20% of our DNA and may have boosted humans' brain function.

***

‘I NEVER imagined,” former NATO secretary general Anders Rasmussen wrote in a Wall Street Journal column last week, that “I would hear a US president declare his intentions to ‘expand our territory,’ as Donald Trump did in his inaugural address.”

***

Arson of Tesla products continues. Fortunately, the Crew-9 splashdown occurred at sea, surrounded by dolphin guardians, inaccessible to vandals and psychotics.

***


Eclipse

We've come a long way from those days when the Church would put an army in the field. But those changes may be logistic; the Church is under-armed.

 The tendency to politicize everything by everyone lives on.

Even the most remarkable human achievement in history has been eclipsed by politics.

This is from a tech site I don't know well:

"In February, President Trump and the chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, began to say that the two astronauts were "stranded" in space because the Biden administration did not want to bring them home. "They got left in space," Trump said.

"They were left up there for political reasons," Musk concluded.

Just what those political reasons were never specified. But the basic message was clear: Biden, bad; Trump, good.

The reality is that NASA set a plan for the return of Wilmore and Williams last August. The spacecraft that brought them back to Earth on Tuesday safely docked to the space station in September. They could have come home at any time since. NASA—not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making—decided the best and safest option was to keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until early this year. Musk knew this plan. He had to sign off on it. Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.

And still, the lies came.
 
On Monday, the president posted a long statement on Truth Social that repeated this canard of the Biden administration, "They shamefully forgot about the Astronauts, because they considered it to be very embarrassing event for them—another thing I inherited from that group of incompetents."

Trump then went on to state that he and Musk had just sent up a SpaceX Dragon (which, in point of fact, launched last September) to rescue the crew

One of the common refrains about spaceflight for decades and decades is that it is nonpartisan.

That is, the Apollo Program brought the country together in the turbulent 1960s and helped make everyone feel good about the country. Pretty much ever since then, Republicans, Democrats, and independents have generally supported NASA and civil spaceflight. If you watch committee meetings in the House and Senate, the members always say this, and the discussions are nearly always cordial. As for the "incompetent" Biden administration, they didn't really play politics with the space program. They liked the "Artemis Program" created by the Trump administration well enough that they simply kept it.

But if we're going to start lying about basic truths like the fate of Wilmore and Williams—and let's be real, the only purpose of this lie is to paint the Trump administration as saviors in comparison to the Biden administration—then space is not going to remain apolitical for all that long. And in the long run, that would be bad for NASA.

Let's also be clear that Musk and SpaceX are currently flying the only spacecraft in the Western world that is capable of reliably flying humans into orbit. Without Dragon, NASA would have been beholden to Russia for the last five years for human spaceflight. And when Boeing's Starliner had issues nine months ago en route to the International Space Station, NASA was fortunate to have the reliable Dragon program to turn to.

Yet perverting that good news story into some tawdry political gain cheapens SpaceX, NASA, and Wilmore and Williams. In this case, the truth was beautiful. When one American space company had a problem, another stepped in, and the heroic astronauts made it home safely with a perfect backdrop.

If only the story ended there."

Another link from the same source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/nasa-officials-undermine-musks-claims-about-stranded-astronauts/

The truth is a camp-follower, loved but with few loyalists, who grows old and succeeds by attrition. A redacted account of the JFK assassination has just been released. But it is hateful to see this towering human achievement grasped and hoarded.