SatStats

On this day: 

217 BC
The Romans, led by Gaius Flaminius, are ambushed and defeated by Hannibal at the Battle of Lake Trasimene.
1734
In Montreal in New France, a slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of the city.
1791
King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family begin the Flight to Varennes during the French Revolution.
1798
Irish Rebellion of 1798: The British Army defeats Irish rebels at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
1877
The Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrants convicted of murder, are hanged at the Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons.
1900
Boxer Rebellion. China formally declared war on the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan, as an edict issued from the Dowager Empress Cixi.
1942
World War II: A Japanese submarine surfaces near the Columbia River in Oregon, firing 17 shells at nearby Fort Stevens in one of only a handful of attacks by the Japanese against the United States mainland.
1964
Three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, United States, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
2001
A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicts 13 Saudis and a Lebanese in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.
2004
SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.

***

A strain of bacteria found aboard the Tiangong space station in 2023 appears to be a variety never previously identified on Earth.

Following its discovery by members of the Shenzhou-15 mission, the crew swabbed the space station with sterilization wipes, froze the samples they collected, and sent them back to Earth for review.

Sent them back to earth?

***

On Sam Haggerty's single to center, former infielder Oneil Cruz ran over to field the ball, but it went under his glove. Rather than chase after the ball, Cruz stood and watched it roll away, allowing Adam Frazier, a second baseman and another volunteer outfielder, to back up the play. Had Cruz immediately run after the ball, he probably would have gotten to the ball first. 

The Press called this "a bad look."  

***

What if, as AI learns, it becomes unimpressed with us?

***

Re: bad looks. Is anyone disturbed about Gabbard's opinion about Iran's nuclear program?

***

SatStats


The Earth rotates on a tilted axis, about 23.5 degrees off vertical, possibly the result of a collision early in its history/ This tilt si responsible for the seasons and the summer solstice, the day with the longest exposure to sunlight in the year. The longest day--today--with apologies to Cornelius Ryan.

The Gregorian calendar has 365 days, but the Earth actually takes about 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. That extra quarter-day is why we have leap years — and why the solstice shifts between June 20 and June 21.

The U.S. fertility rate in 2023 was just 54.5 births per 1,000 women, a historic low.
Since peaking in 1957 at 122.9 births per 1,000 women, the rate has been in steady decline.
More women are having children later in life, with women aged 30–34 now showing the highest birth rates.


The data shows the U.S. general fertility rate peaked in 1957 at 122.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44.
By 2023, that rate had fallen to 54.5—less than half the mid-century high. The sharpest declines came post-1960s, but the downward trend continues in the modern era.

There will be more deaths than births in the US by 2036
Factoring in immigration, the US population will peak in 2080

The median age in the US is 38.5, up from 34.3 in the year 2000
Without immigration, the working-age US population would not have grown since 2000

Three-fifths of advanced economies worldwide already have more deaths than births
Two-thirds of the global population live in countries where fertility is below the replacement rate

The global population is projected to peak at 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s
China is forecast to lose over half of its current population by 2100

Investigations have confirmed the presence of hybrid termite swarms every year since 2021, including in April 2025.
The team genetically tested the termites and found that they had genes from both species.

A new organism.

Drug overdose deaths have been falling for the last 18 months.

Since 2010, the UK has cut every public sector department's expenditure in real per capita terms apart from health. It has moved the country to the bottom of the G7 in spending and taxation.

Private capital funds have taken more money from investors than they’ve distributed back to them in gains for six straight years, for a total gap of $1.56 trillion over that period.

Immigrants have started more than half (44 of 87) of America's startup companies valued at $1 billion or more.

Energy, Properly Used

 

On this day:
1972
Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex
2009
During the Iranian election protests, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video and spreads virally on the Internet, making it “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.

***

Are the speeches about the Iran threat new, or do they use the old Iraq WMD speeches to save paper?

***

28% of people surveyed recently feel that the Biden White House was open and honest about Biden's decline.

***

Energy, Properly Used

Kevin O’Leary commented that the recent meetings at the G7 showed that "the country that has the energy, has the AI, has the economy, has the productivity, and eventually is superior in warfare."

“This is all going to go to drones and robotics one day, and the country with the best AI,” he added.

O'Leary recently warned investors not to conflate AI enthusiasm with real capacity. "You can't just pull that from the local grid without sending electricity bills soaring. Cities won't allow it, and communities push back hard," he said last month, calling power availability the new prime metric for tech valuations.

So AI is the gatekeeper for future security and economic development, despite requiring a tremendous energy supply, a supply that has to be either developed or sacrificed elsewhere and diverted. 

How is this different from the internal combustion engine debate of old? We were told then we simply had to sacrifice energy production and move on to more responsible energy use--i.e. electric car engines--despite the inconvenience and cost, for a greater good. Now we're told we must ramp up our energy production, regardless of its source, with its recently cursed side effects, inconvenience, and cost, for the greater good. The tech race is on, and anyone can win. But anyone without great energy production will fail. AI has got to be fed. 

And what about bitcoin mining? I've seen energy farms for bitcoin mining as big as Section 8 housing projects. Certainly, bitcoin wealth enriches society and is for the greater good.

It should be clear that unexpected sacrifices must be made in our complex, modern world. The only certainty is who has to make those sacrifices.

Some Questions About Iran

On this day:

1269
King Louis IX of France orders all Jews found in public without an identifying yellow badge to be fined ten livres of silver.
1306
The Earl of Pembroke’s army defeats Bruce’s Scottish army at the Battle of Methven.
1586
English colonists leave Roanoke Island, after failing to establish England’s first permanent settlement in North America.
1846
The first officially recorded, organized baseball match is played under Alexander Cartwright’s rules on Hoboken, New Jersey’s Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23-1. Cartwright umpired.
1953
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.
1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.
1982
The body of God’s Banker, Roberto Calvi is found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.

*

Is Caitlin Clark being targeted in the WNBA despite her remarkable impact on fans and on the game's popularity?

*

Karen Read was found not guilty. Very interesting case, essentially, showing 'unanswered question' replacing 'reasonable doubt.' And, of course, the privilege given to white women with good jawlines and high cheekbones.

*

Some Questions About Iran

Iran and Israel are beating each other to a pulp. Iran is particularly damaged and seems to no longer control its airspace. so Israel theoretically could continue air attacks until it runs out of armaments. How come one has declared war on the other? What would war look like if not this?

*

It is said that Iran is months away from a nuclear weapon. This has been the war chant for at least the last decade. Iran is always just a step away from destroying the Middle East. The last version of this was the chant of WMDs in Iraq, which created a military black hole for years. And, of course, we poor citizens are inundated with other imminent crises: global cooling, climate change nee global warming, population growth leading to global starvation, population shrinkage leading to welfare state collapse, social security bankruptcy, falling test scores, and growing adolescent stupidity. These are legitimate concerns for thinking people, but do they deserve a national war footing?

*

Have we become numb to the war drums of crisis? The endless war chants of the Press: Trump is Hitler, threats to democracy, WMDs? How can a democracy make reliable decisions when its information system is as warped as a midnight infomercial? Will we have to rely on outsiders with their own agendas, like Israel?

*

The silence of America's enemies is deafening. No one is supporting Iran in the Middle East. Vicious theocracies are biting their collective tongues. Even China is quiet. What does this mean? Are all these countries aware of the Iranian threat? Is everyone worried?

*

There is also silence from America's friends. The G7 actually voted on innocuous wishes for peace. Ciphers.

*

War does expose the comic. The dithering Europeans, Putin's clownish offer to mediate peace, the American Left's stunned silence. 21% of responding Americans are "unconcerned" over Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

*

What does this say about a nation's internal politics? Is the Iranian theocracy representative of the Iranian citizen? Because they wear clerical robes, do the religious leaders get more of a vote because, presumably, they are closer to God? Does anyone care about the poor Iranian citizen caught in this mess?

*

If Iran is a threat to the world because of their homicidal theocracy, what about North Korea? Should they have a bomb? 

*

Where does the U.S. get the authority to declare who should have a nuclear weapon and who should not?

*

What would be the model for a government that gives up its nuclear ambitions for the betterment of world peace? Libya?

*

Everyone was upset about the Russian attack near the reactor in Ukraine. Is an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear facility okay?

History and Its Discontents

On this day:

618
Li Yuan becomes Emperor Gaozu of Tang, initiating three centuries of Tang Dynasty rule over China.
1178
Five Canterbury monks see what is possibly the Giordano Bruno crater being formed. It is believed that the current oscillations of the Moon’s distance from the Earth (on the order of meters) are a result of this collision.
1429
French forces under the leadership of Joan of Arc defeat the main English army under Sir John Fastolf at the Battle of Patay. This turns the tide of the Hundred Years’ War.
1815
Napoleonic Wars: The Battle of Waterloo results in the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte by the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher forcing him to abdicate the throne of France for the second and last time.
1830
French invasion of Algeria
1858
Charles Darwin receives a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace that includes nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin’s own, prompting Darwin to publish his theory.
1994
The Troubles: the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) open fire inside a pub in Loughinisland, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, killing six civilians and wounding five.

***

Altman says Meta is offering $100 million signing bonuses, plus substantial annual compensation, to attract AI researchers.

***

The leader of Iran is 86.

***

Israel and Iran are bombing the devil out of each other, but neither has declared war. Why is that?

***

Is there scientific evidence of dye toxicity, or is this just another fad?

***

Rep. Omar, an immigrant from Somalia, believes the U.S. has become "one of the worst countries in the world."

***

History and Its Discontents

History weighs heavily on us. Theories abound. History is fulfilling itself, creating an inevitable future. We are psychologically prone to the same motives and emotions that have made the past, so the future will resemble it. Traditions mold us; institutions contain us.

We may be too young a country to exhibit this phenomenon, but Europe is very good at it. They have wars that last for decades, sometimes even centuries. They even reuse battlegrounds in addition to claims. Conservation. Despite this, not much has changed. Animosities, hatred, homicidal philosophies, and men are chewed to a pulp--and it starts again.

When this land was discovered, it was pristine. No wheel, no horse, some metal jewelry, little agriculture. The Europeans brought the things they could carry. They did not bring their enemies, only the memories of them. 

The Europeans struggled with the hostile environment, against an unfortunate Stone Age people, against their memories, and created a government out of the best of European thought. Contemplative. Based on the limits of rule, the best of man and what he could achieve when he was not suppressed for the advantage of others. A new start for the world.

As America has developed, it has had problems. It became an agricultural power, fought a war with itself to finish its vision, and struggled through the nascent industrial period. Throughout its growth, it has endured a lingering curse: some people who come here cannot embrace the future. They cannot escape their history.

Their memory created ghosts they think must be fought. Ethnicities battled in the cities over problems thousands of miles--and often years--away. Embittered European anarchists moved here and remained embittered despite not having an oligarchic enemy. When America entered the world community, some Americans took international positions based on their family origins. German-Americans joined isolationists in opposition to joining the European war. Israel created several opposition alliances. The homicidal caste vision of the homicidal Marxists has morphed like a malignant pest into CRT.

None of these problems is native to the nation. They are imported, like a new competitive fish species dumped in the ballast of ocean-going vessels that destabilize port environments. Furious Arab students might have an argument about Israel (although, to my mind, it is three generations too late). But it is not an argument for the New York streets. It is an argument for the Europeans and the Middle East. Our concern with the Middle East is shipping safety. And preventing nuclear insanity. The students involved might bring wonderful talent to the nation, but these angers are simply dislocated and should be repatriated.

No Kings

On this day:
1673
French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reach the Mississippi River and become the first Europeans to make a detailed account of its course
1775
American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.This was a significant encounter, a planned battle, and the British famously bayonetted the American wounded. It became a focal point and rallying cry. The important Patriot leader, Dr. Joseph Warren, was also killed.
1930
U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law.
1939
Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison
1940
The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
1944
Iceland declares independence from Denmark and becomes a republic.
1972
Watergate scandal: five White House operatives are arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in an attempt by some members of the Republican party to illegally wiretap the opposition.
1994
Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O.J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

***

Can Israel (and the world) be successful against Iran without U.S. air strikes?

***

Some ask with outrage, Why are ICE agents masked? Because some in this country are so crazy, they will identify their opponents, hunt them down, and kill them and their families. 

That's the reason to identify them, right? So they can be intimidated? Even harmed? And their families? Right?

And masked criminals in demonstrations are ok?

Is the idea here that the government's agents cannot be held responsible for their acts if they are masked? In a country that can read a license plate from space?

***

Some publicity was gained when a Canadian Indigenous leader who greeted world heads of state arriving for the Group of Seven summit said he was “filled with rage” and considered leaving before Donald Trump arrived, saying the U.S. president has “caused much pain and suffering in the world.”
Why this man felt this way or deserved this publicity was not explained.

***

No Kings

The No Kings marches are over. It was a tough sell, being held on the 250th anniversary of the U.S. military responsible for separating the U.S. from England and...its king. And, of course, America doesn't have a king. And had a democratic election 4 months ago as mandated by its federal constitution. And a Supreme Court. Maybe they don't know how monarchies work. It was especially difficult in Canada, which has a king, so they bravely called it No Tyrants.

But at least Canada has a monarchy to protest, albeit fecklessly. The U.S. is a constitutional republic with a Supreme Court, not a monarchy. But these are the same people who did not care at all that the last president was non-compos and was surreptitiously substituted for by a masquerading cabal. That is an aristocracy. That is treason. One would think those supporting the anti-autocracy No Kings would be outraged.

One might look at the considerable contribution of teachers' unions. This probably means the No Kings moniker is poetic, but with 40% of the country's 8th graders unable to read, it might be that the teachers really don't know America doesn't have a king, any more than they know what a woman is. They clearly have little regard for the American Revolution.

At the dark heart of the protests is Indivisible, a far-left activist group that has reportedly received $8 million in funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation between 2017 and 2023. Soros is not a king. Nor is he just one of the boys.

And big contributions from billionaire Walmart heiress Christy Walton, who is hard at work trying to put the "ditz" in "philanthropy."

One particularly galling bit of information includes a list of non-profits receiving federal grants contributing to this embarrassment. It is linked below for the impending furious (don't know the link):

https://datarepublican.com/nokings/

Regulatory State

On this day:

1755
French and Indian War: The French surrender Fort Beauséjour to the British, leading to the expulsion of the Acadians.
1816
Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, and inspires his challenge that each guest write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness.
1858
Abraham Lincoln delivers his House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.
1871
The University Tests Act allows students to enter the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham without religious tests (except for those intending to study theology).
1904
Irish author James Joyce begins a relationship with Nora Barnacle and subsequently uses the date to set the actions for his novel Ulysses; this date is now traditionally called “Bloomsday”. Barnacle. She must have been quite a woman to overcome that name with a word guy like him.
1940
World War II: Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain becomes Chief of State of Vichy France (Chef de l'État Français).
1963
Soviet Space Program: Vostok 6 Mission – Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.

***

"Some hold that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name."--Mamet. A truly funny, complex line.

 
***

Iran and Israel are not officially at war. Why is that?

***

The Pirates are the lowest-scoring team in baseball. Analytics are great, but it seems they may not be a formula.

***

The Middle East conflict will not be resolved until the decision is made whether to use U.S. bunker-busters. What will be interesting is if the U.S. is not given the easy decision as a result of Iran attacking--purposely or accidentally--U.S. sites or personnel. Behavior of death cults are difficult to predict.

***

Regulatory State

In his book, George Washington, Entrepreneur, John Berlau warns of the dangers of “regulation without representation” – and argues that the entrepreneurial George Washington shared that same fear. He documents George Washington’s amazing entrepreneurship and innovation. Starting out from a humble background compared to the other Founders and lacking resources for a college education, Washington became an apprentice surveyor for the neighboring Fairfax family at 16. He quickly built a lucrative freelance surveying practice and speculated in real estate by purchasing or asking for compensation in some of the undeveloped land he surveyed.

Decades later—after he acquired Mount Vernon due to the untimely deaths of his older brother Lawrence and Lawrence’s family—Washington abandoned tobacco as the farm’s cash crop, diversified into wheat and dozens of other crops, and built a grist mill to sift flour that he would export throughout the colonies, to the West Indies and Great Britain. Washington would put his name on these bags of flour, essentially trademarking the flour with the “G. Washington” imprint on the bags to differentiate it from his competitors, pioneering the practice of branding we have today. In addition, he turned Mount Vernon into what historian Harlow Giles Unger called in his book, The Unexpected George Washington, “a vast agro-industrial enterprise” that included a blacksmith shop to make tools such as horseshoes and nails and a mini textile factory to make clothing, the latter of which was run largely by Martha Washington. Mount Vernon has since rebuilt the grist mill and whiskey distillery that Washington had placed near the grist mill after he was president.

But these very ventures pulled Washington into the vortex of regulation that the British Parliament foisted upon the American colonies. The red tape stemmed especially from mercantilist trade policies. The Navigation Act of 1651 gave Great Britain complete control of trade routes for the colonies, which meant that colonists officially could only export and import goods with the mother country.

With limited trade routes and high shipping costs for goods from Britain, colonists began to produce their own items and grow their own crops, just as Washington did with his ventures at Mount Vernon. The Industrial Revolution started gaining traction in Great Britain during the eighteenth century and also made its way to the colonies on a small scale, thanks to the efforts of individual entrepreneurs like Washington.

But Parliament saw colonial manufacturing upstarts like the enterprises at Mount Vernon as a threat to British manufacturers, despite how small they were in comparison. Parliament passed laws such as the Iron Act, Hat Act, and Wool Act to restrict or ban colonial entrepreneurs from making everything from nails and horseshoes to hats and wool carpets.

Taxation has been limited in certain situations--like religion--because inherent in taxation is its ability to destroy. It allows those taxed to be crushed or molded for the benefit of others, often the writer of the law.

Regulation is molding and destruction by other means. Why are we not similarly cautious about it?

The Watchmaker

Government allocation, that is, allocation by politicians and bureaucrats, at least partly replaces market signals and incentives.

***

Wild enthusiasm for a government project usually occurs only when we are putting costs on other people.

***

The Watchmaker

Penrose and Hawking did calculations based on their research on black holes. Two of their conclusions:

“The odds against an ordered universe happening by random chance are 10^10^30th to 1, against."

And,

"The odds against life are 10^10^123rd to 1, against.”

"If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence."--Hawkings

The Enlightenment, the reliance on reason, created tremendous problems for religion. Regardless of the various times and philosophies, religion relies on faith. The unreasonable, the miraculous, the very essence of the unknowable inherent to religion was anathema to the Enlightenment. Eventually, this strictness created a reaction with a new reliance on the individual and the value of his feelings, Romanticism. A quasi-enlightenment bridge for religion at this time was Deism. Deism was the belief in a God who created existence but did not interfere in life. The classic image was the Watchmaker, used by William Paley. Paley asks himself what he would think if, while walking in a field, he came upon a stone? Not too much. But if he came upon a watch! What would that complexity imply?

God, as the Watchmaker, made this complex and precise world but did not interfere with it. Once created, the watch ran on its own.

Not only could a reasonable man look at the complexity of life and see the logic behind this complex Creator, he could rationalize why he need not hold God responsible when things went wrong. This analogy continues to this day in various guises, most recently in the Intelligent Design movement, which argues that the cellular information-based genetic system is a modern example of the computer-oriented Watchmaker. So each age builds its own spiritual mirror.

Our current mirror is now clouded. Our new understanding of the universe has become arcane, mathematical and recondite, creating a new, upper strata of knowledge-priests reminiscent of older times..

"It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it," Dirac wrote in 1963. "One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe."  

Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer who has worked at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has recently claimed that a mathematical formula could be the ultimate proof of God's existence. (Warning. The good Dr. Soon is hated by many because he is a global warming skeptic.)

At the core of Soon's thesis is the fine-tuning argument, which posits that the precise nature of the universe’s physical laws is too perfect to have occurred by chance. The theory, initially proposed by Cambridge mathematician Paul Dirac, implies that the universe’s conditions are so precisely balanced that they suggest intentional design. A small variation in constants like gravity or the cosmological constant could have prevented the formation of galaxies, stars, and even life itself.

In an interview on the Tucker Carlson Network last year, he referenced  Dirac, who predicted the existence of “antimatter” in 1928, specifically a counterpart to the electron. Four years later, in 1932, Carl Anderson discovered the positron, a particle with the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge. Soon described this as miraculous, highlighting Dirac’s ability to predict its existence before any experimental confirmation.

Dr. Soon also referred to geometry in mathematics, specifically the concept of closed curvature in spacetime without gravity, which has long challenged the understanding of how mathematics relates to the real world. He noted that studies have explored this topic extensively. Hermann Weyl, a German mathematician, introduced the Weyl tensor to measure spacetime curvature without relying on mass-energy. This tensor helps describe tidal forces in a gravitational field without referencing the energy-momentum tensor.
John Archibald Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, gave “Geometrodynamics”, proposing all physical phenomena could be understood in terms of spacetime geometry, and suggesting that curvature can exist due to the vacuum structure rather than mass-energy. He also introduced geons—self-contained gravitational or electromagnetic waves held together by their own energy, demonstrating curved spacetime without traditional gravitational sources.
Willem de Sitter’s solutions to Einstein’s field equations describe “de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spacetimes,” where a universe with positive curvature is driven by a cosmological constant, independent of any matter content.

How many people can understand this? But, as difficult--and harmonious--as the obscure might be, it is not necessarily spiritual. A Rubik's Cube is difficult and harmonious.

Dr. Soon concluded by saying, “There are many incidents and examples like this. So sometimes we have to bow down and occasionally take a deep breath, and maybe some ever-present forces will illuminate our lives. God has given us light. All we have to do is just follow the light.”

Some Questions on Iran/Israel

On this day:

1645
English Civil War: Battle of Naseby – 12,000 Royalist forces are beaten by 15,000 Parliamentarian soldiers.
1775
American Revolutionary War: the Continental Army is established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Army.
1789
Mutiny on the Bounty: Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 7,400 km journey in an open boat.
1800
The French Army of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in Northern Italy and re-conquers Italy.
1807
Emperor Napoleon I’s French Grande Armee defeats the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland in Poland (modern Russian Kaliningrad Oblast) ending the War of the Fourth Coalition.
1830
Beginning of the French colonization of Algeria: 34,000 French soldiers begin their invasion of Algiers, landing 27 kilometers west at Sidi Fredj.
1846
Bear Flag Revolt begins – Anglo settlers in Sonoma, California, start a rebellion against Mexico and proclaim the California Republic.
1940
The Soviet Union presents an ultimatum to Lithuania resulting in Lithuanian loss of independence.
1940
World War II: Paris falls under German occupation, and Allied forces retreat.
1941
June deportation, the first major wave of Soviet mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, begins.
1947
Roswell UFO incident A supposed UFO crash lands in Roswell, New Mexico

***

Disagreements and protests are inherent to freedom and democracy. But are confrontations inherent to democracy?  Aren't elections the alternative to confrontation?

***

CNN reporter Christine Amanpour stated she was fearful to visit the U.S. to speak at Harvard, comparing her anxiety to that of visiting North Korea. Does that kind of judgment disqualify her opinions elsewhere?

***

Military celebrations are planned in the U.S. to mark the 250th anniversary of the American armed forces. There is also a "Trooping of the Colour" in London, a parade to celebrate the King's birthday.

Demonstrations are planned in the U.S. with the theme "No Kings." Is that a protest against Charles ' birthday? Do the demonstrators think London is in the U.S.? Are the protesters just products of the American education system who think the U.S. is part of Great Britain? Is this a protest against the Biden Regency? Or is this just incoherent?
An additional question has been raised in interviews with Democrats: they are suddenly and inexplicably concerned about the cost of the parade. One can only hope this outbreak of fiscal responsibility seeps into the rest of the national expenses.

***

Last month, over 350 academics, clinicians, and activists signed an open letter titled “Biology is not binary.” Addressed to Bridget Phillipson, the United Kingdom’s Minister for Women and Equalities, its purpose was to denounce recent legal and policy developments in the U.K. that reassert the biological basis of sex in law.

***

Some Questions on Iran/Israel

The conflagration in the Middle East raises some serious world questions and some strange domestic ones. 

Despite the proximity of Iran's proxy anti-Israel groups, this is not a border dispute. Iran is 1,000 miles from Israel.

1. This conflict creates a clear confrontation of significantly divergent world views. Israel vs. Iran pits the totalitarian East against the democratic West, unelected religious hierarchy vs. elected representation, homicidal and obliterative motives vs. desire for survival. These appear to be obvious conflicts that essentially involve the old, tribal, authoritarian world against the modern, reflective, individual present. It will be interesting to see how the college-educated street demonstrators and the increasingly peculiar Democrats come down on this question.

As an aside, the Democrat Vice-President candidate, Tim Walz, said the problems between Iran and Israel require mediation, and his idea of the national intermediary with the most "moral authority" is.....China. China. The Democrat VP candidate thinks China is the world's moral leader. Understand, he really thinks this.

2. Israeli planes refueled over Syria. Could that be done without some international agreement?

3. The precision and thoroughness of the Israeli attacks raise the question of how espionage is best done. Israeli success seems much more personal than electronic.

4. The Israelis launched their drones from inside Iran, much like Ukraine's successful attack on Russia. This should raise some serious questions about domestic land ownership. Free property ownership has always been a basic principle in American philosophy, but this technology might challenge that. China has bought a lot of American farmland.

5. Iran is a true menace to the world community. Their hatred for Israel has far-reaching effects even for uninterested parties: their proxies attack commercial ships in international waters and kill randomly. Israel's success so far might well help the economies and stability of countries around the world, even countries that hate them. They have become like a strange, special unit group for the world, perhaps an international mercenary in some future dystopian world. Imagine a Davos strike force.

Clearly Clouded

On this day:

1525
Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns.
1966
The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
1983
Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune (the furthest planet from the Sun at the time).

***

Law enforcement in Miami-Dade County is seeking to arrest former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown on a charge of attempted murder, according to a warrant reviewed by The Washington Post.

***

The self-indulgent, incoherent, manipulative, attention-seeking, entitled, and insincere press conference break-in by the California senator is an encapsulation of the self-indulgent, incoherent, manipulative, attention-seeking, entitled, and insincere street demonstrations. The real problem is that these people are too old to grow out of it, so it seems we are stuck with them.

***

Clearly Clouded

A modifier is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as "a word or phrase that is used with another word or phrase to limit or add to its meaning." "The tall girl" distinguishes one girl from the others based on height.

Sometimes the effect is not clarifying, it's funny. George Carlin made a living on contradictory modifying phrases, oxymorons, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, acting naturally, and civil war. Sometimes it's a great literary device: with “Oh, brawling love, O loving hate,” Shakespeare describes the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet. 

And sometimes it's purposely obfuscating.

What are we to think of "mostly peaceful demonstrations?" Is it like almost warm, generally bloodless, sort of clean, pretty honest, usually safe, generally accurate, nearly won, mostly pasteurized? Unlike "the tall girl," phrasing meant to refine the meaning, these phrases are meant to diffuse meaning, detract from the word, and its specificity.

Now, that said, what does social justice mean?.

Iran

On this day:
1429
Hundred Years’ War: Joan of Arc leads the French army in their capture of the city and the English commander, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk in the second day of the Battle of Jargeau.
1775
American Revolution: British general Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.
1776
The Virginia Declaration of Rights is adopted.
1967
Venera program: Venera 4 is launched (it will become the first space probe to enter another planet’s atmosphere and successfully return data).
1994
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are murdered outside her home in Los Angeles, California. O.J. Simpson is later acquitted of the killings, but is held liable in wrongful death civil suit.

***

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.--From Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address was delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838, titled "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions". He was 28.

***

Japan is on the verge of revolutionizing deep space exploration with its innovative nuclear battery technology, using the power of radioactive waste to provide energy for space probes for over a century, offering a reliable alternative to solar power in regions of space where sunlight is scarce.

***

Iran

The United Nations nuclear watchdog’s Board of Governors has approved a resolution declaring Iran is not complying with its commitment to international nuclear safeguards, diplomatic sources told Al Jazeera. Russia, China, and Burkina Faso were among the members of the 35-seat board to vote against the resolution.

In response, Iran‘s Foreign Ministry and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) announced in a joint statement that the country will build a new uranium enrichment facility “in a secure location”, adding that “other measures … will be announced later”.

AEOI also announced that it will replace the first-generation centrifuges at the Fordow nuclear site with “advanced sixth-generation” centrifuges, signalling that it will continue its nuclear enrichment.

Israel’s foreign ministry urged the international community to “respond decisively” to the resolution.

Trump reiterated that he would not allow Iran to have an atomic bomb amid mounting speculation that Israel could strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

On Thursday, Israeli media reported that Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Mossad intelligence agency head David Barnea will travel to meet Witkoff ahead of the US-Iran nuclear talks in Oman.

On Wednesday, Iran threatened to target US military bases in the region if conflict breaks out.

According to reports, the US has also evacuated military families and non-essential staff from several countries in the Middle East amid the ongoing regional tensions.

Wars in Europe are often distinguished by time, like decades or a hundred years. Someone casually questioning how the wars in history--countless and purposeless and unending--could possibly occur might well start here. Who wants this confrontation? Iran wants to obliterate Israel, and Israel does not want to be obliterated. Certainly, Israel's citizens don't want to be obliterated. But do Iran's citizens want to risk death to obliterate Israel?

This conflict has been simmering, with the occasional outbreak of murder, torture, and despair, for decades. This is beginning to look more and more like Iran has strapped on the traditional Middle East dress, the suicide vest. And Israel will not have some unresolved conflict with its sworn enemy. They will not take a standing eight count or stagger away, bloodied and damaged, having "learned their lesson". If they fail, they will take the entire Middle East with them to perdition.

Ahab to Ahab.

How could reasonable men reach this point? How could leaders of innocent civilians allow confrontations to progress to threaten themselves--even the whole world--with destruction?

The history of man has been a conflict between those who work and those who would rather steal from those who work than work themselves. Those who work gradually built up their defenses so that those who would not work would find stealing others' production too dangerous.

Enter ideology--philosophy, nationalism, and religion--that taught that stealing from others was just. And the death of others was deserved, even demanded, even inevitable, and that suicide was infinitely superior to certain mundane life situations. The tremendous advantages of the cohesion of family and community have become distorted and dangerous.

Madmen, ideologues, and morons will have their moment. And, despite Lincoln's confidence, even America may not be safe.




 

Owners and Squatters

On this day:
1184 BC
Trojan War: Troy is sacked and burned, according to calculations by Eratosthenes.
1776
The Continental Congress appoints Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.
1938
Second Sino-Japanese War: The Chinese Nationalist government creates the 1938 Yellow River flood to halt Japanese forces. 500,000 to 900,000 civilians are killed.

***

James Howells, who lost his hard drive containing $742M in Bitcoin, finally ended his search for the hard drive after 12 years.

***,

"I could end the deficit in five minutes,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in a 2011 interview. “You just pass a law that says that any time there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

This is getting some renewed internet action. The problem is with the "pass a law" part.

***

Why are students demonstrating at Harvard over Israel and not in front of the Russian embassy over Ukraine?

***

7% of people over age 65 are regular cannabis users.

***

Owners and Squatters

Israel and its enemies is more complex than simple jealousy, although it plays a part. It is the worst of tribalism, expansionism, greed, unforgiving historical resentment--the Hatfields and the McCoys writ large, armed to the teeth and blinded by righteous fury over something most can't remember.

The West, horrified by the murderous WWII, tried to set aside a self-contained political and cultural entity where Jews could enrich and protect themselves. They chose a desert occupied by ill-defined, wandering nomads who had just lost a war. Losing a war has consequences, usually a lot worse than losing some desert. 

But drawing borders and appointing kings have a lot to overcome. See Korea, Vietnam, the Ottoman Empire, the 100 Years' War, and much of Africa. And while the Jewish claim to the area is well documented, everything in history has a precedent. Jewish claims in the Middle East are more literate than the Irishman's claim to London, but no more valid. And how old is national sovereignty anyway? The Treaty of Westphalia? So, all borders start from 1648?

There should be a statute of limitations on national sovereignty. Everyone has some claim or other if you go back far enough. Right now, publicity and PR trump everything. But, as time goes by, big weapons in the hands of a few will trump everything. If the world thinks Gaza is a problem now, imagine what will happen when Iran has a nuclear weapon. How will these problems be resolved? 

Israel was created out of whole cloth by a sympathetic Britain--ratified by the UN--in a land they conquered, for the benefit of a culture that had suffered horribly. Tough but historically common. (minus the kindness)  And the conquered people were displaced. (unsympathically) So, which injustices will we right? Greece-Turkey? The Falklands? The defeat of the Anglo-Saxons? The defeat of a Stone Age people without the wheel by the European People of Steam?

Do the Picts want Edinburgh back? The Chiricahua want Austin? It was said seriously by a commentator about the LA riots that California was originally Mexico's. That is, they stole it first. 

Putin is a metaphor for this world: cynical, virtueless, grasping, homicidal, self-absorbed ambition. He and people like him will destroy the house to evict the squatters. But in Israel, the squatter is similarly armed. And if Israel can't keep what they were given, they will respond Sampson-like and reduce the Middle East to a smoldering, lifeless radioactive trinitite.

"If everyone lights just one little candle," also starts a zillion small fires. Not seeing the realities here and ignoring the risks is childish. And, on a global scale, life-threatening.

 

California Burnin'

On this day:

1190
Third Crusade: Frederick I Barbarossa drowns in the river Saleph while leading an army to Jerusalem.
1793
French Revolution: Following the arrests of Girondin leaders, the Jacobins gain control of the Committee of Public Safety installing the revolutionary dictatorship.
2003
The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

***

Is charity with borrowed money superior to self-indulgence with borrowed money?

***

California Burnin'

LA is beginning to burn again. Fortunately, the heroes responsible for the brilliant reaction to the wildfires are still in office.

The demonstrations are said to be mostly peaceful. However, a mostly sterile solution is not sterile, as a mostly virtuous woman is not virtuous. There is no Richter Scale for violence, but if there were, burning police cars would probably be pretty high.

The peaceful, police-car-burning demonstrators have support. There are actually politicians and press representatives who think that confrontations with the police, complete with felonies, should be tolerated. Maybe even encouraged--in the name of free expression. Perhaps they long for the days of moral outrage--like those of the Vietnam demonstrations--when there was moral outrage, when the short-memoried public held Nixon responsible for the Asian adventures, when people felt more than manufactured and processed ideas of right and wrong.

But riots are not assembly. Arson will not highlight a wrong. The immigration riots are a mess. People are burning flags of the country they say they want to stay in and waving flags of the countries they say they don't want to return to. To the non-academic eye, that looks stupid at best, subversive at worst. And the Left, which caused this immigration problem in the first place, is now mindlessly doubling down and opposing its solution.

What will the stability-seeking guy who just wants to get to work in the morning think?

It looks like a PR event designed by their enemies.

Pentecost

On this day:

53 

Roman Emperor Nero marries Claudia Octavia.
62
Claudia Octavia is executed.
68
Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, after quoting Homer’s Iliad, thus ending the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and starting the civil year known as the Year of the Four Emperors.
721
Odo of Aquitaine defeats the Moors in the Battle of Toulouse.
1924
In the second attempt to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappear, possibly having first made it to the top.
1973
Secretariat wins the Triple Crown.

***

Gretta Thunberg, Time's 2019 Person of the Year, was diverted along with her aid ship, to Israel.

Her net worth is estimated at 1-2 million dollars.

***

A remarkable story out of Russia. A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for “truth” — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed. By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.

This infection of Western chatbots was foreshadowed in a talk American fugitive turned Moscow-based propagandist John Mark Dougan gave in Moscow last January at a conference of Russian officials, when he told them, “By pushing these Russian narratives from the Russian perspective, we can actually change worldwide AI.”

***

Pentecost

Pentecost, observed 7 weeks after Easter, is a complex day in the Church's history and meaning.
Pentecost means "fifty," as the fiftieth week of the year. In the Old Testament, it refers to the giving of the Ten Commandments and signifies the new direction of the New Testament. Christ reappears to the fearful apostles, reinvigorates them, and then breathes upon them, infusing the spirit of the New Testament and the abilities to carry out their evangelism. "Whose sins you forgive..." essentially creates a church structure.

In England, it is--or was--the feast of Whitsun, so changed after the Norman Conquest. Whitsun is a contraction of "White Sunday," attributed to the white vestments catechumens wore on the day. Eventually, white (hwitte) began to be confused with wit or understanding, not entirely inappropriate for the occasion. It was a significant holiday and celebration in its time and began to substitute for more secular spring celebrations.

The word for "Spirit" in Greek has several meanings; it also can mean "wind" and "breath." Christ does breathe on the apostles, and the Spirit is often described as a great wind. One ancient writer describes the Holy Spirit as Christ's last expired breath on the cross.

Breath is, of course, different from wind, which can be destructive, even in the scorching Middle East. But Christ's breath is gentle; it seems there is no downside here, no risk. Unless to the recipient who internalizes it. Of the apostles--who all, save John, abandoned Christ to die alone--after Pentecost, all (except maybe John) died for Christ's message.

In our cautious and uncertain world, Pentecost might be more safely observed from a window.

Assault on the Liberty

On this day:793
Vikings raid the abbey at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, commonly accepted as the beginning of the Scandinavian invasion of England.
1794
Robespierre inaugurates the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large, organized festivals all across France.
1967
Six-Day War: The USS Liberty "incident" occurs, killing 34 and wounding 171.

***

Today is Pentecost

***

Curiously, the world sees Russia's and Israel's efforts as something other than nationalistic expansionism. Both say it's reactive, for their protection. 

Expansionism is rare in a democracy, so Israel's case is particularly unusual.

***

Illegal immigrants are rioting in California. Are they exercising their right to assembly? Demonstrating their political power?

The "rights" of illegal immigrants are mystifying.

If a nation is unable to define itself, what is it?

***

Agroterrorism is a subdivision of bioweapons. Aside from its anti-human savagery, it is a metaphor for the power of the individual, a dark side of the Enlightenment's legacy, which emphasizes the tension between freedom and virtue.

***

Assault on the Liberty

Every so often, the political animal shows its stripes. And national ambition will always trump friendship. Something like this always gives a little context.

Most of this is from St. Clair's summary of "Assault on the Liberty," a first-hand account by James Ennes Jr. whose book of the event is a hair-raising story of betrayal by America's presumed friends and its own leadership. On this day in history, June 8, 1967.

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six-Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived, it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over three hours. The Liberty flew a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

An easily identified, lightly armed American surveillance ship in international waters.

Soon, more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later, a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire, and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.

The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found, and the Liberty got out a message to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier, that it was under attack
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gunfire. 

Strafed the life rafts.

Nobody was going to get out alive that way. 

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”
The Israeli boat turned and left.

A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.

Finally, 16 hours after the attack, two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.

The following morning, Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.

The Children of Israel are never alone. But sometimes it's hard to see why.