Some Notes on 2025

Some Notes on 2025

The Chinese idiom, Three men make a tiger:
Your Majesty, it is for sure no tiger is running in the street. But after being told by three people that there was one, you would believe it was so.

***

New Orleans:
One would think a community described as "a fish tank of bad behavior" would have a police superintendent who looked serious rather than like your great aunt.
Then the FBI spokeswoman reveals she doesn't understand either terrorism or syntax.
These reminders that government attracts and promotes the inept should solidify the basic, unique American suspicion of government and should call into question why anyone would ask government to do anything more than the basics.

***

Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. spoke as she and Democratic Board chairman Robert Harvie, Jr., dismissed the earlier Pa. Supreme Court rulings in order to accept ballots without required signatures or mandatory dates. She declared that she would not second the motion to enforce the rulings “mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

This is a government official. Reminds you of Sanctuary Cities, doesn't it? Or Biden's persisting in invalidating loans.

This is more than inept.

***

A new age of government guidance:

...the most fashionable female economist in the world nowadays, Mariana Mazzucato...[in her]... elegant and self-confident and economically primitive books, such as one reviving the labour theory of value, inspire in my own country Senator Elizabeth Warren from the Left and Senator Marco Rubio from the Right. The senators recommend therefore a Mazzucatian ‘industrial policy’. Let us have arts graduates in governmental offices arrange for innovations. The European Commission under Mario Draghi is about to spend 800 billion euros every year choosing winners from Brussels.--McCloskey

***

New York restaurants responded to the crazed restrictions of Covid with outdoor dining. It was spontaneous and surprisingly successful. 13,000 outdoor dining options emerged in New York.

Then the regulators with their fees moved in.

Of the approximately 13,000 outdoor dining setups that once lined NYC's streets, fewer than 3,000 restaurants have applied for permits for next season. Among them, about 1,400 are for dining sheds, while the rest are for traditional sidewalk cafes.

"The King's men are here."

***

There is a plan to build two islands off the European coast to manage the development and distribution of alternative energy sources. Apparently united Europe is having trouble doing that within national borders.
Faith-based problems demand faith-based solutions.

***

The poorest US state's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than Europe's top five economies, except for Germany.

***

Marx's failures have been examined to exhaustion. There are basic overarching truths. The essence of every utopian dream is the emphasis on results over process. Even the great revolutionary Christian promise hinges upon self-sacrifice. Social utopias, however, always involve the sacrifice of others. That process is arbitrary and messy---and often horrible. It is that process that revolutionary prophets downplay, preferring the wonderful arcadian endpoint over the mass grave intermediary.


There are so many examples of utopian failures that it's hard to imagine people would not be adequately immunized. Maybe that's the reason that utopians uniformly dismiss or change history. And allows for the greatest of Marxian ironies as Marxism claims its birth in the analysis of history.--Magness

***

U.N.R.A., the UN relief organization, was an agent for Hamas in the Middle East.

***

Could we have DEI include the hiring from the Competent Minority?

***

The Pentagon dismissed an order from President Donald J. Trump to use the National Guard to ensure safety on Jan. 6, intentionally delayed Guard deployment for hours, lied about it to congressional leaders, and used its own inspector general to cover it all up, a U.S. House report concludes, after a two-year investigation.

***

The Maine official who moved to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot visited the White House to meet with President Biden and previously referred to the Electoral College as a “relic of white supremacy.”
An unelected official has made a decision to deprive a guy of participating in an election based on her own, personal tastes and eccentric--bizarre--politics.

The lesson here is that just because these opinions are laughable does not mean they are innocuous. These people are making decisions. And they can present nonsense as if it were reasonable,

There is a hierarchy here. It's structured law, law founded on the equality of man. And that law is enhanced by the structure of the country as a republic, avoiding the irrationality, passions, and exclusionary nature of democracies.

We might add, to protect us from morons.

Hogmanay

On this day:

1066
Granada massacre: A Muslim mob storms the royal palace in Granada, crucifies Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela, and massacres most of the Jewish population of the city.

So, maybe there's a problem older than the modern Israeli state?
1853
Gadsden Purchase: The United States buys land from Mexico to facilitate railroad building in the Southwest.
1903
A fire at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois, kills at least 605.
1906
The All India Muslim League is founded in Dacca, East Bengal, British India Empire, which later laid down the foundations of Pakistan.
1924
Edwin Hubble announces the existence of other galaxies.

***

“It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.” --Einstein

***

According to Politico, There is a massive, growing opportunity for Democrats to tap into rising anxiety, fear and anger about the havoc AI could wreak in people’s lives, they say, on issues from energy affordability to large-scale job losses, and channel it toward a populist movement — and not doing it, or not doing it strongly enough, will hurt the party.
Often, reporting makes it so.

***

Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough that supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere.

***

Biden said the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an 'excursion.'
The Trump administration voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine and calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces.
Which of these positions makes the most sense?

***

Hogmanay

Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year, a blend of ancient traditions and possibly a more modern response to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has several characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a 'readying' for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. 

Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

Gospel/Flight to Egypt

On this day:
1065
Westminster Abbey is consecrated.
1867
United States claims Midway Atoll, the first territory annexed outside Continental limits.
1895
Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.
1908

A magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocks Messina, Sicily killing over 75,000.

***

There is hardly any issue today more fateful than the questison of whether modern science is the friend of politics and morality, as Hume says, or the enemy, as Rousseau says.--Mansfield

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Brigitte Bardot died.

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Wind energy is the most expensive energy source, is almost entirely foreign-made, is five times more expensive than American gas, and interferes with commercial and military radar. Whose idea was this?

***

Internal Revenue Code Section 7217—makes it a criminal offense for the president or other executive branch officials to request, direct, or influence the IRS to conduct or terminate an audit or investigation of a particular taxpayer for political or retaliatory reasons.

If such actions go unquestioned, it signals that the president is not bound by the same rules as everyone else.

***

 

Gospel/Flight to Egypt

In today's gospel, Joseph is warned by an angel in a dream that the jealous Herod is hunting the newborn child to kill him. The family is urged to flee to Egypt, where they stay until Herod's death. 

Mathew describes what they leave behind:

Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.”

It does not appear much in literature.
Shakespeare uses it when the great and Christian King Henry demands the surrender of Harfleur and assures its defenders that the horrors of war will come upon them if they do not relent:
"Your naked infants spitted upon pikes
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen." (Act 3, Scene 3, lines 38–41)

Strangely, the slaughter of innocents has become a horrifyingly modern event, a reliable tool of lunatics and death cult devotees who search for meaning in vulnerable, meaningless victims. 

Unlike Herod's, theirs is murder without ambition or purpose, that is, inhuman.

SatStats

 

On this day:

537
The Hagia Sophia is completed.
1831
Charles Darwin embarks on his journey aboard the HMS Beagle, during which he will begin to formulate the theory of evolution.
1845
Ether anesthetic is used for childbirth for the first time by Dr. Crawford Williamson Long in Jefferson, Georgia.
1939
Winter War: Finland holds off a Soviet attack in the Battle of Kelja.
1968
Apollo Program: Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital manned mission to the Moon.
1978
Spain becomes a democracy after 40 years of dictatorship.

2009
Iranian election protests: On the Day of Ashura in Tehran, government security forces fire upon demonstrators.

***

"If you hang a sign that says “horse” on a cow, that doesn’t make it a horse.

Get it? If you do, then you’ll quickly grasp that a Latin American dope dealer is not an alien enemy combatant. The Defense Department, a creature of statute, does not become “the Department of War” by a presidential decree that sends Pete Hegseth to the front of the Pentagon with a plaque and a screwdriver. A foreign terrorist organization does not, by the abracadabra of “designation,” become an authorization for the use of military force — even if we generously assume that a drug gang is the same thing as a terrorist organization. Lindsey Halligan is not the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Riots are neither patriotic nor mostly peaceful. The congressionally established John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is not, by dint of wand-waving by a crony committee, the Trump . . . anything.

And fentanyl is not a weapon of mass destruction, even if the “horse” sign in this instance happens to be an executive order."--McCarthy

***

The US Tech Force is recruiting an elite corps of engineers to build the next generation of government technology.

***

An estimated 150,000 people, mostly from Asia and Africa, have been trafficked to Cambodia by criminal gangs, say rights groups and cybercrime researchers. Many of these laborers have been held in compounds on the border with Thailand, forced to deliver on online romance, investment, and other scams.

***


SatStats


Global suicide rates have declined by 29% from 2000 to 2021

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In 2024, the average company was 14 years old at IPO, in 2004, it was 8.  

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The share of poetry lines that rhyme has been in long-term decline.

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Until around 2009, pedestrian deaths in the US had been falling, declining from 7,516 deaths in 1975 to just 4,109 in 2009 (in per capita terms, this decline would be even larger). But since 2009, pedestrian deaths have surged.

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Consumers of all age groups are using around four different fragrances regularly, which is a significant change from a decade ago when they had one signature scent.

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The best private equity/venture funds don’t return capital for 16-20 years.

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The average U.S. car commuter is spending a record 63 hours annually stuck in traffic. That’s the most since 1982, when the dataset begins.

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In June 2025, China overtook the US in large language model (LLM) downloads.

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The Three Gorges Dam moved so much material closer to the equator that it added 0.06 microseconds to the length of each day.

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Stablecoins could soon be the biggest buyers of treasury bills (T-bills) in the world.

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The computational performance of leading AI supercomputers has doubled every 9 months.

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A study of 500 diners found “attractive servers earn approximately $1,261 more per year in tips than unattractive servers.” Mostly because of “female customers tipping attractive females more than unattractive females.”

The Day After

The Day After

And, on this day, the day after Christmas, a remarkable human event, an event that promised hope and destruction--and eventually killed one of the discoverers.

On this day in 1898, chemists discovered a substance 900 times more radioactive than uranium. That project was led by Marie Curie.

Curie was a medical student at the Sorbonne in Paris when she decided to study the new field of radiation for her thesis.

In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered powerful "Röntgen rays," which would eventually be dubbed X-rays. The following year, Henri Becquerel accidentally discovered that much weaker rays emitted by uranium salts would fog up photographic plates just like light rays did — even in the absence of light.

Key to Marie Curie's research was the piezoelectric quartz electrometer. The device, invented by her brother-in-law, Jacques Curie, measured the weak electrical currents produced by radioactivity.

"Instead of making these bodies act upon photographic plates, I preferred to determine the intensity of their radiation by measuring the conductivity of the air exposed to the action of the rays," Curie wrote in a 1904 article.

Working with her husband, Pierre, and Gustave Bémont, the head of chemistry at the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris, they began to study pitchblende, a black mineral rich in uranium often found in deposits alongside silver.

"How could an ore, containing many substances which I had proved inactive, be more active than the active substances of which it was formed? The answer came to me immediately: The ore must contain a substance more radioactive than uranium and thorium, and this substance must necessarily be a chemical element as yet unknown," Marie Curie wrote.

The trio decided to try to separate pitchblende, which can be composed of up to 30 minerals, into its constituent parts to identify the radioactive substance. They used the light spectra of different substances to try to isolate and identify the ingredients.

They pinpointed one mineral that was around 60 times more "radio-active" than uranium, which they named polonium. And on Dec. 21, they found another — called radium — that was an unprecedented 900 times more radioactive than uranium. They described both new substances during a talk at the French Academy of Sciences on Dec. 26.

Their research on radiation earned the Curies and Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. (Marie was originally going to be passed over, but she received the prize only after her husband, Pierre, insisted the committee credit her work.) Marie would earn another Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry, for her work on radium.

Radium caused frequent radiation sickness and burns in both Curies. Marie's radiation exposure likely killed her; she died in 1934 at age 66 due to aplastic anemia, a type of leukemia that can be caused by radiation damage to bone marrow.--from Tia Ghose

Christmas

“The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”--W.B.Yeats

***

And, in the Christmas spirit, North Korea released new images of what it claims is its first nuclear-powered submarine, a massive vessel equal in size to some of the United States Navy’s attack subs.

***

"Mason Montgomery (acquired by PIT) is an electric lefty reliever with some of the best pure stuff in MLB. "

Sound like Holderman?


***

Christmas


Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful that one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

Virginia

 

“In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is own the S&P 500 index fund.” --Buffett

***

Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse announced Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, calling the diagnosis “a death sentence.”

***

We are in the midst of a blizzard of executive orders, a tyranny of 'good ideas'. This is the exact opposite of the ponderous, reflective slow-motion government envisioned by the founders.

***

Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.

The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?


Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

The Magi

On this day:

1688
As part of the Glorious Revolution, King James II of England flees England to Paris after being deposed in favour of his nephew, William of Orange and his daughter Mary.
1783
George Washington resigns as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
1793
The Battle of Savenay, decisive defeat of the royalist counter-revolutionaries in Revolt in the Vendée during the French Revolution.
1948
Seven Japanese convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are executed at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.
1968
The 82 sailors from the USS Pueblo are released after eleven months of internment in North Korea.
1972
A 6.5 magnitude earthquake strikes the Nicaraguan capital of Managua killing more than 10,000.
1972
The 16 survivors of the Andes flight disaster are rescued after 73 days, having survived by cannibalism.

***

Pope Leo XIV has decided to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church, more than one hundred and forty years after his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, named Newman a Cardinal in 1879.
Newman stated, as the most important point of his speech and apologia, that there was “one great mischief,” which he had from the “first opposed – the spirit of liberalism in religion.”

The word liberalism, in the century since Newman’s death, has taken on various meanings which it might not have had then, or at least with a different emphasis. Simply put, and simply needed, Newman defined the concept as “liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.”

From that starting point, the saintly Englishman continued, flow some very ‘modern’ concepts: the false notion of ‘tolerance,’ the privatization of religion, “personal and peculiar,” and, most profoundly, as the Western world attempts to build a society without Christian foundation, the destruction of that society.

Newman called this whole movement the “great apostasia,” the same everywhere, but in each country differing in detail.--Fr. Benedict Kiely on John Henry Newman and his ‘Biglietto speech.’

***

In mid-December, liberal commentator Rachel Maddow publicly claimed that she has “returned to the Catholic faith,” a declaration first circulated via a Substack post by self-described progressive Catholic Christopher Hale and later confirmed through audio released by MSNBC NOW.

***

A new private equity investment:
Senator Mike Lee has a new bill that encourages the President to authorize letters of marque and reprisal against drug cartels: During the War of 1812, roughly 500 privateers operated alongside a tiny U.S. Navy. The market responded swiftly—privateers like the Comet were commissioned within days of the war’s declaration and began capturing prizes within weeks. Sophisticated institutional design combined profit incentives with regulatory constraints.

***

Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman was confirmed as the new head of NASA.
Isaacman dropped out of high school to pursue his business, but later earned his GED and a bachelor's degree in aeronautics from Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University.

***

And, if possible, a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
--Yeats

A Christmas Story

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)

***

President Trump signed into law new powers to screen and restrict U.S. investment in Chinese technology firms, marking the most significant effort yet to police how American capital flows into businesses that bolster Beijing’s military and surveillance state.

***

Pirates trade a starting pitcher for Brandon Lowe, a real hitter, but another second baseman, and only for a year.

***

Japanese authorities have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant, which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in a pivotal moment as the country looks to shift its energy supply away from fossil fuels.

***

The Reiner, Brown, MIT, and Bondi murders were all done for 'reasons'. The basic question will always be, how can a free culture protect itself from the distorted results of its own ideals?

***

A Christmas Story about a Christmas Icon

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Joseph Has a Dream

On this day:

1620
Plymouth Colony: William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
1919
American anarchist Emma Goldman is deported to Russia.
1967
Louis Washkansky, the first man to undergo a heart transplant, dies in Cape Town, South Africa, after living for 18 days after the transplant.
2004
Iraq War: A suicide bomber killed 22 at the forward operating base next to the main U.S. military airfield at Mosul, the single deadliest suicide attack on American soldiers.

***

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mises

***

Canada recorded a rare contraction in its population, marking the biggest drop in more than five decades
The recent drop, however, is driven largely by a fall in the number of international students studying in Canada after Ottawa pledged to tamp down the number of study permits issued.


***

China’s long-term economic growth is at risk owing to a shrinking labor force and a rapidly aging population, according to Oxford Economics. The country’s potential output growth could fall below 2% by the 2050s, as low birth rates and a rising dependency ratio strain productivity and public finances. While developed nations like the U.S. may buffer this with immigration, China and others face tougher challenges in sustaining growth and managing social support systems.

China may be the only nation that could rival America’s economic dominance. But its long-term prospects will potentially be cut off at the knees by a fundamental flaw: It won’t have the people to keep its growth going.--Fortune

***

Motability is a company whose scheme enables recipients of certain disability benefits to exchange their weekly payments for a leased vehicle.

As the number of Brits on sickness and disability support has rocketed in recent years, so have Motability’s sales. It uses its heft to buy new models in bulk, then leases them to claimants — usually for three years — before selling them on to traders like Samani. That has made it the UK’s leading car-fleet operator, and helped skew the market away from private buyers and sellers.
Motability bought one of every five new cars sold in the UK last year. And yet it only exists to serve a very specific type of customer: people claiming mobility benefits
A surge in the number of people claiming disability benefits has seen the number of Motability customers rise by about 200,000 over the past two years to 815,000.

***

Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation.

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad is said to have formed his opinion of Christianity through contact with an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians were polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance, and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

SatStats

On this day:

1192
Richard the Lion-Heart is captured and imprisoned by Leopold V of Austria on his way home to England after signing a treaty with Saladin ending the Third Crusade.
1522
Siege of Rhodes: Suleiman the Magnificent accepts the surrender of the surviving Knights of Rhodes, who are allowed to evacuate. They eventually settle on Malta and become known as the Knights of Malta.
1606
The Virginia Company loads three ships with settlers and sets sail to establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.
1803
The Louisiana Purchase is completed at a ceremony in New Orleans.
1924
Hitler is released from Landsberg Prison
1987
History’s worst peacetime sea disaster, when the passenger ferry Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker Vector 1 in the Tablas Strait in the Philippines, killing an estimated 4,000 people (1,749 official).
1989
United States invasion of Panama: The United States sends troops into Panama to overthrow government of Manuel Noriega. This is also the first combat use of purpose-designed stealth aircraft.
1991
A Missouri court sentences the Palestinian militant Zein Isa and his wife Maria to death for the honor killing of their daughter Palestina.

***

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”--Kissinger

***

Trump made a lot of outrageous claims in his speech. Some are:

--that $1,776 checks “were on their way” to U.S. troops. Reality: The President does not have the “power of the purse”—Congress does.

--- that he has cut the cost of prescription drugs by 400%–500%. Reality: This is mathematically impossible.

---that he inherited the worst inflation in 48 years. Reality: While inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, it had already fallen to approximately 2.4% by the time Trump took office in January 2025. Current data for late 2025 shows inflation at roughly 3.0%—an increase since he took office, which economists attribute partly to the tariffs implemented in April.

His supporters will always forgive him with the 'Zitp explanation,' but this is becoming unreliable self-parody.

***

We are proving the obvious. Any free culture is vulnerable to the irrational, the possessed, and the stupid. That's bad enough, but it seems that those protecting us from those idiotic threats are pretty dumb, too. Those poor kids in Brown were almost saved by a responsible homeless man--but nobody else.

***

SatStats

The hole in the Antarctic ozone layer has shrunk to its smallest size since 2019, indicating the continued recovery of Earth’s protective upper atmosphere.

*

The first gene therapy for Huntington’s disease proved striking, slowing the rate of cognitive decline in participants by 75%.

*

In the first six months of 2025 alone, China installed new solar systems with a capacity of 256 gigawatts — twice as much as the rest of the world combined.

*

Neves Valente was the top student in his graduating class in 2000 in the physics engineering program at Lisbon's prestigious Instituto Superior Técnico,

*

Warren Buffett's 90/10 strategy involves allocating 90% of assets to a low-cost S&P 500 index fund and 10% to short-term government bonds.

*

Pickens has racked up 1,212 receiving yards, which ranked third in the NFL entering Week 16. CeeDee Lamb is making $34 million per year on his four-year, $136 million extension. By comparison, Commanders wide receiver Terry McLaurin averages $29 million annually on his three-year, $97 million deal, which ranks 10th among wide receivers. 

* *

Crime Stats:

Since 1999, an average of about 18,816 murders per year were committed in the United States, not including the 2,977 people slaughtered during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Roughly 80% of murders in the U.S. are committed with firearms.

One of the “greatest lethality drops” occurred immediately after the Vietnam War because the experience of this conflict led to major advances in trauma care. Medical progress has “suppressed the homicide rate compared to what it would be had such progress not been made.”

In the United States, the portion of murders in which a suspect is identified and acted upon by the criminal justice system declined from 92% in 1960 to 58% in 2023.

From 1965 to 2022, roughly 337,601 murders were committed in the U.S. that were still unsolved as of 2022.

In 2023, the police chief of Washington D.C., reported that “the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide.”

As measured by the DOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey, 6,419,060 violent crimes were committed in the U.S. during 2023, or 5.3 times the FBI estimate. This equals one violent crime for every 44 people aged 12 and older.

42% of Americans will be the victim of a completed violent crime in the course of their lives.

83% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime.

52% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime more than once.

War on Innocents

On this day:

218 BC
Second Punic War: Battle of the Trebia – Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces defeat those of the Roman Republic.

1271
Kublai Khan renames his empire “Yuan” (ࠠ3; yuán), officially marking the start of the Yuan Dynasty of Mongolia and China
1878

John Kehoe, the last of the Molly Maguires is executed in Pennsylvania.
hina.
1912
The Piltdown Man, later discovered to be a hoax, is announced by Charles Dawson.
1916
World War I: The Battle of Verdun ends when German forces under Chief of Staff Erich Von Falkenhayn are defeated by the French, and suffer 337,000 casualties.

***

I’ve never seen an orgy of hypocrisy quite as brazen as how the exact same media corporations and journalists who spent years demanding more Big Tech censorship turned *overnight* into free speech champions: because now it’s their friends being silenced rather than their enemies.--Greenwald

***

NYC now has nearly 50,000 empty apartment units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations.

***

Kant’s middle way, tortuously explained in his magnum opus, the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), is that what he calls things-in-themselves—the reality of things independent of human experience—are ultimately unknowable but that does not leave us with mere subjective opinions. Experience is only made possible because it is framed by our perceptions in ways that all human beings share. So it is not a matter of opinion whether Newton’s laws are true or whether vaccines work, even though we remain ignorant of the essential nature of the universe that underpins our experiences of these facts.--wsj

***

War on Innocents

It's getting hard to be sure about the nature of murder. Our modern world now gives murder a 'context'. But some murders just look like murders.

The word 'terrorist' seems inadequate. Its origin was in the French Revolution, referring to the Jacobins and their coercion to revolutionary conformity. The British picked it up when referring to Russian violence aimed at discouraging the ruling aristocracy in Russia in the mid-1800s.

Now it implies a violent act that is part of a larger, unspoken whole, some notion, like kidnapping, where innocents are threatened for some other purpose.

There comes a moment when every child believes he is 'the best boy', when the performers on The View believe their applause signs, and the bigger picture becomes very small. Every act becomes a tiny thread in a larger tapestry, a single piece of a larger puzzle. So a father can send his daughter ticking into a crowded plaza and rushes to sacrifice his Isaac under an Australian beach umbrella.

Can one be self-indulgent with another's life? Do the collateral victims hear the war cry? Can they decipher it? Is the obtuse warning lost in translation amidst the screaming and weeping? Or is it simply disregarded, like a madman's plea for some coherence?

And will the innocents wreak a cosmic vengeance in this, the octave of Nanjing? 

The Rise and Fall of the Individual

On this day:

1497
Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope, the point where Bartolomeu Dias had previously turned back to Portugal.
1598
Seven Year War: Battle of Noryang Point – The final battle of the Seven Year War is fought between the China and the Korean Allied Forces and Japanese navies, resulting in a decisive Allied Forces victory.
1653
English Interregnum: The Protectorate – Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
1689
Convention Parliament: The Declaration of Right is embodied in the Bill of Rights.
1773
American Revolution: Boston Tea Party – Members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawks dump crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
1920
The Haiyuan earthquake, magnitude 8.5, rocks the Gansu province in China, killing an estimated 200,000.
1944
World War II: The Battle of the Bulge begins with the surprise offensive of three German armies through the Ardennes forest.
1950
U.S. President Harry S. Truman declares a state of emergency, after Chinese troops enter the fight with communist North Korea in the Korean War.
1986
Revolt in Kazakhstan against Communist Party of Kazakhstan, known as Zheltoksan, which becomes the first sign of ethnic strife during Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure
1997
An episode of Pokémon, “Dennō Senshi Porygon”, aired in Japan induces seizures in 685 Japanese children.

***

Europe, in the year 2025, is what NPR would look like if it ran a continent.
It is time for a rant about Europe. It has, in fact, been time for quite a while, but there is always a moment at which the straw meets the camel, and, for me, that moment came when the European Union announced that it intended to extort another hundred million dollars or so out of the wildly productive American tech sector, and then the bureaucrats and politicos who staff that dreadful institution took to the very service they were in the midst of extorting to offer up generalized attacks on the United States. --Cooke from NR

***

In almost every sector of the economy, educational requirements are becoming less strenuous, according to Indeed, a jobs website. America’s professional and business services industry employs more people without a university education than it did 15 years ago, even though there are fewer such people around.

***

Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms. They are health care companies; the University of Pennsylvania gets half its revenue from the hospitals it runs. They commercialize the inventions that spring from their labs. They sell four-year subscriptions for rent and classes to their students and lifelong memberships in an elite club to their donors (posthumous, if the checks are big enough).

By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.

***

The Rise and Fall of the Individual

Sometimes the 'larger picture' can be very small.

One murder after another forced its way onto the news cycle this weekend, each displacing another murder story. Bondi Beach. Brown University. Reiner. Two had skin-crawling Old Testament elements of father and son, Abraham and Isaac. Can you imagine recruiting your father or son for the suicidal murder of strangers?

The Bondi murders have a particular modern odor: the growing importance and insignificance of the individual. It is said to be 'terrorism', violence with a political motive geared to influence political decisions. Some certainly do. Some cause inconvenience, then repression, torture, and death, as anti-German terrorists did in the Second World War. But the impact of terrorism, where a single individual or a small group creates disproportionate harm to strangers and non-combatants, its so-called 'asymmetry', is simply a rogue act by a rogue animal. Its damage hits weak, powerless individuals with little or no influence over the political or social flow of things. It apparently hopes to influence change by awakening the better instincts of its enemy.

Yet they are mere spasms of simple human bloodlust.

As time passes, the 'asymmetric' power of the individual will increase, resulting in greater and more meaningless asymmetric victimhood among an increasing number of bewildered victims.

News flash: four terrorists have been arrested in California, building bombs in their war against capitalism, but were unsure where to send them.

Here War Is Simple

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.

---W. H. Auden

Sunday/The Baptist

On this day:
1287
St. Lucia’s flood: The Zuider Zee sea wall in the Netherlands collapses, killing over 50,000 people.
1542
Princess Mary Stuart becomes Mary, Queen of Scots.1812
The French invasion of Russia comes to an end as the remnants of the Grande Armée are expelled from Russia.
1900
Quantum Mechanics: Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.
1911
Roald Amundsen’s team, comprising himself, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, becomes the first to reach the South Pole.
1939
Winter War: The Soviet Union is expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland
1962
NASA’s Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.
1972
Apollo program: Eugene Cernan is the last person to walk on the moon, after he and Harrison Schmitt complete the third and final Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo 17 mission. To date this is the last manned mission to the moon.
1999
Torrential rains cause flash floods in Vargas, Venezuela, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the complete collapse of the state’s infrastructure.

***

The worst public health crisis in 100 years became arguably the worst public policy failure in U.S. history because of social pathologies that the pathogen triggered. The coronavirus pandemic is over. What it revealed lingers: intellectual malpractice and authoritarian impulses infecting governmental, scientific, academic and media institutions.--Will

***

After nearly 40 years in business, Murray Avenue Grill, on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, is about to shutter its doors for good.

*** 

George Mason University economist Tim Groseclose established in his 2011 book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, that WSJ reporters are among the most left-wing of all reporters for the major media.

***

Sunday/The Baptist  

In today's gospel, the Baptist sends messengers from prison to ask Christ if he is The One, or should they wait for another? This has been one of those long-debated events in the New Testament. Is John unsure? Are his men unsure? Does John want to show his followers that Christ is indeed The One? The implication has always been that this is one of the defining moments dividing the Old Testament from the New. John is the last of the Old Testament prophets, a hard-bitten man of the desert, describing a more physical deity, a God of smiting and war. The New Testament is completely different. As Christ ascends, John declines and sets.

Today's reading is dominated by the "What did you go out to the desert to see?" question. It is a harsh, realistic, and desolate picture of a single intense man and his thoughts. But there is a significant contrasting image in the epistle sent by James, focusing on a completely different aspect of man: the patience of the farmer. The farmer and planting are recurring symbols in the gospels. Certainly, in the relatively nontechnical world of the time, it is reasonable. But there is more, especially here, opposed to the world of the visionary John the Baptist. The rural world is more than familiar; it makes sense to humans. It is very like us.

In truth, John the Baptist is not like us. He is a firebrand, not a neighbor; he is an element, not a friend. But his community is a farming one. And that is what we make up; we are a communal beast. We benefit from work. We benefit from the comfort of our neighbors. As competitive as we are, the competition and success motive has limits.

Christ is offering the universal to beings whose individual success depends upon local, controlled achievement. This dichotomy must be resolved by every individual at some point in their lives, religious or not.

*

The Quickening of John the Baptist
(On the Contemplative Vocation)

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The winesmelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?
Why do you fly those markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?

You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes.
You have drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

The day Our Lady, full of Christ,
Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?
Did not her eyes as grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon
miraculous Elizabeth?

Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother’s body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.

Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!

What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered Christ?

You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
Exulting in your hermitage.
Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.
Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church’s hidden children -
Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;
The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of
contemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.

Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous world
Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild baby,
The unborn John who could not see a thing
We wake and know the Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into our night
With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

Cooled in the flame of God’s dark fire
Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness
And bound and bounce with happiness,
Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.

Thomas Merton

Nanjing, 1937, and Dorian Gray

On this day:

1545
Council of Trent begins.
1577
Sir Francis Drake sets out from Plymouth, England, on his round-the-world voyage.
1643
English Civil War: The Battle of Alton takes place in Hampshire.
1862
American Civil War: At the Battle of Fredericksburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee defeats the Union Major General Ambrose E. Burnside.
1937
Nanjing Massacre. Japanese troops begin carrying out several weeks of raping and killing of civilians and suspected Chinese resistance after the fall of Nanjing.
1939
World War II: Battle of the River Plate – Captain Hans Langsdorff of the German Deutschland class cruiser (pocket battleship) Admiral Graf Spee engages with Royal Navy cruisers HMS Exeter, HMS Ajax and HMNZS Achilles.
1972
Apollo program: Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt begin the third and final Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) or “Moonwalk” of Apollo 17. To date they are the last humans to set foot on the Moon.
2003
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is captured near his hometown of Tikrit

***

Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition that would occur to any intelligent person in his bath.--Stoppard

***

According to a new investigation by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker, many of the vivid details in Sacks's beloved case studies were fabrications — embellishments designed to make better stories. This is written with disapproval, but should it be?

***

“One day, we might even have a ministry run entirely by AI,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said at a July press conference while discussing digitalization. “That way, there would be no nepotism or conflicts of interest.”

***


Nanjing, 1937, and Dorian Gray

Japan's organized expansion into the Asin mainland began in Manchuria in 1932, but cohesive Chinese resistance did not begin until 1937. (War--the Second Sino-Japanese War, conventionally dated 1937-1945--was not declared until 1941.)

On December 13, 1937, 50,000 Japanese troops entered the city of Nanjing, the beautiful, ancient, and one-time capital of China, on the Yangtze River. Many of the city residents had fled, but refugees from the recent capitulation of Shanghai poured north into the city with thousands of defeated soldiers who had de facto surrendered and were left abandoned by their command. The Japanese had received the order to "kill all the captives, " and so began one of the modern world's strangest and most vicious events. 

In the next four days--which trailed into the next weeks--the city was put to the sword. The death rate was conservatively estimated at 270,000 and likely closer to 400,000. Rapes numbered about 80,000. The attack resembled a feeding frenzy. Torture and mutilation were the norm. Killing and maiming "games" and "competitions" developed. The local Nazi representative was so horrified, he set up an attempt at a 'safety zone.'

The average Japanese soldier had become a demon.

What they did is hard to imagine. The historian Iris Chang was said to be driven mad by her studies of it. No one was spared the innovative tortures and deaths. The horrors of war pile up--Auschwitz et al at 6 million, Stalin in Russia 40 million, 400,000 Bengali women raped by Pakistanis in 1971, Timor Lenk killed 100,000 prisoners at Delhi. The Romans killed 150,000 at Carthage. Hitler's air attacks killed 61,000 British. The Netherlands lost 242,000 civilians. Dresden's casualties numbered about 60,000. Air raids on Tokyo killed between 80,000 and 120,000. Hiroshima deaths were 140,000, Nagasaki, 70,000. But nobody killed with the concentrated ferocity of the Japanese at Nanjing.

Strangely, Nanjing and similar events are not talked about much. Churchill doesn't mention Nanjing in his history of WW11. Perhaps it's because of its common thread.

Us.

 

Plymouth Plantation

On this day:

1792
French Revolution: King Louis XVI of France is put on trial for treason by the National Convention.
1927
Guangzhou Uprising: Communist militia and worker Red Guards launch an uprising in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, taking over most of the city and announcing the formation of a Guangzhou Soviet.
1936
Abdication Crisis: Edward VIII’s abdication as King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Dominions beyond the Seas, and Emperor of India becomes effective.
1941
World War II: Germany and Italy declare war on the United States, following the Americans’ declaration of war on Japan in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States, in turn, declares war on Germany and Italy.
1948
The United Nations passes General Assembly Resolution 194, which established and defined the role of the United Nations Conciliation Commission as an organization to facilitate peace in the British Mandate for Palestine.
1964
Che Guevara speaks at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
1972
Apollo 17 becomes the sixth and last Apollo mission to land on the Moon.
2008
Bernard Madoff is arrested and charged with securities fraud in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

***

Q: What did you learn about college football this year?
A: I learned the difference between a team and a gang.

***

So, are we attacking the boats from Venezuela because they are intruding on our turf?

***

In the same vein, what is the world's reaction to the American attack on Iran? Is the world allowing Trump leeway because he is doing things they would never have the strength to do, but they believe the world needs? In essence, is Trump their sin-eater?


***

Plymouth Plantation

In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on equality and need as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. The problem was that young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.

Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. While not a complete private property system, the move away from communal ownership had dramatic results.


This change, Bradford wrote, had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. Giving people economic incentives changed their behavior. Once the new system of property rights was in place, the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.

Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years. It was only after allowing greater property rights that they could feast without worrying that famine was just around the corner.--Benjamin Powell, “The Pilgrims’ Real Thanksgiving Lesson,” Independent Institute, November 25, 2008.

So incentives matter. This proposition, which seems so reasonable, nonetheless must constantly struggle with the irrational. Incredibly bad ideas always get an open hearing. Defund the police, open borders, 1619, modern monetary theory, and critical racial theory are all presented on an equal footing with sensible, reasonable concepts. So the prima facie is invalid.

In such an atmosphere, vigilance--which seems to be an over-response--is essential.

"Putin is Winning."

On this day:

1531
The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico City.
1917
World War I: In Palestine, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby captures Jerusalem.
1937
Second Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Nanjing – Japanese troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Asaka Yasuhiko launch an assault on the Chinese city of Nanjing.
1946
The “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” begin with the “Doctors’ Trial”, prosecuting doctors alleged to be involved in human experimentation.
1950
Harry Gold is sentenced to 30 years in jail for helping Klaus Fuchs pass information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. His testimony is later instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
1965
The Kecksburg UFO incident: a fireball is seen from Michigan to Pennsylvania; witnesses report something crashing in the woods near Pittsburgh. In 2005 NASA admits that it examined the object.
1979
The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first and to date only human disease driven to extinction.
2008
The Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is arrested by federal officials for a number of crimes including attempting to sell the United States Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency.

***

“With $1 million, you could earn 50% a year, but you have to be in love with the subject. You can’t just be in love with the money.” --Buffett

***

Ilhan Omar is worth $30 million. Read that again.

***

Looters in politics wearing different uniforms are on the same team: themselves.

***

China just put a 13% VAT on birth control meds and devices.

***

"Putin is Winning"

There is a narrative on the Left that "Putin is winning," in a general, international way. Biden's weird, observant non-response fit well with Europe's dithering. Trump's position is hard to understand, even if you assume he is 'philosophy-unburdened'. 

These are excerpts (sort of) from The Telegraph on their assessment of the situation Russia and Putin are in with their Ukrainian invasion. They think Trump is foolish in his efforts, but their opinion of Putin is worthwhile.

After two years of growth artificially fuelled by higher defence spending, Russia’s oil and gas income, representing up to 50% of state revenue, is down 27% year-on-year, and recession looms. Inflation is up, at 8%; interest rates top 16%. The budget deficit is rising, more than half of Russia’s liquid sovereign wealth fund has been squandered since 2022, state monopolies face huge debts, foreign investment has plunged, import costs of strategic goods have risen by 122%, and consumer taxes are soaring, all to fund Putin’s war. Russians must even pay more to drown their sorrows: the price of vodka is up 5%.

***

Ukraine has identified a weak spot: Russia’s refineries, pipelines and “shadow fleet” of oil tankers carrying illicit exports. A third tanker was set ablaze in the Black Sea last week by naval drone strikes. Kyiv is regularly hitting energy facilities deep inside Russia, causing panic and fuel shortages. Meanwhile, Russia’s two energy giants, Rosneft and Lukoil, are reeling as Asian buyers, including in China’s vital market, rush to avoid secondary US sanctions.

***

Syria, a prized Middle East ally, turned to the west and Iran came under US and Israeli attack. Now Venezuela, too, looks in vain for support. Ties with China have been upended, with a humiliated Russia relegated to the role of dependent junior partner. Visiting India last week, Putin cut a needy figure in a country that, following US pressure, now boycotts Russian oil.

***

Despite his surprise, full-scale invasion and overwhelming advantages in manpower and materiel, Putin has utterly failed to subjugate Ukraine – a failure measured in shocking Russian casualty figures: more than 280,000 killed or injured in the first eight months of 2025; about one million in total. The average Russian frontline life expectancy is 12 days.

***

The latest US negotiating fiasco has once again exposed Trump’s idiotically lopsided Ukraine “strategy”. Appeasing Russia from the start, he has undermined Ukraine by attacking Zelenskyy and halting arms supplies. Trump’s egotistic eagerness to play peacemaker and make a quick buck, choice of inept relatives and cronies as amateur envoys, and attempts to sideline and pillory Europe assist and embolden Putin.

***

Trump’s meddling is prolonging the war. He should butt out before he does more damage – and Europe (and Nato) must step in with more weapons for Ukraine, reparation loans using seized Russian assets, fully enforced energy sanctions, tougher kinetic responses to sabotage and cyber-attacks, and a more united determination to help end Putin’s age of terror.

Pearl Harbor

On this day:

1941
World War II: Attack on Pearl Harbor – The Imperial Japanese Navy attacks the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army Air Forces and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, causing a declaration of war upon Japan by the United States. Japan also invades Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines at the same time (December 8 in Asia).
1965
Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras simultaneously revoke mutual excommunications that had been in place since 1054.
1972
Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew takes the photograph known as The Blue Marble as they leave the Earth.
1987
Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 crashes near Paso Robles, California, killing all 43 on board, after a disgruntled passenger shoots his ex-boss traveling on the flight, then shoots both pilots and himself.

***

The European conservative harbors “fondness for authority” and a “lack of understanding of economic forces.” Although not blind to the potential—nay, likely—problems that attend innovation and change, the American conservative trusts in the largely unmanaged, undirected choices of individuals and institutions of civil society and the market to produce virtue, prosperity, and flourishing better than any state or statesman ever could. American history vindicates this confidence.--Hayek

***

One of the mysteries of political life is that the opposition to Trump's questionable assumptions of power is not led by small-government conservatives but by the powerful central government Left and the totalitarian socialists.

***

The bill that passed the Senate with Vance as the tie-breaking vote will add nearly $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Yet Vance says, immigration is “the thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy.”

***

By as late as 1940, the federal and state governments’ investment in research amounted to only 23 percent of U.S. R&D and 10 percent of U.S. basic science, and the nature of that investment had little or no impact on rates of American economic or health growth: Defense R&D has almost no economic benefit, while the agricultural R&D was surplus to requirement.
As current criticism of Trump's research cuts shows, perhaps as a consequence of its confidence in wealth elsewhere, this country believes money equals progress.

***

Pearl Harbor

2,403 Americans were killed in the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The Americans then entered World War 11. One could argue that it pushed a hesitant America onto the world stage.

After Pearl Harbor, the country was terrified, especially along the West Coast. The proximity of the attack was exaggerated by the large presence of the American Japanese in California. Since there was no evidence of any Japanese-American involvement in the attack, the argument was made that the Japanese were lying low, waiting to pounce. 

Critical Race Theory Syndrome: the absence of something is proof it existed.  

Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible removal of Americans of Japanese descent from the Pacific coast, was signed by the liberal President Roosevelt in 1942. 120,000 American citizens--Americans--were moved out of their homes into squalid camps and ancient Indian reservations.

This is another rule in politics that should caution anyone expecting the government to do the right thing: "When the going gets tough, everyone loses their principles."

Or, there are no countries, only governments.

STATS

 

On this day:

1240
Mongol invasion of Rus': Kiev under Danylo of Halych and Voivode Dmytro falls to the Mongols under Batu Khan.
1648
Colonel Pride of the New Model Army purges the Long Parliament of MPs sympathetic to King Charles I of England, in order for the King’s trial to go ahead; came to be known as “Pride’s Purge”.
1865
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, banning slavery.
1907
A coal mine explosion at Monongah, West Virginia kills 362 workers.
1917
Halifax Explosion: In Canada, a munitions explosion kills more than 1,900 people and destroys part of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia.1941
World War II: The United Kingdom declares war on Finland in support of the Soviet Union during the Continuation War.
1957
Project Vanguard: A launchpad explosion of Vanguard TV3 thwarts the first United States attempt to launch a satellite into Earth orbit.
1969
Meredith Hunter is killed by the Hells Angels during a The Rolling Stones’s concert at the Altamont Speedway in California.
1973
The Twenty-fifth Amendment: The United States House of Representatives votes 387 to 35 to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President of the United States (on November 27, the Senate confirmed him 92 to 3).
1989
The École Polytechnique Massacre (or Montreal Massacre): Marc Lépine, an anti-feminist gunman, murders 14 young women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.

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You are angry that the current administration has not brought down prices attributed to the previous administration's deficit spending and artificially high energy prices, so you're going to vote for the previous administration?

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The thesis is that politicians, especially the modern Left, campaign on providing things in unlimited supply; is affordability one of those things?

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Somehow, the forgiving and optimistic Left who see in the women-burning, subway-rider-stabbing, habitual recidivist, the flag-waving, street-demonstrating homicidal nationalist bigot, and the cold Bundy-charming CEO back-shooter an element of the divine but can discern the heart of darkness in soldiers one thousand miles away trying to fight child-killing drug entrepreneurs.

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There are more than 80--80!!--large poverty programs in the United States.

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MIT engineers have designed an aerial microrobot that can fly as fast as a bumblebee

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STATS

Every Western European country scores higher on the global ranking of freedom and democracy than the U.S. does, according to Freedom House, a U.S.-based nonprofit that ranks countries according to measures such as election process, rule of law, and individual rights.

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'Autism Centers' in Minnesota grew 700% 2018 to 2023. Funding for them increased 3000% from $6 million to $192 million.

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About 28% of oxygen on Earth comes from rainforests. The majority of it — somewhere between 50% and 85% — actually comes from marine plants, like kelp and phytoplankton in the ocean.

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NYC's budget includes $7.4 billion in federal dollars. That's 6.4% of the budget.

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The restrike rate of attacks like the one in the Caribbean is about 25%.

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China’s fertility rate has fallen to one.

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Among people 45-plus, the rates of loneliness have increased from 35% in 2018, to 40% now.

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Financial fraud has affected 29% of checking, savings or debit account holders and 24% of credit card customers in the past 12 months.

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The 2025 hurricane season is drawing to a close without a single one making landfall in the continental United States — for the first time in a decade.

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IBIT has lost $1.4 billion over five trading days—the highest total for any consecutive-day stretch in its 22-month history.IBIT manages more than $73 billion in assets, the most of any of the spot Bitcoin ETFs.

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The penalty of Bad Stats: In 1937, Olimpiy Kvitkin, a statistician, was executed by firing squad. His crime? Producing inconvenient census numbers, which showed the Soviet Union contained about 6 million fewer residents than Joseph Stalin had claimed, probably because of that little famine the country had just been through.

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The digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence.

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Palidromes
If a number is not a palindrome, follow these steps to make it a palindrome:
Example: 76
Reverse the digits.
67
Add the reverse number to 76, the original number.
76+67=143
Continue to reverse and add until the sum is a palindrome. 341
143+431=484
If you follow these steps, all the numbers from 1 to 100 will eventually become palindromes, and you will find unity and peace.

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Percent of young adults who say they are likey to leave their city. (This occurs for a number of reasons, but mostly, "It's about being engaged in your city, feeling pride in your city, as well as having this growing sense of belonging," Sofia Song, 'global leader of cities research' at Gensler's Research Institute said.)

Moving out
1	Baltimore	61.6%
2	Charlotte, N.C.	58.3%
3	Miami	51.8%
4	Detroit	51.6%
5	Atlanta	50%
6	Nashville, Tenn.	49.4%
7	Portland, Ore.	48.8%
8	Houston	47.8%
9	Philadelphia	45.7%
10	Tampa, Fla.	45.2%
11	Columbus, Ohio	45%
12	San Francisco	45%
13	San Antonio	44.4%
14	New York	44.1%

Bottom half of the rankings

Rank	City	Moving out
15	Phoenix	42.6%
16	Washington, D.C.	42.2%
17	Raleigh, N.C.	41.9%
18	Los Angeles	41.4%
19	Minneapolis	41.4%
20	Dallas	41%
21	Seattle	39.8%
22	Austin, Texas	38.9%
23	Las Vegas	37.9%
24	Denver	37%
25	Chicago	36.1%
26	Boston	27.8%
27	San Diego	27.1%

'Global leader of cities research'!