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?