SatStats

On this day:

44 BC
Casca, Cicero, and Cassius decided, in the night before the Assassination of Julius Caesar, that Mark Antony should stay alive.
1757
Admiral Sir John Byng is executed by firing squad aboard HMS Monarch for breach of the Articles of War.
1780
American Revolutionary War: Spanish forces capture Fort Charlotte in Mobile, Alabama, the last British frontier post capable of threatening New Orleans in Spanish Louisiana.
1942
Orvan Hess and John Bumstead became the first in the world to successfully treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.
1964
A jury in Dallas, Texas, finds Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, assumed assassin of John F. Kennedy

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Voltaire referred to Byng’s execution in his satirical novel Candide: “In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”

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"The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money," Trump said Thursday on his social media site.
It was only last month, in his State of the Union address, that Trump had bragged about gas prices at $2.30 a gallon, a figure that has since soared more than 50% to a national average of $3.60 a gallon, according to AAA.

It's wonderful to be in a country where both contradictory options are the greatest ever seen.

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Modern economic growth in its global form has done more for workers and the environment than any army of government inspectors, regulators, customs officers, or IRS accountants. We Americans are rich not because of unions or anti-trust or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but because, on the whole, we have let capitalism work.--mccloskey

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SatStats

Only 1% of Americans identify as vegans, according to Gallup, while the same poll showed that 3% consider themselves vegetarian. Vegetarian restaurants have had a hard time of it.

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   Environment:

Contrary to the EPA 2009 predictions, there has been a decline in smog levels from 1980 to 2024.

There has been no trend in hurricane numbers or intensities since 1973. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no change in global flooding.

There has been no trend in the EPA heat wave index since 1895, except for the 1930s.

Several studies show a decline in net mortality from heat and cold.

U.S. wildfires have declined sharply since 1926, and global wildfire acreage declined 24% between 1998 and 2015.

Global droughts have declined about 0.5% per decade since 1950.

Global per capita food production has increased 40% since 1980.

And the latest peer-reviewed research reports no acceleration globally in sea-level rise.

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   Immigtation

15% of the population of Ireland entered the US between 1851 and 1860

9% of the population of Norway entered the US in the 1880s

6% of the population of Italy entered the US from about 1900-1910

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Re: California's proposed 5% wealth tax: “Over 100,000 simulations with varying discount rates, wealth tax revenues, and lost income tax revenues associated with departures, we find that 71% of scenarios in which the Act is instituted yields a negative [net present value], signaling the Act would generate a net cost to the state of California,” the researchers wrote in a Thursday Substack post. The “average across these draws,” they say, “is –$24.7 billion.”

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Iran is the size of Europe

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 Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.

But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.

Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.

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People born in 1990 have double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer compared with people born in 1950

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Germany’s population is projected to shrink by nearly 5 per cent within 25 years — a significantly steeper decline than previously forecast, according to an Ifo study.

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In ten-generation world calibrations, Muslims become the largest tradition.

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In 2025, roughly 60,000 new swimming pools were built in the U.S. That's down about 40% from 2022 and approximately half the peak seen during the Covid-era boom.