The Inadequacy of Truth

On this day:

455
Sack of Rome: Vandals enter Rome and plunder the city for two weeks
1692
Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Found guilty, she is hanged on June 10.
1763
Pontiac’s Rebellion: At what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan, Chippewas capture Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison’s attention with a game of lacrosse, then chasing a ball into the fort.
1774
Intolerable Acts: The Quartering Act is enacted, allowing a governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters are not provided.
1793
French Revolution: François Hanriot, leader of the Parisian National Guard, arrests 22 Girondists selected by Jean-Paul Marat, setting the stage for the Reign of Terror.
1919
Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight separate U.S. cities.
1962
During the 1962 FIFA World Cup, police had to intervene multiple times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
1966
Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft land on another world.
1967
Protests in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran turn into riots, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death results in the founding of the terrorist group Movement 2 June.
1995
United States Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady’s F-16 is shot down over Bosnia while patrolling the NATO no-fly zone.
1997
In Denver, Colorado, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

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“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”--Mamdani

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Every member of the cat family Felidae, from the smallest domestic tabby to the largest Siberian tiger, shares the same broken gene. They cannot taste sweetness.

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On Monday, Los Angeles traded for future Hall of Fame edge rusher Myles Garrett in exchange for draft picks and young edge rusher Jared Verse, completing a defense that had already added veteran defensive backs Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson this spring. Everybody is comparing this to the sea-changing Boston-Moss trade in 2007.

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FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend has sued MS NOW, accusing the news organization of using “sham” anonymous sources to “push knowingly or recklessly false allegations” that she abused bureau resources.


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These Delaney Hall riots over the quality of prison food are a wonderful metaphor for our society of innuendo.

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The Inadequacy of Truth

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
This is not political or economic or historical; this is daycare talk.
By collectivism, political theorists and their own champions have meant a social order in which the claims of the group—often defined and enforced by the state—override individual choice, property rights, and voluntary exchange. Production and distribution are guided not by prices and consent but by political priorities, and individual autonomy is tolerated only insofar as it serves collective ends. That is not a caricature; it is the standard definition of what’s espoused in fascist, socialist, and communist literature.

The word’s lineage matters. Zohran Mamdani is consciously drawing on a tradition that stretches from Karl Marx, who rejected “bourgeois individualism” in favor of collective ownership, through Vladimir Lenin, who implemented it via one-party rule, to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who enforced it at colossal human cost. Even outside the communist tradition, collectivism was proudly embraced by Benito Mussolini, who defined fascism as the negation of individualism in favor of the state as an ethical whole, and by strongmen such as Idi Amin, who expelled ethnic minorities and appropriated their land in the name of the national good.

The historical record is not ambiguous. Where collectivism has moved from rhetoric to reality, the results have been grim. The Soviet Union’s collectivized agriculture led to chronic shortages and mass famine through both disastrous economic policies and by design to suppress dissent. China’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Cambodia’s agrarian collectivism under Pol Pot destroyed a quarter of the population, resulting in the “killing fields” and perhaps the most brutal regime in modern history. In each case, politics replaced price signals, error correction was treated as dissent, and individuals weren’t free to exit the collective.--from Bourne

This reasonable summary is nonetheless a curious approach to this strange problem, which has recurrent outbreaks in the West, like malaria or Ebola, rising, killing, then receding. The basic notion is that if it worked, a martial-law approach to the economy would be acceptable. There is rarely a consideration of abstract value. Doesn't freedom have some value, too? Isn't a free economy indirectly an expression of us?

Certainly, collectiveism has a basic appeal to the species: our tribalness, our envy, our romantic and unreasonable optimism and magic, our deep, cold savagery. But these are the basics of the savannah, rooms in our much more glorious house. What we are is not any of these elements; we have transcended them. We are no longer wanderers looking for an Alpha.

The real question, at its heart, is: where does the struggle to justify an inhuman, oppressive, unsuccessful system come from? Infection? Aliens?

Unit 731.5

On this day:

1215
Zhongdu (now Beijing), then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Zhongdu.
1533
Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1648
The Roundheads defeat the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War.
1660
Mary Dyer is hanged for defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1943
British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 is shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German Junkers Ju 88s, killing actor Leslie Howard and leading to speculation the downing was an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

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Tyranny can demand production but not innovation.

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A meteor exploded off the coast of Massachusetts, causing a loud boom that could be heard throughout the state Saturday afternoon.

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Bombs, drones, and missiles were exchanged over the weekend between the U.S. and Iran as they continue to redefine what a 'ceasefire' is.

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Unit 731.5

Change within a free culture will always create new interfaces between the past and the future. Citizen interference with law enforcement, historically a recognized crime, is now apparently at least debatable. The vigilante now has an admired subtype, the vigilangione. Drone warfare has reshaped the requirements of the foot soldier. Technology — and a perceptible ethical slide — has changed our environment and us.

A biotech startup called Bexorg is extracting human brains just hours after death and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the tissue no longer has electrical activity, most of its key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

According to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.

Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive.

“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.