On this day:
47 BC
Ptolemy Caesarion of Egypt, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, is born
1314
First War of Scottish Independence: The Battle of Bannockburn (south of Stirling) begins.1611
The mutinous crew of Henry Hudson’s fourth voyage sets Henry, his son and seven loyal crew members adrift in an open boat in what is now Hudson Bay; they are never heard from again.1758
Seven Years’ War: Battle of Krefeld – British forces defeat French troops at Krefeld in Germany.
1760
Seven Years’ War: Battle of Landeshut – Austria defeats Prussia.
1917
In a game against the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox pitcher Ernie Shore retires 26 batters in a row after replacing Babe Ruth, who had been ejected for punching the umpire.
1942
World War II: the first selections for the gas chamber at Auschwitz take place on a train full of Jews from Paris.
1959
Convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs is released after only nine years in prison and allowed to emigrate to Dresden, East Germany where he resumes a scientific career.
1972
Watergate Scandal: U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman are taped talking about using the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into the Watergate break-ins.
1982
Chinese American Vincent Chin is beaten to death in Highland Park, Michigan, by two auto workers who had mistaken him for Japanese and who were angry about the success of Japanese auto companies.
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Socialism, which had never really taken root in America, is now in danger of becoming the secular religion of many voters — especially disillusioned young people.--Fund, in NR
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A blogger referred to the Tkachuk brothers as "thumb-shaped."
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According to the startup Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster, cheaper, and uses a lot less energy than any other model on the market. The company also claims that SubQ is able to process up to 12 times as much text at once as most other models, allowing it to carry out a range of data-heavy tasks, such as analyzing hundreds of documents or entire code bases. These results, reported in MIT Technology Review, rely on in-house studies.
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Alphabet shares dropped 5% and lost $225 billion in market value after Nobel laureate John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic.
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This daily news out of the Middle East would be comic if it were not such a scary indicator for the future. Taken individually, the plublic statements could all be unrelated. The common thread is that everybody is lying to everybody else at breakneck speed.
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Righteous Vigilante
Nothing in a culture is more dangerous than allowing the courts and the law to become a sword rather than a shield. Or to allow for that perception.
And Democracy's sword is two-edged.
Jury nullification occurs when a jury believes a defendant is guilty but renders a “not guilty” verdict because it regards the relevant law as unjust.
John Adams said about jurors, “It is not only his right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”
It has been said that such an attitude prevailed in the pre-Revolution period when English law was thwarted in the colonies because it was felt the individual was guilty of violating the law, but that the law was wrong. Conscience is a difficult bellwether when the culture does not have common ground. How would someone advocating jihad vote on a matter of terrorism, for example?
States and cultures are organized on basic precepts. That is, basic assumptions. This unanimity among people's beliefs on the nature of life--or the organization of life, the state--is the state's DNA. Law and the courts are a culture's epicenter.
How much latitude can such a system tolerate and maintain its integrity?
What would be the consequences, for example, if a jury thought that Mangione had a point?
Jury nullification occurs when a jury believes a defendant is guilty but renders a “not guilty” verdict because it regards the relevant law as unjust.
John Adams said about jurors, “It is not only his right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”
It has been said that such an attitude prevailed in the pre-Revolution period when English law was thwarted in the colonies because it was felt the individual was guilty of violating the law, but that the law was wrong. Conscience is a difficult bellwether when the culture does not have common ground. How would someone advocating jihad vote on a matter of terrorism, for example?
States and cultures are organized on basic precepts. That is, basic assumptions. This unanimity among people's beliefs on the nature of life--or the organization of life, the state--is the state's DNA. Law and the courts are a culture's epicenter.
How much latitude can such a system tolerate and maintain its integrity?
What would be the consequences, for example, if a jury thought that Mangione had a point?
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