Economic Decisions

On this day:

30 BC
Battle of Alexandria: Mark Antony achieves a minor victory over Octavian’s forces, but most of his army subsequently deserts, leading to his suicide.
1492

The Jews are expelled from Spain when the Alhambra Decree takes effect.
1790
The very first U.S. patent is issued: to inventor Samuel Hopkins for a potash process.
2007
Operation Banner, the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and the longest-running British Army operation ever, comes to an end.


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Slavery was “peculiar” in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.--the always underestimated Sowell

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All 55 European (soccer) football associations have now unanimously agreed to boycott FIFA events if Gianni Infantino pushes ahead with his polarising plan to sell parts of the World Cup to private investors.

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From the NATO Department of Pretend Control:
Cobalt is critical in a Li-ion battery since it forms the cathode (positive electrode), which gives the battery its high energy density and stability. The Copperbelt is the Congo (DRC ) is where most of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from. However, in this region, cobalt naturally co-occurs with uranium. Unless the uranium is removed from the cobalt, it stays along with it during the extraction and processing and is exported as raw material.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton in the US have found that between 2000 and 2024, large quantities of uranium were extracted, concentrated and exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the country’s cobalt supply chain. Estimates suggest that 2,000-5,000 metric tons (4.4 – 11 million pounds) of radioactive material were exported, even as the DRC has not reported uranium production in decades.

China is home to about 95 percent of the world’s cobalt refineries. So, much of this uranium was sent to China. The estimated 2,000-5,000 metric tons of uranium is sufficient to produce anywhere between 600-1,500 nuclear warheads.

The researchers do not think that this was done intentionally. The team also estimates that between 1,000-4,000 metric tons of uranium was released in mine tailings – waste stream from mining, which raises health concerns for miners and communities near the mines.

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Reverse warrants are a technology-driven version of a general warrant. “Reverse location warrants” (or “geofence warrants”) allow the government to demand the identity of an unlimited number of people based on their electronic devices’ location tracking data. “Reverse keyword warrants” operate similarly but identify people based on the words they type into internet search engines.

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Economic Decisions

Adam Smith explained how wealth develops. von Mises explained pricing.

Without the market forces of supply and demand (the trade that creates these forces) and private ownership of the means of production (which enables supply and demand to operate), all factories and industries would lose access to meaningful profit-and-loss accounting. Accounting signals relay information to owners about the success or failure of their enterprises. Without such accounting, there is no basis for managers to make informed decisions. You have no data on which to base your purchases, investments, production, hiring, wages, inventories, or anything else. You lose touch with the reality of the world around you. Such a system will be, quite literally, irrational and thereby subject to the whims of political elites. (Tucker)

Since pricing cannot guide purchasing, producers cannot anticipate demand or assign products. This creates shortages. And shortages substitute bribery for pricing and create a culture of corruption.

It is not necessary to destroy an economy, as in Venezuela, to prove the point. There are all sorts of examples of "Socialism Lite" which disable pricing signals and create shortages and distortions. Rent control fixes the price of rental units, diminishing the surplus available for repair and enhancement. So rent control leads to disrepair and shortage. Price controls on gasoline in the 1970s led to gasoline shortages. 

Wage controls in California will reduce job availability.

If you want to eliminate smoking, fix the price of cigarettes.

These are not theories. These relationships are well understood.

We know that violating these specific economic laws leads to a virtuous glow, followed by disaster. Yet somehow in our information-obsessed culture, this crucial knowledge is ignored. Somehow these politicians purposefully create these socially destructive scenarios despite knowing full well what will happen.

How can anyone be so casual about such risks? And how can anyone supporting the agent of such dangers present themselves as "moral?"

Or, is it possible these people purporting to be our leaders really just don't know?

The Shepherd's Coup

On this day:

1419
First Defenestration of Prague: a crowd of radical Hussites kill seven members of the Prague city council.
1502
Christopher Columbus lands at Guanaja in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras during his fourth voyage.
1608
At Ticonderoga (now Crown Point, New York), Samuel de Champlain shoots and kills two Iroquois chiefs. This was to set the tone for French-Iroquois relations for the next one hundred years.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of the Crater – Union forces attempt to break Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia by exploding a large bomb under their trenches.
1945
World War II: Japanese submarine I-58 sinks the USS Indianapolis, killing 883 seamen.
1971
Apollo program: Apollo 15 Mission – David Scott and James Irwin on the Apollo Lunar Module Falcon land on the Moon with the first Lunar Rover.
1975
Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again, and will be declared legally dead on this date in 1982.

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"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."--Frank Borman

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In such a small-scale society [as colonial North America], privacy as we know it did not exist, and our sharp modern distinction between private and public was as yet scarcely visible. Living quarters were crowded, and people who were not formally related – servants, hired laborers, nurses, and other lodgers – were often jammed together with family members in the same room or even in the same bed.--somewhere

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The staggering debt will bring to a head many triage decisions that are more than philosophical. One will be the willingness of future taxpayers to impose taxes on themselves to finance benefits of comfortable retirees.

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On Friday, Thinking Machines released its first manifesto, outlining its vision for a future in which AI was decentralized and built on local knowledge. The company, whose CEO, [Mira] Murati, witnessed the collapse of communism in her native Albania as a child, compared the current dominant AI paradigm of closed-source frontier labs to “central planning”—great for bounded tasks like chess and math, but not for the real work humans do every day.

***

If the DSA wants to ensure that “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses,” but instead make them “common goods,” they will have to make it illegal to provide those goods and services for profit and punish people who violate the relevant laws. That is, they will have to expect the emergence--or widening--of the relatively small American Black Market.

That will be fun.

***

The Shepherd's Coup

The Editor of The Atlantic spoke smugly on the BBC about Fauci and his Senate appearance, dismissing the U.S. connection with the Wuhan lab as small-minded political jousting, in a MasterClass of condescension. The nature of American involvement in a viral change-of-function project looking awfully like a malignant bioweapons program was not mentioned.

So, Fauci is petty and dishonest. I am truly sorry. I wish he were dashing and grand with insight and easily understood observations on how we live and what social and governmental leaders can do to protect us and improve our lives. But we must understand the real meaning of Fauci's slow public dissolution because it is elemental.

The Americans, with the West trailing, have created and developed the most astonishingly successful society of free men in history. The American unique vision of mankind, with inalienable rights neither granted nor fungible, has allowed for the gradual development of a dominant, innovative and generally benign economy and social state of accomplished citizens that improves health, education and comfort, and which is, amazingly, available to anyone.

During its evolution, the country has seen a subset of its citizens grow up along with it, claiming responsibility for its success and inculcating into the culture the belief that they are essential to its future. Politicians and their attendants, along with a new parallel culture of bureaucratic drones and parasitic governmental entrepreneurs, now shape our lives, limit our freedoms, and try to shape our futures. The basic guiding principles in the society have been undermined and now are blatantly opposed by new prophets and half-wits.

There has been a slow-motion revolution in the hive, and the Queen is dead.

Fauci is the poster child of this disaster. Self-important, ambitious beyond his reach, and confident in matters he does not--and, perhaps, cannot--understand, he creates leadership and guidance that appears, in retrospect, almost randomly simplistic.

And dangerous. Dangerous. Not just to the philosophical nature of the country but to the very health and wellbeing of the world.

15 million people died as a direct result of the Wuhan virus, and countless others were destroyed as governments slashed around like a wild giant trying to stop it. Now they are lying about it, patiently explaining to us poor rubes to let the visionaries alone to do their good work. But there is no 'good work.' You cannot kill 15 million people, then point to the success you've had legalizing a new right 'to turn-right-on red' breakthrough.

The lesson is not that demagogues are dangerous; the lesson is that they are incapable of making good decisions. And the lower 3% are of bad intent

And, of course, these people pardon each other. The general is responsible for the dying young man in the field but never to him.

And it will get worse. Shallow 'grand visions.' New revolutions to kill and die for. Half-baked ideas advanced by the presumptuous sorcerer's apprentices from the lowest quintile of everyone's high school class. These so-called leaders will have new leverage to whet their hunger. Gene editing. AI. Miniaturized weaponry. New threats to the working guy are emerging from the elemental slime of men's minds. But no threat yet can match that of the arrogant, ambitious, hubristic, preening political leader and his entourage.

Discussion and Credible Suspicions

On this day:
1565
The widowed Mary, Queen of Scots, marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Duke of Albany, at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1567
James VI is crowned King of Scotland at Stirling.
1588
Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines – English naval forces under the command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake defeat the Spanish Armada off the coast of Gravelines, France.
1848
Irish Potato Famine: Tipperary Revolt – in Tipperary, an unsuccessful nationalist revolt against British rule is put down by police.
1921
Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
1967
Vietnam War: off the coast of North Vietnam the USS Forrestal catches on fire in the worst U.S. naval disaster since World War II, killing 134.
1981
A worldwide television audience of over 700 million people watch the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

***

"We are 1,000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country, without AI and robots. Nothing else will solve the national debt."--Musk, on AI productivity

***

Fauci is invoking the Fifth. The committee is divided on political lines, and the Democrats are talking about measles. 1 million Americans died and 15 million people died worldwide by a U.S. funded research program, and the country's political life has been altered, and these guys think this is a question of the next midterm election.

***

Is the Constitution compatible with the power and conformity requirements of socialism and Islamism?

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Social experiments are a modern curse. They are soft with subjective criteria and uncontrollable variables. But an alluring study has come out of Scandinavia about retirement and more. 

The unexpected grief of retirement isn't losing a paycheck—it's losing the moment someone notices you're no longer there.  Retirement can remove a steady stream of evidence that a person is noticed, relied upon, and socially consequential. That a person matters.

Simple and impactful.

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You can get a "Pirate Certificate" in phys ed at MIT. (Liz)

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Discussion and Credible Suspicions

A recent article offers that Trump is part of a repeating wave of aristocrats and autocrats who have, since America's founding, have tried to control the country, once by a cabal including the Johnson family of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution, once in the Civil War, once in the Roosevelt Years, and now, with Trump. 

The facts may require a bit of imagination. (The aristocrats during the Revolution were real-- they were British; the planters wanted to be aristocrats but actually weren't; not sure about the Roosevelt years, and most everyone who thinks he's an aristocrat now wouldn't admit to any connection to Trump.) Reaction to ambition and dominance are actually two of the stimuli of America's Revolution.)

The group Students for Life of America has spent the last two years collecting and analyzing water samples in different American cities, searching for evidence to support their claim that women having at-home abortions using the drugs and flushing fetal remains poses a threat to the environment.

That work culminated in the release this week of a study called "controversial" purporting to show “significant levels of mifepristone” contaminating the waterways of Austin, Texas; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Carbondale, Illinois. Despite acknowledging there is no proof the mifepristone detected impacts human health, livestock or the environment, the paper warns of potential “deleterious effects on human and animal biology,” including everything from autism to infertility.

A single study in a journal run by what is called "anti-abortion physicians."

As with global warming studies, such presentations can be insubstantial and thus hard to argue against, and no cause-and-effect scientific demands are claimed. They are suggestions, notions postulating unproved relationships in a media world of information blizzards. But, unlike the stimulating suggestions of curious college coffee houses that have, over the years, proffered everything from Utilitarianism to Bigfoot, these challenges are pointed and purposeful, fueled themselves with ambition and resentment. They are marketing plans and battlecries posing as hypotheses and academic examination.

This sort of information is possible only in a culture accepting of exaggeration and advertising in its efforts to permit free expression, but such an atmosphere demands a critical, discerning citizenry. They are meaningful only to the ecstatic and the gullible.

Libraries in the Gulag

 On this day:

1540
Thomas Cromwell is executed at the order of Henry VIII of England on charges of treason. Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day.
1794
Maximilien Robespierre is executed by guillotine in Paris during the French Revolution.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Ezra Church – Confederate troops make a third unsuccessful attempt to drive Union forces from Atlanta, Georgia.
1868
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is certified, establishing African-American citizenship and guaranteeing due process of law.
1914
World War I: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia after Serbia rejects the conditions of an ultimatum sent by Austria on July 23 following the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
1942
World War II: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issues Order No. 227 in response to alarming German advances into the Soviet Union. Under the order all those who retreat or otherwise leave their positions without orders to do so are to be immediately executed.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah – The British bomb Hamburg, causing a firestorm that kills 42,000 German civilians.
1996
The remains of a prehistoric man are discovered near Kennewick, Washington. Such remains will be known as the Kennewick Man. An astonishing story, whatever you call it.
2005
The Provisional Irish Republican Army calls an end to its thirty-year-long armed campaign in Northern Ireland.

***

One should be suspicious of speakers who always refer to life as a journey, the homeless vagrants as the unhoused, pregnant women as gestating people, and people as folks.

***

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space,  worked as a spinner in a textile factory. And the experience that helped put her into a spacecraft was not flying but parachuting. She remains the youngest woman to fly in space. She flew solo. With that single mission, she logged more time in space than all the US Mercury astronauts who had flown by then combined. Tereshkova’s flight lasted two days, 22 hours and 50 minutes, and she circled Earth 48 times. Alone.

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Now, researchers at Harvard University are repurposing silicon technology to produce custom synthetic DNA.

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Some of the sweetest deals in the five boroughs’ rent-stabilization program are landing in the laps of its wealthiest tenants, not its neediest.

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France’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva launched a verbal attack against the U.S. following a contentious vote to give U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk another four-year term, accusing Washington of abandoning its role as a global human rights leader.

"The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore," the official French mission account posted on X Saturday. "Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it." 

Ambassador Jeff Bartos, the U.S. representative for U.N. management and reform, accused Türk of disproportionately condemning democracies while failing to respond adequately to abuses committed by authoritarian governments.

UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog, published a 2024 analysis of public statements initiated by Türk or his office between Oct. 17, 2022, and Oct. 31, 2024. The organization concluded that Türk criticized the United States more frequently than China, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Qatar combined. It also said it found no self-initiated criticism during that period concerning abuses by Cuba, North Korea, Algeria, Eritrea, Mauritania, Lebanon or Qatar.

The General Assembly then approved Türk’s reappointment by a vote of 144-10, with 13 abstentions, extending his tenure from Oct. 12, 2026, through Oct. 11, 2030.

***

Libraries in the Gulag

There is an interview about socialism in which the interviewer asks, rhetorically, if democratic socialism is little more than a rearranging of the same concerns and solutions that have been routinely addressed before in the U.S., like pooling money for libraries, parks, and roadway maintenance? The group managing "The Commons." This foolish argument is importantly revealing. 

This discussion is even worse as it is made by people who are paid to know better. After all, this is how we get our information.

Libraries have been built for a lot of thoughtful purposes, but they have not been political. When libraries take on a political quality, you know they are being destroyed. The destruction and restriction of libraries are always the result of authoritarianism. Libraries are old. Like Alexandria's. Concentration of information with the hope for its dissemination. Everything politics is not. Early libraries in the U.S. had no revolutionary purpose other than education and were usually privately funded.

One of America's early problems in its creation and continuity, only partially solved by war, is the debate between states and federalism. Maintaining continuity and sharing of common space, like parks and utilities, were practical choices, not political ones. The problem with taking another's earnings, or land, or daughters is that the 'have' wants to retain what is his. The 'have-not' wants what is not his and must use force to take it. It is the force that is the crucial element here, not some starry notion of the brotherhood of man. The Marxist finally solved this problem of arbitrary envy by declaring the 'haves' as an inferior caste (class), atavists from man's early development stage that needed to be exterminated. They were a regressive weed that had to be deracinated before the harvest of the new benign world could flower. It was not only that the propertied caste had no right to their ownership and production; it was that those rights were lost because they did not deserve to live.

The modern socialist starts with unprovable platitudes, then plans a system of direct government with no hesitation, no checks and balances, and no caution.

Talking this way--as if 'democratic socialism' and its arbitrary homicidal behavior, invariant history of creating poverty and despair, and its final goal of hostile and aggressive nationalism is similar to building a library-- creates a great vulnerability: withering fatigue in the listener. No one with any education, or a modicum of common sense, could take this seriously. So when confronted with, ' let's get rid of the executive and the police', 'let's turn the nuclear facilities over to the lower third of the high school class', the sensible person is paralyzed with ennui and begins talking to the socialist with half-attention, nodding and smiling as if he were eight years old, instead of giving him a character-building smack in the head. 

The 'slippery slope' is in this thinking, where libraries and fire departments are in some weird continuum with show trials and gulags and are met with paralyzing neotolerance from the weary, cynical majority that allows this childish nonsense to advance uncorrected.

From Pipe-Dreams to Pipe Bombs and Back

 On this day (yesterday, actually):

1533
Atahualpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, dies by strangulation at the hands of Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors. His death marks the end of 300 years of Inca civilization.
1581
Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (Act of Abjuration): the northern Low Countries declare their independence from the Spanish king, Philip II.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid ends – At Salineville, Ohio, Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan and 360 of his volunteers are captured by Union forces.
1941
World War II: in response to the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the seizure of all Japanese assets in the United States.
1944
The first German V-2 rocket hits Great Britain.
1944
World War II: the Soviet army enters Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine, liberating it from the Nazis. Only 300 Jews survive out of 160,000 living in Lviv prior to occupation.
1945
The Labour Party wins the United Kingdom general election of July 5 by a landslide, removing Winston Churchill from power.
1945
The Potsdam Declaration is signed in Potsdam, Germany.
1953
Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle orders an anti-polygamy law enforcement crackdown on residents of Short Creek, Arizona, which becomes known as the Short Creek Raid.

1953

Fidel Castro leads an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, thus beginning the Cuban Revolution. The movement took the name of the date: 26th of July Movement
1956
Following the World Bank’s refusal to fund building the Aswan High Dam, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal sparking international condemnation.
1989
A federal grand jury indicts Cornell University student Robert T. Morris, Jr. for releasing the Morris worm, thus becoming the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

***

Random attacks prove only that the state cannot protect its citizens, challenging the citizenry's basic belief.

***

Three people were killed and four others wounded in a shooting at a food festival near Seattle's Space Needle on Sunday evening, police said. A suspect was arrested, and another was being sought, they said.
Seattle Assistant Police Chief Tyrone Davis said at a late-night press conference that the incident involved two people they believe were shooting at each other. One was taken into custody, and the other was still on the loose.

***

Where is the $800 million de Blasio gave his wife?

***

Global households added a record $40 trillion in wealth in 2025, pushing total household net worth to $570 trillion—a 7.3% jump that outpaced the 5.9% average growth rate seen since 2000—as the world’s overall balance sheet of assets swelled to nearly $1.8 quadrillion, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s newly released “Global Balance Sheet 2026: Imbalance and Divergence” report.

These are astonishing numbers for a world crying out for revolution.

***

The Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that “The Roberts Court sees only white.” It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that “overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.”
This is from a court.

***

From Pipe-Dreams to Pipe Bombs and Back

Communism was doomed from its inception. Adherents who sneered at the "invisible hand" saw a mysterious invisible force in history that picked its fights toward an idyllic endpoint of incentive-less, motiveless production of peace and wealth, leaving behind a path littered with the bodies of those poor souls only placed on this earth to facilitate as antagonists to communism's great march. This strange, murderous idealism violated all the laws of human reality yet staggered on, storming trenches, deracinating appropriate families, and slashing and burning the present to plant the seeds of the future. It is said that it attracted the idealist--but who could say its mayhem and murderous creed was, in any way, idealistic? No, it attracted the foolish, the embittered, the cynically ambitious, the irrational, and the overtly psychopathic, who unsurprisingly rose in its hierarchy. But eventually, after years of misery and death, the cause flagged, failed, and died.

The death of communism was perfectly predictable, and those critics who predicted it can be rightfully proud. But they must be surprised by its stubborn death throes. How many people were drafted into its horrible, morbid experiment? How many had to die to prove this was a stupid, unworkable, and unnatural pipe-dream? And what are the responsibilities of those clear-thinking observers who coolly watched this nightmare without interfering? After all, it took the Russian communist state three generations to die.

The cockroach has survived by perfecting itself and enduring; Marxism has survived by entirely changing. It no longer speaks to the proletariat and their work; it speaks to the landed, to those whose expensive educations, trust funds and parents' influence are inadequate for their ambitions.

What used to be a fierce warfare born from convoluted economics and history has become simple sociology and envy. We are no longer required to rise up against inevitable historical enemies; those enemies, disappointed and bitter, have become the oppressed. Their enemy is social imbalance; their engines are bigotry and unequal outcome. These social distortions must be righted for the good of 'the Commons' by those of vision and fortitude.

After years of defeats, the upper class wants their aristocracy back.

Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

 

On this day:
1054
Siward, Earl of Northumbria invades Scotland and defeats Macbeth, King of Scotland, somewhere north of the Firth of Forth.
1794
French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre is arrested after encouraging the execution of more than 17,000 “enemies of the Revolution”.
1919
The Chicago Race Riot erupts after a racial incident occurred on a South Side beach, leading to 38 fatalities and 537 injuries over a five-day period.
1964
Vietnam War: 5,000 more American military advisers are sent to South Vietnam bringing the total number of United States forces in Vietnam to 21,000.
1974
Watergate Scandal: the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee votes 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment (for obstruction of justice) against President Richard Nixon.
1996
Centennial Olympic Park bombing: in Atlanta, United States, a pipe bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics. One woman (Alice Hawthorne) is killed, and a cameraman suffers a heart attack fleeing the scene. 111 are injured.
2005
STS-114: NASA grounds the Space Shuttle, pending an investigation of the continuing problem with the shedding of foam insulation from the external fuel tank. During ascent, the external tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery sheds a piece of foam slightly smaller than the piece that caused the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; this foam does not strike the spacecraft.

2026

Tom Lehrer died.

***

The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night. It may not matter much now, but as the children grow up and assume a larger role in the world, it will.-- Cowen

***

Two of the most substantially used words in the current global vocabulary of mathematics and computing come from the same 9th-century Persian scholar working in the same Baghdad library across approximately the same twenty-year period between 813 and 833 CE.


The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name.

***

The Pirates lost 11-0 to the Cubs last night in front of a full stadium.

***

Zakaria's Sunday editorial on CNN is often good. Today it was not, but his interview with Microsoft's CEO Nadella was really worth watching.

***

Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

In today's gospel, more parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a pearl of great price. These are interesting similes, physical representations of the spiritual. And strange suggestions. Both are appropriated, not created, found and not earned. More, they are both of oblique origin; the treasure is someone else's, the pearl the reaction to an impurity.

Maybe he meant these treasures were within.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas

Satstats

On this day:

306
Constantine I is proclaimed Roman emperor by his troops.
1603
James VI of Scotland is crowned as king of England (James I of England), bringing the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into personal union. Political union would occur in 1707.
1609
The English ship Sea Venture, en route to Virginia, is deliberately driven ashore during a storm at Bermuda to prevent its sinking; the survivors go on to found a new colony there.
1755
British governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council order the deportation of the Acadians. Thousands of Acadians are sent to the British Colonies in America, France and England. Some later move to Louisiana, while others resettle in New Brunswick.
1759
French and Indian War: in Western New York, British forces capture Fort Niagara from the French, who subsequently abandon Fort Rouillé.
1783
American Revolutionary War: The war’s last action, the Siege of Cuddalore, is ended by a preliminary peace agreement.
1799
At Aboukir in Egypt, Napoleon I of France defeats 10,000 Ottomans under Mustafa Pasha.
1814
War of 1812: Battle of Lundy’s Lane – reinforcements arrive near Niagara Falls for General Riall’s British and Canadian forces and a bloody, all-night battle with Jacob Brown’s Americans commences at 18.00; the Americans retreat to Fort Erie.
1861
American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the war is being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
1934
The Nazis assassinate Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in a failed coup attempt.
1943
World War II: Benito Mussolini is forced out of office by his own Italian Grand Council and is replaced by Pietro Badoglio.
1978
Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby” is born.
1993
Israel launches a massive attack against Lebanon in what the Israelis call Operation Accountability, and the Lebanese call Seven-Day War.
1994
Israel and Jordan sign the Washington Declaration, which formally ends the state of war that had existed between the nations since 1948.

***

"Joseph Smith an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and "unlaughing" boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a little road south of Palmyra [N.Y.] in 1827. . . . There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the Book of Mormon. With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the "revised" Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he insisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain."--William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways.

***

Who could have imagined that the marketplace would create price pressures in warfare? See the Barracuda missile.


***

Source:Los Alamos National Laboratory Summary:

Researchers have created quantum control techniques that can make a system appear to run backward in time. By precisely managing quantum measurements, they can reshape the system's arrow of time and even harvest energy from the measurement process itself. The breakthrough could lead to more powerful quantum computers, quantum batteries, and other advanced technologies.

***

So Platner was nominated by Maine voters, but that nomination was cancelled by the Democrat party, which will now choose the new nominee. Just like the Biden-to-Harris nomination/handoff. 

Ah, democracy.

***

Another madman in the streets, this one with a screwdriver and a knife. He stabbed a Jewish guy and an Asian.

Why is it being reported as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel crime? Why is the Asian guy eclipsed?

***

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, has been removed from office after the court’s governing body concluded in June that he had committed serious misconduct in connection with allegations of sexual abuse. 

That will give the Netanyahu warrant a lot of credence.

***

Satstats

Burry revealed in a recent post that he's passed the milestone of 300,000 subscribers

***

We are paid more and have an unemployment rate of 4.3% while Europeans are paid less and have an unemployment rate of 6.0%


***

Between 2022 and 2023, left-wing governments held power in 13 countries across Latin America. Today, that number has collapsed to roughly five.

***

According to Pew Research Center data from 2025, public agreement with Republicans on handling crime has risen from 40 percent in 2023 to 45 percent. Over the same period, agreement with Democrats fell from 30 to 28 percent.

***

An estimated 24.6 million older Americans, or 44% of the country's retirement-age population, depend on the Social Security program for 100% of their income.

***

Transgender national vs. state stats:

0.98 percent of minors—1.51 percent of girls and 0.46 percent of boys—received a “transgender-related diagnosis” (typically “gender dysphoria”) 2015-2023. In other words, about one in every 65 adolescent girls in Oregon is a potential candidate for medical “sex reassignment.”
When the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) was published in 2013, it reported a diagnostic prevalence of gender dysphoria among adults as 0.002 percent to 0.003 percent for females and 0.005 percent to 0.014 percent for males.
Last year, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics reported that approximately one in 1,000 American teens was prescribed cross-sex hormones by age 17. The Oregon rate was two to three times higher than that. Indeed, a closer look at the data revealed that hormone prescriptions in Oregon were four to five times the national rate among 14- and 15-year-olds, while puberty-blocker uptake was up to six times the national rate at age 14. Thus, teens in Oregon are not only being medicalized more, but also at earlier ages.

Diagnostic trends, Oregon versus national

***

The U.S. military was the world's 17th largest in April 1917, smaller (less than 250,000) than Romania's, and smaller than Britain's casualties in one battle. America's military became a melting pot for a nation in which one-third of the population had been born abroad or whose parents had been. Forty-three languages were spoken in one Army division raised in New York. (Will)

That "melting pot" unleashed a flu pandemic that killed more people in a year — somewhere between 20 million and 50 million — than the war killed in four years.

***

The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

O. Henry

On this day, many things:

1148
Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.
1411
Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland, takes place.
1487
Citizens of Leeuwarden, Netherlands strike against ban on foreign beer.
1534
French explorer Jacques Cartier plants a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and takes possession of the territory in the name of Francis I of France.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and is replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1715
A Spanish treasure fleet of 10 ships under Admiral Ubilla leaves Havana, Cuba for Spain. Seven days later, 9 of them sink in a storm off the coast of Florida. A few centuries later, treasure is salvaged from these wrecks.
1847
After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City. Celebrations of this event include the Pioneer Day Utah state holiday and the Days of '47 Parade.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Kernstown – Confederate General Jubal Anderson Early defeats Union troops led by General George Crook in an effort to keep them out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1901
O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank.
1911
Hiram Bingham III re-discovers Machu Picchu, “the Lost City of the Incas”. Was it lost?
1915
The passenger ship S.S. Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. How is that possible?
1922
The draft of the British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; and which came into effect on 26 September 1923. The beginning of the end.
1923
The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1929
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers). This is truly precious.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian airplanes bomb Hamburg by night, those of the Americans by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974
Watergate scandal: the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
And, finally, 2009
The MV Arctic Sea, reportedly carrying a cargo of timber, is allegedly hijacked in the North Sea by pirates, but much speculation remains as to the actual cargo and events. An astonishing story that might be gun-running.

***

“It’s very hard to distinguish AI security incidents from AI marketing, and that’s actually a big problem going forward,” --Matthew Green, a security expert at Johns Hopkins University.

***

The “paperclip maximiser” is a thought experiment invented by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003.

He describes a scenario in which people invent an AI whose only goal is to make as many paperclips as possible. But he illustrates how that could quickly become horrifying: it might wipe out the humans that could potentially switch it off and stop it making paperclips, for instance, or it could realise that the human body contains material that could be turned into paperclips and so decide to harvest them and use them for that.

***

A six-year-old, who had a genetic mutation that affected her neurodevelopment, received a gene therapy treatment designed to correct the underlying defect at Shanghai Xinhua Hospital in March 2025, according to an investigation by Science and Retraction Watch. She died days later from a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, the magazine reported, citing documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents.

***

Has anyone heard a coherent, sensible argument against Voter ID laws?

***

Only two companies from the Dow Industrial Average in 1976 remain on the Dow today, Procter & Gamble and Chevron, nee Standard Oil.

***

What in heaven's name is the government doing testing the testosterone levels of its citizens?

***

O. Henry

This day has some gravity. The S.S. Eastland. Operation Gomorrah. The Kellogg-Briand Pact. The British Mandate. The return of Apollo 11.  The MV Arctic Sea hijacking. 

And O. Henry, the talented author, was released from prison on this day.

O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of “The Gift of the Magi,” was one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation. His legacy is celebrated every year by the O. Henry Prize for Fiction. He got his start in prison, while serving time for embezzling funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, where he had worked as a teller.

Much later, a 1916 report characterized the bank in question as “carelessly managed,” and revealed that “the patrons used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars and say a week later, ‘Porter, I took out $200, last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to.’” The Times report claims that Porter, who by the time he was charged had moved to Houston and taken a job as a columnist with The Daily Post, resigned before one of the “misappropriations with which he was charged,” and that if he had simply gone back to Austin when he was summoned to stand trial, he would have been acquitted.

Instead, he took a train to New Orleans, and then hopped on a fruit steamer headed for Honduras, where the law could not reach him. But in February of 1897, he learned that his wife was very ill, and he returned to the States to care for her. His wife died in July, and Porter was convicted the following year, and in March 1898, sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement.

In prison, Porter “did his first serious literary work,” as the Times puts it. In order to be able to send money home to support his daughter Margaret, he wrote and published 14 short stories, under pen names, including the one with which he would become famous: O. Henry.

Porter was released early for good behavior on July 24, 1901, and returned to Pittsburgh to live with his daughter and his in-laws, before moving on to New York City. Most importantly, he kept writing, and in 1904 published his first collection of short stories, Cabbages and Kings, followed two years later by The Four Million, which would include some of his most enduring tales, including “The Gift of the Magi.” He was incredibly prolific; he would keep publishing until he died in 1910.
(from Lit Hub)

Democracy Before Socialism

On this day

1821
While the Mora Rebellion continued, Greeks captured Monemvasia Castle and massacred nearly 3000 Turkish inhabitants.
1903
The Ford Motor Company sells its first car.
1914
Austria-Hungary issues an ultimatum to Serbia demanding Serbia to allow the Austrians to determine who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbia will reject those demands, and Austria will declare war on July 28.
1929
The Fascist government in Italy bans the use of foreign words.
1936
In Catalonia, Spain, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia is founded through the merger of Socialist and Communist parties.
1967
12th Street Riot: in Detroit, Michigan, one of the worst riots in United States history begins on 12th Street in the predominantly African American inner city. It will leave 43 killed, 342 injured, and 1,400 buildings burned.
1968
Glenville Shootout: in Cleveland, Ohio, a violent shootout between a Black Militant organization led by Ahmed Evans and the Cleveland Police Department occurs. During the shootout, a riot begins and lasts for five days.
1968
The only successful hijacking of an El Al aircraft takes place when a Boeing 707 carrying 10 crew and 38 passengers is taken over by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The aircraft was en route from Rome, Italy, to Lod, Israel.
1984
Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown after nude photos of her appeared in Penthouse magazine.
1992
A Vatican commission, led by Joseph Ratzinger, establishes that it is necessary to limit the rights of homosexual people and non-married couples.

***

The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the reach of mere majorities. We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them." (from somewhere)

 

***

With all we have seen, why would we assume that elections are not tampered with?

***

OpenAI claimed responsibility for a security breach of the model platform Hugging Face, in which an agent, driven by a combination of OpenAI models, compromised the platform's infrastructure, while internally testing models on ExploitGym, a benchmark for cybersecurity capabilities. That is to say, in a test sequence to assess a defense program, it breached and attacked it.
We are giving an infant a handgun.

***

There is an effort in Hong Kong to punish booksellers. Several stores have been raided and workers there imprisoned. (A popular protest t-shirt reads "I am a bookstore employee.")
Hong Kong’s security chief, Chris Tang, said that booksellers had a responsibility to ensure their books were lawful, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick”.
So the totalitarian sterilizes our world to keep us safe.

***

Vogue's Culture Writer is a socialist. Vogue.

***

Remember, democracy fans, you chose Katie Porter and the Maine Nazi. What's next?

***

Democracy Before Socialism

The rising interest in "Democratic Socialism" is likely due to several factors, none of them flattering. It provides another mindless answer to the unending and robotic political drone for 'change.' It masquerades as a solution for inept and disheartened lives. (Current demographics imply the true Left in America are the well-educated unsuccessful.)

Contributing to these fantasies is the underlying ignorance as to what a commitment to "democratic socialism" really means. The current citizens, despite access to immeasurable volumes of information, simply have no idea the demon they are embracing.

But they have the marketing down. Democratic sounds modern and up-to-date. And responsive. But there is nothing inherently good or decent in democracy. Hitler was elected.

Nor does the majority have some moral high ground. Democracy is only a process by which leadership is selected; a means. It is the culture and those elected to lead it that always do the damage. The nature and value of a culture and its governing is not measured by how it is chosen but by what that culture holds dear.

The demand that the majority have its way will never end. That's why the Constitution was written and why it has been such a success. Majority vote is not sacred without a hard, basic framework of individual rights, which majority vote always intentionally tries to supersede. Otherwise, we would glorify lynching and gang rape. Doing something by vote is neither right nor good any more than voting to sack Canada is. 

A majority vote is only as meaningful as the guidelines that restrain it.

Socialism is a silly idea, but it is not made any less silly--or given any more dignity--by voting for it. Nor is a bad idea made any better by dying for it.

Artificial Insemination

 On this day:

1099
First Crusade: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1298
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Falkirk – King Edward I of England and his longbowmen defeat William Wallace and his Scottish schiltrons outside the town of Falkirk.
1706
The Acts of Union 1707 are agreed upon by commissioners from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, which, when passed by each country’s Parliaments, lead to the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1797
Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Battle between Spanish and British naval forces during the French Revolutionary Wars. During the Battle, Rear-Admiral Nelson is wounded in the arm and the arm had to be partially amputated.
1937
New Deal: the United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
1942
Holocaust: the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
1946
King David Hotel bombing: a Zionist underground organisation, the Irgun, bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the civil administration and military headquarters for Mandate Palestine, resulting in 91 deaths.
2003
Members of 101st Airborne of the United States, aided by Special Forces, attack a compound in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, along with Mustapha Hussein, Qusay’s 14-year-old son, and a bodyguard.
2005
Jean Charles de Menezes is killed by police as the hunt begins for the London Bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the 21 July 2005 London bombings.
2011
Norway is the victim of twin terror attacks, the first being a bomb blast which targeted government buildings in central Oslo, the second being a massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utøya.

***

Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies.--Lemieux

***

How are Kash Patel's blinking lessons going?

***

Two National Institutes of Health researchers have been charged with allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying to federal authorities.

Vincent Munster, chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, and research fellow Claude Kwe were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after returning from the Republic of Congo.

***

There is an undercurrent of criticism toward Lionel Messi because he hasn't publicly addressed the unspoken national generalizations about Argentina's unspoken racial generalizations.

***

A whale population spontaneously drops its entire repertoire every few years and collectively adopts an entirely new song from thousands of miles away—long-range cultural transmission outside humanity.

***

Artificial Insemination

Radio belly. Cat shovel.

Peculiar junctions of normal adjectives and nouns are always a tipoff; you are dealing with either a Beat poet or a progressive. The poet jars, the progressive inculcates.

With a progressive, one term is being infused with the other. A hybrid is being created, and the alloy is usually a monster. "Health care justice." "The criminal community." "Democratic socialism." Linguistic square pegs are forced into conceptual round holes.

Our lives have become so inundated with opinion and conflict that we are becoming calloused. Do illegal immigrants demand the assumption of innocence? Does an illegal immigrant have to commit another crime before we take him seriously? Can a vicious criminal be abused by the law? Are 'fraudsters' different from thieves? Our whole nation is founded on the right of the individual to defy the majority; does that empower a crazy foreign student?

So we suffer through tortuous legal wranglings and debates. And we know that the system is geared to fairness, so we let these debates play themselves out. A man sues a casual girlfriend for alimony, a group demands dolphin voting rights--and we get up and go to work. We turn the page.

These verbal shotgun marriages wear us down. What is 'social justice," really? The right of people to join a club? To marry whoever you want? To attend any school? It's like hybridization across species; you know the product will be sterile anyway.

What follows is an event reported by Megan McArdle in the WashPo. That this is not a topic of daily conversation is proof of the notion's malignancy.

"In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.

This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories."

In the political laboratory, no experiment is innocuous, no noble lie without consequence, particularly as the fifth column and the press make the inane or the revolutionary routine.

The Enemies of the Good

 On this day:

365
A tsunami devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by the Crete earthquake, estimated to be 8.0 on the Richter Scale. 5,000 people perished in Alexandria, and 45,000 more died outside the city.
1403
Battle of Shrewsbury: King Henry IV of England defeats rebels to the north of the county town of Shropshire, England.
1861
American Civil War: First Battle of Bull Run – at Manassas Junction, Virginia, the first major battle of the war begins and ends in a victory for the Confederate army.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1961
Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission – Gus Grissom piloting Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space (in a suborbital mission).
1969
Space Race: Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission (July 20 in North America).
1973
In the Lillehammer affair in Norway, Israeli Mossad agents kill a waiter whom they mistakenly thought was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.
2005
Four terrorist bombings, occurring exactly two weeks after the similar July 7 bombings, target London’s public transportation system. All four bombs fail to detonate and all four suspected suicide bombers are captured and later convicted and imprisoned for long terms.
2011
NASA’s Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135

***

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.---Lord Acton

***

Since we have become a people who hope to shape our nature through the adoption and criminalization of words like "Washington Redskins," shouldn't we do something to soften the aggressive and dangerous name inherent in the State of Delaware?

***

Gymnasium is a Latinisation of the Greek, meaning to exercise. Its root word is the same as for 'nude.'

The Greeks banned women from the gymnasium but, I believe, the Etruscans did not.

***

John Scopes found guilty, the Americans land on the moon, both on the same day in history. I wonder if we could start a political study, deductible of course, on how days of the year contain inherent historical leanings, like a horoscope. We could meet in Acapulco every six months and discuss our findings, maybe get a university chair or two.

***

The full cost of making America a welfare state wasn’t fully recorded in the federal budget deficits of the 1970s because inflation and bracket creep tax increases transferred much of the cost to the family budget.

***

The Enemies of the Good

Cultures are always threatened by envy, madness, the restless need to change into some imagined good. (The old saw, 'the enemy of good is better.') The Americans are particularly subject to assault because their philosophy allows the revolutionary the freedom to try it.

The American foundation is tough, though. The Founders recognized whimsy as a weak and inaccurate  (and adolescent) motive in political change. And common and shape-changing. They demanded a philosophy and a slow process of foundational restructuring. This may explain the frustrated frenzy of contemporary revolutionaries. Any more, the Americans seem willing to import them.

The current threat from the Left seems to have coalesced into incoherence. America is so brilliantly constructed that its enemies have simply stopped trying to replace it and devolved into emotional tantrums. The objections to America have become geographic, like Israel. Or religious, like Islam. Or historic, like slavery. None of these points are actionable as they are peripheral to the country itself. Their energy is resentment, not constructive. So they would overthrow the British government over the Corn Laws. These are people who hate Catholicism because of the Crusades and Blacks because of the Congo Wars. America's domestic enemies are people without context.

Mamdani will be risky for them because he is real. The Netanyahu kerfluffle is silly but instructive. Mamdani wants to enforce an international edit the country doesn't recognize. This raises practical questions. Who will enforce the edit? Local police? Would they fight Israeli regulars? State cops? National Guard? Where would they put him? Would Israeli special forces counter? Are we going to ask American boys to die for the Hague over some incoherent international cult?

The Left is on the wrong side of all this, but they don't care about much other than winning and blood in the streets. Their incoherence, though, might give them a strange advantage as no sensible person would take such a crew seriously.

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

On this day:

70
First Jewish-Roman War: Siege of Jerusalem – Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, storms the Fortress of Antonia north of the Temple Mount. The Roman army is drawn into street fights with the Zealots.
1807
Nicéphore Niépce is awarded a patent by Napoleon Bonaparte for the Pyréolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine, after it successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône in France.
1903
The Ford Motor Company ships its first car.
1944
World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
1950
Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.
1960
The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.
1969
Apollo Program: Apollo 11 successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on another world almost 7 hours later.
1976
The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1977
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is hit by a flash flood that kills eighty and causes $350 million in damage.
1977
The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments.

***

There is no legitimate use case for crypto. They’ve had 18 years to come up with one. They keep throwing things up like “an inflation hedge” or “source of stability.” Every one of them has turned out to be baseless.

The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering, and crime. It’s the preferred mechanism of choice for global terrorists, sex traffickers, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

You have to ask yourself why crypto has basically hijacked the political agenda of Washington. It’s because they followed the Sam Bankman-Fried model of buying bipartisan support by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns. --Krugman

***

In May, Mamdani’s administration released a map meant to celebrate the city's ethnic diversity and immigrant roots. The chart included Little Palestine and Little Pakistan but omitted Little Italy, one of the best-known neighborhoods in Manhattan. The map included Little Mexico, Little Guyana, and Little Bhod-Tibet, but failed to recognize well known Irish enclaves like Woodlawn and Sunnyside. Not surprisingly, the map omitted Jewish neighborhoods.
Welcome to the 'some are more equal than others' phase.

***

The use of subatomic particles to process data could represent a breakthrough that’s unmatched in modern human history, according to analysts at Bank of America, who compared it to the discovery of fire. “A technology that can perform endless complex calculations in zero-time, warp-speeding human knowledge and development.”

***

Just to be fair:
An 18-year-old has more at stake in an election than an 80-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?
An 80-year-old has more money at stake than an 18-year-old. Should his vote be weighted more?

***

A detector buried a kilometre underground in Japan may have caught the faintest signal ever recorded: the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the entire universe, a background hum of stellar death that scientists have been straining to hear for decades.--Headline  at Space Daily. I suppose they could have said "background hum of stellar creation", too 

***

Putting the Moron Back in Oxymoron

Socialism has been around in some form or other forever. Cain shared Abel's production. Pirates share the spoils. The prospect of sharing the product of another's efforts makes for a terrific recruiting poster. It has been the default system for failing individuals forever. But it is a ridiculous socio-economic system that has deteriorated everywhere it's been tried. From the schoolyard to Jamestown and Plymouth to the early religious conclaves to Mafia protection rackets, sharing others' production has changed only the mailing addresses of the rich.

The modern adaptation--sharing by voting mandate--cleverly sidesteps group sharing's basic flaw: enforcement. If 51% of the population wants to share production, a sizable portion does not. If a citizen has no essential right to the results of his work, and his neighbor has a statutory right to it, how is that conflict resolved? Force.

Democracies have their own flaws. Is a 90% vote more important in a society than a 52% vote? Can a 90% vote make farms communal? Wives? Slaves? Is lynching OK if the correct process is followed?

Ants are very productive and organized. But we are not ants. 

The socialist starts with a superficial notion--property--and works down to organize his culture. The revolutionary geniuses in America started with the basic rights of the nation's citizens--life, liberty, the striving for happiness--and worked up. It is because socialism is so tenuously but fervently moored by property that it is so unstable and dangerous.

So, when one votes for socialism, the job is nowhere near finished. The disenters and countless inconsistencies have to be identified and, in some fashion, attacked. The vote is meaningless until it is forcibly imposed.

So, is democratic socialism an oxymoron?

Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

On this day:
64
Great Fire of Rome: a fire begins to burn in the merchant area of Rome and soon burns completely out of control. According to a popular, but untrue legend, Nero fiddled as the city burned.

711
Umayyad conquest of Hispania: Battle of Guadalete – Umayyad forces under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeat the Visigoths led by King Roderic. This began the successful invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, less than 100 years after the death of the Prophet.
1333
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Halidon Hill – The English win a decisive victory over the Scots.
1545
The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982, the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
1553
Lady Jane Grey is replaced by Mary I of England as Queen of England after only nine days of reign.
1701
Representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sign the Nanfan Treaty, ceding a large territory north of the Ohio River to England.
1843
Brunel’s steamship, the SS Great Britain, is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller and also becoming the largest vessel afloat in the world.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid – At Buffington Island in Ohio, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s raid into the north is mostly thwarted when a large group of his men are captured while trying to escape across the Ohio River.
1864
Taiping Rebellion: Third Battle of Nanking – The Qing Dynasty finally defeats the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
1942
World War II: Battle of the Atlantic – German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the last U-boats to withdraw from their United States Atlantic coast positions in response to the effective American convoy system.
1963
Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 metres (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.
1981
In a private meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French Prime Minister François Mitterrand reveals the existence of the Farewell Dossier, a collection of documents showing that the Soviets had been stealing American technological research and development.
1997
The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army resumes a ceasefire to end their 25-year campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

***

"Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals."--Norberg

***

The country of Peru has seen an influx of babies named after the star of Norway’s World Cup team, Erling Haaland, with over 500 newborns having been named after the forward.

***

Tulsi Gabbard’s older brother allegedly tried to lure several young children into a hotel room with money and gum at a Hawaiian hotel resort.

***

The new Democrat bent is that the Constitution, the very declaration of the values that underlie the nation, is "nostalgic." It's appearing as a common talking point among national candidates. This is brazen, iconoclastic stuff, containing the seeds of a real disaster. And it would not be tried without some support in polling.

***

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it, rivers, rain, clouds, lakes, and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock. It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.

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Sunday/More Parables and Christ's Commentary

A week after the Parable of the Sower comes today's gospel, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows his wheat and, in the night, an enemy oversows the field with weeds. (The weeds are darnel, strangely a name taken by football players and actors. Its historical meaning is "disorder.") The farmer decides to wait and harvest them all together for fear that extracting the weeds will harm the good wheat as well. Christ, in an unusual move, then explains the parable. A hard reading of it should be very alarming.

This is a significant insight into Christ's message. There is a Good. But there is also an Evil. And that Evil is sown by an Enemy, an active Enemy of the Good. The Enemy is surreptitious, and the Evil he sows is inextricably interwoven with the Good so that separating them is injurious to the Good. That is, Good and Evil are linked. There are incidental slaves in this parable--without comment--and the eventual harvesters are Angels. 

Angels.

This is a battlefield, a struggle over the soul of man. Good and Evil are real and hard to separate, but separation will happen. And God is patient; His patience comes from a sincere interest in protecting the Good.

This is the picture of a religion with principals, not simply abstract principles, with active virtue and evil, and both have proponents.


Sowing Seed

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy--bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

ROBERT LAURENCE BINYON
1869-1943 / England