On this day:
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.
***
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."
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.
***
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.
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