The Republic of Pisa is defeated in the Battle of Meloria by the Republic of Genoa, thus losing its naval dominance in the Mediterranean.
1777
American Revolutionary War: The bloody Battle of Oriskany prevents American relief of the Siege of Fort Stanwix.
1806
Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates ending the Holy Roman Empire
1862
American Civil War: the Confederate ironclad Ship CSS is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
1914
World War I: First Battle of the Atlantic – two days after the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany over the German invasion of Belgium, ten German U-boats leave their base in Helgoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea.
1930
Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi in New York and disappears never to be seen again.
1940
Estonia was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union.
1945
World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when the atomic bomb “Little Boy” is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
1991
Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
1996
NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms.
2011
A helicopter containing members of Navy SEAL 6 is shot down in Afghanistan killing 38.
***
Tyranny is not freedom just because you voted for it.
More than 900 million SpaceX shares are set to unlock Thursday, more than doubling the publicly available stock in Elon Musk’s space and AI company.
***
A new tactic is emerging in the evolving Social Security failure:
'Social Security is less a need-based program than a transfer of wealth from the young and unpropertied to the old and comfortable.'
***
The Democrat's search for muscles has arrived in a tight black T-shirt and a mystery degree in Michigan.
This will be a rarely meaningful election as it offers a serial candidate who dislikes the country he wants to represent. That is a serious test of national tolerance.
***
Is a "deal" a "treaty"?
***
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has suggested a state actor was behind the explosive-laden drone that was found at Leipzig airport.
***
Why do Bad Things Stick?
Can we transcend our history? Should we? Somehow the great achievement of the Revolution has been eclipsed in recent years and replaced by guilt. Is that permanent? Does everything in history create a permanent alloy, or are they just blends of colors to be washed away?
Things in America are different now. Silliness is no longer simply dismissed. Foolish people who want to dismantle the Constitution are taken seriously. The President codifies petulance. He puts state money into company investments. These are significant, philosophy-altering events. Can they be rolled back when he leaves, or will we stagger on with the new, heavier and distorting alloy of what we once had?
This is one view:
"America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two-thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.
Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.
Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.
It is the same pattern everywhere. When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insists that the rest of us refer to his country in English as “Türkiye”, he invites us to treat Turkey as a post-colonial failed state rather than as the Western democracy it was before his time. I mean, we use English exonyms for serious places. No one demands that we say Deutschland or Nippon or Magyarország. But touchy third-worldists demand Côte d’Ivoire, Timor-Leste and Cabo Verde – and now the Gulf of America - the classic needy-country move.
…..
Then again, as Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done cannot be undone”. Those who have downplayed, excused, or ignored Trump’s venality will struggle to find grounds on which to oppose equally sleazy stuff from a successor in either party. Standards have been permanently lowered. We will look back wistfully on what was lost."--from Hannan
"America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two-thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.
Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.
Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.
It is the same pattern everywhere. When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insists that the rest of us refer to his country in English as “Türkiye”, he invites us to treat Turkey as a post-colonial failed state rather than as the Western democracy it was before his time. I mean, we use English exonyms for serious places. No one demands that we say Deutschland or Nippon or Magyarország. But touchy third-worldists demand Côte d’Ivoire, Timor-Leste and Cabo Verde – and now the Gulf of America - the classic needy-country move.
…..
Then again, as Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done cannot be undone”. Those who have downplayed, excused, or ignored Trump’s venality will struggle to find grounds on which to oppose equally sleazy stuff from a successor in either party. Standards have been permanently lowered. We will look back wistfully on what was lost."--from Hannan
It's hard to know where to start. Trump? Biden's Presidency-from-the -Crypt? Johnson's creeping Authoritarianism-with-Good-Intent?
Bad ideas will always get a hearing. Some will lie fallow and, unopposed, will fester. The Bell Curve is nonjudgmental. But tolerance for error and respect for precedents has momentum. Ask Dred Scott.
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