On this day, a busy day in history:
1864American Civil War: Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuates Atlanta, Georgia, after a four-month siege by General Sherman
1923
The Great Kantō earthquake devastates Tokyo and Yokohama, killing about 105,000 people.
1939
Adolf Hitler signs an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people
1939
World War II: Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning World War II.
1972
In Reykjavík, Iceland, American Bobby Fischer beats Russian Boris Spassky to become the world chess champion.
1983
Cold War: Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board die, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.
1985
A joint American–French expedition locates the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis commences when armed terrorists take children and adults hostage in Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia.
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~H. L. Mencken
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Daniel Defoe's pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was an attack on High Churchmen, satirically written as if from the High Church point of view but extending their arguments to the point of foolishness. Both sides of the dispute, Dissenters and High Church alike, took the pamphlet seriously, and both sides were outraged to learn it was a hoax. Defoe was arrested for seditious libel in May 1703. He was put in the pillory. The townspeople, instead of throwing rocks, threw flowers.
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In January 2013, CNN reported that then Secretary of State Clinton was treated with blood thinners at a New York hospital to help dissolve a blood clot in her head.
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Men With Guns Report: Officers entered the Elsberry Riding and Farm pasture at about 12:45 a.m. while searching for a missing person. A baby donkey named HeeHaw approached them. The farm described HeeHaw as a beloved pet who had been bottle-raised and participated in petting zoos.
The farm alleges officers attempted to use a Taser on the donkey before an officer shot and killed him. Authorities have not independently confirmed those details.
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Wendell Berry has died.
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Measures of Success in America
Measures of Success in America
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”--Coolidge
These are tough times in the U.S. Everything is being questioned. And since there are no qualified people with answers, we are seeing many unusual answers. So it's refreshing to see some optimism here:
"The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.
SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.
These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.
Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.
Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.
The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.
In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people."--Hillen
These are tough times in the U.S. Everything is being questioned. And since there are no qualified people with answers, we are seeing many unusual answers. So it's refreshing to see some optimism here:
"The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.
SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.
These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.
Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.
Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.
The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.
In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people."--Hillen
This does not appear to be a system that needs dismantling. But sometimes a singer has a song despite what music is played.
