Toward a Kinder, Gentler Society

On this day:

27 BC
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus is granted the title Augustus by the Roman Senate, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.
550
Gothic War (535–554): The Ostrogoths, under King Totila, conquer Rome after a long siege, by bribing the Isaurian garrison.
1572
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk is tried for treason for his part in the Ridolfi plot to restore Catholicism in England.
1581
The English Parliament outlaws Roman Catholicism.
1909
Ernest Shackleton’s expedition finds the magnetic South Pole.
1969
Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 perform the first-ever docking of manned spacecraft in orbit, the first-ever transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another, and the only time such a transfer was accomplished with a space walk.
1979
The Shah of Iran flees Iran with his family and relocates to Egypt.
2003
The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.

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Trump has the terrible strength peculiar to people who are incapable of embarrassment and cannot fathom that they look ridiculous. --Will

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Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize medal to U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday during a White House meeting.

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The green dream is on life support in Sweden as politicians have grown skeptical and investors become wary of giant projects.

In the US, investors feel emboldened and are putting record funding into critical minerals and rare earths.--Bloomberg

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Political thinking tends to conceive of policies, institutions, or programs in terms of their hoped-for results – “drug prevention” programs, “gun control” laws, “environmental protection” policies, “public interest” law firms, “profit-making” businesses, and so forth. But for purposes of economic analysis, what matters is not what goals are being sought but what incentives and constraints are being created in pursuit of those goals.--Sowell

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Professors Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Thomas Sowell, I, and others who decry today’s obsession with income differences blame much of this obsession on intellectual errors, including (but not limited to) treating modern economies as being zero-sum, ignoring the effects of taxes and transfers, and failing to account for the non-monetary values of different voluntary choices that people make – choices that inevitably lead to different monetary incomes.

Further, your argument rests largely on an appeal to the authority of past prominent thinkers such as Plato, St. Augustine, and Karl Marx.

Most of the past thinkers whom you mention lived before the modern market era. Pre-industrial economies were far closer to zero-sum institutions than today’s global market economy. --from a response to a letter

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Trump wants to fix prices on credit cards, just like Bernie Sanders and AOC.

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"There are many who say that Romanticism is dead. But the tensions between Romanticism and the soldiers of the original Enlightenment are rising up again. We are undergoing a cultural reawakening – a sort of Romantic revivalism – as scientific enquiry fails to fully construct a complete picture of nature, as theories of everything continue to fail, and as science is exploited into dystopian realities – such fraught areas as neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care.

Precisely because scientific institutional authority has become a paradigm, it must have a counterculture."

This is from an essay by Jim Kozubek. So, a paradigm demands an alternative? Or is something like unequal access to drugs unrelated to the paradigm that created the drugs?

Paradigm

Noun:
1.a typical example or pattern of something; a model:"there is a new paradigm for public art in this country"
▪a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject:"the discovery of universal gravitation became the paradigm of successful science"
2.a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles:"English determiners form a paradigm: we can say “a book” or “his book” but not “a his book.”"
3.(in the traditional grammar of Latin, Greek, and other inflected languages) a table of all the inflected forms of a particular verb, noun, or adjective, serving as a model for other words of the same conjugation or declension.

Word Origin:

late 15th century: via late Latin from Greek paradeigma, from paradeiknunai ‘show side by side’, from para- ‘beside’ + deiknunai ‘to show’.In science and philosophy, a paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field. The word "paradigm" is of Greek origin, meaning "pattern."

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Toward a Kinder, Gentler Society

On Dec. 15, the European Union added Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss army colonel and former intelligence analyst living in Brussels, to its sanctions list. His offense: appearing on media outlets Brussels dislikes and promoting what the EU calls “pro-Russian propaganda.” The official listing cites his (implausible) claim that Ukraine orchestrated its own invasion to accelerate North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership, which the EU labels a “conspiracy theory.” Others call it "nuts".

Free-speech advocates have long warned Americans about the dangers of adopting “hate speech” codes. The result wouldn’t be the kinder society intended by such censorship; it would be an intimidated, even frightened one. Either you engage in mass arrests, or you enforce the rules selectively, which means targeting some viewpoints above others (by only the most objective, unbiased judges).

For an indication of where this censorious impulse can lead even in a democratic society, look no further than European Union nations and Britain, where the experiment in speech control is running not on university campuses but on national scales, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The results are so extreme that Americans might assume they’re exaggerated. They aren’t.

Start with Britain, where “grossly offensive” communications can be a police matter. In 2023, British police made more than 12,000 arrests under two communications statutes. For comparison, during America’s first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, oneeathrow for  of the worst crackdowns on speech in the nation’s history, the United States averaged about 2,000 arrests per year, when the U.S. population was more than 50 percent bigger than Britain’s today, and there were a lot of commies.

Behind the numbers are stories like that of the Irish guy from Arizona who was arrested when he arrived in Heathrow. for something he had written about transgenderism on the internet, a dutiful official uncovered after a heroic investigation. Or Elizabeth Kinney, a mother of four who was arrested for having called a man who assaulted her a homophobic slur — not to his face, but in a private message to a friend. After the two fell out, the now former friend sent the messages to law enforcement. Kinney’s attacker wasn’t punished, but she was, under the Malicious Communications Act. Told she potentially faced 10 years in prison, Kinney pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to the British equivalent of probation and community service, and fined the equivalent of nearly $500.--mostly Lukianoff.

So, the government has a social 'paradigm'. Better watch your mouth--or pen--and pick your friends judiciously.

Some New Year Notes

On this day:366
The Alamanni cross the frozen Rhine River in large numbers, invading the Roman Empire
1920
The second Palmer Raid takes place with another 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists arrested and held without trial. These raids take place in several U.S. cities.
1935
Bruno Hauptmann goes on trial for the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh
1959
Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched by the Soviet Union

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What is going on inside Iran?

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Mandani is now Mayor of New York.

This is going to be so much fun.

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Are the Pirates spending money because streaming demands a real product?

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The 64-year-old wife of Jill Biden’s ex-husband was found dead in her Delaware home after law enforcement responded to investigate a domestic dispute late Sunday, authorities said.

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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

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A few years ago, a poll found that whereas 63 percent of voters said they viewed the Founding Fathers as heroes, among those under thirty, that figure shrank to 39 percent. Meanwhile, fully 31 percent of U.S. voters under 30 said they saw the Founders as “villains.”

"Villains."

Can a culture that does not hold itself in high regard survive?

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

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Fossil fuels are cheap, available, and efficient. Their substitutes are less so. Fossil fuel substitution suggests energy decline, an inevitable energy contraction. There will be a general and widespread self-sacrifice, all for the greater good.

 

Shutting down the world's energy will create circumstances considerably deeper and more serious than can be borne by a stiff upper lip. Production will decline. Living standards will decline. Economies will implode. Agricultural and industrial production will be reduced, sometimes to nothing. People will die. Some cultures will suffer disproportionately.  

What if some resist? Or, worse, what if they see their energy-less neighbors as an opportunity for exploitation? Or revenge? What if some see it to their advantage?

What if some nations see a sliding scale of 'self-sacrifice'?

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The Russians are losing 41,000 men a month in Ukraine.

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One might be curious and suspicious about the development of a culture that accepts misrepresentation and mendacity as staples in its daily life. What is chilling is the casual way these people view their deceits, suggesting they, themselves, don't take themselves seriously. 

That is true nihilism.

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What is more of a threat to the Republic, the Jan. 6 riot, or Packing the Supreme Court?

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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.

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In 2025, SpaceX launched 165 separate Falcon spacecraft. 165.

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We have become obsessed with the outlier. 

A gift from Critical Theory: an individual cannot escape or transcend his group. Strange and outrageous behavior by one individual has become generalized to represent a larger group. So one lunatic cop is representative of all cops. And those cops are representative of all society.
The wide generalization from small experiences to large populations is a virtual definition of bigotry.

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"Democracy" implies "virtue" to our arrogant minds. It is not. It is a simple way of deciding. In the American example, it is ingenious--but only because of the limits created by its founders. Its success is defined by its self-imposed restraints. The potential for tyranny is constrained by the Constitution. But this is not a characteristic of democracy; it is unique. Russia votes. Hitler was elected.

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One of the authors of an anonymous Department of Human Health and Services (HHS) review published in May, penned an op-ed for the Washington Post on Thursday detailing how the report found that “gender-affirming” procedures for minors “rests on very weak evidence.”

This may be true, but it is much more revealing that the review was originally published anonymously.

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Where does the U.S., or any country, get the authority to determine the internal workings of another state? We are reasonably afraid of the implications of a maniacal, homicidal theocracy that has threatened its neighbors and the U.S. and periodically killed our citizens. They are, without question, a malignant threat to the U.S. and the world. The world will rejoice at the effort, albeit probably silently. But where does the justification for such a huge military action come from?

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Americans and Europe

The Americans are deeply criticized by a loud, intense, European minority. Some are simple foreign agents on a relentless, insincere social media crusade, some are fanatical faith-based social zealots, and many are mean, jealous outsiders with a nationalist bias. Here is a clarifying little snippet that is informative:

'While Europe has created 14 companies worth more than $10 billion in the past 50 years, with about $400 billion of market value in total, Americans have created nearly 250 such companies, worth $30 trillion.

That success has driven up America’s middle-class incomes. The median disposable U.S. household income, according to the OECD, is now 25% greater than the median German household and 60% greater than the median household in Italy.

Europeans’ incomes would be even lower if they weren’t free-riding on American innovation, defense spending, and higher drug prices, which incentivize research. America’s median incomes would be higher if we had more talent devoted to supervising and creating jobs for blue-collar workers or Northern Europe-like distribution of test scores.

The outsize success of America’s talented entrepreneurs doesn’t stem from their superior intelligence. It comes from working at companies such as Google and Microsoft, which mine the technological frontier and expose employees to valuable knowledge, insights, and opportunities. Apple is worth more than the 30 largest German companies combined. Apple’s employees and its alumni use their knowledge and training to create more value than their counterparts in Europe.

Unlike Europe, the enormous success of American entrepreneurs motivated an army of talented Americans to get valuable on-the-job training, work longer hours, take risks, and succeed. A small amount of success bubbles up from a large pool of failure.

…..

When entrepreneurs capture as little as 5% of the value they create for others, it makes little sense to encourage successful risk-takers to quit working long before they achieve outsize success. With the effect technological success has on the productivity of talented American workers, who are our constraint to growth, and the effect of their productivity on the growth of middle-class incomes relative to Europe, that’s not a “policy failure.”'--Conard

There are myriad additional factors involved with the distinctions here. Many are outlined by the insightful McClosky. Another is the failure of Americans to indulge in vindictive, self-destructive tax policies. However the major one is an old De Tocqueville observation: Americans regard success highly and do not see the success of others as an impediment to their own individual efforts to attain similar success.

"Putin is Winning."

On this day:

1531
The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico City.
1917
World War I: In Palestine, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby captures Jerusalem.
1937
Second Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Nanjing – Japanese troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Asaka Yasuhiko launch an assault on the Chinese city of Nanjing.
1946
The “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” begin with the “Doctors’ Trial”, prosecuting doctors alleged to be involved in human experimentation.
1950
Harry Gold is sentenced to 30 years in jail for helping Klaus Fuchs pass information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. His testimony is later instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
1965
The Kecksburg UFO incident: a fireball is seen from Michigan to Pennsylvania; witnesses report something crashing in the woods near Pittsburgh. In 2005 NASA admits that it examined the object.
1979
The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first and to date only human disease driven to extinction.
2008
The Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is arrested by federal officials for a number of crimes including attempting to sell the United States Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency.

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“With $1 million, you could earn 50% a year, but you have to be in love with the subject. You can’t just be in love with the money.” --Buffett

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Ilhan Omar is worth $30 million. Read that again.

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Looters in politics wearing different uniforms are on the same team: themselves.

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China just put a 13% VAT on birth control meds and devices.

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"Putin is Winning"

There is a narrative on the Left that "Putin is winning," in a general, international way. Biden's weird, observant non-response fit well with Europe's dithering. Trump's position is hard to understand, even if you assume he is 'philosophy-unburdened'. 

These are excerpts (sort of) from The Telegraph on their assessment of the situation Russia and Putin are in with their Ukrainian invasion. They think Trump is foolish in his efforts, but their opinion of Putin is worthwhile.

After two years of growth artificially fuelled by higher defence spending, Russia’s oil and gas income, representing up to 50% of state revenue, is down 27% year-on-year, and recession looms. Inflation is up, at 8%; interest rates top 16%. The budget deficit is rising, more than half of Russia’s liquid sovereign wealth fund has been squandered since 2022, state monopolies face huge debts, foreign investment has plunged, import costs of strategic goods have risen by 122%, and consumer taxes are soaring, all to fund Putin’s war. Russians must even pay more to drown their sorrows: the price of vodka is up 5%.

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Ukraine has identified a weak spot: Russia’s refineries, pipelines and “shadow fleet” of oil tankers carrying illicit exports. A third tanker was set ablaze in the Black Sea last week by naval drone strikes. Kyiv is regularly hitting energy facilities deep inside Russia, causing panic and fuel shortages. Meanwhile, Russia’s two energy giants, Rosneft and Lukoil, are reeling as Asian buyers, including in China’s vital market, rush to avoid secondary US sanctions.

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Syria, a prized Middle East ally, turned to the west and Iran came under US and Israeli attack. Now Venezuela, too, looks in vain for support. Ties with China have been upended, with a humiliated Russia relegated to the role of dependent junior partner. Visiting India last week, Putin cut a needy figure in a country that, following US pressure, now boycotts Russian oil.

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Despite his surprise, full-scale invasion and overwhelming advantages in manpower and materiel, Putin has utterly failed to subjugate Ukraine – a failure measured in shocking Russian casualty figures: more than 280,000 killed or injured in the first eight months of 2025; about one million in total. The average Russian frontline life expectancy is 12 days.

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The latest US negotiating fiasco has once again exposed Trump’s idiotically lopsided Ukraine “strategy”. Appeasing Russia from the start, he has undermined Ukraine by attacking Zelenskyy and halting arms supplies. Trump’s egotistic eagerness to play peacemaker and make a quick buck, choice of inept relatives and cronies as amateur envoys, and attempts to sideline and pillory Europe assist and embolden Putin.

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Trump’s meddling is prolonging the war. He should butt out before he does more damage – and Europe (and Nato) must step in with more weapons for Ukraine, reparation loans using seized Russian assets, fully enforced energy sanctions, tougher kinetic responses to sabotage and cyber-attacks, and a more united determination to help end Putin’s age of terror.

Visiting the Museum

 

More than 19,000 unguided rockets have been launched at Israel since the start of the war in October, the Israeli military says.

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"We need to say out loud what we know to be true, which is a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity, a worldview that thinks merit and excellence are suspicious, is one that is fundamentally hostile to us and all that we stand for." Bari Weiss said this, implying equity laws specifically disadvantage the Jewish people. That is, such laws are essentially anti-Semitic.
Fascinating.
So, are the Jews the modern Kulaks?

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Visiting the Museum

France is opening Notre Dame after years of repair. Now, with the time scrubbed off, the world will have insight into the real creations of the Old Europe.  

The trolling on the internet will start soon. The Americans don't offer this. They offer baseball.

That's true. America is too young to offer classical anything, too big and diverse to offer an identifiable, uniform style. Indeed de Tocqueville thought it a characteristic--and advantage--of its people. Its exceptionalism was practical, not necessarily flattering. He thought Americans a small-town, agricultural people interested in productivity, freedom, and self-reliance without much interest in abstract culture or science.

Nor do they seem terribly interested in other places, including, one would assume, Notre Dame. Only 51% of Americans have passports--up from 10% in 1994.

Contrary to what the European docents would have you believe, this is not a simple matter of esthetics. America is really big and offers good reasons and variety for staying home. From Los Angeles to New York is about the same distance as London to St. Petersburg. You don't have to cross lands you recently fought over and the people are friendly--particularly they don't hate you for where you come from.  There are other elements, like Notre Dames's damage done by the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. And, of course, the two world wars. America has had its human problems but does not have much of a history of institutionalized savagery. (Defenders of The Mausoleum will accuse Americans of their slavery sin but everyone was guilty at the time, many still are, and the Americans were the only ones who fought a war over it. One should remember that at the time of the American Civil War the British and the Russians were losing 100,000 men at Stebastapol, a battle so horrifying and pointless that it changed Tolstoy's life, and those combatants are still at work now in Ukraine.)

With more passports in circulation, more Americans will be traveling. A good thing, presumably. One would hate to miss a trip before Europe closes. And time travel should be provocative as Americans visit the European Museum from the future.

Examining the Valley of Death:Trying to Understand Ukraine

A man arrested and charged with capital murder of a policeman was released on bond in Texas.

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"The end of the war is very, very far away,"--Zelenskyy

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Examining the Valley of Death: Trying to Understand Ukraine

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

How will there be progress in Ukraine? Well, practice makes perfect. We poor humans will always jump at a chance to die for glory, justice, and retribution. And we might be getting better at it as we seem to fight on the same battlefields. After all, Tennyson wrote "Charge of the Light Brigade" about a cavalry charge in the British action against the Russians in the Crimean War in 1854. 1854! The British have been fighting the Russians in Ukraine for almost 200 years. But what can you expect from people who define their conflicts in terms of 'decades' and 'centuries.' George Washington had a point. There's no rush to join a European war; we can join at any time.

But if our thinking has not evolved, our weapons have. Modern 'Javelins' are not lances. Modern explosions can kill the world.

And now Ukraine is back.

The public blowup with Zelenskyy over the weekend raises several frightening worries. Superficially, after weeks of negotiations, Zelenskyy declined to proceed. He left with the American administration publically furious, was feted in Europe by members of the EU who offered emotional support (but little else), and Trump's administration was attacked by the Left as being pro-Russian and in thrall to Putin, perhaps treasonously so. (The Left suddenly hates Russians.)

                                      WWII

Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union when dictator Josef Stalin seized the rich, fertile land from the local farmers in the early 1930s and forced them into a collectivized, state-run agricultural system.

The result was one of the worst famines of the 20th century. The death toll is still debated, but mainstream historians put the figure at 3 million to 5 million deaths in Ukraine. (Ukraine's current population is about 38 million.)

                                 Russia Dissolves

When the Soviet Union was falling apart in December 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on the independence it had long sought. A whopping 92% voted in favor — a result that helped accelerate the collapse of the Soviet state just weeks later.

Ukraine worked out an unusual agreement in 1994, just three years after receiving independence. The country agreed to give up all the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. In exchange, Ukraine received guarantees from Russia, the U.S., and Britain that its borders would be respected. (Read again. That was actually signed and celebrated. No wonder the Ukrainians worry.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it even harder with his repeated meddling in Ukraine, seeking to keep pro-Russia leaders in power. In 2004, Russia was seen as trying to rig the Ukrainian presidential election in favor of a pro-Russia candidate, Viktor Yanukovych. Ukrainians pushed back with massive street protests — the so-called Orange Revolution. Yanukovych was defeated. In 2014, Ukrainians again took to the streets in protest of Yanukovych — who at that point had served as president for four years. After weeks of demonstrations, he fled to Russia.

But shortly after Putin lost out politically in Ukraine in 2014, he sent the Russian military to seize Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, and the troops have remained there.

                                         2022

Russia invades Ukraine again. Hilary Clinton says it will be good for America as it will "bleed" Russia. Biden offers Zelensky asylum in an astonishing display of detachment and stupidity. Zelenski's response is Churchillian: "I don't need a ride, I need guns."

                                         Istanbul

In March and April 2022, the first months after the Russian invasion, US allies Israel and Turkey hosted talks between Ukraine and Russia. In Istanbul, the two sides agreed to the outline of an agreement.

Under that deal, Russia would withdraw from territory seized after the invasion in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality and limits on its military. In addition, Kiev would recognize Crimea as Russian and its Western backers would lift sanctions on Moscow.

In April 2022, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev and informed Ukrainian President Zelensky that he would not receive Western support if he signed the deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Most of these reports are Russian and Johnson has denied them, saying he just “expressed concerns” about the nature of the potential agreement.)

A common concern: “Many of us have, and it’s absolutely human, a willingness to see that the war ends as soon as possible, that people are not suffering, not dying, and that there are no bombings,” said a senior European diplomat who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about sensitive security issues. “There is an unfortunate dilemma. The problem is that if it ends now, there is a kind of time for Russia to regroup, and it will restart, under this or another pretext. Putin is not going to give up his goals.”

As part of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military entered Ukraine from Belarus. One of the initial moves was a push towards the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, as part of which a huge column of military vehicles moved south towards the city of Bucha. Russian troops entered and massacred the city. Ukrainian troops rallied and pushed the Russians away from Kyiv and out of Bucha. On April 1, 2022, following the Russian withdrawal, video footage was posted to social media that showed mass civilian casualties and dogs feeding on the corpses in the street.

With all the political and ethnic elements in the stew, the Bucha event was a factor in the failure of the Istanbul initiative. The Ukrainians were enraged, vengeful, and buoyed by their military success.

This conflict began to have a Bosnian element.

                              February, 2025

Trump indicated he would be willing to lift sanctions on Moscow, or at least begin to normalize the economic relationship between the superpowers, as part of a deal to end the war in Ukraine. “I am in serious discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia concerning the ending of the War, and also major Economic Development transactions which will take place between the United States and Russia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Talks are proceeding very well!”

                                Rubio meets Zelensky

When asked about the growing tension between the two leaders, Rubio
said Trump's frustration with Zelensky escalated after Ukraine rejected
a proposed deal involving U.S. investment in the country's mineral
resources.

According to Rubio, the deal was intended to protect American economic
interests while also recovering some of the nearly $200 billion in aid the
U.S. has provided.

"We want to be in a joint venture with Ukraine—not because we're trying
to take advantage of them, but because we believe it's actually a security guarantee," Rubio said.

He claimed Zelensky initially seemed receptive to the deal but later publicly rejected it, contradicting what had been discussed and agreed to in private. Rubio was visibly angry over what he felt was a reversal of the agreement.

Diplomatic tensions appeared to ease between the Trump administration
and Zelenskyy after U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, retired Lieutenant
General Keith Kellogg, took a markedly different approach during his
meeting with the Ukrainian leader in Kyiv and reported progress.

                   Zelenskyy comes to Washington

After the Ukrainians agreed to the initial trade agreement regarding the
rare earth deposits, Zelenskyy flew to for the official signing. An intense
discussion was held on how Zelenskyy was to limit the public discussion before the signing ritual. Then, on to the ceremonial Press Conference.

Now for the worrisome news. It is said routinely on TV and in news articles that, after he was prepped by the Republicans on how to manage the ceremony, Zelenskyy spoke to the Democrats for 45 minutes where they advised against cooperating with the administration.

Then Zelenskyy walked into the Oval Office and, as he had earlier with Rubio, reversed course. 

                      Possible lessons:

Zelensky is unreliable. He may be a liar.

Zelenski may not want peace. After all, diplomatic solutions have been laughable. It may be a Bosnian bloodlust. Or mindless revenge. One upsetting theory says there can be no corruption investigation if the war continues.

Trump is clear-minded and results-driven but may be too harsh for weak-minded observers to consider. The European response has been almost foolishly symbolic.

Trump's opponents may never be able to approve of anything he does, regardless of merit.

People seem to have forgotten the implications of losing a war. (See Gaza.) The less success you have in war, the further you are pushed away from the negotiation table. War is diplomacy by other means.

Europe's response will be inept but it will be self-clarifying.

Important, too, is the Democrat behavior. If the reports of their meddling are true, it shines a light on the complete autonomy of their efforts that are unrelated to the benefits to the nation. In the background is the essential incompatibility of liberalism with the American revolutionary vision.

If the Democrats did interfere with the negotiations, is that treason?

 

Germany

cipher (n.)

Late 14c., "arithmetical symbol for zero," from Old French cifre "nought, zero," Medieval Latin cifra, which, with Spanish and Italian cifra, ultimately is from Arabic sifr "zero," literally "empty, nothing," from safara "to be empty;" a loan-translation of Sanskrit sunya-s "empty." Klein says Modern French chiffre is from Italian cifra.

The word came to Europe with Arabic numerals. From "zero," it came to mean "any numeral" (early 15c.), then (first in French and Italian) "secret way of writing; coded message" (a sense first attested in English 1520s), because early codes often substituted numbers for letters. Meaning "the key to a cipher or secret writing" is by 1885, short for cipher key (by 1835).

Figurative sense of "something or someone of no value, consequence, or power" is from 1570s.
also from late 14c.

And, of course, to figure and "decipher."

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Germany

“The problem with consensus societies is that sometimes the consensus is wrong, and when it is, there is no corrective mechanism.”-- Wolfgang Münchau, author of “Kaput—The End of the German Miracle.”

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In 2023, Germany recorded 133,000 patent applications, less than half the numbers in South Korea and Japan, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

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A summary from a WSJ's summary: 

Germany’s CO2 emissions per capita are above the global and the European Union average, higher than the U.K.’s and France’s, and just below China’s. Meanwhile, German households paid the highest electricity prices in the EU in the first half of 2024.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to accelerate a planned phaseout of nuclear energy. It meant Germany needed more fossil fuel, including coal and Russian natural gas, as it ramped up renewables. Then Moscow invaded the rest of Ukraine and began throttling gas deliveries, driving up prices and forcing Berlin to restart idled coal-fired plants. Germany’s last three nuclear power plants went offline in April 2023.

The country registered more than 250,000 asylum applications last year, down from 2023 but higher than any other year since 2016. Today, migrants are less likely to be working than Germans and more likely to commit crimes. The federal government alone spends 30 billion euros a year, equivalent to $31.46 billion, on benefits for refugees and asylum seekers—more than half the country’s defense budget.

One theory of Germany’s inability to change course when circumstances evolve, evident both in its nuclear energy and immigration policies, points to “a static view of the world,” that has become ingrained since reunification, that Germany no longer had to change. Its own version of "the end of history."

History may have another view.

Self-inflicted Wounds of the Righteous

... among corruptible human beings, the power to weaponize a vision of justice and impose it on a world of alternative visions is toxic.--Schmidtz

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Roger Federer said, “In the 1526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%.”

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Blue Origin is preparing to step into a new chapter of rocketry, by debuting its first orbital class rocket, New Glenn, Bezos' entry into the spaace race. It will also attempt to recover the first stage booster on landing platform the Atlantic Ocean. Its launch was planned for today but cancelled early this morning.

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A gymnist pauses for a glass of wine:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-crSMSNoz/?igsh=MTM1b2JiOGc3eWVjeg%3D%3D

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Self-inflicted Wounds of the Righteous

Global warming beliefs have created dangerous waters.

The Germans have a word for periods of simultaneous low wind and sun. Literally. It's Dunkelflaute, meaning "flat, dark calm." The word elsewhere is "winter."

Dependence on unreliable energy sources (wind, solar), combined with the hasty phase-out of nuclear power, has made Germany's electricity the most expensive in Europe and compromises the country's -- and ultimately the continent's -- energy autonomy.
On December 12 of this year, for example, German electricity production from wind and solar power was thirty times lower than the demand for it.

To make up for energy shortfalls they have increased reliance on coal and lignite. This raises their carbon footprint. More importantly, they have to compete for energy on the open market.

Germany's high electricity prices are leading to the relocation of its industry, as companies look for sites where energy costs are more affordable. In Germany, industry pays up to three times more for electricity than itscompetitors.

Whole swathes of Germany's proud industry are collapsing. Not just the big names -- VW, BASF, Mercedes-Benz -- but every big company that disappears or downsizes takes with it a myriad of small and medium-sized affiliated enterprises that end up collapsing along with it.

None of this is accidental. None is the result of weather whimsy. This is administrative, the consequence of government decisions from faith-based "conceptual frameworks." Most importantly, these decisions, made by a small group of idealogues, summate to swamp the average working guy in changes that may not be shared by the law-making elite.

That is Germany's, and Europe's, true rising tide.

Americans and Europe

Re the attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas: 

Messianic causes, religious or political, demand engagement. It should be clear that no culture can be safe from them. The idea that the U.S. specifically or the West generally can simply disengage and walk away from the Middle East or Russia is naive.

   --The FBI's first instinct (their first announcement from Ms. Duncan declared the attack 'was not terrorism') is to manage public opinion. Truth does not seem ever to be a priority.
   --60% of radical Islamic online social media presence is from North Africa.

   --Messianic causes are programmed to engage, regardless of their victims' nature. That is why they are so comfortable attacking schools, hospitals, and nunneries. They are robotically aggressive. They will not stop.

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Argentina’s deregulation czar, Federico Sturzenegger has discovered a rough rule of thumb: Where deregulation happens, prices decline in the range of 30%. He has seen it in textiles, logistics, and some agricultural products.
30% is a decade of 3% extra growth.

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One in eight individuals will end up in the top 1% of U.S. income earners at least once in their lifetimes; only 1 in 166 will remain there for a decade.

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Americans and Europe

The Americans are deeply criticized by a loud, intense, European minority. Some are simple foreign agents on a relentless, insincere social media crusade, some are fanatical faith-based social zealots, and many are mean, jealous outsiders with a nationalist bias. Here is a clarifying little snippet that is informative:

'While Europe has created 14 companies worth more than $10 billion in the past 50 years, with about $400 billion of market value in total, Americans have created nearly 250 such companies, worth $30 trillion.

That success has driven up America’s middle-class incomes. The median disposable U.S. household income, according to the OECD, is now 25% greater than the median German household and 60% greater than the median household in Italy.

Europeans’ incomes would be even lower if they weren’t free-riding on American innovation, defense spending, and higher drug prices, which incentivize research. America’s median incomes would be higher if we had more talent devoted to supervising and creating jobs for blue-collar workers or Northern Europe-like distribution of test scores.

The outsize success of America’s talented entrepreneurs doesn’t stem from their superior intelligence. It comes from working at companies such as Google and Microsoft, which mine the technological frontier and expose employees to valuable knowledge, insights, and opportunities. Apple is worth more than the 30 largest German companies combined. Apple’s employees and its alumni use their knowledge and training to create more value than their counterparts in Europe.

Unlike Europe, the enormous success of American entrepreneurs motivated an army of talented Americans to get valuable on-the-job training, work longer hours, take risks, and succeed. A small amount of success bubbles up from a large pool of failure.

…..

When entrepreneurs capture as little as 5% of the value they create for others, it makes little sense to encourage successful risk-takers to quit working long before they achieve outsize success. With the effect technological success has on the productivity of talented American workers, who are our constraint to growth, and the effect of their productivity on the growth of middle-class incomes relative to Europe, that’s not a “policy failure.”'--Conard

There are myriad additional factors involved with the distinctions here. Many are outlined by the insightful McClosky. Another is the failure of Americans to indulge in vindictive, self-destructive tax policies. However the major one is an old De Tocqueville observation: Americans regard success highly and do not see the success of others as an impediment to their own individual efforts to attain similar success.

Johnson on the US and Europe

Japan’s a nursing home, Europe’s a museum, and China’s a jail. --Larry Summers

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Around 420 million years ago, life was predominantly aquatic. It was then that the ancestors of the modern sharks first appeared. So they're older than trees.

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Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 370,000 wounded. That compares with 600,000 dead and wounded reported in Russia.

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So Assad is gone. And apparently, no U.S. intel agency had a clue. Reminiscent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Biden's offer to Zelenskyy of sanctuary. Not a clue.

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Johnson on the US and Europe

Boris Johnson recently published an editorial in, of all places, The Daily Mail, discussing the relationship between the economies and the cultures of America and Europe. Here are some of his points.

In the year 2000, the average worker was 8 percent more productive even than the average German worker,

Today the gap is widening, and the average German worker – swaddled with EU laws on workers’ rights – is now 16 percent less productive. As for Britain, the story is even worse. They started the century 18 percent behind. They are now 27 percent behind the Americans.

The US taxpayer provides about 60 percent of the defense budget of the entire 32-strong Nato alliance. To understand the scale of the US commitment, in hardware, NATO currently has about 5,000 fighter and ground attack aircraft – of which about 4,000 come from the US, with the 31 other countries of NATO supplying the rest.

Great Britain plans to push defense spending up to 2.5 percent of GDP; yet most other countries are barely on 2 percent, while the US is spending 3 percent of a vastly greater GDP.

Europe will have to learn from America because there is plainly a link between the culture of freedom – the constitutionally protected freedom of speech and thought – and the American culture of innovation. There is a link between American risk and reward, tax cuts and growth, and deregulation and dynamism.

Why should Americans work all the hours God gives, and take a week’s holiday a year (as many Americans do) to pay for the defense of Europeans who can’t even be bothered to go into the office?

Johnson writes, "We need to reacquire some of the incredible energy and can-do spirit propelling their economy. We may not want their healthcare system or their gun laws. But we would be mad to sneer at the US economic model when it is such a storming success. Above all, we can’t sneer at the American economic model and simultaneously sponge off America."

Sat Stats

Adam Smith-Connor is an Englishman found guilty of silent prayer on the public street near an abortion facility, officially criminalizing thoughts.

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More than 6.1 million malaria cases, and 1,038 deaths, have been recorded in the country this year through the end of September, compared with 4.5 million cases, and 469 deaths, for all of 2023. Worse, cases are likely to soar far higher in the next couple of months because peak malaria season, driven by seasonal rains, begins in September and runs through the end of the year.

“We’re backsliding so fast — we’ve gone back a decade,” said Fitsum Tadesse, the lead scientist overseeing the malaria program at the Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Addis Ababa, the capital of the country.

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South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, dropped further last year, with the average number of expected babies per woman decreasing to 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022.


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Sat Stats

Nicolai Tangen leads Nordic behemoth Norges Bank Investment Management, which governs the revenue earned by Norway’s oil and gas resources, hoping to distribute its benefits fairly between current and future Norwegian generations.

Under Tangen’s leadership since 2020, and over the past decade, the $1.6 trillion fund has invested more heavily in the U.S. instead of its closer neighbors in Europe.

Tangen told the Financial Times America’s performance, particularly in innovation, is “worrisome” in contrast to Europe.
Part of comes down to mindset, Tangen added, and how accepting each continent is of mistakes and risk: “You go bust in America, you get another chance. In Europe, you’re dead,” he said. But there is a difference in the "level of ambition,” he added. “We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder,” Tangen continued.

Meanwhile, data from the International Labour Organization, last updated in January, showed the average hours workers clocked in the U.S. was 38 hours a week. However, of those employees, 13% worked 49 hours or more per week, which outstripped the majority of European nations.

Moreover, countries like the U.K. have a statutory requirement entitling staff to 28 paid days of leave a year—if you’re a full-time employee. In the U.S. it is not a legal requirement for staff to be given any paid time off; however, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average employee who is in their first year of service takes eight PTO days

Investments in the U.S. now represent 46.9% of Norges Bank’s portfolio, whereas a decade ago the U.S. represented just under 30%. Going back a further 10 years, in 2003, the organization’s investment in America made up just 26.3% of all investments.

Conversely, in 2003, 59.5% of Norges Bank’s portfolio was invested in European countries, a figure that, by 2023, had fallen to 28.7%.

AI, a growing field of American-European disparity, is instructive. “I’m not saying it’s good, but in America, you have a lot of AI and no regulation; in Europe, you have no AI and a lot of regulation. It’s interesting,” Tangen added.

 

Draghi's Report

Between 2004 and 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, the industrial price of energy in the UK tripled in nominal terms, or doubled relative to consumer prices.

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For their annual meeting, the American Economic Association’s organizing committee greenlit some 45 sessions devoted to topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, inequality, gender, belonging, segregation, sexual harassment, discrimination, race and LBGT.

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Draghi's Report

The European Commission tapped Mario Draghi, a respected technocrat who served as Europe's top central banker as well as Italy's prime minister, to diagnose Europe's economic problems. One year later, he returned with over 300 pages of findings and proposals designed to help the EU compete with the U.S. and other global peers.

"For the first time since the Cold War, we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation," Mario Draghi, told reporters this week.

Roughly a third of startups founded in Europe since 2008 that went on to be unicorns — those valued at $1 billion or more — left the bloc, with the majority coming to the U.S.The report says the U.S. is home to 22 of the 50 companies with the world's biggest research and development budgets. Europe has 12.

Draghi calls out Europe's "weak innovation" in AI. Over 70% of AI models built since 2017 are from the U.S., while 15% stem from China.
 
All six of the most valuable companies in the U.S. — all of which are worth more than $1 trillion — have been created in the last 50 years.By contrast, no European company valued at more than $100 billion has been started in that period.

The U.S. labor force is expected to keep growing for the rest of the century, in stark contrast to Europe, where it's already shrinking (even after accounting for immigration).
Europe's workers had 95% of the productivity of their American counterparts in 1995. Today, however, that number has fallen to less than 80%.

The Shieldmaiden

Pittsburgh police said the Walgreens pharmacy in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood was robbed at gunpoint on Thursday night.

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A 2017 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine examining road closures for marathons found a small but significant increase in mortality among people with heart trouble on marathon days, apparently caused in part by ambulance delays.

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An American-funded project, listed as “Gender-inclusive demining for sustainable futures in Ukraine,” has a funding budget of $4 million.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has initiated discussions about selling existing shares at a price that could value the closely held company at roughly $200 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The Shieldmaiden

A wonderful sobriquet has appeared, applied to the fierce Dutch conservative with the wonderful name,
Eva Vlaardingerbroek.

 

Eva Vlaardingerbroek

She has been nicknamed the "Shieldmaiden of the Far Right."

She is an unashamed Christian Dutch Nationalist and she hates immigration in Europe. She spoke recently at CPAC Hungry and, as usual, drove everyone nuts. (Her speech has been blocked on YouTube. The one place I found the written speech was infected.)

One of her recurrent notions is that nationalism is not inherently bad, dangerous, or a prelude to war-- but expansionism is.

Shieldmaiden!

A Minority Report

Most of the world’s major nations have concluded that healthy children do not need Covid-19 vaccinations.

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Russia is developing a space-based capability to attack satellites using a nuclear weapon, an aggressive move that has alarmed U.S. national security officials and lawmakers who worry that Russia could interfere with or disable critical communications and intelligence systems, according to people familiar with classified intelligence on the matter.--WashPo

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Canada's demographics are changing. Male immigrants, especially in working/fighting/reproducing age groups, are surging. The figures highlight the country’s changing demographic trends due to its liberal immigration policy, which aims to rapidly expand the pool of workers to stave off long-term economic decline from an aging populace.

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A Minority Report

Last week Trump threatened to let NATO countries that failed to meet the two percent of GDP defense budget obligation fend for themselves against Putin. This may be one of Zito's "taking Trump seriously but not literally" moments but it is pretty harsh. But is it nutty?

NATO leaders pledged in 2014 to commit at least 2% of their gross domestic product to defense spending, in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and instabilities in the Middle East. These are not funds that countries would pay to NATO, but contributions to their own military budgets. The alliance doesn't have its own army and its military protections are insured by member countries.

Only 11 of the 31 nations were predicted to spend more than 2% of their GDP on defense in 2023, according to NATO estimates published in July. Almost a decade ago, only three countries met that mark. The U.S. was estimated to spend 3.49% of its GDP in 2023 on defense, which is roughly $860 million. Poland comes in first with 3.9% -- more than $29 million. The only other country estimated to pass the 3% mark was Greece, with more than $7 million.

NATO's border runs along the Eastern Europe interface with Russia as well as along the very long border Russia shares in the Arctic with Canada, contributing 1.38%. The problem isn't just investment, it's competence. While many countries haven't maintained their financial obligations, some could not maintain their readiness with three times the financial requirements. Remember the reports that the German Army trained with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough machine guns?

This isn't just a matter of fairness; an unprepared nation is vulnerable regardless of its financial commitment. And vulnerability invites aggression because that's how we--and especially non-democratic nations--are. Those unprepared members of the coalition would, logically, depend upon the prepared members. I.E. us.

Look at Germany. In the last years, Germany has behaved politically like the Americans have behaved socially, which is to say, nuts. The country has given up its energy independence and it may lose a significant portion of its manufacturing base. Its earlier economic strategy was to cast its lot with Russia and China. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a far-right organization, is the number 2 party there and growing, and the former east is politically polarized and illiberal. Most of all, the country has lost its will to defend itself despite a well-educated population and a deliberative political system that in the more distant past worked well.

If Germany is in trouble, NATO is in trouble.

Trump's excesses may astutely expose a serious American risk.

Populations

CNN is showing Biden polls for the first time. Why?

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So there is a debate over whether schools should inform parents of their children's gender 'choice.' What other things should employees withhold from parents?

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Does anyone believe that Biden is making national and international decisions? If 'no,' who is?

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Populations

From Twitter:
France used to be the "China of Europe"—1 in 25 people globally was French and 1 in 5 Europeans was French. Now, France is smaller than Germany and virtually identical in population to Britain Why? Thanks to some wonderful new work, we probably know the answer! 

3:38 PM · Sep 1, 2023

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