The Day After

The Day After

And, on this day, the day after Christmas, a remarkable human event, an event that promised hope and destruction--and eventually killed one of the discoverers.

On this day in 1898, chemists discovered a substance 900 times more radioactive than uranium. That project was led by Marie Curie.

Curie was a medical student at the Sorbonne in Paris when she decided to study the new field of radiation for her thesis.

In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered powerful "Röntgen rays," which would eventually be dubbed X-rays. The following year, Henri Becquerel accidentally discovered that much weaker rays emitted by uranium salts would fog up photographic plates just like light rays did — even in the absence of light.

Key to Marie Curie's research was the piezoelectric quartz electrometer. The device, invented by her brother-in-law, Jacques Curie, measured the weak electrical currents produced by radioactivity.

"Instead of making these bodies act upon photographic plates, I preferred to determine the intensity of their radiation by measuring the conductivity of the air exposed to the action of the rays," Curie wrote in a 1904 article.

Working with her husband, Pierre, and Gustave Bémont, the head of chemistry at the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris, they began to study pitchblende, a black mineral rich in uranium often found in deposits alongside silver.

"How could an ore, containing many substances which I had proved inactive, be more active than the active substances of which it was formed? The answer came to me immediately: The ore must contain a substance more radioactive than uranium and thorium, and this substance must necessarily be a chemical element as yet unknown," Marie Curie wrote.

The trio decided to try to separate pitchblende, which can be composed of up to 30 minerals, into its constituent parts to identify the radioactive substance. They used the light spectra of different substances to try to isolate and identify the ingredients.

They pinpointed one mineral that was around 60 times more "radio-active" than uranium, which they named polonium. And on Dec. 21, they found another — called radium — that was an unprecedented 900 times more radioactive than uranium. They described both new substances during a talk at the French Academy of Sciences on Dec. 26.

Their research on radiation earned the Curies and Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. (Marie was originally going to be passed over, but she received the prize only after her husband, Pierre, insisted the committee credit her work.) Marie would earn another Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry, for her work on radium.

Radium caused frequent radiation sickness and burns in both Curies. Marie's radiation exposure likely killed her; she died in 1934 at age 66 due to aplastic anemia, a type of leukemia that can be caused by radiation damage to bone marrow.--from Tia Ghose

Virginia

 

“In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is own the S&P 500 index fund.” --Buffett

***

Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse announced Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, calling the diagnosis “a death sentence.”

***

We are in the midst of a blizzard of executive orders, a tyranny of 'good ideas'. This is the exact opposite of the ponderous, reflective slow-motion government envisioned by the founders.

***

Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.

The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?


Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

The Magi

On this day:

1688
As part of the Glorious Revolution, King James II of England flees England to Paris after being deposed in favour of his nephew, William of Orange and his daughter Mary.
1783
George Washington resigns as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
1793
The Battle of Savenay, decisive defeat of the royalist counter-revolutionaries in Revolt in the Vendée during the French Revolution.
1948
Seven Japanese convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are executed at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.
1968
The 82 sailors from the USS Pueblo are released after eleven months of internment in North Korea.
1972
A 6.5 magnitude earthquake strikes the Nicaraguan capital of Managua killing more than 10,000.
1972
The 16 survivors of the Andes flight disaster are rescued after 73 days, having survived by cannibalism.

***

Pope Leo XIV has decided to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church, more than one hundred and forty years after his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, named Newman a Cardinal in 1879.
Newman stated, as the most important point of his speech and apologia, that there was “one great mischief,” which he had from the “first opposed – the spirit of liberalism in religion.”

The word liberalism, in the century since Newman’s death, has taken on various meanings which it might not have had then, or at least with a different emphasis. Simply put, and simply needed, Newman defined the concept as “liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.”

From that starting point, the saintly Englishman continued, flow some very ‘modern’ concepts: the false notion of ‘tolerance,’ the privatization of religion, “personal and peculiar,” and, most profoundly, as the Western world attempts to build a society without Christian foundation, the destruction of that society.

Newman called this whole movement the “great apostasia,” the same everywhere, but in each country differing in detail.--Fr. Benedict Kiely on John Henry Newman and his ‘Biglietto speech.’

***

In mid-December, liberal commentator Rachel Maddow publicly claimed that she has “returned to the Catholic faith,” a declaration first circulated via a Substack post by self-described progressive Catholic Christopher Hale and later confirmed through audio released by MSNBC NOW.

***

A new private equity investment:
Senator Mike Lee has a new bill that encourages the President to authorize letters of marque and reprisal against drug cartels: During the War of 1812, roughly 500 privateers operated alongside a tiny U.S. Navy. The market responded swiftly—privateers like the Comet were commissioned within days of the war’s declaration and began capturing prizes within weeks. Sophisticated institutional design combined profit incentives with regulatory constraints.

***

Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman was confirmed as the new head of NASA.
Isaacman dropped out of high school to pursue his business, but later earned his GED and a bachelor's degree in aeronautics from Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University.

***

And, if possible, a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
--Yeats

A Christmas Story

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)

***

President Trump signed into law new powers to screen and restrict U.S. investment in Chinese technology firms, marking the most significant effort yet to police how American capital flows into businesses that bolster Beijing’s military and surveillance state.

***

Pirates trade a starting pitcher for Brandon Lowe, a real hitter, but another second baseman, and only for a year.

***

Japanese authorities have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant, which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in a pivotal moment as the country looks to shift its energy supply away from fossil fuels.

***

The Reiner, Brown, MIT, and Bondi murders were all done for 'reasons'. The basic question will always be, how can a free culture protect itself from the distorted results of its own ideals?

***

A Christmas Story about a Christmas Icon

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Joseph Has a Dream

On this day:

1620
Plymouth Colony: William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
1919
American anarchist Emma Goldman is deported to Russia.
1967
Louis Washkansky, the first man to undergo a heart transplant, dies in Cape Town, South Africa, after living for 18 days after the transplant.
2004
Iraq War: A suicide bomber killed 22 at the forward operating base next to the main U.S. military airfield at Mosul, the single deadliest suicide attack on American soldiers.

***

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mises

***

Canada recorded a rare contraction in its population, marking the biggest drop in more than five decades
The recent drop, however, is driven largely by a fall in the number of international students studying in Canada after Ottawa pledged to tamp down the number of study permits issued.


***

China’s long-term economic growth is at risk owing to a shrinking labor force and a rapidly aging population, according to Oxford Economics. The country’s potential output growth could fall below 2% by the 2050s, as low birth rates and a rising dependency ratio strain productivity and public finances. While developed nations like the U.S. may buffer this with immigration, China and others face tougher challenges in sustaining growth and managing social support systems.

China may be the only nation that could rival America’s economic dominance. But its long-term prospects will potentially be cut off at the knees by a fundamental flaw: It won’t have the people to keep its growth going.--Fortune

***

Motability is a company whose scheme enables recipients of certain disability benefits to exchange their weekly payments for a leased vehicle.

As the number of Brits on sickness and disability support has rocketed in recent years, so have Motability’s sales. It uses its heft to buy new models in bulk, then leases them to claimants — usually for three years — before selling them on to traders like Samani. That has made it the UK’s leading car-fleet operator, and helped skew the market away from private buyers and sellers.
Motability bought one of every five new cars sold in the UK last year. And yet it only exists to serve a very specific type of customer: people claiming mobility benefits
A surge in the number of people claiming disability benefits has seen the number of Motability customers rise by about 200,000 over the past two years to 815,000.

***

Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation.

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad is said to have formed his opinion of Christianity through contact with an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians were polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance, and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

Sinterklaas

Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.

Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.

The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in the Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.

Dutch Stamps:

Epiphany

FOX anchorette Kayleigh McEnany has the BRCA 2 genetic mutation

***

A massive piece of space junk recently smashed into a village in Kenya.

***

Epiphany

Shakespeare is famous for encapsulating the essence of a play in his opening scene. And there are many examples in literature where a scene or chapter is a concentration of the larger vision. The Epiphany is such a scene in the New Testament. The Magi--astrologers and dream interpreters--follow thin scientific promptings to Jerusalem and ask Herod for help in the final leg of their journey to find the Christ child. Herod asks his priests to explain who they are seeking. The priests use the Old Testament to explain the Christ prophesies. Then the Magi leave for Bethlehem and Herod plots to find the child and kill him.

So Christ is born, is sought and adored by Gentiles from a metaphysical caste, and is stalked by killers trying to protect their worldly power and position. So far, so good. But the priests are the stunner: They are the academic resource, the intellectuals who know the connection between the Old Testament and the evolving New, the students and teachers of the question. They explain why the Magi are there and explain where they likely are bound. The Messiah may be at stake. And then they, the intellectuals,....do nothing.

Joseph Has a Dream

 Kamala Harris, our Czar of Artificial Intelligence, speaking at the Essence Festival of Culture:

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And in present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment.
And we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy, because as you know, it comes in the morning.
We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way too."

This is why we have a republic.

***

Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah.

***

Two Oregon men who entered the woods of Washington State on a Christmas Eve hunt for Sasquatch have been found dead, authorities confirmed on Saturday

***

Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation. 

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad formed his opinion of Christianity through contact with an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance, and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

The Magi

On the morning of Boxing Day, 2004, a tsunami was unleashed across the Indian Ocean after a giant undersea earthquake struck off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, killing over 230,000.

***

Montana Supreme Court voted 6-1 this week and effectively declared a state constitutional right to protection from climate change.

***

More than half of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act's estimated costs came from tax incentives to green corporations.

***

And a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

--Yeats

Christmas

Though Ferguson sees profoundly the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity, this is not primarily a political conversion. It's a deeply personal and deliberate turn to faith by a man who was formerly a lifelong atheist.--Niall Ferguson on X

***

This is the time of year when we contemplate whether man's discontent can be overcome by force, will, and circumstance. And particularly, if that discontent can be alleviated by harming or otherwise taking advantage of his neighbor.

***

Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

Virginia

"The indisputable fact that nobody can argue is that when we do get there, our current securities, the cybersecurity systems — which includes everything from Bitcoin to email — will be in great danger."--senior lecturer at the University of Kent Perez-Delgado on quantum computing

***

Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

***

No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well.--Churchill

***

Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

A Christmas Story

A Guatemalan migrant has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his female victim burned to death.

***

Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment.

***

President Biden is granting clemency to 37 of the 40 federal inmates facing death sentences. Their sentences will be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The three inmates who didn't get clemency are the convicted murderer in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the gunman at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. 

Well, some criteria must be present, I guess.

And the Democrats are worried about Musk influencing the government?
The country is being run like a college frat house.

Is there a bigger scandal in the country than this unreported substitution-presidency?

***

A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:  

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Sinterklaas

 

The World Bank estimates that crime costs South Africa 10% of GDP annually.

***
 
…the most significant destruction on the Korean Peninsula was wrought by the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century. Nearly two million Koreans, a staggering 20 percent of the population, perished during the Imjin Wars, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaigns of 1592-1598 to subjugate the Korean Peninsula. Hideyoshi’s object was the conquest of Ming China (1368-1644) but the result was to turn Korea into a ruined land.--meyer

***

Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.

Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.

The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in The Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.

Dutch Stamps:

  

Epiphany

President Joe Biden was not aware for days that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. 

Does anything about these people make sense?

***

A New York Times opinion piece openly speculated this week whether Taylor Swift is a closeted queer person. The NYT. Fit to print.

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Big day tomorrow.
United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket is scheduled to lift off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday at 2:18 a.m. EST (0718 GMT). The launch — the first ever for the powerful new rocket — will carry the private Peregrine moon lander.
The Vulcan Centaur will replace ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV workhorses.
The 202-foot-tall (62-meter) Vulcan Centaur consists of two stages, and its thrust can be augmented by up to six strap-on solid rocket boosters. Vulcan's first stage is powered by two of Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, so Monday's mission is also a big one for Jeff Bezos' aerospace company. (The BE-4 is also the first-stage engine for New Glenn, Blue Origin's big, reusable rocket, which remains in development.)

Monday's liftoff will be the first for Peregrine as well. The robotic lander, built by Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, will aim to become the first private spacecraft ever to touch down softly on the moon.

Peregrine is flying via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to help pave the way for the agency's crewed Artemis moon landings. The private spacecraft carries a variety of scientific payloads, provided by NASA and other space agencies, as well as some commercial cargo. (culled from space.com)

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Epiphany

Shakespeare is famous for encapsulating the essence of a play in his opening scene. And there are many examples in literature where a scene or chapter is a concentration of the larger vision. The Epiphany is such a scene in the New Testament. The Magi--astrologers and dream interpreters--follow thin scientific promptings to Jerusalem and ask Herod for help in the final leg of their journey to find the Christ child. Herod asks his priests to explain who they are seeking. The priests use the Old Testament to explain the Christ prophesies. Then the Magi leave for Bethlehem and Herod plots to find the child and kill him.

So Christ is born, is sought and adored by Gentiles from a metaphysical caste, and is stalked by killers trying to protect their worldly power and position. So far, so good. But the priests are the stunner: They are the academic resource, the intellectuals who know the connection between the Old Testament and the evolving New, the students and teachers of the question. They explain why the Magi are there and explain where they likely are bound. The Messiah may be at stake. And then they, the intellectuals,....do nothing.

 

Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation. 

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad formed his opinion of Christianity through contact with an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance, and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

And a more complex view of Christmas

Georgia Taxpayers Lose $160,000 for Every Job Created by Film Tax Credits.

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The Wall Street Journal reports on a Los Angeles low‐​income project, Lorena Plaza, that has taken 17 years to complete because of neighborhood opposition, lawsuits, and zoning and environmental rules. The Plaza’s 49 units are costing $34.2 million to build, or about $700,000 each.

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Now, as Professor Mises has emphasised, given central ownership and control of the means of production, the registering of individual pulls and and resistances by a mechanism of prices and costs is excluded by definition. It follows therefore that the decisions of the executive must necessarily be “arbitrary.” That is to say, they must be based on its valuations – not on the valuations of consumers and producers. This at once simplifies the form of choice. Without the guidance of a price system, the organisation of production must depend on the valuations of the final organiser.--Robbins

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And a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

--Yeats

Virginia

New York City Mayor Eric Adams reportedly carried 293 "special assistants" on the over-burdened city payroll during his first fiscal year in office, the New York Post reported. The aides, who were listed under vague titles, made up about one-third of the Mayor's Office, costing taxpayers $24.3 million, according to payroll records reviewed by the newspaper.

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According to Anthony de Jasay the word “fair” (and its derivatives) exists only in English “and has not even remote foreign equivalents.” In de Jasay’s view, “fair” is an empty and chameleonic word that means “nice” and has served mainly to corrupt “justice” into “social justice.” In a classical liberal perspective and in de Jasay’s anarchism, justice lies in voluntary contracts and interactions.

Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

***

So many things are easy to say. "Justice now." "End war now!"

“To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can’t do that.” --Biden

So, how will that nonviolent pacification be done? How will the cat be belled?

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From the First Things First Department:

A group of House lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest made public a court-approved confidential mediation between the Biden administration and environmental groups pushing to remove four hydroelectric dams in Washington to protect salmon. Salmon.

The document, which has yet to be made public, was drafted on Nov. 2 as part of an agreement in which activist groups agreed to pause their litigation against the federal government. The groups have argued in favor of breaching the four federally managed dams amid declining salmon populations in the lower Snake River, which winds through Idaho and Washington before feeding into the Columbia River and then into the Pacific Ocean.

I wonder what they were promised.

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Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

A Christmas Story

President Joe Biden was safe on Sunday night after a car collided with a motorcade SUV that was part of the president's security detail, a Reuters witness said.

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According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Councilman Bruce Kraus and Councilwoman Erika Strassburger have teamed up on bills to ban the production and sale of fur-related items in the city and the sale of foie gras, while Kraus has introduced his own bill to ban horse carriages.

Sometime in the darkest night, a bright light of optimism will shine.

***

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday that he could help fix the out-of-control migrant crisis if he was the one sitting in the White House.

Speaking of bright lights...

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A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:  

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Sinterklaas

A protester with a Palestinian flag self-immolated on Friday outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, injuring a security guard who attempted to intervene, authorities said.

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The World Bank estimates that crime costs South Africa 10% of GDP annually.

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…the most significant destruction on the Korean Peninsula was wrought by the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century. Nearly two million Koreans, a staggering 20 percent of the population, perished during the Imjin Wars, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaigns of 1592-1598 to subjugate the Korean Peninsula. Hideyoshi’s object was the conquest of Ming China (1368-1644) but the result was to turn Korea into a ruined land.--meyer

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Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.

Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.

The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in The Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.

Dutch Stamps:

  

Christmas

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. -James Thurber, writer, and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)

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The CIA has been meddling in Twitter’s internal content moderation for years, according to the latest dispatches from Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” — which also revealed “mountains of insistent moderation demands” from the Democratic National Committee, but not from the GOP.

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The Marines, for fear of misgendering someone, may drop the terms “sir” and “ma’am.”

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Scientists have identified two minerals never seen before on Earth in a meteorite weighing 15.2 metric tons (33,510 pounds).

The minerals came from a 70-gram (nearly 2.5-ounce) slice of the meteorite, which was discovered in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth-largest meteorite ever found, according to a news release from the University of Alberta.

***

Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.