A Fifth Column

On this day:
1178 BC
The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War.
1457 BC
Likely date of the Battle of Megiddo between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh, the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.
73
Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Jewish Revolt.
1746
The Battle of Culloden is fought between the French-supported Jacobites and the British Hanoverian forces commanded by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, in Scotland after the battle many highland traditions were banned and the Highlands of Scotland were cleared of inhabitants.
1917
Lenin returns to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland.
1945
More than 7,000 die when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo.
1945
The Red Army begins the final assault on German forces around Berlin, with nearly one million troops fighting in the Battle of the Seelow Heights.
2007
Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest spree killing in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho, kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide.

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"Nothing is more suicidal than a rational investment strategy in an irrational world."--John Maynard Keynes

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Has the attack on Iran been so successful that we don't know who is negotiating their surrender?

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Culloden was fought between the British and the Scots, Catholics and Protestants, Highlanders and Lowlanders. The Campbells turned coat to fight for the Brits. I had a friend named Campbell who was refused service there because of his name.

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Does the Swalwell fiasco open the door to the Governor's mansion to Kamala?

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A Fifth Column

A new report from The New York Times highlights a significant change in the types of individuals and entities funding political campaigns across the United States. Rather than traditional individual donors, an increasing amount of political money is now coming from wealthy, anonymous sources, raising concerns about transparency and the influence of undisclosed interests in the electoral process.

Wealthy. And anonymous. 

Americans have a lot of concerns and interests. And not a lot of time or organization to do it. That's one reason we have governments. Governments can try to maintain the integrity of the nation. Safety. Protection from invasion and piracy.

We are constantly burdened with someone's idea of a brave new world as street activists and aggressive politicians try to reshape us. This NYT information suggests their ideas may not be their own. Other nations have big budgets; why not spend it here, trying to influence policy and money flow? It's probably cheaper than war.

One would hope these public servants would suppress their tendencies to be public reformers and just do the basics to protect us. We, not foreign money, should determine our future. We, not thieves, should determine where our money goes. If it is really true that 15% of the national budget is stolen every year, we should know and pursue that; with that volume, it should be easy to find.

Unless, of course, these "public servants" are complicit in this national and economic erosion.

The Democracy of Violence

On this day:

1708
James Francis Edward Stuart lands at the Firth of Forth.
1775
American Revolutionary War: Patrick Henry delivers his speech – “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” – at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
1801
Tsar Paul I of Russia is struck with a sword, then strangled, and finally trampled to death in his bedroom at St. Michael’s Castle.
1806
After traveling through the Louisiana Purchase and reaching the Pacific Ocean, explorers Lewis and Clark and their “Corps of Discovery” begin their arduous journey home.
1956
Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic in the world. (Republic Day in Pakistan)
1980
Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador gives his famous speech appealing to men of the El Salvadoran armed forces to stop killing the Salvadorans.
1994
Aeroflot Flight 593 crashes in Siberia when the pilot’s fifteen-year-old son accidentally disengages the autopilot, killing all 75 people on board.

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Several ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer rescue organization were set on fire outside a synagogue in a neighborhood home to London’s largest Jewish community early on Monday

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New York City’s LaGuardia Airport was closed Monday after a passenger plane collided with an emergency vehicle on the runway, killing two pilots

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The head of the International Energy Agency said on Monday that at least 40 energy assets across nine countries in the Middle East have been “severely or very severely” damaged since the Iran war began, raising fears of prolonged supply disruptions.

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Gold prices resumed their slide on Monday after suffering the worst week in 15 years before paring some losses in late morning trade.
Silver, platinum, and palladium also plunged as investors retreated from precious metals amid renewed inflation fears.

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Chicago’s tipped workers could have their hourly pay frozen at 76% of the city’s minimum wage, thanks to a City Council vote Wednesday that throws an economic bone to restaurants, but sets the stage for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s third veto.

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James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of James 11, deposed by William in the Glorious Revolution, was the center of the Jacobite movement to restore him and Catholicism to the English throne. He made five attempts to invade the British Isles. His forces were defeated at the Boyne in Ireland, then finally and decisively at Culloden.

***

The Democracy of Violence

"God made all men, but Colt made them equal"--Samuel Colt

What started as a GPS-guided, piston-engine drone with basic inertial navigation has transformed into a platform integrating Starlink satellite connectivity, Nvidia Jetson Orin AI processors, 16-element CRPA anti-jamming antennas, and real-time video streaming. The discovery in February 2026 of a reconnaissance Geran-2 carrying a Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer and a Windows 11 mini-PC made in China illustrates the improvised but surprisingly effective nature of Russia’s drone upgrade program — combining commercial off-the-shelf tech with military-grade components to build capability faster than Western sanctions can stop it.

A vast, unsanctionable buildout of technical destruction and death.

A new tech, cheap, with an aggressive advancement system, portable, low maintenance, satellite connected, often anonymous--this is a democratization of a murderous technology for all. Imagine this tech available to the rich drug cartels. Or a small international player with local interests. (Iran)

The raw scale of Shahed drone attacks in Ukraine in 2026 is enormous. Nearly 19,000 attack drones in a single winter campaign — from October 2025 through early March 2026 — represents an aerial bombardment campaign that has lasted, by CSIS’s reckoning, longer than the infamous London Blitz of World War II. The 810-drone single-night attack on September 6–7, 2025 set a new benchmark in drone warfare, and the cadence of attacks exceeding 500 drones per sortie across late August 2025 makes clear this was not a one-off. These figures reveal a deliberate Russian strategic posture: launch enough drones, often enough, to grind down Ukrainian air defenses, energy infrastructure, and civilian morale simultaneously.

A single Iranian drone can cost as little as $35,000 to produce, while intercepting it can cost anywhere from $500,000 to $4 million.

Ukrainian interceptor drones produced in 2025: 100,000 units

The overall interception rate is ~90%.

There are an astonishing number of sites devoted to this technology. Here are some stats in this diffuse information environment:

---Russia has scaled domestic production of the Geran/Shahed series to over 5,500 units per month at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone 

---Rather than a few thousand long-range drones, its total Shahed fleet is estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000 across all variants.

---Iran reportedly produces around 100 drones per month. This translates to approximately 3-4 drones per day.

---Shahed-136 loitering munitions cost just $20,000-$50,000 each. 

---Iran’s production facilities can manufacture up to 6,000 airframes annually,

---Iran outsourced Mohajer-6 production to Venezuela while fulfilling requests for advanced systems featuring 1,000 km range and GPS jamming capabilities. 

---The IRGC supplies Hezbollah and Syrian proxies despite Israeli strikes damaging manufacturing infrastructure.

---Tehran’s drone program generates revenue through strategic exports, with Russia becoming its primary customer since 2022.

---Modern drones now feature embedded GPS for stable positioning, Return to Home functionality, and Follow Me mode that enhances autonomous operations. These unmanned aerial vehicles enable surveillance and engagement operations while allowing Iran to reduce risk to military personnel during targeted strikes. 

---Advanced systems now integrate thermal imaging capabilities that enhance search and detection operations in challenging environments and low-visibility conditions.   

---The incorporation of 360-degree camera technology in some reconnaissance variants enables immersive real-time intelligence gathering for ground control stations. This rapid modernization timeline transformed dated assets into multi-domain strike platforms supporting sustained autonomous operations.

These changes have occurred in just a few years. They could end up in the basements of every neighborhood throughout the world--not just the West. They could put long-range destruction--or strategically focused attacks--in the hands of every nut case or hotblood or adventurer on the planet as we accelerate our return to tribalism.

The push into western Texas by the European farmers and explorers was stopped dead by the most sophisticated light cavalry in the world: the Comanche. When the Colt revolver was introduced into the stalled western expansion, the Comanche was gone.

 

 

 

Law From a Great Distance

On this day:

1048
Protestantism: The villagers around today’s Baden-Baden elect their own priest in defiance of the local bishop.
1649
King Charles I of England is beheaded.
1661
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England is ritually executed two years after his death, on the anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed.
1703
The Forty-seven Ronin, under the command of Ōishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master.
1835
In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen.

1862
The first American ironclad warship, the USS Monitor is launched.
1933
Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany.
1945
World War II: The Wilhelm Gustloff, overfilled with refugees, sinks in the Baltic Sea after being torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, leading to the deadliest known maritime disaster, killing approximately 9,400 people.
1948
Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi known for his non-violent freedom struggle is assassinated by Pandit Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist.
1969
The Beatles’ last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert is broken up by the police.
1972
Bloody Sunday: British Paratroopers kill fourteen unarmed civil rights/anti internment marchers in Northern Ireland.
1996
Gino Gallagher, the suspected leader of the Irish National Liberation Army, is killed while waiting in line for his unemployment benefit.
***
More than four million Americans will turn 65 between now and 2027. “That’s over 11,000 people hitting this milestone every single day. The program's cash surplus is expected to run out in less than a decade,” according to NPR.

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The fast-growing measles outbreak in South Carolina is now the largest in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated in this country more than two decades ago. 789 cases were reported as of Tuesday.

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The Left is whispering. They say last week in Brussels, Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister and one of Europe’s most vocal Trump supporters, pulled aside his fellow European leaders to share what he’d witnessed during a private meeting with the American president. The word he used to describe Trump’s demeanor? “Dangerous.”

Governing by rumor and innuendo is how the Left works now. We don't know if it's true, what he meant, or what accuracy governs Mr. Fico, but we do know that when you govern by rumor and innuendo, and you allow your President to abdicate his powers to a group of grad students for four years, you lose a lot of credibility.

***

Law From a Great Distance

Rules should be a relief to a culture.

The oldest known evidence of any law code are tablets from the ancient city Ebla (Tell Mardikh in modern-day Syria). They date to about 2400 B.C. — approximately 600 years before Hammurabi put together his famous code.

"An eye for an eye ..." is a paraphrase of Hammurabi's Code, a collection of 282 laws inscribed on an upright stone pillar. The code was found by French archaeologists in 1901 while excavating the ancient city of Susa, which is in modern-day Iran.

He ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E. And his laws seem to grow out of necessity: he was trying to organize an expanding empire of diverse groups with diverse rules and norms.

His was actually an effort to eliminate tribal justice that holds groups responsible for individual acts and individuals for group acts, for example, Hatfield and McCoy thinking. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the thinking of the modern, ironically named, Progressive.

Group identity is the most primitive of all legal forms. Hammurabi's genius was to overcome it, to apply individual crimes to individuals. There is a thesis that it influenced the Old Testament (through the Babylonian Captivity).

Group identity has never left the Middle East. And it's strong, the obverse of our bonding. We will always have the lurching monster staggering around, fed and encouraged by the Left in the American University Lab, as it seeks a place to apply its broad brush.

Its threat in places like Minneapolis is that it appeals to very early, unformed human thought because it requires so little of it. A complex problem can be quickly solved and acted upon without the hesitancy and uncertainty of unfocusing debate.

And in the softer mind, certainty is its own reward. Law is a unifying and stabilizing element in a culture. It takes advantage of that bonding tendency in us and focuses it towards a general, agreed-upon good.

In Minneapolis, the local government has officially denied the law, sits back while the Feds go in alone to enforce it, and then complains bitterly about the chaotic results.

That takes a special kind of high-minded cowardice.

Rising Above the Law and Those Left Behind

On this day:

1834
US President Andrew Jackson orders first use of federal soldiers to suppress a labor dispute
1886
Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile.

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

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Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund made $247 billion in 2025. Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) manages the fund on behalf of the Norwegian population. Set up in the 1990s to invest excess revenues from Norway’s oil and gas industry, the fund is currently an investor in more than 7,000 companies across 60 countries.The fund is worth the equivalent of $385,000 for every Norwegian man, woman and child and finances some 25% of the country's fiscal budget.

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"But it does make a kind of sick sense that if Vance can’t have a white wife standing next to him as he clearly looks toward the 2028 presidential election, the next best thing is a pregnant one."

This is from Slate, and you can keep it in mind for those times when you are uncertain how bad the far Left really is.

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Rising Above the Law and Those Left Behind

Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. spoke as she and Democratic Board chairman Robert Harvie, Jr., dismissed the earlier Pa. Supreme Court rulings in order to accept ballots without required signatures or mandatory dates. She declared that she would not second a motion to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, “mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

So a county commissioner thinks the law is optional, perhaps part of a continuum. A hint of what's to come.

This may help explain the current problems in Minnesota. The state has refused to enforce the immigration laws and has forced the Federal agents to work alone in the face of serious local opposition, including assaults, to protect Federal criminals living or arrested there.

This stance, called 'nullification,' was an early Southern position to resist anti-slavery laws, a charming precedent for the good citizens of Minnesota to adopt. Like the county commissioner, it rejects the law, in this case because the individual has a better idea. Importantly, the local officials have encouraged their citizens to encounter the Federal law enforcement with the hopes that the conflict will dramatize their position. Two have been killed, but sacrifices must be made. And they can sue.

One is struck by the confused thinking the violators use to explain themselves. It is a throwback to the pre-Hammurabi days, when Hammurabi's 'eye-for-an-eye' was a significant civilizing advance over the barbaric vendetta and vigilante arrogance. And, as the commissioner shows, the so-called political and social leaders are at least as dim-witted and irresponsible as their camp followers.

And, according to the news, these lemmings think Noam is the problem. There are plenty of problems.

It's hard to imagine how popular support for immigrant criminals will turn out, but while the nation will suffer, the immigrants--both legal and illegal--will suffer most. Biden let in over 10 million unvetted people--perhaps as high as 20 million--from all over the world. They will be of all sorts. Most will be just desperate, like their predecessors, although some, like the 70 battalions of young Chinese men, will be of more specific concern. The fate of the 300,000 unaccompanied children will be abandoned to...fate.

The criminals among them will eventually reveal themselves, but managing that number of people will be difficult without public support. We will probably have to accept the group and their social and criminal burden, and deal with the criminals one by one, as their new, emancipated selves fulfill their criminal destinies. And, we'll watch the others--and those that look like them--suspiciously. This will create in the national mind a second class of citizens, undermine the culture's cohesiveness, and accept the apparent unrest these people seem to be so comfortable with. And, of course, there's the success of the rioters and the lesson that will teach.

It would be great if Noam and the reaction of the law were the problem.

Policing a Feeding Frenzy

On this day:
1500
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot on Brazil.
1531
Lisbon, Portugal is hit by an earthquake--thousands die.
1564
The Council of Trent issues its conclusions in the Tridentinum, establishing a distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
1565
Battle of Talikota, fought between the Vijayanagara Empire and the Islamic sultanates of the Deccan, leads to the subjugation, and eventual destruction of the last Hindu kingdom in India, and the consolidation of Islamic rule over much of the Indian subcontinent.
1885
Troops loyal to The Mahdi conquer Khartoum.
1949
The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory sees first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope (until BTA-6 is built in 1976).
1978
The Great Blizzard of 1978, a rare severe blizzard with the lowest non-tropical atmospheric pressure ever recorded in the US, strikes the Ohio – Great Lakes region with heavy snow and winds up to 100 mph (161 km/h).
1998
Lewinsky scandal: On American television, U.S. President Bill Clinton denies having had “sexual relations” with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

***

When Theodore Roosevelt asked Attorney General Philander Knox to concoct a legal justification for the unsavory U.S. measures that enabled construction of the Panama Canal, Knox replied, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

***

I looked over old records of the Kent State shootings. While I found interviews in which the students thought the Guard's weapons had blanks, I found nothing to show the Guard thought so.

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Why is the Minnesota fraud case a partisan investigation?

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Spot prices of silver cracked past $103, while gold ran to as high as $4,988, just $12 shy of $5,000.

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There was a dramatic selloff in the Japanese bond market last week, accompanied by wild swings in the yen. Inflation, long dormant in Japan, has taken hold, and, moreover, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is pushing fiscal stimulus plans that would swell a government debt pile that is already uncomfortably large. As a result, investors have been frantically sending bond yields up to levels once unthinkable — more than 4% on the longest-dated JGBs. That’s exerting upward pressure on interest rates from the US to Britain and Germany.
Higher Japanese yields will prompt domestic investors to bring much more of their money back home. Some $5 trillion of the country's capital is deployed overseas.

***

Policing a Feeding Frenzy

So the residents of Minnesota have organized into helpful little volunteer groups to monitor whether the Immigration Police are operating within the law. They are trying to make these encounters more difficult but more safe, a bit contradictory. Re the safety part, isn't that what the cops are supposed to do? Why do they need these standins? Apparently, the most recent shooting involved the victim intervening between ICE and an observer. They've been complaining that ICE is undertrained; are the self-appointed observers well-trained?

And the 'making the police action more difficult' part, how exactly does that fit in? Does that make things safer?

What's really happening is that amateurs are interfering with the cops. They are intervening in police actions against illegal immigrants. Dangerous stuff. Combustible. And unpredictable. Why would amateurs expose themselves to such risk? To pacify? Maybe they plan a religious conversion? Do they even know there is a risk? Do they think the good guys can shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand? Do they think that in a fight with the cops and someone yells "Gun!", that there will be several calm moments to debate if the cry is accurate or not?

We are seeing a growing number of militant busybodies who are trying to influence behavior in a shark tank. Why would any sensible person do such a thing? There may be some recent insight. A congressional representative recently said in an interview that ICE was not in Minnesota to enforce immigration law; they were there for 'intimidation.' The crack interviewer did not ask any clarifying follow-up questions, so we were not told who was being intimidated or why.

This is the opinion of an elected official. We can't explain what the thought process was here or its relationship to the militant observers. But we can accept the innuendo: the bell-shaped curve is a hell of a lot flatter and broader in this country than we thought.

 

911. Can You hold?

On this day:

971
In China, the war elephant corps of the Southern Han are soundly defeated at Shao by crossbow fire from Song Dynasty troops.
1368
In a coronation ceremony, Zhu Yuanzhang ascends to the throne of China as the Hongwu Emperor, initiating Ming Dynasty rule over China that would last for three centuries.
1556
The deadliest earthquake in history, the Shaanxi earthquake, hits Shaanxi province, China. The death toll may have been as high as 830,000.
1570
James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, regent for the infant King James VI of Scotland, is assassinated by firearm, the first recorded instance of such.
1897
Elva Zona Heaster is found dead in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. The resulting murder trial of her husband is perhaps the only case in United States history where the alleged testimony of a ghost helped secure a conviction.
1941
Charles Lindbergh testifies before the U.S. Congress and recommends that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Adolf Hitler.
1943
World War II: Australian and American forces finally defeat the Japanese army in Papua. This turning point in the Pacific War marks the beginning of the end of Japanese aggression.
1960
The bathyscaphe USS Trieste breaks a depth record by descending to 10,911 m (35,798 feet) in the Pacific Ocean.
1968
North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo, claiming the ship had violated their territorial waters while spying.

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However, as much as the political left loves to use words like “change” and “revolution” as if they had a monopoly or a copyright on them, the actual track record of the left pales in comparison with the social revolutions created by the free market.
No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.--Sowell

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Hayek pushes the point that markets are about price discovery. In controlled systems, the price is arbitrary.

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The astonishing rise of standards of living over the last two centuries has lifted everybody. Even a Dickensian street urchin has joined the productive class with hopes of more than others' success. And some have more success than others. This is the dreaded so-called income disparity. Many reasons might explain these disparities, although one rarely hears that any of the unhappy have themselves to blame.
But the idea that any inequality inspires some to break the system that has revolutionized the world is breathtaking.

***

Mamdani's restricted housing is like restricted car-buying. The story is in the circumstances. There is abundant, affordable housing, but not in Manhattan. Or Marcos Island.

***

What in the name of heaven is Newsom doing stalking Trump in Davos? Did he think he would rescue the stupid appearance with a stupid gay joke?

This is a leader?

***

911. Can You hold?

The Minneapolis conflicts have an asymmetry. The ICE problem is an unusual external, whereas the everyday is the local cops, and what is asymmetrical is their absence in civic disturbance, disturbances that are advertised and certainly easy to find. These diffuse confrontations, which seem to be planned with the hope of escalating violence, would be ended with the appearance of the local police. Yet they are not in evidence, even by accident.

How is that possible? How can the people and the organizations responsible for civil order ignore this dangerous chaos? They are employed--and paid--to maintain civil order but seem devoted not to do so.

So, who is responsible for the citizens' safety? For the general order of the community?

And, on a coarser level, who is legally responsible when those agents, for whatever reason, refuse their sworn duty?

The Price of Freedom

On this day:

1610
Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able distinguish the last two until the following day.
1785
Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
1835
HMS Beagle drops anchor off the Chonos Archipelago.
1920
The New York State Assembly refuses to seat five duly elected Socialist assemblymen.
1940
Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stops and completely destroys the overwhelming Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road.
1942
World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
1945
World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.
1948
Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.
1952
President Harry S. Truman announces that the United States has developed the hydrogen bomb.

***

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”--Kissinger

***

The Maduro capture is looking like a more serious international position. Venezuela and South America are less vulnerable to American enemies, the yuan is less a threat, the hemisphere emphisis is new and places a burden upon NATO--the military arm of the people at risk, and may make opponents of former allies over the remaining hemisphere. China and Russia.

***

The early hearings on Minnesota fraud sound as if the government is really an agent of organized crime.

***  

A lot of the fraud in Minnesota was done in crypto.

***

The Price of Freedom

What is the price of freedom?

In all other governmental systems, you are forced to suffer other people's errors. Imagine living where the political philosophy believes that a person is born with an unescapable responsibility for the condition of total strangers, conditions that stretch back before either you or they were born. And imagine that the future depends, not only on your acceptance of this, but your death and the deaths of your children and family. Imagine being subject to whatever goofy notion catches on in university coffee houses: illiterates taking over oil facilities, or health facilities. Beliefs that you will work tirelessly for the well-being of your alcohol-consumed neighbor. The somber belief you should sacrifice your daughter's heart to the Sun God.

Freedom allows you to make your own decisions, to make your own life. Freedom also allows you to make your own mistakes, a circumstance that encourages the insinuation of people who offer to relieve you of those risks, with, by the way, no credentials at all.

The price of a Melania coin is just under 14 cents; people paid as much as $8.48 for each one less than a year ago.
But you can also buy 25 pristine, wrapped pennies for between 9 and 10 dollars.
That is the price of freedom.

Everyday People

On this day:

1791
The National Constituent Assembly in Paris is dissolved; Parisians hail Maximilien Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion as “incorruptible patriots”.
1882
Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States.
1888
Jack the Ripper kills his third and fourth victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
1927
Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a season.
1938
At 2:00 am, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

***

Nicolas Dufourcq, the head of France’s state investment bank Bpifrance, warned that Europe is becoming “doubly colonized” by Chinese industry and U.S. tech.

***

Speaking at the FutureChina Global Forum 2025, Dalio warned that the excessive spending and spiraling debt by the U.S. government has become “unsustainable” and that the world’s largest economy is facing a major fiscal crisis that will put its monetary order at risk.

He added that all currencies risk losing their appeal as repositories of wealth when global governments appear reluctant to rein in excessive spending and borrowing, making gold and non-fiat currencies more viable stores of value.

Dalio urged investors to diversify their assets with around 10% of their portfolio in gold.

***

Russell Wilson needs to keep starting the entire season in order for that 4th-rounder to materialize for the Steelers. And if he plays less than 40% of the snaps, his contract could fall all the way to the 6th round.

***

The overwhelming majority of prostitutes are seduced, coerced, or outright trafficked into the flesh trade, but, apparently, Mamdani thinks it only an unusual career path

***

Everyday People

When discussing the epidemic of mindless violence against the defenseless, one never hears the possibility of simple stupidity. Craziness and homicidal ideologies are easier targets. But the bell curve is unforgiving. Idiots are everywhere, and many are armed.

Two new news stories:

Philadelphia is planning to raise the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) flag outside City Hall in honor of the regime's founding. This in the city whose mayor cannot spell 'eagles.' The CCP flag has been flown there twice before, in 2017 and 2019.

In other news, the Chicago Teachers Union honored a convicted cop killer on social media Thursday, praising Joanne Chesimard as a “revolutionary fighter” following news of her death in Cuba.

The union’s official X account posted:

"Rest in Power, Rest in Peace, Assata Shakur.

Today we honor the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.

Assata refused to be silenced."

A jury convicted Chesimard, before she became Assata Shakur, of first-degree murder in 1977 for shooting New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a routine traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Two years into her life sentence, Chesimard escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility for Women when armed accomplices broke her out in 1979. She fled to Mexico, then Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s government granted her asylum.

Is it possible these political leaders do not understand the foolishness of publicly honoring murder cults? Is it possible that the people we entrust to educate our children don't see that honoring lightweight homicidal revolutionary groups is a bad idea? Is this proof of alien life? Or just more examples of the success of mainstreaming morons?

Every Man a King

On this day:

1066: The Battle of Stamford Bridge marks the end of the Viking invasions of England.
1513
Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa reaches what would become known as the Pacific Ocean.
1906
In the presence of the king and before a great crowd, Leonardo Torres Quevedo successfully demonstrates the invention of the Telekino in the port of Bilbao, guiding a boat from the shore, in what is considered the birth of the remote control.
1957
Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, is integrated by the use of United States Army troops.

***

Apple, Oracle, Google, all started in a garage. They could've not have afforded to do this, and all of those companies took advantage of talent they couldn't find in the United States as they grew. I think what this does is hurt innovation long-term. I agree that it's going to push these really talented people into other countries. My attitude about this is if we educate you at MIT or at Harvard any school, we should give you a free ticket to stay here, get married, form a company, and build American businesses here. Why train them and kick them out?--Kevin O'Leary

***

What kind of culture is it where 'rhetoric' can kill? It sounds like a South Park skit.

***

How does an individual decide that a law, passed by a legally elected representative government, is illegal?

***

A Paris court on Thursday sentenced former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison after finding him guilty of criminal conspiracy in an alleged scheme to finance his 2007 campaign with funds from Libya.

***

There is a statute of limitations on lying to Congress. Honesty has a shelf life.

***

Russia has turned to its ally North Korea to fill some of its military and labor shortages. Laws prevent women from working dangerous defense jobs--but not foreign women who are being recruited from Asia and Africa.

***


Every Man a King

We have become a society--not just politically but socially--that will be characterized in the future as insincere. In every walk of life, we lie. We lie about why we go to war, why we want to change the medical system, the purpose of taxes, the reasons for ethanol fuel, why we are supporting GM, why we did not support Lehman Brothers, why we have no charter schools, and why some students do badly regardless. And who knows what global temperatures mean now? Or the acid in the ocean? The way we are going, we will outlaw mathematics. And we lie to ourselves: the students with the lowest scores on achievement tests have the highest self-esteem. Political correctness supplants comity.  

And we expect insincerity. No one believes the nation's ubiquitous commercials. Evan a military guy can't answer straight. Nor does it matter. Obama says he won't pursue the torture question, and the next day he says he will. No one blinks. The guy who audited the S&L disaster in the 80s was interviewed in a hearing and was asked to estimate the amount of fraud in each government contract, and he said, "7% off the top and then whatever trickles down at each level." A culture that is completely crippled by lies. It is symbolically fitting that the greatest economic meltdown in history occurs because "no one trusts each other".

Now we have some serious domestic trouble. The leverage of free individuals is showing in its greatest strength: a strange, suicidal form of terrorism. The power of one man with a weapon or an explosive. Personal freedom abuts public safety. We need some help to think about this. And who do we have as a translator?  Who will make things clear? The boy who, for the last decade at least, has been crying "wolf!" Russia, Russia, Russia. The Hunter laptop. 1619. Biden's competence. Fascists. A president whose supporters "take him seriously but not literally."

The Dissemblers-in-Chief. 

We have no honest source of information. A culture without an interstitium, a culture where everyone is on their own.

And people are surprised by the "lone wolf?"

The Merging of Stupid and Madness

On this day:

1780
American Revolution: British Major John André is arrested as a spy by American soldiers exposing Benedict Arnold’s change of sides.
1806
Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis after exploring the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
1821
Tripolitsa, Greece, falls and 30,000 Turks are massacred during the Greek War of Independence.
1857
The Russian warship Lefort capsizes and sinks during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard.

***

The U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday that it "dismantled a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York tristate area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials.

"This protective intelligence investigation led to the discovery of more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites," the Secret Service said in a statement. "In addition to carrying out anonymous telephonic threats, these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks. This includes disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises. "

***

Right now, I understand that is Oregon, Ohio State, Texas… Texas Tech because of their oil money. There’s five or six [programs] out there that have unlimited NIL resources. It’s kind of scary for everybody else.”-- Indiana head football coach Curt Cignetti on multi-million NIL deals.
12 of Tech’s 18 transfer additions this cycle are rated as four-star players.The estimate on the money spent on the portal this year for Texas Tech? $28 million..

***

The Merging of Stupid and Madness  

“It was kind of an ultimate protest against the system. There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.” 

Clyde Barrows? Trotsky?

These are the words of Sara Jane Moore, a doctor's wife, mother of five, who, in 1975, tried to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. Why? There are explanations. She became interested in the crazy Symbionese Liberation Army. Squeaky Fromm, one of the crazy Manson girls, had just tried to kill Ford. But can you catch crazy?  

You can't get crazy by reading about crazies. Nor can you just sign up. One of the rules of psychology is that crazies do not join groups. A defining characteristic of madness is that they cannot bond. 

Manson might be mesmerizing, but lunatics will not line up shoulder to shoulder with him. Wendy Masako Yoshimura might be interesting and provocative, but...

Yet there they were, lining up, sacrificing for each other, doing horrible things to strangers... just like a real group of normal killers. But, of course, Sara Jane didn't have the one characteristic of normal killers: she had no motive--or, at least, had no good one. She said she was opposed to the Vietnam War, but Ford had nothing to do with the War, and it was already over when Mrs. Moore tried to kill him. And what about one of the victims joining the team? Patty Hearst was a quiet upper-class girl kidnapped and raped by one of these groups, and after a while, she was guarding the bank door with an automatic.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? 

One of the staples of modern thinking is that the bell curve inevitably allows for the festering of a certain number of lunatics who will eventually act to the detriment of the culture. The culture's defense, it is said, is testing and vigilance. But testing and vigilance would not find the staid suburban Sara Jane. Or Hearst. Or Kirk's killer, apparently a good citizen with no real history. 

We might mainstream the peripheral and hope to identify the dangerous outlier. But Mrs. Moore and Kirk's killer point to something new under the sun. These are relatively average people moved to vicious acts by deep passion and righteousness. People who are unbridled by societal constraints once they have come to grips with their virtue. Like Old Testament holy men, they recognize their calling and make the sacrifice. But they sacrifice you.

A culture where the unreasonable bleeds into the irrational.

"There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun." That sounds like a culture with a problem.

.

The Lone Wolf

On this day:

14
Tiberius is confirmed as Roman Emperor by the Roman Senate following the natural death of Augustus
324
Constantine the Great decisively defeats Licinius in the Battle of Chrysopolis, establishing Constantine’s sole control over the Roman Empire.
1812
The 1812 Fire of Moscow dies down after destroying more than three-quarters of the city. Napoleon returns from the Petrovsky Palace to the Moscow Kremlin, spared from the fire.
1885
Riots break out in Montreal to protest against compulsory smallpox vaccination.
1895
Daniel David Palmer gives the first chiropractic adjustment.
1944
World War II: The British submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoes Junyō Maru, 5,600 killed.
1975
Patty Hearst is arrested after a year on the FBI Most Wanted List.
2001
First mailing of anthrax letters from Trenton, New Jersey in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

***

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (18 Sep 1709-1784)

***

Is there a difference between competition from across the border and competition from across the street? Is competition from Alaska more or less damaging than competition from Mexico?

***

79% of Democrats believe it is reasonable to remove Trump from office by force.

***

So-called "static pets" such as stones, mango pits, paper boxes, and even toothpaste have become very popular with Chinese youths looking for low-commitment companionship to compensate for their stressful daily lives and careers. However, one such static pet has been seeing massive popularity in the Asian country, “pet yeast”.

***


The Lone Wolf

The Left is rooted in struggle. Conflict. Oppression does not need to be identified; it is assumed. And it must be overcome. A victory cannot be reached through discussion. It can be achieved only through winning. In essence, it views itself as being in the midst of a battle between good and evil, within an ongoing historical process. The battle is inevitable; their victory is inevitable. And, of course, there is no compromise with evil.

In such a struggle, what is allowed? What are the limits we impose upon ourselves in such a Manichean battle? The Marxists, through a poorly understood idea of Darwin and economics, believe the power held in our current, collapsing political entity can be finally defeated only by deracinating it. Those successful people are a subset in the culture, a predatory class or caste arising over centuries, and would spring up from the fertilizer of its predecessors unless they were all destroyed and their fields sown with salt. Killing the Tsar's children was not seen as a slaughter of the innocents; it was a necessary, unavoidable extermination of a genetic and social fault developed over the years.

The Left will always bring these struggles. But something new is in the air. The new revolutionary doesn't have comrades or a creed; he has a personal beef.

First, Kirk. Kirk was an unlikely assassination target in the traditional sense. He seemed more evangelical with strong political corollaries than political with religious overtones. He wasn't elected to anything, had never held an elected position, and, indeed, had diverted such suggestions toward his primary interest: teaching. A campus crusader.

He was certainly prominent, well known among the younger population, less so among the older. His encounters and speeches reveal an opinionated, well-spoken guy with a big mind and an accepting heart--not at all the hateful guy you would expect from his killer's statements and those of his other enemies. But hate is in the mind of the beholder; that's the reason we have laws.

Assassinations are usually attacks on political direction through public figures. They are rare in the U.S., where they are usually personal. Even Booth's murder occurred after the Civil War was decided and was a self-inflicted wound; its results were much more damaging to the South than the North.

With Kirk, as with Mangioni, we may be seeing the rise of the vigilante assassin.

Vigilantism has a pre-Hammurabi feel, the feel of The Feud. The vigilante acts within a justice tradition but outside a formal legal code. He usually acts in response to judicial inaction to a wrong that most people would agree with. It's like a Mafia code, or Sharia court: laws everyone agrees with are enforced by special interests outside the organized legal system. With a vigilante, the laws are more capricious, and the enforcing judge and executioner is often a very small group. Usually one.

Kirk's murder is much like Luigi Mangione's murder of Brian Thompson. Regardless of motive, Mangione's act was strange. He killed a man because he worked for a company that was in an industry Mangioni didn't like. An enemy once removed. 

The Kirk murder is stranger still because Kirk's crimes are hard to glean. He seems like a nice, talented guy. He was opposed to transgender ideology, but how many are? Which of those guys should be killed? And, like Mangioni, the killer will have a limited impact. The movement Kirk created is sizable, robust, and, with his death, energized. And his widow, if her speech after his death is any indication, will be a powerful force in his absence. Personal hatred of a public figure is not what most people think of as a motive for assassination. And many people loved him; don't they get a voice?

Yes. They do get a voice. This murder has turned a page. The country's reverence for the individual has always caused problems, but one wonders about this new development. This was a capricious, stupid act by a random guy, said to be bright, but whose stupid act carries the day. And his supporters--there are supporters--leaped to the barricades to mute the impact. The killer was in love. He had a difficult childhood. The relationship with his roommate was "tender." Jimmy Kimmel attributed Kirk's assassination to MAGA influence. And 41% of Democrats think that Kirk was killed by a Republican.

Meanwhile, one of Mangioni's supporters has married "his AI."

There is a gulf developing in the country. Fortunately, the one malignant group looks like morons. They will certainly do some weird damage; the twisted individual mind is hard to manage. But maybe this will be self-limited.

In History's Dark Alleyways

 

Is there political division in the country that separates those in favor of murder from ambush from those opposed? Is there really a murder-from-ambush subset?

***

Sanity has a significant cultural component. Cannibalism in New Guinea is not the same as in Cleveland.

***

So, when did Kirk's opinions and beliefs lose diversity approval and go on the Index? Who makes that Index?

***

In History's Dark Alleyways

Perhaps the Internet is not a diversity tool at all. Maybe it is so vast that it allows clusters of people who would otherwise be outliers, but on the large and empty internet sit like desert tribes, isolated and self-contained. Each, in essence, has its own culture, with its own laws, rituals, initiations, and expulsions, underlying faith-based dogmas and unchallenged assumptions. Coming upon it on social media sites is like encountering a new tribe in the jungle, unique and strange.

This implies these groups are isolated and alone in our neutral and unjudging cultural desert. 

Kayapo with automatics.

Analyzing the Unanalyzable

On this day:
1521
The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade.
1862
American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas.
1955
Black teenager Emmett Till is murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.
1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech
1968
Riots in Chicago, Illinois, during the Democratic National Convention.
1979
An IRA bomb explodes on the Grand Place in Brussels.
1991
Collapse of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
1991
Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1996
Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales divorce.

***

Denmark publicly apologized on Wednesday to Greenlandic women who were victims of a decades-long involuntary birth control campaign. The birth control campaign came to light in 2022 when records showed that thousands of women and girls as young as 13 had been fitted with intrauterine devices without their knowledge or consent between 1966 and 1991, the year Greenland was given authority over its healthcare system.

***

The Salvadoran man--or the Maryland man--Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is seeking to remain in the United States by renewing his bid for asylum. He wants protection from a rival gang back home.

We are a sanctuary for criminals.
Who will protect us from him?

***

China is the world’s largest booze market. For millennia, liquor has lubricated social gatherings and business deals. Wedding banquets are referred to as “happy alcohol”, while the celebration to mark a child’s first month of life is “full-month alcohol”.
But alcohol sales are down, and a growing number of young Chinese say they’re “disgusted” by their country’s drinking culture. China’s leaders have banned alcohol from official events.

***

Analyzing the Unanalyzable

There has been another group shooting, this time in Minneapolis, in a Catholic church where the parish school children were attending mass. Two children were killed and seventeen injured.

The political and journalistic classes reflexively responded. "Thoughts and prayers." The shooter was a "coward." Were the parents responsible? Guns should be better regulated.

There will be a search for reasons, motives behind a murderous, armed attack on children. All of these reactions imply the killer was just a normal guy distorted by the rigors of life, an average citizen gone wrong. We are supposed to search for a diary, comb through his social media history, and find mitigating circumstances, forks in his developmental path that resulted in this behavior.

But this, like all the others, was not a cruel or senseless act. This was simply madness. This was completely separate from the reflective, thoughtful bonding qualities that separate our species from the other great predators. Even the rogue wolf or elephant is recognized as crazy by his fellows.

But we are free. We revere the bell curve and embrace the outlier. And the outlier bites.

There have been 118 mass shootings in the last 20 years. Gun legislation will do as much as drug legislation because they are not the essential problem. The problem is mental health--in a population of 300,000,000.

But we are cautious with rules, accept the eccentric, and are suspicious of the State. Everyone knows that Simpson killed that poor girl, but an American jury could not convict him. Nor will we start mimicking the Minority Report. and insinuate ourselves into people's lives to intercept the outlier.

Worse, we are basically disinterested. We accept a few dead and injured in our lives to be left alone to do our jobs and live our lives. We have our own standards but, like the post-modern world around us, are unsure we can apply standards to others. We ignore even the basics of education, refuse to demand any criteria of social virtue. Live and let kill.

So, we will continue with the occasional candlelight ceremony and step over the bodies on the sidewalks, with the unspoken understanding that the current attitude and quasi-management is simply a placebo for the practitioners.

California Burnin'

On this day:

1190
Third Crusade: Frederick I Barbarossa drowns in the river Saleph while leading an army to Jerusalem.
1793
French Revolution: Following the arrests of Girondin leaders, the Jacobins gain control of the Committee of Public Safety installing the revolutionary dictatorship.
2003
The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

***

Is charity with borrowed money superior to self-indulgence with borrowed money?

***

California Burnin'

LA is beginning to burn again. Fortunately, the heroes responsible for the brilliant reaction to the wildfires are still in office.

The demonstrations are said to be mostly peaceful. However, a mostly sterile solution is not sterile, as a mostly virtuous woman is not virtuous. There is no Richter Scale for violence, but if there were, burning police cars would probably be pretty high.

The peaceful, police-car-burning demonstrators have support. There are actually politicians and press representatives who think that confrontations with the police, complete with felonies, should be tolerated. Maybe even encouraged--in the name of free expression. Perhaps they long for the days of moral outrage--like those of the Vietnam demonstrations--when there was moral outrage, when the short-memoried public held Nixon responsible for the Asian adventures, when people felt more than manufactured and processed ideas of right and wrong.

But riots are not assembly. Arson will not highlight a wrong. The immigration riots are a mess. People are burning flags of the country they say they want to stay in and waving flags of the countries they say they don't want to return to. To the non-academic eye, that looks stupid at best, subversive at worst. And the Left, which caused this immigration problem in the first place, is now mindlessly doubling down and opposing its solution.

What will the stability-seeking guy who just wants to get to work in the morning think?

It looks like a PR event designed by their enemies.

Sat/Stats

Olivia Hussey has died.

***

Quantum Computing:
Encryption will no longer guarantee privacy as quantum computers can crack ciphers in seconds. What will that do to the price of Bitcoin?
Quantum computing can enhance artificial intelligence by speeding up information retrieval.
Quantum computers may advance climate change research by improving weather modeling.

***

In 2022, there were nearly 6 million police-reported crashes, more than 90% due to human error. Will self-driving technology help?

***

December 2024 will see a rare "black moon," a term for the second new moon in a calendar month.
December's second new moon will occur at 5:27 p.m. ET (2227 GMT) on Dec. 30, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.
A second new moon is sometimes called a "black moon," just as two full moons in a month is sometimes called a "blue moon."  
New moons happen when the sun and the moon share the same celestial longitude, a position also called conjunction. You can't see the moon during this phase from Earth because the illuminated side is facing away from us; new moons are visible only during eclipses.

***

Sat/Stats

In a TV interview, Jordan Peterson said a small percentage of criminals were responsible for 55% of crimes...

*

William Kelly, director of the University of Texas Center for Criminology and Criminal Justice Research, noted that according to the U.S. Sentencing Project, as many as 100 million U.S. residents, which in 2014 would have been equal to 41 percent of the adult population, had a criminal conviction. That sounds hard to believe. Is it simply convictions divided by population?

*

According to the 2014 National Crime Victimization Survey, only 37 percent of U.S. property victimizations and only 46 percent of violent victimizations were reported to police.

*

In 2014, Swedish researchers drawing on records accounting for the experiences of 2.5 million people born in that country from 1958 to 1980 reported that from 1973 to 2004, some 1 percent of the population accounted for 63 percent of all violent crime convictions.

*

A study found that a "small proportion of the study males (7%) were defined as ‘chronic offenders’ because they accounted for about half of all officially recorded offenses"

*

Wolfgang found that 6 percent of juvenile boys accounted for about half of alleged juvenile crimes.

*

A routine finding in the criminological literature is that about half of the crime is committed by a very small fraction of the population, around 5-8 percent depending on the sample and methodology used.

*

The rearrest rate (for the first eight years after release) is about 49 percent. The re-conviction rate is 32 percent. The re-incarceration rate is 25 percent.

*

Inmates who didn’t finish high school are 10 points more likely to be arrested again than those who got a high school diploma – and 40 points more likely than those who finished college.

*

Prisoners released before turning 21 had a rearrest rate of about 68 percent; those released at age 60 or older had a rate of 16 percent.

*

Offenders convicted of crimes involving guns are far more likely (68 percent) to end up being arrested again.

Epigenetics of Despair

A survey of 1,095 registered voters from the conservative news network FOX showed that Biden is leading his presumptive Republican rival, Trump, by two points (50 percent to 48 percent).

***

“When Hamas is talking about eliminating Israel, it’s talking about not killing all of the Jews. It’s about eliminating the idea.'"(When one of the panelists, Free Press columnist Eli Lake, erupted in laughter, she continued.) “Sir, can I just finish this sentence? It’s about eliminating the idea of a Jewish state, ending a Jewish state, ending an ethno-national state, and having a state more like what we have in the United States.”--Bernie Sanders' former spokesperson and co-host of The Hill TV’s Rising, Briahna Joy Gray

***

Today there is an article in the NYT arguing the U.S. is a theocracy.

***

The WashPo says today that the Iranians are three weeks from nuclear weaponization.

***

Epigenetics of Despair

It's nice to see continuity in the culture. And in social disorder. It is as if there are basics at work that can be dealt with. That thesis that 3.5% of the population is necessary for confrontational social change is beginning to make a lot more sense.

Our current anti-Israel demonstrations on campus now remind me of a few years ago when Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested at a demonstration for attacking a police car with Molotov cocktails.

Both are attorneys. Above is a picture of the esteemed counselors.

This should raise some serious questions.

Is the orderly legal function of the state seen, by its very agents, to be illegitimate? Is the education of those agents of the courts so inadequate, or the choosing of candidates of such so inadequate, that the citizenry has reason to fear them? And what laws can be broken with impunity? Are the rest of us able to break laws because of our political vision, or for some other reason we see as valid? If so, which ones?
Or, is it only some special people among us that have such privilege?
How does this lawlessness differ from the abusive lawlessness of the police they are protesting?

And, is the damage or failure of this community so great that even achieving the trappings of apparent success, that the rest of the culture admires, is inadequate? If so, what will substitute for the social and economic advances that previous cultures have viewed as their ambition and the evidence of their success?

And, as an aside, what is the implication if the 3.5% social revolutionaries are judges, legislators, and attorneys?

Crime, Death, and Taxes

The free market depends on virtues it rewards but can’t create itself.

***

John Eastman was disbarred and may be indicted for the crime of representing Donald Trump. In April he announced that at least two banks with which he had done business were terminating his accounts. His crime? Providing legal advice to Donald Trump in his effort to challenge the integrity of the 2020 election.--Kimball

***

Word of Day

Obloquy:
Invective implies vehemence comparable to vituperation but may suggest greater verbal and rhetorical skill; it may also apply especially to a public denunciation, as in "blistering political invective." Obloquy, which comes from the Late Latin ob- (meaning "against") plus loquī (meaning "to speak"), suggests defamation

***

Crime, Death, and Taxes

The guy who attacked Pelosi's husband with a hammer has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
It could have been more except that Judge Corley said in court that she had taken into account Mr. DePape’s lack of a previous criminal record and his vulnerability to conspiracy theories.

It's probably kind that the judge pulled the punch on the maniac but it should not be confused with justice.

What does she mean, lack of a previous criminal record? He was in the country illegally. His tourist visa expired in 2008. He had been residing in the country illegally for fourteen years. Doesn't that qualify as a crime?

The Times then branched into a strange concept of cause-and-effect that the Times feels made the attack inevitable:

"Mr. DePape reflects the underbelly of American politics: a man driven by online conspiracy theories who seemed to embrace the rhetoric of many right-wing figures, who have used dehumanizing language for years to describe Ms. Pelosi and call her an enemy of the United States."


So, DePape wasn't really viciously attacking anyone as much as completing a part in an evolving chain of Rube Goldberg influences culminating in his attack on Pelosi. This absolves him of personal responsibility.
The devil made him do it.

And ducks the other obvious element: DePape sounds nuts.

The message here is not that benign guys can be influenced by goofy ideas. Or that there are a lot of poorly tied-down cannons out there. That's a gimmie. Look at some of the dominant political and social notions loosed upon the land today. But 300 million people in the culture are complicated. Simplistic answers are worse than unhelpful, they are dangerous. And, often, so are illegal immigrants.

 

 

Eliminating the Middle Man

 

Could our personalized AI companions of the future be subpoenaed to testify against us in court?--Altman

***

The (London) Times reports "Nervous drivers pay to be whisked across America’s scariest bridge." 10-30 clients daily, each paying $40 per trip to cross a Maryland bridge.

***

Eliminating the Middle Man

Ciudad Juárez’ International Airport has become the main turf fought over by the Sinaloa and the Juarez cartel for being where thousands of migrants arrive every day in hopes of making it across the border into Texas.

But above both criminal organizations is a new cartel: the Mexican Institute of Immigration (INM for its Spanish acronym). The top immigration authority in Mexico is now operating as its own criminal entity extorting, kidnapping and smuggling migrants all across the country.

Although the two main cartels in Juárez are still fighting each other to get full control of the juicy business of human smuggling, the INM is making bigger bucks by selling immigration permits to foreigners to be able to freely travel through Mexico, an advantage Mexican officials have over criminal organizations.

Each permit, according to sources who have acquired one, is being sold for up to 50,000 Mexican pesos, roughly $2,000. Without one of these, migrants are stuck at the Mexican southern border for months and end up having to pay sometimes more as a bribe to the same INM officials to let them out of Mexican southern border towns like Tapachula.

INM officials offer to get them in touch with a human smuggler right outside the airport, for a few extra thousands of pesos. The INM officials are making a circular business by asking migrants for cash in exchange for a “plug” and asking cartels a fee to hand over business to them. --Saga