NGOs in the Weeds

On this day:

1187
Siege of Jerusalem: Saladin captures Jerusalem after 88 years of Crusader rule.
1780
John André, British Army officer of the American Revolutionary War, is hanged as a spy by American forces.
1789
George Washington sends the proposed Constitutional amendments (The United States Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.
1835
The Texas Revolution begins with the Battle of Gonzales: Mexican soldiers attempt to disarm the people of Gonzales, Texas, but encounter stiff resistance from a hastily assembled militia.
1919
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffers a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed.
1928
The “Prelature of the Holy Cross and the Work of God”, commonly known as Opus Dei, is founded by Saint Josemaría Escrivá.
1937
Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo orders the execution of the Haitian population living within the borderlands; approximately 20,000 are killed over the next five days.
1944
World War II: German troops end the Warsaw Uprising.
1950
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz is first published
2001
NATO backs U.S. military strikes following 9/11.

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If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. -Samuel Adams, revolutionary

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Removing immigrants from the labor force reduces the domestic market for goods and services. Immigrants are not only workers, but also consumers. As immigrants are expelled and the labor supply shrinks, economic growth diminishes and employers have fewer opportunities to invest in their businesses. Which is to say a nation's promary asset is its people

***

The United States already has a smaller average class size than a number of countries whose educational achievements are higher. Japan, for example, averages 41 students per class, compared to 26 for the United States. In mathematics, where the performance gap is especially glaring, the average class size in Japan is 43, compared to 20 in the U.S. Within the United States, the ratio of pupils to teachers declined throughout the entire era from the 1960s to the 1980s, when test scores were also declining.

***

The U.S. has run annual trade deficits every year, without fail, starting in 1976 – that is, for 20 percent of the country’s existence. And yet the U.S. unemployment rate is today 4.1% – less than half its rate of 8.5% in 1975 (the last year the U.S. ran an annual trade surplus).


***

-Three people were injured in a shooting following an altercation outside George K. Cupples Stadium on the city's South Side, after a Westinghouse High School and University Prep game.

-Police found a “male” stabbed near the East Liberty bus station.

-Wilson and Metcalf both looked good in the Steelers' depressing loss last night.

***

NGOs in the Weeds

“Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Leading Scholars’ Association Says,” ran the headline in The Washington Post.
The BBC’s headline read: “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say.”

The World's Leading Experts? The organization? The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)

The Guardian quoted the president of the association, Melanie O’Brien, declaring that the resolution represented “a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide.” In another interview with ABC News Australia, O’Brien boasted that the resolution passed with nearly 90 percent support.

Salo Aizenberg, a board member of Honest Reporting and contributor to NGO Monitor, tested that proposition. After exploring the IAGS website, he found that he could become a member of the organization with just a $30 contribution. “This organization that purports to be a leading organization of scholars is open to anyone who is interested,” he told The Free Press. For thirty dollars.

After Aizenberg posted about his new membership to X, others joined in on the fun. Newly minted genocide scholars now include Emperor Palpatine, the villain of the Star Wars franchise; Adolf Hitler of Gaza City; and the favorite, “Mo Cookie,” who turns out to be the Cookie Monster wearing a green scarf with the Hamas logo. And the 90% support? It was 90% of a small portion of the group who bothered to answer.--from Plosker

This is silly. And people trying to use them as persuasive "experts" is silly. But a lot of silly stuff is dangerous. People dressed in KKK outfits are silly. Tariffs are silly. Government ownership of private businesses is silly.

But I surely dislike how manipulative people are rewarded by silliness. I hate when it is influential. And I despise it when it is insincere and tax-deductible.

Canaanites

On this day:

1122
Pope Calixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V agree to the Concordat of Worms to put an end to the Investiture Controversy, essentially a struggle between the church and the European ruling houses over who could appoint local religious leaders. The state controlling the church!
1409
Battle of Kherlen, the second significant victory over Ming China by the Mongols since 1368.
1459
Battle of Blore Heath, the first major battle of the English Wars of the Roses, is fought at Blore Heath in Staffordshire.
1641
The Merchant Royal, carrying a treasure worth over a billion US dollars, is lost at sea off Land’s End.

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.

***

Let us start with the obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it. --cooke

***

According to leaked documents released by Edward Snowden, British intelligence spied on Israeli diplomats and military officials in 2008 and 2009, warning that "the Israelis constitute a true threat to regional security, notably because of the country’s position on the Iran issue."

***

"During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened.

China also broke off meaningful arms control talks. You may think it is their right to play catch-up, and to be cynical of our motives, but that is what happened.

How well did China share timely information about Covid and cooperate to stop its initial spread?

Get the picture?"--cowen

***

Large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics.

***

Jaxson Dart could miss the rest of the season after tests showed that the New York Giants quarterback's knee injury is more severe than initially anticipated

***

The typical house cat kills somewhere between 50 and 139 animals a year.

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Two University of Mississippi students died this week and packaged kratom was found during the separate death investigations, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

***

Can we just agree that mendacity and egomania are simple facts of modern politics and our first job as citizens is to limit their impact, not look for a 'purer version '?

***

Canaanites

In the Bronze Age, between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, a diverse group of people called the Canaanites lived in the Middle East. Despite their culture and influence — one of the only golden calf idols discovered was found in the Canaan seaport of Ashkelon — they left behind little information about themselves. Other civilizations made records of them, such as the Greeks, Egyptians, and the authors of the Hebrew Bible. But, without Canaanite texts to cite, scholars view the ancient people as a bit of an enigma. The Hebrew Bible offers one explanation for the destiny of the Canaanites: annihilation. The Israelites, per Deuteronomy 20:16-18, were commanded to “utterly destroy” the cities of various tribes, including the Canaanites.
Some information has emerged from the petrous bone, a region of the skull behind the ear that's also the densest bone in the body. It protects DNA like a strongbox and has, in recent years, advanced the study of ancient DNA.
DNA was taken from the petrous bone of five Canaanite people who lived 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. Though the skeletal remains were buried in a hot and humid region along the Mediterranean, the scientists were still able to extract genetic material.  
They sequenced the Canaanite genome and compared it to genomes of modern people, including Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and others from around the world. The comparison revealed that 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of people in Lebanon came from the Canaanites. (The other 10 percent was of a Eurasian steppe population.)
There was more genetic continuity in Lebanon than in England.

Labor Day

On this day:

70
A Roman army under Titus occupies and plunders Jerusalem.
1191
Third Crusade: Battle of Arsuf – Richard I of England defeats Saladin at Arsuf.
1812
Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Borodino – Napoleon wins a Pyrrhic victory over the Russian army of Alexander I near the village of Borodino.
1864
American Civil War: Atlanta, Georgia, is evacuated on orders of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.
1940
World War II: The Blitz – Nazi Germany begins to rain bombs on London. This will be the first of 57 consecutive nights of bombing.
1942
Australian and US forces inflict a significant defeat upon the Japanese at the Battle of Milne Bay.
1977
The Torrijos-Carter Treaties between Panama and the United States on the status of the Panama Canal are signed. The United States agrees to transfer control of the canal to Panama at the end of the 20th century. The world still awaits an explanation of the thinking here.
1978
While walking across Waterloo Bridge in London, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov is assassinated by Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Giullino by means of a ricin pellet fired from a specially-designed umbrella. In many cultures, the advancement of homicide underlies the major technology.
1996
American Hip-Hop star Tupac Shakur is fatally shot four times on the Las Vegas strip after leaving the Tyson-Seldon boxing match. Mr. Shakur was the author of the famous line, "We're afraid of the same people you white people are."
2008
The US Government takes control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

***

"In fact, it would be more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn’t slavery but the effort to abolish it. Slavery is among the oldest and most ubiquitous of all human institutions; as the Times series’ title indicates, American slavery predated the American Revolution by a century and a half. What’s unique about America is that it alone announced at birth the principle that all men are created equal—and that its people have struggled to realize that principle since then. As a result of their efforts, the Constitution today has much more to do with what happened in 1865 than in 1776, let alone 1619. Nothing could be more worthwhile than learning slavery’s history, and remembering its victims and vanquishers. But to claim that America’s essence is white supremacy is to swallow slavery’s fatal lie."--Timothy Sandefur

1619 was a historical incident. 1776 was the revolutionary idea, unfinished until 1865. Slavery is bad enough. Making slavery more than that is grotesque.

***

Karaoke Nation: Just like everyone thinks they can sing, so many think they can govern. But only a special breed grabs the mic.

***

Explosions at an Italian shell factory. Jammed signals around the Baltic Sea. Drones and munitions found at a German airport. Disruptions in transportation, trade, and commerce.

With diminishing gains on the battlefield of an increasingly unpopular war, Moscow has turned its attention towards soft targets in Europe. With the diminishing returns of strikes on military and civilian targets in Ukraine, the Russian military and security services are leveraging the openness of European democracies to attack civilian and military targets through sabotage operations.

Germany and other large Western European countries may join the central and eastern European members of NATO and the EU in providing intelligence resources and enabling active measures against the Russian war machine. In lieu of a risk-averse policy of de-escalation and appeasement, we could see the start of a tit-for-tat campaign by the Europeans against Russian assets.--Vindman


***

Amy Acton, Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, was the target of an attack on Sunday during a campaign stop at the Canfield Fair, campaign officials said.

***

Cruz against lefties has a 40.6% strikeout rate.

***

Labor Day


A Labor Day parable I stole off a blog:

A guy looked at my Porsche the other day and said I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car costs. I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components that went into it, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people in Decatur IL, at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore. It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families. BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.

*

Another thought on labor for Labor Day.

"Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
….
We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world."--McCloskey

Sunday/A Life and a Death

On this day:

3114 BC
According to the proleptic Julian calendar, the current era in the Maya Long Count Calendar started.
1522
The Victoria, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, returns to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world.
1620
The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.
1847
Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts.
1901
Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
1949
A former sharpshooter in World War II, Howard Unruh kills 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, with a souvenir Luger to become the first U.S. single-episode mass murderer.
1966
In Cape Town, South Africa, the architect of Apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, is stabbed to death during a parliamentary meeting.
1972
Munich Massacre: 9 Israel athletes taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games by the Palestinian “Black September” terrorist group died (as did a German policeman) at the hands of the kidnappers during a failed rescue attempt. 2 other Israeli athletes are slain in the initial attack the previous day.
1991
The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
1997
Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, takes place in London. Over a million people lined the streets, and 2.5 billion watched around the world on television.

***

"Tactical nukes are a gateway drug to Armageddon"--Andreas Kluth

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Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.--Swift

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Everyone who has a job, even at minimum wage, is in the top 15 percent of the world's income distribution.

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Bartiromo made $70 million in her tenure at Fox News, according to court documents

***

In the gambling-ridden sports world, the Michigan game ending certainly did nothing for the game's credibility.

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No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.
The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into orbit.

***

 
Sunday/A Life and a Death

The author, Wendell Berry, has died. His writings are part of an American rural tradition that emphasizes humanity's foundational elements: nature, the land, family, and religion. American man without car chases. What follows is a very tender eulogy from a local writer.

"We have been told that we live in a time after democracy, that liberalism has failed, the American constitutional order is lost, and all that remains is picking a side in an agonistic struggle between factions that lust after the power to govern our discordant nation. The philosopher that many, particularly on the right, turn to in order to anchor their account of our decline is the late 19th-century German Friedrich Nietzsche.

But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed, all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life of a community. His many essays and lectures were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words, the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well known to committed democrats like Emerson.

But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of knowledge.”

That writer, of course, is the late Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of Mr. Berry’s life.

Among the many words that Berry wrote, these words that close his New York Times obituary strike me as summarizing his work perfectly: “You know, if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left,” he said in 2005. These words place him in the tradition of Emerson, as well Emerson’s great friend and one of Berry’s great influences, Henry David Thoreau.

These words also put him at odds with more or less the entirety of contemporary American public life, virtually all of whom (including most Christians) have little interest in the Gospels, little memory of the Declaration, and little regard for the Constitution. If you doubt that Emerson was right to warn so frequently about the dangers of the herd, or that Thoreau was right to say that so many of our neighbors live lives of “quiet desperation,” I would suggest you are simply not paying attention.

That raises the question, of course, of how one can escape the mindless herds prowling about today. How can a person live in a way not marked by that haunting Thoreauvian phrase? Can we find genuine vitality as well as beauty and goodness within the confines of our life today? Berry showed us how, and he did so in two distinct ways.

The first was his contrariness. Among his most loved poems is “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer,” which you can hear the man himself read in this recording done with On Being many years ago.



Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.


The contrariness Berry endorses is not “the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” The contrariness, rather, is the acted-out recognition of the ways that conformity seduces us over time, nudging us into saying things we do not mean or do not believe and to repressing the thoughts we actually do believe. Berry’s contrary farmer cares more about saying what is true than he does appeasing the desires, prejudices, and conventions of others. This contrariness is also a form of neighborly love, offered in the hope that others who see the same but say nothing would be emboldened to speak.

Several of Berry’s greatest fictional creations exemplify this commitment—Jayber Crow, the barber and protagonist in the novel bearing his name, perhaps most of all. It is also the subject of another of his poems, perhaps my favorite of all his poems, called “Do Not Be Ashamed.” Several lines in particular are worth sharing:



Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.


If you would protect the light you have made in your life, Berry warns, then you must be contrary. You must refuse to say “I am ashamed” when the herd attempts to coerce you into doing so.

But there is a further commitment of Berry’s that is significant. Berry’s three greatest novels, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter are in one sense a trilogy considering the problem and challenge of marriage. Indeed, marriage is in many ways the dominant metaphor for all of Berry’s work, as some of his own essays suggest—most notably those found in Standing by Words as well as the title essay from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

In an interview with the filmmaker Laura Dunn, he says that



We all come from divorce now. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. … That’s the way the work has to go.


He says something similar near the end of Jayber Crow, his greatest novel in my opinion. Writing near the end of his life, Jayber reflects on what he thinks hell might be, and he says it is



where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart.


Jayber’s idea of hell, incidentally, sounds very like the agonistic world that the Nietzscheans mistake for reality. If we would be saved, we would do well to heed, instead, the examples of Emerson and Berry.

The answer to the rupture of divorce is the faithfulness of marriage, a way of life that radiates outward from the lovers into fidelity to the world—the habits and virtues taught within the form of marriage are one means by which we learn to keep faith more generally. We learn something of what it means to live for the good of our neighbor, or even the good of our home place, by the ways in which marriage forces us very directly and intimately to live for the good of another. In this, Berry and his wife of 69 years, Tanya Berry, became models which we might emulate. The point of contrariness is not mere negation; it is to accept the mantle of responsibility thrust upon each of us as a condition of our life in the world. The form of his marriage to Tanya is one of the chief ways that Mr. Berry learned this responsibility, I think—or at least that is what I am led to believe by his many poems addressed to Tanya. Consider this, for example,



... yet

You have taken me and quieted me.

You have been such light to me

That other women have been

Your shadows.


In “Do Not Be Ashamed” Berry speaks of the nameless “they,” which Emerson would think of as “the herd.” They go about shining a light in search of you so that they might find you and compel you toward their way. This external light is a light, as the poem says, that will squelch the light you have made yourself. But in “Marriage” the light offered by Tanya is a gift, not a means of control or coercion. The contrariness of the mad farmer ultimately exists to serve and enliven the marriage of the mad farmer. The demands of contrariness create the circumstances that bring about life, or at least that is how I read Berry.

My favorite scene in all his fiction comes near the end of A Place on Earth. It is an uneven novel, which Berry himself knew, given that he revised it after publication and released a new edition. But its high points are the highest points in all his fiction. One such point comes near the end when the town of Port William, loosely modeled after Port Royal, learns that World War II has ended and their boys will be returning home. The town converges on the lone street running through it to celebrate, and the local purveyor of the finest moonshine materializes with the fruit of his labor. Jayber Crow, Burley Coulter, and several others enjoy that fruit thoroughly. They take turns passing the bottle—Berry remarks elsewhere that the sound of moonshine poured from a jug sounds like “good good good”—and on each pass Jayber “greets” the bottle cordially. He then embarks on a half-drunk sermon, offered in response to the whiskey’s benediction, that I think contains much of Berry’s wisdom, for his own time and for ours:



For is not the abuse of the mortal the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?—for is it not upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their tracks?—and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?


Writing as his life came to an end, Jayber remembered the sound of that whiskey being poured from the bottle when he wrote,



I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say ‘good-good-good-good-good!’ like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith. But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.


Berry was a man of faith. He went through enough, as we all will, to kill him. But he lived in such a way that the sound of his life is doubtless contained in the sound I heard just now as I poured out a glass of his state’s finest export to toast the man’s life and work. And the light he made in his story not only preserved him from those who would demand his shame; it offered to us what Tanya gave to him, a light that drives all else into the shadows.


Rest in Peace, Mr. Berry, a citizen of Port William and a son of the commonwealth of Kentucky."

--Jake Meador in The Dispatch

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

A Decline of More Than Numbers

On this day:

3114 BC
According to the Lounsbury correlation, the start of the Maya calendar.
1521
Tenochtitlán (present day Mexico City) falls to conquistador Hernán Cortés.
1792
King Louis XVI of France is formally arrested by the National Tribunal, and declared an enemy of the people.
1831
Nat Turner sees a solar eclipse, which he believes is a sign from God. Eight days later he and 70 other slaves kill approximately 55 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.
1868
A massive earthquake near Arica, Peru, causes an estimated 25,000 casualties, and the subsequent tsunami causes considerable damage as far away as Hawaii and New Zealand.
1937
The Battle of Shanghai begins.
1942
Major General Eugene Reybold of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorizes the construction of facilities that would house the “Development of Substitute Materials” project, better known as the Manhattan Project.
1962
Representatives from the Russian Orthodox Church and the Holy See meet in Metz, France, and come to an agreement wherein the Russian church would send observers to the Second Vatican Council and in exchange, the Roman Catholic Church would refuse to condemn Communism.

***

Quotes from Mamdani’s top aide, Cea Weaver: ‘If you don't believe in the government's sacred right to seize property, it's over’, and ‘Impoverish the White middle class’.

Thinking is, apparently, harder than governing.

***

The Pittsburgh airport plans to replace two people movers with additional seating in the concourses.

***

A TikToker and Instagram user (whose account is now unavailable) claims that "On August 12, 2026, the world will lose gravity for 7 seconds. NASA knows. They're preparing but won't tell us why." The video has had almost 62,000 likes and has been shared 268,000 times on Instagram alone and is now creeping into feeds. Why this nonsense is preferred in the huge reservoir of internet nonsense is unknown.

***

Longtime NASA astronaut Mike Fincke is leaving NASA months after he lost the ability to speak for roughly 20 minutes aboard the International Space Station, an incident that forced a premature end to his and three crewmates' journey.
Fincke’s last day at the space agency is Wednesday, NASA said in a news release.

***

Forbes fired its top editor after discovering that he had accepted a seven-figure payment from a businessman whose company had a lucrative relationship with the magazine.

Randall Lane, Forbes’ chief content officer, received roughly $6 million from RJ Shook, the founder of Shook Research, a company that has worked with Forbes on the magazine’s rankings of the top financial advisers for a decade, according to a New York Times report.

***

A Decline of More Than Numbers

Humanity has never lived in a time of long-term secular population decline. There have been sudden demographic shocks, like the Black Death, but those were short-lived and came at times when the human population as a whole was much younger on average. To a degree we probably cannot even fathom, human civilization and human psychology are built upon notions of growth, youth, renewal, and hope. What would it mean to live in a shrinking world, where most people will have no direct connection to future generations? Where innovation and creativity, disproportionately supplied by younger people, are not only increasingly scarce but perhaps even seen as increasingly undesirable? Where the very notion of sacrificing for the future becomes obsolete? Unlike the economic consequences of demographic decline, these are some of the harder-to-quantify aspects of the problem that society, by and large, has not even begun to reckon with. But they might prove far more important, especially if it turns out that the techno-optimists are right about the role technology can play in the economy of the future. In short, we are on the precipice of arguably the most fundamental shift humanity has ever experienced. And right now, for the most part, we are going into that shift blind.--Jeremy Friedman

This might be the largest of the Left's many blind spots. Struggle is a condition of man. It has always been with us. But achievement has not. What Friedman is writing about here is not production or the financial balance of entitlement demands. It is even possible that AI will be able to meet those demands. What this population trend heralds is the gradual loss of struggle, the human fight to achieve and provide. The threat of scarcity and its liberating human efforts to overcome and succeed. Achievement. 

Shrinking effort and success. Narrowing dreams. And a disconnection of us from the future. It sounds like we'll be better fed and less sick, but it also sounds like a return to the emotional Dark Ages.

Socialism and Free Association

 On this day:

1099
First Crusade: 15,000 starving Christian soldiers march in a religious procession around Jerusalem as its Muslim defenders look on.

1497
Vasco da Gama sets sail on the first direct European voyage to India.
1709
Great Northern War: Battle of Poltava – Peter I of Russia defeats Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava thus effectively ending Sweden’s role as a major power in Europe.
1896
William Jennings Bryan delivers his Cross of Gold speech advocating bimetalism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
1947
Reports are broadcast that a UFO crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico.
1970
Richard Nixon delivers a special congressional message enunciating Native American Self-Determination as official US Indian policy, leading to the Indian Self-Determination Act.
2011
Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched in the final mission of the U.S. Space Shuttle program.

***

"To the BELOVED REPUBLIC under whose equal laws I am made the peer of any man, although denied political equality by my native land, I dedicate this book with an intensity of gratitude and admiration which the native-born citizen can neither feel nor understand."
Dedication to Andrew Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy (Scribner's, 1886)

***

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he believes the ceasefire and interim agreement to end the war with Iran are now “over” as the two sides traded strikes after Tehran was accused of attacking three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

***

What kind of people would advance or accept the idea of a man like Platner being a credible national leader?

***

New York State lawmakers recently rejected a bill that would have added “caste” to the state’s anti-discrimination code. Had it passed, it would have made New York the first state—following a failed attempt in California—to enshrine the Indian system of social hierarchy in its law, adding yet another category to the ever-growing list of DEI concerns.

The battle, however, is far from over. Thanks to activists pushing this latest identity category, Seattle has already added caste to its anti-discrimination law, and universities including Brandeis, UC Davis, Brown, Columbia, and the California State University system have added caste to their nondiscrimination policies.

***

From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.

Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%.

The Trumps cashed out $1.9 billion and are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes' calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.

***

Norway has a sovereign wealth fund known as Norway’s Oil Fund. By early 2026 it held assets worth more than $2 trillion, spread across roughly 7,200 companies, and stood as the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. Split a little over $2 trillion among 5.5 million citizens, and each notional share comes to roughly $385,000 on paper.

Is the government a good and unbiased investor?

***

A fascinating, admittedly soft, correlation from a large study: the closeness of people’s relationships with their own parents predicts almost nothing about how many children they want. The average family size of peers matters about twice as much as the respondent’s own number of siblings in childhood.

***

Socialism and Free Association

The drift towards tyranny is always with us; like gravity, there is always some man or idea spreading an attracting field. Energy is always necessary to prevent a people from being pulled into the tyrant's orbit.

Anne Applebaum, in Iron Curtain, details Stalin's dynastic efforts in Eastern Europe, first as a Nazi partner, then as an independent totalitarian contractor. It contains some interesting observations on tyranny as practiced by real experts, first Hitler, then Stalin. Hidden in it is some practical advice for free people.

She references the historian Stuart Finkel, who had the startling observation that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. When Lenin launched the New Economic Plan in the 1920s, Applebaum notes, the "systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated." Similarly, in Poland under the Nazis, Germany's war aims were not completely military."The object of the German occupation of Poland," she writes, "had been to destroy Polish civilization." After signing a pact to divide up the region between them, both Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September 1939. Under Hitler, much of the country's upper class was executed or sent to concentration camps. Stalin recognized a master when he saw one. The Soviets committed Nazi-style mass murders, most infamously the Katyń Forest massacre, which saw 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war executed. "The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies," Applebaum writes. At the end of the war, there was almost literally nothing left of Warsaw.

After the war, the Soviets in Poland continued this broad cultural warfare. They attacked anti-Nazi groups(!) and the Polish Boy Scouts, for example. Catholic Church groups were a high priority with their close-knit communities and their international connections. Some organizations were absorbed. The Polish Women's League, a group of earnest volunteers set up to feed refugees in train stations, was infiltrated by Soviet bureaucrats and turned into a mouthpiece for party dogma.

What Hitler and Stalin later did in Eastern Europe was not an attempt at a simple military victory. Both were attempting to destroy a people, to obliterate the social fabric, to deconstruct the very infrastructure that people used to live and work. Why? Because tyranny can be resisted by a people who see themselves as a people, as an entity. The nucleus of a "people" is hard to control. If you are looking for attempts to undermine a state, look for attacks on its socially shared beliefs.

The Left, which fuels the fire of homicidal rage through group identification and antagonism, fears the self-alignment of groups. This may be more than ironic. Recent studies connect the decline in births not to the lack of desire to have children but to the lack of social support groups.

It seems a country that cannot produce friendship will not produce much of anything else.

7/8/26

The Fourth

 On this day as well:

1054
A supernova is seen by Chinese, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri. For several months, it remains bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.
1187
The Crusades: Battle of Hattin – Saladin defeats Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem.
1754
French and Indian War: George Washington surrenders Fort Necessity to French Capt. Louis Coulon de Villiers.
1863
American Civil War: Siege of Vicksburg – Vicksburg, Mississippi surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant after 47 days of siege. 150 miles up the Mississippi River, a Confederate Army is repulsed at the Battle of Helena, Arkansas.
1863
The Army of Northern Virginia withdraws from the battlefield after its loss at the Battle of Gettysburg, signalling an end to the Southern invasion of the North.
1918
Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family (Julian calendar date).

1943
World War II: Beginning of the Battle of Kursk, the largest full-scale battle in history and the world’s largest tank battle at Prokhorovka village.
1976
Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all but four of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists
1997
NASA’s Pathfinder space probe lands on the surface of Mars.

***

Fourth of July


America had an exceptional revolution, one that did not attempt to define and deliver happiness, but one that set people free to define and pursue it as they please.--Will

*
Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος (law) would make them equal. --Arendt

*
The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

*
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.--Thacher

*
Jay Leno had a recurring skit where he asked questions to passers-by on the street--questions most people think are rather simple and obvious. He asked several people what the Fourth of July celebrated, when independence was declared, and from whom the country separated. Of course, the results were embarrassing to most of those interviewed. One was particularly interesting. A college instructor knew nothing about the Revolution at all, thought it occurred in the 1920s, and thought China might have been involved.

*
A recent survey found that 27% of the people questioned were unaware that the American Revolution was waged against the British.

*

Both former U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826–the day of the Jubilee–the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, in an extraordinary and eerie coincidence. Jefferson died shortly after noon at the age of 83 in Monticello, Virginia. Several hours later, Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the age of 90. According to newspaper reports, Adams’s last words were, “Jefferson still lives.”

Exactly five years later, on July 4, 1831, former U.S. President James Monroe died.

*

The Fourth

When I was a child in the '50s, the Fourth of July was a great event. The kids decorated their bikes, small local parades were held--every community had some commemoration, and the larger communities had fireworks. It was unlike other secular events like Thanksgiving, which were delightfully family-oriented; this was a commonly held social event. It was a birthday party. And it was heartfelt. Everyone felt that years ago, something of value had been accomplished, something special in the world created. There was a glow.

When Obama was first campaigning, he was asked about American Exceptionalism. (The phrase was de Tocqueville's, from Democracy in America, 1835: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.")

American exceptionalism is a description of how America developed, not what it was. I'm unsure de Tocqueville--or Europeans then and now thought it complementary. It was special. It was unique.

The phrase has been used since by those who saw America as a point of reference in man's search for freedom and liberty. (It was also used by Stalin as a slur, decrying America's self-held belief that it was somehow excluded from the Marxian class warfare generality.) Obama saw the question as a trap--it would not do to talk of "exceptionalism" when we want all people to be the same, all nations indistinguishable. So, he hedged and said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He, unlike those Americans of just a generation or two earlier, does not think that America is unique.

Unique. If that element is lost in this country, a lot has been lost. So, buy a small flag. Decorate your bike.

july 4, 2026

It Is Known, Khaleese

 

Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. --McKENZIE 

***

What is this $1.6 billion slush fund for? Is it to compensate people who were unjustly targeted by the Biden Regency and had to spend a fortune to defend themselves from the people who created the Trump Russian conspiracy and the 'Hunter Biden computer is Russian disinformation?' What exactly is the penalty for a government agency attacking in court people they simply don't like?

***

According to the Post, one of the San Diego shooters wrote in their 'manifesto,' that he " lamented being short, which he said caused him great pain and humiliation."

***

New York City’s $125 billion budget is larger than the $115 billion the entire state of Florida is expected to spend this year. New York City has 8.5 million people; the state of Florida has 23.6 million.

***

It Is Known, Khaleese

Critics this weekend point to investment patterns suggesting Trump is misusing his power to benefit from his own decisions. When he came to office, he said he would not take a salary, he built the ballroom with private money, and set aside his investment money in a private trust with management he could not influence. Is this a change? Is he now in control of his finances and betting on his own executive acts? Or is this charge just untrue?

It's reasonable to be cynical about government but, as Lily Tomlin said, it's hard to keep up. These people will take advantage of anything for influence or profit.
Regulators are seeking information from prediction-market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket over wagers tied to political events and military operations. Such bets pose a challenge for authorities because insider-trading laws weren’t designed for people who wager on the outcome of legislation, political races, and even U.S. military action.

Remember, these people have inside information, i.e. they are the insiders making these decisions.

Enter the innuendo. Is it possible that the administration has had the time to be as evil as is said? Trump is still said to be a Russian agent. There has been no reason to believe that, aside from the suggestion of a paid political opponent. Pedophile? That seems to be a specific charge with real definitions, but, again, no charges. 

Fascism. Fascism has a definition; does Trump qualify? Are these people confusing Fascism with authoritarianism? Trump is certainly that, but is he worse than, say, FDR? Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; was he a fascist?

All this has become political dogma, like the spiritual claims of religions, global warming, or aliens. The democracy functions on individual citizens' input. If its input is this flawed, democracy has little chance.

 

AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

 If you see your glass as half empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching. — Anon

***

The now-extinct Celtic language of Gaulish gave French its infamously tricky base-twenty counting system, where eighty is “quatre-vingts,” but only a few hundred Gaulish-origin words persist in modern Metropolitan French.
A now-extinct language of Frankish was a Germanic language, as English is. Though it contributed the names of France and the French people, it comprises only about 10% of modern French vocabulary.

***

“East of Eden” is a defining literary work, centered on California's Salinas Valley, and is deeply tied to the state’s geography and identity.

The seven-episode series, starring Florence Pugh, recently wrapped up filming in New Zealand.

***

Davis is hitting .151 through the first quarter of the season and just .177 with a meager .289 slugging percentage over his 218-game career.

***

AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

A multi-trillion-dollar bet on the development and acceleration of AI has become the biggest outlay of capital in the history of business.

That said, AI is becoming deeply unpopular. It has a 26% approval rating, which is below just about every institution, including ICE. Data centers are being protested around the country. Two people even decided to take a shot at Sam Altman’s house. The industry has spent $150 million in PAC money to purchase compliance from the two major parties, but that hasn’t stopped ordinary people from coming to their own conclusions.

More money is now being spent on data centers than on commercial office buildings.

The hyperscalers plan to spend $700 billion, including data centers, on AI infrastructure in 2026. A major sports arena costs a couple billion or so. So imagine 7 new sports stadiums being built in every one of the 50 states this year, and you have a sense of the scale of the investment. (From Yang)

So what's going on here? Are we to advance society and knowledge at the expense of jobs--or should we purposefully stop those advances for the unproven benefit of the few? Are technological changes really up for popular vote? If so, what about online betting and pornography? Are these workers just Luddites, impassioned and wrong? What are the ancillary, unimagined applications of the technology, good and bad? And the real, basic, and unspoken question: what are the non-economic implications of this technology?

What happens in an increasingly comfortable but workless culture? Will social disruption be caused by aesthetics? The barricades manned by librarians and psychologists?

And can this technology be ignored--or suppressed--when it might be commandeered by people of bad intent?

From the Annals of Willing Suspension of Disbelief

On this day:

1204
Constantinople falls to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, temporarily ending the Byzantine Empire.
1829
The British Parliament grants freedom of religion to Roman Catholics.
1861
American Civil War: Fort Sumter surrenders to Confederate forces.
1873
The Colfax Massacre takes place.
1941
Pact of neutrality between the USSR and Japan is signed.
1943
World War II: The discovery of a mass grave of Polish prisoners of war executed by Soviet forces in the Katyń Forest Massacre is announced, causing a diplomatic rift between the Polish government in exile in London from the Soviet Union, which denies responsibility. The Nazis were shocked!
1970
An oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 explodes, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to the spacecraft while en route to the Moon.

***

"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."--Frank Borman (ex-Eastern CEO)

***

The Colfax massacre, sometimes referred to as the Colfax riot, occurred on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, the parish seat of Grant Parish. An estimated 62–153 black men were murdered while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan

***

Estimates of the number of Polish citizens executed at three mass murder sites in the spring of 1940 range from some 14,540 to 21,857 to 28,000. Most of those killed were reserve officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Polish September Campaign, but the dead also included many civilians who had been arrested for being "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners, and officials."

Between 250,000 and 454,700 Polish soldiers had become prisoners and were interned by the Soviets, following their invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939, three weeks after Germany and the Soviet Union had signed the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This was a little over two weeks after the initial invasion of Poland by Germany, on September 1, 1939.

***

Spanish Prime Minister's wife charged with corruption. Sometimes the high road is short.

***

From the Annals of Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Life is full of surprises and contradictions. Some are enlightening. Some are unsettling. Public politics is beginning to be more under the heading of "Diagnosis." Examples:

-Iran, disarmed, defeated, and humiliated, continues to posture as a tough guy. Are they trying to fulfill their martyrdom? Their's may be desired, but their citizens' may not be. Is this an Eastern example of the government enforcing a 'greater purpose' on its citizen-victims?

-America's enemies shudder at the blockade as 'an act of war.' What did they think was going on here? And what about Iran's blockading itself? Are they declaring war on themselves? Sometimes martyrdom is harder to achieve than you would think. Is two beligerents blockading one belligerent a tie?

-Is threatening the Iranian culture a lot worse than Death to America?

-Iran's negotiations started with their demands that everything return to before the war and that the US pay reparations. What explains that mindset? In light of their recent self-blockade, are they negotiating with themselves?

-Mamdami just declared a socialist victory in NYC without having done anything yet. Does that remind you of Iran, or is it just politics?

-Why is it a logical step with a past heavily laden with accusations of sexual assault to run for governor? Do these politicians, like Mamdani's victory dance, live in a parallel universe?

Betting on America

On this day:

1830
The Book of Mormon is published in Palmyra, New York.
1917
World War I: First Battle of Gaza – British troops are halted after 17,000 Turks block their advance.
1971
East Pakistan declares its independence from Pakistan to form People’s Republic of Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Liberation War begins.
1975
The Biological Weapons Convention comes into force.
1997
Thirty-nine bodies are found in the Heaven’s Gate cult suicides.
1998
Oued Bouaicha massacre in Algeria: 52 people are killed with axes and knives, 32 of them babies under the age of 2.

***

"The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form."--Munger

***

OpenAI plans to build “an autonomous AI research intern”—a system that can take on a small number of specific research problems by itself—by September.

***

An interesting internet question: How does Ghostwriting fit with AI writing?

***

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use. Signed April 10, 1971, it became effective March 26, 1975.
Russia opened its Biopreparat bioweapons development program the following year.
Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the BWC lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation.

A fantasy. A simple collection of actors going to great dinners, drinking great wines, with conferences disguised as cooperation, debate disguised as principle, and timelines disguised as progress.  

Like Heinlin.

***

In a similar vein, Trump continues to report on negotiations with people who deny they are negotiating with him. Would they be like Harvey, the invisible rabbit? Or would Harvey be Trump?

***

Betting on America

Freedom, like free verse, requires leeway.

But there must be some deference paid to the system that permits that freedom, some compromise with freedom to allow the health of the social fabric permitting freedom to flourish. Freedom cannot feed off its nourishing parent until it is a lifeless husk. There are no beach monitors. There are not enough police patrols to guard every traffic light.

Freedom must restrain itself.

--On Monday, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike — with no public news to explain it — roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants.

--On the Friday before the war began, an unusual surge of more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets predicting a U.S. strike on Iran by the next day, according to a New York Times analysis.

--On Jan. 2, a trader turned roughly $32,000 into more than $400,000 by betting on the capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro before it was announced the next morning.

--Last April, a surge of bullish stock trades appeared minutes before Trump announced a dramatic 90-day pause on the "Liberation Day" tariffs that were roiling the market.

Shameless? The death of shame? The question is not who is an unpatriotic crook; the question is who is not?

Freedom has limits. In a successful free culture, those limits must be mutually agreed upon and self-imposed. But if those limits are ignored and abused, someone will impose them.

The cops will move in on the beach party. Some forms of poetry will be banned.

Civility

On this day:

37
The Roman Senate annuls Tiberius’s will and proclaims Caligula emperor.
235
Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother Julia Mamaea are murdered by legionaries near Moguntiacum (modern Mainz). The Severan dynasty ends.
1229
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor declares himself King of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade.
1241
Mongols overwhelm Polish armies in Kraków in the Battle of Chmielnik and plunder the city.
1314
Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake.
1834
Six farm labourers from Tolpuddle, Dorset, England are sentenced to be transported to Australia for forming a trade union.
1871
Declaration of the Paris Commune; President of the French Republic, Adolphe Thiers, orders evacuation of Paris.
1915
World War I: Massive naval attack in Battle of Gallipoli. Three battleships are sunk during a failed British and French naval attack on the Dardanelles.
1922
In India, Mohandas Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience. He would serve only 2 years.

1942
The War Relocation Authority is established in the United States to take Japanese Americans into custody.
1962
The Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War of Independence, which began in 1954.
1965
Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space.
1968
Gold standard: The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.
1990
In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings, collectively worth around $300 million, are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

***

What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.--Sowell

***

We are asked to suffer at TSA by politicians for a greater cause they cannot articulate. When will they ask us for the sacrifices necessary to offset the problems of the national debt they created?

***

This is an ad for AI DJs. If this is true, it is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reR71FQExxo

***

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday. He wrote about his wife in his resignation letter. She was an NSA linguist killed in Syria.

On Jan. 16, 2019, Chief Kent was meeting with a source at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, when a suicide bomber killed her and three other Americans.

Chief Kent was posthumously promoted to senior chief.

“She should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there,” Mr. Kent said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. “And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts.”

In his resignation letter, Mr. Kent cited what he said was Israel’s influence over the Trump administration’s policies.

***

From an article on Cesar Chavez:
"Insiders hinted the explosive allegations — the details of which have yet to be released — had been been a long time coming."

***

Your government at work.

On this day in 1937, a massive explosion caused the steel-framed school building in New London, in Rusk County, to collapse, killing a reported 298 people. It was the worst school disaster in United States history.
Of the 500 students in the building, only about 130 escaped serious injury. The explosion, which was heard four miles away, occurred when a manual-arts teacher turned on a sanding machine and inadvertently ignited a mixture of gas and air.
Three days after the explosion, inquiries were held to determine the cause of the disaster. Investigators learned that in January 1937, to save gas expenses of $300 a month, the school board and superintendent had authorized plumbers to tap a residue gas line of H. L. Hunt's Parade Gasoline Company. Apparently, gas had escaped from a faulty connection and accumulated beneath the building.


***

Civility

Imagine you patronize a local grocery where you notice the butcher regularly puts a finger on the scale. He distorts your purchase. And your relationship.

Trade is more than an exchange of goods. It goes beyond social conviviality. It creates — and is the result of — trust. It makes fair exchange possible, which ordinarily entails the risk of loss. That trust is built and reinforced over time, trade after trade, so that basic principles of fairness under mutually agreed-upon rules become assumed and expected. They don't have to be negotiated and renegotiated in an atmosphere of suspicion. A good relationship has developed through predictable honesty, and the trade is mutually beneficial. The trade is shared. And that fairness spreads.

Trade is not just civilized, it is civilizing.

Now, apply these observations to tariffs.....

The Other 51%

On this day:
597 BC
Babylonians captured Jerusalem, replaced Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king.
37
Caligula became Roman Emperor after the death of his great uncle, Tiberius.
1244
Over 200 Cathars are burned after the Fall of Montségur
1521
Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines.

1621

Samoset, a Mohegan, visited the settlers of Plymouth Colony and greets them, “Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset.”

1861
Edward Clark became Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston, who has been evicted from the office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.
1865
American Civil War: The Battle of Averasborough began as Confederate forces suffer irreplaceable casualties in the final months of the war.
1912
Lawrence Oates, an ill member of Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition, left the tent to die, saying: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
1935
Adolf Hitler ordered Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.
1945
Ninety percent of Würzburg, Germany is destroyed in only 20 minutes by British bombers. 5,000 are killed.
1945
World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima ended, but small pockets of Japanese resistance persisted.
1968
Vietnam War: In the My Lai massacre, between 350 and 500 Vietnamese villagers (men, women, and children) are killed by American troops.
1988
Halabja poison gas attack: The Kurdish town of Halabjah in Iraq is attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents on the orders of Saddam Hussein, killing 5000 people and injuring about 10000 people.
1995
Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment is officially ratified in 1865.

***

"The point to remember is that what the government gives, it must first take away."--John S. Coleman, address to the Detroit Chamber of Commerce

***

After Columbus, the English came late to settle America with their successful colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. But traders and explorers sailed the coast. In 1524, the Florentine seaman and explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano mapped the entire eastern seaboard of North America and provided the first map of the region later known as New England.
The Mayflower landed off the coast of modern-day Massachusetts in November 1620. They were supposed to have landed in Virginia and were unprepared for the harsh New England winter, and with so many of them sick, building the settlement progressed slowly.
Samoset was the Abenaki Native American who first approached the English settlers of Plymouth Colony in friendship, introducing them to natives Squanto and Massasoit,   who would help save and sustain the colony.

***

Is capitalism failing most Americans? Median hourly wages (for men and women), annual earnings (for men and women), and family and household incomes are at all-time highs.

***

Cuba looks to be waking up. The Americans never forgave them for the Missile Crisis. Israel is devastating Lebanon with cluster bombs. Russia is getting resistance in the southeast.

Of 16,000 strikes in Iran, 9,000 have been Israeli.

***

The Other 51%

From the swamps to the savannah to the modern world, competition has driven advances, with its failures. The creation of a sense of place and its defense, first as individuals, then gangs, then clans, then larger. The common thread has been war, on some scale.

Reading about this Darwinism applied genetically, one usually thinks of males either in combat or in combat's more subtle forms of integrity, place, and achievement.

The evolution of males from hunter/defender to farmer, then corporate--trying to establish himself and his future with periodic forays into combat--might be understandable as a sliding analog development, as physical Darwinism becomes more social. These thoughts and images always seem to be one-sided, male-dominated generalizations. But what about women? It always seems as if the contributor of 50% of the genetic future is just along for the combative ride. 

Does the female bring the same edgy competition to the selective process and the future? What is her competitive advantage on the savannah, and how is it recognized, encouraged, and advanced? 

And when she arrives in the modern world of glass and towers, will the same male rewards of success, power, and influence that he brought from the savannah reward her? Does her law degree tickle some atavistic site in her analog slide into modernity?

Or has she always taken independent, unsupported steps into each new future? Has she always been a wide-eyed captive in every new world?