Spiting Your Face in New York

 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 morally superior to self-indulgence with borrowed money?

***

Is the SPLC a Reichstag Fire organization funded with tax-deductible contributions for the purpose of fighting political opponents through de-banking, government defunding, and prejudice?

***

Let me in out of the rain, dude, or I'll kill you?

***

The Platner nomination must mean something.

***

Spiting Your Face in New York

Trump was on the way to Game 3 of the NBA Championship, with the executive order in his pocket. He was excited. The President can't be above everything. After all, the Knicks hadn't won a championship in over 40 years. And the Spurs had won 5 in the last 25. Talk about inequality!!!

Of course, the Constitution doesn't mention the NBA; that gave him some leeway--if it's a living document and all. And the success of the Spurs and the failures of the Knicks is worth something--maybe a reparations argument. 

New Yorkers had suffered some tough times, and with goofy Mamdani, more were coming; they needed a win. He stepped out of the limo.

Later that night, in an interview with FOX News, a Trump spiritual advisor explained, "Yeah, he was gonna give the Knicks 10 points by executive order, but when the fans booed him, he got pissed and bagged it."

With the final score Spurs 115--Knicks 111, those ten points would have made all the difference. 

Nonsense in Education

SpaceX's newest version of its massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is scheduled to launch its critical test flight today, Friday, May 22, at 6:30 p.m. EDT from Starbase, Texas.

***

Health officials are furious at the U.S. for leaving WHO. They hold that act definitive in the emergence of the new Ebola episode--almost as if there were no other responsible nations in the world.

***

Colbert's exit is being framed as if Trump caused it.

***

"The Nakba" is the phrase Palestinians use to describe their displacement during the war of 1948. "Nakba” itself literally means “disaster,” and was coined by a Syrian professor who used it to describe not the Jews’ attempt at self-defense, but the sheer and gross stupidity of virtually all Arab states in waging war against Israel — and then losing badly, despite overwhelming numeric advantages.

***

Nonsense in Education

The DOE in NY is responsible for just 844,400 students, a huge drop from the 1.1 million as recently as 2012.

More surprising. NYC pays over $44,000 per student per year to "educate" them. Yet with staggering costs for fewer students, performance scores remain unchanged, at an estimated 30% to 40% of the expected achievement level.

Increased costs without increased benefits has become a virtual slogan of modern American government.

How can a democracy, which depends upon at least a passing knowledge of the world and its risks, survive when only 30% of its young people can read normally? 

Who benefits from this mess? 

One guess.

In this clearly disastrous system, the system itself is trying to decrease teacher work requirements.

NY education Chancellor Kamar Samuels warned that it’ll be “very difficult” for the city to meet the mandate of no more than 20-25 students per class, depending on grade level.

Compliance now stands at 64%, he says, but the city won’t even hit the 80% mark by September.

(In fairness, the chancellor surprisingly questioned the “hold harmless” policy, which requires giving every school at least as much funding as the year before, even when its enrollment keeps plummeting. Questioned, but did not change.)

A full 29% of the city’s budget, an astounding $39 billion, goes to a school system where enrollment is down, truancy is up, and achievement is inferior, but stagnant, while its major preoccupation seems to be decreasing teacher workload.

Those are not pigeons circling, waiting to roost; they are vultures.

 

Vigilangione, Continued

 

Joyce taught English at Berlitz schools in Pula and Trieste, and is supposed to have known up to thirteen different languages.

***


Vigilangione, Continued

Order is restrictive; when does it become oppressive? It certainly is convenient. If half the people literate in English wrote from right to left, we would have no fewer literate people, but they would not be comprehensible to one another. If half of Americans decided it was right to drive on the left side of the road, car travel would stop, the car would become useless, and its convenience would be replaced. What would happen to chess if activists tried to broaden its appeal by straightening out and simplifying the knight's move?

Mormon polygamy was seen in the nineteenth century as a threat to the U.S. moral structure and was fought, legislated against, and eventually bullied away with very little legal justification. In Europe, polygamy has become a significant socio-economic problem for the growing nurturing state as dependents logrithmically outstrip underpinning arithmetical working support.

The values of the West are increasingly impractical in the modern, expanding world. In America, the values of equality and freedom have become a threat to the stability of the culture. The Americans suffer domestic disruption by people who oppose the very laws that protect their outrage, even to the point of organized street opposition to legitimate law enforcement agencies. The British now have hate-speech laws that rival any communist country. Sitting in judgment of your fellow citizens has become very disruptive, even if you're right. And Americans are telling themselves that by taking products without paying—a behavior they call "microlooting' known to the rest of us as "stealing"—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.

Is this a trend percolating up or seeping down? What did the Americans do in Venezuela? They declared the country an outlaw — as they did with the Barbary states — and preemptively invaded it. The danger is that, in a larger view, Venezuela deserved it. American behavior in Iran is more illustrative. Iran is certainly a danger to the civilized world, and a nuclear weapon in its hands, according to its own philosophy and statements, would result in economic disruption and nuclear destruction to friends and enemies alike. That said, there is no obvious legal or moral reason Western nations should be able to control Iran's internal affairs simply because they fear the implications of its national ambitions. Nonetheless, the Americans and Israel preemptively destroyed most of Iran's military and scientific infrastructure.

Again, this was all in a good cause. The world's nonreaction even implied its tacit approval. The Americans want only stability and stable commerce. But is their action consistent with their values? Does the threat justify their extraordinary means? And, worse, what would have happened had the Americans not resorted to those extraordinary means?

So Mangioni, whoever shot Kirk, whoever attacked the Press Dinner, the gerrymanderer, Trump himself--all place their personal motives aside and, like the sin eater of ancient times, sacrifice themselves for what each knows is the greater good.

"Like Nobody's Ever Seen Before"

 

"Like Nobody's Ever Seen Before"

I apparently overestimated the importance of Trump's weekend tweet on Iran. 

I believe words matter. Communication is the essence of socialization, of the bonding of individuals, and the escape from isolation. Words are the refinement of signals, planned, considered, and constructed. Words' great refinement develops social baselines, culture, and even art. The respect for words and language is a bulwark against the culture of mendacity.

And there is the difficult and provocative relationship between communication and the conceptualization behind it. 

I thought Trump's tweet--regarding a very important topic--was a coarse, meaningless outburst, little more than a snarl in the underbrush. It did not lower the bar; it removed it. In a leader's communication, he also defines the community he represents. 

We are worth more than a growl between rounds.

But apparently, most disagree. "Sticks and stones," you know.

Maybe we can find definition, expression, and safety in the people of Artemis 11.

Tipping Point

 

Tipping Point

This quote was Trump's Easter Day message to Iran, perhaps to the American people. His messages are usually contorted, often created to bolster his image (which is always under attack), counter the popular press, (which runs on the Opposition's bias), and to avenge himself upon the forces which historically have tried to undermine him with what must be described as calumny. All that and Zitos's brilliant description, "His enemies take him literally but not seriously, his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

That is to say, we must take him in context.

We must approach our leaders carefully. It's a tough job. Often, they are chosen for reasons beyond their reach. Sometimes, the democracy offers options that have nothing to do with the democratic process and are entirely the result of small-minded party politics and ambition.

This is not an excuse; it is a description of our long-standing problem: we are real people living with real-world problems, who have created a revolutionary political vision, but are being ruled by politicians who live in a self-gratifying political world of symbolism and fantasy.

Take Iran. The country is an ancient, influential, and coherent people, currently ruled by a theocracy with an apocalyptic vision of confrontation and destruction. They are situated on an energy chokepoint. Over the years, Iran's powerful opponents, fearful of that chokepoint, have avoided confrontation and, occasionally, have actually supported the regime's military advancement financially. Kicking the can down the road...to what? A religious conversion? An emerging fear?

But angry martyrs are not afraid. This direction leads toward inevitable confrontation. The question is, confrontation under what circumstances? Now, their military gone, Iran defaults to their basic strength, the chokepoint. Maximum damage with tiny resources. The true terrorist advantage.

We have a debt of $38 trillion. This is because we spend more than we create. It is not from our incredible graft or immigrants. Those are serious, different problems. We spend too much. That will not go on forever, despite how our politicians act.

These problems, Iran, and debt — and many others —will not go away. They will be resolved. Or they will resolve themselves. The question is how. And every day of delay makes the resolution less controllable.

I do not envy Trump, but he did choose this. And his opponents, whose interest in America's success is only coincidental, will offer no help. His effort to grapple with these problems is admirable. But he is not. There is no reason, if you show the strength to confront these evolving crises, to cry out and tear your clothes. This is a proud country, and it should be. Having its leader weep like Europe is demeaning and spiritless. Man up. Be an example for the nation. Even Lincoln, huge as he was, never allowed himself to eclipse the nation or the cause he was fighting for.

“The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!”

Sineater

On this day:

1046
Naser Khosrow begins the seven-year Middle Eastern journey which he will later describe in his book Safarnama.
1616
Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is banned by the catholic chuch
1770
Boston Massacre: Five Americans, including Crispus Attucks, and a boy, are killed by British troops in an event that would contribute to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (also known as the American War of Independence) five years later. At a subsequent trial the soldiers are defended by John Adams.
1836
Samuel Colt makes the first production-model revolver, the .34-caliber.
1933
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party receives 43.9% at the Reichstag elections. This later allows the Nazis to pass the Enabling Act and establish a dictatorship.
1940
Members of Soviet politburo sign an order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 Polish POWs, known also as the Katyn massacre.

***

The Cassidy Report diagnosed FDA as a bottleneck to innovation.

***

This year there will be over 9 billion--BILLION--trips from China.

***

Korea imports nearly all its fossil fuels, including oil and natural gas, all of it brought in by tanker. About 70% of Korea’s oil imports and up to 30% of liquified natural gas come from the Middle East.

***

Amanda Askell has been hired by Anthropic to teach Claude, its chatbot, the sense of right and wrong.

***

Sineater

The last few years have been a concentration of questions and problems that have bobbed on the surface of America's stormy sea of self-definition and interpersonal governance. Obama's benign, enept power accumulation, the palace overthrow of the Biden Regency, and, now, this. Trump is a reaction to the last administrations, which have left us with huge problems whose only solutions seem to be traditionally unmanageable. Trump is bringing solutions outside the history of constitutional constraint.

Trump is philosophy-free, a casual utilitarian. He solves problems by decree. Wry and without philosophical roots, he is a difficult politician to pin down. He adopts as his justifications the bumper-sticker declarations of previous Leftist policies: patriotism, 'working families', and 'the children.'

Iran has been killing Americans for 40 years as national policy. We have been ignoring this as our own policy— and, in Obama's time, paid them off, like nuclear Barbary pirates.

The Latin American countries have been infiltrating drug damage and human trafficking into the country as routinely as interstate commerce.

The Biden Regency became the poster child for paralyzed neglect with their border non-policy.

We are now bombing Iran into oblivion, sinking mysterious boats in the Caribbean, stalking the streets for dark-complected men with accents.

Illegal immigration has dropped. Drug importation is down. Iran is gasping. Military success seems to justify the adventure.

The previous politicians created a vacuum. Trump is filling it, by hook or by crook. 

This looks, horribly, as if many Americans believe that their well-being cannot be managed lawfully in the modern world through Constitutional limits.

Worrying/AI from the Workbench

On this day:

202 BC
The coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu of Han takes place, initiating four centuries of the Han Dynasty’s rule over China
1784
John Wesley charters the Methodist Church.
1900
The Second Boer War: The 118-day “Siege of Ladysmith” is lifted.
1922
The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
1939
The erroneous word “dord” is discovered in the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation.

1947
228 Incident: In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of 30,000 civilian lives.
1953
James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April’s Nature (pub. April 2).
1959 

Discoverer 1, an American spy satellite that is the first object to achieve a polar orbit, is launched.
1993
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.
1997
GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.

***

‘Never trust someone who is unkind to those who can do nothing for him.’--Goethe

***

America has stepped into another's property to kill a mad dog threatening the neighborhood. Better for the world, they say. Now, to protect the world from global warming, would it be right for the Chinese to shield the world from the sun's rays by seeding the atmosphere with reflecting material, risking global cooling?

***

The New York office of the FBI was hacked several years ago, and Epstein information was stolen.

***

The Clintons are not sure Epstein killed himself.

***

President Trump said the federal government will stop working with the AI company Anthropic, acting on a deadline for Anthropic to allow the military to use its models in all lawful use cases, a concession the company has refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said yesterday. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump and administration officials have attacked Anthropic for being too “woke,” taking exception to its push for AI regulations and links to big Democratic donors. Meanwhile, federal agencies have raised concerns about the safety and reliability of Elon Musk’s xAI tools in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter.

Fascinating.

***

                              Worrying/AI from the Workbench

From a guy named Matt Shumer:

  I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

The last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech . . .

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

. . . [T]he gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone.

. . . Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

. . . Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

Procrustean Bed

On this Day:1547
Henry VIII dies. His nine year old son, Edward VI becomes King, and the first Protestant ruler of England.
1754
Horace Walpole coins the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann.
1909
United States troops leave Cuba with the exception of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base after being there since the Spanish-American War.
1977
The first day of the Great Lakes Blizzard of 1977, which severely affects and cripples much of Upstate New York, but Buffalo, NY, Syracuse, NY, Watertown, NY, and surrounding areas are most affected, each area accumulating close to 10 ft of snow on this one day
1986
Space Shuttle program: STS-51-L mission – Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart after liftoff killing all seven astronauts on board.

***

There is something obscene about people holding protest rallies in order to try to keep getting money that someone else has worked for.--Sowell

***

A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.

Options on things that don't exist in inaccessible places.

***

The shark cannot explain his hunger. Nor can the baby chick explain his urge to take the risk and fly.
Most forks in the road are not solved with decisions; they are of a shorter circuit. So ambition becomes passion; love becomes obsession.
It is this edge of transition, where assessment becomes generation, where comedy and tragedy are born, and we humans live.
Take a bunch of hot-blooded young men with righteous anger and automatic weapons that can stop an elephant and put them in conflict with a bunch of suburban moms with righteous anger who think that their moral passport is a library card, and you've got a real problem.

***

Procrustean Bed

With tariffs, U.S. farmers have higher costs for seeds and fertilizer, as well as new international competitors like Brazil. With a diminished competitive advantage and the loss of the Cold War’s cooperative infrastructure, U.S. farmers now face a more volatile global market. Indeed, Trump is now in Iowa as part of his Forever Campaign and went to a restaurant where he touted his new $12 billion farmer bailout to compensate.  

So a little tariff interference here requires a compensatory tweaking subsidy there. The $12 bilion subsidy must come from somewhere. Somehow. And a distorting, byzantine infrastructure grows.

We live in a world of growing suspicion that demands old lessons be retaught. Actions have consequences. We can only wait and see where the rewards of Minneapolis's experiment with selective law enforcement lead.

Because of a nail. 

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.

No Pawns

On this day:

1096
People’s Crusade: The Turkish army annihilates the People’s Army of the West.
1097
First Crusade: Crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto, and Raymond IV of Toulouse, begin the Siege of Antioch.
1774
First display of the word “Liberty” on a flag, raised by colonists in Taunton, Massachusetts in defiance of British rule in Colonial America
1805
Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Trafalgar: A British fleet led by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet off the coast of Spain under Admiral Villeneuve. It signals almost the end of French maritime power and leaves Britain’s navy unchallenged until the 20th century.
1854
Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses are sent to the Crimean War.
1861
American Civil War: Battle of Ball’s Bluff – Union forces under Colonel Edward Baker are defeated by Confederate troops in the second major battle of the war. Baker, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, is killed in the fighting.
1944
World War II: Battle of Aachen: The city of Aachen falls to American forces after three weeks of fighting, making it the first German city to fall to the Allies.
1944
World War II: The first kamikaze attack: A Japanese plane carrying a 200 kg bomb attacks HMAS Australia off Leyte Island, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf began.

***

"Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals, the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great creative scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned if at all." -Martin Gardner, mathematician and writer (21 Oct 1914-2010)

***

A funny aspect to 'No Kings:' The hope this would become an international leftist populist movement (without the violence, rape, and murder inherent to revolutionary philosophies) was limited by the fact that many of the target countries really had kings.

***

A common assessment of the New York mayoral election is that the popular candidate is dangerous to the city. But he is the expression of a sizable portion of the electorate; are they dangerous, too?

***

No Pawns

One of the axioms of democracy is that 'Freedom Isn't Free.' It also isn't one-sided. A simple look at the American Revolution, a pivotal point in the Western world, shows that getting rid of oppression wasn't the half of it. 

On July 2, 1776, the Congress voted to declare independence. Two days later, it ratified the text of the Declaration. Cornwallis surrendered his entire army at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. The American Revolution officially ended on September 3, 1783. Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, in New York City. It took years to hammer out a constitution that everyone could tolerate.

After the Lee Resolution proposed independence for the American colonies, the Second Continental Congress appointed three committees on June 11, 1776. One of the committees was tasked with determining what form the confederation of the colonies should take. This committee was composed of one representative from each colony. John Dickinson, a delegate from Delaware, was the principal writer.

The Dickinson Draft of the Articles of Confederation named the confederation "the United States of America." After considerable debate and revision, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation on November 15, 1777, establishing a "league of friendship" for the 13 sovereign and independent states. Each state retained "every Power...which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States. The Articles of Confederation also outlined a Congress with representation not based on population – each state would have one vote in Congress. Partisan bickering delayed final ratification until March 1, 1781.

A few years later, the young country was on the brink of collapse. With the states-nee-colonies retaining considerable authority, the central government had insufficient power to regulate commerce. Nor could it tax, set commercial policy, or support a war effort. Congress attempted to function with a depleted treasury, and paper money was flooding the country, creating extraordinary inflation.

The states were on the brink of economic disaster, and the central government had little power to settle quarrels between states. Disputes over territory, war pensions, taxation, and trade threatened to tear the country apart.

In May of 1787, the Constitutional Convention assembled in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. They shuttered the windows of the State House (Independence Hall) and swore secrecy so they could speak freely. By mid-June, the delegates had decided to completely redesign the government. After three hot, summer months of highly charged debate, the new Constitution was signed, which remains in effect today.

This is to say, after the stunning success of the Revolution, even the geniuses who engineered it could not create a lasting government structure. Their first effort resulted in unworkable chaos.

Which brings us to the charming street fair known as 'No Kings.' Free government is an oxymoron; it is very hard. Trying to create your own populist movement by opposing something that doesn't exist by dressing up in multicolored unicorn costumes and dancing is benign enough, but only if you truly understand that it is neither serious nor meaningful.

The real lesson of 'No Kings' is that the flamboyant opposition to something that doesn't exist is not even a first step to solving our life-threatening problems.

An NGO for You

On this day:
1449
Battle of Tumu Fortress – Mongolians capture the Chinese emperor.
1504
Michelangelo’s David is unveiled in Florence.
1923
Honda Point Disaster: nine US Navy destroyers run aground off the California coast. Seven are lost, and twenty-three sailors killed.
1935
US Senator from Louisiana, Huey Long, nicknamed “Kingfish”, is fatally shot in the Louisiana capitol building.
1941
World War II: Siege of Leningrad begins. German forces begin a siege against the Soviet Union’s second-largest city, Leningrad.
1943
World War II: United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly announces the Allied armistice with Italy.
1944
World War II: London is hit by a V2 rocket for the first time.
1945
Cold War: United States troops arrive to partition the southern part of Korea in response to Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the peninsula a month earlier.
1994
USAir Flight 427, on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport, suddenly crashes in clear weather killing all 132 aboard; resulting in the most extensive aviation investigation in world history and altering manufacturing practices in the industry.

***

Oliver Wendell Holmes once called Franklin Roosevelt “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”

***

In the bigger picture, the Pirates entered Friday playing 25-19 (.568) baseball since the All-Star break, tied for the fifth-best record in the league during that span. For reference, the only four teams ahead of Pittsburgh in that category – Milwaukee, Toronto, the Philadelphia Phillies and Boston – would all be in the playoffs if the season ended today. The same can be said for the New York Yankees, whose second-half record is still identical to Pittsburgh's after dueling Friday losses.

***

An innovative contest by a city in formerly communist East Germany to curb depopulation by offering a fortnight of free housing has stunned local officials with its success.

***

Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities. Well into the 20th century, SROs were the least expensive option on the housing market, providing a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars)
For some reason, politicians have since made boarding houses illegal by zoning that enforced single-family homes and by rules limiting occupancy, demanding every room have a private bathroom, outlawing shared kitchens, and requiring parking spaces for every resident.

***

Denmark is abolishing the VAT on books, in an effort to boost reading. It was formerly twenty-five percent, the highest in the world.

***

OpenAI is lending its generative artificial-intelligence tools to the creation of an animated movie, hoping to prove the technology can make films faster and cheaper than Hollywood.

***

On this day in 1941, German forces began their siege of Leningrad, a major industrial center and the USSR’s second-largest city. The German armies were later joined by Finnish forces that advanced against Leningrad down the Karelian Isthmus. The siege of Leningrad, also known as the 900-Day Siege, though it lasted a grueling 872 days, resulted in the deaths of some one million of the city’s civilians and Red Army defenders.

***

An NGO for You

“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.

On Tuesday evening, 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.

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 shallow people are rewarded by silliness. I hate when it is influential. And I despise when it is tax-deductible.

Defending the Tree House

On this day:

1661
Fall of Nicolas Fouquet: Louis XIV Superintendent of Finances is arrested in Nantes by D'Artagnan, captain of the king’s musketeers.
1666
Great Fire of London ends: 10,000 buildings including St. Paul’s Cathedral are destroyed, but only 6 people are known to have died.
1698
In an effort to Westernize his nobility, Tsar Peter I of Russia imposes a tax on beards for all men except the clergy and peasantry.
1774
First Continental Congress assembles in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1793
French Revolution the French National Convention initiates the Reign of Terror.
1877
Indian Wars: Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse is bayoneted by a United States soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson in Nebraska.
1914
World War I: First Battle of the Marne begins. Northeast of Paris, the French attack and defeat German forces who are advancing on the capital.1942
World War II: Japanese high command orders withdrawal at Milne Bay, first Japanese defeat in the Pacific War.
1945
Cold War: Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet Union embassy clerk, defects to Canada, exposing Soviet espionage in North America, signalling the beginning of the Cold War.
1945
Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese-American suspected of being wartime radio propagandist Tokyo Rose, is arrested in Yokohama.
1969
My Lai Massacre: U.S. Army Lt. William Calley is charged with six specifications of premeditated murder for the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai.
1972
Munich Massacre: A Palestinian terrorist group called “Black September” attack and take hostage 11 Israel athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. 2 die in the attack and 9 die the following day.
1975
Sacramento, California: Lynette Fromme attempts to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford.

1977
Voyager program: Voyager 1 is launched after a brief delay.
1984
STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery lands after its maiden voyage.

***

Happy Reign of Terror Day!

***

"Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality."--UATX president Carlos Carvalho

***

A recent editorial raised an interesting question about the attack on the three-man fast boat: What were the eight additional occupants of the fast boat up to?

***

“Most people are silent because they are afraid of retaliation if they criticize.”-- Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, highlighting what he sees as a dangerous suppression of economic debate at a critical juncture for the United States.

***

The government is still debating the merits of outlawing governmental insider trading.

***

French hospitals have been told to prepare for a potential armed conflict in Europe by next year.
In a letter, the Ministry of Health asked hospitals to prepare for a “major (military) engagement” by March 2026, warning that between 10,000 and 50,000 men could be expected in hospitals over a period of 10 to 180 days.

***

Defending the Tree House

Democracies are messy. The voters suffer from a narrow knowledge and interest, a dangerous combination for wielding an Enlightenment tool. But all the theoretical dangers of our current government — the debt, the conflation of equality and sameness, the loss of political culture — nothing showed the immediacy of the problem as clearly as the Senate hearing interviewing RFK Jr. yesterday.

Full disclosure: I have no idea why a guy with Kennedy's personal and medical history is running anything. Nor do I have any idea what his philosophy on immunization is. That said, a meeting that was purported to be a fact-finding effort on the direction of health policies and bureau personnel changes was nothing more than an Olympic-level posturing, shouting, and sound-bite seeking contest where absolutely nothing was explained or answered.

Instead, the nation was treated to infantile screaming, intense bickering over non-points, and general bad partisan behavior from people who are said to be leaders of the nation and have been in control of the country during the rise of the problems they are now complaining about. 

All this and a $36 trillion debt.

Mamdani and the Dreaded NGO

On this day:
565
St. Columba reports seeing a monster in Loch Ness, Scotland.
1485
The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet.
1642
Charles I calls the English Parliament traitors. The English Civil War begins.
1780
James Cook’s ship HMS Resolution returns to England (Cook having been killed on Hawaii during the voyage).
1831
Nat Turner’s slave rebellion commences just after midnight in Southampton, Virginia, leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who are killed in retaliation for the uprising.
1910
Korea is annexed by Japan with the signing of the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, beginning a period of Japanese rule of Korea that lasted until the end of World War II.
1922
Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army is shot dead during an Anti-Treaty ambush at Béal na mBláth, County Cork, during the Irish Civil War.
1963
American Joe Walker in an X-15 test plane reaches an altitude of 106 km.
1992
FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

***

The owner of OnlyFans was paid $701m (£523m) in dividends last year

***

I’ll not grant the proposition that an effective means of harming a rival nation is to engage in so-called “dumping.” If the Chinese really are selling goods to Americans at prices below the costs the Chinese incur to supply these goods, they are impoverishing themselves as they enrich us. --Bordeaux

***

Barring death, in 2029, the queen (consort) of Malaysia will be an Ulsterwoman. Her bio reads like she's the queen of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuanku_Zara_Salim

***

Mamdani and the Dreaded NGO

Zohran Mamdani first reached elected office in 2021. He defeated four-term Democratic incumbent state assemblywoman Aravella Simotas, a 46-year-old former lawyer, City Hall staffer, and Community Planning Board member who belongs to the century-old Greek immigrant community of northwestern Queens. Mamdani, then 29 years old, had been rejected from The Nation’s internship program after graduating from college. He then tried to launch a rap career and worked as a music coordinator on a Disney-produced film directed by his mother, Mira Nair. His sole qualification for public office was his relatively brief time as a housing counselor for Chhaya Community Development Corporation, an organization that works with low- and middle-income South Asian communities in Jackson Heights, in central Queens.

To dismiss this résumé as a multinational trust-fund kid’s laughable excuse for a career is also to misunderstand how power is now organized within Democratic Party verticals in major cities. Groups like Chhaya have become one of the primary instruments of public policy in New York, where social programs are often carried out through the public subsidy of nonprofit private-sector partners—groups with the freedom to be less accountable, more sectarian, and more ideological than government tends to be. In New York City, nonprofits received $20 billion in public money in 2021. Billion. In 2019, Chhaya got $595,000 in government grants, accounting for one-third of the organization’s revenue. This public largesse didn’t mean Mamdani was drawing a large salary at taxpayers’ expense—though, as the son of a renowned historian and a globally famous director, he didn’t really need one. According to the group’s 990 form from 2019, Chayya split $729,000 in nonexecutive compensation between 27 employees.

The public-private trough would prove even more helpful to Mamdani when he entered politics. In New York City, a taxpayer-funded matching program pays candidates eight dollars for every one dollar they raise from city residents whose donations are $250 or lower. This is twice what New York’s public match rate was in 1998, and a generous multiplier by national standards. Actually, by any standards. The taxpayer actually funds the ambitious politician. And this is without regard to his beliefs.

So far, Mamdani’s campaign for mayor has received $2.5 million in private funds and $9.8 million in public funds.

A lot of New Yorkers now have jobs and backgrounds very similar to Mamdani’s. New York is thought of as the sink-or-swim epicenter of American capitalism, but that’s not true anymore. The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in the government sector. Read that again. Nonprofits now employ nearly 17 percent of the city’s total private-sector workforce. 17%. And nationally, the rate is 10%. How much is lost to the economy when those guys call off sick?

Wage growth in the nonprofit sector healthily outpaced the rest of the private sector statewide in New York between 2017 and 2022, 29.3 to 25.3 percent.

Nonprofit-dominated sectors are also adding jobs at a far higher rate than any other part of the city’s economy. Of 67,000 new jobs added in New York City in the year before May of 2025, 63,800 were in “private education and health services.” During the same period, the city created an anemic 600 jobs in trade, transportation, and utilities and lost 4,900 jobs in manufacturing and construction.

Between 2010 and 2015, the time when leadership of the city shifted from the centrist liberal patrician Michael Bloomberg to the progressive Bill de Blasio, the city added 158,000 total jobs in the nonprofit-heavy health care, education, media, and arts sectors, compared to 58,400 total in traditional outer-borough industries like construction, transportation, wholesale trade, manufacturing, and real estate.

The subsidized classes rose in power as the city’s productive industries faded. New York has gone from about 1 million manufacturing jobs in 1955 to fewer than 45,000 today, with construction and wholesale seeing a similar decline during the same period, from 750,000 to a shade under 500,000 jobs. The NYPD, a longtime source of lower-middle-class employment and social mobility, has gone from 40,000 active officers in 2000 to 34,000 today. The multigenerational working class—the remnant of the city’s mid-to-late-20th-century mix of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Italians—has shrunk in relative size and power. New York’s Black population has contracted this century, from 1.9 million in 2000 to 1.7 million in 2020. Similarly, the city’s Puerto Rican population plunged from 715,000 to 574,000 between 2017 and 2022 alone.

This is culled from a recent Tablet article and is not presented to be particularly critical of Mamdani. The non-profit world might be an occupation of last resort, but it is also a source of highly leveraged political influence, an influence that many underestimate. And this world, unlike most of the world, is not self-correcting; it fosters isolated and peripheral personal notions and projects--like the inept Mandani and his goofy ideas--that we poor working folks will be forced to subsidize, then clean up.

One wonders, with the government shutting down the economy for eighteen months, subsidizing the economy with unsustainable debt, and redoing failed social and economic experiments, how long the beleaguered working culture can do this.

Enemies of Success

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.

***

President Trump is moving ahead with plans to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House grounds next July 4, the U.F.C.’s chief executive, Dana White, told CBS on Tuesday.

***

“Based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, one advanced nuclear plant (2 x AP1000) produces 33.17 megawatts (MW) per acre, while one offshore wind farm produces approximately 0.006 MW/acre”—making nuclear about 5,500 times more efficient.

***

Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, has an opinion piece in the WashPo on the decision to wind down its mRNA vaccine development activities. He writes that the platform has failed to earn the public trust. As most opinions coming out of Washington, he blames the Biden administration, largely because it chose a strategy of mandates rather than a risk-based approach and did not properly acknowledge Americans’ growing concerns regarding safety and effectiveness.
In 2021, the Biden administration’s HHS spent nearly a billion dollars on a campaign supporting the coronavirus vaccine, the most expensive pharmaceutical advertising campaign in history. The government spent the money on a vast number of TV, radio, and internet spots, which misinformed the American public that the vaccine would protect them from contracting and spreading COVID-19. Nevertheless, just a few years later, less than half the U.S. adult population would heed the CDC’s guidance.
Complete confidence about vaccine safety and efficacy requires an exact understanding of dosage, biodistribution, and off-target effects. Unfortunately, this program fell short on all three.
From a regulatory perspective, getting approval for a vaccine with such inherent uncertainties should be difficult.

Science, he says, is "humility," not much of a political virtue.
It is an interesting argument over how perception should mold reality, a legitimate question in an advertising culture.

***

Durastanti’s latest novel, Missitalia, has a section set in Basilicata, mixing the true story of the women-only gangs that haunted its forests in the 19th century.

***

There are only 20,000 great white sharks in the world.

***

Enemies of Success

California has become the fourth-largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan's.

Think about that. A state with Karen Bass running one of its largest cities, that actually encourages the immigration of homeless, unemployed foreigners, whose infrastructure encourages the native homeless and insane, a state that is subject to terrible natural risks, continues to be one of the most productive economies in the world.

Or consider this: The poorest American state, Mississippi, has a higher per capita GDP than Britain, France, or Japan. Mississippi.

Any serious student of government would want to explain this economic success. As would any serious politician. One would expect flag-waving and chest-thumping.

So why would anyone consider the policies of America's declared economic and military enemies, policies that historically have led to death, destruction, and ruin? How could anyone even consider Mamdani as a serious political leader? With all the threats to democracy that are identified every minute in this country, is this not the obvious one?

America the Observant

On this day:
1099
First Crusade: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of The Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1298
Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Falkirk – King Edward I of England and his longbowmen defeat William Wallace and his Scottish schiltrons outside the town of Falkirk.
1706
The Acts of Union 1707 are agreed upon by commissioners from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, which, when passed by each country’s Parliaments, lead to the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1797
Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Battle between Spanish and British naval forces during the French Revolutionary Wars. During the Battle, Rear-Admiral Nelson is wounded in the arm and the arm had to be partially amputated.
1937
New Deal: the United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
1942
Holocaust: the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
1946
King David Hotel bombing: a Zionist underground organisation, the Irgun, bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the civil administration and military headquarters for Mandate Palestine, resulting in 91 deaths.
2003
Members of 101st Airborne of the United States, aided by Special Forces, attack a compound in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, along with Mustapha Hussein, Qusay’s 14-year-old son, and a bodyguard.
2005
Jean Charles de Menezes is killed by police as the hunt begins for the London Bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the 21 July 2005 London bombings.
2011
Norway is the victim of twin terror attacks, the first being a bomb blast which targeted government buildings in central Oslo, the second being a massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utøya.

***

Can a society subsidize what opposes it?

***

What, exactly, is Gabbard saying about the intel agencies?

***

Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies.--Lemieux


***

Suwinski is hitting .103. Skenes is pitching 1.95

***

The French government proposed cutting two public holidays per year to boost economic growth as part of a budget plan that it billed as a “moment of truth” to avoid a financial crisis. But in a country where vacations are sacred, the idea — unsurprisingly — prompted outrage across the political spectrum, suggesting it may have little chance of becoming law.

***

America the Observant

For a government so often criticized for its decisions, the American government is slow to take the reins. America evolves over time, often through significant mistakes. Our own 'dialectic.' We mature into things.

Now we are at a historic moment of opportunity—one that offers serious options. The world remains in its traditional chaos: wars, ethnic cleansings, nations pursuing historically disastrous economic policies, and incompetent, grasping masters threatening citizens, their families, and their futures. America's citizenry is protected because its constitution has withstood all the usual foolish and malicious attacks, and it upholds a political philosophy that encourages personal and economic freedom and growth. It is the world's destination for liberty and safety. 

But America has a problem, one unrelated to the usual malice and envy. It needs people to fill in its shrinking population. It needs innovators and workers to maintain its momentum.

Why is this a crisis and not an opportunity? Why are we not advertising and holding lively interviews, looking for people who understand our life and can improve our country, instead of passively watching our borders collapse and our city streets burn?

 

Tick Tock

On this day:
1536
Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, stands trial in London on charges of treason, adultery and incest. She is condemned to death by a specially-selected jury.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, marries James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, her third husband.
1648
The Treaty of Westphalia signed.
1776
American Revolution: the Virginia Convention instructs its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States Declaration of Independence.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of New Market, Virginia – students from the Virginia Military Institute fight alongside the Confederate Army to force Union General Franz Sigel out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1891
Pope Leo XIII defends workers’ rights and property rights in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching.
1963
Project Mercury: The launch of the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9 with astronaut L. Gordon Cooper on board. He becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space.

***

Camp Century, a U.S. military base built under Greenland’s ice during the Cold War, was part of an ambitious and clandestine Pentagon plan for a network of nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. It was partially constructed in 1959, abandoned in 1967, and is now buried under at least 100 feet of ice.

***

Pete Rose was posthumously removed from the Major League’s banned list yesterday. An Index for people.


***

A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found.


***

Tick Tock

In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok will challenge the law banning it from U.S. app stores. TikTok argues in its brief that the law demands a divestiture (from Chinese ownership) that is technologically and commercially impossible — and unprecedented: “Never before has Congress expressly singled out and shut down a specific speech forum. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.” In 2023, TikTok says, U.S. users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos were viewed worldwide more than 13 trillion times. TikTok argues that the ban violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee and the guarantee of equal protection under the laws.

Granted, any company beholden to China’s Leninist party-state will do what the Communist Party dictates. But labeling speech (often accurately, regarding TikTok) as foreign propaganda does not license government interference with it. In 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that burdened citizens’ “right to receive” communist propaganda mailed from a foreign adversary.

…..

The TikTok law asks us to trust the government that evidently thinks we cannot be trusted to cope with propaganda. Trust the government that tried to suppress as misinformation true criticisms of the government’s pandemic policies? The government, which in 12 months extending into this election year, overstated by 818,000 the number of jobs created during the Biden administration?--from wsj

The great problem with democracy is that it burdens the citizen with decisions. And those decisions will be influenced by their education and common sense. Free societies will always be faced with such problems that are not just homicidal, they are suicidal. The choice is obvious. 

The American Revolution changed the world. But it came very late to the human social table, so it must not be a no-brainer. It is through education that the government should arm its citizenry. If it must protect them through control of its intellectual atmosphere, it is too late.

Fetterman's Reassessment

On this day:

1960
The Food and Drug Administration announces it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle’s Enovid, making Enovid the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill.
1979
Iranian Jewish businessman Habib Elghanian is executed by firing squad in Tehran, prompting the mass exodus of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran.
1980
In Florida, Liberian freighter MV Summit Venture collides with the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, making a 1,400-ft. section of the southbound span collapse. 35 people in six cars and a Greyhound bus fall 150 ft. into the water and die.

***

Until America goes into decline, there won't be an American pope.--Cardinal George from Chicago (from Chris)

***

The White House convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private mission to the moon after the largest group of Native Americans in the United States asked the administration to delay the flight because it would be carrying cremated human remains destined for a lunar burial.

***

Fetterman's Reassessment

There are changes afoot in the information cartel.

Fetterman has long been an interesting guy. Huge (6'8''), tattooed, and rough, he had an epiphany as a young man: when faced with the brevity and inequity of life, he decided it was not a fact of existence but injustice. Fault was involved. He changed his life, became a socialist, married the beautiful Gisele (who might be the brains of the outfit), and entered politics. Like all such political activists, he simply ignores the basic truth that the government power and devotion necessary for such political ambitions are as incompatible with the nation's origin and character as is monarchy. Instead, as all such visionaries, he follows the advice of Blackadder's Anthony Melchett: “If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.” Pigheadedness and the threat of violence.

Suffice it to say, he has been lionized. He became the Mayor of Braddock, a waystation on the bullet train of automation, clean energy, and outsourced labor, and now a violent shell disguised as a town. With no real demonstration of administrative ability or imagination, he ran for Pennsylvania lieutenant-governor and won.

Then he pitted his shallow public appeal against that of TV personality Dr. Oz and won the senate race. As a senator, his major accomplishment seems to be his refusal to follow dress codes. He's a maverick.

Then he had a stroke.

The following months were filled with news accounts of his struggle to return to normal. He could not speak. He required special electronics. Then he was hospitalized for depression, a serious event in any life.

Since then, he has had slow progress back to flouting dress norms.

But things have changed.

A recent news article worried about a shouting match he had at a meeting with the teachers' union.

That interaction at Fetterman’s Washington office, described to The Associated Press by the two people who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity, came the day before New York Magazine published a story in which former staff and political advisers to Fetterman aired concerns about the senator’s mental health.

That story included a 2024 letter, also obtained by the AP, in which Fetterman’s one-time chief of staff Adam Jentleson told a neuropsychiatrist who had treated Fetterman for depression that the senator appeared to be off his recovery plan and was exhibiting alarming behavior, including a tendency toward “long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues.”

And some who have worked closely with Fetterman question publicly whether his recovery is complete.

In the 2024 letter to Dr. David Williamson, Jentleson warned that Fetterman was not seeing his doctors, had pushed out the people who were supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan, and might not be taking his prescribed medications. Jentleson also said Fetterman had been driving recklessly and exhibiting paranoia, isolating him from colleagues.

“Overall, over the last nine months or so, John has dismantled the early-warning system we all agreed upon when he was released,” Jentleson wrote. “He has picked fights with each person involved in that system and used those fights as excuses to push them out and cut them off from any knowledge about his health situation.”

Aristocracies solve leadership questions by birth. Democracies must simply work harder. As the country has shown over the years, democracies pick pretty randomly and need to be lucky. This country has been.

But much of its luck has been tempered by a belief--even among its most incompetent--that the betterment of the nation was somehow at stake. With the Biden experience, the nation no longer has that buffer. Ambition and power have no default mechanism, no circuit breaker. The cabal-that-be will pursue power and keep it at any price, even if it means supporting an addled, demented old man as president of the country and leader of the free world.

What we saw was not simply outrageous lust; we were seeing a complete suppression of responsibility and conscience.

That is what makes this negative Fetterman publicity so shocking. What is going on here?

Notes

The DOGE play is much ado about nothing. It will not stop us from getting to where the government can no longer borrow enough to fund its spending, including the ever-rising share of interest payments. At that point, we will be staring in the face the threat of Weimar-era hyperinflation, confronting our political leaders with the need to suddenly do something serious and substantive. The curtain will come down on the political theater.--Kling

***

Capitalism is based on companies competing for the favour of consumers with better goods and services, but unfortunately many companies choose instead to compete for the favour of politicians to get subsidies, tariffs, regulatory benefits, and bailouts so that they do not have to worry about consumers.--Norberg

***

Great book title: A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims:

***

Notes (others)

Very interesting, if true:

A period of dedicated rest after learning improves memory.

For offline waking rest to be comparable to post-learning sleep in terms of its effect on recall, the key is to make your breaks as similar to sleep as possible. No music. No screens. No chatting with friends.

Just quiet downtime, preferably with your eyes closed, or if that’s not possible, doing something mindless. Taking a walk. Looking out the window.

Or even exercising. A study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise found that exercising after learning significantly improves memory, recall, and retention.

In fact, a study published in Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2023 found that just six to 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise can improve your working memory and significantly improve higher-level cognitive skills like organization, prioritization, and planning – regardless of when that exercise session takes place.

***

We all want clean air and water, don’t we? The only problem is that there has never been any such thing.

Any one of us could make the air in his own home cleaner by installing all sorts of costly filters, and we could eliminate many impurities in water by drinking only water that we distilled ourselves. But we don’t do that, do we? We think it is too costly, whether in money or in time.

Only when we are putting costs on other people do we go hog wild like that. Making us pay is one way to make us think.--Sowell

***

In an executive order last week, President Trump directed White House security advisers to draw up a national resilience plan for critical infrastructure that shifts more responsibilities to the state and local level.

About a week earlier, the Department of Homeland Security cut about half of the federal funding, or $10 million, to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which shares threat intelligence among states.

***

USAID

Kim Strassel is one of the WSJ's very able editorialists. She recently wrote an article on USAID, its history, the attempt to fix it, and the validity of the attacks on those efforts. There's no real reason to revise it so I've pasted it here in its entirety for anyone who missed it.

Dismantling USAID

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced an end to his review of U.S. Agency for International Development programming, resulting in a cancellation of 5,200 contracts, or some 83% of USAID programs. The headlines covering this “culling” and “purge” of USAID works, suggest a ramshackle process that is already resulting in vast “human costs” and “unnecessary deaths.” Much of the frenzy stemmed from a memo blasting the cuts as a recipe for disease and destabilization, drafted and shared by a USAID employee, Nicholas Enrich (who was then put on leave). Media outlets admitted they couldn’t verify Enrich’s warnings of “death and disability,” though that didn’t stop them from publishing. If only they’d put the same effort into researching the administration’s USAID review, presented in detail in court documents filed in response to litigation against the foreign-aid pause. Those papers present an orderly evaluation, complete with notice and procedures, clear objectives, levels of oversight, and a process for waivers or exemptions. It’s unclear if this State review is emblematic of Donald Trump’s efficiency drive in other agencies—or an anomaly. Yet it’s a strikingly different view of proceedings than that generally supplied by the press. Here’s what the documents show: Timing: Trump on Day One issued an executive order requiring a 90-day pause on new foreign-development assistance in order to evaluate it for efficiency and realign it with his objectives. Rubio four days later issued a stop-work order on existing awards (not just new ones). The review began Jan. 27, and over the ensuing weeks, State issued waivers to allow money back to critical missions, including AIDS and other global health programs, refugee assistance, and narcotics, peacekeeping and antiterror operations. Rubio on March 10 announced the completion of his six-week review, beating the Trump deadline. Process: Court documents note that each award was examined on “an individual basis and through a multi-step process.” USAID’s Deputy Administrator Pete Marocco explained in an court attestation that policy staff initially reviewed every grant/program—including information about the recipient, dollar amounts, subject matter and description of the project—to determine whether it aligned with Trump’s foreign-policy priorities. These recommendations for cuts were reviewed by a senior policy official. The ensuing lists were then reviewed by Marocco, who factored in whether a program might still be worthwhile based on broader “institutional and diplomatic equities”—say, the “location of the project or the general subject matter.” Final termination recommendations were reviewed and finalized by Rubio. The Secretary of State’s Monday announcement that he was retaining nearly 1,000 programs (and folding them into the State Department) shows the cuts weren’t blanket. Details: Throughout this process, court attachments show, employees were provided timelines, technical guidance on how to handle the pause, as well as FAQs addressing obscure government-process questions. Documents also explained the perimeters of waivers and the procedure for asking for exceptions. Reviewing staff received guidance on judging programs against Trump priorities. An intriguing side note: The documents direct questions to State Department offices—not anyone from the Department of Government Efficiency. Obligations: Contrary to media reports, the government isn’t bailing on obligations; guidance allows for payment of “legitimate expenses incurred” prior to Rubio’s stop-work order, and State says it is also working with counterparties on disputes. The government also hinted that one reason for the initial hard stop on continuing projects was to pre-empt a flood of demands, since “grant recipients frequently submit payment requests before they are due,” and moreover “recouping” money sent improperly “would be extremely difficult.” That puts in a new light a federal judge’s orders that USAID pay out for “work” up to Feb. 13 (in litigation that continues). What’s left: State hasn’t released a list of the programs that were cut or kept. DOGE and the White House already gave Americans a glimpse of the more ridiculous or counterproductive USAID projects (a transgender opera in Colombia; DEI initiatives in Ireland and Serbia; nonprofits linked to terror groups), which presumably are gone. Critics are now warning the cuts could include health initiatives for malaria, tuberculosis or AIDS, for instance—yet they don’t know that, and Rubio’s decision to offer waivers for these during the review suggest they could be among the 1,000 kept. The final measure ought to be the value of the programs retained, not the number of those axed. (And 1,000 distinct foreign-aid programs is still a lot.) The law: Rubio’s review might be complete, but the saga isn’t. The Trump administration has been sued numerous times over USAID and its foreign-aid freeze. In his recent decision ordering the administration to pay recipients through mid-February, Judge Amir Ali claimed Trump had an obligation to spend funds Congress provided for USAID—though didn’t go so far as to insist it revive programs it has now canceled. The case seems to be shaping up as one of several centered on “impoundment”—a president’s ability to delay or cancel spending—now barreling toward the Supreme Court. No doubt this review and realignment contained some bumps and flubs. The Trump administration is the first to tackle a government resizing of this magnitude, so everything is new. The State Department’s decision to shut down many programs—and Rubio’s decision to fold USAID programs into the State Department—will also infuriate those who want programs on auto-pilot. But the impression that media and Democrats are deliberately building—that the process has no rational basis beyond “destroying” government and “firing” everyone—simply isn’t true. Trump campaigned on a change in foreign aid, won and is now—going by the State Department review—methodically implementing big changes that align with his vision. Agree or disagree with that vision, but don’t suggest it doesn’t exist.