Lessons of International Crises

 

On this day:
1469
Ferdinand II of Aragon marries Isabella I of Castile, a marriage that paves the way to the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain.
1512
Martin Luther becomes a doctor of theology (Doctor in Biblia).
1781
At Yorktown, Virginia, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’ sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau.
1789
Chief Justice John Jay is sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the United States.
1805
Napoleonic Wars: Austrian General Mack surrenders his army to the Grand Army of Napoleon at the Battle of Ulm. 30,000 prisoners are captured and 10,000 casualties inflicted on the losers.
1812
Napoleon I of France retreats from Moscow.
1813
The Battle of Leipzig concludes, giving Napoleon Bonaparte one of his worst defeats.
1900
Max Planck, in his house at Grunewald, on the outskirts of Berlin, discovers the law of black body emission (Planck’s law).
1950
The People’s Republic of China joins the Korean War by sending thousands of troops across the Yalu river to fight United Nations forces.
1956
The Soviet Union and Japan sign a Joint Declaration, officially ending the state of war between the two countries that had existed since August 1945.
2005
Saddam Hussein goes on trial in Baghdad for crimes against humanity.

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“Make no mistake: What we are dealing with is a real mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine. And like all the best fairy tales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.”--Jack Clark, whose official title at Anthropic is head of policy

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Another political concept often heard in our times is “solution.” Early in these essays, I argue that there are no real solutions in politics – only trade-offs. That theme also recurs in the essays that follow, and extends to foreign policy as well as domestic issues, to economics as well as law, to educational issues no less than to issues of race and sex.--Sowell, in a preface

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A tablet, known as Plimpton 332, was discovered in the early 1900s in Southern Iraq by the American archaeologist and diplomat Edgar Banks, who was the inspiration for Indiana Jones. The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now, but new research by the University of New South Wales, Australia, has shown it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, which was probably used by ancient architects to construct temples, palaces, and canals. However, unlike today’s trigonometry, Babylonian mathematics used a base 60, or sexagesimal system, rather than the 10 that is used today. Because 60 is far easier to divide by three, experts studying the tablet found that the calculations are far more accurate.
The tablet, which is thought to have come from the ancient Sumerian city of Larsa, has been dated to between 1822 and 1762 BC.

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This is from a Substack that believes the Pens have made an unspoken decision and that this year is not unplanned: 

"They still need to find their next franchise player, or somehow get into a position for it. Maybe this will be the year it happens.
In the meantime, they are clearing long-term cap space, stockpiling picks, and trying to find some hidden gems.
Do you know what that is? That is rebuilding."

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In California, one of the richest, tech-savvy populations in the world, only 38.4% of public school students showed math proficiency on tests this spring. Only 49.3% met or exceeded state standards in English.

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Noah Adams, a writer, broadcaster, and storyteller who hosted All Things Considered for 18 years, has died.

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Strange episode of a car weaponized in Wichita.

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Lessons of International Crises

Communication changes have allowed us to see more of the world's processes and decisions. It's not reassuring. The two more obvious and dangerous problems are Israel and AI.

There is violence in the street over more than Israel's policies; there is debate over its very existence. Evidence encompasses UN resolutions, the history of the Holocaust, even Old Testament precedent. But, of course, there is no deed to the Promised Land.

AI has scared everyone witless. AI executives are calmly suggesting that AI might initiate the end of the world. That, of course, is worst case. A happier compromise, best case, would be humanity's enslavement. The problem is, AI is everywhere, even in the hands of people less enlightened than Washington. And, like Israel, everyone is assuming good intentions. Who would be so foolish as to use it for ill?

The debates are very heartfelt, and sometimes the losers in the debates can become quite righteous. But both of these arguments exemplify the essence of modern conflict: these intense problems are never clean problems. Often there are collateral elements, never discussed, that are more important.

Israel debates will never be resolved without this unasked--and probably totally unresolvable--question: After whatever dissolution-destruction-evaporation of the Israel problem, what will be done with Israel's 200 nuclear weapons? Why does this question never come up?

And with AI, what will happen if the Americans develop and control it? Or ban it? Will everybody accept their decisions? Will there be no efforts at rogue use? Is there a good history of agreements among nations that have allowed for the effective control of dangerous technologies?

Or are these just two more wistful, bell-the-cat notions, shallow and self-congratulatory, whose main impact is to call attention to the hand-wringing virtuous and, preemptively, absolve them of responsibility?

Representative from Bristol

On this day:

1529
The Siege of Vienna ends as the Austrians rout the invading Turks, turning the tide against almost a century of unchecked conquest throughout eastern and central Europe by the Ottoman Empire.
1582
Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year is followed directly by October 15.
1764
Edward Gibbon observes a group of friars singing in the ruined Temple of Jupiter in Rome, which inspires him to begin work on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
1783
The Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon marks the first human ascent, by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, (tethered balloon).
1793

Queen Marie-Antoinette of France is tried and convicted in a swift, pre-determined trial in the Palais de Justice, Paris, and condemned to death the following day.
1815

Napoleon I of France begins his exile on Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean.
1863
American Civil War: The H. L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink a ship, sinks during a test, killing its inventor, Horace L. Hunley.
1880
Mexican soldiers kill Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists.
1888
The “From Hell” letter sent by Jack the Ripper is received by investigators.
1894
The Dreyfus affair: Alfred Dreyfus is arrested for spying.
1917
World War I: At Vincennes outside of Paris, Dutch dancer Mata Hari is executed by firing squad for spying for the German Empire.
1934
The Soviet Republic of China collapses when Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army successfully encircles Ruijin, forcing the fleeing Communists to begin the Long March.
1945
World War II: The former premier of Vichy France Pierre Laval is shot by a firing squad for treason.
1951
Mexican chemist Luis E. Miramontes conducts the very last step of the first synthesis of norethisterone, the progestin that would later be used in one of the first two oral contraceptives.
1956
Fortran, the first modern computer language, is shared with the coding community for the first time.
1997
The Cassini probe launches from Cape Canaveral on its way to Saturn.
2001
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter’s moon Io.
2003
China launches Shenzhou 5, its first manned space mission.
2008
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 733.08 points, or 7.87%, the second worst day in the Dow’s history based on a percentage drop.

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From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living, nothing in my eyes is better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad. -Ivo Andric, novelist, Nobel laureate (9 Oct 1892-1975)

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There's a movement growing aimed at Peter Theil's legal use of a legal government tax program devised to help people avoid impoverishment in their old age by the tax and spend governmental system and the failing government social security plan.

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Sally Rooney, the very successful Irish novelist has had her book royalties impounded by the British government because of her support of an organization they have declared 'terrorist.'

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Beyond Understanding Department:

Moscow accused Ukraine of launching its first strike against a Russian oil refinery in the Ryazan region since Trump abruptly declared an “energy ceasefire” that neither Russia nor Ukraine said they had agreed to. Sort of an incomplete Memorandum of Understanding.
Zelenskyy said Russia had attacked Ukraine with more than 850 Shahed drones at a time when the speed of Ukraine’s defensive capabilities was being “artificially restricted”, a reference to the sudden limitations on Ukraine’s use of the Starlink and Starshield mobile internet terminals.
Tech mogul Elon Musk has suggested that the US government could be behind the decision to restrict the speed of SpaceX’s satellite-technology used by Ukraine’s military.

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Vast numbers of nonwhites are being raised to believe that America hates them. This, itself, should be a hate crime.

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Representative from Bristol

On November 3, 1774, the great quasi-liberal conservative member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, delivered his immortal “Speech to the Electors of Bristol.” He was responding to a claim by his opponent in an election that a representative ought to be a mere servant of the self-interested opinions of their voters. Burke declared, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. . . . Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”

That is to say, the representative from Bristol gives Bristol's voice to the national debate.

The Antagonists

On this day:
539 BC
The army of Cyrus the Great of Persia takes Babylon.
1216
King John of England loses his crown jewels in The Wash, probably near Fosdyke, perhaps near Sutton Bridge
1279
Nichiren, a Japanese Buddhist monk founder of Nichiren Buddhism, inscribes the Dai-Gohonzon
1492
Christopher Columbus’s expedition makes landfall in the Caribbean, specifically in The Bahamas. The explorer believes he has reached India
1692
The Salem witch trials are ended by a letter from Massachusetts Governor William Phips.
1773
America‘s first insane asylum opens for 'Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds’in Virginia
1823
Charles Macintosh of Scotland sells the first raincoat.
1871
Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) enacted by British rule in India, which named over 160 local communities 'Criminal Tribes', i.e. hereditary criminals. Repealed in 1949, after Independence of India. Critical theory?
1960
Cold War: Nikita Khrushchev pounds his shoe on a desk at United Nations General Assembly meeting to protest a Philippine assertion of Soviet Union colonial policy being conducted in Eastern Europe
1960
Inejiro Asanuma, Chair of the Japanese Socialist Party, is assassinated in Japan by Otoya Yamaguchi, a 17-year-old. The cameras were rolling at the time, so the moment was caught on film.
1984
Brighton hotel bombing: The Provisional Irish Republican Army attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. Thatcher escapes but the bomb kills five people and wounds 31.
2000
The USS Cole is badly damaged in Aden, Yemen, by two suicide bombers, killing 17 crew members and wounding at least 39
2002
Terrorists detonate bombs in the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 and wounding over 300.
2005
The second Chinese human spaceflight Shenzhou 6 launched carrying Fèi Jùnlóng and Niè Hǎishèng for five days in orbit.

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“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of."--Peterson 

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Today is "Columbus Day" or Indigineous Peoples Day," commemmorating the meeting of two peoples, a tribel namadic people of earlier times and a new people, of the wheel, of steam power, of cities, of distance weapons, religeous ferver, and mass organization. History then sat back to watch the encounter.
Some people are shocked at the results of this collision.

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Ideocracy: noun:
1. Government according to the principles of a particular ideology.
2. A state or society governed in this way.

ETYMOLOGY:
From ideo- (idea) + -cracy (rule). Earliest documented use: 1813.

Ideocracy is one letter away from idiocracy (government by idiots). The pairing even has presidential precedent: John Adams proposed ideocracy on the model of ideology but his written coined word appears to read 'idiocracy,' while his grandson’s 1851 edition prints 'ideocracy.' So it's a thin line between rule by ideas and rule by idiots.

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President Trump stated that inflation could pay down the debt rapidly. That is, high inflation is a de facto method of reducing the real burden of debt. Is that the plan?

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One common observation about American government is the apparent concern with the letter of the law and not with the crucial element in government the Founders recognized: the ability and willingness within the nature of politicians to sacrifice the community's well-being for their own advantage. The sanctity of the individual citizen seems to have been displaced in the hubbub.

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A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Sunday to stop airing ads funded by the U.S. government that portray President Donald Trump in a favorable light, effective immediately.
Why is this even debatable?


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Funny shirt but, like so much in politics, doesn't actually describe what's happening.

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After being drafted by the Pirates last year, third baseman Murph Gray hit .305 with a 1.042 OPS, 32 home runs and 97 RBIs in 2026.

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The Antagonists

In most of the adventure stories I remember, the really, really bad guy is a businessman. I can't think of a Bond movie without one. It's never a politician with his nukes, or his lab making a homicidal virus, or his army. And, of course, the ubiquitous revolutionary wants the government to solve the problem of evil so the evil must not be centered in the government.

Indeed, the fear of the impact of corporations and businesses on our lives might be exaggerated by special interests who seek their own power through government. Commerce is a good target. It's everywhere and more personal than government. Problems can be personalized, as at some point, a commercial transaction always occurs.

Monopoly accusations are hard to deny when a business is successful. And there's always the Jews. They own lots of businesses and were perfect for Hitler. So a businessman can be shot in the street by a stranger, and many people debate about it. They consider the factors.

Strangely, commercial interests are seen as wealthy, even though they pale in comparison to government wealth. 60% of American land is privately owned; the other 40% is government land. For fiscal year 2025, the budget proposed $7 trillion in spending. Put that number up against your average business. Commercial companies hope you buy their product; the government sends you a bill for the money they need and arrests you if you don't comply.

Governments are armed to the teeth, have unimaginable weapons, have a police force and an army, write rules you must obey, manipulate the economy, crush disagreement, regulate borders and trade, invade and destroy people they don't like, build weapons of mass destruction and end-of-life potential, and constantly harrangue their citizens about the danger of the neighborhood grocer.

With all this power, you would think they would do a better job--a bigger question. After all, how many of us could list government job requirements? How could you tell a good government leader from a bad one? And what about his legions of assistants and advisors? None of the bureaucrats I've encountered resemble any of those noble idealists Michael Lewis knows. What if these guys are there by chance, or simple persistence? Are they going to be able to rise to the occasion when real business threats like dangerous pharmaceuticals, military accidents, or AI present themselves? They don't seem to be able to keep the streets drivable or safe.

That might be a good place to start.

Human Destruction Olympics

On this day:

1620
The Mayflower starts her voyage to North America
1701
James Francis Edward Stuart, sometimes called the “Old Pretender”, becomes the Jacobite claimant to the thrones of England and Scotland.
1776
American Revolutionary War: the Battle of Harlem Heights is fought.
1812
The Fire of Moscow (1812) begins shortly after midnight and destroys three quarters of the city days later.
1893
Settlers make a land run for prime land in the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma.
1920
The Wall Street bombing: a bomb in a horse wagon explodes in front of the J. P. Morgan building in New York City – 38 are killed and 400 injured.
1941
World War II: Concerned that Reza Pahlavi the Shah of Persia is about to ally his petroleum-rich empire with Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union invade Iran in late August and force the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
1978
An earthquake measuring 7.5 to 7.9 on the Richter scale hits the city of Tabas, Iran, killing about 25,000 people.
1990
The railroad between the People’s Republic of China and Kazakhstan becomes complete at Dostyk, adding a sizable link to the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge.
2007
Mercenaries working for Blackwater Worldwide allegedly shoot and kill 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad; all criminal charges against them are later dismissed, sparking outrage in the Arab world.

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What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.--Hayek

***

Ukraine has destroyed two irreplaceable Russian bombers with long-range drone strikes.
Satellite images show that at least two Tu-95 ‘Bear’ nuclear-capable bombers were targeted at a Russian airbase, Engels-2, in July and August, putting both Soviet-era aircraft out of action, The Telegraph reported.
Oryx, an open-source intelligence research group, has recorded that at least 10 Tu-95s have been targeted since the invasion began in February 2022, not counting the two strikes at Engels-2 this summer.

***

The further out you look in space the faster things appear to be moving away from us. Some objects are flying away from us faster than the speed of light because the space between is actually growing that fast. The furthest objects appear more and more red until the wavelengths vanish into the infrared. Anything beyond this cosmic horizon will never be seen again.

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The Pirates' Fan Appreciation Weekend is not long enough.

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America’s AI buildout is pushing up prices on everything from smartphones to electricity. One chart showed consumer prices for computer software and accessories had climbed roughly 15% from a year earlier.

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Human Destruction Olympics

There's been a debate over who is most to be feared: government or business. (The New Singularity Tech, the creature of business, may be a new candidate.) The academic world holds business as the most dangerous, and they offer all sorts of wacky economic policies to hamper business, despite the mountains of bodies governments are stack, stack, stackin' at heaven's door. Nor do businesses have armies. And there's debate over whether Fauci qualifies as government or business or academia or what. Anyway...

New evidence has arrived in the government vs. business Human Destruction Olympics:

---Fauci insisted time and again that the “lab leak hypothesis” was a wacky conspiracy theory, that the virus had jumped naturally from animals to humans, presumably at the “wet market” in Wuhan, China.

Yet the diaries reveal that he knew early on the beast had not come from the wet market. More, he was confronted with scientists he’d selected who argued that the “lab leak” was the truth — and that the bug was likely bio-engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Bioweapon.

---Fauci himself referred to research at WIV that he had funded with federal cash as “GOF,” meaning “gain of function,” altering viruses to make them more deadly or contagious to humans, though he later testified time and time again under questioning by Sen. Rand Paul that he’d never funded such work.

--Fauci lied to the public to discourage them from using masks that were in short supply so they could be saved for hospital workers. Apparently, all citizens are not actually created equal.

---He pushed hard for media and social-media companies to suppress or ban contrarian voices about COVID’s origins, and even worked with Beijing to ensure that international investigations would never get close to being able to examine the evidence. He engaged in the same information control to stomp on experts who questioned the wisdom of locking everything down to fight COVID,

Years later, he turned around and claimed he’d never pushed for mass lockdowns:

---And his personalization of scientific debate fed into the lunatic politicization of COVID policy, such that America kept its schools closed longer and tighter than the Europeans, and insisted on masking toddlers who were never at risk.

That politics led to the similarly lunatic Biden presidential pardon that likely immunizes Fauci from criminal charges for his perjury, abuses of government power, and so on. The basic change seems to be that one can pursue as dangerous a plan as is imaginable, without the fear of noble justice or simple retribution.

So the only thing worse than government or business is a government-business partnership. Or was the partnership with Fauci really a business partnership?

Maybe what's worse is a government-anything partnership.

The Cat Wants to be Belled

On this day:668
Eastern Roman Emperor Constans II is assassinated in his bath at Syracuse, Italy.
921
At Tetin Saint Ludmila is murdered at the command of her daughter-in-law.
1440
Gilles de Rais, one of the earliest known serial killers, is taken into custody upon an accusation brought against him by the Bishop of Nantes.
1776
American Revolutionary War: British forces land at Kip’s Bay during the New York Campaign.
1812
The French army under Napoleon reaches the Kremlin in Moscow.
1835
HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, reaches the Galápagos Islands. The ship lands at Chatham or San Cristobal, the easternmost of the archipelago.
1950
Korean War: United States forces land at Inchon
1962
The Soviet ship Poltava heads toward Cuba, one of the events that sets into motion the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1963
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing: Four children killed at an African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, United States
1968
The Soviet Zond 5 spaceship is launched, becoming the first spacecraft to fly around the Moon and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
2008
Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

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"We never leave the circle of perspectives." --Rovelli

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A new study suggests that evolving groups can develop robustness and resilience, almost as a side effect, without any specific evolutionary pressure.

The study team also argues that slight biological variations might be more important than previously thought, perhaps revealing the underlying shape of the fitness landscape and how a population has traveled along it through evolutionary history.

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Is the sudden, apocalyptic concern over AI's dangers another scare to keep everyone unsettled? Is it another Covid-Commie-Warming -Inflation-National Debt-Aliens-China-Russia-Oil Shortage-Oil Glut-Houthis press-induced panic? After all, if you were doing something you thought was a threat to your family, friends, and neighbors, would you run in the street and cry for help or would you just stop doing it?

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A Pittsburgh-area man is facing a terrorism-related charge after the FBI believed he was planning an attack in support of ISIS.

According to the criminal complaint, Jonathan Kramer of Valencia was arrested outside a hotel in Cranberry where he allegedly paid cash to stay for a week.

After a search of Kramer's hotel room and house, agents said they found a semi-automatic rifle, loaded rifle magazines, a rifle scope and boxes of ammunition, along with 30 knives and a note.

The note told people not to look for him, saying "I cant live In constant Fear," court paperwork said.

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Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Monday at the the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference that the service has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against “hostile adversary action.”

Meink declined to comment on the type of weapons or why the announcement was made now.

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A factoid is a small bit of information, or an idea that seems like a fact and has been repeated often but may not actually be true. Norman Mailer coined it and defined factoid in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, as “facts which have no existence before."

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The Cat Wants to be Belled

Everyone is upset over AI. Everyone wants to regulate it. But, as always, risk to society and man is never philosophy or technology; the risk is men.

September 4, 1954, in a top-secret nuclear test, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber dropped a 40-kiloton atomic weapon just north of Totskoye village, exposing some 45,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians to nuclear fallout. On purpose.

The Wuhan lab worked on changing a virus's genetic structure to change its behavior- on purpose-, allowed it to escape the lab, infect the entire world, and cause 8 million deaths.

A Broken Arrow is a term for an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons, such as accidental launching, theft, or loss. Accidentally launched? Launched? The U.S. acknowledges 32 official Broken Arrows, but other sources indicate many more incidents. The number of such events by less open, less competent armed organizations is unknown.

To this day, six U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered. Lost. Nuclear weapons.

The Biopreparate labs for bioweapons development in Russia were so lax they all allowed their viruses to infect the surrounding forest creatures.

Now we are faced with a new technology, artificial intelligence, conceived in liberty or authoritarianism, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, and so incompetent, can long endure.

And we want to give the keys to the lab to the sorcerer's apprentice. Let's just give control to the Simpson jury.

The Twelve Good Men and True of Democracy

 On this day:

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

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"It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion."--John Kenyon’s 1983 volume, The History Men

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Many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s English that is odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

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Some kid named Lucas McGill flew a drone into the sky to measure CO2 levels and found, surprisingly, that ground-level CO2 in cities was lower than in rural areas. That's good because we should be able to shut down the farms more easily than cars.

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The Twelve Good Men and True of Democracy

Is it wise to assume that silly opinions will dissolve in the light of public scrutiny?

A few weeks ago, Karen Bass, the once-and-future mayor of LA, patiently explained the dynamics of homelessness to wide-eyed Americans. It seems that the drug-addled, criminal vagrants plaguing American streets have a cause we had overlooked and we can treat. The real problem is they have no teeth. 

We'll see the effect of militant Dental Activists that will surely follow.

A DSA spokesman gave an interview attacking rental property, claiming there is no constitutional provision for double-digit returns on investment.

Some successful recent campaigns promise the end of the Supreme Court and the Senate; some promise to end the Presidency. And, of course, no police, prisons, or borders.

Several senatorial candidates plan to establish 50% national ownership of the nation's largest companies.

A power company rerouted its lines to avoid the site of house-elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, which contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby.” 

Are the shallowness and scope of these opinions and promises self-disruptive? When you hear opinions like diverting a multi-zillion-dollar power line because it complicates the non-existent gravesite of a non-existent character representing a non-existent species in a children's fantasy book —your tendency is to turn off the critical-thinking part of your brain and rest. You do not join in the fray. You can not imagine any consequence of this non-storm in this non-existent teapot.

This may be an underestimating the foolishness of humanity.

Imagine children reporting being abused in mysterious tunnels under a daycare center or teachers killing rabbits and turtles to intimidate them. Or a baby being sacrificed in a church. Barnyard animals being sacrificed in schoolrooms. A student taken to a graveyard, where he helped unearth a coffin and saw a body that was then cut with knives. "Bad Clowns," "robots," ritualized abuse, "magic rooms," and "Satanic practices." Preschool teachers who flew in the air while dressed as witches.

This was not Salem three hundred years ago; this was California and New Jersey a generation and a half ago.

Margaret Kelly Michaels, a teacher at the Wee Care Nursery School, was indicted for 299 offenses in connection with the sexual assault of 33 children and eventually convicted and sentenced to 47 years in prison. Albert Algerin, employed at the Praca Day Care center, was sentenced to 50 years for rape and sexual abuse. Bernard Baran, working at Early Childhood Development Center in Pittsfield, was convicted on January 30, 1985, of three counts of rape of a child and five counts of indecent assault and battery. He was sentenced to three life terms, plus 8 to 20 years on each charge. At Fell Acres, Gerald Amirault was convicted of assaulting and raping nine children, and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in state prison. In a separate trial, his mother, Violet Amirault, and sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, were also convicted of similar charges, and sentenced to jail for 8 to 20 years. (Reporting on this case won Dorothy Rabinowitz the Pulitzer Prize.)

All of these cases were brought by educated American citizens, prosecuted by adult law graduates (including Janet Reno), and all the victims were convicted by 12 good men and true. All of those convicted went to prison; Margaret Kelly Michaels went to prison for five years before she was rescued by a bloodied and battered common sense.

In this context, perhaps it is unwise to be confident that political positions that are clearly nuts will be easily sterilized by the purifying air of our sacred democracy.

So, start handing out the toothbrushes.

New American Science

 On this day:

55
Roman forces under Julius Caesar invade Great Britain.
1346
Hundred Years’ War: the military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armoured knights is established at the Battle of Crécy.
1429
Joan of Arc makes a triumphant entry into Paris.
1768
Captain James Cook sets sail from England on board HMS Endeavour.
1789
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is approved by the National Constituent Assembly of France.
1883
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa begins its final, paroxysmal stage.
1920
The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote.
1942
Holocaust in Chortkiav, western Ukraine: At 2.30 am the German Schutzpolizei starts driving Jews out of their houses, divides them into groups of 120, packs them in freight cars and deports 2000 to Belzec death camp. 500 of the sick and children are murdered on the spot.
1999
Russia begins the Second Chechen War in response to the Invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.

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It is liberty which is ancient, and despotism which is modern.--Germaine de Staël


***

A source familiar with the matter alleged to Reuters that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House because of her ongoing opposition to the Iran war.

***

In a recent Science study, a hibernation-like state in mice erased the state of more than half of their synapses, and yet the mice apparently kept their memories. Think anesthesia.

***

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a 2028 presidential hopeful, had welcomed data centers as an economic-development boon, boasting last year that an Amazon plan to build $20 billion in AI infrastructure was the "largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania."
On Tuesday, Shapiro, whose Republican opponent in November is campaigning on halting data-center development, went from AI cheerleader to critic and signed an executive order imposing stringent new requirements for data-center developers.
He did the same thing with school vouchers, in favor while campaigning, opposed while governing.

 Calculatingly cynical.

***

Musk recently said Anthropic was leading the AI race, his company, Grok, was behind, and that soon AI would become too advanced for humans to control.

***

Paul Skenes pitched six innings of three-hit ball, and Oneil Cruz hit the first homer allowed by Mason Miller in over a year with two outs in the ninth Tuesday night, giving the Pittsburgh Pirates a 1-0 victory over the San Diego Padres.


***


New American Science

There is a plan to reorganize the country's science funding.

'American science has long been state-funded but not state-directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue: the system was decentralized and not under state control. This ..{new} ..rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science.'--Taborrok

The bureaucrat is, by his own assessment, confident, insightful, and high-minded. He is deaf to what history has stammered over and over: short-term control does not lead to long-term direction.

Afghanistan and Vietnam as Long-Term Investments

On this day:

79
Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash (note: this traditional date has been challenged, and many scholars believe that the event occurred on October 24).
410
The Visigoths under King Alaric I begin to pillage Rome.
1349
Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz after being blamed for the bubonic plague.
1391
Jews are massacred in Palma de Mallorca.
1456
The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
1662
The Act of Uniformity requires England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.
1682
William Penn receives the area that is now the state of Delaware, and adds it to his colony of Pennsylvania
1814
British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings.
1857
The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in United States history.
1929
Second day of the two-day Hebron massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attacks on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, result in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city.
1949
The treaty creating NATO goes into effect.
1991
Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1991
Ukraine declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.

***

“Every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.”--Latin American author Eduardo Galeano

***

When Vesuvius erupted, 20,000 people lived in Pompeii, including merchants, manufacturers, and farmers who exploited the rich soil of the region with numerous vineyards and orchards. None suspected that the black fertile earth was the legacy of earlier eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Herculaneum was a city of 5,000 and a favorite summer destination for rich Romans. According to Pliny the Younger’s account, the eruption lasted 18 hours. Pompeii was buried under 14 to 17 feet of ash and pumice, and the nearby seacoast was drastically changed. Herculaneum was buried under more than 60 feet of mud and volcanic material. Today, Mount Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Its last eruption was in 1944, and its last major eruption was in 1631.

***

The trial of the woman who killed her children includes testimony from medical professionals who saw her the day before the murders, and they said she was perfectly sane. Assuming they are competent, these murders imply that a lot of threatening and violent behavior is performed by people who are very different from their fellows but not clinically insane. That should worry everybody.

***

Full decompression kills an astronaut primarily through oxygen reversing direction, leaving the blood and diffusing backward into collapsed, unpressurized lungs, a process that can cause unconsciousness in as little as ten seconds. And his saliva boils.

***

You have to show your identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor, or check out a library book and rent a video, but not to vote for who runs the government. But you are assuming that your vote helps run the government and is not a placebo.

***

Afghanistan and Vietnam as Long-Term Investments

Trump has invested federal dollars in private companies, thirty so far. This is not new, clever, or innovative. This is contrary to every idea in a free society, and the Americans have fought an endless rearguard action against it. Not only does interference in the economy violate basic American principles, it also doesn't work. It's bad enough when the government is just predatory; it is a disaster when it gets entrepreneurial.
Two observations on recent events.

--Shapiro has done a U-Turn. He now opposes data centers. He did this with school vouchers, as well. He looked like a promising guy, so this is extremely disappointing. Is he just part of the current rage of politicians unrestrained by any real philosophy, like Trump? Does comfort with contradiction just make you agile in politics? Or do multiple U-Turns mean you're just a guy running in circles?

This looks like a significant political opportunity for someone. Data centers are coming, either fast or slow. And this astonishing and dangerous technology is going to be something the world will have to learn to live with. Why not develop a policy that accepts that reality, design and build a template to manage the new technology, and allow it to develop efficiently and safely? You might even create a template that presents risk management ideas for future technologies that are beyond the average politician's myopic ken.

Accept the challenge, create a management plan, then beat those politicians--whose idea of management is suppression--to a pulp with it.


--There is a weird dichotomy with successful people. Everyone is mad at them. The rich and successful are somehow on the outs. We vilify them; we suspect them of harboring aristocratic philosophies and cabalistic plans; we farm them for taxes.


But when they have an idea or want to start a business or a laboratory program, we suddenly think they are needy and desperate for our help. The country will lose its international edge without our tax support of these selfsame successful, rich, and creative people.

Why should the most capable, productive people in the land get money from taxes? Why should their efforts be underwritten by the average guy, struggling along? If a business idea or research is insightful and promising, the free market will be standing in line to support it and benefit. Yet these politicians think these people need their help. Somehow politicians and their bureaucratic assistants think all the smart, successful, hard-working highest quintile guys in society who have already proven their value just can't get along and achieve anything without the approval and help of the lower quintile of the high school class.

Sometimes the fussy State intrudes just because it can. There is a big difference between "I need..." and "I could use..." And sometimes the government just thinks it's crucial to everything

But the day is coming when financial restraint will not be voluntary.

Why do Bad Things Stick?

1284
The Republic of Pisa is defeated in the Battle of Meloria by the Republic of Genoa, thus losing its naval dominance in the Mediterranean.
1777
American Revolutionary War: The bloody Battle of Oriskany prevents American relief of the Siege of Fort Stanwix.
1806
Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates ending the Holy Roman Empire
1862
American Civil War: the Confederate ironclad Ship CSS is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
1914
World War I: First Battle of the Atlantic – two days after the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany over the German invasion of Belgium, ten German U-boats leave their base in Helgoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea.
1930
Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi in New York and disappears never to be seen again.
1940
Estonia was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union.
1945
World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when the atomic bomb “Little Boy” is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
1991
Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
1996
NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms.
2011
A helicopter containing members of Navy SEAL 6 is shot down in Afghanistan killing 38.

***

Tyranny is not freedom just because you voted for it.

***

More than 900 million SpaceX shares are set to unlock Thursday, more than doubling the publicly available stock in Elon Musk’s space and AI company.

***

A new tactic is emerging in the evolving Social Security failure:

'Social Security is less a need-based program than a transfer of wealth from the young and unpropertied to the old and comfortable.'

***

The Democrat's search for muscles has arrived in a tight black T-shirt and a mystery degree in Michigan.

This will be a rarely meaningful election as it offers a serial candidate who dislikes the country he wants to represent. That is a serious test of national tolerance.

***

Is a "deal" a "treaty"?

***

German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has suggested a state actor was behind the explosive-laden drone that was found at Leipzig airport.


***

Why do Bad Things Stick?

Can we transcend our history? Should we? Somehow the great achievement of the Revolution has been eclipsed in recent years and replaced by guilt. Is that permanent? Does everything in history create a permanent alloy, or are they just blends of colors to be washed away?

Things in America are different now. Silliness is no longer simply dismissed. Foolish people who want to dismantle the Constitution are taken seriously. The President codifies petulance. He puts state money into company investments. These are significant, philosophy-altering events. Can they be rolled back when he leaves, or will we stagger on with the new, heavier and distorting alloy of what we once had?

This is one view:

"America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two-thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.

Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.

Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.

It is the same pattern everywhere. When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insists that the rest of us refer to his country in English as “Türkiye”, he invites us to treat Turkey as a post-colonial failed state rather than as the Western democracy it was before his time. I mean, we use English exonyms for serious places. No one demands that we say Deutschland or Nippon or Magyarország. But touchy third-worldists demand Côte d’Ivoire, Timor-Leste and Cabo Verde – and now the Gulf of America - the classic needy-country move.

…..

Then again, as Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done cannot be undone”. Those who have downplayed, excused, or ignored Trump’s venality will struggle to find grounds on which to oppose equally sleazy stuff from a successor in either party. Standards have been permanently lowered. We will look back wistfully on what was lost."--from Hannan

It's hard to know where to start. Trump? Biden's Presidency-from-the -Crypt? Johnson's creeping Authoritarianism-with-Good-Intent?

Bad ideas will always get a hearing. Some will lie fallow and, unopposed, will fester. The Bell Curve is nonjudgmental. But tolerance for error and respect for precedents has momentum. Ask Dred Scott.

The Nobles and Nobility

On this day:
1305
William Wallace, who led the Scottish resistance against England, is captured by the English near Glasgow and transported to London where he is put on trial and executed.
1583
Sir Humphrey Gilbert establishes the first English colony in North America, at what is now St John’s, Newfoundland.
1620
The Mayflower departs from Southampton, England on its first attempt to reach North America.
1689
1,500 Iroquois attack the village of Lachine in New France.
1735
Freedom of the press: New York Weekly Journal writer John Peter Zenger is acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, on the basis that what he had published was true.
1763
Pontiac’s War: Battle of Bushy Run – British forces led by Henry Bouquet defeat Chief Pontiac’s Indians at Bushy Run.
1862
American Civil War: Battle of Baton Rouge – along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Confederate troops drive Union forces back into the city.
1864
American Civil War: the Battle of Mobile Bay begins – at Mobile Bay near Mobile, Alabama, Admiral David Farragut leads a Union flotilla through Confederate defenses and seals one of the last major Southern ports.
1884
The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island) in New York Harbor.
1916
World War I: Battle of Romani – Allied forces, under the command of Archibald Murray, defeat an attacking Ottoman army under the command of Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, securing the Suez Canal and beginning the Ottoman retreat from the Sinai Peninsula.
1944
World War II: The Nazis begin a three-day massacre of anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000 civilians and prisoners of war in Wola, Poland.
1979
In Afghanistan, Maoists undertake an attempted military uprising.
1981
Ronald Reagan fires 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work.

And

In the future, on this day:

https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/there-will-come-soft-rains

***

“Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials”--some guy named Climperman

***

The rising value of women’s time is largely counterbalanced by declining motherhood penalties in earnings and work hours, so forgone market work adds little to relative cost growth.--a paper that believes this is clear.

***

Kenny Pickett is on his fifth NFL team since entering the 2022 NFL draft. Pickett signed a $4 million contract with Carolina in March.

***

This year, like last year, “the European Union will again make more money from fining US tech companies than from the total tax income from Europe’s own public tech companies!”
Read that again.

***

The New Yorker has an article on "Discrimination against the unattractive"

***

The Nobles and Nobility

Fauci is beginning to change before our eyes into a weird alloy of his public service past and his new, careless and duplicitious present. But
Fauci, a man of parts, should raise some questions as to where the real dangers to us poor working stiffs come from. Is it the businessman? The capitalist? The farmer? Even the soldier? This will prove to be a tough assessment because the sort-of-free-Press is intimately involved in Fauci's image.

This quote is from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith is not a capitalist apologist but a true philosopher, an integral part of the Scottish Enlightenment that included Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. His Moral Sentiments was viewed at the time as being more important than his economic writings.

"The violence and injustice of great conquerors are often regarded with foolish wonder and admiration; those of petty thieves, robbers, and murderers, with contempt, hatred, and even horror upon all occasions. The former, though they are a hundred times more mischievous and destructive, yet when successful, they often pass for deeds of the most heroic magnanimity. The latter are always viewed with hatred and aversion, as the follies, as well as the crimes, of the lowest and most worthless of mankind. The injustice of the former is certainly, at least, as great as that of the latter; but the folly and imprudence are not near so great. A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes through the world with much more credit than he deserves."

"A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes through the world with much more credit than he deserves." And so the high-minded and the high-born are forgiven. 

We learn in school of warriors and warlords, the kindly beard-stroking teachers of homicidal philosophies--the cold and heartless man of parts and influence--and not the thoughtful, learned man of goodwill striving for a noble life. And, in any culture, what good can come of that?

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!”