The Museum of Self-Indulgence

On this day:

4004BC
The day of creation according to the Irish scholar Archbishop James Ussher, who used Biblical references, astronomical data, and secular history to build a timeline. This was published in 1650 and included in the margins of modern English Bibles, like the King James version, into the 19th Century.
42 BC

Roman Republican civil wars: Second Battle of Philippi – Mark Antony and Octavian decisively defeat Brutus’s army. Brutus commits suicide.
1641
Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
1642
Battle of Edgehill: First major battle of the First English Civil War.
1861
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus in Washington, D.C., for all military-related cases.
1906
Alberto Santos-Dumont flies an airplane in the first heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris, France.
1911
First use of aircraft in war: An Italian pilot takes off from Libya to observe Turkish army lines during the Turco-Italian War.
1912
First Balkan War: The Battle of Kumanovo between the Serbian and Ottoman armies begins.
1956
Thousands of Hungarians protest against the government and Soviet occupation. (The Hungarian Revolution is crushed on November 4).
1958
The Springhill Mine Bump – An underground earthquake traps 174 miners in the No. 2 colliery at Springhill, Nova Scotia, the deepest coal mine in North America at the time. By November 1, rescuers from around the world had dug out 100 of the victims, marking the death toll at 74.
1983
Lebanon Civil War: The U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut is hit by a truck bomb, killing 241 U.S. military personnel. A French army barracks in Lebanon is also hit that same morning, killing 58 troops.
2002
Moscow Theatre Siege begins: Chechen terrorists seize the House of Culture theater in Moscow and take approximately 700 theater-goers hostage.

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If a man can be a woman, there is no such thing as a woman. --Interesting line from Rowling

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Belling the cat: On Oct. 14, 2026, Citizens Against Government Waste released its 2026 edition of Prime Cuts. First published in 1993, when the national debt was $4.4 trillion, its 494 recommendations, drawn from proposals by both Democratic and Republican administrations, members of Congress, and nonpartisan sources, would save $639 billion in the first year and $5.6 trillion over five years.

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Researchers say they have found a consistent internal signal that seems to function a little bit like pain does in biological beings inside 25 different AI models. Like pain.

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Ben Kindel could return to practice as soon as next week after losing consciousness aboard the Pittsburgh Penguins team plane Tuesday, general manager Kyle Dubas said Thursday. The episode has been called 'vasovagal,' a sudden drop in pulse rate and blood pressure, the mechanism of fainting.

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Is 'The greatest good for the greatest number' meaningful without a definition of 'the good'?

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The Museum of Self-Indulgence

A provocative question has been raised about the Smithsonian Institution.

The White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) published a report arguing that the Smithsonian Institution has “adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance.” More bluntly, the report—titled “Saving America’s Story”—claims the exhibits at the Smithsonian’s flagship National Museum of American History were “prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.” According to DPC director Vince Haley, “The bottom line is that there’s no national story at the National Museum of American History.”

Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott writes that Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch—who recently announced that he’ll retire at year’s end—“has been an enormously consequential leader.” Kennicott elaborates: “Never has the nation more urgently needed to focus on key issues, like climate change and its long history of racial, ethnic and class division,” rather than on “the happy narrative of American exceptionalism.”

In his 2019 book A Fool’s Errand, Bunch criticized a museum profession “awash in whiteness” and expressed his desire “to help Americans grapple with their own culpability in creating a society based on slavery.” He has also said that he wants museums “to make diversity and inclusion so central that it’s no longer talked about,” and that museums should “inspire new generations of activists.” His worldview is particularly evident at the National Museum of American History, where exhibits opened under his watch—and that of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director for the past seven years—excessively prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion over telling America’s story. The museum now devotes more square footage to displays about lowrider cars and salsa music than to displays about the American Founding.

Is this received well? Is there a correlation between these changes and attendance?

According to the institution’s own statistics, in 2018—the last full pre-Bunch (and pre-Hartig) year—the number of visits to the Smithsonian was 28.5 million. In 2025, it was 14.9 million. In other words, the Smithsonian had barely over half as many visits in 2025 as in 2018.

If we exclude numbers from the National Zoo, which hasn’t been overtaken by DEI—and, unsurprisingly, hasn’t declined in popularity—from this assessment, the Smithsonian lost even more than half of its attendance from 2018 to 2025: visits fell from 26.7 million to 13 million, a 51 percent drop. The National Museum of American History fared worse than Smithsonian museums overall. From 2018 to 2025, its attendance fell from 4.1 million visits to just 1.8 million—a 56 percent decline.

The median American museum lost only 5 percent of its annual attendance from pre- to post-COVID, comparing 2019 to 2025. The Smithsonian’s attendance drop over that same timespan places it in the bottom 10 percent of all museums nationally. 

Is all this just a coincidence?

--most from City Journal

Some UBI Results

On this day:
362
A mysterious fire destroys the Temple of Apollo at Daphne outside Antioch.
1707
Scilly naval disaster: four British Royal Navy ships run aground near the Isles of Scilly because of faulty navigation. Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell and thousands of sailors drown.
1784
Russia founds a colony on Kodiak Island, Alaska.
1797
One thousand meters (3,200 feet) above Paris, André-Jacques Garnerin makes the first recorded parachute jump.
1844
The Great Anticipation: Millerites, followers of William Miller, anticipate the end of the world in conjunction with the Second Advent of Christ. The following day became known as the Great Disappointment.
1877
The Blantyre mining disaster in Scotland kills 207 miners.
1943
World War II: in the Second firestorm raid on Germany, the Royal Air Force conducts an air raid on the town of Kassel, killing 10,000 and rendering 150,000 homeless.
1962
Cuban Missile Crisis: US President John F. Kennedy, after internal counsel from Dwight D. Eisenhower, announces that American reconnaissance planes have discovered Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, and that he has ordered a naval “quarantine” of the Communist nation.
1964
Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turns down the honor.
2008
India launches its first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1.

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"Debt is future consumption brought forward," von Böhm-Bawerk

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Starlink is having regulatory problems in India. This, from Space Jam:
It’s important to remember here that Starlink is not any ordinary satellite operator: it has massive geopolitical power. It operates the largest LEO constellation with about 11,000 satellites, a scale that’s difficult for its competitors in India to currently match. Starlink and SpaceX are also key parts of the U.S.’s civil and defense space ecosystems, with Starlink playing a key role in the Ukraine conflict. Again, India has multiple interests to balance: consumer choice, local innovation, and its relationship with the U.S. A key challenge for the nation here, therefore, is in taking advantage of Starlink’s technical capabilities while ensuring that the national communications infrastructure isn’t controlled by a single operator.

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Cameroon’s 92-year-old Paul Biya is no ordinary leader.
Ruling oil-rich Cameroon since 1982, the world’s oldest head of state basically lives at the InterContinental Geneva, where his delegation books out the entire 16th floor.

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The moon turns red because, as Earth blocks the Sun's rays, any sunlight reaching the moon has to travel along our planet's edge. Most of the light with shorter wavelengths—blue, violet, and green—is scattered away by the atmosphere, leaving only longer wavelengths—the red, orange, and yellow colours —to dimly illuminate the moon.

This process also causes the reds and yellows at sunrise and sunset.

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Federal authorities on Thursday charged a prominent Virginia Democrat with racketeering and a money laundering conspiracy as part of an alleged public corruption case involving a cannabis business she co-owns. Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, one of the most powerful Democrats in the state, surrendered to authorities Thursday, the Justice Department spokesperson said.

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Dubas said the Kindel incident has been diagnosed as a vasovagal episode.

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Four years after being the #4 draft pick, Termarr Johnson's development has stalled, his prospect stock has plummeted, and a devastating knee injury has made an already uncertain future even more complicated.

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Europe is worried about its reliance upon American space technology. 98% of the weight launched into space is carried by SpaceX.

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Some UBI Results

Universal basic income (UBI) is a notion that would provide federal cash for everyone, no strings attached. An annual payout to every citizen--age limits to be determined--to guarantee the basic necessities of life.

There's a history. Thomas Paine, a pamphleteer whose ideas helped spur the American Revolution, proposed a tax plan in which revenues would provide a basic government income. So, too, Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed “guaranteed income” in his book "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" published in 1967. In 1962’s "Capitalism and Freedom",  Milton Friedman argued that a “negative income tax”—essentially a UBI—would help overcome a mindset where citizens aren’t inclined to make sacrifices if they don’t believe others will follow suit. Libertarian philosopher Charles Murray believes that guaranteed income would also cut government bureaucracy. He has proposed a $10,000-per-year UBI, as well as basic health insurance, which he says would allow the government to cut Social Security and other redistribution programs.

And a present. AI is looming. How will workers be impacted? In 2023, researchers at OpenAI—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) research organization—and the University of Pennsylvania published a working paper analyzing the impact of the technology on the labor market. Per their analysis, 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work affected by large language models, a type of AI that can process and generate text. 19% of workers could see 50% or more of their tasks impacted. AI might alleviate the damage. And there's Andrew Yang, always the smartest guy in the room. He estimates UBI, which he enthusiastically endorses, would cost almost $2 trillion and suggests covering those expenses, in part, by shrinking other social programs and imposing a 10% value-added tax (VAT) on businesses. He also proposed ending the cap on Social Security payroll taxes and taxing carbon emissions for his guaranteed income plan.

Comedian Dave Chappelle, a serious guy, thinks UBI would "save my community almost instantly."

UBI activist Conrad Shaw agrees, "You would effectively get rid of extreme poverty immediately."
He says a UBI will help people "start businesses, fix their homes, or invest in sustainable gardens."

Sustainable gardens.

Sam Altman, the guy behind ChatGPT, helped create a test. His big study gave 1,000 low-income people $1,000 per month for three years—no strings attached. What happened?

Not the great things that were promised. After three years of getting $1,000/month, UBI recipients were actually a little deeper in debt than before.

Why? Because they worked less. Their partners did, too.

And the group used more health care.

Some recipients talked about starting businesses, but few actually tried it. Most who said they did start a business waited until the third year of the study—when their free money was about to end.

Some advocates said that working less meant they were enjoying life more. As might be expected, work generally doesn't seem to be a virtue in this group.

But nobody ever said getting $1,000 a month was bad.

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.

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"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)

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Another "No Kings" weekend. A funny aspect of '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.

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In his early fantasy baseball shortstop rankings for 2027, CBS Sports' Scott White ranked Griffin fourth overall, behind only Bobby Witt Jr., Elly De La Cruz and C.J. Abrams.

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...“children getting lost in the woods, in a world without human signifiers, without signage or trails, only celestial bodies and natural forms”--from the new translation of Thure Erik Lund’s The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch

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Anyone who challenges the notion that campus rape is a widespread phenomenon, or that alleged victims must automatically be believed, supports and upholds “cultures and systems of rape, sexual assault, and violence,” in the words of Columbia Political Review.--City Journal


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No Pawns

One of the country-and-western axioms of democracy is that 'Freedom Isn't Free.' It also isn't one-sided. A look at the American Revolution, a pivotal event 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, Congress ratified 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.

The Merging of Stupid and Madness

On this day

622
Prophet Muhammad completes his hijra from Mecca to Medina.
1180
Manuel I Komnenos, last Emperor of the Komnenian restoration, dies. The Byzantine Empire slips into terminal decline.
1645
Battle of Rowton Heath, Parliamentarian victory over a Royalist army commanded in person by King Charles
1780
Benedict Arnold flees to British Army lines when the arrest of British Major John André exposes Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point.
1869
“Black Friday”: Gold prices plummet after Ulysses S. Grant orders the Treasury to sell large quantities of gold after Jay Gould and James Fisk plot to control the market.
1890
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially renounces polygamy.
1957
President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends 101st Airborne Division troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce desegregation.
2009
The G20 summit begins in Pittsburgh with 30 global leaders in attendance. It marks the first use of LRAD in U.S. history.
2025
Sara Jane Moore, a Ford would-be assassin, dies.

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"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Douglas Adams

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Wealth Tax? The numbers are terrible. Wealth is not cash sitting idle in a bank account. It is the factories, companies, technologies, and investments that generate future income for millions of people. Taxing wealth at punitive rates may satisfy a desire to punish the rich, but it risks shrinking the very economic base from which future prosperity will come. It's a self-imposed tariff on comfort.

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The Dark Ages implies that television and phones are the main cause of cognitive decline. This fails to explain the patterns in PISA scores. Why did England and Scotland fall so precipitously from 2000 to 2005 whilst America improved? Why did England and Estonia hold steady after 2015 whilst most other OECD countries declined? How have Singapore, Taiwan, and ,Japan avoided decline altogether?

A better explanation is that a country’s education system is more important than its television diffusion.--Thompson

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American Revolution stated the rights of man were preordained, not granted or inflicted upon man by the government. This created the world's first written democratic constitution and the world's longest existing democracy. Those eager to overturn this dramatic redirection of human direction are counter-revolutionaries.

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Sara Jane Moore died Sept 24, 2025. She fired a shot at President Gerald Ford on Sept. 22, 1975 as he exited the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, but missed by inches due to a faulty sight on her gun
She served 32 years of her life sentence before being released from custody in 2007, and said she believed that killing a sitting president would spark a revolution in the U.S.
Moore, who had four children and was married five times, passed away at the age of 95 in a Tennessee nursing home.

This is an old post:

The Merging of Stupid and Madness  

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

Clyde Barrows? Trotsky?

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

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

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

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

Is this beginning to sound familiar? 

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

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

A culture where the unreasonable bleeds into the irrational.

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

Morality-Based Mendacity

 On this day:

1515
Thomas Wolsey is invested as a Cardinal
1823
Simón Bolívar is named President of Peru.
1846
Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
1897
Lattimer massacre: A sheriff’s posse kills 20 unarmed immigrant miners in Pennsylvania, United States.
1898
Empress Elizabeth of Austria is assassinated by Luigi Luchen
1939
World War II: The submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy’s first loss.
1963
20 African-American students enter public schools in Alabama.
2008
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

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We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.--Sowell

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Criterion: n: A principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided. Early 17th century: from Greek kritērion 'means of judging', from kritēs. As is "crisis." At one time a crisis was specifically the turning point of a disease, a change that leads either to recovery or death. Also the root of "critic" (early 17th century), and "critical" (late 16th century.
The plural is "criteria."

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If consumers choose to buy products with social benefits, or refuse to buy those that inflict social harms, nothing about the capitalist system prevents them from doing so. If investors want to accept lower returns in exchange for investing in socially conscious businesses, they are free to do that too.

But the governmental activist does not want to rely upon the citizen or his decision-making. He believes the citizen must be forced to do the right thing.

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President Donald Trump says he would offer every adult American a $5,000 payout if Republicans win both chambers of Congress in November's midterm elections – a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars.
The offer was made in a speech at the party's first-ever convention in the middle of a US presidential term.

At some point here, irony has become shameful.

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“Y’all ain’t dreamed big enough yet. Some of these clickety-clack revolutionaries have never been in a f—ing gunfight, but some of us that grew up in the hood know what guns are like. … Y’all ain’t nowhere near ready for a war in the streets. You better get ready for both kinds of war, and if you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.”-- Butch Ware, associate professor of history at UCSB, on Saturday at the Marxism Conference in Chicago. A professor of history at a major college.

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There were so many pop-ups on Lit Hub this morning, I couldn't read it.

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Lunch yesterday at Casbah. Carol's salad was so awful she could not eat it. I found a sharp, thumbnail-sized piece of porcelain in my salad that was almost weapons-grade. 

Really mind-changing about the place.

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Morality-Based Mendacity

The arrogance of the righteous knows no bounds. When you know the truth, you do not care who knows your agenda. And, as always, those eager to appoint themselves as our leaders have great disdain for those they feel are nothing but an audience for their great performance.

Here are some quotes from "climate leaders" who have glory on their minds.
Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC's fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth." 

U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.'s 2014 Paris climate conference was "to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution." 

Christine Stewart, Canada's former Minister of the Environment, said: "No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. ... Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." 

Tim Wirth, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol, said: "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."

Under ordinary circumstances, such disclaimers would be incendiary to an informed, aware audience. So maybe the lack of response to the insincerity is more disturbing than the proud insincerity itself.

Nostalgia

On this day:
31 BC
Final War of the Roman Republic: Battle of Actium – off the western coast of Greece, forces of Octavian defeat troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
44 BC
Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion.
44 BC
Cicero launches the first of his Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. He will make 14 of them over the following months.
1666
The Great Fire of London breaks out and burns for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings including St Paul’s Cathedral.
1792
During what became known as the September Massacres of the French Revolution, rampaging mobs slaughter three Roman Catholic Church bishops, more than two hundred priests, and prisoners believed to be royalist sympathizers.
1864
American Civil War: Union forces enter Atlanta, Georgia, a day after the Confederate defenders flee the city.
1870
Franco-Prussian War: Battle of Sedan – Prussian forces take Napoleon III of France and 100,000 of his soldiers prisoner.
1885
Rock Springs massacre: in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 150 white miners, who are struggling to unionize so they could strike for better wages and work conditions, attack their Chinese fellow workers killing 28, wounding 15 and forcing several hundred more out of town.
1945
World War II: Combat ends in the Pacific Theater: the Instrument of Surrender of Japan is signed by Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and accepted aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
1958
United States Air Force C-130A-II is shot down by fighters over Yerevan in Armenia when it strays into Soviet airspace while conducting a SIGINT mission. All crew members are killed.

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"Follow a tip from a company's president and you will lose half your money. Get a tip from the chairman and you'll lose all of it."
--Bennett Goodspeed (The Tao Jones Averages)

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The German government on Tuesday blamed Russia for an attempted attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport last month using a drone laden with explosives, and announced that it would shut down a Russian consulate among other measures.

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In Cuba, government permission is needed to have a boat. The fishermen's boats are smaller than a normal rowboat and therefore too small to take far from shore (e.g., to another country). Or to fish. So most seafood has to be imported.

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Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) is an extensive reconstruction of Marx as a thinker and philosopher. One of his observations: Partly as a result of the influence of Engels, Marx has often been seen as an admirer of Darwin. But in fact Marx disliked Darwin’s theory of natural selection because it left human progress ‘purely accidental’, preferring the work of the forgotten French ethnographer Pierre Trémaux, who argued that racial differences have ‘a natural basis’ in biology and geology – a common view at the time.
Is that like Critical Theory?

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So, let's just say we recognize that data centers, their energy demands and their negative downstream AI effects, influence voters--and therefore their so-called leaders--to stop data center production.
Then what?

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Nostalgia

If the principles of the Constitution are nostalgic, what should be done?. Can you replace principles? What replaces them? And why? If we scrap the Constitution and its well-defined rights of man, will we find new rights? Will there be a vote on them first before the plans of implementing their protection are enumerated? Can you imagine the likes of Kamala Harris and AOC rewriting the works of Madison and Jefferson?

Perhaps a Memorandum of Understanding.

Kamala Harris recently insisted that opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court is mere “nostalgia” for a system that is no longer working. “I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,” she said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also declared that “nostalgia is not working” and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work.”

Marxists had long rejected calls to preserve institutions and citizens’ rights as “nostalgia” and “sentimentality,” standing in the way of needed progress. (See Mao.)

For the Democratic Socialist of America organization, nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate, presidency, and the Supreme Court to fundamentally change the republic.

A choir of 'nostalgia awareness.'

After Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent working in the media, defected in 1970, he revealed the four stages by which the Soviets hoped to bring about revolutionary change in the U.S. It began with undermining our institutions and values, with the help of journalists and academics.

In a New York Times op-ed — “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” — law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

In yet another New York Times editorial, Jennifer Szalai denounced “Constitution worship” and claimed that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”

Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky insists that it is time to trash the Constitution in favor of “radical changes.”

The Constitution is a foundation and a framework to confine the ambitions of men. Instead of relying on 'the angels' we elect with their embodiment of the virtues of man, we should provide our leaders with electric dog collars to keep them in their place. After all, many of them are from the lower quintile of the class and will need help in dealing with the lowest 3% of the class.

Without those protections, we will unleash the self-destructive forces that have been tearing apart other democratic systems since Athens. It is our Constitution that spared us from that fate. As James Madison observed, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Great Britain and Mississippi

On this day:

20
Agrippa Postumus, adoptive son of the late Roman Emperor Augustus, is executed by his guards while in exile under mysterious circumstances
636
Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid seize Syria and Palestine from the Byzantine Empire, marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests and the rapid advance of Islam outside Arabia.
1308
Pope Clement V pardons Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, absolving him of charges of heresy.
1672
Former Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis are brutally murdered by an angry mob in The Hague.
1858
Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory.
1998
U.S. embassy bombings: the United States launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

***

Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to.

***

Louisiana requires florists to be licensed. Are their arrangements better? More pleasing to the eye? Better for the environment? Safer? Is there a national security reason?

***

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows, and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat.

***

Pittsburgh in Esquire:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a73444112/insiders-guide-pittsburgh/

***

Great Britain and Mississippi

"How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi" is a good piece in the Atlantic by Idrees Kahloon:

Some colorful anecdotes of a nation in decline:

The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care.

Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Does this sound familiar?

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.

…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.

Upon closer inspection, the United States looks a lot less like a shining city on a hill and a lot more like a declining Great Britain, appendaged with one or two dynamic sectors, most notably AI. The similarities are especially obvious in the retrograde solutions Britain has lumbered into, namely attacking immigrants and trade—Brexit being the equivalent of a high tariff regime. Nations in decline, like people, tend to lash out at others rather than deal with their real problems. Needless to say, neither immigrants nor trade explain Britain’s—or California’s—inability to build high-speed rail or other infrastructure.

It is discomforting to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and free speech—the nation that once built the railways, the steam engines, the factories that remade the world—lose the capacity to build much of anything, or even to tolerate people speaking their minds. In parallel, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right gets literally hysterical over symbolic culture-war questions like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and progress movements are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.

Behind the Mayor's Smile

On this day:

43 BC
Octavian, later known as Augustus, compels the Roman Senate to elect him Consul.
1561
An 18-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots, returns to Scotland after spending 13 years in France.
1612
The “Samlesbury witches”, three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, are put on trial, accused for practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in English history.
1692
Salem witch trials: in Salem, Massachusetts, Province of Massachusetts Bay five people, one woman and four men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.
1745
Prince Charles Edward Stuart raises his standard in Glenfinnan – the start of the Second Jacobite Rebellion, known as “the 45”.
1782
American Revolutionary War: Battle of Blue Licks – the last major engagement of the war, almost ten months after the surrender of the British commander Lord Cornwallis following the Siege of Yorktown.
1812
War of 1812: American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, earning her nickname “Old Ironsides”.
1848
California Gold Rush: the New York Herald breaks the news to the East Coast of the United States of the gold rush in California (although the rush started in January).
1934
The creation of the position Führer is approved by the German electorate with 89.9% of the popular vote.
1960
Cold War: in Moscow, downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Soviet Union for espionage.
1991
Dissolution of the Soviet Union, August Coup: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is placed under house arrest while on holiday in the town of Foros, Crimea.
1999
In Belgrade, tens of thousands of Serbians rally to demand the resignation of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milošević.

***

"Many bad men, for sure, are rich, and many good men poor; yet will we not change our virtue for these men's wealth, seeing that virtue endureth but possessions belong now to this man and now to that." - Theognis of Megara, 6th/5th century bc., apparently a zero-sum guy. More than half of the extant elegiac poetry of Greece before the Alexandrian period is his. (He also wrote that he wanted to drink the blood of his enemies, mostly pro-democratic revolutionaries.)

***

It is reported that China is now arresting economics professors at their own universities who tell the truth about China’s stagnating economy in their classes

***

Former President Obama’s drone assassinations of American citizens were non-issues because observers knew Obama “meant well.” When Obama decided to bomb Libya in 2011, his appointees made it clear that he would ignore the War Powers Act of 1973, enacted to prevent presidents from launching wars on their whim. When a federal judge ruled in May 2016 that the Obama administration’s consumer subsidies under the Affordable Care Act violated the Constitution, the decision was almost completely ignored — perhaps because Obama’s illegalities were progressive. When President Trump ended the subsidies, he was denounced for trampling Congressional prerogatives.
This is possible only if people are not paying attention or do not care.

***

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi is travelling to South Korea today (Wed) for his first official visit there in five years. Why now?

***

Trebuchets reached the peak of their development in medieval times, probably the most famous example being Edward I’s massive machine, Warwolf. This terrifying device was over sixty feet (18 meters) high and was capable of throwing a three-hundred-pound (140-kilogram) rock several hundred yards, projecting some five hundred kilojoules of energy, a thousand times the power of Roman ballistas and five thousand times as powerful as a single person. Edward used it just once, in 1304 during his wars of conquest against the Scots, to attack Stirling Castle, the last stronghold of the Scottish armies. The defenders were so petrified by the prospect of the attack that they sued for peace before Warwolf could be used, but Edward refused to let them surrender until he had tested the machine; in four days it totally destroyed one of the castle’s curtain walls.--Ennos

***

Shackleton Crater near the moon's South Pole has high rims that create permanently shadowed regions known as “cold traps,” where it’s thought that water (in the form of ice) and other useful materials may have accumulated over billions of years. In all of NASA’s and China’s plans for long-term settlement on the Moon, relatively few square miles at the Moon's South Pole matter most.

If they are successful, what will China's territorial decisions be?

***

An eight-year Finnish study found that children who spent more time on screens tended to show better cognitive processing as teenagers, challenging common assumptions about screen use. 

***

Behind the Mayor's Smile

Mamdani's biggest asset seems to be his smile. And his incongruity. (He's speaking Chinese.) But...

NYC sent out letters to people thought to be eligible for the second home pied-à-terre tax. Then NYC published it. Why would they do that?

Malice. They want to identify their enemies to their base. With luck, they will personalize their outrage. Maybe even show up and vent their anger. There might be violence- just enough to imply the war the Left believes in and cherishes.

These are bad people who do not wish us or our culture well.

The Shepherd's Coup

On this day:

1419
First Defenestration of Prague: a crowd of radical Hussites kill seven members of the Prague city council.
1502
Christopher Columbus lands at Guanaja in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras during his fourth voyage.
1608
At Ticonderoga (now Crown Point, New York), Samuel de Champlain shoots and kills two Iroquois chiefs. This was to set the tone for French-Iroquois relations for the next one hundred years.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of the Crater – Union forces attempt to break Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia by exploding a large bomb under their trenches.
1945
World War II: Japanese submarine I-58 sinks the USS Indianapolis, killing 883 seamen.
1971
Apollo program: Apollo 15 Mission – David Scott and James Irwin on the Apollo Lunar Module Falcon land on the Moon with the first Lunar Rover.
1975
Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again, and will be declared legally dead on this date in 1982.

***

"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."--Frank Borman

***

In such a small-scale society [as colonial North America], privacy as we know it did not exist, and our sharp modern distinction between private and public was as yet scarcely visible. Living quarters were crowded, and people who were not formally related – servants, hired laborers, nurses, and other lodgers – were often jammed together with family members in the same room or even in the same bed.--somewhere

***

The staggering debt will bring to a head many triage decisions that are more than philosophical. One will be the willingness of future taxpayers to impose taxes on themselves to finance benefits of comfortable retirees.

***

On Friday, Thinking Machines released its first manifesto, outlining its vision for a future in which AI was decentralized and built on local knowledge. The company, whose CEO, [Mira] Murati, witnessed the collapse of communism in her native Albania as a child, compared the current dominant AI paradigm of closed-source frontier labs to “central planning”—great for bounded tasks like chess and math, but not for the real work humans do every day.

***

If the DSA wants to ensure that “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses,” but instead make them “common goods,” they will have to make it illegal to provide those goods and services for profit and punish people who violate the relevant laws. That is, they will have to expect the emergence--or widening--of the relatively small American Black Market.

That will be fun.

***

The Shepherd's Coup

The Editor of The Atlantic spoke smugly on the BBC about Fauci and his Senate appearance, dismissing the U.S. connection with the Wuhan lab as small-minded political jousting, in a MasterClass of condescension. The nature of American involvement in a viral change-of-function project looking awfully like a malignant bioweapons program was not mentioned.

So, Fauci is petty and dishonest. I am truly sorry. I wish he were dashing and grand with insight and easily understood observations on how we live and what social and governmental leaders can do to protect us and improve our lives. But we must understand the real meaning of Fauci's slow public dissolution because it is elemental.

The Americans, with the West trailing, have created and developed the most astonishingly successful society of free men in history. The American unique vision of mankind, with inalienable rights neither granted nor fungible, has allowed for the gradual development of a dominant, innovative and generally benign economy and social state of accomplished citizens that improves health, education and comfort, and which is, amazingly, available to anyone.

During its evolution, the country has seen a subset of its citizens grow up along with it, claiming responsibility for its success and inculcating into the culture the belief that they are essential to its future. Politicians and their attendants, along with a new parallel culture of bureaucratic drones and parasitic governmental entrepreneurs, now shape our lives, limit our freedoms, and try to shape our futures. The basic guiding principles in the society have been undermined and now are blatantly opposed by new prophets and half-wits.

There has been a slow-motion revolution in the hive, and the Queen is dead.

Fauci is the poster child of this disaster. Self-important, ambitious beyond his reach, and confident in matters he does not--and, perhaps, cannot--understand, he creates leadership and guidance that appears, in retrospect, almost randomly simplistic.

And dangerous. Dangerous. Not just to the philosophical nature of the country but to the very health and wellbeing of the world.

15 million people died as a direct result of the Wuhan virus, and countless others were destroyed as governments slashed around like a wild giant trying to stop it. Now they are lying about it, patiently explaining to us poor rubes to let the visionaries alone to do their good work. But there is no 'good work.' You cannot kill 15 million people, then point to the success you've had legalizing a new right 'to turn-right-on red' breakthrough.

The lesson is not that demagogues are dangerous; the lesson is that they are incapable of making good decisions. And the lower 3% are of bad intent

And, of course, these people pardon each other. The general is responsible for the dying young man in the field but never to him.

And it will get worse. Shallow 'grand visions.' New revolutions to kill and die for. Half-baked ideas advanced by the presumptuous sorcerer's apprentices from the lowest quintile of everyone's high school class. These so-called leaders will have new leverage to whet their hunger. Gene editing. AI. Miniaturized weaponry. New threats to the working guy are emerging from the elemental slime of men's minds. But no threat yet can match that of the arrogant, ambitious, hubristic, preening political leader and his entourage.

From Pipe-Dreams to Pipe Bombs and Back

 On this day (yesterday, actually):

1533
Atahualpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, dies by strangulation at the hands of Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors. His death marks the end of 300 years of Inca civilization.
1581
Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (Act of Abjuration): the northern Low Countries declare their independence from the Spanish king, Philip II.
1863
American Civil War: Morgan’s Raid ends – At Salineville, Ohio, Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan and 360 of his volunteers are captured by Union forces.
1941
World War II: in response to the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the seizure of all Japanese assets in the United States.
1944
The first German V-2 rocket hits Great Britain.
1944
World War II: the Soviet army enters Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine, liberating it from the Nazis. Only 300 Jews survive out of 160,000 living in Lviv prior to occupation.
1945
The Labour Party wins the United Kingdom general election of July 5 by a landslide, removing Winston Churchill from power.
1945
The Potsdam Declaration is signed in Potsdam, Germany.
1953
Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle orders an anti-polygamy law enforcement crackdown on residents of Short Creek, Arizona, which becomes known as the Short Creek Raid.

1953

Fidel Castro leads an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, thus beginning the Cuban Revolution. The movement took the name of the date: 26th of July Movement
1956
Following the World Bank’s refusal to fund building the Aswan High Dam, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal sparking international condemnation.
1989
A federal grand jury indicts Cornell University student Robert T. Morris, Jr. for releasing the Morris worm, thus becoming the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

***

Random attacks prove only that the state cannot protect its citizens, challenging the citizenry's basic belief.

***

Three people were killed and four others wounded in a shooting at a food festival near Seattle's Space Needle on Sunday evening, police said. A suspect was arrested, and another was being sought, they said.
Seattle Assistant Police Chief Tyrone Davis said at a late-night press conference that the incident involved two people they believe were shooting at each other. One was taken into custody, and the other was still on the loose.

***

Where is the $800 million de Blasio gave his wife?

***

Global households added a record $40 trillion in wealth in 2025, pushing total household net worth to $570 trillion—a 7.3% jump that outpaced the 5.9% average growth rate seen since 2000—as the world’s overall balance sheet of assets swelled to nearly $1.8 quadrillion, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s newly released “Global Balance Sheet 2026: Imbalance and Divergence” report.

These are astonishing numbers for a world crying out for revolution.

***

The Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that “The Roberts Court sees only white.” It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that “overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.”
This is from a court.

***

From Pipe-Dreams to Pipe Bombs and Back

Communism was doomed from its inception. Adherents who sneered at the "invisible hand" saw a mysterious invisible force in history that picked its fights toward an idyllic endpoint of incentive-less, motiveless production of peace and wealth, leaving behind a path littered with the bodies of those poor souls only placed on this earth to facilitate as antagonists to communism's great march. This strange, murderous idealism violated all the laws of human reality yet staggered on, storming trenches, deracinating appropriate families, and slashing and burning the present to plant the seeds of the future. It is said that it attracted the idealist--but who could say its mayhem and murderous creed was, in any way, idealistic? No, it attracted the foolish, the embittered, the cynically ambitious, the irrational, and the overtly psychopathic, who unsurprisingly rose in its hierarchy. But eventually, after years of misery and death, the cause flagged, failed, and died.

The death of communism was perfectly predictable, and those critics who predicted it can be rightfully proud. But they must be surprised by its stubborn death throes. How many people were drafted into its horrible, morbid experiment? How many had to die to prove this was a stupid, unworkable, and unnatural pipe-dream? And what are the responsibilities of those clear-thinking observers who coolly watched this nightmare without interfering? After all, it took the Russian communist state three generations to die.

The cockroach has survived by perfecting itself and enduring; Marxism has survived by entirely changing. It no longer speaks to the proletariat and their work; it speaks to the landed, to those whose expensive educations, trust funds and parents' influence are inadequate for their ambitions.

What used to be a fierce warfare born from convoluted economics and history has become simple sociology and envy. We are no longer required to rise up against inevitable historical enemies; those enemies, disappointed and bitter, have become the oppressed. Their enemy is social imbalance; their engines are bigotry and unequal outcome. These social distortions must be righted for the good of 'the Commons' by those of vision and fortitude.

After years of defeats, the upper class wants their aristocracy back.

Artificial Insemination

 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.

***

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

***

How are Kash Patel's blinking lessons going?

***

Two National Institutes of Health researchers have been charged with allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying to federal authorities.

Vincent Munster, chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, and research fellow Claude Kwe were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after returning from the Republic of Congo.

***

There is an undercurrent of criticism toward Lionel Messi because he hasn't publicly addressed the unspoken national generalizations about Argentina's unspoken racial generalizations.

***

A whale population spontaneously drops its entire repertoire every few years and collectively adopts an entirely new song from thousands of miles away—long-range cultural transmission outside humanity.

***

Artificial Insemination

Radio belly. Cat shovel.

Peculiar junctions of normal adjectives and nouns are always a tipoff; you are dealing with either a Beat poet or a progressive. The poet jars, the progressive inculcates.

With a progressive, one term is being infused with the other. A hybrid is being created, and the alloy is usually a monster. "Health care justice." "The criminal community." "Democratic socialism." Linguistic square pegs are forced into conceptual round holes.

Our lives have become so inundated with opinion and conflict that we are becoming calloused. Do illegal immigrants demand the assumption of innocence? Does an illegal immigrant have to commit another crime before we take him seriously? Can a vicious criminal be abused by the law? Are 'fraudsters' different from thieves? Our whole nation is founded on the right of the individual to defy the majority; does that empower a crazy foreign student?

So we suffer through tortuous legal wranglings and debates. And we know that the system is geared to fairness, so we let these debates play themselves out. A man sues a casual girlfriend for alimony, a group demands dolphin voting rights--and we get up and go to work. We turn the page.

These verbal shotgun marriages wear us down. What is 'social justice," really? The right of people to join a club? To marry whoever you want? To attend any school? It's like hybridization across species; you know the product will be sterile anyway.

What follows is an event reported by Megan McArdle in the WashPo. That this is not a topic of daily conversation is proof of the notion's malignancy.

"In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.

This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories."

In the political laboratory, no experiment is innocuous, no noble lie without consequence, particularly as the fifth column and the press make the inane or the revolutionary routine.

The Enemies of the Good

 On this day:

365
A tsunami devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by the Crete earthquake, estimated to be 8.0 on the Richter Scale. 5,000 people perished in Alexandria, and 45,000 more died outside the city.
1403
Battle of Shrewsbury: King Henry IV of England defeats rebels to the north of the county town of Shropshire, England.
1861
American Civil War: First Battle of Bull Run – at Manassas Junction, Virginia, the first major battle of the war begins and ends in a victory for the Confederate army.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1961
Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission – Gus Grissom piloting Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space (in a suborbital mission).
1969
Space Race: Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission (July 20 in North America).
1973
In the Lillehammer affair in Norway, Israeli Mossad agents kill a waiter whom they mistakenly thought was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.
2005
Four terrorist bombings, occurring exactly two weeks after the similar July 7 bombings, target London’s public transportation system. All four bombs fail to detonate and all four suspected suicide bombers are captured and later convicted and imprisoned for long terms.
2011
NASA’s Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135

***

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.---Lord Acton

***

Since we have become a people who hope to shape our nature through the adoption and criminalization of words like "Washington Redskins," shouldn't we do something to soften the aggressive and dangerous name inherent in the State of Delaware?

***

Gymnasium is a Latinisation of the Greek, meaning to exercise. Its root word is the same as for 'nude.'

The Greeks banned women from the gymnasium but, I believe, the Etruscans did not.

***

John Scopes found guilty, the Americans land on the moon, both on the same day in history. I wonder if we could start a political study, deductible of course, on how days of the year contain inherent historical leanings, like a horoscope. We could meet in Acapulco every six months and discuss our findings, maybe get a university chair or two.

***

The full cost of making America a welfare state wasn’t fully recorded in the federal budget deficits of the 1970s because inflation and bracket creep tax increases transferred much of the cost to the family budget.

***

The Enemies of the Good

Cultures are always threatened by envy, madness, the restless need to change into some imagined good. (The old saw, 'the enemy of good is better.') The Americans are particularly subject to assault because their philosophy allows the revolutionary the freedom to try it.

The American foundation is tough, though. The Founders recognized whimsy as a weak and inaccurate  (and adolescent) motive in political change. And common and shape-changing. They demanded a philosophy and a slow process of foundational restructuring. This may explain the frustrated frenzy of contemporary revolutionaries. Any more, the Americans seem willing to import them.

The current threat from the Left seems to have coalesced into incoherence. America is so brilliantly constructed that its enemies have simply stopped trying to replace it and devolved into emotional tantrums. The objections to America have become geographic, like Israel. Or religious, like Islam. Or historic, like slavery. None of these points are actionable as they are peripheral to the country itself. Their energy is resentment, not constructive. So they would overthrow the British government over the Corn Laws. These are people who hate Catholicism because of the Crusades and Blacks because of the Congo Wars. America's domestic enemies are people without context.

Mamdani will be risky for them because he is real. The Netanyahu kerfluffle is silly but instructive. Mamdani wants to enforce an international edit the country doesn't recognize. This raises practical questions. Who will enforce the edit? Local police? Would they fight Israeli regulars? State cops? National Guard? Where would they put him? Would Israeli special forces counter? Are we going to ask American boys to die for the Hague over some incoherent international cult?

The Left is on the wrong side of all this, but they don't care about much other than winning and blood in the streets. Their incoherence, though, might give them a strange advantage as no sensible person would take such a crew seriously.