Redoing Socialism

 On this day:

1260
The Mamluks defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine, marking their first decisive defeat and the point of maximum expansion of the Mongol Empire.
1650
Third English Civil War: in the Battle of Dunbar, English Parliamentarian forces led by Oliver Cromwell defeat an army loyal to King Charles II of England and led by David Leslie, Lord Newark.
1651
Third English Civil War: Battle of Worcester – Charles II of England is defeated in the last main battle of the war.
1658
Richard Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of England
1777
American Revolutionary War: during the Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, the Flag of the United States is flown in battle for the first time.
1783
American Revolutionary War: the war ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain
1939
World War II: France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, forming the Allies.
1941
The Holocaust: Karl Fritzsch, deputy camp commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, experiments with the use of Zyklon B in the gassing of Soviet POWs.
1976
Viking program: The American Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis – day 3: the Beslan hostage crisis ends with the deaths of over 300 people, more than half of which are children.

***

Anthropic did a controlled study of a blindly reward-seeking system. They got a very competent, dangerous machine. As a result, both Anthropic and OpenAI have intentionally slowed down AI development in light of these risks.

***

Gloria Steinem has died.

***

People 65 and older now outnumber children ages 5 and younger worldwide for the first time in recorded history, according to a new report by the U.S. Census.

***

Redoing Socialism

Socialism is back. Apparently there is some debate over how it's been working. There's an interesting article on this by Kristian Niemietz. This is a portion:

"This socialist revival is, of course, neither a homogeneous movement, nor a fully worked-out policy program. But if there is a common thread, it is the belief that emerging forms of socialism could be completely different from anything that has flown under that ideological banner in the past. For these new socialists, socialism doesn’t necessarily mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. Nor does it mean a command-and-control economy, directed by a distant, technocratic elite. It means experimenting with new forms of social ownership and democratic decision-making, devolving power to the grassroots, and empowering ordinary working people.

When explaining away the failures of the past, it was assumed that the hierarchical, stratified character of failed socialist projects had been a result of some deliberate political choice. Which is to say: It was believed that previous socialist experiments had failed because the leaders of these movements caused them to be centralized and autocratic as a matter of design—as opposed to a democratic socialist system based on mass participation and a radical decentralisation of power.

But the truth is that mass participation and radical democratization always had been idealized by socialists, including by socialist leaders who led successful national movements. But these dreams never survived, because it simply isn’t feasible to run a large society and a complex economy in this kind of participatory way. Democratic socialism works perfectly fine in small, self-selecting and homogeneous high-trust communities with relatively simple economies, the prime example being the Israeli Kibbutz. But that model is not scalable (and hasn’t even aged particularly well in Israel itself). There is a reason that, even at the height of the Kibbutz movement, Kibbutzim never grew beyond a certain size. There seems to be an upper limit of around 1,500 people, and even that is rare: Most Kibbutzim have fewer than 500 members.

Regardless of what socialists say they want to build, socialism can only mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. It can only mean a command-and-control economy directed by a distant, technocratic elite. The reason it always turns out that way isn’t because revolutions are “betrayed” by selfish or undisciplined actors, but because no other path is possible. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that every generation needs to learn for itself..."

As Mr. Williams says, "Sharing is fine when you know everybody's name."

So socialism's problem is a lot bigger than its cruel, unmanageable, and unachievable distribution system. It is believed that socialism, in its implementation, somehow becomes inexplicably bent. Distorted. There persists this curious search for what goes wrong with socialism, why it turns on those it says it wants to help, and why, on a large scale, it becomes so dangerous, as if this were not the very nature of the beast. Sure, socialism is adopted as a crusade by homicidal, self-obsessed psychopaths, but certainly not all socialists are nuts, they say.

This is similar to the search for why dogs bite; they are so cute and playful when they are young. And lions are so docile in the womb.

Enemies of Success

 On this day:

1689
The Battle of Dunkeld in Scotland.
1770
James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales
1808
Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeat French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot near the village of Vimeiro, Portugal, the first Anglo-Portuguese victory of the Peninsular War.
1831
Nat Turner leads black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion.
1863
Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre.
1879
The Virgin Mary, along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, reportedly appears at Knock Shrine in Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.
1918
World War I: The Second Battle of the Somme begins.
1942
World War II: a Nazi flag is installed atop Mount Elbrus.
1942
World War II: the Guadalcanal campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru
1945
Physicist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. is fatally irradiated in a criticality incident during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1961
Motown releases what would be its first #1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes.
1963
Xa Loi Pagoda raids: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces loyal to Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem, vandalises Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands and leaving an estimated hundreds dead.
1968
Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring; on the same day, Nicolae Ceauşescu, leader of Communist Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet maneuver, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.
1991
Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses.

***

Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera

***

When President Biden's mental faculties declined, his responsibilities were subsumed by those around him. Taken over. By the same people proclaiming threats to voting honesty and to democracy itself.
Biden's implosion, a threat to the integrity of the government, the very foundation of the government, was not seen as a crisis; it was seen as an opportunity, a breach in the constitutional dam restraining man's tyrannical tendencies to exploit.
That is a coup. Treason.

And yet, no response.

Why has there been no reaction? No leap to the barricades? Where are the wild-eyed street radicals? The cold, intense legal guardians of the republic?

Was that less important than whatever is in the Epstein Files? Than who Natalie Harp is?

***

During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago.
Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033.

***

Alice's report from Wonderland: NYC has suggested using tax dollars to prop up private grocers hurt by competition from Mamdani’s city-owned supermarkets — a program anticipated to cost $70 million for five stores across the boroughs. Ah, redistribution.

***

U.S. Treasury buybacks are like paying your mortgage with your credit card.--Morgan's Sullivan

***

Enemies of Success

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

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

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

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

So why would anyone consider the policies of America's declared economic and military enemies, policies that historically have led to death, destruction, and ruin? How could anyone even consider its vacuous standard-bearers like Hong or Mamdani as serious political leaders? 

With all the threats to democracy that are identified every minute in this country, is this not the obvious, dangerous one?

What Politics Is

On this day:

30 BC
Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last ruler of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty, commits suicide, allegedly by means of an asp bite.
1099
First Crusade: Battle of Ascalon Crusaders under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon defeat Fatimid forces led by Al-Afdal Shahanshah. This is considered the last engagement of the First Crusade.
1676
Praying Indian John Alderman shoots and kills Metacomet, the Wampanoag war chief, ending King Philip’s War. ('Praying Indian' refers to an American Indian convert to Christianity.)
1914
World War I: the United Kingdom declares war on Austria-Hungary; the countries of the British Empire follow suit
1944
Waffen SS troops massacre 560 people in Sant'Anna di Stazzema.
1952
The Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow.
1960
Echo 1A, NASA’s first successful communications satellite, is launched.
1976
Between 1,000 and 3,500 Palestinians are killed in the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, one of the bloodiest events of the Lebanese Civil War
1982
Mexico announces it is unable to pay its enormous external debt, marking the beginning of a debt crisis that spreads to all of Latin America and the Third World.
1994
Major League Baseball players go on strike. This will force the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
2000
The Oscar-class submarine K-141 Kursk of the Russian Navy explodes and sinks in the Barents Sea during a military exercise. 

***

The sinking of the Kursk was a MasterClass in a state's self-absorbed disdain for those it professes to represent and to care for. And, of course, an insight into its glorious leader, Putin.

***

"We’ve generated the first early human eggs derived from stem cells. This is a big deal -- the potential to redefine fertility is real."

This is a post on X from a guy in a lab.

***

The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.--Cowen

*** 

Termarr Johnson, who is one of the top prospects for the Pittsburgh Pirates, suffered a serious injury.

***

Mayor Zohran Mamdani blamed a “miscommunication” Tuesday after an awkward public clash between City Hall and NYPD officials over whether the department would provide security for his wife Rama Duwaji’s upcoming Middle East trip.
He's got to be the only socialist in history who doesn't know that revolutionaries take over the police first.

***

In 2024, Nancy Pelosi earned more from investments than any large hedge fund in the United States.

***

The Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a Roman shipwreck in 1901 turned out to be a hand-cranked bronze computer that could predict eclipses and track the irregular orbit of the Moon, and nothing of comparable mechanical complexity would appear anywhere on Earth for another 1,400 years

***

Recently, the government gave $500 million to the coal industry, mostly in West Virginia. Now that's a lot of money, but that's less than the people of NYC gave to the wife of the Ex-mayor when they left office. That's consoling.

***

The goofy Ms. Hong lost in the Democrat primary for Governor in Wisconsin, despite support from the GOP PACs. One wonders if she was finally recognized as an incompetent by Democrats or alienated her foolish base by compromising on her foolish positions.
And Flanagan won in Minnesota, proving voters don't care what you do or don't do in office.

***

Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled organism that can only reproduce sexually inside cats, rewires the fear circuits in rodent brains to make them attracted to cat odors rather than repelled by them.

Researchers have spent decades investigating whether this same parasite, which lives dormant in hundreds of millions of people, might subtly influence human behavior and preferences in ways we don't recognize.

That may be unconstitutional!

*** 

What Politics Is

A very ugly podcast is being rebroadcast on a website I like. It is an interview with a trans-prostitute and her story of an encounter with Lindsey Graham. I'm sure there will be many opinions about this, especially on the very confused Left. 

I know little about Graham. I thought he was funny, and I've heard the rumors. And I don't care about his personal life — aside from the security risks it presents. But I do care about scandalmongering, especially the dead, as a political tool, and I think that it characteristically appears late and in the absence of substance or courage. And I hate the idea that this kind of attack substitutes for political debate and reduces serious, threatening government problems to personal quirks and inconsistencies.

AI, The Debt, Censorship, Suspicion of Achievement, The Iran War, Russia in Ukraine, Open Borders, Mystery Cabinet Appointments, Children's Academic Test Scores, The Electoral Success of Shallow Revolutionary Thought — and we get this.

It confirms my opinion of the perpetrators and changes my opinion of the website that rebroadcast it.

An Allocation Economy Run by Autocrats Makes You Free

 

On this day:

991
Battle of Maldon: the English, led by Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, are defeated by a band of inland-raiding Vikings near Maldon in Essex.
1519
Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships set sail from Seville to circumnavigate the globe. The Basque second-in-command, Sebastian Elcano, will complete the expedition after Magellan died in the Philippines.
1755
Under the orders of Charles Lawrence, the British Army begins to forcibly deport the Acadians from Nova Scotia to the Thirteen Colonies.
1792
French Revolution: Storming of the Tuileries Palace – Louis XVI of France is arrested and taken into custody as his Swiss Guards are massacred by the Parisian mob
1920
World War I: Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI’s representatives sign the Treaty of Sèvres that divides up the Ottoman Empire between the Allies.
1969
A day after murdering Sharon Tate and four others, members of Charles Manson’s cult kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
1990
The Magellan space probe reaches Venus. (Symmetry!)

1995
Oklahoma City bombing: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols are indicted for the bombing. Michael Fortier pleads guilty in a plea-bargain for his testimony.

***

“One is not born, but becomes a woman”--Simone de Beauvoir

***

The New World of Malice and Mischief: The water system in Braham, Minnesota, was among dozens of systems hit after federal agencies warned that Iran-linked hackers could target U.S. infrastructure.

***

It was at Cambridge that Darwin read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative – a book that was partly a travel account and partly a scientific treatise of the German explorer’s expedition through South America. It was this publication, Darwin said, that “determined me to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in Her Majesty’s ship Beagle”.
He returned to England in October 1836 with more than 1,500 specimens preserved in spirits and almost 4,000 skins, bones and other items. Then the real work began: sorting, classifying, writing and thinking. He published The Voyage of the Beagle (and sent it in trepidation to his hero Humboldt, who admired it) and began to make notes on his “species theory”.

***

Three skeletons have been found in a cave in Mexico dating to about 13,000 B.C., earlier than the freezing of the Bering Strait. They look like ethnic Indonesians.

***

During her Sunday appearance on ABC News’s “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez discussed her decision to freeze her eggs, saying, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us, as leaders, to have these conversations and share these processes.”

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

***

An Allocation Economy Run by Autocrats Makes You Free

According to Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College, "the socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival." He continues, “The socialist believes that making things free makes people free.”

Freedom "from the need to smile for the sake of a sale?" From the unexplained bodega closing? The freedom to be rude? Impolite? Disinterested? Unmotivated?

And, more importantly, who is making these free things and why?

You can’t have socialism with a scarce good or service, especially among strangers, without the dreaded word unheard in socialism: allocation. Scarce goods and services must be allocated. Allocated. By someone. Not by the market, but by some person based on some uncertain criterion. 

Who are the allocators? What will be the criterion? 

This is a professor at a university, and this is simply not serious thinking.

The Scarce and the Non-scarce

On this day:

1492
Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain.
1852
Harvard wins the first Boat Race between Yale and Harvard. The race is also the first American intercollegiate athletic event
1914
World War I: Germany declares war against France.
1921
Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis confirms the ban of the eight Chicago Black Sox, the day after they were acquitted by a Chicago court.
1934
Adolf Hitler becomes the supreme leader of Germany by joining the offices of President and Chancellor into Führer.
1948
Whittaker Chambers accuses Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.

***

"The future is disorder. A door like this had cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."--Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

***

In the top of the sixth inning, Arizona Diamondbacks utility man Tim Tawa attempted to bunt for a base hit with Guardians ace Gavin Williams working on a perfect game. Chaos followed. Then a single.

***

Why have grocery stores at all? Why not just give food away?

***

Are the scientists on the Shroud of Turin looking for the DNA of God?

***

According to Ken Rosenthal and Will Sammon of The Athletic, the Pirates remain active in trade discussions involving not only bullpen help but also a right-handed-hitting outfielder. That looks like a team that thinks they can play in the playoffs. The team that played this weekend did not.

***


The Scarce and the Non-scarce


Economics is the study of the allocation of limited resources.

In an article in AIER, Tucker discusses Munger's explanation of the distinctions between capitalism and socialism. The pro-capitalist camp believes in ownership, the evolution of prices, and production structures for scarce goods. There is no better, more peaceful, more productive way to deal with the fact that sometimes there is not enough of everything for everyone. The best solution is to adopt a peaceful method of exchange and production, allowing for more wealth to be distributed among everyone over time.

At the same time, capitalists believe in the universal sharing of non-scarce goods like knowledge. This distinction between scarce and non-scarce helps explain so much about the world around us. We have to learn to distinguish them so that we can apply tools of production and allocation in the proper way. Scarce goods absolutely require the application of economizing; non-scarce goods can be freely and expansively shared without the need for economizing.

The socialist left makes a mess of this distinction, mixing up the two things. They want socialism for scarce goods and private ownership for non-scarce goods. How so? They want free college for everyone, health care for everyone, food for everyone, and they advocate all this with near-zero appreciation for the reality that these are scarce goods and so there are massive costs associated with these plans, and everyone must bear them, not to mention endless force to make people do what they would otherwise not want to do.

At the same time, these same people apply the limitations of scarcity where it need not apply. They say there can be no cultural appropriation even though culture is a non-scarce good that is malleable and universally shareable. They demand identity politics even though identity is something anyone can adopt without taking away anything from anyone else. Identity is a non-scarce good and need not be commodified like a physical good.

Socialists are mostly intellectuals. Their most valued personal production is within the realm of ideas. They share these ideas constantly with anyone who will listen. Their goal is to seek influence, which can occur without the need for allocating and apportioning their product. They are producing goods that are non-scarce.
They can’t understand why doctors, colleges, food growers, and factories cannot do the same. The problem of scarcity does not present itself in their profession, so they remain oblivious to the reality that scarcity exists for every single good other than ideas.

Why the rising popularity of socialism? Munger suggests, “Much of the new wealth is digital, and takes the form of music, movies, or other entertainment or software, code that once written down can be reproduced at no cost and transmitted worldwide essentially for free.”

The great migration from the physical world to the digital world has vastly expanded the realm and pool of non-scarce wealth. That’s a wonderful thing. But this might tempt intellectuals to believe the same thing can happen in the physical world. And yet no matter how much we digitize, it doesn’t obliterate the essential distinction between scarce and non-scarce.

If a Twitter post can be universally distributed, why not vegan dinners and brain surgeries? Now you know the answer; it is the difference between scarce and non-scarce. One can be shared into infinity and the other can't. That’s a huge difference. And those rules will not change whether or not a person understands them.

Not understanding this will sentence a person to struggle with the square peg and the round hole forever, with ever-increasing energy.

If we can’t get that straight, we can never learn to think rationally about economics. Even worse, failing to understand this and barreling ahead, mixing the two up, we can destroy both prosperity and liberty.

Libraries in the Gulag

 On this day:

1540
Thomas Cromwell is executed at the order of Henry VIII of England on charges of treason. Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day.
1794
Maximilien Robespierre is executed by guillotine in Paris during the French Revolution.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Ezra Church – Confederate troops make a third unsuccessful attempt to drive Union forces from Atlanta, Georgia.
1868
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is certified, establishing African-American citizenship and guaranteeing due process of law.
1914
World War I: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia after Serbia rejects the conditions of an ultimatum sent by Austria on July 23 following the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
1942
World War II: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issues Order No. 227 in response to alarming German advances into the Soviet Union. Under the order all those who retreat or otherwise leave their positions without orders to do so are to be immediately executed.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah – The British bomb Hamburg, causing a firestorm that kills 42,000 German civilians.
1996
The remains of a prehistoric man are discovered near Kennewick, Washington. Such remains will be known as the Kennewick Man. An astonishing story, whatever you call it.
2005
The Provisional Irish Republican Army calls an end to its thirty-year-long armed campaign in Northern Ireland.

***

One should be suspicious of speakers who always refer to life as a journey, the homeless vagrants as the unhoused, pregnant women as gestating people, and people as folks.

***

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space,  worked as a spinner in a textile factory. And the experience that helped put her into a spacecraft was not flying but parachuting. She remains the youngest woman to fly in space. She flew solo. With that single mission, she logged more time in space than all the US Mercury astronauts who had flown by then combined. Tereshkova’s flight lasted two days, 22 hours and 50 minutes, and she circled Earth 48 times. Alone.

***

Now, researchers at Harvard University are repurposing silicon technology to produce custom synthetic DNA.

***

Some of the sweetest deals in the five boroughs’ rent-stabilization program are landing in the laps of its wealthiest tenants, not its neediest.

***

France’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva launched a verbal attack against the U.S. following a contentious vote to give U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk another four-year term, accusing Washington of abandoning its role as a global human rights leader.

"The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore," the official French mission account posted on X Saturday. "Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it." 

Ambassador Jeff Bartos, the U.S. representative for U.N. management and reform, accused Türk of disproportionately condemning democracies while failing to respond adequately to abuses committed by authoritarian governments.

UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog, published a 2024 analysis of public statements initiated by Türk or his office between Oct. 17, 2022, and Oct. 31, 2024. The organization concluded that Türk criticized the United States more frequently than China, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Qatar combined. It also said it found no self-initiated criticism during that period concerning abuses by Cuba, North Korea, Algeria, Eritrea, Mauritania, Lebanon or Qatar.

The General Assembly then approved Türk’s reappointment by a vote of 144-10, with 13 abstentions, extending his tenure from Oct. 12, 2026, through Oct. 11, 2030.

***

Libraries in the Gulag

There is an interview about socialism in which the interviewer asks, rhetorically, if democratic socialism is little more than a rearranging of the same concerns and solutions that have been routinely addressed before in the U.S., like pooling money for libraries, parks, and roadway maintenance? The group managing "The Commons." This foolish argument is importantly revealing. 

This discussion is even worse as it is made by people who are paid to know better. After all, this is how we get our information.

Libraries have been built for a lot of thoughtful purposes, but they have not been political. When libraries take on a political quality, you know they are being destroyed. The destruction and restriction of libraries are always the result of authoritarianism. Libraries are old. Like Alexandria's. Concentration of information with the hope for its dissemination. Everything politics is not. Early libraries in the U.S. had no revolutionary purpose other than education and were usually privately funded.

One of America's early problems in its creation and continuity, only partially solved by war, is the debate between states and federalism. Maintaining continuity and sharing of common space, like parks and utilities, were practical choices, not political ones. The problem with taking another's earnings, or land, or daughters is that the 'have' wants to retain what is his. The 'have-not' wants what is not his and must use force to take it. It is the force that is the crucial element here, not some starry notion of the brotherhood of man. The Marxist finally solved this problem of arbitrary envy by declaring the 'haves' as an inferior caste (class), atavists from man's early development stage that needed to be exterminated. They were a regressive weed that had to be deracinated before the harvest of the new benign world could flower. It was not only that the propertied caste had no right to their ownership and production; it was that those rights were lost because they did not deserve to live.

The modern socialist starts with unprovable platitudes, then plans a system of direct government with no hesitation, no checks and balances, and no caution.

Talking this way--as if 'democratic socialism' and its arbitrary homicidal behavior, invariant history of creating poverty and despair, and its final goal of hostile and aggressive nationalism is similar to building a library-- creates a great vulnerability: withering fatigue in the listener. No one with any education, or a modicum of common sense, could take this seriously. So when confronted with, ' let's get rid of the executive and the police', 'let's turn the nuclear facilities over to the lower third of the high school class', the sensible person is paralyzed with ennui and begins talking to the socialist with half-attention, nodding and smiling as if he were eight years old, instead of giving him a character-building smack in the head. 

The 'slippery slope' is in this thinking, where libraries and fire departments are in some weird continuum with show trials and gulags and are met with paralyzing neotolerance from the weary, cynical majority that allows this childish nonsense to advance uncorrected.

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.

Democracy Before Socialism

On this day

1821
While the Mora Rebellion continued, Greeks captured Monemvasia Castle and massacred nearly 3000 Turkish inhabitants.
1903
The Ford Motor Company sells its first car.
1914
Austria-Hungary issues an ultimatum to Serbia demanding Serbia to allow the Austrians to determine who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbia will reject those demands, and Austria will declare war on July 28.
1929
The Fascist government in Italy bans the use of foreign words.
1936
In Catalonia, Spain, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia is founded through the merger of Socialist and Communist parties.
1967
12th Street Riot: in Detroit, Michigan, one of the worst riots in United States history begins on 12th Street in the predominantly African American inner city. It will leave 43 killed, 342 injured, and 1,400 buildings burned.
1968
Glenville Shootout: in Cleveland, Ohio, a violent shootout between a Black Militant organization led by Ahmed Evans and the Cleveland Police Department occurs. During the shootout, a riot begins and lasts for five days.
1968
The only successful hijacking of an El Al aircraft takes place when a Boeing 707 carrying 10 crew and 38 passengers is taken over by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The aircraft was en route from Rome, Italy, to Lod, Israel.
1984
Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown after nude photos of her appeared in Penthouse magazine.
1992
A Vatican commission, led by Joseph Ratzinger, establishes that it is necessary to limit the rights of homosexual people and non-married couples.

***

The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the reach of mere majorities. We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them." (from somewhere)

 

***

With all we have seen, why would we assume that elections are not tampered with?

***

OpenAI claimed responsibility for a security breach of the model platform Hugging Face, in which an agent, driven by a combination of OpenAI models, compromised the platform's infrastructure, while internally testing models on ExploitGym, a benchmark for cybersecurity capabilities. That is to say, in a test sequence to assess a defense program, it breached and attacked it.
We are giving an infant a handgun.

***

There is an effort in Hong Kong to punish booksellers. Several stores have been raided and workers there imprisoned. (A popular protest t-shirt reads "I am a bookstore employee.")
Hong Kong’s security chief, Chris Tang, said that booksellers had a responsibility to ensure their books were lawful, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick”.
So the totalitarian sterilizes our world to keep us safe.

***

Vogue's Culture Writer is a socialist. Vogue.

***

Remember, democracy fans, you chose Katie Porter and the Maine Nazi. What's next?

***

Democracy Before Socialism

The rising interest in "Democratic Socialism" is likely due to several factors, none of them flattering. It provides another mindless answer to the unending and robotic political drone for 'change.' It masquerades as a solution for inept and disheartened lives. (Current demographics imply the true Left in America are the well-educated unsuccessful.)

Contributing to these fantasies is the underlying ignorance as to what a commitment to "democratic socialism" really means. The current citizens, despite access to immeasurable volumes of information, simply have no idea the demon they are embracing.

But they have the marketing down. Democratic sounds modern and up-to-date. And responsive. But there is nothing inherently good or decent in democracy. Hitler was elected.

Nor does the majority have some moral high ground. Democracy is only a process by which leadership is selected; a means. It is the culture and those elected to lead it that always do the damage. The nature and value of a culture and its governing is not measured by how it is chosen but by what that culture holds dear.

The demand that the majority have its way will never end. That's why the Constitution was written and why it has been such a success. Majority vote is not sacred without a hard, basic framework of individual rights, which majority vote always intentionally tries to supersede. Otherwise, we would glorify lynching and gang rape. Doing something by vote is neither right nor good any more than voting to sack Canada is. 

A majority vote is only as meaningful as the guidelines that restrain it.

Socialism is a silly idea, but it is not made any less silly--or given any more dignity--by voting for it. Nor is a bad idea made any better by dying for it.

Is Socialism a Hate Crime?

On this Day:

622
The beginning of the Islamic calendar.
1054
Three Roman legates break relations between Western and Eastern Christian Churches through the act of placing an invalidly-issued Papal Bull of Excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during Saturday afternoon divine liturgy. Historians frequently describe the event as the start of the East-West Schism.
1779
American Revolutionary War: light infantry of the Continental Army seize a fortified British Army position in a midnight bayonet attack at the Battle of Stony Point.
1861
American Civil War: at the order of President Abraham Lincoln, Union troops begin a 25 mile march into Virginia for what will become The First Battle of Bull Run, the first major land battle of the war
1941
Joe DiMaggio hits safely for the 56th consecutive game, a streak that still stands as a MLB record.
1942
Holocaust: Vel‘ d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’d'Hiv): the government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13,152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz
1945
Manhattan Project: the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Happy Anniversary!
1945
World War II: the leaders of the three Allied nations, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, and Joseph Stalin, meet in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.
1948
The storming of the cockpit of the Miss Macao passenger seaplane, operated by a subsidiary of the Cathay Pacific Airways, marks the first aircraft hijacking of a commercial plane.
1950
Chaplain-Medic massacre: American POWs were massacred by North Korean Army.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11, the first manned space mission to land on the Moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
2007
2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake: an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 and 6.6 aftershock occurs off the Niigata coast of Japan killing 8 people, injuring at least 800, and damaging a nuclear power plant.

***

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.--tupi

***

Chipotle announced that it is opening its first location in Mexico

***

Conspiracy alert: Some of the coldest objects currently listed as stars in the Milky Way may not be stars at all. A new study by astrophysicist Amirnezam Amiri from the University of Arkansas suggests that these extremely cold objects could instead be giant energy-harvesting structures built by advanced alien civilisations. According to the research, these objects match the expected behaviour of engineered systems that collect a star's energy and release the leftover heat as infrared radiation.

***

At the centre of Earth is a solid metal sphere smaller than the Moon, probably heavier than it, and still accreting new layers from a surrounding ocean of liquid metal.

***

Lindsey Graham’s sister is to fill his South Carolina Senate seat. (Keep repeating, 'There is no hereditary, aristocratic class.)

***

Anthony Mantha, who scored a career-high 33 goals last season for the Pittsburgh Penguins, has signed a two-year contract worth $9.5 million with the New Jersey Devils, the latter team announced Wednesday.

***

The Houston Astros optioned highly-rated, former Pirate, Mike Burrows to Triple-A Sugar Land on Tuesday.

***

Is Socialism a Hate Crime?

Revolutionaries are forward-looking; they step over the bodies with their eyes on the horizon. But taking someone else's property and production is not passive; that's why it's always sold as an evolution, an inevitable and natural process. Nor are people recruited to work for the betterment of others; they are pressed into the service of the ship of state. That sounds much like another state, the state of slavery.

The socialist glibly talks around these grim realities by appealing to some vague construct like 'social justice', a recently coined fancy that is hard to attack because it is so insubstantial. But all of the various redistributive notions can be identified by their dark heart. Behind their curiously Christian-like vision breathes a very un-Christian-like motive: revenge.

Freedom, electronics, and anonymity have allowed the growth of absurd ideas that ordinary people in ordinary times would kill in their cradle. People will actually say, with a collective straight face, that some people are guilty of a crime other people committed before anybody thought it was a crime, and that a third party should be compensated for it. (Unsurprisingly, money, not incarceration, is the punishment.) A president is incapacitated for four years, and no one cries 'wolf.' And they offer him for reelection without shame and, when caught out, offer no contrition. We shut the entire social and economic world down for two years because some people got sick. A border declared closed is obviously not. An education system that denies it benefits teachers, not students, obviously does. Child rapists are pardoned. A Supreme Court justice cannot define a woman. Innuendo and rumor are presented unchallenged. A guy with a Nazi tattoo is nominated for the Senate. The culture is besieged by notions that are both silly and horrifying.

This is a perfect time for the resurrection of the socialists.

The communists have a reason for their revolution. True, it is inevitable. Like gravity, it's a law. It is also genetic. Who knew? Darwin didn't. But, apparently, some people have, like in the Indian caste system, certain inescapable genetic socio-economic-political groupings that their children share as well. These qualities do not go away. Or educated away. Nor can those so afflicted just go away and allow the socialist dawn to flower. Nor can they be driven away--or even put in camps. These regressives must be derascinated, branch and root. They must be killed, along with their children, to exterminate that regressive element that weighs, like a newly discovered group of moronic homo habilis living in their own camp, on the future. (You can see how this madness morphs so nicely into purges and pogroms.)

So the enemy is the productive and successful, and they must be killed so the society can become successful and productive.  

A philosophy whose time has come. Again.

Churchill on Socialism

 On this day:

1755
French and Indian War: Braddock Expedition – British troops and colonial militiamen are ambushed and suffer a devastating defeat by French and Native American forces.
1815
Talleyrand becomes the first Prime Minister of France.
1821
470 prominent Cypriots, including Archbishop Kyprianos, are executed in response to Cypriot aid to the Greek War of Independence
1850
U.S. President Zachary Taylor dies, and Millard Fillmore becomes the 13th President of the United States.
1868
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing African Americans full citizenship and all persons in the United States due process of law.
1875
Outbreak of the Herzegovina Uprising against Ottoman rule, which would last until 1878 and have far-reaching implications throughout the Balkans
1944
World War II: Battle of Tali-Ihantala – Finland wins the Battle of Tali-Ihantala, the largest battle ever fought in northern Europe. The Red Army withdraws its troops from Ihantala and digs into defensive position, thus ending the Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive.
1958
Lituya Bay is hit by a mega-tsunami. The wave is recorded at 524 meters high, the largest in recorded history.
1962
The Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test is conducted by the United States of America.
1972
The Troubles: In Belfast, British Army snipers shoot five civilians dead in the Springhill Massacre.

***

“Where there is no property, there is no justice.”--Locke, in Two Treatises of Government


***

A 749-square-foot home in someone else’s backyard just sold for $530,000 in California — the first-of-its-kind deal called an Accessory Dwelling Unit.

***

Communities across the United States have now blocked or delayed more than $130 billion in AI data centers in the first three months of 2026.

How will politicians react if the democracy stands in the way of the future?

***

It’s now possible to edit the DNA of human embryos with unprecedented precision, suggesting that human germline editing might be possible in the relatively near future.

***

Regulations add an average of $131,734 to the cost of a newly built home, representing 26.4% of the final sale price.

***

The mayor formerly known as Young Cardamom has weighed in on the Maine Senate race.

Thank heavens.

***

Churchill on Socialism

From Winston Churchill’s first election broadcast on June 4, 1945:

....there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.

But I will go further. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted; that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary, simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

Socialism and Free Association

 On this day:

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

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

Is the government a good and unbiased investor?

***

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

***

Socialism and Free Association

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/8/26

After Socialism

On this day:

1834
In New York City, four nights of rioting against abolitionists began.
1846
Mexican-American War: American troops occupy Monterey and Yerba Buena, thus beginning the U.S. acquisition of California.
1863
United States begins its first military draft; exemptions cost $300.
1865
American Civil War: four conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln are hanged.
1928
Sliced bread is sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
1930
Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser begins construction of the Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam).
1946
Howard Hughes nearly dies when his XF-11 spy plane prototype crashes in a Beverly Hills neighborhood.
2002
A scandal breaks out in the United Kingdom when news reports accuse MI6 of sheltering Abu Qatada, the supposed European Al Qaeda leader.
2005
A series of four explosions occurs on London’s transport system killing 56 people, including four alleged suicide bombers, and injuring over 700 others.

***

Failure is also information.

***

Is there a reason why this particular allegation against Platner should be taken more seriously than the previous ones? Or have we defaulted to the volume of insight as a criterion for decisions?

***

Headline: "A 21-year-old influencer, known as DreamDoll Brii, has died after being shot while in a lime green Lamborghini."
Neither her outfit nor its color was described.

***

The men's soccer team was badly outclassed by Belgium last night. They went as far in the tournament as they could, and that should be the end of it--some more than expected success, with some frantic bad moments. But it won't be. The cloud of Trump's buffonish intervention because he disagreed with the game's rules will make America look again like rubes and cowboys. And bad sports.

***


After Socialism

Alan Charles Kors's article, “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?”, written for the Atlas Society (An Objectivism/Rand group), is an old article but interesting because it is so accurate and heartfelt. It also highlights the absence of any reflective examination of socialism's obvious disasters:

"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them.
….

The record is truly plain. Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, always culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor. It was, at its best, the ability, through horror and servitude, to build Gary, Indiana, once, without the good stuff, and without the ability even to maintain it.
…..

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.
…….

We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire “socialist experiment,” by contrast, ended in stasis; ethnic hatreds; the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal; and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison."

7/7/26

A Kind, Painless, Stable Life

On this day:

1535
Sir Thomas More is executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
1557
King Philip II of Spain, consort of Queen Mary I of England, sets out from Dover to war with France, which eventually results in the loss of the City of Calais, the last English possession on the continent, and Mary I never seeing her husband again.
1777
American Revolutionary War: Siege of Fort Ticonderoga – After a bombardment by British artillery under General John Burgoyne, American forces retreat from Fort Ticonderoga, New York.
1885
Louis Pasteur successfully tests his rabies vaccine. The patient is Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog
1892
3,800 striking steelworkers engage in a day-long battle with Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike, leaving 10 dead and dozens wounded.

***

“We are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air. We know at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors, wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking — what time is it? But none of the clocks have hands.” George Goodman, who wrote as 'Adam Smith,' writing, in 1968, of a high-flying stock market in “The Money Game.”

***

In 1660, John Milton faced numerous obstacles as he worked on his epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” His role as an advocate for republicanism left him politically disgraced during the Restoration reign of Charles II. His second wife had recently died. And, of course, he had gone blind. Lying in bed at night, he composed verses of a vast poem that encompassed nothing less than the creation of the world and the fate of mankind. In the morning, he would dictate fresh lines to his daughters.

***

A cockroach can survive for about a week without its head, dying eventually of thirst rather than injury. Any parallels with states or governments is coincidental.

***

Pennsylvania’s public-school employees’ pension fund is $41 billion short of what it needs to pay promised benefits. Promised.

***

Were Jim Crow laws as restrictive of voters as Gerrymandering?

***

A Kind, Painless, Stable Life

The autocrat cannot help himself; he's got to interfere. If it can appear to be virtuous, all the better. And nothing draws the autocrat like disparity.

So Trump steps across all boundaries to intrude into international sports, fouling the World Cup and contaminating the game, regardless of the outcome.

Is nothing safe from these people?

Socialism despises competition and its fallout of failure. In a way, it is an intolerance of the nature of life with its ups and downs--and eventual fatal denouement. Those who relentlessly try to interfere with all social and economic events are actually attempting to smooth the uncertainties of living and homogenize the outcomes of social and economic interactions.

We see encountering risk and overcoming it as success. They see risk as a basic enemy of life. And they are willing to sacrifice progress--the result of risk-taking--to eliminate it. In the back of their self-declared kind minds, they believe their ingenuity can substitute for the creative destruction of the marketplace. It's a wonder that they allow our dangerous social interactions, like school and romance. Clearly, they hate sports.

Perhaps this explains the Left's hysterical, aggressive reaction to the chaotic Virus.

But the Left is tolerant; they do allow for some disorder. They are quite willing to endure the messy period of social disruption as they sort out whom they will allow to assist their leadership. And, of course, the purges. The New State must eliminate all those incapable of seeing the new future. Unanimity is the enemy of risk; the creation of unanimity is not.

Creative disorder, for all its positives, is disorder and will leave pain and failure in its wake. The socialist prefers their own power to create pain and failure.