Sunday/Picnic

On this day:
216 BC
Second Punic War: Battle of Cannae – The Carthaginian army led by Hannibal defeats a numerically superior Roman army under the command of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro.
338 BC
A Macedonian army led by Philip II defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony in Greece and the Aegean.
1776
The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence took place.
Although the Second Continental Congress declared its intention for independence on July 2, 1776, no one signed the Declaration of Independence that day. Congress did sign the Lee Resolution, named after Virginian Richard Henry Lee, on July 2. This resolution had three parts: separating from the British Crown, a call to form foreign alliances, and a plan for confederation. Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4, 1776, and the call for freedom was announced at Independence Hall with the Liberty Bell. Americans celebrated as news spread throughout the newly independent states. Although independence had been declared, delegates of the Continental Congress had not yet signed the document. On August 2, 1776, when most delegates signed the Declaration, it became official.
1798
French Revolutionary Wars: the Battle of the Nile concludes in a British victory.
1869

Japan’s samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant class system (Shinōkōshō) is abolished as part of the Meiji Restoration reforms.
Edo Japan frequently diverged from the Shinōkōshō model. Wealthy merchants exercised influence, financially struggling samurai took secondary jobs, and farmers engaged in side industries or trade. Interaction across social categories was common, particularly in cities.
1934
Gleichschaltung: Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany.
1939
Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.
1945
World War II: the Potsdam Conference, at which the Allied Powers discuss the future of defeated Germany, is concluded.
1964
Vietnam War: Gulf of Tonkin incident – North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly fire on the U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy.
1990
Iraq invades Kuwait, eventually leading to the Gulf War.

***

America is not a hiding place or a refugee camp; it is a place of purpose.

***

Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years.

***

America did not become the richest nation in history because Washington, D.C., was exceptionally good at directing the economy. It thrived because its institutions largely prevented Washington from interfering. The rule of law and constitutional limits have allowed millions of individuals to make sound decisions that no central authority could possibly coordinate.--deRugy

***

Biden’s interviews with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, conducted four years before he would be elected president, show that Biden was already having trouble remembering names and dates.

***

At the age of three, Jason Arday was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay. He was unable to speak until he was 11 and could not read or write until 18. Despite that, he forged an impressive academic career, mostly focusing on race and education, with stints at Roehampton, Glasgow and Durham universities, and is now a professor at Cambridge. His astonishing story is cautiously described in a recent Guardian article.

***

"Drew Allar has plenty of progress left in front of him."--Yahoo

***

Sunday/Picnic

Today's gospel is the Loaves and Fishes gospel, the only miracle appearing in all four evangelists. It is a lovely mixture of the worldly and the spiritual.

Christ seeks refuge and quiet after the murder of John the Baptist, so He takes the apostles to "a deserted place." This is not just for contemplation but for prudence; the authorities are interested in them. They go to an area just out of Herod's jurisdiction. The geography is known and described, the sea and the journey to the small town, the race by the locals to catch up with them is all quite clear and detailed. Local slang appears in the original Greek. And Christ is not put out by the interruption of His plans when the crowd arrives; He is, on the contrary, welcoming and concerned. 

And, as Christ so often does, He has an almost humorous exchange with the disciples when they want to let the crowd go to eat. He says, "There is no need for them to go: give them something to eat yourselves." Is that a joke? Is he teasing them? Is He listening to some second, parallel script like the line to Pilate, "That's what you say."

Then he creates a meal for 5000, a miracle of essential things, and makes sure everyone cleans up after.

 

SatStats

On this day:

30 BC
Octavian (later known as Augustus) enters Alexandria, Egypt, bringing it under the control of the Roman Republic.
1800
The Act of Union 1800 is passed in which merges the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1801
First Barbary War: The American schooner USS Enterprise captures the Tripolitan polacca Tripoli in a single-ship action off the coast of modern-day Libya.
1834
Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.
1894
The First Sino-Japanese War erupts between Japan and China over Korea.
1927
The Nanchang Uprising marks the first significant battle in the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and Communist Party of China. This day is commemorated as the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army
1944
The Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation breaks out in Warsaw, Poland.
1966
Charles Whitman kills 16 people at The University of Texas at Austin before being killed by the police. A remarkable story.
2004
A supermarket fire kills 396 people and injures 500 in Asunción, Paraguay.

***

“Where there is no property, there is no justice.”--Locke

***

Against Killer Asteroids!

In the Double Asteroid Redirection Test [DART], NASA sent a 1340-pound spacecraft to collide with the Dimorphos asteroid in 2022. The results exceeded expectations, as the impact slowed the asteroid’s orbit around another asteroid [Didymos] by 32 minutes—well above the pre-defined success threshold of 73 seconds. The mission cost only $330 million.


***

Cash, subsidies, and long parental leave have had no impact on fertility rates.
Sweden has adopted a suite of “pro-family” policies including heavily subsidized day care, with lower-income families paying nothing, and its birth rate has stayed well below replacement.
One suggestion is that parenting competes with other 'ambitions.' Time is a limited asset, forcing triage decisions.


***

The former Olympian who was accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool will no longer face charges after federal prosecutors said there is information suggesting the damage was caused by construction and installation failures.

***

Should the Pirates really be buyers at this stage?

***

Arizona State University has introduced a new Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, allowing students to earn a four-year degree focused on becoming professional content creators, digital storytellers and influencers.

***



SatStats

White people make up 15% of the world's population.

*

Studies have shown that less than 5% of “intentional communities”, which are set up away from the usual systems in an assumed “self-sustaining” fashion, last longer than five years. What does work are organically formed communities of roughly 20 to 30 families, or an apartment block.

*

Twenty-first-century fathers are spending far more time “washing, feeding and preparing food, putting to bed, supervising and playing with children” than they did in earlier generations. In fact, fathers in the United States now spend as much (less-than-college-educated) or more (college-educated) time with their children than mothers did a half century earlier—even though family sizes are smaller.

 

*

More than half a million personal bankruptcies were filed last year, a nearly 50% jump from three years earlier, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

*

The South Korean benchmark KOSPI index dived as much as 12.6% before reversing some losses to close down 6%, extending Tuesday’s near-11% rout and putting the market on course for its steepest monthly decline on record. The slide has erased almost 40% of the index's value from a peak reached little more than a month ago.

*

Visa-holders founded half of today’s Fortune 500 companies and a majority of billion-dollar startups.

*

Canada has reported about 3,500 wildfires so far this year, which is in line with recent historical averages. As for the effects of climate change, a paper in the journal Nature Communications last year reported that fires in recent decades in North America are running far below historical levels (between 1600 and 1880).

*

In a March 2025 government survey, 24% of seniors reported that Social Security supplies 90% or more of their income. But when Census Bureau researchers matched responses with IRS filings and benefits records, they found that retirees frequently omitted their 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, making the real figure only about 14%. Meanwhile, 58% of retirees draw less than half their income from the program.

*

In 2024, American shipyards accounted for just 0.04 percent of global commercial shipbuilding.

*

Individual plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges are projected to spike by about 14 percent in 2027, according to recent insurer filings.
As of 2025, 93 percent of enrollees in the exchanges received subsidies, up from 86 percent in 2021. If nearly everyone on the exchanges needs subsidies, that’s a clear sign that the product being sold is not affordable.


*

More than $1 of every $10 in SNAP benefits went to people who didn’t qualify in 2025.

*

A survey:

1. Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis)--in Hebrew, unfortunately, Bereshit-- or the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
2. More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Chris­tians believe that "God helps those who help themselves" is a Bible verse.
3. More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.
4. One in ten adults believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. (My personal favorite.)

Economic Decisions

On this day:

30 BC
Battle of Alexandria: Mark Antony achieves a minor victory over Octavian’s forces, but most of his army subsequently deserts, leading to his suicide.
1492

The Jews are expelled from Spain when the Alhambra Decree takes effect.
1790
The very first U.S. patent is issued: to inventor Samuel Hopkins for a potash process.
2007
Operation Banner, the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and the longest-running British Army operation ever, comes to an end.


***

Slavery was “peculiar” in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.--the always underestimated Sowell

***

All 55 European (soccer) football associations have now unanimously agreed to boycott FIFA events if Gianni Infantino pushes ahead with his polarising plan to sell parts of the World Cup to private investors.

***

From the NATO Department of Pretend Control:
Cobalt is critical in a Li-ion battery since it forms the cathode (positive electrode), which gives the battery its high energy density and stability. The Copperbelt is the Congo (DRC ) is where most of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from. However, in this region, cobalt naturally co-occurs with uranium. Unless the uranium is removed from the cobalt, it stays along with it during the extraction and processing and is exported as raw material.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton in the US have found that between 2000 and 2024, large quantities of uranium were extracted, concentrated and exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the country’s cobalt supply chain. Estimates suggest that 2,000-5,000 metric tons (4.4 – 11 million pounds) of radioactive material were exported, even as the DRC has not reported uranium production in decades.

China is home to about 95 percent of the world’s cobalt refineries. So, much of this uranium was sent to China. The estimated 2,000-5,000 metric tons of uranium is sufficient to produce anywhere between 600-1,500 nuclear warheads.

The researchers do not think that this was done intentionally. The team also estimates that between 1,000-4,000 metric tons of uranium was released in mine tailings – waste stream from mining, which raises health concerns for miners and communities near the mines.

***

Reverse warrants are a technology-driven version of a general warrant. “Reverse location warrants” (or “geofence warrants”) allow the government to demand the identity of an unlimited number of people based on their electronic devices’ location tracking data. “Reverse keyword warrants” operate similarly but identify people based on the words they type into internet search engines.

***

Economic Decisions

Adam Smith explained how wealth develops. von Mises explained pricing.

Without the market forces of supply and demand (the trade that creates these forces) and private ownership of the means of production (which enables supply and demand to operate), all factories and industries would lose access to meaningful profit-and-loss accounting. Accounting signals relay information to owners about the success or failure of their enterprises. Without such accounting, there is no basis for managers to make informed decisions. You have no data on which to base your purchases, investments, production, hiring, wages, inventories, or anything else. You lose touch with the reality of the world around you. Such a system will be, quite literally, irrational and thereby subject to the whims of political elites. (Tucker)

Since pricing cannot guide purchasing, producers cannot anticipate demand or assign products. This creates shortages. And shortages substitute bribery for pricing and create a culture of corruption.

It is not necessary to destroy an economy, as in Venezuela, to prove the point. There are all sorts of examples of "Socialism Lite" which disable pricing signals and create shortages and distortions. Rent control fixes the price of rental units, diminishing the surplus available for repair and enhancement. So rent control leads to disrepair and shortage. Price controls on gasoline in the 1970s led to gasoline shortages. 

Wage controls in California will reduce job availability.

If you want to eliminate smoking, fix the price of cigarettes.

These are not theories. These relationships are well understood.

We know that violating these specific economic laws leads to a virtuous glow, followed by disaster. Yet somehow in our information-obsessed culture, this crucial knowledge is ignored. Somehow these politicians purposefully create these socially destructive scenarios despite knowing full well what will happen.

How can anyone be so casual about such risks? And how can anyone supporting the agent of such dangers present themselves as "moral?"

Or, is it possible these people purporting to be our leaders really just don't know?

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.

Discussion and Credible Suspicions

On this day:
1565
The widowed Mary, Queen of Scots, marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Duke of Albany, at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1567
James VI is crowned King of Scotland at Stirling.
1588
Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines – English naval forces under the command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake defeat the Spanish Armada off the coast of Gravelines, France.
1848
Irish Potato Famine: Tipperary Revolt – in Tipperary, an unsuccessful nationalist revolt against British rule is put down by police.
1921
Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
1967
Vietnam War: off the coast of North Vietnam the USS Forrestal catches on fire in the worst U.S. naval disaster since World War II, killing 134.
1981
A worldwide television audience of over 700 million people watch the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

***

"We are 1,000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country, without AI and robots. Nothing else will solve the national debt."--Musk, on AI productivity

***

Fauci is invoking the Fifth. The committee is divided on political lines, and the Democrats are talking about measles. 1 million Americans died and 15 million people died worldwide by a U.S. funded research program, and the country's political life has been altered, and these guys think this is a question of the next midterm election.

***

Is the Constitution compatible with the power and conformity requirements of socialism and Islamism?

***

Social experiments are a modern curse. They are soft with subjective criteria and uncontrollable variables. But an alluring study has come out of Scandinavia about retirement and more. 

The unexpected grief of retirement isn't losing a paycheck—it's losing the moment someone notices you're no longer there.  Retirement can remove a steady stream of evidence that a person is noticed, relied upon, and socially consequential. That a person matters.

Simple and impactful.

***

You can get a "Pirate Certificate" in phys ed at MIT. (Liz)

***

Discussion and Credible Suspicions

A recent article offers that Trump is part of a repeating wave of aristocrats and autocrats who have, since America's founding, have tried to control the country, once by a cabal including the Johnson family of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution, once in the Civil War, once in the Roosevelt Years, and now, with Trump. 

The facts may require a bit of imagination. (The aristocrats during the Revolution were real-- they were British; the planters wanted to be aristocrats but actually weren't; not sure about the Roosevelt years, and most everyone who thinks he's an aristocrat now wouldn't admit to any connection to Trump.) Reaction to ambition and dominance are actually two of the stimuli of America's Revolution.)

The group Students for Life of America has spent the last two years collecting and analyzing water samples in different American cities, searching for evidence to support their claim that women having at-home abortions using the drugs and flushing fetal remains poses a threat to the environment.

That work culminated in the release this week of a study called "controversial" purporting to show “significant levels of mifepristone” contaminating the waterways of Austin, Texas; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Carbondale, Illinois. Despite acknowledging there is no proof the mifepristone detected impacts human health, livestock or the environment, the paper warns of potential “deleterious effects on human and animal biology,” including everything from autism to infertility.

A single study in a journal run by what is called "anti-abortion physicians."

As with global warming studies, such presentations can be insubstantial and thus hard to argue against, and no cause-and-effect scientific demands are claimed. They are suggestions, notions postulating unproved relationships in a media world of information blizzards. But, unlike the stimulating suggestions of curious college coffee houses that have, over the years, proffered everything from Utilitarianism to Bigfoot, these challenges are pointed and purposeful, fueled themselves with ambition and resentment. They are marketing plans and battlecries posing as hypotheses and academic examination.

This sort of information is possible only in a culture accepting of exaggeration and advertising in its efforts to permit free expression, but such an atmosphere demands a critical, discerning citizenry. They are meaningful only to the ecstatic and the gullible.

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.